Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels) (30 page)

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Cort Wesley hurdled the interior fence enclosing the field and outdoor track. He had no recollection of pushing his way through the panicked crowd to get this far, only dimly aware of the chorus of screams and staccato bursts of fire from Guillermo Paz’s twin submachine guns. Paz’s huge, dark shape looked to be part of the big, black pickup from which he had burst. There were bodies everywhere, many still writhing, and the endless swell of panicked kids and adults stole any chance of him finding Dylan in his sights.

Cort Wesley entered that swell, the feeling like being swept under by an ocean wave. The panicked crowd even seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air, making it hard to breathe, the world turned oven-hot, those he pushed his way past literally steaming to the touch.

“Dylan!” he yelled out. “Dylan!”

He could barely hear himself, but he screamed the boy’s name again, his left arm carving the way forward while his right hand clung to the pistol. The body of a boy in a burgundy uniform nearly tripped him up, and Cort Wesley dropped to a crouch with his heart lurching against his chest wall, breath held until he saw it wasn’t Dylan; then both sadness and rage consumed him when he saw there was nothing left to be done for the boy.

Beneath the heavy spill of the stadium vapor lights, he could now see more bodies dotting the field. He’d just steered toward another shape wearing a burgundy uniform top crumpled on the field turf when a teammate pushed fleeing bystanders aside so he could drop down to help. The boy shed his stick, knelt by his fallen teammate’s side, and tore off his helmet to let a nest of long black hair swim freely.

Dylan! It was Dylan!

Cort Wesley surged forward, noticing crazed shadows of the panicked projected against nearby buildings by the sodium lights, cast as massive sentinels looming over the chaos. He was halfway across the field when the crowd buckled and pushed back against him, the massive pickup from which Paz was firing scattering them as a pair of the killers dressed as disabled veterans closed on Dylan.

*   *   *

Locaro pushed his way through the crowd that had engulfed him on the field, flinging anyone aside when they loomed too close. His eyes swept the blood-strewn scene he’d created, his ears awash in the sounds of screams and the gunshots of his remaining men.

He’d focused his attention initially on the uniformed police assigned to the event, four of them woefully inadequate to respond with mere pistols. Locaro killed them with his machete, moving from one to another to clear the way for his men to storm the field.

But events continued to conspire against him. First his snipers had been taken out, then two of his men were dropped where they stood by someone firing from the crowd.

The woman Texas Ranger maybe, or the outlaw father of his target. Uniform number forty-one currently lost from sight.

But the Venezuelan, the muck-dwelling Mayan, Guillermo Paz made for his biggest problem. The Ranger’s and these boys’ protector roaring across the field in a truck from hell, holding the remainder of his men at bay, shooting two more down. That left only two still with him on the field to join the search for the older target, while all the panic the attack had created stole sight of him from the younger one in the stands.

Locaro couldn’t help but smile, loving the world being made before him. He didn’t want to let go of the sights, sounds, and smells, wanted them to go on forever.

But Locaro saw that wasn’t going to happen, as his final two men closed on a boy wearing a burgundy uniform numbered forty-one.

*   *   *

Caitlin felt Luke clinging fast to her as they pushed down the bleacher steps for the field, gunshots continuing to echo through the night.

Not once had she experienced anything like this, guessed even the prison and labor riots her father and grandfather had been called in to stop couldn’t compare. She remembered going to football games herself, a cannon ignited whenever the home team scored, leaving the smell of sulfur and cordite to waft across the stands. The smell was similar tonight, the gunshots coming in pops not unlike Fourth of July firecrackers.

She finally reached the waist-high chain-link fencing but held her ground, suspended between staying here to protect Luke and joining Cort Wesley on the field in search of Dylan.

What if Dylan came this way instead? What if Cort Wesley somehow missed him?

That made her decision easier, dragging Luke in tighter against her with the SIG palmed in her free hand. Caitlin was running her gaze over the panic still dominating the field when a sliver in the crowd opened up, allowing her to catch enough of a glimpse of a St. Anthony’s player kneeling by a fallen teammate to know it was Dylan. Knew it before she even saw his number or hair swimming past his shoulders.

Knew it even as a pair of gunmen finally cleared the crowd enough to find him in their sights.

*   *   *

Cort Wesley saw them too, desperately trying to find enough of a window through the crowd to fire and too far away to bother mounting an effective charge.

If he opened fire now, he was certain to hit bystanders, accomplishing nothing. If he didn’t, the killers had a clear path to Dylan, accomplishing less. The situation was further muddled by so many parents and team supporters wearing replica burgundy team jerseys, adding another element to the madness. They seemed everywhere now, mirror reflections of Dylan and his teammates, like the downed one over whom the boy was now kneeling.

But the crowd blocked Cort Wesley’s sight and path again, leaving the two gunmen a much clearer path to Dylan, as Guillermo Paz’s pickup surged the rest of the way through the crowd. Its huge tires ground wildly, kicking up the black pellets that helped provide traction on the turf. Scattering bystanders from its path and grazing those who didn’t lurch aside fast enough.

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Caitlin was a good shot, but this was going to need a better one, along the lines of Earl and William Ray Strong. Frontier shooters who lived as long as their skills permitted and not a day more. She could only wish either of them, or even her father, Jim Strong, was with her now to take the shot she couldn’t risk through the crowd still fleeing in all directions across the field.

In that moment Paz’s pickup truck crossed her line of vision. In that moment she grasped his intentions and flinched involuntarily, tensing with the certainty of what was to come.

The pickup roared past Dylan, putting itself between him and the two gunmen in the last instant before they opened fire. Their bullets pinged into the truck’s heavy steel frame, a burst of wet mist from the grill indicating at least one had pierced the radiator. But the truck surged on, still picking up speed.

Caitlin actually covered Luke’s eyes in the moment before impact, the big truck’s extended after-market grill slamming into both men at once, hurtling them like bowling pins in separate directions. A combination of the impact and bullet spray sent the pickup whirling into an uncontained spin, the G-forces at that speed sufficient to topple it over. Caitlin saw the huge form of Paz either leaping out of it or being ejected to safety.

Then her eyes were drawn to the origin of fresh screams to see the stout man who looked overgrown with muscle hacking his way through anyone in his path with a machete that showered blood into the air like rain.

“Stay here!” she ordered Luke, pressing him against the corner of a concession stand. “I’m going to get your brother.”

*   *   *

Incensed after the collision killed his last two men, Locaro decided to finish the boy his way, on his own. This is where guns had gotten the team he’d brought with him; dead, all of them. The best he could find, desperate to breathe the air outside of Cereso Prison again, men as tough as they came killed by their reliance on weapons they falsely believed rendered them invincible.

Locaro would never make that mistake. Locaro avoided guns at all costs, preferred the old ways for the terror they inspired in his enemies. He could find no trace of Paz anywhere around the toppled truck, leaving him an easy path to the uniformed boy still crouched over his teammate, hand pressed to stanch the blood oozing from a chest wound.

Locaro continued to use his machete to clear that path, showered again in the blood of his victims and finally meeting the boy’s gaze when he drew to within twenty feet,
thwacks
of bullets against his flak jacket stealing his air.

*   *   *

Caitlin was ready to fire when she saw Cort Wesley shove more bystanders aside and take up a shooter’s stance. He was still fifty feet away from the shape only vaguely resembling a human being that was about to kill Dylan, his initial shots somehow squeezed between more of those fleeing.

Those bullets barely slowed the man down, as if he were made of steel instead of flesh and bone. But Caitlin steadied her SIG once more, ready to try for an impossible shot.

*   *   *

Cort Wesley didn’t have time to aim his initial shots, hoping only to slow the machete-wielding madman long enough to allow him to sight in for a kill shot to the head. While in Cereso he’d heard rumors of such a man languishing in the stench-riddled bowels of the prison from which no one ever emerged. A man whose final act as a free man had been to hack off the arms of two of the Mexican policemen who’d come to arrest him for throwing his own father off a fourth-story balcony. Then he’d dropped his machete and sank to his knees laughing.

Cort Wesley knew in that moment this was the same man, wished he’d gotten his chance at him in the dusty ring forged out of the prison yard when fights to the death were all that had kept him alive. Then he wouldn’t have needed to deal with him here. He fired two more shots for the man’s head, the first aimed high to stretch over the heads of onrushing bystanders and the second jerked errantly aside when a flood of them crossed his line of vision at the last moment.

Just one bullet left now.

Cort Wesley didn’t hesitate, couldn’t hesitate. Fired with a reasonably clear shot. Saw the man-monster reel sideways, hand to the side of his head where the bullet had impacted. Coming away with an ear in his hand and turning toward Cort Wesley.

With a smile.

Cort Wesley in motion now, sprinting, knowing there was no way to reach the man-monster before the man-monster reached Dylan.

*   *   *

Still dazed from the heavy fall, Guillermo Paz finally made it back to his knees, as tall even then as many of those rushing past him. He had his knife in hand, ready to hurl it toward Locaro at the first opening of space. Locaro still holding his severed ear as he swung back toward the oldest son of Cort Wesley Masters, who had taken something else in his grasp.

*   *   *

Dylan had known the boy at his feet was dead, had known it for some time, but still couldn’t bring himself to move his hand from the wound, as if applying pressure might miraculously bring him back to life. Who knew?

Only when the stump-shaped man who looked pumped full of air discarded the ear his father had shot off did Dylan release his hand from his friend’s chest and grasp the lacrosse stick by his side. He brought it up from his knees, the ball he’d scooped up before the killing started still trapped in the webbing, and fired a shot as if the man bleeding down the side of his face was the opponent’s goal.

High for the corner.

Aiming for his third goal of the night.

The ball struck the man square in the forehead, halting him as if someone had just slammed on his internal brakes. His eyes remained open the whole time he dropped to his knees and then keeled over, freeing Dylan to return his hand to the hole in his dead friend’s chest.

*   *   *

He felt that hand being pried off by his father, no idea how much time had passed or where his dad had come from.

“Let it go, son, let it go.”

Dylan let his father move his hand away, saying nothing, not even feeling himself breathe as he spotted Caitlin rushing toward him too. Then his gaze shifted sideways toward where he’d dropped the killer, who looked somehow like the Michelin Man, with a lacrosse shot.

But he was gone.

“Where’s Luke?” Cort Wesley asked when Caitlin reached them.

She turned back toward the field-level concession stand that they’d taken cover alongside of, Luke certain to be in her view from this angle.

“Oh, shit” was all Caitlin could say.

Because he was gone too.

P
ART
E
IGHT

Free as the unchained winds that sweep the boundless prairie, he was a terror to the incarnate Mexican Devils, a sworn foe to the Indians, who with torch, tomahawk and blood-freezing war-whoop terrified helpless women and children; the ranger, characteristic exponent of the Anglo-Saxon race, drove every enemy away from him and established peace and contentment.

Katie Daffan,
Texas Hero Stories
(1908)

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Captain D. W. Tepper’s face was ash white, his expresion utterly flat with an unlit Marlboro hanging out the left side of his mouth. He reached Caitlin, who’d just separated herself from Cort Wesley and Dylan, and flung the cigarette aside.

“Witness statements aren’t worth shit,” Tepper told her. “Near as we can figure, the same Mexican who shot up the crowd made off with Luke on foot. No one saw them enter a vehicle and we can’t find a single person who saw the man you and Masters figure was the leader flee the area. Hell, maybe he just goddamn disappeared.” He swung his gaze back about the chaos that continued to dominate the field under the harsh glow of the stadium lights that now sliced through a slight mist. “Have you ever considered another line of work, Ranger?”

“Not until tonight, Captain.”

“Good thing maybe,” he said, expression looking as if it were caught halfway through a belch.

“You blaming me for this now?”