Strong at the Break Page 3

  “They’re gonna burn those Chinese along with everything else,” Caitlin said and pushed back her jacket to expose her holstered SIG Sauer nine-millimeter pistol.

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Beauchamp asked her, pocketing his phone and ripping out his pistol in its place.

  4

  QUEBEC; THE PRESENT

  Caitlin slid across the icy street, the wind and cold feeling like bramble shrubs brushing against her cheeks. Beauchamp was heading around to the rear of the house, their plan to trap the Hells Angels inside in their cross fire. Her heart had steadied to a slow, rhythmic pounding, her breath steady and a bit rapid. She felt her ears perk up, her vision suddenly able to pierce the night like a cat’s, seeing the world the way she would through a rifle’s crosshairs.

  A gunman’s cloud, her granddad had called it. The first time Caitlin had experienced violence firsthand had been in the parking lot of the Tackle and Gun in Midland, when she’d stepped out to join her father with Earl Strong’s Colt heavy in her grasp. After that day she’d resolved to never let the same hesitance and fear conquer her again, and truth be told, it hadn’t. Thing was, violence, when it did come, was normally a sudden thing, as unexpected as it was unpredictable. Walking into firestorms like this was rare indeed, and time slowed to a crawl the moment she reached the grow house’s front yard, clinging to the shadows.

  Caitlin lived every breath, every thought, every glimpse through the home’s windows with the naked eye. Going up against eight men was bad odds for sure, especially when they were spread through the house, which made taking them all by surprise impossible. The air misting with frost and moonless sky would keep them from seeing her approach, but once she and Beauchamp started blasting, stealth would be forfeit.

  Crack!

  The booming report of a heavy pistol shot smacked Caitlin’s ears like a baseball bat slung against a wood beam. She recorded a muzzle flash at the distant edge of one of the windows just crossed by one of the LaChance brothers. She felt herself picking up the pace, surging into the neat slivers of light sifting out through the windows. SIG raised and ready when she came to the nearest, a bay offering the best view inside of an unfinished great room rich with dark figures slithering about, locked down as targets in her mind.

  It was no different from what Jim Strong must have felt when he climbed out of their truck to finish things with the Reverend Max Arno once and for all. He knew what was coming then just as she did now.

  Almost to the window glass … Caitlin’s mind cataloging placement and movement, the calculations as instinctive as her motions now …

  There was glass to consider, what it did to the trajectory of bullets, bending them all over the place, and how that had to be anticipated in the shots that were about to start flowing.

  Caitlin didn’t remember pulling the trigger. There was recognition of one of the LaChance brothers about to put a bullet from his hand cannon, a long-barreled Magnum, into another Chinese man before she fired her SIG twice through the glass. The first shot grazed his shoulder, spinning him around. The second, already reprogrammed to account for what she’d learned from the first, took him dead center in the face, throwing him backward into the wall directly beneath the spray of gore from the exit wound that painted the wall.

  As the Chinese man LaChance had been about to shoot crawled desperately across the floor, another Hells Angels swung toward the bay window glass, firing without a clear target. She emptied the magazine’s remaining eleven bullets to drop him, his bullets getting no closer to Caitlin than the glass sprayed outward to smack her like hailstones, a few shards leaving their stinging mark through fabric or against exposed skin.

  She was slamming a fresh magazine home when a shotgun-wielding Angel whirled into position before the window. Ready to fire when Pierre Beauchamp’s first bullets punched him through what was left of the bay window’s glass from the rear of the house. Caitlin could see the Mountie twisting to his right, gun angle changing before a blast fired by a Hells Angel out of her line of vision staggered him. She could see Beauchamp’s gun go flying, the Angel who’d shot him crossing into her view, stealing sight of the now unarmed Mountie from her.

  Damn!

  The bay window’s integrity had been pretty much ruptured, so the rest of it should give way without a fight. Lots of things could have flashed through Caitlin’s mind in that moment, but what stuck was standing in the parking lot of the Tackle and Gun, her granddad’s big Colt too heavy to raise much less fire.

  She’d seized up because she’d been thinking, and any gunman worth his weight in blood and shells will tell you that there was no place for thinking in gunplay. Not now, not ever. So outside this house where people were dying, Caitlin launched herself into a leap she didn’t remember taking until she smashed through the remaining glass into the kill zone.

  5

  QUEBEC; THE PRESENT

  Caitlin landed on her feet, stumbling and churning as the floor went icy beneath her boots, coming up as she dropped to meet it. The fall saved her from a barrage of automatic fire instead, sprayed by the Hells Angel who’d been about to finish off Beauchamp. She fired up into him, twisting across the floor until she heard him gasp and looked up to see blood cascading from this throat.

  There was no time to check on Beauchamp, not now, especially when Caitlin heard the poof! of flames catching, unsure whether a round or a match had been the culprit. Either way, gulping up the gasoline fueled their rise, and the empty great room was cast in an eerie orange glow. A wash of fire came at her and Caitlin backpedaled desperately, jacking home her third and last magazine. Doing a mental count of the downed Angels in her head and thinking of the five surviving Chinese she still needed to get out of here. Two darted past her for the door, one burning his hand on a knob superheated by the burgeoning flames. But he still managed to yank it open and cold air washed into the room, further fanning the fire that had begun to melt the thick snow surrounding the house.

  Caitlin started forward, holding a sleeve against her mouth, fighting not to retch for the watering it would bring to her eyes, when one of the Angels she thought she’d killed found his feet and his gun. Silhouetted against the flames, holding a hand against his neck to stanch the blood leaking through his fingers.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Not his bullets, though. They were the damn Mountie’s, good old Beauchamp firing his pistol through a back window before he dropped to his knees in the snow outside.

  Caitlin pushed herself into motion again. She had no real knowledge of the interior’s layout. The pungent skunklike smell of freshly grown marijuana plants thickened in the air, and she stepped over the body of a second Chinese en route to a gutted section of the home that contained shiny foiled arrays of house plant pot laid out like a cornfield or orchard. The stench came close to overpowering her until figures dashed down the nearest row, slicing toward her, and Caitlin held her fire long enough to see it was another three Chinese, the last according to her rough count, taking flight.

  Another Angel lurched out from the same row in their path. Caitlin shot him before he could get off a single round himself, shot him five times, but he still kept coming. Barreled straight into her when she jammed the SIG into his face and fired, drenched instantly by the spray of blood, bone, and brain matter. The faceless Angel fell atop her and Caitlin shoved him off, feeling about the muck-ravaged floor for the gun she’d somehow lost hold of.

  The marijuana in this section of the grow house had caught now, tentacles of flames reaching for the ceiling, which darkened to black and then began to peel away. Caitlin coughed up a storm, the watering she’d been desperate to avoid in her eyes playing havoc with her vision, though not enough to keep her from seeing the huge figure that had appeared before her down the row.

  The second LaChance twin, big and bald as his brother with matching hand cannon in hand, his arrow skull tattoo pointing directly at her. Caitlin spotted the SIG just out of her reach in the same moment he did. Both
of their minds measured off distances, concluding there was no way she could reach it before he shot her dead. He hesitated in that moment as flames licked the air around him.

  Go for it, his hateful eyes urged her, go for the gun. And he wanted for her to do just that. Prolong the enjoyment of the kill, convinced the SIG held Caitlin’s only chance.

  But it didn’t.

  The smoke kept LaChance from seeing her hand dip under her jacket just as her father’s had twenty-plus years ago, coming out with the very same knife that had killed the not so reverend Maxwell Arno. It was airborne before LaChance could react. Sped forward on an upward angle and found his throat, lodging actually on a forty-five-degree angle directly under his chin. LaChance coughed out a horrible gurgling rasp before going down, eyes wide as cue balls, his whole body smoking as the flames converged to swallow him.

  Caitlin found her feet, heard herself coughing. The flames were thicker here in the part of the house this LaChance had set fire to first. But gagging sounds mixed with soft whimpers told Caitlin her count had been off. There was one more Chinese inside, after all, and damn if she was gonna go through all this and leave him inside to die.

  It turned out to be a her. Caitlin knew the air was too smoke-rich to breathe anymore. So she sucked in one last deep breath before following the sounds to a young woman curled up in a fetal position amid the charred wood and toppled marijuana stalks that smelled like mold and roadkill skunk baking on the blacktop.

  Caitlin’s lungs burned. She felt the heat of the floor through her boots. The spreading flames nipped at her, stealing the path to the nearest window and making her wonder if they owned her for good.

  6

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “What happened next?” Captain D. W. Tepper asked from across his desk at Texas Ranger Company D headquarters in San Antonio a week later.

  “Heat pressure had already blown out all the glass so I grabbed the girl, closed my eyes from the burning, and headed toward cold air.”

  “Smart move.”

  “Never been so scared in my whole life, being inside a fire like that. Six of the Chinese got out. Two didn’t. I went out to tend Beauchamp.”

  “Your field dressings saved that Mountie’s life was what I heard.”

  “I got lucky none of his wounds was a bleeder. You know the strangest thing?”

  “What?”

  “The way the heat of the flames melted all that snow. By the time I dragged Beauchamp clear, the yard was down to bare brown ground. We watched the roof and walls collapse before the fire trucks even got their hoses primed. I’ll never forget that stench for as long as I live. Give me a gunfight any day over that.”

  “Speaking of gunfights, report I got from up north recommends I suspend you.”

  “What’d you tell them?” Caitlin asked him. She swept the long black hair from her face and felt the beginning of a burn on cheeks still getting used to the Texas hot spring sun again. It seemed she looked older than she had just a month back when she left, and Caitlin blamed it on the cold air turning her face to parchment. Her arms were missing their tone from lost time in the gym, and the dark eyes that always seemed too big for her face looked smaller, as if unable to see as much as they had when she left. She’d missed the road, the Texas towns that fell in her patrol, being able to define the job by the moment instead of letting the job define her. She was five-foot-eight in bare feet, and a good inch more than that in boots, but her return left her feeling considerably shorter after the weeks away.

  “That I warned them what was gonna happen when they requested you. Far as I’m concerned, they got only themselves to blame. I gotta figure this drug task force wasn’t ready for the shit storm that follows wherever you go.” Tepper leaned forward. “Tell me something, Ranger. You ever gone anyplace you didn’t kill somebody?”

  “Wounded Mountie’s doing just fine,” Caitlin told him from the other side of the desk. “Hell of a man too. I’d ride with him anytime.”

  Tepper smacked his lips, his expression taking on the scowling tilt of a man who’d just swallowed something bitter. “They’re claiming one of the Hells Angels you shot was an informant.”

  “Didn’t stop the bad guys from making our stakeout. And if there really was an informant planted inside the Angels, why didn’t we get at least some kind of warning?”

  Tepper started working his finger in and out of the furrows of his brow. “I ever tell you about the time me and your daddy came up against an Angels chapter in Abilene?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Was like this. They were mixing up some badass crystal meth, to be pushed by their California brethren, out of a slab house looked like it was ready to drop straight down to hell. House was guarded by other Angels making little effort to disguise their presence, figuring nobody’d ever dare mess with them. So your daddy gets the idea we should show up in the guise of vacuum cleaner salesmen to get us close enough to where we needed to be without making a fuss.

  “So we stop at Sears to pick up the most state-of-the-art machine they had. Pull our truck over innocently enough and up we walk with badges in our pockets and guns holstered far enough back to hide. We lug that vacuum up the walk and one of the Angels who smelled like he’d rolled himself in shit stops us halfway. Two others show themselves, and we start acting all scared, begging off until we had all three zeroed.

  “Then your dad and I whip out our guns, the three bikers stupid enough to draw theirs, and the shooting began. So I twist aside to steady a shot and trip right over the vacuum. Got off two shots with no idea where they went, while Jim Strong dropped all three bikers.

  “All of a sudden, a blast plume near blows the roof of the house clean off. I’d later realize the shots I’d squeezed off tripping over the vacuum had gone right through the walls and punctured a tank of acetylene or some other meth ingredient, making the whole lab go boom. Your daddy and I were standing there when the biker chemists come crashing through the door, stripped down to their skivvies thanks to the heat of the lab inside what used to be the house.

  “Kicker is one had a pistol jammed down his undershorts which he proceeds to reach for as he darts out across the lawn, looking like he’s grabbing for his pecker. I swear I heard your daddy laugh and before either of us could shoot the biker, dumb son of a bitch that he was, blows off his own johnson. Ranger, you never saw such a mess in your whole life.”

  Caitlin noticed a video game called “Outlaw” featuring a Texas Ranger of old on the cover still wrapped in plastic atop Tepper’s desk. “That about reliving old times?”

  “Bought it for my grandson in the hopes it’ll take his mind off wanting to learn how to shoot for real.”

  “How old is he now?”

  “Twelve. Still rather have him blasting away at make-believe bad guys than shoot real lead into cardboard cutouts.”

  “My granddad started taking me to the range when I was eight.”

  “Playing with guns instead of dolls, in other words.”

  “They never made a holster for Barbie, D.W.”

  Tepper leaned forward and interlaced his fingers, making them look like twisted pencils. “That’s good, since I need you to talk to a soldier patient over at the Intrepid Center for Heroes.”

  “I’m barely in the door, Captain, and my suitcase is still in the car. Why you giving this to me?”

  “’Cause you worked on the grounds way back when in that other life of yours. Figured that gave you lay of the land.”

  “I worked out of Brooke Army Medical Center as a therapist and counselor.”

  “Same grounds, same vets.”

  “The Intrepid specializes in burn victims and amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan. Things they can do with prosthetics make you feel you’re in some Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.”

  “See, you just proved my point. Kid says his life’s in danger and he needs to talk to somebody fast. I took the call myself, and there’s nobody better to take things from here.”


  “Shouldn’t he be talking to the army instead?”

  Tepper cleared his throat and swallowed down some phlegm. “He says the army’s the ones that want him dead, Ranger.”

  7

  SHAVANO PARK; THE PRESENT

  Cort Wesley Masters sat in a chair next to his sixteen-year-old son Dylan, the boy positioned in a way that kept his face hidden by his wavy black hair. He kicked at the cheap rug on which the chairs were perched in front of Thomas C. Clark High School principal George Garcia’s desk, seeming determined to slice through the nap with the heels of his boots.

  “We take truancy seriously here, Mr. Masters.”

  “So do I, Mr. Garcia. I assure you of that much.”

  Garcia moved his eyes briefly to Dylan before continuing. “Your son, apparently, doesn’t concur.”

  Garcia was a gaunt man wearing a wide tie that further exaggerated the length of his neck, Adam’s apple bobbing over the knot. He had coarse graying hair and droopy eyes that made him look tired all the time. Same height as Cort Wesley, but all told a man he could break over his knee. His office was plainly furnished with surprisingly sparse walls adorned by neither framed diplomas, awards, nor school pictures. Just a few portraits of clowns that matched both his penholder and Post-it dispenser.

  Cort Wesley tried to keep his eyes off them.

  “I told you there’d be severe repercussions if Dylan missed any more time,” Garcia was saying, “and now here we are.”

  “Where’s that exactly?” Cort Wesley asked him.

  The principal wasn’t afraid to hold his stare, and Cort Wesley respected him for that. The harsh intensity of his charcoal-colored eyes was normally enough to make any man turn away. Cort Wesley wasn’t cut or buffed by bodybuilding standards, but his shirt did little to contain the width of his shoulders or the knobby bands of muscle up and down his arms. He’d taken to wearing his hair shorter these days, because it was easier to take care of and made him feel he had the same control over things he’d enjoyed back in the military. A million years ago, sure, but Cort Wesley liked to think he could pull off the same stuff today he had back then, although mostly these days that entailed raising a pair of boys he’d met only two years before. Hell, the goddamn Iraqi Republican Guard he’d come up against in the Gulf War had nothing on one teenager and another just short of that milestone.