Strong As Steel Read online

  Neither Ranger said a word, their .45s steadied before them. Then the two gunmen in the center, set slightly back from the others, moved aside to create an opening for Luna Diaz Delgado, la Viuda Roja, to pass through.

  Her high heels clacked against the depot’s old wooden floor, everything about her bleeding elegance, from the perfect length of her stride to the way the designer dress hugged her shapely lines and how her hair, the color of a raven’s feathers, tumbled past her shoulders.

  “I think we should talk, Tejano,” the Red Widow said to Jim Strong.

  12

  SONORA, TEXAS

  “She still runs a good part of the show south of the border,” Caitlin said, when Tepper halted his tale. “But I never knew my dad had a run-in with her.”

  “It was a hell of a lot more than that, Ranger, believe me.”

  “So why stop there, Captain?”

  “Because, Ranger, Jim Strong had his reasons for never wanting you to hear this story, and I figure respecting his wishes is the best course to follow.”

  Caitlin turned back to the rectangular ditch dug out before them. “His reasons for that have anything to do with what somebody pulled out of this hole? Because I’m thinking that whatever got clipped from the freight train that night in 1994, before it reached Mexico, ended up getting buried here. And the reason you’re all out of sorts is now somebody went and dug it up again.”

  “So, what, now you’re my psychiatrist?”

  “Maybe I just know the feeling of laying eyes on something I thought was gone forever.”

  “Right now, all we’re laying eyes on is an empty hole.”

  “And you have no idea what used to be inside it?” Caitlin said.

  “Not a clue.”

  “How about the identities of the men behind those skeletons?”

  Tepper swung from the ditch and glared at Caitlin. “I look like a psychic to you, Ranger?”

  “I’m not a psychic, either, and yet I’ve got a feeling ballistics just might find evidence that it was forty-five-caliber shells that killed the four men once attached to those skeletons.” Caitlin knew she should have left things there, but she couldn’t hold back. “I think you have reason to believe Jim Strong was the one who put them in the ground. So tell me, D.W., if we run any slugs we find through ballistics, will they match up with your forty-five, too?”

  Caitlin expected that comment might raise Tepper’s ire, but his expression remained flat and expressionless. Empty, the way a man’s does when he’s forgotten how to smile.

  “Your dad and I worked the case together through most of it, until the investigation went south and I was dispatched to Huntsville, where a whole bunch of prison riots had broken out.”

  “Leaving the freight car investigation to my father.”

  “He was ordered to Huntsville, too, difference being he didn’t go.” Tepper took off his Stetson and scratched at his scalp again, then curled his fingers up before him as if to look for the Marlboro he’d already shed. “Guess it runs in the family.”

  “Disobeying orders?”

  “Some would call that insubordination, Ranger. Grounds for dismissal.”

  “But just another day at the office for a Texas Ranger.” Caitlin stopped, realized she was holding her breath along with her words. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

  “Which question was that?”

  “Whether it was my dad who planted these bodies in the ground like watermelon seeds.”

  Tepper’s expression tightened anew, looking strained, as if he might’ve been in physical pain. “I wasn’t around. Been reassigned, remember?”

  “Sure, D.W., whatever you say.”

  “You don’t want to believe me, that’s your prerogative.” He shook his head. “I think this kind of thing has been following the Strongs around ever since your great-great-granddad Steeldust Jack did his ranging.” Tepper deliberately worked another Marlboro free of the pack, as if daring Caitlin to say something, then resumed when she didn’t. “Luna Diaz Delgado’s still one of the most powerful people in Mexico. Heads of the cartels don’t lift a finger unless she blesses their ring. That means she’d make a worthy target for the winds of Hurricane Caitlin to topple over, and I don’t want to go putting thoughts in your head.”

  “You think I don’t already know everything there is to know about her?”

  “Well, you didn’t know your own dad mixed it up with her once.”

  “Define ‘mixed it up,’ Captain.”

  “A topic for another day,” said Tepper, his spine seeming to stiffen.

  “Midnight’s not too far off. I can wait.”

  Tepper turned to face her head-on. Caitlin hadn’t realized he’d lit up another cigarette until the smoke rose between them.

  “Leave this one alone, Ranger. Will you trust me on that?”

  “Not unless you tell me why, D.W.”

  “Because it’s something Jim Strong wouldn’t want you to know.”

  Caitlin felt a pressure in her chest, an overall heaviness settling over her. She swung away from Tepper to simmer down and avoid the argument that her stubbornness otherwise would have likely resulted in. She found herself gazing out into the darkest part of the desert, a vast black hole of nothing.

  Except for a single dim flash of light. Caitlin wrote it off as the product of her imagination, until it flashed again, then a third time, when the wind picked up.

  “Captain,” Caitlin said, turning back around.

  “I’m done arguing the point, Ranger. Getting in the ring with you means the bell never sounds.”

  Caitlin glanced back into the emptiness and caught the flicker again. “There’s something out there we need to check out.”

  13

  EZIAMA OBIATO, NIGERIA

  “Did you truly believe God would not punish you for your indiscretion?”

  Enrico Molinari’s towering shape swept through the residents gathered on the edge of the village’s landscape of once fertile fields, now reduced to a decaying wasteland. The men tried not to recoil at the sight of his patchwork face, at the jagged scars where grafted skin had been sewed in place. The women mostly turned away or looked down in revulsion, while the children were brought to tears and cries.

  He spoke English because that was the country’s native language, left over from colonial times, although villages like Eziama Obiato had begun to fancy Hausa, from the precolonial days. That inclination was symbolic of another national tendency of late, that which had brought Molinari and his troops here to make an example of this village. It was not the only village to have fallen prey to a scourge that had drawn the attention of his superiors and had led to his being dispatched, just the one they’d decided to make an example of.

  “You wish to know what has become of the firstborn sons of your village,” Molinari said to those gathered before him like loyal subjects. “You cower at my feet and beg for a mercy you would never have needed had you not turned away from our Lord. Before you stands my legion of soldiers in His army sent here under His charge to fulfill a mission of His calling.”

  The legion Molinari spoke of formed a neat line of thirty well-armed commandos, not mercenaries but those whose faith was boundless and unquestioning. Men like him, for whom killing was a holy task, to be celebrated as a kind of Eucharist and ultimate duty before the Lord. His men stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking the sight in the field beyond, soon to be revealed to the villagers.

  “There is only one God,” Molinari continued, loud enough for all of them to hear. “And you have betrayed His word. You have sought solace among the false god of heathens and foolishly expected no recrimination for such a blasphemous transgression from His teachings.

  “For the wrath of God,” Molinari continued, quoting Romans, “is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. And such a truth is the very word you have turned away from, and know that He will punish those who do not kno
w God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus,” Molinari said, finishing with a quote from Thessalonians.

  As a child, he had dreamed of being a priest, but he enjoyed the company of women too much to survive the seminary. This bitterly disappointed his family, who were mollified only slightly by Molinari’s decision to join the Italian army, where his physical stature and prowess allowed him to rise swiftly through the ranks, ultimately becoming a member of Italy’s elite Special Forces group known as 9th Reggimento d’Assalto Paracadutisti, the 9th Paratroopers Assault Regiment, or Col Moschin. Because of his vast bulk and his height, which stretched to nearly seven feet, they had to design a special parachute for him.

  Being part of the Italian version of the British Special Air Service paved the way for a career in law enforcement with the carabinieri. There, he earned the reputation as a crime-busting officer who was not afraid to mix it up with the most powerful elements of Italian organized crime. The stalwart, uncompromising giant stoked fear in the hearts of mob figures and provided a face for Italy’s determined efforts to, at long last, rid this scourge from the country.

  Until he walked into a trap, his men killed and Molinari captured. They forced him to kneel, his hands and feet bound with chains. Then they doused him with gasoline and, while a video camera whirred, set him on fire.

  The agony that had followed had given birth to another man entirely, in mind and spirit as well as in body. A man freed from the bonds of laws and mores to serve justice on those who threatened the word of God and risked the integrity of His sacred house.

  Eziama Obiato was a prime example of the scourge sweeping through Nigeria, the scourge of Islam, which was uprooting Christianity as the nation’s dominant religion. The entire African subcontinent was in danger of being swept away, and all previous, more docile efforts at reconciliation undertaken by the Vatican fathers had failed. Molinari and his men had become the Church’s last resort, called upon when all else had failed to dispel this vast threat to Christianity itself.

  In service to the true army of God, a legion of those who believed in His word in an unfaltering manner and were willing to back up their beliefs with blood.

  In service to the Order.

  Molinari had not randomly chosen Eziama Obiato to serve as an example to the rest of the country, straying from faith. Instead, the village had been a strategic selection, thanks to the common boundaries it shared with four other government areas in the Nigerian state of Imo.

  “This morning,” Molinari continued, “you witnessed me burn your much-revered palm trees that bear three branches that symbolize unity, progress, and faith. But since you’ve lost your faith, you no longer deserve the other two. And your firstborn sons were taken so you might know the pain you have caused God by heeding the blasphemous words of Islam. Those words burn in your throat just as the leaves of your trees perished in a blaze. And now you will behold the punishment for the error of your ways and the sinful straying that led me here today.”

  With that, Molinari’s men, all soldiers beholden to the Order, parted to reveal the firstborn sons of Eziama Obiato buried in the ground so only their heads rose above the soil. Dozens of them, arranged in neat, even rows, in the form of a spring planting, gagged to silence their screams. But their eyes swam with terror, pleading for help, for mercy, which disappeared with the appearance of the massive cultivator being driven by another of Molinari’s men.

  The villagers gasped, cried, screamed, dropped to their knees in the semblance of Christian prayer.

  “It is too late for that now,” Molinari told them, as the cultivator’s razor-sharp tongs chewed through the ground. “You should have thought of your faith before you squandered it and became the enemies of God. To whom shall I speak and give warning that they may hear? Behold, their ears are closed and they cannot listen. Behold, the word of the Lord has become a reproach to them; they have no delight in it.”

  The cultivator continued on, the land receding in its path, drawing straight in line with the exposed heads of the village’s firstborn sons.

  “This great machine was a gift of the very Church you forsake, though when you turned away from His name, you still continued to employ it for your own gains. So what has Islam done for you, besides bring His wrath upon you in my dispatch? But I am full of the wrath of the Lord; I am weary with holding it in. So I will pour it out on the children in the street and in the gathering of young men to others.”

  The cultivator churned the ground in a blur, bringing to the top richer, deeper-colored soil from beneath the residue of crop life that had been laid to waste ahead of Molinari’s coming.

  “Watch!” he ordered those villagers who sought to close their eyes to the inevitable. “Behold His wrath being visited upon you!”

  The cultivator rolled over the first rows, making a crackling, crunching sound not unlike the one it made when devouring stray branches, spraying blood, bone, brain matter to soak into the soil.

  “Their houses shall be turned over to others,” Molinari said, his voice carrying over the crunching, as well as the cries of the villagers, “their fields and their sons together. For I will stretch out My hand against the inhabitants of the land, declares the Lord.”

  The cultivator ground to a halt, its work done. Molinari kept his gaze fastened that way, eyes feasting on the finished product.

  “This is the price you pay for not keeping that hand in yours, when it was extended with love by the Father. This is the price you pay for betraying His word and besmirching His kingdom.”

  Molinari walked off toward the field, leaving his men with the still shrieking villagers. He stopped at the midpoint of the cultivator’s work, his boots crunching over the refuse left in its wake.

  “It is done, Your Eminence,” he reported into his satellite phone.

  “Good to hear,” the prefect of the Order replied, “because your presence is required elsewhere, immediately. In America, Captain, the state of Texas.”

  14

  SONORA, TEXAS

  The headlights of Caitlin’s SUV bounced off a rock formation spilling out from the nest of mesas that dipped and darted through the landscape. She ground the tires to a halt there and climbed out ahead of D. W. Tepper. Caitlin kept her pace slow so he could keep up with her across the uneven land laden with boulders that glowed red beneath the spill of their flashlights.

  The source of the flickering light rested upon a flat nesting of scrub amid a natural rock formation. She helped Tepper atop it, fifteen feet above the wasteland beyond, in the shadow of the jagged mesas that sliced the greater landscape like scissors.

  Tepper dropped his hands on his knees while Caitlin dropped her hand toward the remnants of a small fire that, when fueled by the wind, kicked up the flickering flames she’d spotted. The rock formation offered a view clear to the construction lights set up over the dug-out trench from which something, in addition to those skeletons, had been removed.

  “What do you make of this, Captain?” Caitlin said, kneeling by the remains of the fire enclosed by a nest of stones.

  Tepper crouched alongside her and, still breathing hard, sifted his hand through some stray ash. “Whoever was here didn’t leave too long ago.”

  Caitlin shined her flashlight about, but the smooth rock face wasn’t conducive to holding footprints and there was nothing else in evidence that could tell her anything about who had been here.

  “Someone was watching that site you’re investigating, Captain,” she said suddenly.

  “Here we go again.…”

  “Hear me out on this. Hard to believe it was just coincidence, given the sight line straight to that hole in the ground.”

  Tepper started to rise, Caitlin needing to help him make it all the way back upright. “Where you going with this, Ranger?”

  “Maybe whoever it was also happened to be around when that backhoe dug up the contents of that hole.”

  Tepper had the look of a man who wanted to be anywhere else in the world bu
t here. “Or maybe they were roasting marshmallows and telling ghost stories around the campfire.”

  Caitlin ignored his comment and knelt back down, smoothing her hand through the cooling ash and feeling it pass over something smooth and white amid the char. She closed her fingers around what turned out to be a jagged, half-burned piece of paper, blackened at the edges. She shined her flashlight against it and stood up so Tepper could better regard it.

  “Looks like some kind of receipt, Captain,” she said, sliding an evidence pouch out of her pocket.

  “You take those things into the shower with you?” He frowned.

  “Only if I’m expecting to find something important in the drain.”

  Tepper squinted to give the piece of paper a closer look, as Caitlin fit it into the pouch. “Your dad and I used to use baggies. This was back in the Stone Age, when nobody knew what ‘Ziploc’ meant.”

  “I’m going to have this checked out,” Caitlin said, sliding the evidence pouch into her pocket. “See if it leads anywhere.”

  Tepper cupped a hand against his ear. “Hear that, Ranger?”

  “Hear what?”

  “The winds of Hurricane Caitlin picking up, about to barrel down on the world.” He lowered his hand and fought the wind to light a cigarette. “Yup, here we go again.”

  PART THREE

  In 1878, the Rangers received a tip that the legendary train robber, Sam Bass, planned to knock over the bank in Round Rock. Bass was killed in a shoot-out with the Rangers. According to one account, the outlaw’s last words were “Life is but a bubble, trouble wherever you go.”