Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel Read online

  None of the big men tucked snugly into the desks before him moved a muscle. Fisker aimed the .357 straight at Hacksaw, head of the Bandidos.

  “That gunfight at the Waffle House in Waco and all the bullshit since stops now,” Fisker continued, holding the pistol steady with finger poised on the trigger. “I called you boys here to my own backyard, my home, the ghost town I rebuilt from the ground up to get that straight. Your pissant squabbles have hurt business and that needs to stop today. We play our cards right, the sky’s the limit.”

  Hacksaw didn’t look like he was even breathing, eyes tight on the revolver, as if he’d spotted something inside the bore. Fisker pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  Hacksaw started breathing again.

  “We play our cards wrong, we’re as fucked as a two-dollar whore,” Fisker resumed and, without missing a beat, spun the cylinder and resteadied the Magnum on Arlo Teague, head of the Hells Angels Texas chapter. “My daddy didn’t lay all the groundwork for what we’re building to see it lost in a shit storm of pansy-ass bullshit over who gets what city or what Podunk town.”

  Fisker curled his finger over the trigger and pulled it again.

  Click.

  Frank Fulton, head of the Cossacks, was grinning when Fisker aimed the Magnum straight for him, after spinning the cylinder a third time.

  “Offer’s still open, Frank, if you want to take your leave.”

  Fulton’s response was to sandwich his hands around the pistol and press the bore dead center against his forehead. “Let’s do this.”

  “You wanna talk territory, Frank,” Fisker said, starting the trigger inward, “let’s talk about the whole goddamn U. S. of A.”

  Click.

  Fisker laid the Magnum back atop the desk where any of the gang leaders could grab it. “Guess I underestimated you boys,” he said, coming around the desk toward the blackboard. “Now that we’ve got that behind us, school is in session.”

  The ghost town of Elk Grove, in its heyday, had been home to twelve hundred who liked living in a dirt-rich town carved out of the South Texas prairie two hundred miles south of San Antonio in McMullen County. Its population had varied considerably through the years, in accordance with the fluctuating nature of the state’s oil booms. By the time the sixties arrived, the oil had all dried up, followed by the water when a dam broke to the west and the town’s faucets started yielding nothing but air. The residents left, pretty much en masse, their small homes that dotted the town’s outskirts falling into deep disrepair, along with the town’s single L-shaped main drag of buildings.

  Fisker had first spotted the town from a helicopter and knew he’d found exactly what he’d been looking for. A location literally off the world’s map, where he could settle his people unbothered from the rest of the civilization. McMullen County was so sparsely populated that nobody much cared, especially when Fisker made hefty campaign contributions to the presiding sheriff, judge, and officials at the county seat. He made sure all taxes were paid on time and fashioned an insular world where not a single call had ever been placed for assistance of any kind to the outside world.

  Fisker’s first order of business had been to rebuild the homes and central buildings to their pristine, original condition. He used his own people, or their own people, to work construction, certain elements kept secret to the point where some of the work was done only at night. So, too, he made sure no Confederate flags or any other symbols were displayed anywhere in the open or publicly. Nothing to rouse the suspicions or raise the concerns of anyone who might be passing by, stumble in, or be paying a routine service visit to restock the propane tanks that fed the town all of its power. Elk Grove was as self-contained as it got, a slice of down-home Americana that, except for its soul and secrets stored within its dark underbelly, looked carved out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

  “Lesson number one,” Fisker continued to the three men, whose knees were all rubbing up against the underside of their kid-sized desks, when he reached the blackboard. “We gotta go along to get along, and get along to get ourselves where we’re supposed to be. As in this…”

  With that, Fisker yanked on a partially exposed pull-down map of the continental United States, held in a spindle. The map was so old and faded, he wasn’t even sure Alaska and Hawaii were included. He pulled too hard, eased up when he heard a slight tearing sound, then jabbed a finger into the center of the map.

  “This is where we’re supposed to be,” he told the leaders of the three motorcycle gangs. “This is our territory. We got product spilling in from Mexico, as well as points south and north of the border in Canada. We got a distribution network that puts Walmart and Amazon to shame, and a firm presence in all fifty states you can see right here. Well,” Fisker added, correcting himself, “forty-eight, anyway.”

  Hacksaw, leader of the Bandidos, raised his hand.

  “Speak your mind,” Fisker told him.

  “Product’s the problem. We could move ten, even twenty times the pills we’re moving now through our territories, and our suppliers are getting less and less reliable.”

  “Goddamn Fed crackdown’s hitting us hard,” said the leader of the Cossacks, nodding in agreement.

  “Maybe we waste a few of the motherfuckers, they’ll turn to thinking different on the matter,” suggested Arlo Teague of the Hells Angels.

  “That’s one way of doing business,” Fisker told him, “if you want that business to dry up to nothing, and a crackdown like nobody’s business to put us behind bars.”

  “Behind bars is where your daddy started all this,” Hacksaw noted. “At least, that’s what you’ve always said.”

  “True enough. You can build an empire behind bars but it’s not as easy to run one from there,” Fisker told the three of them. “We keep our noses as clean as we can, and we keep stuffing our pockets full.”

  Hacksaw shifted in his desk and the whole thing lifted into the air from the effort. “You want an empire, we’re gonna need more pills; more Oxies, Vikes, Percs, and crystal meth. A lot more.”

  Fisker pulled down on the map just hard enough to make it snap back into place with the thwack of a gunshot. “That’s the other reason I called you boys here today. Because this supply problem is about to become a thing of the past.”

  He looped around the teacher’s desk again and retrieved the .357 Magnum. The three gang leaders paid him no heed at all, barely acknowledging his action, until he pressed the pistol’s bore against his own temple.

  “Fair’s fair, right? If I was a better leader, if I’d schooled you on the way things needed to be when I should have, all this bullshit would’ve stayed in the can. But I didn’t and that blame’s mine to shoulder.”

  Click.

  “Now,” Fisker said, sliding the big gun back into his holster, “where were we?”

  12

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  It wasn’t like any crime scene Caitlin had ever seen before; it wasn’t like any crime scene at all.

  The man, potential victim, sat slumped in a reclining chair in his apartment’s living room, facing a widescreen television much too big for the room. The picture flared, but the volume had been muted, likely the single alteration that first responders had made to the room, so they could go about their duties without sound blaring in stereo. The victim had rubber tubing tied around his bicep to inflate veins now holding still blood. An empty vial of what must’ve been heroin rested on a table squeezed up against the chair arm, and Caitlin spotted the telltale spoon and lighter nearby as well.

  “Well, check out what we got here,” a voice called out, and Caitlin looked up to see a big figure lumber out of what must’ve been the bedroom. “A genuine Texas Ranger at our little ole crime scene.”

  It took her another second to recognize Detective Frank Pepper from their one previous, and unpleasant, encounter. She’d heard he’d been fired from the Houston police department shortly after that, but had no idea he’d gotten a job down here. The San An
tonio police detective’s badge dangling from his neck told her otherwise; Caitlin was barely able to hold her tongue.

  “Nice to see you again, Doctor,” she said, calling him by his nickname.

  Pepper’s expression bent into a snarl, recalling the uncomfortable history they had between them. “That’s what my friends call me.”

  “Your friends down here know what else they called you up in Houston? ‘Peepers,’ wasn’t it, on account of how you were prone to strip-search female suspects rousted on a traffic violation?”

  “I lost my seniority, the years I had in, and most of my pension,” he groused. “Isn’t that enough for you?”

  “You did that all on your own, Detective.”

  “Bullshit. I dared to cross the mighty Texas Rangers, and this is the price I paid for it. Low man on the totem pole getting put on diddly shit cases that don’t even reach the bottom of the barrel.” Pepper swung his eyes that were too small for his head around the room, as if seeing it for the first time. “But since you’re here, I guess maybe you’re swimming in it, too. And I don’t recall requesting any Ranger involvement.”

  “That’s not your call,” Caitlin said, turning toward Doc Whatley, who was already in the preliminary stages of examining the body. “Right, Doc?”

  “Right,” Whatley echoed, not paying attention to her.

  Pepper scratched at his scalp, drawing a sound like sandpaper against wood. “We don’t need the Bexar County ME to diagnose a drug overdose.”

  “Paramedics thought otherwise,” Caitlin noted.

  “For good reason,” Whatley said, retrieving a syringe that had slipped under the recliner. “This is still full. Victim must’ve dropped it before shooting up. So it wasn’t an overdose that killed him.”

  The paramedics hovering nearby nodded, as if they’d already figured that much out.

  Pepper moved closer, wanting to see the syringe for himself. “So he’d shot up already. OD’d before he could shoot more poison into his vein.”

  “Check out his arm,” Caitlin said, gesturing toward the still puffed-up parts beneath the rubber tubing looped round his bicep. “There are scars from plenty of past needle marks, but nothing fresh. Not only did the victim not overdose, he was clean until…” She looked back toward Whatley. “Can you hazard a guess as to the time of death?”

  “Last night.”

  “Makes sense,” Pepper said. “A neighbor found him this morning, when she stopped by to return some plates.”

  “What’s the man’s name?” Caitlin asked him.

  “Tyrell Liston.” Pepper paged through his memo pad. “Claimed he was related to Sonny, the fighter that then–Cassius Clay beat to claim the heavyweight title.”

  “That the man’s primary claim to fame?”

  “That and the fact that he spent a year in Huntsville on a drug beef going back a decade.”

  “My guess is that’s where he got clean, or at least started to,” Caitlin suggested. “Search the apartment and you’ll probably find a bunch of stuff labeled ‘NA’ for Narcotics Anonymous.”

  “So you think somebody killed him and made it look like an overdose?”

  “Doc?” Caitlin said to Whatley.

  “No signs of foul play at all here yet, but…”

  “But what?”

  Whatley went back to his examination of the body. “I’m not ready to say yet. But the paramedics made the right call in alerting the medical examiner’s office. There’s something here that they…”

  “They what?” Caitlin echoed, prodding Whatley to continue.

  “Tyrell Liston’s been dead for a while, Ranger.”

  “I thought you put the time of death as last night.”

  “Dying, then. He’d been dying for a while. Weeks maybe, days at least. Based on the way the blood’s settled, I’d say he barely moved from this chair for the whole day before he died, at the very least.”

  Before Whatley could continue, one of the patrolmen Frank Pepper had assigned to canvass the apartment building returned, half out of breath.

  “We found another body, Detective,” he said, leaning against the wall to steady himself.

  * * *

  It was a woman, found dead in her bed two floors up from Tyrell Liston’s apartment. The patrol cop explained that he’d caught the smell while knocking on her door, and fetched the building superintendent. Then rushed back down here, once he was sure.

  At Caitlin’s urging, only Whatley entered the apartment and returned after the ten minutes it took for him to perform a rudimentary examination of the woman’s body.

  Caitlin closed the door behind him. “Well?”

  He held up the iPhone he used as a camera and extended it toward her so she could see the screen. “Look familiar?”

  It was a picture of the female victim’s eyes, the whites so yellowed they looked like somebody had taken a paintbrush to them.

  “Same as Tyrell Liston,” Caitlin realized.

  “It’s too early to make any definitive pronouncements, Ranger, but this is consistent with catastrophic liver failure in both cases,” Whatley affirmed. “And that’s not all of it, either.”

  “All of what?” Detective Frank Pepper asked him. “Hey, I’m talking to you.”

  Whatley looked back toward Caitlin, clearly not wanting to say anything more, where he might be overheard.

  “Doesn’t matter, anyway, Detective,” Caitlin said, easing her phone from her pocket. “Things here just changed in a big way in a big hurry.”

  She hit a number on her speed dial.

  “Who are you calling?” Pepper demanded.

  “Homeland Security,” Caitlin told him. “And I want you to begin an evacuation of the entire building.”

  13

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee leaned so far forward, her microphone barely picked up her next words.

  “Let me get this straight, Mr. Skoll,” Congresswoman Sheila Decker said to David Skoll. “You purchased Redfern Pharmaceuticals in order to buy control of drugs currently on the market, but operating at a loss.”

  Skoll mimicked her motion, only strains of his voice reaching the microphone. “That’s correct, ma’am.”

  “And would you like to explain to this committee why a purportedly successful hedge fund manager like yourself would knowingly make a deal that would lose money?”

  “Because the drugs in question were remarkably undervalued.”

  “By which you mean underpriced. That’s correct, isn’t it, Mr. Skoll?”

  “If you say so, Madam Chairman.” Skoll smirked.

  His lawyers had advised Skoll to be temperate and humble in his remarks, and avoid being the wiseass the public had already branded him.

  Skoll ignored them.

  They recommended he dress like a thirty-eight-year-old successful businessman, and not wear his trademark jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers. Dress for the occasion, they told him.

  Skoll had dressed for the occasion in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt.

  They’d warned him to make sure he shaved and got a haircut.

  Skoll’s face currently featured three days of beard stubble and his hair, worn exactly the way he had since high school, still hung down to his shoulders.

  “And what do you say, Mr. Skoll? What do you say about raising the price of a dozen drugs by up to ten thousand percent virtually overnight?” Decker put on her glasses in order to read from the list before her. “Drugs to fight HIV, hepatitis C, malaria, MERS…” She took off her glasses again. “Older drugs, long in circulation, you purchased in order to turn them into so-called specialty drugs. What do you have to say to that, sir?”

  “That I wasn’t expecting to cause such a fervor,” Skoll said into the microphone. “That I wished I owned a drug that could cure the kind of stupidity that keeps people from seeing that, with the increased profits, I’ll be able to pump more money into research and development. That undervaluing drugs in the mark
etplace has the very real effect of depressing the kind of innovative research that can save lives in the future.”

  “And what about the people who are no longer able to afford the drugs you now own, which they need to stay alive?”

  Skoll popped a stick of gum into his mouth and worked it audibly about his mouth, another thing his lawyers had warned him not to do. “Madam Chairman, I lost my father to ALS. There’s no drug that can cure ALS. Recently, my mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. There’s no drug that can cure that, either. And there never will be—for ALS, Alzheimer’s, or any other modern-day scourges—because it costs a billion dollars to develop them. And the only way to raise that billion dollars is to raise the price of drugs already on the market. You want to blame someone for my actions, blame the Food and Drug Administration for creating such an onerous approval process.”

  “Tell that to the loved ones and families of victims who’ll soon be dying because your prices aren’t so bearable to them and their budgets,” Congresswoman Decker told him. “And you can do just that, because they’re next on our list to testify. So stick around, Mr. Skoll.”

  “I don’t have to, Madam Chairman. I’ve already been subjected to parades of protesters outside my home and office with their signs and their placards, showcasing their ignorance at the behest of politicians like you, who are persecuting me because I’ve long refused to donate to your political campaigns.”

  Skoll waited for the murmurs rising through the chamber to quiet before continuing.

  “That’s right. I have in my possession campaign fund-raising solicitation letters from half the members of your committee, sent over the course of the past election cycle. If you’d like me to produce them…”

  “That won’t be necessary, sir.”

  “Even yours, Madam Chairman?”

  A few chuckles rose through the crowd this time, Skoll ready to resume the moment they subsided.

  “Unfortunately, Madam Chairman, my company doesn’t make a drug to treat hypocrisy.”