Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  “Why’s that, Colonel?”

  Paz looked toward his priest. “So we can receive his blessing for what we’re about to do.”

  “No offense, but he doesn’t look particularly up to the task.”

  The side rail was lowered again, so Paz could feed Father Boylston his breakfast, consisting of the watered-down oatmeal he ate for lunch and dinner, too. The spoon looked like something out of a dollhouse kitchen in Paz’s massive hand, and Cort Wesley followed the process of him gently easing the next spoonful toward the priest’s mouth that gaped gratefully to accept it. Beyond that, the priest he knew had been Guillermo Paz’s spiritual adviser since he’d come to San Antonio flashed nothing that even passed for life. Except for an occasional blink, his eyes were blank and unresponsive, not even following the spoon beyond the outskirts of their line of vision.

  “Being up to the task is a relative term, outlaw.”

  Cort Wesley noticed a stack of cards, the size of the playing variety, imprinted with simple words and symbols, fanned across the tray between the bowl of oatmeal and what looked like a kid’s sippy cup, equipped with an extra-long straw.

  “I’ve been trying to find a way for my priest to communicate,” Paz said, noting his interest, “a means to allow him to better express himself.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “Not very well. Once in a while, especially with the YES and NO cards, I think I’m making progress, only to realize it was more likely my priest passing gas.”

  “Got one of those cards for revenge, Colonel?”

  Paz left his eyes on Father Boylston as he responded. “I’m of the same mind on that subject as Nietzsche who said, ‘It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it.’”

  “Now there’s someone I can agree with.”

  “But John Milton said, ‘He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds open, which otherwise would heal and do well.’”

  “That guy,” Cort Wesley said, “not so much.”

  “We’ll have satellite reconnaissance and thermal imaging of Elk Grove within a few hours,” Paz told him, easing another spoonful of oatmeal toward the priest’s open mouth.

  “How many men will Jones allow you to bring?”

  “As many as we need.”

  “I get the feeling Armand Fisker’s been on his radar a lot longer than he’s been saying. I think we’re doing his dirty work for him, Colonel. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was Jones who sent those bikers to the Village School last night. That would explain why the grenade was meant to rattle my spine, instead of blow up. I think maybe he set this whole thing up.”

  Paz didn’t look his way or respond, readying another spoonful instead, for when Father Boylston swallowed the last one. “Tell me about the Ranger, outlaw.”

  “What about her?”

  “Last night, in a dream, I saw her cut the head off a serpent.”

  “She thinks she found the man who raped her eighteen years ago,” Cort Wesley said, the candidness of his statement surprising him.

  “I hope she’s familiar with what Alexander Dumas wrote in The Count of Monte Cristo: ‘Fool that I am, that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself.’”

  “I’m not sure if she’s read the book, but I think she knows that.”

  Paz finally glanced Cort Wesley’s way. “And did you think she’d get in a bar fight with another creature from her past?”

  “I like you calling him a ‘creature.’”

  “Humanity is something that should be earned, not given. The monsters around us come in many shapes and sizes, all of them sharing the desire to see us as no better than they are, to provide a moral justification for their actions.”

  “If I don’t do this, Colonel, Armand Fisker is going to kill both my boys. How’s that for moral justification?”

  Paz was still turned toward Father Boylston, but Cort Wesley watched him smile slightly in the reflection off the window glass. “How do you feel about the outlaw’s words, Padre? Can you bless his intentions, or do you agree with Gandhi that ‘An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind’?”

  The priest swiped some stray oatmeal from his lips with his tongue, his mouth working to swallow the tiny portion.

  Paz left the spoon in the soupy remains of the bowl this time and selected the YES and NO cards in either hand. “Are you still hungry, Padre? Do you want some more of your breakfast? Look toward the NO or the YES to give me your answer.”

  The priest just lay there, shoulders supported by the bed’s upright position, his mouth making a smacking sound.

  “YES or NO?”

  The level of compassion Paz was showing the man didn’t change the fact that his tone suggested more of a secret police interrogation, his words somehow sounding like they carried the threat of torture behind them to Cort Wesley.

  “Come on, you can do this, Padre, I know you can.”

  The priest’s eyes flitted, seeming to regard the remains of his oatmeal for the first time. Then he appeared to regard Paz with the slightest bit of recognition, paying no heed to the YES and NO cards, before the brief flicker of life flashed from his eyes again.

  Paz laid the cards down atop the bedcovers. “I’m not giving up,” he told his priest, his tone grim and solemn at the same time. “I just want you to know that, Padre. I’ll be here tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. I wish you didn’t need me now, as much as I’ve needed you all these years. I hate not having your wisdom to guide me about what I’ve done and what I’m planning, like today when my outlaw friend here wants to know if it’s okay for us to remove a man from this world who’s tried to kill both his boys. We came here for your blessing.”

  The bedcovers rustled and shifted, as Cort Wesley looked on.

  “Come on, you can do this,” Paz implored.

  One of the signal cards had slipped to the floor and Cort Wesley plucked it from the cold tile.

  “Come on, Padre, you can do this. I know you can.”

  “Colonel,” Cort Wesley said softly, when Father Boylston remained unresponsive, “I think we’ve got his answer.”

  Paz turned to see Cort Wesley holding the card he’d scooped up off the floor:

  YES

  85

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  As soon as she was back in her car, Caitlin felt sick to her stomach. An unpleasant odor Frank Doyle had dragged into the interrogation room with him seemed to ride her. A smell like milk that had spoiled filled her SUV to the point where she thought a rodent might have found its way in and died beneath one of the seats.

  She opened all the windows, but a wave of nausea still overcame her and she opened her door to vomit. Nothing but a few dry heaves and some bile emerged, and Caitlin pulled herself all the way back into the driver’s seat. She popped a breath mint shaped like a tire she’d gotten at the car wash into her mouth.

  She angled the rearview mirror to get a look at her face and used it make sure she wiped her lips clean. Then she tussled her hair and tried to massage the color back into her cheeks before switching on the radio to get some music on.

  Only a few chords had played before her Bluetooth rang with a call from D. W. Tepper.

  “Hey, Captain,” she managed, pushing the words through her mouth that had gone dry and pasty.

  “I don’t even want to know where you are,” Tepper told her. “I don’t need to know, since I’m sure somebody’s gonna be calling me before you know it complaining about something you did.”

  “I found the man who assaulted me, D.W. Frank Doyle’s been acting as a pimp for a rapist who’s likely left a trail of assaulted women across the entire state.”

  “So you’re in Austin.”

  “Just about to head back.”

  “Don’t. There’s a man in the area expecting you who can clear up some things on another front, an old Ranger named Big Bill Kennedy.”

  Caitlin instantly recalled the story Jones had told her the prev
ious night about her grandfather’s pursuit of the escaped Nazi prisoner Gunther Haut.

  “Jones told me you might be interested in his whereabouts.”

  “Sure, Captain, so I can leave flowers on his grave. The man must be near a hundred.”

  “Pushing ninety-five as we speak, but still making the rounds to elementary schools to spread the Ranger word. Matter of fact, he’s visiting one not far from where you’re at right now. I already called ahead to tell him you were coming.”

  86

  WACO, TEXAS

  David Skoll knew he had a problem, yet another one. Frank Doyle refused to see the lawyer he’d hired for him, a man with a reputation for running circles around law enforcement. Somebody at Austin police headquarters told the lawyer that Doyle had made other arrangements.

  What did that mean exactly?

  Skoll had no idea, knew only that it couldn’t be good. Only thing the lawyer could tell him was that Doyle had received a visit earlier in the morning from a Texas Ranger. The Austin police, the lawyer explained, had broken protocol by putting Doyle in a room with her.

  Her?

  Meaning Caitlin Strong. Meaning he was fucked, and how long could it be before Armand Fisker got word that his business associate was going to be arrested on rape charges and take whatever measures necessary to sever all trace of the connection between them? How many of his crazy bikers would Fisker send to Redfern Pharmaceuticals to make sure Skoll never got the chance to do to Fisker what Frank Doyle had done to him? And he didn’t expect he’d be able to last very long in jail, not with the Aryan Brotherhood as powerful as ever across the prison system.

  “How’s the work coming?” he asked Dobie, his windowless office smelling of Doritos and the can of Dr Pepper he’d spilled yesterday that had left the floor all sticky.

  Dobie stuck another chip in his mouth. “Almost there. The program’s rudimentary, but it should work.”

  “Rudimentary,” Skoll repeated over the hum of the pharmaceutical plant’s machines doing what they did twenty-four hours a day. “What’s that mean in this case?”

  “Basic. I haven’t got time to write new code, so I had to improvise. Fortunately, I found a back door into the AM-TECH site and raided their proprietary software for the upgrade we needed.”

  “AM-TECH?”

  “Here, take a look,” Dobie said, crunching on his chips as he spun his oversized computer screen around so Skoll could see it.

  “Wow,” Skoll said, reacting to the man-sized robots packing an arsenal of weapons that AM-TECH was building for the military.

  “That was my reaction, too.”

  “And you can turn our robots into that?”

  “Close enough, boss, minus the weapons, of course.”

  Skoll looked back at the screen, passing on Dobie’s offer to take a Dorito from the bag he extended in an orange-tinted hand. “Best news I’ve heard in a while.”

  87

  ROUND ROCK, TEXAS

  “You look just like your granddaddy,” Big Bill Kennedy said, grinning at Caitlin mischievously.

  “I’m going to take that as a compliment, sir.”

  “Sir? I ain’t no sir any more than Earl Strong was. I’m a Texas Ranger.” He took off his Stetson and scratched at his scalp through the sparse pockets of hair. “Man oh man, in our day if you’d ever said a lady would be ranging, I don’t even wanna repeat the language I would’ve come at you with.”

  “Then I appreciate you taking the time to see me even more.”

  The old Ranger glanced about the playground from the picnic table they occupied, as a big rubber ball bounced past them. “Well, it is recess.”

  In Caitlin’s mind, Big Bill Kennedy didn’t look a day over seventy, drawing stares in the playground of Blackland Prairie Elementary School, north of Austin in Round Rock. She had to love any school that featured a Coding Club for fifth graders among its offerings, but still sought to bring living pieces of history into the classroom to remind students of the kind of heroes it took to bring the country that far.

  Caitlin had entered a classroom that looked designed and furnished by NASA through a door in the rear of the room and had watched the tail end of Big Bill’s presentation from there without attracting any attention. There were a lot of questions about the guns and artifacts he’d brought in for a kind of show-and-tell, the class especially fascinated by the particular histories of the Samuel Walker Colt Peacemaker and the Model 1911 .45 caliber pistols. Her grandfather’s Colt had been the first gun Caitlin ever shot, not particularly well, given she was only seven years old at the time.

  Big Bill had told Tepper he had a break around eleven, at which point she could ask him her own questions pertaining to history. In particular about what had happened after Earl Strong and Captain Henry Druce of the British SAS, with J. Edgar Hoover in tow, had trailed murderous Nazis from Abilene to Fort Worth.

  Caitlin took a sip of chocolate milk from the eight-ounce, squat, boxlike design she hadn’t seen since attending a school like this herself, when they’d only served regular milk. “Did Captain Tepper tell you what I came to talk to you about?”

  “He didn’t have to. And what you’re inquiring about, little lady, is something your granddad and I were both sworn to secrecy concerning.”

  “Like state secrets, national security, that sort of thing?”

  Big Bill shrugged his still-formidable-looking but now bony shoulders. “They didn’t use those terms exactly back in 1944, but close enough, yeah. Your granddaddy had been put through the wringer when it came to Gunther Haut, from the time he set foot in that Hearne prisoner-of-war camp. But he didn’t learn the truth why until that night I met him for the first time and, like me, I don’t think he ever shared it with a single soul afterward.”

  “I appreciate you doing so on my account, Big Bill.”

  “Well, little lady, I’m ninety-five years old, and no matter how good I feel and how often I get to dress up like a Ranger again to visit elementary schools, being ninety-five is like holding an express ticket to the O.K. Corral in the sky.” His eyes looked a bit faded in color from what must’ve once been a deep, majestic blue, but they still sparkled with life as they regarded Caitlin. “I can’t let this story make that trip with me, and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather turn it over to than you.”

  Caitlin finished her milk. “I appreciate that more than I can say, sir.”

  “What did I say about calling me sir, little lady?” Big Bill scolded. “And you better reserve judgment on that assessment until after you hear how the story ended.”

  88

  ABILENE, TEXAS; 1944

  “My men can handle things from here, Ranger,” J. Edgar Hoover said to Earl Strong.

  “You mean the ones who didn’t get blown up by land mines in their rush to storm a house with nothing but dead people inside?” Earl told him, the night’s darkness hiding the grin he couldn’t wipe from his face over seeing the head of the FBI damn near piss himself. “My truck’s over here.”

  “You check the IDs on the bodies?”

  “Didn’t have to know they was dead, back-shot by the real bad boys here. This whole thing’s been ugly from the time it started, but it would’ve been less ugly if you’d told what we were up against from the start in Hearne.”

  “There is no ‘we,’ Ranger.”

  Earl flashed Captain Henry Druce a wink. “There is now, Mr. Hoover.”

  * * *

  Earl got as much as his Chevy truck would give him on the forty-five-minute drive to downtown Abilene and the train station where the Texas and Pacific Railroad’s line connected the city with Fort Worth. The company had conceived the line way back in the 1870s as part of an ambitious plan to build a southern spur of the transcontinental railroad that would run all the way to California.

  “Do we have any chance of catching that train, Ranger?” Hoover asked him, squeezed into the center of the cab with Druce pressed against the door.

  “Only if it’s late,
Director, which does tend to happen from time to time,” Earl told him, holding the Chevy at its top speed. “And it’s gotta be late by at least an hour for us to have any chance at all. Regardless, whether we even get there or not is up to you, Mr. Hoover.”

  “How’s that?”

  Earl braked hard and swung the truck off the road, slinging it down a slight embankment. “See, sir, we’re gonna have a little talk, the three of us. Since I’m the one literally in the driver’s seat, you boys are gonna tell me what brought you both to these parts here and now, or this taxi ride is over.” He looked toward J. Edgar Hoover, hand instinctively straddling the .45 holstered on his belt. “You, Mr. Director, are the reason why Gunther Haut escaped when he did with the help of the camp commander. You’re the reason Haut’s three bunkmates had to die, so they wouldn’t be any the wiser. It all happened because word got to the people behind all this that you were on your way to take Haut into FBI custody for reasons you elected to keep from me.” Earl stopped there and moved his gaze across Hoover to Druce. “And you, Captain, must think I’m a fool to believe the British government and the Special Air Service sent you all the way to Texas on some made-up fox hunt, when you knew the fox you were after all along. So unless you boys want Gunther Haut to be in the wind for good, which I’m surmising you don’t, you best come clean on what all this is really about and who this murdering son of a bitch really is.”

  Druce and Hoover stiffened, their breathing starting to fog up the truck’s windows, moving Earl to roll down his all the way. There was something uniformly strange about the bent of their gazes, Earl certain it wasn’t doubt he was seeing in them, so much as fear.

  “Let me tell you boys another thing from my perspective,” he told them. “It irks me every day of my life that I never got my chance to fight the Nazis over in Europe. My own grandfather was a Civil War hero fighting for Texas, but my father William Ray missed out on the First World War, just like I missed out in the second. So you might say I’m doing this for both of us. If I can’t fight the Nazis in Europe, I can damn well fight them in Texas.”