Strong Cold Dead Read online

  “I dropped a stink bomb.”

  “That’s your defense?”

  “How about the fact that it worked? Locals and Feds who spent the rest of the night interrogating me have reclaimed the neighborhood. You know what’s going on here as well as I do, D.W.”

  Tepper continued to simmer, doing his best not to seem to see her point. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “I got it done when they couldn’t. And since when is skunk oil a weapon of mass destruction?”

  “Since you dropped it on the city of San Antonio, Ranger.”

  “I tried to play ball here, Captain. Took my intentions to Deputy Chief Alonzo, who practically spit in my face.”

  “Speaking of which, you’ve looked better.”

  Caitlin touched the bruises on her face, left by her fight with Diablo Alcantara, and tried to move the jaw he’d cracked with an elbow. Paramedics were pretty certain it wasn’t broken, but she was supposed to go for precautionary X-rays just to make sure. Her hands, too, were badly scuffed and bruised, knuckles swollen like those of the ex-boxer her father, Jim Strong, had busted, as peacefully as he could, when the retired fighter was having what he called one of his “episodes.”

  “Good thing SAPD let me take a shower and change clothes,” Caitlin told him. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to stand the smell of me, never mind the sight, thanks to that weapon of mass destruction.”

  Tepper shook his head, easing into his mouth the second cigarette he’d tapped out. “You mean stink bomb?”

  “Camouflaged the scene, to boot.”

  “I’m sure you had the whole thing thought out.”

  “As much as I could, under the circumstances.”

  Tepper held up a cigarette lighter that looked more like a soda can, jerry-rigged with a computer lock to the top of his desk. He watched Caitlin shaking her head as he lit up.

  “What, you need me to explain why I gotta keep a lighter so heavy it gave me tendonitis chained to my desk? Do you really?”

  Caitlin settled back in her chair. “You want to kill yourself, D.W., that’s your business.”

  “Then why do you keep stealing my cigarette lighters? You know what’s worse for my health than Marlboros? You. You and this Lone Ranger role you’ve fallen into. Problem being that every time your trusty horse, Silver, leaves shit in the streets, it tracks right back here.”

  “No pun intended.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  Tepper nodded, puffing away and making sure Caitlin could see the smoke. “That’s what I told the chief of police and the commissioner for public safety: Never mind. Never mind that Caitlin Strong had a crop duster buzz east San Antonio, contaminated a quarter of the city, and shot up a street. Never mind all that. She’s old school. One riot, one Ranger, just like she told Deputy Chief Alonzo. Right or wrong?”

  “Wrong. Because there was no riot. That’s why I did what I did.”

  “What you always do, Ranger,” Tepper said, with the cigarette holding to the side of his mouth. “Last night took Hurricane Caitlin to a whole new level. Forget hurricane, you’re a full-fledged tsunami now. They don’t name tsunamis, do they?”

  “Guess there aren’t enough of them.”

  “Lucky me, having one all to myself, then. You know that desk downstairs I refinished a couple weekends back?”

  “The one where the varnish never quite dried?”

  Tepper frowned. “It’s all yours, Ranger. Catch up on your paperwork until we get the mess you caused last night sorted out.”

  “I don’t have any paperwork to catch up on.”

  “Then catch up on mine—fitting, given that most of it is about you. Department of Public Safety wanted your head on a platter this time, but they ended up settling for your ass in a chair.”

  “How nice of them.”

  “Don’t worry. You can keep your gun. Just in case the office gets attacked by somebody likely gunning for you anyway.”

  “Should I keep another weapon of mass destruction at the ready, too?”

  “Long as it doesn’t stink up the place.”

  * * *

  Downstairs, Caitlin was still staring at the empty desk, which was chipped and sticky with undried varnish and set in a darkened corner of the first floor, when her cell phone rang. She leaned against the desk chair, listening to it squeak, as she answered the call.

  “Hello.”

  “Caitlin Strong?” a muffled male voice greeted her.

  “Who is this?”

  “Just thought you’d want to know a friend of yours is about to get himself in some trouble.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Oldest son of Cort Wesley Masters. Named Dylan, I believe. I’d hurry if I were you.”

  7

  BOERNE, TEXAS

  “New game,” Guillermo Paz said into the microphone, from the table set atop a small portable stage at the front of the dining room in Morningstar Ministries at Menger Springs Senior Living Community.

  At seven feet tall, Paz hardly needed to be standing on even a meager platform. But the placement was easier on the fading eyesight of the elderly residents, who sat with varying numbers of bingo cards assembled before them, patiently waiting for him to call each number.

  After all, Paz reasoned, they weren’t going anywhere except back to their rooms in the assisted living portion of the facility. The priest he’d been visiting at San Antonio’s historic San Fernando Cathedral for more than seven years was now living in the nursing center section, after suffering a stroke. Paz had been the one who found him, the man’s body canted outside the confessional, blood dribbling out one of his ears and staining his white hair red on that side. Paz had wanted to pray for him while he waited for the paramedics to arrive, but he wasn’t much for prayer. He figured God’s tolerance for his murderous actions hardly entitled him to heavenly favors. Although Paz had long ago lost track of the number of people he’d killed, the Almighty certainly hadn’t.

  “First number,” Paz said into the microphone. “Under the B, seven. That’s B seven. B for Boylston. That’s the name of my priest. He lives in this place now but isn’t in shape to play bingo. Want to hear something? I didn’t even know his name until I came to visit him here for the first time. The receptionist asked who I came here to see and all I could tell her was, ‘My priest.’ She nodded and said, ‘You must mean Father Boylston.’ And that’s how I learned his name.”

  The residents of Menger Springs’s Boerne campus continued to look up at him, seeming to hang on Paz’s every word, eagerly awaiting his call of the next number, bingo dabbers held like guns. Visiting his priest almost every day had left Paz with a fondness for the entire facility, for its peace and pleasantness, in spite of the stale fart smell in the hallways and the general hopelessness that characterized the nursing center section. He thought Father Boylston would be proud of him for volunteering, playing a role, making a difference. Each number he called was a small homage to the priest who’d helped him define his ongoing transformational period.

  “See, a man is more than the measure of his name,” Paz continued. “Aristotle is Father Boylston’s favorite philosopher. Personally, I prefer the Germans, but since my priest cottons to Aristotle, I’ll tell you that Aristotle believed the body and soul were prime parts of what creates our nature, that a man’s identity belongs to a holy trinity of the mind, body, and spirit. The first time I visited Father Boylston I told him the first man I killed had murdered my first priest, back home in the slums of Venezuela, for daring to stand up to the gangs. He bled to death in my arms, the food he’d bought to feed the poor scattered in the street. I watched the life fade from his eyes and knew what I had to do. And I’ve been doing it ever since.”

  Paz churned the wire cage holding the numbered bingo balls, then grasped the one that had found its way to the top.

  “Under the G, fifty-four. That’s G fifty-four. G for goodness, something I look for in my eyes every day. I came
here all those years ago to kill a woman, a Texas Ranger. But when I looked in her eyes I saw something I didn’t recognize. I didn’t know what it was, only that I wanted to see it in my eyes too. All of you have lived a long time and done a lot of things, both good and bad. But how many of you ever thought that life could change in a single moment, a single glance? I mean, isn’t that something?”

  Most of the elderly bingo players looked at Paz blankly, but a decent number, women mostly, were nodding up a storm.

  “Ever since that moment, I’ve wanted nothing more than to see the same thing in my eyes. Was it bravery? Determination? Conviction? Belief? Only recently did I realize it was goodness, G for goodness. In the course of my transformation, I’ve done a lot of good. But my eyes haven’t changed yet, so I keep trying.”

  Sensing the crowd’s impatience, the eager residents of Menger Springs ready with their dabbers once more, Paz spun the cage again, so hard the balls inside rattled up against each other, clacking like hailstones against glass. He grasped the ball that emerged out the top, but he stopped short of reading it because he spotted the figure of a V-shaped man with a military-style haircut standing in the back of the room, smirking as he nodded Paz’s way.

  Paz looked down toward the first row and at a man with a John D. MacDonald paperback stuffed in the pocket of a button-down sweater that fit him like a smock.

  “You mind taking my place, Francis?”

  The man started to stand up, then stopped. “How’d you know my name?”

  “We must have met.”

  “My name’s Frank. Only my mother ever called me Francis.”

  “You must’ve told me.”

  “I did?”

  “Must have,” Paz said, stepping down off the slight stage and handing the ball he’d yet to call to the rail-thin man, who looked like a broomstick with limbs.

  Paz walked straight out of the dining room that doubled as the bingo hall, ignoring the man who’d just arrived, until he fell into pace alongside him.

  “You’re a piece of work, Colonel, I’ll give you that,” the man said, smirking again as he shook his head.

  “What is it this time, Jones?” Paz asked the man from Homeland Security, for whom he worked when the need arose. “It better be good, for you to interrupt my bingo game. Those old people depend on me.”

  “ISIS in Texas,” the big man he towered over told him. “Is that good enough for you?”

  8

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS

  The call she’d received sent Caitlin to the Comanche Indian reservation, located on the outskirts of the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge.

  “I can’t believe you’re calling me,” Conseulo Alonzo said, when Caitlin reached her on her cell phone.

  “I wanted to apologize for last night, Deputy Chief.”

  “Save it for your hearing before the Department of Public Safety’s oversight committee.”

  “I’m heading up to the Comanche Indian reservation near Austin.”

  “Why am I not surprised, you and trouble being joined at the hip the way you are?”

  “What kind of trouble, ma’am?”

  “Oil drilling crew being blocked from entering the rez by some young protesters who want to turn the Balcones into Wounded Knee. From what I hear, they just might get their wish.”

  “Thanks for your time, Deputy Chief.”

  If Caitlin had her history straight, Spanish explorers had named the land northwest of what is now Austin “Balcones” because of its rolling, terraced hills. Those limestone hills and spring-fed canyons made up most of the sprawling, twenty-five-thousand-acre refuge, which had been formed in the early 1990s to protect some endangered bird species. But one hundred thirty years or so before that, a portion of the deeply bisected Edwards Plateau on its outskirts had been deeded to the Comanche as their rightful land, first under the auspices of Sam Houston and then confirmed by the U.S. government itself in the Medicine Lodge Treaty.

  The refuge, located off Route 183 through Lago Vista, was a majestically beautiful enclave of oak, elm, and cedar trees shading a lush countryside similarly rich in ground flora. All thanks to the waters of the massive Edwards Aquifer, which leached upward to keep the vegetation nourished, in stark contrast to the more barren, erosion-prone areas of the hill country. That same aquifer provided drinking water to a large number of Texans through springs that fed rivers flowing into the marshes, estuaries, and bays for miles and miles.

  The Comanche reservation had been carved out of the most fertile portion of the basin before the preserve itself was a thought in anyone’s mind. A large patch of prime land as lush and pretty as any that Texas had to offer, and upon which the Strong legend was born. Approaching the entrance to the reservation, Caitlin found herself searching her memory for the tale her grandfather had told her about his own grandfather, Steeldust Jack Strong, a Civil War hero who made his bones as a Texas Ranger on these very grounds.

  The actual entrance to the reservation was a wrought iron gate fastened to a high stone wall layered with what looked like mosaic tile. That wall and gate, rimmed by wildflowers and accessible only via a single flat but unpaved road off of RM 1431, had been erected a mere generation before. The twin sections of gate, which had settled into a permanently open position, were today replaced by a tight line of young-looking Comanche lined up arm-in-arm to block access to the reservation by a number of trucks. Those trucks were currently parked amid the tall grass bordering the road, lugging both light and heavy construction equipment. An equally long, straight line of sheriff’s deputies, Austin city cops, tribal policemen, and members of the highway patrol stood between the protesters and construction workers currently milling about, doing their best to keep the peace, while a grouping of spectators and media types watched from a makeshift gallery further back.

  Caitlin left her SUV in a makeshift lot of vehicles parked in no particular pattern and approached, figuring Dylan’s father, Cort Wesley Masters, wasn’t far behind after receiving her text message. More than one hundred forty years ago, Jack Strong had probably been one of the few white men to set foot on the land beyond, which was rich with oak-juniper woodlands, mesquite savannas, and riparian brush that rare bird species shared with gray foxes and white-tailed deer. The preserve stood pretty much unchanged and unspoiled from that day, a swath frozen in time, which seemed appropriate given that many of the young Comanche blocking the entrance were dressed in garb better fit for the nineteenth century.

  Caitlin could feel the building heat, the closer she got to the fracas, and not from either the sun or the camera lights. The bevy of construction workers looked none too happy about being denied entrance to the land on which their jobs rested, while what looked to be between fifty and sixty protesters, dominated by a dozen or so with painted faces and matching headbands, stood arm-in-arm before them.

  Caitlin spotted Dylan Torres smack-dab in the center. His left arm was laced through the arm of one of the painted young Comanche men and his right arm was linked to a young, dark-featured woman whose beauty radiated even in a scene like this. She had long black hair and the darkest eyes Caitlin had ever seen, so full and shiny they seemed more liquid than solid. She boasted athletic lines and was wearing a sleeveless shirt that showed off the muscle layering her arms, her biceps strung with veins and all three heads of her triceps easily definable. Drawing closer, Caitlin noticed that the Comanche protesters, in their early to midtwenties, wore trousers that looked woven from animal skins, and open vests exposing what looked like blood streaks on their chests.

  Now a junior at Brown University, Dylan wore the tapered jeans Cort Wesley hated, stretched over the boots Caitlin had bought him for a birthday that seemed a hundred years ago. He’d let his hair grow out, and it hung in loose waves and ringlets, past his shoulders, the same way it had back when Caitlin had bought him the boots, when he was often mistaken for some rock star whose name she couldn’t remember. His gaze was fixed on the workers congested befor
e the protesters, and Caitlin thought he was the only non–Native American manning the line that those workers looked ready to storm at any moment. Knowing Dylan as well as she did, his proximity to the beautiful Comanche girl made the reason for his presence here obvious.

  Oh, man, she thought. Not again …

  The boy was no stranger to trouble, almost all of it related to one girl or another. But the dark-haired Native American with whom he’d laced arms was the most beautiful of the lot, features and frame so perfect that she seemed painted onto the equally striking backdrop of the Balcones. Caitlin had intended to wait for Dylan’s father, Cort Wesley, to arrive before she tried to sort things out. But a sudden forward thrust of construction workers, forcing the police closer to Dylan and the other protesters, changed that plan in a hurry.

  The officers were barely managing to hold the line when Caitlin circled out behind them and in front of the Native Americans, even with the center, where Dylan and the beautiful Comanche girl stood.

  “We’re not looking for trouble, Ranger!” a big man with a scruffy beard, whom she took to be the work foreman, shouted from the other side of the cops.

  “Well, sir,” she said, hands planted squarely on her hips, “it looks like you found it, all the same.”

  9

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS

  Caitlin’s Texas Ranger badge glinted in a shaft of sunlight slicing through the shade trees, bouncing the light weakly back toward the workers.

  “The trouble’s standing right behind you, Ranger,” the foreman resumed, thrusting a thick, calloused finger toward the neat line of protesters. “I got the permits and copies of the signed contracts in my truck, if you want to see them. And these Injuns got no call to prevent us from doing the job we were hired to do by their mommies and daddies.”

  “Did he just call us ‘Injuns’?” asked the Comanche girl standing next to Dylan.

  Caitlin turned, ignoring Dylan while fixing her gaze on her. “Let me handle this please.” She turned again toward the foreman. “I’d ask, sir, that you and your people take a few steps back while we get this all sorted out. Nobody wants trouble, but if it comes, it’ll be sure to delay the work you came to do even longer. I don’t think that’s in anyone’s best interests. We on the same page here?”