Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  He knew it was him the gunmen had come for, the same kids, no doubt, who’d been chased off by the hail of bricks sent raining down upon them by Guillermo Paz the other day. He’d wondered up until that moment if he were truly capable of firing the pistol he’d been holding low by his hip. But Dylan held no such doubt tonight about firing the big shotgun his hands squeezed tight.

  The thought he was about to kill somebody filled his mind and choked off his breath, as a surge of heat blew into him and he shouldered the front door all the way open.

  * * *

  Caitlin had heard the first boy cry out, then spotted him rolling back and forth on the grass, screaming as he tried to reach around for a spot in his buttocks. It was like listening to a baby’s cries, the same sound she recalled coming from the kid one of her initial shots had winged, and she had to remind herself such innocence stopped there. This boy and the others had followed Dylan home with assault rifles at the ready, military grade tuned to full auto. That was the ticket they held and now it was getting cashed.

  Or so she tried to remind herself, so as not to consider they were still kids.

  A second shape, taller and more athletic, stumbled up the stairs, likely as unnerved by the downed boy’s horrible wails as she was. Caitlin had two bullets left in her SIG, but wasn’t going to shoot him. Planning to use the fact that the kid seemed oblivious to her presence to jump him. But then Dylan appeared in the doorway behind the twelve-gauge’s gaping barrel, the kid’s M16 leveled straight for him. Dylan was about to die in the very same spot where his mother had fallen dead the day she’d saved his and his brother’s lives.

  Not on her watch.

  Caitlin felt the breath catch in her throat as she fired. Her first bullet took the kid in the side of his neck, one hand jumping to the wound while the other clung to the trigger. All this recorded in the pause between heartbeats, as she fired again and blew a wash of blood, bone, and brains through one side of his skull and out the other.

  The force of the bullet threw him back and to the side, crashing through the porch railing and dropping into the garden Cort Wesley had begun lovingly tending below, crushing his latest plantings that had just sprouted their first petals.

  “Dylan!” she yelled out.

  But he was already past her, streaking down the stairs into the blackness of the yard and the sight of Cort Wesley pinned down under an onslaught of fire.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley made it to the cover of the tree, his ears ringing from the constant percussion of the bullets clacking around him. He dropped behind the thickest part of the base, adjacent to where the lumbering tub of a kid was still propped up unconscious, bark spitting around him from the constant spray of automatic fire.

  Cort Wesley lurched out to sight down on the shooter, just as a spray of bark lifted under a fresh fusillade of fire, either a bullet graze or wood shard stinging Cort Wesley’s wrist and sending his pistol flying.

  Damn!

  He hadn’t faced down all manner of lowlife and miscreant these past few years to get gunned down by a punk only tough enough to roust illegals who couldn’t fight back. And if he went down, that would bring the offspring of Armand Fisker, a waste of sperm if ever there was one, that much closer to Dylan. He thought of his own father, Boone Masters, dying alone and unloved in a hospital bed, a man he’d never truly known until years later after far too much time had passed for it to truly matter. He wasn’t about to let Dylan and Luke grow up that way. Having missed the early parts of their lives, he had no intention of missing the rest of them.

  There had to be something, because there was always something.

  He just had to find it.

  The kid in the tree still had his M16 shouldered, held to him by its strap, and Cort Wesley twisted toward him. He heard the clack of an ejected mag hitting the ground. The snap of a fresh one being slammed home greeted him just as he lunged to his feet, twisting toward the assault rifle firmly in his sights slung from the fat kid’s shoulder.

  Cort Wesley got it up and leveled between the tub of lard and the tree itself, hit the trigger before the oncoming kid hit his.

  Click.

  The gun was empty.

  * * *

  Caitlin rushed down the stairs in Dylan’s path, stopping just long enough to scoop up the wounded kid’s M16. Lifting it from the ground when he grabbed her leg, more reflexively than defensively, his terrified eyes begging for help, for something.

  Caitlin tried to kick herself free, but his grip wouldn’t give, locked onto her like a flex cuff in desperation and terror. She finally knocked it off with the butt of the M16, swinging toward Dylan when she heard the shotgun’s roar.

  * * *

  Dylan recognized the kid as the driver of the big black pickup he’d confronted outside the body shop where his father had gotten him a job. The kid wasn’t looking at him, never even noticed him, too busy righting his mean-looking assault rifle at something else:

  His father.

  Dylan remembered the most frightened he’d ever been in his life, waking up screaming from a nightmare at the age of six. His mother rushed in and all Dylan could do was blabber on about a dark figure with a sword knocking on his window, wanting to get inside so he could take him away the way he’d taken a classmate who’d been killed in a traffic accident.

  “The Green Ripper, Mommy!” he wailed. “The Green Ripper wants me, too!”

  Dylan had slept with the lights on for weeks, barricading the window the “Green Ripper” had been tapping on. No one understood the source of his fear, because it wasn’t the Green Ripper he thought was coming for him; it was the Grim Reaper.

  Death itself.

  And now death had returned, minus the scythe and black shroud, death in the form of the kid standing before him about to kill his father.

  Dylan had heard about moments where time froze up solid, but never believed it was actually possible until that moment. Time just stopped. The world wasn’t moving, the kid wasn’t moving, his M16 wasn’t moving.

  Only Dylan was moving, the Remington twelve-gauge in concert with him. He never remembered pulling the trigger, never recorded the muzzle flash exploding from the bore. All he remembered was the kid blown backward off his feet, arms splayed to the side like they were wings flapping, before he hit the ground soundlessly to Dylan’s ears that had been deafened by the blast.

  Had he fired once or twice? Had he fired at all? Was this just another bad dream?

  Then someone was taking the shotgun from his grasp and he saw lips mouthing, Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, but he still couldn’t hear and recognized nothing around him, as he sank to his knees in his father’s grasp.

  PART SIX

  Captain R. A. “Bob” Crowder transferred to the Ranger force from the DPS Bureau of Intelligence in 1939. In 1955 the inmates at Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane rioted and took hostages, giving Crowder a chance to live up to the “One riot, one Ranger” legend. Alone, Crowder walked into the maximum security unit to meet with the leader of the riot. The two men exchanged words, and within an hour, the riot was over and the hostages were freed. Before Crowder agreed to enter the building, however, the Ranger talked to the lead inmate on the phone and informed him that, although he was coming in alone, he would have a Colt .45 on each hip. “I want to tell you one thing,” said Crowder. “I’m not comin’ in unarmed because you’ve already got three people over there as hostages and I don’t want to be the fourth one—and I’m not going to be. I just want to tell you this. If somethin’ goes amiss, I know who’s going to fall first.”

  —“Lone on the Range: Texas Lawmen” by Jesse Sublett, Texas Monthly, December 31, 1969

  51

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “Well, Ranger,” Captain Tepper said, a Marlboro at the ready in his right hand, “this is one royal mess.”

  Caitlin looked at him from the top of the porch steps where she’d sat down, hoping to quell the queasiness in her stomach. The feeling was a
mix of nausea and the worst indigestion she’d ever had, sometimes rotating between the two and sometimes roiled by both at the same time.

  “I killed a kid tonight, D.W,” she said, looking down again. “I never even saw his face. I killed a kid I wouldn’t even recognize if his ghost walked right up to me.”

  “Would looking him in the eye have changed anything?”

  “I’ll never know, since I didn’t get the chance.”

  Tepper sat down next to her on the top step and took off his hat. “Nobody’s tougher on you for that loose trigger finger than me, Ranger. But if there’s another way this could’ve gone down tonight, I can’t see it. Sometimes you force the issue—that’s true enough. But tonight the issue forced you.”

  “I still killed one kid and put two bullets in another.”

  Tepper had never appeared more grim and dour, the look of a man holding an entire lemon in his mouth having claimed his expression. He gazed out toward the last two dead bodies being loaded into the coroner’s wagon under Doc Whatley’s supervision. Shavano Park police department detectives had listened to Caitlin’s story and were still listening to Cort Wesley’s, while the techs continued taking measurements and an overall inventory of the crime scene.

  “What do you suppose the combined ages of the three victims were?” Caitlin asked him.

  Tepper started to lift the cigarette toward his mouth before changing his mind again. “I’d rather count up the expended shells from all the rounds they shot off. You mentioned they were firing on full auto. You want to tell me how kids no older than my grandchildren can get their hands on that kind of firepower?”

  “Real hard to believe, being that this is Texas and all.”

  “They’re illegal in this state, too, Ranger.”

  “Then I imagine that’s a question for the father of the boy Dylan shot to save Cort Wesley: Armand Fisker.”

  “Not a conversation I’m looking forward to having,” Tepper groused.

  He finally lit up the Marlboro and took a long, deep drag. Beyond them, the endless array of flashing lights sprayed a kaleidoscope of color about the street. Cort Wesley was still being interrogated separately by Shavano Park detectives and sheriff’s department deputies inside the house, explaining why Caitlin had staked a claim to the porch in case things got out of hand there. Something that could easily happen when five gunmen show up to kill your son.

  Just as fast as he’d started the cigarette, Tepper dropped it onto the step even with his boot and stamped it out. “From where I sit, the three of you are gonna come out of this just fine.”

  “At least I won’t have to see the face of the kid I killed every time I close my eyes for a while.”

  “Do yourself a favor, then: don’t read the papers or watch the news tomorrow.” Tepper looked down at the ruined cigarette, as if to wish he hadn’t stamped it out. “You talk to Dylan yet?”

  “There wasn’t a lot of opportunity, given that neighbors had already called the Shavano Park PD and they showed up not more than a minute later.”

  “He didn’t see the body?”

  “Captain?”

  Tepper’s expression looked genuinely pained from trying to mince words. “What that shotgun did to Armand Fisker’s boy.”

  Caitlin shook her head.

  “You’re going on administrative leave, effective immediately,” Tepper said abruptly.

  “Say that again.”

  “With pay,” he added.

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  Tepper rose to his feet and laid a boot on the second step, his knee on that side creaking as he leaned in toward her, pain from more than his arthritis spreading across his features. “This is different than the other shootings, Ranger. You know that as well as I.”

  “Even though I’m going to come out of it just fine?”

  “This one’s sure to get political, drag every enemy you’ve made over the years out from the woodwork. And that’s a long line, if I need to remind you. Especially since Willie Arble, the man you shot in Stubb’s the other night, has filed suit against the Department of Public Safety.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “The suit alleges excessive force and there’s a school of thought already brewing that he’s got a good case.”

  “I thought he was a rapist, D.W.”

  “Tell it to the judge, as they say,” Tepper said, before his voice took on a cautionary tone. “On second thought, better not, because that would make your history part of the story here, who you were really shooting at when you plugged Arble.”

  Caitlin let his remark stand.

  Tepper took off his Stetson and held it against his side, releasing the sweet smell of the Brylcreem he still slathered into his thinning hair every single day, making it look pasted to his scalp except for the patches that took less kindly to his hat. “History’s not your friend in this case, Ranger,” he resumed.

  “I’m going to find the man who raped Kelly Ann Beasley, Captain.”

  “You mean, the man who raped you.”

  Caitlin pushed herself to her feet. “Guess the ending to that movie somebody wants to make about me isn’t written yet, is it?”

  Tepper turned his gaze over the flood of activity that continued under the spray of police floodlights and the spots blazing into the eyes of the bevy of news reporters going live from the scene with the best rendition of events they could assimilate. “Since it’s your story, Ranger, you can bet it’ll be bloody.”

  He’d barely finished his sentence when a distant roar reached a crescendo, and turned deafening. Caitlin swung with him to the head of the street where an endless parade of motorcycles sped forward, enclosing an armada of SUVs and pickup trucks.

  Tepper peeled back his jacket to expose his .45. “Like I was saying.”

  52

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  The roar of motorcycle engines drew Cort Wesley from inside the house, along with the Shavano Park detectives who’d been interrogating him, reaching for their guns as well.

  Cort Wesley stopped just behind Caitlin and Captain Tepper. “Armand Fisker and friends, no doubt,” he said, smelling of the ash and char leftover from the fires started by the Molotov cocktails inside the house.

  “You visited his home, Cort Wesley. I guess he’s returning the favor.”

  Shavano Park police officers had confiscated their firearms, along with the Remington twelve-gauge, as evidence. Caitlin had backups inside her SUV parked in the driveway, but didn’t figure the local cops would take kindly to the notion of her getting into a second gunfight in the same night. But she and Cort Wesley moved toward the street anyway, watching the convoy stop on a dime, the bikers making no effort to disguise either the long guns they were wielding or pistols holstered to their belts.

  A passenger door on the lead truck opened, and Armand Fisker dropped out, instantly in motion and shadowed by a good portion of the army that had accompanied him here.

  “Where’s my son?” he cried out, steam blown from his mouth with the words that split the stone-cold silence of the night. “Where the fuck’s my son? You hear me over there? I want my son’s body!”

  Captain Tepper cast Caitlin and Cort Wesley a gaze lodged somewhere between a scowl and a frown. “Two of you better hang back to keep this from going to guns.”

  Caitlin ran her eyes across the lawn, taking note of cops both exposed and having taken cover behind anything they could find, all with pistols drawn and ready. Twenty guns at most, maybe, against as many as sixty. And pistols versus assault rifles to boot, for the most part. But there were three other Rangers on scene now, in addition to her and the captain, which provided some cause for hope if things turned bad.

  She watched Tepper move through the assembled officers from various law enforcement bodies and stop fifteen feet from Armand Fisker in the spill of the headlights streaming from both trucks and motorcycles.

  “Mr. Fisker, I’m Captain D. W. Tepper of the Texas
Rangers and I’m mighty sorry for your loss.”

  “Where’s my son?” Fisker raged, storming forward into the same spill of light that had captured Tepper. “You give me my goddamn son!”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that. His body’s already been hauled away.”

  “Where?”

  “That’s a police matter, sir. If you and me can talk, I might be able to—”

  “I’m not talking to you, I’m not talking to anybody! If I got something to say, I’ll let my bullets speak for me, until I get my son back.”

  Tepper stood there rigidly. “That’s not going to happen right now, much as both of us might want it to. You want, I can take you to him, sir, but it’s got to be just the two of us.”

  “Sure, so you can gun me down the way he was gunned down.”

  “Sir, he was firing a fully automatic M16. We’ve found two expended magazines we believe came from it, meaning he fired sixty shots before he went down. You want to explain how that makes him a victim here?”

  “Who shot him?”

  “That’s under investigation.”

  “You’re a Texas Ranger, true old-school. So why don’t you just hand over the shooter to me and we’ll call it even?”

  Caitlin watched Tepper take off his hat and flap it against his side. The Brylcreem he’d slathered on made his hair appear shiny in the spill of the streetlights, but her angle made him look like a single David facing an army of Goliaths. She thought back to the times of her father and grandfather, wondering how many times they’d found themselves standing up against the kind of crowd Tepper was confronting now.

  “Nothing can make this even, sir, after the loss you’ve suffered,” he said, his voice echoing slightly in the still night air. “But that doesn’t mean making it worse is the way to go, either.”