Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels) (43 page)

Ana Guajardo hadn’t moved or reacted, still didn’t seem to be breathing, the dull emergency lighting losing her to the shadows. “It takes one to know one, because we’re the same, you and I,” she managed finally, summoning the hate she knew so well. “Tell me you don’t look in the mirror and see my face looking back at you, Ranger.”

“All I know is I’m looking at a monster right now. And I’m gonna make you pay for what you’ve done.”

With that Guajardo stooped to retrieve an assault rifle that must have been shed by one of her men in his rush to flee.

“Not today,” she said calmly.

*   *   *

Paz hurled his knife from the ground, propped up on his back. It lodged in Locaro’s shoulder, stopping him in his tracks five feet away, machete locked into position overhead.

Locaro jerked the blade out and tossed it aside. “You can’t kill me,
India chusma
,” he grunted, almost grinning.

A dark blur of motion caught Paz’s eye behind Locaro, accompanied by a heavy pounding that left the ground quaking and rumbling beneath both of them.

“I don’t have to.”

Paz watched the charging male rhino gore Locaro from behind with its horn and then jerk him upward, spearing him deeper until the horn emerged through the thrashing Locaro’s chest, dragging blood and gore with it. The massive animal continued to twist him from side to side before tossing his still writhing body to the ground and prancing proudly off.

*   *   *

Caitlin held her gaze on Ana Guajardo, focusing on the woman’s finger as it stopped just short of the assault rifle’s trigger.

“Your rapist is already dead, ma’am. You can’t kill him again, no matter what you do to me or anyone else.”

Guajardo’s eyes widened, then narrowed hatefully, the assault rifle stiff in her grasp.

“I’m not a child, and this isn’t Willow Creek,” Caitlin told her.

Guajardo’s expression grew strangely placid and sure. “All the same to me.”

She jerked the assault rifle upward, finger finding the trigger just as Caitlin dropped down behind the cover of her father’s wheelchair. Guajardo hesitated before firing.

Not long, but enough.

Caitlin fired four times from her crouch, two hits to Guajardo’s chest and one to her head to go with the single miss before Guajardo ever pulled the trigger.

“I’m nothing like you,” she said, more falling chunks of the ceiling entombing Ana Callas Guajardo in rubble as Caitlin rushed for the exit.

*   *   *

Paz was waiting when she emerged, the Mexican army already scouring the grounds to round up Guajardo’s fleeing troops. The shelling had ended, the remnants of the bunker likely entombed by now with all evidence of Ana Guajardo’s plot lost forever.

Which, Caitlin figured, had been the whole point.

“You’ve looked better, Colonel.”

Paz grimaced, still in pain. “You too, Ranger.”

They looked up when troop-carrying helicopters soared over the scene, lowering to dispense more Mexican soldiers.

“Government down here can’t afford to let this get out,” Caitlin said, as much to herself as Paz. “That means we better make ourselves scarce in a hurry. Kind of makes you wonder why we keep bothering, doesn’t it?”

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for, Ranger.”

“That’s Hemingway, right?”

Paz nodded. “The rest of the quote reads, ‘And I hate very much to leave it.’”

“Well,” Caitlin told him, “I don’t suppose the two of us are going anywhere.”

E
PILOGUE

The New Texas needs the Rangers every bit as much as the old.

Dallas Morning News
; January 30, 1994

S
AN
A
NTONIO

Three days later, a lawyer in Phoenix contacted Cort Wesley to inform him that Dylan and Luke were the sole beneficiaries of the proceeds from the estate of Maura Torres’s murdered sister, Araceli. The amount was somewhere in the high six figures and the lawyer wanted to schedule a convenient time for Cort Wesley to sign the necessary paperwork.

“See, bubba,”
he heard Leroy Epps say,
“I told you so!”

“You say something?” Caitlin asked him, as he pocketed his phone.

“Just thinking out loud,” Cort Wesley smiled.

They sat side by side on the porch swing, watching Dylan and Luke taking turns on the half-pipe. Cort Wesley had oiled the sprockets that morning to eliminate the squeaking, and the swing rocked smoothly back and forth now.

“What about what’s left of Guajardo’s plan, Ranger?” he asked Caitlin.

“I couldn’t tell you, Cort Wesley, other than to say Jones and his counterparts in Mexico are handling the cleanup. All those giant remote-controlled aircraft that never got airborne are being rounded up and the transformers manufactured by Guajardo’s company are being retrofitted. Meanwhile, those two software geeks turned themselves in and are talking up a storm about how to prevent anyone from actually succeeding where they almost did.”

Over on the half-pipe, Luke took another spill on his skateboard under Dylan’s tutelage.

“Doesn’t come easy for him, does it?” Caitlin said.

“That’ll make it all the more worthwhile once the boy gets it right, Ranger.”

“Voice of experience, Cort Wesley?”

“I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

Caitlin watched Cort Wesley flinch as Luke went flying again, leaving Dylan to just shake his head with hands planted on hips. “Be plenty of folks who couldn’t handle watching their kids take falls like that.”

“Guess we’re immune to such things.”

“All being relative, of course.”

Cort Wesley let out an easy breath. “Dylan just got an e-mail from Brown telling him he’d been officially accepted. An hour later comes a message from Coach Estes with the off-season football program included. I’d say he’s truly excited about something other than the shit we’ve dragged him into.”

Caitlin turned toward the half-pipe, where Dylan was shredding up a storm while Luke looked on, his board balanced against his leg. “Should give him a chance to be a regular kid.”

“Somehow,” Cort Wesley said, with his eyes straying to her. “No thanks to us.”

*   *   *

Earlier that day, holding Caitlin’s detailed report about what had transpired inside Ana Guajardo’s underground bunker, D. W. Tepper settled back in his chair and faced her. “You really used a
wheelchair
for cover?”

Caitlin shrugged. “Accomplished what it was supposed to. And, the thing is, he was already dead when I found him. Managed to live just long enough to see the daughter who’d put him in that chair fall miserably.”

“Speaking of which, Ranger, it seems strange that somebody just
happened
to leave an assault rifle behind in the middle of that floor.” Tepper took a Marlboro from a freshly opened pack but stopped short of lighting it. “Sounds to me like whoever it was put the gun there for a reason.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Caitlin said, her gaze giving up nothing.

Tepper shook his head and lit his cigarette. “I am truly glad we’re on the same side, Hurricane.”

With that, he touched the tip of his cigarette to Caitlin’s report and dropped it in a nearby wastebasket as the flames caught. Tepper had started to raise the cigarette to his mouth, when Caitlin leaned over his desk and plucked it from his hand.

“Me too, Captain, me too.”

*   *   *

Caitlin continued to hold Cort Wesley’s stare. “Down in that bunker, facing off against Ana Guajardo, finally brought it home to me.”

“Brought what home?”

“She told me she and I were the same. The scariest thing being she was almost right, because I realized the only thing that made us different is you and those boys.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say it was the only thing.”

“Most important, then.”

“I’ll give you that.”

“You’ve given me plenty already.”

“Likewise.”

Caitlin eased up against him, and Cort Wesley drew her in closer still with an arm wrapped over her shoulder. “So where do we go from here, Ranger?”

“Same place as always.”

“Where’s that?”

The afternoon sun broke through the clouds, casting shimmering rays across the front yard that splayed shadowy patterns through the trees on Dylan and Luke on the half-pipe.

“I’ll let you know when we get there, Cort Wesley.”

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE

This is the West, sir.

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Carlton Young as Maxwell Scott,
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

History, my good friend Steve Berry counsels, matters. It does indeed and I normally take great pride in the attention I pay to history in my Caitlin Strong books, specifically the history of the Texas Rangers. Normally.

See, I took a few liberties with this one—hence, my first stab at a proverbial Author’s Note to explain myself. I refer specifically to the composition of “Strong’s Raiders,” who’ve you just met. William Ray and Earl Strong, of course, are products of my imagination, but the other Rangers are all real and all presented as they really were, more or less. More in the kind of men they were and the kind of deeds they’d done. Less in the fact that I played loose with some key facts and dates here.

The famed Bill McDonald, for example, really did die in 1918, a year before the events depicted in
Strong Rain Falling
. I needed a Texas Ranger legend and I figured I could cheat at least this once. I didn’t cheat at all with Frank Hamer, as tough a Ranger as there ever was, who was famously lured out of retirement to bring down Bonnie and Clyde. For his part, Monroe Fox never returned to the Rangers following his alleged role in a very real massacre, although that role remains in dispute to this day. As for Manuel Gonzaullas, well, I couldn’t resist including a future legend in Strong’s Raiders as well. And, other than the fact that “Lone Wolf” didn’t actually become a Ranger until a year later (1920), his background is otherwise presented exactly as it was.

Meanwhile, the Battle of Juárez really did happen in June of 1919, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that battle was in any way connected to an early fiendish force of Mexican drug dealers. But while
esos Demonios
never existed, Esteban Cantú most certainly did. And all evidence points to the fact that he did indeed run the first major drug smuggling ring out of Mexico, bringing opium into California out of Mexicali and Tijuana through Baja and beginning the scourge that ultimately begat the notorious cartels themselves.

Hope you don’t think less of me or the book for these embellishments. Hey, I’m in good company; remember, the motto of the Texas Rangers—
One Riot, One Ranger
—was never actually spoken by anyone. That’s why we print the legends. That’s what makes us storytellers.

O
THER
B
OOKS BY
J
ON
L
AND

The Alpha Deception

*
Betrayal

*
Blood Diamonds

*
The Blue Widows

The Council of Ten

*
Day of the Delphi

*
Dead Simple

*
Dolphin Key

The Doomsday Spiral

The Eighth Trumpet

*
The Fires of Midnight

The Gamma Option

*
Hope Mountain

*
Keepers of the Gate

*
Kingdom of the Seven

Labyrinth

The Last Prophecy

The Lucifer Directive

The Ninth Dominion

The Omega Command

The Omicron Legion

*
The Pillars of Solomon

*
The Seven Sins: The Tyrant Ascending

*
Strong at the Break

*
Strong Enough to Die

*
Strong Justice

*
Strong Vengeance

The Valhalla Testament

The Vengeance of the Tau

Vortex

*
A Walk in the Darkness

*
The Walls of Jericho

*
Published by Forge Books

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

JON LAND is the critically acclaimed author of thirty novels, including the bestselling series featuring female Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong:
Strong Enough to Die, Strong Justice, Strong at the Break,
and
Strong Vengeance.
In addition, Land is the coauthor of the nonfiction bestseller,
Betrayal
, which was named Best True-Crime Book of 2012 by
Suspense Magazine.
Jon Land lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and can be found on the Web at
jonlandbooks.com
.