Strong Darkness Page 9

  Tepper flashed her a wink, popped a cigarette into his mouth but didn’t light it. “Glad you figured that much out all on your own.”

  “What is it you’re not telling me, D.W.?” Caitlin said, recalling how cryptic he’d sounded over the phone as well.

  Tepper moved to the desk over which hung the framed tapestry map of old West Texas. “Houston, Amarillo, Lubbock,” he said, touching each city through the glass, “San Antonio, and Laredo. That line I just drew look familiar to you?”

  “I’m not following you, D.W.”

  “Take a closer look, Ranger.”

  Caitlin stepped back and did, seeing the map in a whole new way and feeling her eyes widen. “Oh, God,” she realized. “It’s the original rail line built by the Southern Pacific.”

  25

  NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS

  “I’m impressed,” the big man said, over the steady drone of the machines in the secret underground level of Yuyuan.

  “Your skills in killing are matched only by your loyalty, Qiang,” Li Zhen said, moving a hand out from behind his back toward one of the computers inputting information fed by his orbiting satellites. “But in less than a week’s time, I will be able to kill thousands with a simple touch of a key.”

  “And yet you still require my more old-fashioned services,” Qiang told Zhen.

  “The two targets are threats we must eliminate to ensure we encounter no setbacks.”

  The big man nodded, letting his eyes run along the walls of numbers rolling down the screens taking up one entire wall of the sublevel. He regarded them diffidently, seeming to forget they’d ever been here as soon as he turned away.

  Qiang was big everywhere. A tower of muscle wrapped into a black suit, shirt, and tie that hid all but a single line of tattoo ink that pushed itself up over his collar. Li knew Qiang’s entire body would be covered in ink, each drawing etched into his skin telling a different story of his background, lineage, and experience with the Triad, still the most powerful criminal organization in China. Like organized crime in America, the Triad had been targeted relentlessly by law enforcement, ultimately moving their efforts underground. Men like Qiang became ghosts, lost to their families who were under constant surveillance and adopting the philosophy that they were already, for all intents and purposes, dead—at least the men they had been were. The men they were now had no families, no history, no friends, no relationships. They had only the Triad.

  “Qiang” wasn’t his real name, but one appropriated because it meant “strength” in the Chinese language. Qiang’s father had been one of Li Zhen’s closest associates, the man who had guided him through his formative years when the highest echelon a peasant scum could reach in China was in either gambling or pornography. Thanks to Qiang’s father, Zhen had ended up in pornography, taking over the entire business when his mentor fell ill. Near death, he’d asked Zhen to pledge that he’d look after his son, a wish Zhen was more than happy to grant for his own selfish reasons, given Qiang’s reputation as a violently effective enforcer even when barely out of his teens.

  “You are prepared, then?” Li Zhen asked him now.

  Qiang looked away from the wall he’d taken to studying again. “I have two teams moving into place, ready to act as soon as I give the word. I need only one more thing from you.”

  “Name it.”

  “Camellia flowers from your gardens for the strings they produce,” Qiang finally said. “I want my men to partake in the traditional ceremony as my ancestors did before they set out in battle.”

  “This isn’t just a battle, my friend, it’s the beginning of a war.”

  Qiang looked down at the keyboard over which Zhen stood. His spine stiffened, making him seem even taller. “Qǐshì,” he said.

  “Chinese for apocalypse,” Zhen translated, “because that is what I’m bringing to America.”

  Li moved to another terminal attached to a screen with only four numbers frozen upon it and depressed the Enter key.

  “And what was that?” Qiang asked him.

  “A test, my friend, a test.”

  PART THREE

  “We had a little shooting and he lost.”

  —Anonymous Texas Ranger

  26

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  Guillermo Paz sat seething behind the wheel of his massive, customized pickup truck currently stuck in traffic on the 410 heading out of San Antonio. He lived in a cabin on a lake he’d bought with cash from his American employer at Homeland Security, a long way from growing up in the La Vega slum of Venezuela that was built on a hillside so the raw sewage could run downhill.

  Traffic started moving, then snarled to a halt again almost immediately in all three lanes. Paz cringed behind the wheel, squeezing it so hard he could feel the leather starting to crack. He was coming from the other English class he taught to recent immigrants at San Antonio College and it had gone no better than the last.

  “Today’s lesson is on delusion,” he started the class off by saying. “Pay special attention now.”

  He paused, the entire class nodding and smiling as if they totally grasped what he was saying, except for one woman who was texting on her cell phone. Probably his only student who deserved an A.

  “See,” Paz continued, “I thought I’d found the answer to what I’d been looking for in existentialism. That term was coined by the French, you know, and I started turning away from the Germans to Sartre and a little Camus for the spiritual message I was somehow still missing. That’s what life is about—searching, even if you don’t find what you’re looking for. But I thought Sartre’s premise that meaning exists out of nothingness—it’s there for us to create of our own making—made a whole lot of sense. A wonderful concept really, don’t you agree?”

  The class nodded enthusiastically, even though not one of his students had any idea what he was actually saying.

  “Except it’s total bullshit. The existentialists embraced the darkness and ugliness, and preached hopelessness, not because they actually believed it so much as it made them rich and famous amid the decadence and despair of the post–World War Two world. You see what I’m getting at here?”

  More enthusiastic nods.

  “So it was lies, all of it, dressed up in philosophical bullshit to sell books and pad bank accounts. And it fooled me. What was I thinking? These people don’t know any more about meaning than I do. I’m starting to realize I should have faith in the lessons of my own experience and rely less on the lessons of others. Comes down to lies again, and I’m not going to lie to you or anyone else. America’s not the land of opportunity anymore; there’s no such thing and maybe never was here or anywhere. You’re wasting your time and should go back home. Clase desestimó,” Paz said, shaking his head in disgust as he moved for the door. “Class dismissed.”

  * * *

  And now he was stalled in traffic, an apt metaphor for what he was feeling, like there was an itch he couldn’t scratch. Paz had been a soldier before he became a killer, and what he felt now was like the final moments before a battle began. The waiting, the tension, the apprehension giving way to the reality of what was about to happen. Men who defend violence normally haven’t seen and lived as much of it as he had. Very few were cut out for the kind of life Paz himself missed when he was away from it for too long. It had become like a drug to him, a fix, an insatiable addiction that defined him and left him grasping for philosophical bullshit to fall back on when his core was robbed of the adrenaline that violence sent coursing through his veins.

  Maybe that’s what had brought Caitlin Strong into his life. Maybe his Texas Ranger was a magnet who drew bullets toward her and Paz had latched on so he might have moral justification to dispense his own. Maybe what he’d seen in her eyes the day they’d first met with guns blazing was not emblematic of the moral core he was missing, but a mirror image he’d tried to reject. The mere possibility had chased him from the classroom an hour before and now left him cringing behind the wheel, ready to flo
or his accelerator and plow through all the cars blocking his way ahead on the 410.

  Until he saw the minivan pulled over on a strange angle on the side of the road. At first, Paz thought the three kids hovering by the vehicle were there to help, maybe offer to change a flat tire or something. But at next glance their baggy clothes, tough-guy strut, and pistols displayed in the waistbands of at least the two he could see clearly told him they were gangbangers. Probably out for a quick score, maybe a carjacking.

  Paz saw a way to scratch his itch and pulled his truck over onto the shoulder behind the minivan.

  27

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “That’s what I like to see,” Paz said, climbing out of the truck and tucking his long-sleeve denim shirt all the way into the olive drab cargo pants he liked because of the extra pockets. “Young people out doing a good deed. Think I paid you boys five dollars at a car wash to raise money for the homeless a few weeks back.”

  “You got it wrong, man,” said the kid Paz took to be the leader, making sure to show no fear of him. At least outwardly. “Best be on your way now. We can take things from here.”

  Paz kept coming, reaching the rear of the minivan much faster than the gangbangers had figured. “What do you mean exactly, ‘take things from here’? I’m sorry, it’s my English.”

  The kid hitched up his pants with one hand, the other straying back on his hip to where his pistol was tucked. Paz glimpsed the second kid carrying a pistol tucked into waistband mimic that motion, and now he could see a third gangbanger was holding a baseball bat on the passenger side of the minivan. Paz heard soft sobbing and realized three kids were squeezed into the rear seat, a woman who must have been their mother behind the wheel shaking her cell phone as if that would help her find a signal or reach 911 faster.

  “Oh, I get it,” Paz said, stopping just outside of the range he needed. “Taking things from here means teaching these kids how to hit, right?” Then, to the ’banger holding the bat, “Hey, you got a baseball? ’Cause I think I may have one in my truck.”

  The leader drew his gun, held it sideways, tough-guy style, which nobody who really understood how semiautomatics worked would ever do. In Paz’s experience, men who held their guns that way never fired them. It was less than a toy in their hands because, at least with a toy, you pulled the trigger.

  “Oh,” he went on, “I see. Not baseball, target practice. Makes sense. Fine skill to teach young people. Who taught you, amigo?”

  “Fuck you, man!”

  “Hey, talk to me like that,” Paz grinned, “and I might have to ask you for that five dollars I donated at the car wash back.”

  “Get your ass gone or I’ll blow a second hole in it, fuck wad.”

  “Hey, that’s good English. I teach a couple classes to immigrants. Maybe I should have you in as a guest speaker.”

  The other two gangbangers were looking at each other, the leader trying to hold his pistol steady with its weight starting to bring the barrel down.

  “Fuck you, man!” he blared. “Fuck you!”

  “Sure, whatever you say. I think I know this family from the neighborhood. Let me just check to see if they fed my dog like I asked them.”

  Paz knocked on the rear window, angling himself closer to the leader without the ’banger ever realizing it. Paz took his gaze off him, still watching the ’banger’s reflection off a window featuring a smiley face drawn in built-up condensation. The sun cut through the van from the other side of the road, ending up in the leader’s eyes.

  The ’banger did exactly what Paz was expecting next: eased himself a little closer, gun starting to tremble a bit. Not taking his eyes from the window until the very last moment, Paz whirled. He latched a hand onto the ’banger’s wrist holding the pistol so fast the guy didn’t even have the split second he needed to pull the trigger. And by the time he found it, Paz had wrenched his hand downward and to the side, the snap of his wrist breaking almost as loud as the gunshot that followed.

  The second armed gangbanger had his gun out by then, and Paz used the leader’s to shoot the kid’s wrist, the .45 caliber slug practically blowing his whole hand off as the percussion powdered Paz’s ears. Inside the minivan the kids were screaming and on the other side the kid with the baseball bat, for some inexplicable reason, started hammering it against the window. Shards of glass blew airborne, most of them raining inside the cab.

  The next instant found Paz leaping onto the minivan, hitting the hood first and denting it badly before projecting himself over, the screams of the kid whose hand was halfway blown off bubbling his already rattled eardrums. He hit the ground just as the final ’banger twisted, canting his body to strike with the bat hard and fast.

  He was holding the bat at the ready, then he wasn’t. Because Paz had stripped it from his grasp. Kid could do nothing but watch, as Paz took it in either hand and snapped the bat in two, square in the middle.

  “Man, it’s a good thing you didn’t try hitting a baseball with this piece of shit.”

  Paz watched the final gangbanger turn and rush off down the shoulder, his form shrinking rapidly to utter insignificance. Then he tossed both halves of the bat aside, listened to them clack against the pavement while the two other gangbangers battled for who could scream the loudest in pain.

  Paz grinned, looked inside the minivan where the mother was now cradling two of her kids, staring at him as if she wasn’t sure he was really there.

  “Clase desestimó,” he said, and walked back to his truck.

  28

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  Wake up, bubba, wake up!

  Cort Wesley heard Leroy Epps trying to stir him from his sleep in the chair by Dylan’s bedside, but he couldn’t make himself awaken. Going sleepless in the hotel the night before should have been nothing for a man who’d once humped four days straight through Iraq in the Gulf War without even a nap. This was different, though, and not just because he was almost twenty-five years older. There was no stress worse than worry, even battle, and worry for his son’s very life gave no quarter and provided no respite.

  He realized the only place he could sleep at all was here by Dylan’s bedside where he need not fear the ringing of a phone.

  “Dad?”

  Cort Wesley heard Dylan calling to him in his dream, but couldn’t see him anywhere. He was back playing football a million years ago in high school, only the field was formed of unlined tall grass and none of the players were in uniform. Then the scene morphed to a seaside and he found himself walking along a dock, ecstatic because he was about to take his boys fishing.

  “Dad?”

  But Dylan and Luke were nowhere to be found and, when he reached the end of the dock, there was no boat or moorings. His own father was suddenly standing there, refusing to acknowledge Cort Wesley no matter what he did. The dream ended just as their eyes met.

  “Dad!”

  His eyes shot open. He practically jumped out of the stiff chair.

  Dylan was looking at him from the bed, eyes fighting to stay open. He’d interlaced his fingers near his chest, tugging at one of the zillion wires and lines attaching him to this machine or that.

  “Dylan!”

  Cort Wesley burst out of his chair too fast to realize his right leg was still asleep. It crumpled beneath him and he had to grab the near railing on Dylan’s bed to stop from falling.

  “I’m not dead, am I?” his son asked, his voice dry and cracking.

  “Not unless I am too, son,” Cort Wesley said, smoothing a hand through the boy’s hair. He almost stopped himself, then changed his mind and went right on doing it.

  “I’m real thirsty.” Dylan glanced around him, starting to realize where he was.

  “Yeah, you’re in a hospital.”

  The boy’s gaze found the television. “That the best you could do?”

  Cort Wesley looked up at the screen, saw it was tuned to some kid’s show featuring a giant red dog.

  Dylan was trying for a
grin when he looked back. “I was just playing with you.” Then a grimace flashed across his expression. “Whoa.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s something inside my dick.”

  “They had to put a catheter in.”

  “And my head’s killing me. Can you get them to give me some aspirin?”

  Cort Wesley watched him swipe a tongue over his parched lips, and knew he must be thirsty after getting his liquids only through a tube for a couple days now. He moved to pour Dylan a glass of water from the pitcher he’d been using for himself when he saw the boy’s features lock, his groggy eyes seizing up.

  “Uh-oh…”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t feel my legs, Dad.”

  29

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “That’s quite a story, Ranger,” said the older woman dressed in denim overalls, imitating an old-time railroad engineer, after Caitlin finished explaining how a serial killer from the present was explicitly linked to one who’d struck in a camp of Chinese workers laying the old Trans-Pecos rail line for the Southern Pacific railroad.

  “It sure is, ma’am. And I was hoping as a general expert on those times that you could help me make some sense out of it.”

  “Well, I just work at the Railroad Museum, I’m not an exhibit in it.”

  Sharon Yarlas wet her lips with her tongue and adjusted the red kerchief tied round her neck from side to side as if the material was making her itch. She had a big-boned frame with ample flesh riding it, pushing sixty probably with her hair an even measure of gray and black. She wore work boots that must have been hell on her feet and left her standing almost equal to Caitlin’s five feet eight inches.

  The museum’s spacious grounds were located a short haul from Alamo Plaza in the city’s Oak Grove neighborhood just short of Schulmeier Cemetery. Not far from them, a line of tourists was building for the next train ride on an adjoining track. In addition to the brief journeys aboard old-fashioned locomotives, the museum contained both indoor and outdoor displays charting the history of railroads in Texas.