Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel Read online

  She sighted on a drug mule rushing in toward them wildly with a nonstop staccato burst pouring from his assault rifle’s barrel. But it was Charlie who downed him with rounds fired from the SIG he still had a hold of. Charlie Weeks, who had gunned down bank robbers and prison escapees, managing an impossible shot while lying on his back bleeding from a gunshot wound to the gut.

  Caitlin saw another mule coming at them and let loose with the Ruger. Wild shots, breaking every rule of the range her father had taught her. No one had ever explained how to shoot from the ground with at least one bullet dug deep inside her. All that experience, instinct was supposed to take over, but in the end it was panic and having enough bullets left to get the job done.

  Caitlin saw the mule go down as if someone had yanked his legs out from under him, heard him crying out in Spanish and screaming. She propped herself up to find him writhing in a fissure of radiant moonlight. Strangely, he stopped moving in the very instant the clouds released the darkness once more, his own light extinguished at the same time.

  She’d lost count of how many there were, how many were left. She heard shouts from voices sounding more distant, moving farther away from her and Charlie instead of closer. Caitlin counted out the seconds.

  “Come on! Come on!”

  An engine flared, followed by the sound of tires spitting gravel and pebbles in their wake before headlights blazed into the tunnel and then disappeared.

  “I think they’re gone, Charlie,” she said, her breathing steady again. “I think we’re good now. Charlie?”

  She twisted round to find Charlie Weeks’s eyes closed and his head drooped toward his chest.

  “Don’t you die on me, Charlie Weeks! You hear? Don’t you fucking die on me!”

  Caitlin didn’t know where she found the strength to stand back up and lift him into her arms. Didn’t remember the final stretch to their SUV that ended with her laying Charlie across the length of the backseat. Her next clear memory was the sight of flashing lights miles and miles down the same gulch-ridden desert road that had nearly delivered Caitlin and Charlie Weeks to their deaths.

  The night played tricks with the distance, the lights much farther away than they had originally seemed. But an EMT wagon was among the vehicles responding. Turned out she’d driven eighty miles, the memories of which must have seeped out of her with the blood.

  EMTs laid Caitlin and Charlie Weeks side by side on gurneys inside the wagon and she was sure he was alive when her mind finally gave up its last tenuous hold on consciousness. She felt her eyes closing and dreamed she was sitting with her father, the great Jim Strong, under a cottonwood tree near their favorite swimming hole. They were eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches and drinking root beer from bottles cold with frost from the cooler, while Jim Strong told stories of the exploits of Texas’ infamous hanging judge Katherine Hansen.

  When she woke up at the hospital, Charlie Weeks was dead.

  3

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Caitlin ended the story there, studying Rita Navarro’s expression that had paled to the point of looking as if someone had borrowed the blood from it. She regarded Caitlin differently; tentatively, Caitlin thought, with a slight bit of unease, maybe fear, making her regret that she had held nothing back.

  Finally Navarro leaned forward and rested her elbows on her desk. “I’m skeptical—skeptical that a person of your background is best suited to work with those who’ve been victimized by violence.”

  “Because I practiced it.”

  “Quite well, apparently.”

  “Torture’s a different kind of violence. It’s more like rape. The strong dominating the weak.”

  “You know a lot about rape, Miss Strong?”

  “I know a lot about strength and weakness, Miss Navarro.”

  “Missus.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So am I sometimes.”

  Caitlin felt the tension in the room ease a bit. Something had softened Rita Navarro’s stare. She wasn’t sure what.

  “I dealt with a number of rape victims with the Rangers,” Caitlin told her. “It doesn’t say that in those pages, but I did. Ended up holding a lot of hands waiting for the sheriff’s department or highway patrol to show up. I once had to do a rape kit in a ser vice station bathroom.”

  “You want this job.”

  “I do.”

  “You feel yourself qualified.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Navarro glanced down at the pages before her again. “Your application lists you as married to a Peter Goodwin, but you’re not wearing a ring.”

  Caitlin smiled faintly. “Another old habit, I’m afraid. My dad was the best shot I ever saw and he never wore any jewelry, not even a watch. Only metal he wanted near his hand was his Colt 1911 model .45. Everything else just got in the way. As for my husband Peter, he passed away.”

  “I’m sorry. How?

  “Iraq.”

  “A soldier?”

  “Nope. Worked in computer software for one of those private contractors. He was working on a cable television system for Baghdad when an IED blew him up.”

  “You never took his name,” Rita Navarro noted.

  “Guess I felt it’d be doing my dad a disservice. My mom passed ’fore he got the son he wanted, so responsibility for the family name fell on me.”

  Navarro tucked the pages of Caitlin’s résumé back into the file folder with her name stenciled on the tab. “Why victims of torture, Miss Strong?”

  Caitlin had thought long and hard about that question, knowing it would be coming sooner or later. She’d even rehearsed answers—nice, neat and pat—except none of them stuck or sounded even halfway genuine.

  “How much you wanna hear, Mrs. Navarro?”

  “You asked me that before.”

  “As much as I want to tell you, you said. So lemme say I’ve been on both sides of some pretty bad things. You do ’em and you live with ’em, ’cause it’s what you are and what you figure you’ll be left with when everything’s said and done. But sometimes said and done comes quicker than it’s supposed to, and you don’t like what you’re left with at all.”

  Rita Navarro rose stiffly from her desk chair, Caitlin figuring the handshake and polite good-bye were coming.

  “Let me show you the facility, Miss Strong,” she said. “See if it might be what you’re looking for.”

  4

  HUNTSVILLE STATE PRISON, THE PRESENT

  Cort Wesley Masters followed Warden T. Edward Jardine down the long caged walk toward his freedom.

  “Wanted to see you off personally, Mr. Masters,” Jardine told him.

  “Seems a bit of a hollow gesture at this point, don’t it?” Cort Wesley shot back. “Considering I never should’ve been here in the first place, I mean.”

  The pungent stench of disinfectant, laid over stale urine and feces that wafted out of the cell block, dissipated the closer they got to the other end. Cort Wesley never thought he’d welcome a sound as much as the sound of his boots clacking atop the worn linoleum floor. Those boots were the one thing he’d taken into Huntsville he was taking out. He shifted his feet about inside them, thinking about how many livers, kidneys and ribs had perished to their steel-toe boxes.

  “Being bitter is no way to start your first day of freedom.”

  “I been bitter a lot longer than that, Warden. You wanna stand there and try telling me I don’t got call to be, then go ahead.”

  Jardine didn’t. “May I make a suggestion?”

  “Free country, last time I checked. For most, anyway.”

  “I’ll expect you to take full advantage of the next phase of your rehabilitation.”

  “Rehabilitation . . . that what you call it? I never should’ve been jailed in the first place, so there’s not really anything I gotta be rehabilitated from. Right or wrong?”

  “Technically, right.”

  “Glad we got that straight, Warden. DNA test fully exonerated me. No parole
or probation. You and me, we’re on the same terms. That’s why we look so much alike now. Equal ground. Man to man. How’s the view from where you’re standing?”

  Jardine’s upper lip quivered ever so slightly. Cort Wesley watched him glance over his shoulder to check where the nearest bull was. Cort Wesley grinned, teeth even whiter than they were when he came in thanks to an almost religious ritual of brushing twice daily. One of the things he held onto that helped him get by.

  “Don’t worry, Warden. I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said from inside a shirt stretched at the seams by the hard layers of muscle stitched along his torso. The stiff prison-issue khakis he’d been given sagged some in the waist and the belt didn’t have enough holes to hold them up. Cort Wesley didn’t like the way they felt, reminding him too much of the way Latino gang members wore theirs to suggest toughness by having their boxers showing.

  “You managed to keep yourself out of trouble for almost five years, Mr. Masters. In a place like The Walls, given your reputation, that’s a heck of an accomplishment and I’d hate to see it squandered.”

  “Not my intention, I assure you.”

  “Temptation’s a powerful thing.”

  “I gave up drinking my first day in.”

  “I wasn’t talking about alcohol, Mr. Masters.”

  “What then?”

  Warden T. Edward Jardine looked at Cort Wesley’s shirt, as if seeing through it to the tattoo beneath. “Your tattoo, ‘Vengeance Is Mine.’ ”

  “Yeah?”

  “See that it remains a slogan and not a prophecy. People who are falsely imprisoned have to fight the urge to lash out, to get back at those who put them away.”

  “Got that ink before I came in, Warden.”

  “I think you’re missing my point.”

  “What’s that?”

  Jardine’s eyes narrowed, as if he were about to share a secret. “If I were you, I’d use the legal system to your benefit. Sue the Texas Rangers, the forensic lab that originally IDed that blood sample, and everybody else involved. That’s between us. Anybody asks, I never said it.”

  “Prefer dealing with such things my own way, Warden. Anybody asks, I never said that.”

  They reached the first of three gates Cort Wesley would have to pass through before he was truly free. Beyond those gates, the sunlight shed a different glow than it did over the prison yard he’d been lucky to see for maybe an hour a day over the past five years. Cort Wesley couldn’t wait to feel it against his face.

  “You’d be better served to take advantage of this opportunity,” said Jardine. “Move on and put the past behind you.”

  Cort Wesley stopped and flexed his fists. Slowly, liking the feel of wrapping his fingers tight into his palms. “You ever lose something mattered to you, Warden?”

  Jardine wasn’t going to answer, but the look in Cort Wesley Masters’s eyes left him afraid of what would happen if he didn’t. “My wife died of cancer three years ago.”

  “Meaning you won’t be getting her back. Bet that chews at you, leaves you up at night staring at the ceiling angry ’cause there’s nothing you can do to change it. Kind of like the five years of my life I lost, Warden. I’m never getting them back neither.”

  “If you’re talking about your wife and sons—”

  “She’s not my wife.”

  “I . . .” Jardine stopped there, the rest of the sentence gulped down his throat.

  “That’s none of your affair,” Cort Wesley continued, the blacks of his eyes seeming to swallow the whites. “Just leave it be.”

  “Nothing I can do about my wife,” Jardine said, finding his voice. “Nothing you can do about those five years.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Jardine handed him an envelope containing his release papers and a state of Texas check in the amount of fifty dollars, extending his free hand.

  Cort Wesley didn’t take it.

  “You really kill as many men as they say, Mr. Masters?”

  “Don’t know, Warden. Why don’t you ask them?”

  5

  HUNTSVILLE, THE PRESENT

  From The Walls, Cort Wesley walked two blocks through the sleepy town of Huntsville in the scalding sun to the Greyhound bus station. The sweat soaked through his shirt and made him long for a cold shower in a stall by himself without his back pressed against the wall to ward off a shank attack.

  He could have gone anywhere but opted to buy a ticket for San Antonio, as close to a home as he had, using some of the change from the fifty dollar check he’d cashed at the local bank to buy a pack of Marlboro Lights. He smoked three outside, trying to just relax and watch the world go by around him, but failing badly. The tension and anxiety clung to him like a stench he couldn’t wash off. Cort Wesley figured it was the fresh air. Make yourself accustomed to living in rancid squalor with quarters the size of a closet long enough and smells like flowers and charcoal-broiled meat spewed by restaurant exhaust fans were all but unrecognizable and scary in their unfamiliarity.

  Cort Wesley knew the town of Huntsville was actually home to nine state prisons with The Walls the most dangerous of any here, perhaps in the whole country as well. The mixture of Latin, Asian and African-American gangs inside mixing with the Nazis, bikers, and an all-around miserable assortment of violent criminals who had committed horribly heinous acts which they wore inside as badges of honor. It was the mad ones, the crazies, Cort Wesley knew to avoid most of all. Unaffiliated whack jobs with no allegiance or collective identity to rein in their actions or lend a balance to them.

  At first the Latinos sent a few massive pump monkeys and cherries after him, a few of them having come up on the short end of run-ins with Cort Wesley in East San Antonio. The Latin gangs there didn’t understand territory, figured it consisted of whatever they could steal from everybody else and that their advantage in guns would overcome all else. Cort Wesley represented the interests of the Branca crime family that had migrated to Texas after being chased out of Louisiana and Florida by a conflagration of brutal storms and an unforgiving judiciary. They played by the rules and expected their competitors to do the same. When those competitors didn’t, they called Cort Wesley.

  His reputation spread quickly among the Latinos, most of it well earned except for the crazed tales of him wiping out entire families and house holds—that legend adding to their fear of him. They weren’t hard to scare really, their bravado based on sheer numbers and believing that the side with more guns won. The Latinos stockpiled men, kids mostly, whose hard edge was more defined by their tattoos. Covered themselves in ink, then hoped it passed for courage and toughness. And mostly it did, until they ran up against Cort Wesley Masters who painted a much more impressive mosaic in blood than in ink. When he went after someone, he always took down whoever was running with him at the time, further intimidating the Latinos and helping to turn them against each other.

  The guards known as bulls in hard-edged prisons like The Walls didn’t so much as control things as preside over the deadly sense of order imposed by the prisoners on themselves. The cons were the ones who really ran things and dispensed justice to those who broke whatever code was in place at the time.

  Cort Wesley tried keeping to himself and was mostly left alone save for the occasional young crazy out to make his reputation by taking out a Texas legend. Cort Wesley had killed four of them, including a kid with such rage and self-hatred in his eyes that he thought he was an instrument of suicide more than anything else.

  He continued smoking outside the bus station, recognizing a couple of Mexican kids from the inside who must’ve gotten their parole papers. The Mexican kids never looked back at him. He made sure his gaze was enough to keep them away. They probably came in for some drug-related offense and came out battle-hardened, world-weary punks whose spirits and souls had been sodomized as much as their bodies.

  I might have been the one innocent man in there.

  Cort Wesley was not a man easily touched by irony but even he
was struck by the absurdity of that. To get away with all the things he’d done over the years only to be jailed for something he hadn’t.

  He flicked his cigarette into the gutter and watched the rest of it burn away, his lungs left burning enough to make him fight off a cough.

  It was the Texas Rangers who’d put him away. The fucking Texas Rangers, used to be out there riding the badlands on horse back. Cort Wesley thought they directed traffic these days until a woman Ranger drew on him in an El Paso bar where he was making a cash pickup for the Brancas. He remembered it all so vividly, right down to a roadside portable sign still advertising a band called The Rats that had played the week before. It would have been funny if the look in her eye hadn’t told him she had him beat six ways to Sunday, apparently not much impressed by the reputation everyone else was.

  A woman of all things!

  Cort Wesley was glad that much hadn’t reached the inside. Otherwise more would’ve come after him, perhaps too many to fend off. Everything came down to odds; sooner or later somebody gets you. Simple as that.

  But that doesn’t mean you can’t get them back.

  6

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “Almost all our patients are refugees,” Navarro said to Caitlin, closing her office door behind them, “foreigners lucky enough to have found asylum and safety in the United States. I use the term ‘lucky enough’ ironically, because many of them left their families behind or worse. Left pieces of themselves wherever it was they came from, both figuratively and literally. You see the scars, the missing limbs, the burn marks, the agony in their eyes, and you think of the physical pain they’ve endured and often are still enduring. But it’s the mental pain, the emotional anguish, we treat here.”

  Caitlin nodded, studying Navarro in the corridor’s murky light. She could see through the glass squares built into the ceiling that several of the bulbs behind them had burned out. Remembered that many of the older buildings in San Antonio were plagued by wood and framework swollen by humidity to the point that slide-out pane panels didn’t slide anymore. They mostly just shattered from the slightest jarring.