Strong at the Break Read online

  Arno watched the big man stiffen, the color seeming to bleed from his face. “Told you to let me handle it.”

  “Might just do that, Jed, after I sit in with the doc for a time. Make sure he doesn’t miss anything.”

  “Extra pair of eyes is always a good thing.”

  “Just get yourself ready to travel, Jed, and program your GPS for Galveston.”

  14

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  Cort Wesley Masters was waiting at the curb when Caitlin screeched her SUV into the drive set before the Thomas C. Clark High School. He was inside before she’d come to a complete stop, saying “Let’s get going” with enough heat steaming off him to singe the upholstery.

  “What the hell happened, Cort Wesley?” she asked, driving off with him still working the seat belt assembly into place.

  “Dylan ran away, that’s what happened. I’m here for a meet with the principal and he took off in my truck while I’m fighting to keep him enrolled. Learner’s permit and all.”

  “Keep him enrolled?”

  “Guess you don’t know everything now, do you?”

  “Might help if you’d tell me.”

  “Meaning you’d have to be around for me to do so, ’stead of gunning down bad guys north of the border as well as south now.”

  “Word travels fast.”

  “I’ve been keeping in regular touch with your captain.”

  “Get back to Dylan.”

  “Just drive me over to the nearest rental place and you can go about your business, Ranger.” Cort Wesley studied her briefly, then resumed. “It’s clear you got something else on your mind and I don’t want to be a bother here.”

  Caitlin’s thought of the single sheet of paper folded up in her pocket and dialed her emotions down a notch, focusing on the matter at hand. “Hell with that, Cort Wesley. My business is Dylan right now.”

  “This is between me and him, Ranger.”

  “Then consider me your chauffeur.” Caitlin hesitated at the next intersection. “Where we going exactly?”

  “Head south on the interstate. Some back roads after that.”

  “Mexico?”

  “Mexico.”

  * * *

  “You call the cops?” Caitlin asked him.

  Cort Wesley looked like he couldn’t believe she’d even posed the question. “I called you.”

  “What about Dylan?”

  “His phone’s going straight to voice mail. Turned off so you can’t locate him by GPS.”

  “What kind of head start’s he got?”

  Cort Wesley checked his watch. “An hour now. Bit more maybe.”

  “Guess we both know where he’s headed.”

  “You casting blame on me in that statement?”

  “Why, ’cause you never took him down there to see Maria Lopez like you promised?”

  A year before, Dylan had saved the life of a runaway Mexican girl named Maria Lopez, who’d been part of a group of kidnapped girls being ferried to a worksite outside San Antonio. Problem was the man he’d saved her from turned out to be behind four hundred serial murders of women across the Texas-Mexico border, embroiling both the Texas Rangers and Cort Wesley Masters in a battle with drug cartels and a renegade Mexican colonel. The embroilment ended with a host of bodies being downed and Dylan emerging with a chip on his shoulder he dared the world to knock off. Facing down one of the deadliest men ever born, as close to the spawn of Satan as the world would ever see, had imbued the boy with a bravado and hardness that had come to define too many of his actions and thinking. That attitude had made school an afterthought and had led inevitably, Caitlin knew, to today’s actions.

  “I’ve been busy too, in case you haven’t noticed,” Cort Wesley told her.

  “South of the border, right?”

  “Why you looking at me that way?”

  “What way is that?”

  “You got something to say, just say it.”

  “I think you should have stayed clear of Mexico,” Caitlin said, the words feeling like ground glass in her mouth. “You’re not exactly popular with the federalés, one Major Batista in particular.”

  “You ever know something like that to stop me?”

  “No, that might actually take some honest thought.”

  Cort Wesley stopped looking at the road ahead of them and turned to glare at her. “You know what takes some thought? Figuring out how many Americans still got legitimate business south of the border they’re too scared to conduct given the danger involved.”

  “So they pay you to make them feel safe.”

  “Where’s this headed, Ranger?”

  “You kill anybody in Mexico?”

  Caitlin watched him freeze up, his features locking as his chest stopped its quick motions in rhythm with his nervous breathing. She drew the folded-up piece of paper from the pocket of her jeans.

  “You’re wanted for murder down there, Cort Wesley. And I’m supposed to bring you in.”

  15

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  Cort Wesley crushed the piece of paper she’d handed him into a ball without reading it. “What is this exactly?”

  “Letter to the Mexican authorities from Austin saying the State of Texas is going to comply with their extradition request.”

  “Simple as that?”

  “Why don’t you tell me how simple it is?”

  Cort Wesley looked away from her and squeezed the balled-up piece of paper tighter in his fist. “What happened down there had nothing to do with the services I was providing businessmen.”

  “Well, it had to do with something.”

  Cort Wesley rotated his gaze between Caitlin and the road ahead. “Shouldn’t you be turning around?”

  “Be a good idea if I did. Somehow I don’t think driving into a country where you’re wanted for murder’s a very good idea.”

  Silence settled between them, Caitlin deciding to wait for Cort Wesley to make the next move.

  “Man I killed was a runner for the Juárez cartel,” he said finally.

  “Simple as that?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “So why don’t you explain the complexities to me?”

  Cort Wesley returned his focus to the road ahead. “We gotta take a right just up ahead.”

  “Get off the main roads.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Just in case anybody else is fixing to track you down?”

  “Because this is the way Dylan would have gone,” Cort Wesley told her.

  * * *

  “This is the route you and your dad used to run stolen appliances across the border,” Caitlin realized, once her SUV’s tires thumped off the main road.

  “Used stuff nobody was gonna miss anyway.”

  “Except for the pieces that disappeared from new construction in those gated communities.”

  “Took the gate once too.”

  Something in Cort Wesley’s tone made Caitlin realize something. “You told Dylan about those days, didn’t you?”

  Cort Wesley’s eyes narrowed ahead into the blinding sunlight. “This road leads to a border crossing my dad and I used to use.” He looked over at her, his expression bled of emotion, his mind somewhere else entirely. “It was always Dylan’s favorite part of the story.”

  Caitlin squeezed the wheel tighter. “Tell me something, Cort Wesley. You ever think about keeping your promise to take him to visit that girl?”

  “Yeah, plenty of times.” Cort Wesley took the deepest sigh Caitlin could ever remember, sounding more like a crackling sob in the end. “But I couldn’t, Ranger. I couldn’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “’Cause Maria Lopez was killed two months ago.”

  16

  MEXICAN BORDER; THE PRESENT

  It felt to Caitlin like someone had kicked her in the gut. She’d gotten bad news before, plenty of times, but never something that came through unfiltered on a direct line to a place deep inside herself very f
ew could make stir. She looked from Cort Wesley back to the road, squeezing the steering wheel so tight the leather wrapping squeaked.

  “Car accident,” Cort Wesley continued a bit farther on, how much Caitlin couldn’t say. “Maria and her parents were all in the front seat of her father’s truck, none wearing seat belts when a car running from the police struck them broadside.”

  “Two months ago and you didn’t say a word?”

  “Dylan loses his mother two years back, what am I supposed to tell him?”

  Caitlin spun her gaze on Cort Wesley and held it so long she nearly veered off the road. “I wasn’t talking about him, I was talking about me.”

  “Some things you gotta bear alone. That sound familiar?”

  “No.”

  “It should, Ranger. You’ve said as much to me maybe a hundred times. ‘Lone Wolf Caitlin’ they ought to call you, the way you keep walking away from anything that can take you from your guns.”

  Caitlin swallowed hard, stung by her oversight. “You know why we get along so well?”

  “Do we?”

  “Figure of speech. It’s ’cause we both like living in a vacuum while the world keeps trying to suck us out.”

  “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Bearing our pain alone. Must run in the family. My father was the same damn way. Unlike my granddad, he didn’t relish telling me his tales of being a Ranger, all the gunplay and the like. There was only one time I pried the whole story of something out of him and that was different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was there.”

  17

  WEST TEXAS; 1990

  “I need you in West Texas, Ranger,” Ranger Assistant Commander Maurice Cook said to Jim Strong from across his desk at the State Capitol in Austin.

  “My duffel’s packed in my truck as always, Commander.”

  “Might need two since this assignment could keep you away for a time.”

  Jim waited for Cook to continue. He was a big man with thick forearms that kept him from buttoning the cuffs of his dress shirts. Cook was also one of the best-educated men who’d ever served the Rangers in an executive capacity, boasting a law degree along with several others that all came with fancy initials. That education had helped him spearhead a move to restructure and streamline some of the Ranger hierarchy and, if rumor became fact, he’d soon be succeeding H. R. Block as Senior Ranger Captain, Chief of the Texas Rangers.

  “Ever hear of the Church of the Redeemer?” Cook asked finally, his words slightly slurred by the pinch of tobacco packed between his cheek and gum.

  “Yes, sir, and none of it good. Heard enough to figure that place is something just short of the devil’s playground.”

  “Well, we’re setting up a task force to see to the group’s end on direct orders from the governor, and I’m assigning you to head it.”

  “I’d like to take D. W. Tepper with me if I could, sir.”

  “Son, you can take the Lord Jesus Christ Almighty Himself if it helps put the Reverend Maxwell Arno behind bars.”

  “He was my second choice, sir.”

  Cook grinned and rose to shake hands. He’d taken Jim Strong under his wing some years back and, as a result, Jim had found himself involved in some of the highest profile Ranger cases since the start of his career. He’d been dispatched to the Rio Grand Valley in 1966, four years after becoming a Ranger at the age of thirty, when the United Farm Workers struck for higher wages, setting off a firestorm of violence. He’d been on the front lines when a criminal named Fred Gomez Carrasco led inmates in an armed takeover of the Walls Unit, where Texas’s most violent offenders were housed, in Huntsville State Prison in 1974. He’d been part of the Ranger team that secured the release of thirteen-year-old Amy McNeil in a bloody gunfight with her kidnappers in Alvarado in January of 1985.

  Jim Strong might have been pushing sixty in 1990 but he looked ten years younger and acted twenty. He could still shoot with the best of them, and the craggy lines that had shown up on his brow and patches beginning to darken under his eyes did nothing to diminish the tight bend of his stare or the stature with which he carried himself. His father had died a few months before and his passing seemed to fill Jim with a renewed vigor, as if he was channeling the legendary Earl Strong and, by connection, had become the owner of Earl’s famed exploits as well as his own. He’d married late in life and had his daughter, Caitlin, even later, testament to the fact that for Jim Strong life truly had begun at forty.

  Cook let go of Jim’s hand but held on to him with his stare. “Ranger, if half of what we hear about Arno and this church of his are true, we’ve got ourselves a genuine mess on our hands. Best to deal with it before the spill widens, and with these rumors of Arno stockpiling weapons, that spill could end up running red.”

  “Not on my watch, Commander.”

  Cook grinned, his lower lip drooping lower than the upper thanks to the Skoal wedged in there. “Report whenever you see fit. Anything you need, Austin will provide.”

  What Jim Strong needed most, though, was someone on the inside of the Church of the Redeemer, a group notorious for tightly screening its membership and maintaining vigilant security precautions against precisely what Jim was planning. Before leaving for Midland, he studied the list of the church members who worked outside the grounds and cross-matched the names with criminal complaints and convictions. Sure enough, Max Arno had been beyond cautious with his selection, but the name Beth Ann Killane popped up for an altogether different reason: her son Danny was due to start his sentence at the Abilene juvenile detention facility in three weeks time for shooting two classmates with a pistol at his high school, located between the towns of Midland and Odessa.

  The fact that the victims were Latino would-be gangbangers who’d chosen to bully Danny in order to prove their toughness made some impression on the court, but not enough to prevent Danny from being sentenced to a two-year stretch. Because his was a violent crime, he’d be placed with boys even worse than the bangers who’d terrorized him. Latinos and blacks for whom juvie was a joke and rehabilitation was an opportunity to make your bones before you even returned to the outside. Kill or maim a fellow inmate and they could get their gang tats the day of their release instead of waiting months to be initiated.

  Beth Ann Killane, Danny’s mother, was a church member who worked at Pancake Alley, a coffee shop off I-20 in Odessa—pretty much an institution in those parts. So as soon as he hit town, Jim Strong began showing up there for breakfast every morning, Stetson in hand, cinco-pesos badge pinned to his lapel, and model 1911 .45 holstered on his hip. He made sure to exchange conversation and small talk with her, lingering well after his third or fourth cup of coffee was drained and morning paper long folded over in the hope the opportunity arose to enlist her help.

  Beth Ann seemed to be growing more edgy by the day, the clock ticking ever closer to her son’s incarceration that would either kill or break him. One morning a week into Jim’s routine, she was refilling his cup when the pot of coffee dropped from her grasp and exploded on the floor, dousing his pant legs with scalding liquid.

  “I’m a mess,” she moaned, soaking up the coffee with a combination of paper towels and dishrags. “I’m just a mess.”

  “Sit down across from me and calm yourself, Beth Ann,” Jim said in as soothing a voice as he could imagine. His own wife had been gone for going on eleven years now and he’d learned to live without a woman’s company in any but the most distant circumstances. Beth Ann Killane smelled of coffee grounds right then, but most mornings she smelled of lilac-scented body lotion and flowery shampoo. If she wasn’t so sad and did more with her hair than just shampoo it, she’d be quite attractive, as the pictures he’d seen of her boy attested.

  “My break doesn’t start for another twenty minutes.”

  Jim Strong looked around the mostly empty diner and cast the owner a nod, his eyes saying the rest of what needed to be said. “It’s been extended to
day.”

  She took the chair across from him.

  “Now why don’t you tell me what’s eating you up so, ma’am?”

  The story of her son spilled out like somebody broke off the spigot. It flowed nonstop for twenty minutes, every detail, nuance, and tragic turn. Beth Ann finally broke down at the end of a tale in which she laid the blame for her son’s plight squarely at her own feet, hands ringing her face to save it from dropping all the way to the table. “My poor boy, my poor boy…”

  Jim Strong reached across the table and laid a hand on her arm. Her skin felt hot and moist, the hairs standing up straight.

  “I could look into your boy’s case, if you want.”

  * * *

  “It’s not good, I’m afraid,” he said, when she sat down across from him the following morning. Watching Beth Ann Killane deflate, her hope draining like the contents of an air mattress, made him feel as low as it got. But he was a Ranger with a job to do. “Your son’s case is ironclad. He shot those boys down and the jury reckoned it was justifiable only to a point. Now I do believe the fact that jury was nine out of twelve Hispanic gives you grounds for appeal if—”

  “We gave up that right based on the prosecution agreeing to put him in a juvenile facility instead of Huntsville.”

  “Oh,” said Jim Strong as if he didn’t know that when, of course, he did.

  “So there’s nothing you can do.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  Jim held her gaze. In the thin light of Pancake Alley, thanks to a number of roof panel–covered bulbs that had blown, her face looked darker in the places where tears had streaked it. “Well, that depends.” He lowered his voice and slid his chair around closer to her, looking up. “See, there might be something I can do for Danny, but it would depend on you doing something for the Rangers. After he looked into the matter, my captain mentioned that you’re a member of the Church of the Redeemer.”

  “I am,” she said.

  “There’s no other way to put this, so I’m just gonna say it direct.” Jim paused, waiting for Beth Ann’s eyes to hold his before resuming. “If you were willing to provide the Rangers some information on the church and the Reverend Maxwell Arno, I believe my captain would be able to intervene on your son’s behalf.”