by Jon Land
Pepper’s expression came up just short of a smirk. “You gonna draw on me, Ranger, get into your comfort zone?”
“You’re not worth the price of the bullet, Detective, and I believe you have another nickname, don’t you? Mr. Peepers, on account of your proclivity to make female suspects strip naked to make sure they’re not hiding a weapon somewhere in their privates. Now that I think of it, I saw the complaint one filed when you made her do that after arresting her on a traffic warrant. She came to the Rangers when nobody at Houston PD would give her the time of day.”
Before Pepper could respond, a commotion erupted out beyond the room. Caitlin noted the rapid shifting of bodies through the window as something like a dark streak of energy cut straight through them. An instant later the door to the office burst open, and Cort Wesley Masters surged inside.
17
ARMAND BAYOU, TEXAS
“Get over here, son,” Cort Wesley said to Luke.
Captain Tepper followed in his wake, must’ve been running interference when Cort Wesley made his presence known at the visitors’ center entrance without a badge or any law enforcement ID. Luke bounded up off the couch and practically leaped into Cort Wesley’s arms.
“We’re gonna sort this out. We’re gonna make some people pay for whatever they did here,” Cort Wesley said, hugging him.
“What did he just say?” Pepper snapped, his face an even deeper red.
“Rangers are running lead on this now, Detective, until the FBI sets up shop,” Tepper informed him, sizing up the situation. “You got a problem with that, take it up with the Department of Public Safety. But this is Ranger business, so thank you for your service and please stand aside.”
Pepper’s eyes fell on Cort Wesley, who was holding Luke against him with a single arm now, the other one held low by his hip with fingers bent, clawlike, halfway to a fist. Then he turned to D. W. Tepper, who’d just recovered his breath.
“Nice zoo you’re running, Captain. How’s teaching the animals the limits of their cages going?”
“Why don’t you step inside mine and find out?” Caitlin asked him.
* * *
“Well,” Tepper said, planting his hands on his hips when Pepper closed the door behind him, “some things don’t change. Hurricane Caitlin blows again.”
“That man’s lucky he’s not swallowing his teeth.”
“Maybe so. He’s an asshole, for sure, but you’re not the conscience of Texas, Hurricane, and it’s not your place to dispense judgment, even on a depraved asshole like Pepper. That’s my job,” he added as an afterthought, stealing a glance first at Luke and then at Zach, who’d remained in the same position on the couch, looking forlorn and lonely there by himself. “Your parents coming, son?”
“They’re divorced.”
“Has either of them been called?”
“Nobody asked me for their number, and that detective took my phone.”
“Well, I’m asking now, and I’ll get your phone back straightaway.” He widened his gaze to include both Caitlin and Cort Wesley. “We’re gonna need to bag the clothes both boys are wearing, so forensics can give them the once-over. There’s a bathroom where they can change.”
Tepper opened the door and summoned a pair of Houston patrolmen standing just outside it to escort the boys. Caitlin watched Zach finally relinquish his claim on the couch, his shoulders staying slumped as he followed Luke out the door.
“And Detective Peepers is not to come anywhere near them,” Tepper instructed the uniforms. “Is that clear?”
“Who, sir?”
“Sorry, I meant Detective Pepper.” He turned back around, shaking his head as his gaze locked on Caitlin again. “Either of the boys say anything could prove helpful?”
“Something about penlights in the woods,” she told him. “I’m still putting it all together.”
Tepper stuck one of the unfiltered cigarettes he’d bummed outside in his mouth, only to realize he’d left his lighter back in his truck at the Department of Public Safety’s San Antonio heliport.
“Somebody made off with those kids, Captain,” Cort Wesley said, his breath trailing the words like a growl. “My son got lucky, unlike his friends. That means I won’t rest until they’re found.”
Tepper fished a pack of matches from a desk drawer in the office and lit his cigarette. “You and Hurricane teaming up to hunt down bad guys?” He shook his head. “Well, wouldn’t be the first time for a Masters and a Strong.…”
Caitlin took a single step forward. “Come again, Captain?”
“I never did tell you how Boone Masters and Jim Strong joined forces once, did I? Well, I suppose this is as good a time as any.…”
18
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS; 1983
“Looks like we take ours the same way,” Jim Strong said, as Boone Masters twirled a spoon through his mug. “Except I prefer a bit more coffee with my sugar.”
Boone dumped one more spoonful, his fifth, in. “What is it they say, ‘I ain’t happy until the spoon stands straight up’? Least of all the things that makes us different, I suppose, considering we stand on opposite sides of the law.”
“Not this time, Boone. Not this time.”
They’d been stitched up, bandaged, and released from Southwest General within minutes of each other. Jim Strong was waiting outside when Boone Masters emerged.
“You want to get a coffee, Boone?”
“I’d prefer a beer, Ranger, something to chase down those painkillers they gave me.”
“I never take them.”
“Never?”
Jim shook his head. “Nope. I go by one simple rule: if it affects the way I shoot, I don’t do it.”
“How about sleep? You do that?”
“Never had to shoot anybody in my sleep.”
Boone winked at him. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
A San Antonio police cruiser was parked across the street and Jim asked the rookie patrolman inside to give them a ride back to their trucks. The kid gushed the whole time about how thrilled he was to meet his first Texas Ranger, spouting off legend after legend that taught even Jim Strong a thing or two. Finally, regarding Boone almost as an afterthought, he asked, “You a Ranger, too?”
“I’m undercover,” Boone said softly. “Keep it under your hat.”
There was an all-night diner not far from where their trucks were parked, and Boone relented, deciding to join Jim for that coffee, only after checking the time.
“Didn’t realize it was this late,” Boone said, finally setting his spoon down on the saucer. “Shit, I missed last call and all to come afterwards, thanks to you.”
The diner was housed in a stripped-down, hollowed-out old train car that had served as a parlor car on the famed Sunset Limited, which had once made its leisurely way west, straight through these parts. The counter was formed by the ledge that ran the car’s length, padded polished wood with the authentic brass fittings still in place. The windows, too, were authentic, and it wasn’t hard, in quieter times, for Jim Strong to sit by one and imagine the world passing by before him as it had for the passengers aboard the Sunset Limited.
“Remember what I said in the back of the ambulance?” he said to Boone Masters, who sat across from him before one of those very windows. The night beyond was just empty and dark, the world not moving at all.
“Something about Russian gangsters.”
“The ones you been fencing your merchandise through; same ones who you’re still gunning for after they ripped off one of your warehouses.”
“Hold on there, Ranger. That would make me a criminal, when, last time I checked, I was a free man with no charges pending.”
Jim Strong sipped his coffee, considered ordering something to eat to go with it, except his mouth felt too sore to chew. “Let me put it this way, just between the two of us, a couple Texas boys born and bred shooting the shit. And there was a time when Rangers were more like you than me. Those Russians did you wrong, and Boone Master
s is hardly the kind of man to just let that go.”
“Well, Boone Masters also ain’t the kind of man who joins up with the law.”
“Might want to give that notion some more thought, on account of you having the bad sense to involve your son in your dealings. Something I didn’t tell you before, Mr. Masters, but San Antonio PD’s got a witness ready to testify they saw your boy playing lookout when you boosted that storage depot in Lubbock.”
Masters tried not to appear rattled. “Do they now?”
“Rent-a-cop was watching the whole thing, too scared to move an inch. That’s in addition to the security tape that pictures Cort Wesley clear as a bell. Makes him an accessory to grand larceny.” Jim raised the coffee cup to his lips and continued speaking through the steam rising from it. “That’s serious time if they try him as an adult.”
“You’re a piece of shit, Ranger.”
“Only doing my job, Masters, just like you.”
“So what’s the deal?”
“Like I said, SAPD’s got the case now, in tandem with the highway patrol. That can change with one phone call when I inform the parties that be that the Masterses, both father and son, are working with the Rangers in exchange for making that investigation go away.”
Boone gave up trying to look nonchalant about the whole thing. “You can do that?”
“I’m a Texas Ranger. I can do anything I want.” Then, after a pause, “So long as you do something for me.”
“This Russian thing.”
“Yup.”
“Bastards ripped me off.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not the only one, neither.”
“I know that, too.”
Boone leaned forward, his big chest canted over the table. “They think they can ride into Texas and pull the same shit they been pulling in New York. Don’t give a shit about anybody but themselves.”
“New York’s where they got their American business started. Heard about this Potato Bag Gang, where a bunch of them disguised themselves as merchants selling antique gold rubles on the cheap that ended up being bags of potatoes. Made themselves a fortune. That was the midseventies. And it only got worse from there, when the Soviet government freed a whole bunch of dead-enders from their prisons who found their way to the West.”
“You ask me, Ranger, the Statue of Liberty ought to read, ‘Give me your assholes, your shitheads, and your huddled misfits.’”
“The bottom line, Mr. Masters, is that it should be an easy choice between your boy going to prison and you helping me to put those very same assholes, shitheads, and misfits there instead.”
Masters leaned all the way back, resting his coffee cup against his chest. “And what’s the real reason?”
“Real reason for what?”
“The Rangers’ interest in these mobbed-up Russians. What you’re saying doesn’t square with a man of your history. How am I supposed to take you at your word when you’re not telling me everything I need to know?”
“I am,” Jim Strong told him. “For now.”
Before Masters could respond, something out the window claimed Jim’s attention: a coyote prancing off with the shredded corpse of a skunk in its mouth. The sight made him think the animal had assured itself a fine meal at the expense of an odor that would stick to it for days. A trade-off. A metaphor for life itself that Jim found to be oddly appropriate. You pay a price for what you want the most, and sometimes you pay an even steeper price to keep it.
“Let me make it simple for you, Ranger,” Boone Masters was saying. “You wanna go up against these Russians, be ready to go to guns. And I mean lots of them.”
Jim Strong peeked out the window again. “In my experience, one’s more than enough to do the trick.” He leaned forward. “Now, how long before you can get this set up?”
“How long before you can tell me what’s really going on here?”
19
ARMAND BAYOU, TEXAS
Tepper stopped when Luke Torres and the kid named Zach reappeared, wearing the change of clothes they’d brought for the morning that had never really come for them, which pretty much looked like what they’d been wearing before.
“So, what was it?” Caitlin asked him.
“What was what?”
“What was Jim Strong really up to with these Russians, what he really needed Boone Masters for?”
“Story for another day, Ranger,” Tepper said evasively, taking a quick look at Cort Wesley, who’d listened to the tale as entranced as Caitlin. Then his eyes darted between the two of them, far away and still there in the same moment. “Can you imagine, your two daddies like that, working together?”
He stopped when Luke moved into his line of vision, the boy stopping between Caitlin and Cort Wesley. “I wanna go home now,” the boy said, holding both of them in his stare. “Can we go home?”
Cort Wesley didn’t look for some signal from anyone in purported authority, just nodded. “You bet. Anything they want from you, they can get later.”
“And we need to take Zach with us. There’s nobody at his house.”
“Where your parents at, son?” Cort Wesley asked him.
“My mom and stepdad are traveling,” was all the boy said, leaving it there. “I don’t talk to my real dad.”
“Then grab your stuff,” Cort Wesley said. “You’re coming home with us.”
Caitlin looked toward Captain Tepper. “I’ll expect you to finish that story another time. I’m gonna walk Cort Wesley out, in case some fool like Detective Pepper gets in his way. Then we can take another look at the grounds, see whatever it was we missed.”
“How you know we missed something, Hurricane?”
“Because I just thought of something. About those lights Luke thought he saw.”
* * *
Caitlin trailed Cort Wesley and the boys from the visitors’ center, immediately noticing Guillermo Paz leaning casually against his massive, extended cab pickup truck, impervious to the stares being cast his way by everyone who passed. Paz stood silent and still as a pillar, not even moving his eyes or seeming to breathe.
“What’s he doing here?” Cort Wesley said, unsure of how to react to Paz’s presence.
“You get these kids home, Cort Wesley, and let me find out. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Whatever you say.” He followed, hardly enamored by the prospects, and then slid stiffly away.
Luke trailed after him, then stopped and turned back toward Caitlin, suspended in that moment between her and his father. His eyes looked tentative and longing at the same time, filled with uncertainty, words forming in his head that never quite reached his mouth.
“We’ll talk when I get back,” Caitlin said simply.
The boy blew the hair from his face out of the side of his mouth, just like his older brother, and nodded. Then he jogged off to catch up with Zach, the two of them following Cort Wesley to wherever he’d parked, leaving Caitlin to steer toward Guillermo Paz.
20
ARMAND BAYOU, TEXAS
“How’d you know, Colonel?”
Paz pulled a business card from the lapel pocket of his olive-shaded shirt and handed it to Caitlin.
“What’s this?”
“Psychic I saw earlier today. I told her I’d give you her card. She said there’s a long line of people on the other side waiting to talk to you.”
“Most of whom I probably put there ahead of their time.”
“According to Madam Caterina, the line stretches too far into the past for her to know for sure.”
“Madam Caterina?”
“The psychic’s name. It’s on the card, Ranger.”
Caitlin pocketed the card without checking. “You’re visiting psychics now?”
“When you’re lost on the road, you stop in as many places as it takes to find your way.”
She let Paz see her gaze past him into the truck; its tires were so high she really couldn’t see anything. “Even though you’ve got navig
ation installed on your dashboard, Colonel? Means you don’t have to stop and ask anyone for directions. You can get where you’re going all on your own.”
“Too bad we don’t have something like that wired into our brains.”
“We do,” Caitlin told him. “It’s called instinct, and you should know that better than anyone.”
Paz ran his eyes around him, seeming to take in a scene hidden by the trees, far out of range of the human gaze. “Madam Caterina told me one of the Torres boys was in trouble. She asked if they were your sons.”
“Close enough, I suppose. Don’t tell me she told you exactly where to come.”
Paz stepped away from the truck, turning so the host of police and media types starting to grasp his presence could only view him from behind. From this angle, the width of his shoulders seemed to match that of the driver’s side door, and the truck riding on tires almost as high as Caitlin’s waist seemed normal in size when measured in relation to him.
“No, I was going to make a few calls after I left,” he told her. “When I started the car, the radio came on with a bulletin of those missing kids up here. It was a Spanish station. Details were sketchy but so is everything really. I knew right away that’s what Madam Caterina was talking about.”
“You going back to see her again?”
“Would you like to join me?” Paz took a quick glance behind him at some media types passing by. “That’s how people looked at me back in Venezuela.”
“You’re a lucky man, Colonel. About as lucky as they come. You got a second chance when you came here, and a third one when Homeland Security hired you to lead their personal assassination squad. And now you can stand out here in the open, your whole past wiped off the board. The ultimate mulligan.”
“All because of you, according to Madam Caterina.”
“What else did she have to say on the subject?”
“She told me she saw a strong, blinding light that swallowed the world.”
“Uh-oh.”
“That was my thought too, Ranger.”
