Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels) (31 page)

Tepper’s expression didn’t change, his bony shoulders stiffening as if to keep from turning back toward the utter carnage littering almost the entire field that was dark with drying patches and pools of blood. “No, Caitlin, I’m not. I’m just asking because that’s the way I feel right now.” He started to turn to regard what he’d just walked away from, but stopped. “I was at the scene after a nutcase named George Hennard crashed his pickup truck into Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen and then shot up a whole bunch of folks eating their lunch. I was one of the first inside of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, and haven’t been able to get the smell of burned hair and flesh out of my mind since. You wanna tell me what chance I ever have of sleeping again after this?”

Caitlin returned her gaze to the carnage that looked day-glow bright under the sodium vapor lights, the litter of bodies being properly cataloged and zipped into bags while blood-soaked EMTs and volunteers rushed wheeled dollies across the turf, over a field where a district championship lacrosse game should have been played out instead, now turned into a triage unit.

“Who was he?” Tepper asked her. “That freak show of a man who got away somehow.”

“I have no idea, Captain.”

“I think I do,” Cort Wesley said, standing back a ways with his arm stretched around Dylan’s shoulder, spine held so straight he looked a half foot taller.

*   *   *

“For all the good that does us,” Tepper said, after Cort Wesley had finished describing what he’d heard while in Cereso.

“Somebody got him out of there, Captain,” Cort Wesley told him. “And now he’s got Luke.”

Tepper held his expression steady. “We got roadblocks in place in a five-mile radius. We got choppers, and dogs, the Highway Patrol, and the ghosts of every dead Ranger out there looking.”

Cort Wesley shook his head and ran his tongue around the inside of his parched mouth. “None of it matters. They’d have the escape route planned out. They could have killed Luke, but they wanted him alive.”

“Because whoever’s behind this knows we’re getting close,” said Caitlin grimly, her determination growing with each word. “They needed leverage, something to hold us back. Means they’ve gotta keep him alive, Cort Wesley, and that means we’re going to find where he’s stashed no matter what it takes.”

If the assurance meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. “You shouldn’t have left him, Ranger,” Cort Wesley said almost too soft to hear, as if the words belonged to somebody else.

“Dad,” Dylan started.

“Quiet, son,” Cort Wesley snapped, never taking his eyes off Caitlin. “We just can’t help ourselves, can we? No matter when and where the bell goes off, we’re off racing to the fire and everything else be damned.”

“This one’s on me, Cort Wesley. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“I do,” said Captain Tepper. “I know exactly what you were thinking because it’s what you’re always thinking, and this time it caught up to you.” He shook his head. “What is it about you that attracts this shit? I swear, Ranger, you are like some kind of super magnet dragging every monster the good Lord ever made straight to you.” Tepper raised another cigarette to his mouth and started a lighter toward it. The lighter trembled in his hand but he managed to touch it to the Marlboro’s tip, eyes retrained on Caitlin. “You know how I always tell you to ease back on those hurricane force winds that blow with you?”

“Category Ten you’ve called them.”

“Well, this time I’m gonna find shelter in my basement and let you go at it.”

“D.W.?”

Tepper turned away, continuing to puff on his Marlboro as he responded. “No reports, no actuarials, no travel logs, no time sheets, no gas vouchers, no powdering your nose, and no missing what you shoot at. As of now you are on special assignment and nobody needs know where or how, and that includes me. In fact, all I ever want to know is that it’s done once and for all. You find out the why, you find out the who, Ranger, and you leave them the way they left our people here tonight. That clear enough for you?”

Caitlin could only nod.

“Your granddad used to put men on the chain when he cleaned up Sweetwater during the oil boom. I expect you to wrap that chain around as many deserving necks as you can find. Just get that boy back.”

Then, shaking his head, he walked off, leaving Caitlin with Cort Wesley and Dylan.

“What now, Ranger?”

“We go old school, Cort Wesley, just like Captain Tepper said.”

79

S
AN
A
NTONIO

“You go on ahead,” Caitlin told him. “I’ll meet you at home. Got somebody else I need to talk to first.”

Cort Wesley held his gaze on her the whole way back to the parking lot, while Caitlin looked about until she spotted a figure standing by the glass of the press box, the one spot in the stadium lost to darkness. She located the back stairs leading up to it behind the home section of stands and found the single long table set with folding chairs still littered with notebooks and laptops, the attending press having fled in such a hurry that they’d left them behind.

“His name is Locaro,” said Guillermo Paz, stepping into a thin sliver of light so she could see him. “He used to keep reasonable order between the cartels. For a time they needed to seek his permission before killing a major public official or rival. Our paths have crossed before.”

Caitlin looked at Paz through the darkness between them. “I’m trying to understand something here, Colonel.”

“What’s that?”

“Some problems I’m having with how things got handled tonight.”

“Are you talking about you or me?”

“Guess we’ve both had better nights, haven’t we?”

“My men took out the snipers,” Paz said defensively, unnerved by Caitlin’s criticism. “We thought we had them trapped. The wheelchair guises took even me by surprise.”

“Is that it or did you force Locaro’s hand so you could let it play out just the way it did?”

“You rushed the field instead of staying with the boy. I guess that makes us both prisoners, Ranger.”

“Of what?”

“Our natures.”

“That’s a goddamn cop-out and you know it.”

“You’re raising your voice because you’re mad at yourself.”

“But I’m talking to you.” Caitlin again turned her voice toward the window. “This didn’t have to happen.”

“And it didn’t have to end the way it did.”

“You know what, Colonel? I’m starting to think you’re no different from the man who had the mother of Cort Wesley’s boys killed. Maybe I had you wrong. I think maybe you knew it was Locaro all along tonight. I think maybe you wanted this to happen,” she added, casting another gaze outside a window now dappled with flashes of red from revolving lights both leaving and entering the scene.

“Keep going.”

“Excuse me?”

“It helps to turn your anger on me, so you won’t turn too much of it on yourself. You’re capable of hurting yourself more than any of your enemies, Ranger, but that makes you weaker and thus vulnerable to them.”

“So you’re saying what? I should just forget the fact that I got a boy kidnapped tonight while you let a war break out?”

“We did what was right for one moment, not the next. And it’s in that moment we must judge ourselves.”

“Is that how you’ve lived with all this shit for so long, Colonel?”

“I used to have a different approach than you, Ranger.”

“How’s that?”

“I used to remain above it all without feeling, until our paths crossed for the first time. Now I live within it, the same way you do.”

“Means you get to experience pain, Colonel. How’s that feel?”

Now it was Paz who turned his gaze toward the window. “I’m not finished with Locaro yet.”

“And I won’t rest until I bring Luke back safe and sound.”

They looked at each other again.

“That’s how we live with all this, Ranger.”

80

M
EDINA
C
OUNTY,
T
EXAS

“Thanks for coming on such short notice, Mr. Tawls,” Caitlin greeted, not shaking the man’s hand since it would’ve hurt too much with the bruised knuckles of her right hand wrapped in gauze.

The first thing Regent Tawls glimpsed after he closed the door was a man digging a hole on the outer rim of the wasteland that had once been his farm. The man’s bare chest showcased banded muscles across his arms and shoulders and pectorals that looked like baseballs tucked into his chest. At this time of the morning, when the sun was right, he could distinguish the burned patch of earth that had ruined the dreams bred from his life when he was still a young man. But it was the bare-chested man with thick shovel in hand that continued to claim his attention, as he approached Caitlin Strong.

She’d called Regent Tawls and asked him to meet her on the site of his former farm in Medina County just outside of Devine after the indescribable violence at St. Anthony’s school had culminated in Luke’s kidnapping the night before. She managed to steal some sleep in fits and starts broken by nightmares featuring the monster of a man named Locaro hovering over her bedside.

“The boy’s mine now,” he told her with a grin and, for some reason, the thing she recalled most clearly was a stomach-turning stench that rose off him.

The sun-scorched ground on what had been Regent Tawls’s farm was brown, impossible to distinguish where the refuse of crops grown ended and dirt began, although both smelled musky and sour beneath an unforgiving sky. Looking at the surroundings now, it was hard to picture life ever having sprouted from it, like regarding a massive above-the-earth grave where the dead were still awaiting last rites.

Moments before she watched Regent Tawls pull onto the property in his white Cadillac, which shimmered in the sunlight. The heat rose from its hood in visible ripples that continued to churn as he exited and approached her, forcing a smile even as the buttons of his shirt showed the strain of keeping his stomach contained. His walk was more of a lumbering gait, his cheeks shiny with perspiration that also dappled his forehead in actual drops, his eyes squinting to better make out the solitary figure digging away at the hard ground that fought his efforts every step of the way.

“I appreciate you meeting me out here,” Caitlin continued.

“Well, Ranger, truth be told, I thought you might have an eye on the property,” he said with a smile, a bad attempt at humor that produced no response from Caitlin.

“I believe there are some things you’ve been leaving out of your story about what happened here in nineteen-eighty.”

The smile slipped from his face, his eyes darting back toward the hole digger in the hope he might be gone. But instead, he had seemed to redouble his efforts upon Tawls’s arrival. “And what things would those be?”

“Well, sir, I did some back checking to the original investigation and reports,” Caitlin told him. “My dad was one of those investigating the theft and the fire in the fall of that year. You were very cooperative at first, full of information, clues, and even indications where you thought the likely culprits could be found.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me say ‘at first.’ When Jim Strong came back for follow-up, you clammed up. Suddenly had nothing to say, and you even retracted some of your earlier claims and insisted some of the information you’d furnished had been given in error. Have I got that right?”

“Not to my recollection, Ranger. But you know how many years ago this was now?”

“Yes, I do, sir, down to the day, and there are some things I can’t expect a man to forget, lying to the Texas Ranger investigating a theft from his farm and subsequent arson being one of them. Something like that tends to stick.”

Tawls shrugged his already slumped shoulders. “Like I said—”

“I know what you said, just like I know what you said all those years ago. Problem is, it doesn’t add up; or what it does add up to creates a significantly different picture from the one you’ve been sketching.”

“Ranger, I—”

“You see the news last night about what happened at St. Anthony’s High School?”

“The lacrosse game shooting? It’s been on the air nonstop. It’s … horrible,” Tawls managed, immediately looking as if he wished he’d chosen a different word.

“Sir, I believe whoever’s behind that incident, which included the kidnapping of a teenage boy, is very much connected to what happened on this farm of yours here in nineteen-eighty. I believe there’s plenty more you haven’t told me that you’re going to tell me now.”

Tawls looked about the wasteland around him, hoping to see someone else about besides the hole digger. A hitchhiker, squatter, vagrant, potential buyer—anything. But there was no one. Just him, a hole digger, and a Texas Ranger known for planting more bodies in the ground than any gunfighter in Texas history.

“You know what he’s digging?” Caitlin asked him, joining Tawls’s gaze toward the outer reaches of his former farm where the sour ground had taken on the texture of concrete.

“I’d rather not speculate, Ranger.”

“Let me put it this way, then, sir: do you have any idea how many bodies of Mexican bandits and Comanche are buried in this area, maybe right here on this very land?”

“Quite a few I’ve heard told,” Tawls said, swallowing hard.

“Many of them planted by the Texas Rangers and dumped in makeshift graves where they’ve yet to be found to this day.” Caitlin took a step closer to him, angling herself to block his view of the hole digger. “You know the Comanche could fire arrow after arrow without hardly a pause and those Mexican bandits often outnumbered the Rangers ten to one, but those Rangers prevailed. We’re still prevailing, Mr. Tawls, but it’s been a long time since we’ve been in the grave-digging business.” She turned sideways so he could see the hole digger again. “That changed last night. All bets are off now. On top of that kidnapping, we’ve got fifteen dead so far and five times that hospitalized, and it’s a miracle there weren’t more of both. I can’t tell you much more, but one thing I can tell you for sure is anyone who stops me from doing the job I’m sworn as a Ranger to do might as well be six feet under for all I care. And I won’t give it any more thought than the Rangers who preceded me with bullets as well as shovels. Are we clear so far?”