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

  “How long have you been taking them now?”

  “I don’t mark the days off on my calendar.”

  “You can’t take them forever.”

  “They’re for pain. When it goes away, so do the pills. And I swallow, not grind them up and snort them.”

  His eyes moistened. “I’m sorry.”

  Caitlin canted her frame to better face him. “What if all those colleges you’re applying to found out?”

  Those same eyes widened in fear. “Will they?”

  “Nope, not unless you tell them. Of course, they might notice the drop-off in your grades.”

  “I’ve got a four-point-two-five grade point average and I’m acing all my AP classes.”

  Caitlin nodded. “That’s better.”

  “What?”

  “Hearing you talk about things that matter. You know what else matters? You telling me how regularly you’re using.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “What?”

  “‘Using.’ It makes it sound like I’m some homeless guy who gets swept off the streets.”

  “They had to start somewhere, son. And stop changing the subject.”

  “You think I’m, what, like an addict?”

  “Are you?”

  Luke answered with his gaze focused on the muted television. “This was like the third time.”

  “What was the occasion?”

  “A friend from the soccer team got into Harvard early decision. We were celebrating.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “It’s easier to bring pills to school than weed or booze.”

  “Sure,” Caitlin said, feeling the back of her neck heat up, “that explains it.” She paused long enough for Luke to meet her stare again. “This friend of yours have a name?”

  “You want me to rat him out?”

  She remained silent.

  “I can’t do that, Caitlin. And stop looking at me like that.”

  “Looking at you like what?”

  “Like you don’t recognize me. You talk to Dylan lately?” Luke asked her. His older brother had recently returned to Brown University.

  “What does he have to do with this?”

  “Nothing. I asked if you’d talked to him, maybe checked Instagram.”

  “You think I do that?”

  “Check out his Instagram page,” Luke told her. “You got bigger problems with him than me.”

  “Worse than almost dying?”

  Luke rolled his eyes. “I didn’t almost die.”

  “I think maybe you and me should take a little field trip.”

  “I just came from the hospital, Caitlin.”

  “I was talking about the morgue, where plenty of overdose victims end up.” She hardened her gaze. “You know what the phrase ‘setting of the features’ means?”

  Luke shook his head. “You know what Dylan’s been up to?”

  Caitlin ignored him. “It’s what a mortician does to make a body suitable for viewing—that placid facial expression that gives the deceased that look like he doesn’t have a care in the world. You know how they do that?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “They stuff the throat and nose with cotton and then suture the mouth shut, either using a curved needle and thread to stitch between the jawbone and nasal cavity or using a needle injector machine to accomplish a similar job more quickly. Small spiked cups are also inserted under the eyelids to keep the lids closed and the eyes from caving in. Should I go on?”

  Luke looked suddenly queasy. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “You said that already.”

  He struggled to sit up again. “No, I mean I think I’m going to puke.”

  Luke pushed himself off the bed, standing up while clutching the front post. Caitlin fought the urge to help him, holding herself down as he staggered toward the door, then through it and into the bathroom across the hall.

  Her phone rang as he closed the door behind him, Doc Whatley’s mobile number lighting up at the top of the screen.

  “I guess Camino Pass has you working late, Doc.”

  “You busy, Ranger?”

  Caitlin looked across the hall toward the closed bathroom door, hearing the toilet flush inside. “You don’t want to know.”

  “How soon can you get down to University Hospital?”

  “You mean in the morning?”

  “No, I mean now. This can’t wait for morning.”

  18

  TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER

  “So, what, this is all about making the Guinness Book of World Records?” Roland Fass said to the big man who towered over him.

  Inside the cramped dressing room that was once a supply closet, Yarak Bone continued looping hand-wrap tape around his fingers and knuckles to cushion the blows he would soon be unleashing. “I ever tell you I had ancestors that could scalp you in maybe a second?”

  The dressing room’s light came courtesy of a single bulb dangling from a chain overhead. The facility in which tonight’s bare-knuckle fights were being staged had once been a waste treatment facility, constructed to make sure raw sewage wasn’t dumped into the nearby Rio Grande. Bone figured this converted supply closet must have once contained harsh chemicals of the kind that could choke your breath, based on the pungent, corrosive scent that still hung in the air after so many years.

  The actual fights took place in what had once been an underground storage tank, which stank of waste matter mixed with dried sweat that clung to the iron walls like glue. Spectators, bettors all who’d also paid an exorbitant admission fee, watched from one of the three levels that spiraled upward over the tank. Their cheers echoed in hollow fashion through the cavernous facility, the smells of beer, cigarettes, and weed adding to the stale, fetid air that left spectators in need of a shower just for showing up. As a boy growing up in a traditional Comanche family, Bone had skinned and gutted animals from the time he was seven years old, so the stench didn’t bother him.

  Fass tried not to look frightened. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Answer mine first.”

  “No, this is the first time you’ve shared that with me.”

  “I don’t think Guinness keeps records on how fast you can kill five men with your bare hands,” Bone told him. “You paying them ten grand to take me on was a stroke of genius.”

  “They only get paid if they last two minutes,” Fass reminded.

  Bone flexed his hands to make sure he could still tighten them into fists. “You know the best thing? Each of them figures How hard can it be?, two minutes being such a short time. Of course, chances are they’ve never been pounded for two minutes straight. You have any idea how many blows I can land in two minutes? They could make it one, for all I care. If I can’t kill a man in a minute, he deserves to walk away rich.”

  Fass almost told Yarek Bone that ten thousand dollars hardly qualified a man as rich, but quickly thought better of it. “You read what I sent you, check out the pictures?”

  “You made a mess you need cleaned up.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I didn’t have to read anything to know that much. But, hey, I’m about to try to kill five men in under five minutes. You killed, what, three hundred in the blink of an eye?”

  “There’s no proof our facility had anything to do with this.”

  “And yet here you are talking to me, chuma.”

  “We’re just playing things safe here. What’s chuma mean?”

  “Chief.”

  “I don’t think you understand the extent of the problem here. This is coming from your chief.”

  Bone twisted his head from side to side, loosening his neck with twin crackling sounds. “You’re a chief, not my chief. I don’t have a chief.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

  “I know you need somebody killed.”

  “There was a survivor in Camino Pass.”

  “Not for long.�
�� Bone grinned.

  * * *

  They came through an iron door that looked lifted off a submarine, one at a time; five men, naked from the waist up, with chests and jaws protruding, breathing bravado. Until they got a good look at Yarek Bone’s towering, muscular figure, by which point the hatch-like door had been sealed behind them. And, hey, if any of them were still standing after a mere two minutes, the ten thousand would be theirs.

  The first fighter was thin and wiry, just a few inches shorter than Bone, with knobby muscle and close-cropped hair. Bone hit him with two blows to the face, leaving one eye closed and two teeth spit out onto the slick floor. Then he let the man slam him with a pair of blows flung from clearly trained hands, just so he could smile through them.

  “I got this condition,” Bone said, as he circled the man, firing off lighter blows just to feel his head snap back upon impact. “It’s called CIP, for ‘congenital insensitivity to pain.’ In other words, I can’t feel pain, no matter how hard you hit me.”

  At which point, Bone snapped off a blinding punch that flattened the man’s nose and sent plumes of blood spraying into the air from both nostrils. The crowd roared their appreciation, pumping their fists. Spilled beer showered the air, some of it falling to the tank floor and further adding to the slippery sheen.

  “Currently, there are three known genes, with twenty-eight mutations, that can lead to a diagnosis of CIP,” Bone told the man, amid a flurry of jabs that left his eyes glassy and his hands hanging limp by his sides, “all of which affect how nerves transmit pain signals. Bottom line being that my wiring is all fucked up, which is bad news for you since you could rip my arm off and I wouldn’t feel a thing.”

  Bone felt the man’s spinal cord crack, as he landed an uppercut that snapped the fighter’s head so far back he looked like a rag doll. His feet literally lifted off the floor ahead of him, the back of his head breaking the fall when he landed.

  Just over a minute, Bone saw from the LED counters strung overhead, the crowd roaring so loud he could feel his ears bubbling. Taped hands were thrust triumphantly into the air as the body was carried out another door. Meanwhile, a second fighter entered the makeshift ring.

  “Ever hear of CIP?” Bone asked him.

  * * *

  “Four minutes forty-one seconds. Congratulations,” Roland Fass said to Bone, back in the converted supply closet. “Maybe I’ll give Guinness a call.”

  Bone wasn’t even breathing hard as he toweled himself off, leaving an equal mix of sweat, grime, and blood from the five men he’d just left splattered on the ring floor.

  “Don’t bother,” Bone told him. “Next time I’m going for ten in ten minutes.”

  “Let’s talk about your next kill first,” Fass reminded. “That survivor from Camino Pass.”

  19

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “I expected more from you, Ranger,” Bexar County Medical Examiner Frank Dean Whatley told Caitlin.

  “How’s that, Doc?” she asked him. They were in a sealed area beyond the isolation ward that the Department of Homeland Security had constructed inside University Hospital.

  “Normally, you bring me puzzles that keep me up at night trying to fit the pieces together. This time you brought me one already assembled.”

  Whatley had shed the hazmat gear he’d donned to perform detailed examinations and preliminary autopsies on a sampling of the victims who’d died the previous night in Camino Pass. But Caitlin still detected the pungent scents of latex and rubber mixed with the stale sweat that came from wearing the airtight suits for a prolonged period. Caitlin could picture Whatley donning the outfit as soon as the bodies arrived at the dedicated DHS area of University Hospital, and then not shedding it until he’d placed his phone call to her.

  Frank Dean Whatley had been Bexar County medical examiner since the time Caitlin was in diapers. He’d grown a belly in recent years that hung out over his thin belt, seeming to force his spine to angle inward at the torso. Whatley’s teenage son had been killed by Latino gangbangers when Caitlin was a mere kid herself. Ever since then, he’d harbored a virulent hatred for that particular race, from the bag boys at the local H-E-B supermarket to the politicians who professed to be peacemakers. With his wife lost first in life and then in death to alcoholism, he’d probably stayed in the job too long. But he had nothing to go home to, no real life outside the office, and he remained exceptionally good at his job, which he approached with rare pathos and compassion for those who had the misfortune of ending up on one of his steel slabs. Caitlin had run into him at a Walmart once with a cart full of linens. He said he liked refreshing the supply, out of respect for those whose deaths he was charged with detailing.

  “You mind telling me what you’re getting at here, Doc?” Caitlin asked him.

  “Hazmat gear must have kept you from getting a clean scent of the air, Ranger, in which case you would’ve caught the distinctive odor of almonds.”

  “Almonds,” Caitlin repeated.

  Whatley nodded. “It was cyanide that killed the residents of Camino Pass.”

  “You want to tell me how, exactly?” Caitlin pressed.

  “I can tell you how, but not exactly,” Whatley told her. “First off, we’re talking about hydrogen cyanide here, an extremely toxic gas that forms in combination with, or exposure to, acids. It’s among the most rapidly acting of all known poisons, basically shutting down the respiratory system. An oral dosage as small as two to three hundred milligrams can be fatal. But, according to the results of my preliminary examinations of the deceased, I’d say the residents of this town were hit with maybe fifty to a hundred times the gaseous equivalent of that.”

  “Fifty to a hundred times,” Caitlin repeated, as if hoping it would help her make more sense of how an entire town had died in a matter of minutes.

  Whatley nodded. “As near as I can estimate from samples taken from the victims’ lungs.”

  “They stopped breathing—that’s what you’re saying—most dying in their sleep.”

  “Like I said, Ranger, this was an easy one to figure out, comparatively speaking.”

  “So where’d this gas come from?”

  “Homeland Security has more personnel trying to figure that out right now than the number of residents who died in Camino Pass.”

  “Homeland’s not here right now, so I’m asking you.”

  “You want to know if this was hostile action. You want to know if somebody was trying out some newfangled weapon in that border town in the middle of nowhere.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  Whatley shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “Likely?”

  He shrugged again. “As I said—”

  “Ask Homeland Security,” Caitlin completed for him. “The problem being that, with our old friend Jones no longer on the job, I don’t have anybody’s number stored on my phone. Any notion as to how it was Lennox Scully managed to survive?”

  “I’ve been too busy with the dead to focus on the living.”

  “Speaking of which, what’s the alternative to hostile action?”

  “Something no one’s ever seen before, something I’d call unprecedented.”

  “I’d call it something else, Doc.”

  “What’s that, Ranger?”

  “Monday—as in business as usual in these parts. I think I better have a talk with that survivor.”

  “That’ll have to wait, Ranger,” Doc Whatley told her. “Homeland Security’s with him right now.”

  And that’s when the alarm sounded.

  20

  HOUSTON

  So what are you going to do, Cort Wesley?

  Caitlin’s question stuck with him through the early part of the drive north back to Houston and beyond. Luke had wedged earbuds into place almost as soon as they set off, tuning his father out along with the rest of the world. Cort Wesley elected not to push things, having said everything he had to say already. And, truth be told, he was gl
ad for the opportunity to be alone with his thoughts and not bear the burden of forcing conversation, once his youngest son drifted off to sleep.

  They’d set out at the crack of dawn so Luke would only miss a few classes—driving into the sun, as his father used to put it. Boone Masters wouldn’t have cared much if Cort Wesley overdosed on drugs, beyond the fact that it would rob him of his lookout, the role Cort Wesley had played while his father was boosting appliances from warehouses, from the time he was twelve years old. His father had never told him not to drink or smoke, such things being left out of whatever father–son manual he read from. The only time Boone Masters had ever commented about his behavior was when Cort Wesley had killed his first man, who’d gone at his date with a knife in the midst of a robbery. He never did remember what happened between that and looking down at the knife wedged into the guy’s sternum. Cort Wesley was covered in the man’s blood, which gave him a pretty good idea of what had gone down, though not the particular sequence that had left the guy, who turned out to be a recently released inmate from Huntsville, dead on the sidewalk.

  Did it count as killing a man if you didn’t remember doing it?

  Anyway, he never dated the girl again, and she made her intentions clear by moving to the other side of the high school halls whenever their paths crossed, until she transferred to another school.

  Cort Wesley started making a checklist in his head, various approaches he could take going forward, which all had one thing in common: he couldn’t let this go.

  Someone had pushed drugs onto the Village School campus and Cort Wesley didn’t believe for a second it was as simple as kids swiping their parents’ prescriptions. No, this was something else, starting with a dealer at the school getting supplied product by some outside source. Lower rungs on a food chain that likely led straight to a wide-scale drug operation with an organized crime element roosting at the top. Defined by the kind of ilk society welcomed being taken off the map, and the police wouldn’t even think twice about the circumstances involved.

  Ilk, Cort Wesley repeated in his mind, having conjured that word on his own for the first time, given that he owed its usage to someone else entirely.