Strong Light of Day Read online

  Ilg cupped a hand over his brow and pretended to stare back down the two-lane, trying so hard to look casual and nonchalant that the gesture had the look of a badly rehearsed stage move. “Well, I don’t see no trucks. You fixing on squeezing my herd into that German half-track of yours?”

  “It’s a Ford Explorer, sir, and the trucks will be here any minute to haul your cattle away, accompanied by federal marshals who won’t take to you as kindly as the local sheriff’s deputies.” Caitlin let him see her run her eyes about the gunmen protectively enclosing Ilg in a wide semicircle. “And those marshals have orders to arrest any of your friends here who attempt to impede their efforts, on accessory charges—meaning they’d face the same ten years as you, too. How do you think that’ll sit with them? Guess you’re going to find out just how good friends they are.”

  “This won’t wash, Ranger,” Ilg said slowly, and so softly the reporter had to stick the microphone closer to his mouth.

  “Maybe this will,” Caitlin told him, extracting a set of pictures from her pocket. “The resolution of these isn’t great, but you’ll notice that they’re all close-ups of the brands on the cattle you claim to be yours. The tampering is evident in all that discoloration.”

  Caitlin extended the pictures forward but Ilg didn’t take them, tried not to even look. Then he swept a hand out and brushed them from her grasp. They fluttered through the air and landed, all face up, strangely, on the bleached concrete.

  “Pictures is pictures,” was all he said. “And if it interests you any, I got plenty pictures of my own, showing what the government did to half my herd. Picked ’em clean to the bone to make it look like aliens or something, to scare me off. Well, I ain’t scared of them and I ain’t scared of you, neither.”

  Caitlin stooped to retrieve the pictures, never taking her eyes off Ilg. “I’ve also got an affidavit from a local vet who inspected your cattle and found a number of the brands to have fresh scarring. How do you think that could be, exactly?”

  Ilg’s pale skin had turned a shade of sunburned red, and he was breathing noisily now through his mouth. He seemed to suddenly remember the microphone stabbing the air before him and he cleared his throat, trying to get back the bravado that had won him his sudden celebrity.

  “This is free land, Ranger,” Ilg spoke her way, going back to his canned lines and raising his voice to be heard over the increasing volume of the helicopter that was just a few hundred feet over them now. “My cattle can graze on it as I see fit. You hear?”

  “They’re not your cattle, sir,” Caitlin said, reaching for the handcuffs clipped to her belt. “And you’re under arrest.”

  * * *

  Caitlin kept her eyes on Ilg the whole time Frank Denbow and his deputies approached to take him into custody. The tension between the armed camps felt like a hot summer wind blowing through her. But something had changed, uncertainty settling over Ilg’s supporters, as if they were suddenly questioning the reason they’d gone to guns.

  “I ain’t going nowhere,” Ilg said through puckered lips, hands tucked behind his back to avoid the handcuffs Caitlin was holding. “Let the lead fly.”

  So Caitlin circled behind him while Ilg primped for the cameras that had converged like a third army onto the scene. As she snapped the handcuffs on, he swept his gaze about the blocked portion of the two-lane, expression crinkled in dim confusion over his militia protectors, none of whose names he actually knew, holding their ground but not his stare.

  “He’s all yours, Captain,” she said to Frank Denbow, as if it were only the three of them now.

  While the cable news camera continued to roll, Congressman Asa Fraley had made himself conveniently scarce, and Caitlin found herself scanning the lines of the militiamen in search of the man she took to be his brother.

  Before she could spot him again, the helicopter she’d figured had been dispatched by another television network set down on flat stretch of ground on the empty side of the road, its rotor wash kicking up a storm of dust and gravel, which left forces on both sides shielding their eyes. Caitlin watched as the thin, knobby figure of Texas Ranger Captain D. W. Tepper climbed out of the chopper and ducked low to avoid the blades still spinning in a blur as he made his way toward her, getting only so far as the pavement of the two-lane.

  “We got trouble, Ranger!” Tepper yelled over the sounds of the still-churning helicopter. “Come on, the meter’s running!”

  “Where we headed, Captain?”

  “An empty school bus was found just outside of Houston.”

  “Since when do the Rangers get called in to investigate empty school buses?”

  “Since all the students who’d been riding it are missing. Since those students come from a fancy Houston prep school.” He paused, his dour expression making the furrows lining his face seem deeper than ever. “Since one of the missing students is the youngest son of that boyfriend of yours, Cort Wesley Masters.”

  5

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  “Hey, baby, you like what you see?”

  Cort Wesley Masters smiled back at the dancer who’d just tossed her top into his face, stopping short of feeding her the ten- or twenty-dollar bill she’d been expecting for the effort. When that failed, she ran her hands through his thick hair, now tinted gray at the temples, and let her fingers trace the lines of the deepest sun wrinkles dug into his face. Then she backed off, flashing an even more forced smile that slipped from her face so fast it seemed the gesture must’ve hurt her.

  Cort Wesley sat at a table squeezed against the stage, which was scuffed by heels and discolored in patches by spilled drinks. The girl whose top he dropped onto an empty chair was one of three performing now at the Pleasure Dome, the reddest of all the establishments in Dallas’s red-light district off Harry Hines Boulevard, just steps away from a family-oriented area of stores, shops, and restaurants. Several blocks were jam-packed with massage parlors, adult book and video stores, rooming houses that rented by the hour, and establishments that ranged from truly seedy to those attracting a reasonably respectable crowd of businessmen and college students, like the Pleasure Dome.

  The marquee outside advertised a free luncheon buffet and a daily morning attraction called Legs and Eggs, for those either getting off work, on their way to it, or simply suffering from insomnia. He’d heard that much of this section of Harry Hines Boulevard was owned and operated by the Russian mob, after the Branca family out of New Orleans, in whose employ Cort Wesley had once served, had pulled up stakes due to either eradication or imprisonment of its leaders. He’d never given that much thought, until he’d gotten the call that brought him here this afternoon.

  Hey, it’s a living.

  Cort Wesley didn’t know who coined that phrase originally, but truer words had never been spoken.

  A second dancer was tempting him by leaning over and spreading her butt cheeks as far as they would go. Cort Wesley flirted with the notion of wedging at least a dollar bill into the space revealed, then decided on a cocktail napkin instead, in keeping with the true purpose behind his presence here.

  The dancer shot him the finger before moving on down the line.

  Cort Wesley figured the cocktail napkin would do the trick for sure, and he sipped at his ginger ale, which was now watery with melted ice. The Pleasure Dome didn’t charge a cover during the day, relying solely on food and alcohol sales to justify the show. Proper tipping was an unwritten rule here, as much as the fifteen percent added to a restaurant tab was, the difference being that the amounts swayed wildly depending on the level of a customer’s drunkenness, desperation, and depravity.

  Cort Wesley saw one of the dancers look toward him but not quite his way. He realized that this was the first time in the hour he’d been at the stage-front table, for which he’d paid twenty bucks, that none of the girls were anywhere near him. Then a trio of broad shadows fell over his table.

  “We need you to leave the premises,” the biggest of the shadows said, with knuckles laid
on the table in simian fashion.

  “I do something?”

  “No,” the big man said. “That’s why we need you to leave.”

  “I paid twenty bucks to get this table.”

  “It’s also customary to tip the ladies.”

  “Ladies?” Cort Wesley smirked. “Really?”

  “How hard do you want to make this?”

  How hard do I need to? Cort Wesley wanted to say, but that would have broken the illusion he needed to cast.

  “I want my twenty bucks back first,” Cort Wesley said, not budging from his chair. “You can buy me a drink on the way out.”

  The biggest shadow leaned across the table and spilled Cort Wesley’s ginger ale in his lap. “There’s your drink, and this is me tossing your ass out of here.”

  Cort Wesley let himself be jerked out of the chair by the other two hulks squeezed into dark suits that looked ready to burst at the seams. “I wanna see the manager.”

  “This is close as you’re gonna get,” said the biggest one doing all the talking.

  “The owner, then. I want my twenty bucks back or I go straight to my lawyer. He won me a bunch of cash in a personal injury case. It’s all I’ve got to live on—that’s why I’m not tipping. Tell your boss to show some compassion or my lawyer will serve him before the next shift goes on tonight. So what’ll be, bub?”

  “Bub?”

  “Hey, I didn’t mean anything by it. Does your boss have any idea how you treat customers?”

  And, just as expected, the commotion had drawn that boss, a burly older Russian named Alexi Gribanov, from his back office down a short hall just off the bar.

  “Hey!” Cort Wesley called to him as the three thugs dragged him off. “Hey, you! You think I don’t know who you are, what you’re really doing here? Smarten up, bub. I can turn your lights out forever.”

  Gribanov must’ve passed some signal to his thugs to stop them in their tracks, because that’s what they did. Then they started dragging Cort Wesley toward the bar instead of toward the exit, slicing past tables where seated patrons barely looked away from the stage antics they’d come here to see.

  “Hey!” Cort Wesley made himself protest, forcing himself to go limp in the thugs’ grasp. “Who the fuck you guys think you are?”

  They tossed him into Gribanov’s office and planted him in a chair, didn’t close the door until their boss was inside.

  “So,” he said to Cort Wesley, “tell me why I shouldn’t have you killed?”

  6

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  “Hey, bub,” Cort Wesley started fearfully, hands held out almost as if he was praying to the Russian, “I made a mistake, okay?”

  “No, this is not okay in my establishment. And ‘bub,’ what is this ‘bub’?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like calling somebody ‘sir’ or ‘friend.’”

  Gribanov slapped Cort Wesley across the face with a hand that stank like sardines. “Am I your friend now?”

  Gribanov crouched down, face-to-face with him now, smelling lightly of cologne instead. He was a dapper man with well-coiffed white hair and a perfectly groomed mustache. In his late sixties probably, short and heavyset to the point where Cort Wesley guessed he must’ve had his suits custom made, unlike his thugs, who probably bought their matching black ones off the rack in the big-and-tall-man section of the nearest department store.

  “You know the Russian word for ‘bitch’?” Gribanov sneered at him.

  Cort Wesley noticed his eyes looked set too far back in his face, as if they’d been somehow pushed out of place. And one of them seemed to lag behind the other when they blinked.

  “No.”

  “It’s cyka.” He slapped Cort Wesley again, harder. “And you’re my cyka now; you’re my bitch because you ask to be treated like one. You disrespected my establishment, my home, and that means you disrespected me.”

  “Hey,” Cort Wesley pleaded, pulling back. “I got problems, okay? I told your men here I was in this car accident, and ever since—”

  Gribanov slapped him a third time, the hardest blow yet, and easily hard enough for Cort Wesley to sell being thrown from the chair to the floor, where he lay cowering on his back, waiting for the stars to clear from before his eyes.

  “Can we just forget this, please?”

  Gribanov stared down at him.

  “I get my next installment check on my settlement the third of the month. I’ll come make good with the girls then, I promise. Hand to God, man, hand to God.”

  And Cort Wesley stuck a trembling hand up to enunciate his point.

  Gribanov glared at him. “They’re not girls; they’re ladies. You understand me?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “They deserve your respect. And the way you show respect is with money, and when you don’t, you pay a different way.”

  Cort Wesley saw the biggest thug’s foot coming and prepared for it as best he could. But it still rammed his torso with the force of a jackhammer splitting concrete, compressing his ribs enough to rip his breath away and leave him gasping for real. The thug kicked him again, Cort Wesley taking the blow square on his hip, sparing his ribs and soft tissue this time. Then Gribanov was in his face, Cort Wesley sucking in a lungful of his cologne, mixed with the sardine stench when he let out his breath.

  “We leave things here, eh, bub?” He pronounced it boob. “But you come back here it gets much worse. Your lawyer shows up and it gets even worse than that—for him, too. Nod if you understand.”

  Cort Wesley nodded.

  “Now, get out of my sight … bub.”

  Which drew a chuckle from all three thugs, none of whom lowered a hand to help him up. So Cort Wesley stretched a hand up to the sill of Gribanov’s desk, spilling the contents of a pen holder to the floor, making a desperate show to replace everything inside and put it back in place when he finally got to his feet.

  He said nothing further, just raised his hands in that same conciliatory fashion he couldn’t remember ever doing before in his life and backed out the door. Still seething, his ribs still fiery with pain, Cort Wesley pushed through a side exit into the parking lot and headed toward an innocuous SUV parked in a darkened corner, climbing in and slamming the door hard enough to startle the big shape behind the wheel.

  “Whoa, easy does it there, bub,” smirked the man Cort Wesley knew only as Jones.

  7

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  Cort Wesley had met Jones through Caitlin Strong and, like a bad penny, he just kept coming back. “Well,” he said, closing the door behind him, “at least I know the bug’s working.”

  “Where’d you plant it?”

  “Under Gribanov’s pen holder.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Cort Wesley shook his head. “It hurts too much to laugh.”

  Jones took out his cell phone and jogged it to an application already on the screen. He hit a single key on the keyboard, transferring Cort Wesley’s considerable fee for letting the Russian assholes kick his ass, and stuck the phone back in his pocket.

  “There you go. Not bad for a day’s work.”

  In his mind, Cort Wesley was already parceling out the money between his son Dylan’s college bills and son Luke’s tuition for the prep school he attended in Houston. “Easy for you to say, Jones; they’re not your ribs.”

  “Just don’t go running to the Ranger and tell her I mistreated you.”

  “Afraid she might shoot you?”

  Jones smirked, the gesture seeming to lengthen the rectangular face dominated by crystal-colored eyes. Cort Wesley thought his hair looked more like individual strands of straw sewn onto his scalp.

  “If she was going to shoot me, cowboy, she would’ve done it a long time ago.”

  “What’s all this about, Jones?”

  Jones started to turn the key. “You’ve been paid for your efforts. Let’s just leave it there.”

  “Why does Homeland Security care about a two-bit Russian gangster li
ke Alexi Gribanov? What’s their interest? And why bother planting what they called a tin ear in my old man’s time when you’ve got the goddamn NSA on speed dial?”

  Jones started the engine and gunned it. “Because maybe the fiasco that went down here in your lovely state last year changed the equation some. Maybe Homeland, in general, and yours truly, in particular, lost a little juice and gumption. Maybe I’m persona non grata and the NSA isn’t taking my calls anymore.”

  “Cry me a river, agent man.”

  “You were special ops in the first Gulf War?”

  Cort Wesley nodded. “Long before it came into fashion.”

  “So, does the fact we’re cut from the same cloth irk you at all?”

  “Different tailors, though,” Cort Wesley said, and noticed two of Gribanov’s thugs, including the biggest one, whose shoe imprints he was currently wearing on his ribs, emerge from the same exit and light up cigarettes as they clung to the slight shade provided by an overhang.

  “You mind giving me a minute here?” Cort Wesley said, easing the door open. “I think I left something inside.”

  * * *

  Cort Wesley looped the long way around the parking lot, clinging to the edges and approaching the two thugs from outside their line of sight. Add that to the distraction of them making small talk, probably joking about the loser whose ass they’d just kicked, along with the fact that each had a hand occupied working a cigarette, and this was going to be over very quickly.

  They didn’t see Cort Wesley, even at the last, didn’t see him at all until he’d angled himself to sweep in off their rear. The one closest to him—not the one who’d done the kicking—must’ve caught a hint of motion out of his peripheral vision. He swung, both hands coming round with him to leave his cigarette dangling free in his mouth. Cort Wesley hit him so fast with a blow to his face that his mouth gaped and he swallowed his cigarette, gagging and retching when he slammed back against the side of the building.