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

  “Now, that’s a fact, bubba,” came the voice of Leroy Epps from his truck’s backseat.

  21

  HOUSTON

  In the rearview mirror, Cort Wesley could see the spectral shape’s lips were pale pink and crinkled with dryness, the morning sunlight casting his brown skin in a yellowish tint. The diabetes that had planted him in the ground had turned Leroy’s eyes bloodshot and numbed his limbs years before the sores and infections set in. As a boxer, he’d fought for the middleweight crown on three different occasions, had been knocked out once and had the belt stolen from him on paid-off judges’ scorecards two other times. He’d been busted for killing a white man in self-defense and had died three years into Cort Wesley’s four-year incarceration at Huntsville’s infamous Walls prison. But ever since, he always seemed to show up when Cort Wesley needed him the most. Whether he was a ghostly specter or a figment of his imagination, Cort Wesley had given up trying to figure out. He just accepted the fact of Leroy’s presence and was grateful that his old friend kept coming around to help him out of one scrape after another.

  Prison officials had let Cort Wesley attend Leroy’s funeral in a potter’s field for inmates who didn’t have any relatives left to claim the body. He’d been the only one standing at the graveside, besides the prison chaplain, when Mexican laborers had lowered the plank coffin into the ground. Cort Wesley tried to remember what he’d been thinking that day, a difficult task since he’d done his best to erase those years not just from his memory but also from his very being. One thing he did remember was that the service was the first time he’d smelled the talcum powder Leroy Epps had used to hide the stench of the festering sores spawned by the diabetes that had ultimately killed him. And, in retrospect, for days after the funeral, Cort Wesley had been struck by the nagging feeling that Leroy wasn’t gone at all. The scent of his talcum powder still hung heavy in the air inside his cell, and Cort Wesley woke up at least once every night, certain he saw Leroy standing there, watching over him, grinning and sometimes even winking when the illusion held long enough.

  “Where you been, champ?” Cort Wesley asked the ghost, glad Luke was both sleeping and lost between earbuds humming with music, like a mosquito buzzing around his ear.

  “Busy. You wouldn’t think such a word would pop up from where I be now, but you’d be surprised. And you aren’t the only concern in my purview.” Cort Wesley could see the ghost’s translucent eyes tilt toward Luke. “You wanna wake your youngest up so I can set him straight on a few things?”

  “Not sure that’s a good idea, champ.”

  “Oh no? Even given that there’s plenty followed the road to where I be now doing exactly what he done to himself the other day?”

  “I’m not sure he’d be able to hear you.”

  “You think he heard you, bubba?”

  “Guess we’ll find out.”

  “What kind of answer you call that?”

  “Only one I’ve got right now.”

  “On account of your thinking being focused elsewhere. Know how I can tell?”

  “I’ve got a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “Damn straight I am. It’s your knuckles, looking like somebody ran them through a meat grinder, you been squeezing that steering wheel so hard. Hell, for a time there, I thought you were gonna break clean through the leather wrap.”

  “I’m working some things out in my head, champ,” Cort Wesley told the ghost of his best friend.

  “You think I don’t know that? Answer me a question: How is it all the choices you ran through your mind got bad ends written all over them?”

  “You ever hear about this thing called privacy?”

  “Yes, sir, and it’s for folks who are where you be, not my kind. Those of us who’ve moved on to a zip code with no numbers don’t cotton to the same kind of behaviors. We got a bigger picture in mind.”

  “And where do drug dealers fit in to that bigger picture?”

  “Wouldn’t know. They normally find themselves occupying a lower realm.”

  “There you go.”

  “Doesn’t make it your job to punch their ticket there.”

  “You think I’m gunning for bear over this?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Not with an eye toward putting people in the ground.”

  “What would you call it then?”

  Cort Wesley realized he was squeezing the steering wheel again, hard enough to make his knuckles feel as if they were going to pop. A glance in the rearview mirror found a grin stretched across Leroy Epps’s face that said “I told you so.”

  “I’d call it making sure the scum behind the drugs that almost killed my boy can’t do it again.”

  “Dangerous road, bubba.”

  “I didn’t go looking for it, champ. It found me.”

  “There you go,” the ghost said, throwing his own words back at him, as if Cort Wesley had made his point for him. “I never try to dissuade you from your predilections and foibles because they’re normally about the bigger picture. But this one’s a snapshot, bubba, and no good can come of you rousting the lowlifes who took it.”

  “You want to tell me where you’re going with this?”

  “You aim low, all you hit is dirt. You’re normally prone to setting your sights higher.”

  “One step at a time,” Cort Wesley told the ghost.

  “You just made my point for me, bubba,” Leroy said, shaking his head in a way that made it look detached from his body. “Maps exist to guide you to your destination. But this one don’t lead nowhere even I can see, and my vision’s got wider angles than those dang flat-screen televisions everybody watches these days.”

  “Is there some advice hiding in all that?”

  “Why don’t you let the Ranger lady handle this one?”

  “Luke’s not her son.”

  “Close enough, and I imagine if she heard you say that, you’d be looking down the barrel of her gun a flick later.”

  Cort Wesley rolled his eyes, resisting the urge to check Leroy Epps in the rearview mirror again. “What’s it going to take to make you shut up, champ?”

  “Bottle of root beer be nice. Now that would hit the spot. Better get three so your boy can join us. I believe there’s a rest stop coming up dead ahead, no pun intended.”

  Before Cort Wesley could angle the truck toward it, though, Luke stirred in the passenger seat, his eyes opening.

  “Who were you talking to, Dad?”

  Cort Wesley checked the rearview mirror to find Leroy Epps nowhere to be seen, something like a thin mist floating up toward the truck’s roof.

  “No one,” he told his son. “Just myself. But now that you’re awake, there’s something you need to tell me…”

  22

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  Caitlin rushed through the security door as soon as it opened, straight into the charge of doctors working with Homeland Security, who were still wearing their hazmat gear.

  “What happened?” she demanded, as they stopped in their tracks.

  “He took a hostage!” one of them managed. “Threatened to kill her if we don’t let him out!”

  His words emerged through his helmet’s faceplate in garbled fashion, leaving a blanket of mist on the plastic.

  “Her?”

  “We’re doctors, scientists for Christ’s sake! Security’s handling it, okay?”

  “Hospital?”

  “Homeland.”

  “Shit,” said Caitlin.

  * * *

  The Homeland Security officers the doctor had just referred to were dressed in camo fatigues, sidearms drawn and aimed unsteadily toward the glass wall, beyond which Lennox Scully was holding what looked like a scalpel against the throat of a woman outfitted like an astronaut.

  “Texas Ranger?” one of them said. “Really?”

  “You’re not authorized to be here,” the other added.

  “You boys think you can solve this from this side of the glass?”

>   “We’re not authorized to enter the chamber,” said one.

  “Nobody is, without proper gear,” said the other.

  “Yeah, about that,” Caitlin said, moving toward the keypad mounted on the wall to the left of the access door. “One of you want to give me the code, or should we just watch that lady in there die?”

  * * *

  The door sealed behind her and Caitlin entered with her hands in the air, SIG Sauer left in the observation room beyond the isolation chamber.

  “Remember me, Mr. Scully?”

  The scalpel trembled in Lennox Scully’s grip. “I remember the badge. Big chance you took coming in here without a suit.”

  Caitlin met the eyes of the woman he’d taken hostage through the faceplate of her helmet. “Gives us something in common, sir.”

  Scully started to smile, then stopped. “Nobody calls me ‘sir.’ And I want to get out of here, Ranger. I want to go home.”

  “Not much left there for you, Mr. Scully.”

  “Nobody calls me that, either.”

  “That’s right. You go by ‘Scull.’”

  “Along with loser, bum, drunk, asshole—take your pick.”

  “I’ve been called all of those, except for drunk, Scull.”

  Scully’s expression turned sad, the scalpel forgotten in his hand for that moment. “My wife died giving birth to a stillborn.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want your pity. I want to know what happened back home, what killed my town, if it wasn’t space aliens or something like that.”

  “We’re still sorting that out, sir.”

  “You can put your hands down now, Ranger.”

  Caitlin did just that. “What’s the game here? What do you expect to get out of this?”

  “Maybe I got all these people figured as space aliens. Maybe I don’t want to get taken to the mother ship.”

  Caitlin again cast a reassuring glance toward Scully’s hostage. “Notice I sealed the door after I entered.”

  “To keep whatever I may have inside me that killed the rest of the town from getting loose.”

  “That’s not going to happen, Scull. Looks like it was cyanide gas killed everybody else in Camino Pass. My great-grandfather worked a case there as a Ranger, back in his day. Met up with Pancho Villa, of all people.”

  “I’ve heard that story. You mean it’s true?”

  Caitlin nodded. “You know what else is true? The fact that you’re the town’s lone survivor. It sure will help these science types if they can figure out why that is, why you didn’t die. It’ll also help them figure out why everybody else did.”

  “I was in the clinic, passed out.”

  “We know that, sir. What we don’t know is what else made you different from everyone else in town. Were there any other patients when they brought you in?”

  “I honestly couldn’t say, Ranger.”

  “What about when you woke up? What’d you see then?”

  “Nothing, on account of them putting me in what they call the Scully Suite. Used to be a closet or something, so there’s no window I can fall out. I woke up hungry, thirsty, and sick to my stomach. Every time I go on a bender, I promise myself it’ll be my last, but it never turns out that way.”

  “That’s the case for a lot of folks, Scull.”

  “Why am I still alive?”

  “That’s what we need to find out, why you need to let the woman go, so she and her colleagues can get back to their job of helping you.”

  “They don’t give a shit about me. I’m a road crash dummy to them, nothing more. They been poking and prodding me since I got here. I got more tubes stuck in me than an old-fashioned television. Can they really do this?”

  “Homeland can pretty much do whatever they want, if it’s in the interests of national security.”

  “How could a drunk like me serve the interests of anybody?”

  “First off, by dropping that scalpel and letting the woman go.”

  Scully’s eyes dipped to Caitlin’s empty holster. “You left your gun out there.”

  “Because I don’t need it. Because you’re not a criminal or dangerous in any way. Because you’re going to let the woman go.”

  Scully looked toward where scientists still garbed in hazmat suits were pressed close to the glass, forming a thick wall. “They’ll have me arrested. I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “You won’t. You haven’t hurt that woman yet and you don’t look like the type to have any plans on doing so. You’re scared, Scull, and with good reason. Best thing you can do now is cooperate with these folks, so they can determine why you lived when everyone else died.”

  Scully jerked the scalpel away from the woman’s throat but maintained his hold on her. “I’m scared, Ranger.”

  “So am I, but not of you. I’m scared of whatever killed your town, and you’re the only one who can help us figure out what that was.”

  Scully grew agitated again, flirting with the notion of lifting the scalpel back into place against the woman’s throat. “I can’t tell you a goddamn thing, because I don’t know a goddamn thing.”

  “You’re the only chance we’ve got. Help us figure out what wiped out your friends and neighbors.”

  “You said it was cyanide. I just heard you say that.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense; no plausible accounting for how such a thing could happen. And the only way we can find out what is plausible is to let your body tell these good folks while everything’s in working order, when your friends and neighbors didn’t end up so lucky.”

  “Kids too?” Scully asked tentatively, even though he must have known the answer.

  “The poison took everyone’s life but yours.”

  Scully angled his gaze downward, his grasp on the woman slackening. She could probably have pulled free, but Caitlin cast her a slight head shake to warn her off such an intention.

  “That’s a shame,” Scully said, “a damn shame. It was an attack, it must have been. Somebody attacked our town and left everybody dead but me. You need to find them. You need to see justice done. Isn’t that what Rangers do?”

  Caitlin nodded. “That’s why I’m here talking to you, sir. Now, let the woman go so we can continue sorting this out.”

  Scully finally pulled his hands away and sank back to the bed, eyeing Caitlin’s empty holster again. “You can’t shoot whatever did this, Ranger.”

  “I guess we’ll see about that.”

  23

  HOUSTON

  “Mind if I have a word with you, Ben?” Cort Wesley asked the boy who’d just finished running laps around the Village School track.

  The kid did a double take, surprised that a stranger knew his name, and then looked about as if hoping to find someone else in the area. But they had the track to themselves.

  “I’ve got to get to class,” the boy said, picking up a gym bag emblazoned with the school logo.

  “I’m Luke Torres’s father. This won’t take long.”

  The boy named Ben looked around again, not noticing Cort Wesley had positioned himself to block his only route to the gate in the fence that enclosed the track. His last name was Brussard and, according to Luke, he was from right here in Houston, the River Oaks section, where homes went for more than two million on average. Luke said Ben had taken him to eat at River Oaks Country Club several times and had stood up for him when the student population of the Village School had learned he was gay. They were the same height, Ben a bit more wiry and sporting similar floppy hair that he kept trimmed tighter.

  “How’s Luke?” Ben asked him. “I heard what happened.”

  “He’s fine. I just dropped him off. And I’d like to talk to you about what happened.”

  The boy swallowed hard but said nothing, seeming to realize that Cort Wesley’s stance had blocked his exit.

  “Luke told me you were there.”

  Ben’s eyes wavered.

  “Congratulations on getting into Harvard, son.”


  “Thanks,” Ben said, looking down.

  “Hell of a school. My oldest is at Brown.”

  A single nod.

  “That’s definitely an occasion worth celebrating, Ben. Luke told me you’re the one who brought the pills to commemorate the occasion.”

  “I really need to go,” Ben said, coming up just short of swiping at his eyes, which had darkened with moisture.

  Cort Wesley seemed to recall that Ben’s father was in the oil business, but that was hardly unusual in Texas, particularly in the Houston area.

  “Could you answer a question for me first, son?”

  “If I can.”

  “Where’d you get the drugs?” Cort Wesley asked, sounding as gentle as he could. He’d despised bullies so much in high school; the irony that this could be perceived as him bullying a kid now wasn’t lost on him.

  Ben swallowed hard again, his eyes shifting about as if in search of an answer. “I swiped them from my parents. They got so many bottles, they never notice. You’re not going to tell them, are you?”

  “No, son, I won’t, not about that anyway, because it’s a lie. See, I’ve done a bit of work for Homeland Security, which has left me with some contacts. And according to one of them, neither of your parents has filled a prescription for anything even approaching an opioid since your mom had dental surgery five years ago. So you mind telling me how you stole something that wasn’t there?”

  “Mr. Torres—”

  “It’s Masters. Torres was Luke’s mother’s name. Maybe you heard he witnessed her murder.”

  Ben’s features seemed to have frozen. Cort Wesley thought if he waved a hand in front of the kid’s face, there’d be no reaction. He reminded himself to back off, dial it down a bit.

  “My point being that he’s been through a lot. But he makes it a point to tell me you always had his back after he came out, and that means a lot to him so it means a lot to me, too. You had his back then, son, and what I’m asking is that you have his back now. I mean, if you saw someone try to gun him down, you wouldn’t hold anything back, right?”