Strong from the Heart--A Caitlin Strong Novel Read online

  “By who?”

  “Don’t know. Men went that way to fetch them,” the woman said, pointing south. “That was two days ago. Last we seen of them too.”

  Toward Mexico.

  “Sheriff in town?”

  “He led the posse that disappeared when they went out looking.”

  William Ray could make no sense of the town’s children being kidnapped, though he’d put nothing past the Mexican bandits, who were maybe just desperate enough to try out a new crime. He reminded himself of his purpose here in Camino Pass, his dutiful assignment being no more than to serve as escort for a prisoner who was slated to stand trial in Presidio.

  “When this happen?” William Ray asked, because he couldn’t help it.

  “Children were snatched two days back, early in the morning, round the time school started. Sheriff and the others set off later that day. He’s been sheriff of both for a time now.” The woman’s expression tightened in thought. “Yup, it was two days ago for sure, almost exactly now.”

  Which was long enough for William Ray to figure they weren’t coming back, neither the children nor the members of the sheriff’s posse that had gone after them.

  “Sheriff leave his deputy behind, ma’am?”

  “He did, but the man moved on as soon as he was gone, not about to face what he was fearing might come back, that being them that stole the children.”

  “Well, I got to be moving on myself,” William Ray said to the older woman, focusing back on the task at hand.

  She finally opened the door enough for him to see the shapeless dress, more like a smock, draped over her frame. “You’re going the wrong way. I told you, they went south.”

  “Let me see what I can see in town first, ma’am,” William Ray told her, spitting out a wad of tobacco behind his disgust at forming the lie.

  * * *

  He felt more frightened eyes fixed upon him as he hitched Jessabelle up to a post outside the sheriff’s station and entered the single-room building through a creaking door. William Ray smelled stale sweat and unfinished wood, the cloud of dust that coated the air riding him across the floor.

  A Mexican man, more of a boy really, but still the prisoner he was to transport, sat up on a tattered mattress atop a single cot inside a cell against the far wall.

  “Keys are hanging on a hook by the window, el Rinche,” the man-boy told him.

  William Ray followed his gaze, the keys jangling when he fetched them. “You’re a cooperative one, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll hang if you take me to trial.”

  “Not my concern, son,” the Ranger said, jiggling the key until it sank home in the lock.

  “What about the missing kids? That your concern?”

  William Ray pulled the cell door open but held his ground. The prisoner didn’t look much out of his teens, with a bird’s nest of thick black hair and a forehead stained with grime from where the brim of his hat had dripped sweat. He had a small, angular nose, baby-soft features, and smooth skin that combined to make him look pretty in a male sort of way, though he did have the makings of a mustache struggling to ride his upper lip. More boy than man, in William Ray’s mind.

  I’ll hang if you take me to trial.

  Not his concern, indeed.

  “You’re Doroteo Arango,” William Ray said, recalling the man-boy’s name as he stepped all the way inside the cell and unclasped a set of wrist irons from his belt.

  “I used to be,” the boy said, making no show of resistance or protest.

  “Who are you now, son?”

  “Francisco Villa, but you can call me Pancho. And I know what happened to those missing kids.”

  “So what’s your story, Pancho?” William Ray Strong asked the young man, stopping short of fastening the wrist irons on yet.

  “What have you heard?”

  “Only what I needed to hear to transport you to trial. That you and a bunch of other bandits you ride with have been robbing folks on both sides of the border. That you killed a man when you were fifteen years old.”

  “For raping my sister. What would you have done, Ranger?”

  “Kill him twice, I suppose.”

  “The man happened to be somebody you don’t want to cross. It was either flee to the mountains or watch far worse happen to my family.”

  “You kill anybody since?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How is it you speak such good English, son?”

  “Couple of the bandits I rode with were from north of the border. They taught me. When you’re hiding out, there’s plenty of time for learning.”

  “These Americans have names?”

  “They did indeed. Pretty bad hombres in their own right. Maybe you’ve heard of them. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

  “Those outlaws have had the good sense to stay out of Texas,” William Ray noted. “Well, Pancho, we best get a move on.”

  “What about the missing kids?”

  The Ranger readied the wrist irons. “Not my concern.”

  “You got any kids of your own, Ranger?”

  “I’m planning to.”

  “And if somebody took them from you?”

  “It would be the second-worst day of their lives, the worst being when I caught up to them.”

  Pancho Villa nodded, the light framing his sharp features in a way that made him still look like a boy. “People in this town got nobody to do that in their stead. And since the raiders didn’t get all the kids this time, the townfolk are afraid they’ll be back for the rest.”

  “You saw all of this happen?”

  Villa gestured toward his cell window, outfitted with a grate of bars over the glass. “I saw enough to know who the men were and where they came from.”

  “Keep talking,” said William Ray Strong.

  Pancho Villa lay back down on the cell’s wooden cot, pushing more straw through the fabric of the ragged mattress. “Not from inside here.”

  “You prefer we talk on the way to Presidio, muchacho?”

  “I’m no kid, el Rinche,” Villa said, again using the standard Mexican derogatory slang term reserved for Texas Rangers.

  “Trying to get a rise out of me, boy?”

  “Just returning the favor.”

  “Maybe I should just shoot you and tell the county seat that you tried to escape.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because you’re a Texas Ranger, meaning justice is your middle name.”

  “Ray’s my middle name, the first being William and last being Strong, son.”

  Villa sat back up, his bony shoulders pushing the fabric of his shirt up in the corners. “Then I can call you Fuerte or Sólida. Which would you prefer?”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn. Now, get on your feet,” William Ray ordered, holding the wrist irons out before him.

  Villa took his time rising to his feet. “How am I supposed to ride a horse with those strapped on me?”

  “You’ll figure it out. And they’re for your own good.”

  “How’s that, Ranger?”

  “Cuts back on the temptation to make a break for it, in which case I’d have to shoot you.” William Ray tossed the chains to Pancho Villa who let them clang to the floor. “Now put those on.”

  Villa made no move to pick them up. “Afraid to do it yourself?”

  “Be less painful if I leave the task to you.”

  Villa retrieved the wrist irons and fastened them in place before him, making sure to hold his hands in easy view of William Ray Strong. “What about those kids, Ranger?” he repeated.

  “Still somebody else’s problem.”

  “And the missing sheriff and that posse? Are they somebody else’s problem too?”

  William Ray conjured up in his mind a vision of what had gone down here. He saw the town’s children being rousted from the schoolhouse he’d noted farther down the main drag, dark faceless men pistol-whipping the schoolmarm when she tried to inte
rvene. The mothers and fathers would have been tending to their flocks and crops, doing what ranchers and farmers do. It would have happened early on in the day, in a sleepy town where both the sheriff and his deputy were as far from men of action as it got.

  “You got my curiosity up, bandit, I’ll give you that.”

  “I’m not a bandit.”

  “Then what got you jailed?”

  “What I did, not who I am.”

  “You always talk this way?”

  “What way is that, Ranger?”

  “So nobody can understand a dang word you’re saying.”

  “I’ve read a lot of books while holed up in the mountains,” Pancho Villa told him. “History and philosophy, mostly.”

  “Learn anything?”

  “That the world is full of evil men.”

  “Damn, son, I could’ve told you that without you opening a single page.”

  “Was evil men that took those kids, Ranger. There’s a town over the border, about thirty miles from here. They would’ve stopped there on the way where they’re going.”

  “And you know where that is.”

  “I believe I do.”

  “And you know who’s behind this.”

  “Yes, sir, I believe I know that too.”

  “Thirty miles, you said.”

  “Thirty miles,” Villa nodded.

  “Then we better get a move on, muchacho.”

  15

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “Pancho Villa,” Caitlin said slowly, when Tepper stopped to light a fresh Marlboro. “I remember that now. I must’ve been eight when my grandfather told me the story.”

  “Recall the rest of it?”

  “It came to guns.”

  “Doesn’t it always?”

  “So fill in the blanks.”

  “You must really be captivated, Ranger. You haven’t said a word about me lighting up another one.”

  Tepper touched his lighter to the edge of the Marlboro and a flame burst shot up, which forced him to cough the cigarette to the floor and stamp it out with his boot.

  “Now how do you suppose that happened?” he asked Caitlin, the furrows and creases lining his face suddenly looking as if they’d gotten deeper.

  “Looks to me like somebody must’ve poked out the tobacco and filled the wrapper with something flammable.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Magnesium, maybe. You going to pick up the story, what happened when my great-grandfather and Pancho Villa got to that town they headed out for?”

  Tepper checked to make sure the next Marlboro he pulled from the pack was filled with tobacco, but he held it away from his mouth. “Think I’ll risk blowing my face up again first, Ranger.”

  He watched Caitlin ease an orange prescription bottle from her jacket pocket and shake out a small pill that she popped into her mouth.

  “Tell you what, Ranger, you leave me to my smoking and I’ll leave you to swallowing those pain pills like candy.”

  Caitlin dry-swallowed the pill down. “The difference being that my pain’s going to pass while your smoking’s showing no signs of doing the same.”

  “You sure about that?” Tepper asked her, an uneasy edge to his voice.

  “How is it I don’t remember my grandfather ever finishing the story, D.W.?” Caitlin said, instead of answering him.

  “Maybe it didn’t have a happy ending.”

  “That never stopped him.”

  “Must’ve been something else, then,” Tepper said evasively.

  Caitlin was about to press the issue when her phone buzzed with an incoming call from Cort Wesley, as opposed to a text, and she excused herself to take it.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of—”

  Cort Wesley’s words ran right over hers and she cut herself off to listen to what came after “Luke overdosed.”

  16

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “You waited long enough to call me,” Caitlin said, mounting the steps to the front porch, where Cort Wesley was waiting for her in the darkness, the dome light switched off.

  She expected him to have a craft beer or a coffee in hand, but she recognized the dark bottle as that of his favorite root beer—his and that of the ghost of his dead friend, Leroy Epps.

  “I wanted to get Luke home and settled first,” Cort Wesley offered.

  “Will you promise me something?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t heard what I was going to say yet.”

  “I don’t have to, Ranger. You want me to promise you not to go after whoever Luke got the drugs from.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Okay, I promise.”

  “Not good enough, Cort Wesley. I was thinking more along the lines of the opioid network across all of Texas.”

  “Why not include the whole Southwest?”

  “I almost said the whole country, but tempered my thinking.”

  Cort Wesley sipped his root beer. “Not a bad idea.”

  Caitlin sat down next to him on the porch swing, drawing a creak from its worn springs. “Can I see him?”

  “I waited until he was sleeping to call you. Figured dealing with me was enough for one day.”

  Caitlin turned her gaze toward the front door where Maura Torres, Cort Wesley’s former girlfriend and mother to both Luke and his older brother, Dylan, had been shot dead a decade before. Caitlin had managed to save their lives and had served as their de facto mother pretty much ever since, a role she relished in the face of the challenges that came with the scope of that responsibility. It seemed like both boys had attracted trouble ever since, almost as if the proclivity had rubbed off on them from spending too much time around her and their father. Caitlin knew smells could pass from one person to another, so maybe tendencies could too, including being a magnet for violence and evil.

  “So how was your day?” Cort Wesley continued.

  “Started out with me coming up against ICE agents trying to roust elementary school kids and proceeded to me wearing a hazmat suit in a town where pretty much everybody died in their sleep.”

  “I’m being serious here, Ranger.”

  “So was I.”

  “Oh,” Cort Wesley managed, not all of what Caitlin had said fully registering.

  “You can’t take a flamethrower to the whole drug trade,” she told him.

  “Why not?”

  “You’d have to torch the whole state, the whole country.”

  “I’d settle for whoever sold the pills Luke and his friends sucked up their noses.”

  “They might’ve come from home, Cort Wesley, some parents’ medicine cabinets.”

  “That’s what Luke said.”

  “But you’re not buying it.”

  Cort Wesley drained the rest of his root beer, his expression that of a man who’d just swallowed something sour. “Luke pretty much admitted this wasn’t a onetime thing. Maybe not a regular occurrence for him, at least not as regular as a bunch of his friends.”

  “Too many pills to come from medicine cabinets then.”

  “You know how it works, Ranger.”

  Caitlin nodded. “One of the kids was supplying the others.”

  “Maybe moving enough to cover his tuition money for Village School,” Cort Wesley elaborated.

  “That’s a lot of pills.”

  “That’s my point.”

  Caitlin let him see the harshness of her glare. “You can’t brace a kid, Cort Wesley.”

  “I’m going to brace whoever it was that almost got my son killed.”

  Caitlin pushed herself off the porch swing, drawing a fresh creak from its springs. “I’m going inside to see Luke.”

  17

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “You knew I’d be awake,” Luke said.

  He was lying on his bed, still wearing jeans and a T-shirt, arms laced behind his head, facing a wall-mounted thirty-two-inch flat-screen television with the sound muted.

  Caitlin stopped at the foot of th
e bed. “I figured you did enough sleeping.”

  “After I passed out, you mean. You pissed?”

  “Surprised.”

  “Disappointed?” the boy managed, after swallowing hard.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  Luke unlaced his hands and sat up. “You want to sit down?”

  Caitlin took a seat kitty-corner at the edge of the bed, keeping her distance. “I’m trying to figure this all out.”

  “What’s to figure? I messed up.”

  “That all?”

  “It’s not enough?”

  “How many other times we talking about here?”

  “That I OD’d?”

  “Used.”

  Luke rolled his eyes, the snide impatience riding his expression making him look more like his older brother. “Do we have to do this?”

  “You asked me to sit down.”

  “It’s not like I keep count.”

  “Of the times you OD’d or used?”

  He started to roll his eyes again but stopped, as if catching himself. “Not a lot.”

  “You want to tell me where you got the drugs?”

  “They weren’t mine.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “The pills could’ve been anybody’s, Caitlin.”

  “Anybody’s not a name.”

  Luke hesitated. “You plan on arresting them?”

  “If I don’t shoot them first.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Neither was getting the news from your dad.”

  Luke lay back down, careful not to disturb Caitlin when he stretched his bare feet back toward the edge of the bed. He was taller than his brother, almost six feet now, and she was still getting used to looking slightly up at him, even in boots.

  “I feel sick again,” he said.

  “Side effect of the Narcan they gave you at the hospital.”

  “The stuff they give to addicts?”

  “And overdose victims. I carry a dose in my glove compartment. All Rangers do now.”

  “Just in case you need it yourself?” Luke asked, seeming to immediately regret the harshness of his tone.

  Caitlin took the prescription bottle from her jacket and shook it so the pills inside clacked against each other. “Doctor’s orders, Luke. You need me to explain the difference?”