Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels) (7 page)

12

Q
UINTANA
R
OO,
M
EXICO

“It was through Chavez,” Guajardo elaborated, “when we were doing some business down there and Paz was part of his secret police. We needed a village cleared so we could exploit the mineral rights. Chavez ended up keeping them all for himself.”

“I’m surprised he avoided assassination,
jefa
.”

“He had Paz.”

Guajardo stiffened as their stroll brought her stables and riding pen into view. Not far away, a withered shape in a wheelchair baked in the sunlight under the careful watch of a white-garbed male attendant. Her two captains made it a point to ignore Ana’s wheelchair-bound father, not even acknowledging his presence as the attendant leaned over to check his pulse. Ana Guajardo’s father had built this entire sprawling estate in Quintana Roo around those stables, constructing the riding pen in a way that allowed view of the horses from all sides of the hacienda but the rear. The four-story, ten-thousand-square-foot home was finished in an elegant cream stucco beneath a clay-colored roof with an overhang supported by majestic pillars modeled after renderings of ancient Aztec temples.

Concealed within this beauty, though, was the highest level of concrete and steel construction, capable of withstanding a Category Five hurricane. All the windows were made of bulletproof glass with fitted hurricane shutters for extra protection. The main rooms were outfitted with forty-five-foot-long, low-arching boveda brick ceilings, and each of the six bathrooms was finished with handmade Mexican tiles. The seven bedrooms all opened onto large balconies; the main, seven-hundred-square-foot veranda off the second floor overlooked a tennis court Ana Guajardo never used and a swimming pool she had not once swam in. Nor had she ever visited one of the beaches, among Mexico’s most beautiful, located just five miles away, because there was always too much else to do.

“I knew of Paz’s connection to the Ranger, not the cowboy,” Uribe defended. “And I didn’t know, no one knew, he was still in Texas.”

Guajardo stopped within clear view of her horses at play in the field. “But we know now, don’t we?” She took a quick glance toward her father, then returned her attention to Uribe and Vasquez.

“We won’t fail next time,
jefa
.”

“You’re right, because there’s not going to be a next time,” Guajardo said suddenly. “The Torres boys are not your problem any longer—they are mine. That will free you to focus on the bigger picture.”

“What picture is that,
jefa
?”

“Our coming attack against the
Estados Unidos
.”

Guajardo’s captains looked at each other, unsure they’d heard her correctly.

“
Jefa?
” Vasquez raised.

“Did you say
attack
the United States?” followed Uribe immediately.

“I need fifteen hundred pilots,” she told them both, “perhaps as many as two thousand.”

“
Airplane
pilots?” Uribe posed in disbelief.

Guajardo remained utterly calm, her gaze fixed on her frolicking horses as she replied.

“They are not thoroughbreds, you know,” she said from the edge of the pen they’d just reached. “They are
paso fino,
horses raised for the mountainous regions of South America. The first two were gifts from my father’s associate Juan Arrango in Colombia. I was a teenage girl when a stable boy, a peasant, saddled his first mare wrongly. My father made me watch as he took a hatchet and chopped the boy’s hand off for punishment while two workmen held him down.”

Vasquez and Uribe grinned in approval. Both had heard the story before. The legend was well-known, one of the many tales that had helped foster the Guajardo family’s well-earned mystique and reputation for ruthlessness. Nothing inspired fear more than a myth like that.

“These horses remind me of what I came from,” Guajardo continued. “I look out at my
paso fino,
and I remember my roots as well as those who sought to destroy my family. That is why I brought those children to die at my own hand in Willow Creek. That is why the Torres boys should be dead now too. Because only when the past is laid to rest can the future truly rise. And six days from now,
mis compadres,
that future begins with our attack. Come, there’s something else you need to see.”

She led them past the horse pen into the lavish, rolling fields abundant with exotic flowering trees and plantings native to the Yucatán and others, which Guajardo had paid exorbitantly to have transplanted and then maintained. There were Chak Kuyché, also known as Shaving Brush Trees, colored a deep wine-red color, and perfumed flowers in white and magenta. Mixed in among these were Royal Poinciana and orchid trees that seemed in perpetual bloom.

Guajardo’s flowering fields ended at a drop-off, beyond which a stretch of land had been cleared for several acres, surrounded on three sides by native brush that grew wild and untamed. Vasquez and Uribe saw a foreman wearing a wide-brimmed hat supervising the work of flattening and leveling the land with a combination of heavy rollers and payloaders. He noticed Guajardo and tipped his hat, as she led her two most trusted officers forward.

“The pilots needed for the attack will be trained right here,” she said, just loud enough to be heard.

Vasquez and Uribe exchanged a befuddled glance, having no idea how that could be possible in such a limited space, but not about to challenge Guajardo on the point. Just as they never challenged the story of her father hacking off a boy’s hand for mis-saddling a horse.

“The work goes well, Cesar?” Guajardo asked when they reached the foreman.

“
Sí,
señora,
very well.”

He tipped his hat reverently to her again and that’s when Vasquez and Uribe noticed his other arm dangling useless by his side, ending in a stump where his hand had once been.

“Six days,” Ana Guajardo told them. “In six days, our war begins.”

13

S
AN
A
NTONIO

“Where’s it stop, Ranger?” Captain D. W. Tepper asked Caitlin from across his desk, showing his disgust in the scowl that seemed to deepen the furrows carved into his leathery face.

Those furrows looked more like shadows nesting in his skin, courtesy of a four-bulb overhead light fixture that currently had only one screwed in. The result was to cast only the area before his desk in any decent light, Caitlin feeling it spraying down over her while Tepper himself moved in and out of the spill with each rock of his chair forward.

“There was no other choice I could see, Captain.”

“You talking about killing four men in Providence or calling in Paz to kill three down here? You know, San Antonio does have a police department that, last time I checked, had a working phone number.”

“And how do you think ordinary cops would have fared in Six Flags last night?”

“Guess we’ll never know.”

“I do,” Caitlin said, half under her breath.

“They’ve got guns too, Ranger.”

“But scoring one hit per magazine doesn’t cut it against what Cort Wesley was up against.”

*   *   *

Earlier that day, Cort Wesley and Luke had been waiting when Caitlin and Dylan emerged from the jetway at San Antonio International Airport.

“You came yourself?” Caitlin said, after they hugged tightly.

“I didn’t trust the job to anyone else and I wasn’t about to leave Luke alone.”

Caitlin noticed him take a sidelong glance, as if to wonder what might be there. “But you didn’t come alone, did you?”

“Nope.”

“Paz?”

“Paz,” Cort Wesley nodded.

“Where is he?”

“I have no idea. He called in some of his men too, but I haven’t seen any of them either.”

“And you won’t. He’s probably using some of those Venezuelan rebels from his native Mayan region; he’s been recruiting them since our friend Jones, Smith, or whatever he’s calling himself these days let the colonel off his leash.”

“Homeland Security’s personal hit squad.”

“Now ours,” Caitlin said, not bothering to disguise the irony in her voice.

*   *   *

Caitlin watched Tepper swallow hard, his face looking like stomach acid had splashed up into his mouth. “You have dragged the entire nineteenth century into the present with you, Hurricane. I’m starting to think the only solution to me not finishing my career as a crossing guard is finding a time machine to whisk you away to where you belong.”

“It doesn’t concern you that somebody sent ten Mexican hitters to kill two teenage boys?”

“It does indeed, only a little more than you calling in that one-man cavalry of yours.” Tepper leaned back out of the reach of the light and shook his head.

“Look me in the eye and say you blame me, D.W. Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing from fifteen hundred miles away.”

“How’s it feel to have gunned men down in a whole new time zone, Ranger?”

Caitlin shook her head, suppressed rage flushing blood through her face. “Just who murders kids, anyway?”

“Strange you should ask,” Tepper said, extending a file folder across the desk. “Because we got five others killed in a ghost town by the name of Willow Creek.”

14

S
AN
A
NTONIO

Caitlin held the folder stiffly, but didn’t open it. “You say Willow Creek?”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Caitlin.”

“I might as well have.”

“Come again?”

“Willow Creek doesn’t strike a chord in you?”

“Why should it?”

“My granddad never told you.”

“Told me what?”

“About his first day as a Ranger, D.W.”

“Sure, he did. He and your great-granddad William Ray were holed up in a saloon celebrating with whiskey—at least William Ray was celebrating. I seem to recall Earl telling me one glass stayed his limit from that day on. Believe the town was called Smokeville.”

“Nothing about a boy wandering out of the desert with a drawing of monsters in his pocket?”

“Uh-oh,” Tepper said, upper lip curling back from his teeth.

“What’s wrong, Captain?”

Tepper waved a thin, knobby, nicotine-stained finger across his desk. “You got that look, Ranger, the look that says calling nine-one-one or summoning the whole goddamn Fifth Army can’t save us from what’s coming.”

“It’s just a story, D.W., and one it’s time you heard.”

15

W
ILLOW
C
REEK,
T
EXAS; 1919

William Ray and Earl Strong, with the still nameless boy latched to him for dear life, rode across the desert to Willow Creek, a town too close to the Mexican border for comfort. It was a blistering hot day for this time of year, the harsh land giving up a pleasant breeze to temper the air a bit.

The ride south to Willow Creek, six hours on horseback, meant the boy had been walking for at least four times that, likely setting out through the desert sometime yesterday morning or early afternoon. The trek had taken them past the same rolling tumbleweeds Earl had plucked from the boy’s hair, along with bleached branch and tree remains having the dried texture of driftwood. More and more these days, motorcars were showing up even in small Texas towns, but Rangers to a man still patrolled on horseback, not about to entrust Henry Ford’s invention for travel through the badlands and back roads they covered.

“Only thing those motor buggies got over horses,” William Ray Strong was fond of saying, “is they don’t shit. Then again, that oil they belch smells a hell of a lot worse.”

William Ray’s hope was to make the town before nightfall, no real desire to face whatever had sprayed blood all over the boy after dark.

“Tell me about Willow Creek, son,” he prodded Earl.

Earl felt the boy’s grasp tighten at the mere mention of the town’s name. “Sir?”

“It’s part of your Rangering patrol. That means you gotta know it inside and out.”

“Not much of a town these days,” Earl recalled. “Had a boom for a time when the plan was for the railroad to cut through it years back. But the boom died when the railroad got rerouted.”

“On account of…”

“Mexican bandits. ’Cause of the nearby water and hills, bandits looking to make time and avoid detection are known to pass through border towns just like Willow Creek.”

“Meaning we best keep an eye out, doesn’t it?”

“It sure does, sir.”

“You ready for your first gunfight if that eye spots something?”

“Hard to say right now. Not at all hard once my Colt clears its holster.”

William Ray looked down at the Model 1911 Springfield .45 caliber pistol holstered on his own hip, its squared design distinguishing it from the .45 caliber revolver he’d given Earl as a gift on his eighteenth birthday. “You wanna trade?”

“No, sir.”

William Ray grumbled something under his breath and prodded his horse for just a bit more speed. He’d first been issued the eight-shot Model 1911 for combat purposes in 1916 when he helped lead General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing and his five thousand soldiers on a retaliatory raid against none other than Pancho Villa, leader of the Mexican revolution. After attacks by Villa’s rebels in Texas claimed the lives of U.S. soldiers and citizens, William Ray was called in on orders from President Woodrow Wilson himself because no one knew the terrain and the territory better than he. During his days riding with the legendary Captain George W. Arrington of the Frontier Battalion, Ranger incursions into Mexico were so frequent as to be like side trips with trails traversed so often the Rangers’ horses knew them by heart.

“Don’t be so quick to dismiss this Model nineteen-eleven here, son,” William Ray said, their horses continuing to amble slowly through the desert. “Got itself quite a history in its own right. See, Ranger Earl, over in the Pacific, U.S. troops were armed with thirty-eight-caliber double-action revolvers that barely slowed the Filipino tribesmen down. There were tales of Moro warriors absorbing multiple bullets while they continued to hack away with their
kris
knives at the GIs. Got so the need for more firepower grew so desperate that old stocks of Model Eighteen Seventy-Three, forty-five-caliber Colt revolvers were returned to active service, many of which dated back to the Plains Indian Wars, where they took down those Moros just like they dropped the Apache and Comanche.”