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

by Land, Jon

  This unit was being devoted to Arthur Schopenhauer, whose writings had grabbed Paz’s attention as of late. This was his first night visiting the class, and he resolved to cling to the rear, fit in as best he could by being silent, and hopefully find the solace that had been missing lately in his regular visits to church confessionals.

  Those visits had begun years before in his home country of Venezuela, to which Paz could never return, begun when his own conscience got the better of him over the increasingly murderous deeds he’d been entrusted to perform. His estrangement from the Chavez regime was followed almost immediately by a job in Texas that brought him face-to-face with the Texas Ranger who’d both changed his life and sent him searching for the purpose behind it. Paz considered himself, that very life, a work in progress. And now that priests seemed no longer able to help guide him through that evolution, he had turned to San Antonio College on San Pedro Avenue because of the school’s generous collection of night classes. Guillermo Paz, former colonel in Venezuela’s infamous secret police, figured nights were best for all concerned.

  “Schopenhauer,” the professor, whose name Paz had already forgotten, was saying, “claimed that the world is fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will. His analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fully satisfied. The corollary of this is an ultimately painful human condition. Consequently, he considered that a lifestyle of negating desires was the only way to attain liberation.”

  Paz shook his head, unable to keep himself quiet. He raised his hand. The professor tried his best to ignore him until Paz waved his hand in the air, feeling the tiny desk he was squeezed into creak from the strain.

  “Yes?” the man said finally, still reluctant to look in Paz’s direction very long.

  “I was wondering if you’d like to rethink your last statement, Professor.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This shit about controlling desires being the only way to find freedom,” Paz said. “That’s not really what Schopenhauer had in mind, is it?”

  Now everyone in the classroom was looking at him, or at least trying to. Even the professor, previously reluctant to even acknowledge Paz’s presence, took a tentative step toward him, as if to defend his territory.

  “I don’t recall seeing you in this class before,” he said.

  “I’m just visiting, getting a feel for things, trying to figure out if it’s worth my time.”

  “Would you like directions to the registrar’s office? I’d recommend coming back tomorrow during business hours.”

  “I’m open twenty-four hours a day and you won’t see me here again.” He ran his eyes around the students whose eyes were uniformly riveted upon him. “In fact, you’re lucky if you ever see any of them here again. Let me enlighten you, Profesor. For Schopenhauer life was all about will, the ability to exert yours over someone else’s. Yes, he believed the primary motivation of human beings lies in their most basic desires, but he was only saying this in reference to how little we’d evolved from the animal kingdom. He said what he said just to make that point, but it doesn’t really cover his core philosophy. You should know that, shouldn’t you?”

  “What’s your name, sir?” the professor asked instead of responding.

  “Oh, I’m not enrolled in this class. I’m kind of just auditing, looking for someone who can shine a light on something I haven’t seen before.”

  “I think you should leave.”

  Paz rose, his classroom desk shifting from the strain and nearly toppling when he stepped away from it to reveal his true size. “I figure I better enlighten your students first, Profesor.” Addressing them now, seeking out eyes reluctant to meet his or looking the other way entirely. “The word on Schopenhauer was that he was a defeatist, a believer in the fact that human desire itself was futile and, by extension, life was pointless since desire was everything. He might have said both those things at some point, but there was never a connection between them.”

  “I’m going to call security,” the teacher said.

  “The thing I take from Schopenhauer,” Paz continued, ignoring him, “is that man’s will at its basest level poses a challenge that is in our capacity to overcome, to become the master of. He believed life was about cause and effect, becoming the champion of cause in order to control effect.”

  “Security’s on their way,” said the professor, holding his cell phone for Paz to see.

  But Paz continued to ignore him, aware that more eyes were regarding him now, the reluctance dissipating as the younger students began to see in him some form of rebellious kindred spirit. “I’ve been reading Schopenhauer a lot lately because his philosophy kind of follows my own life path. Five years ago I killed because I was told to, obeyed my orders and felt nothing over the pain they left behind. I wasn’t doing it for me, so taking all those lives left me feeling empty inside. Then I met my Texas Ranger and she showed me how the missing ingredient was belief. I realized, and all of you should too, that Schopenhauer was really saying that pain exists in the absence of passion. When you believe in something, your desires will reflect that which defines your morality. It’s the distinction between purpose and action, or action undertaken as a result of moral purpose, being what makes us human and gives us hope.”

  He stopped, realizing all eyes in the room were rooted on him now.

  “Isn’t that right, Profesor?” he asked the man still holding his cell phone as if he’d forgotten it was there.

  The professor could only swallow, consumed by the shadow Paz cast over him.

  “Your teacher isn’t graced with the grandest of thinking,” Paz told the class. “Maybe that explains why his quote about Schopenhauer’s view of the world came straight out of Wikipedia. Isn’t that right, Profesor?”

  This time the professor didn’t even swallow.

  “Ever since I met my Texas Ranger, I realized that man is the master of his own will, that he can make himself into whatever he wants. Too many think Schopenhauer was saying man is a prisoner of his will when the point he was really making concerned the rewards of overcoming it. But you won’t find that in Wikipedia.”

  A few of the students actually smiled smugly, their body language taking them closer to Paz’s viewpoint, if not Paz himself.

  “Any questions?” he asked, when he heard his phone buzz with an incoming text message.

  He eased the phone from his pocket and checked it fast, stiffening and seeming to grow taller and broader right before the students, who recoiled inwardly again.

  “Sorry, gotta go,” he said, turning for the door.

  Paz was halfway out it before anyone had even noticed he’d moved, the class more startled than scared.

  “Looks like my Texas Ranger needs me again,” he added, poking his head back inside the classroom, continuing with his gaze fastened on the professor. “And all of you need another teacher.”

  7

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  Caitlin laid her cell phone down on the counter, willing it to ring with Guillermo Paz’s voice on the other end. After Cort Wesley’s phone went straight to voice mail, she’d considered calling D. W. Tepper, but he lived ninety miles from San Antonio. Company F headquarters wouldn’t have another Ranger readily available and, since she’d come to figure that the San Antonio police had permanently blocked her number from their phone lines, there was no sense calling them either.

  “You want to tell me what that was all about?” Finneran said, having hovered over her while she sent Paz a text message that read simply CALL ME.

  Caitlin noted for the first time that the detective’s hair was a strawberry blond color tinged with gray at the temples. The room’s harsh fluorescent lighting exaggerated the strawberry tones, making it look painted on, more the work of an artist than a barber.

  “You saw everything you needed to.”

  “Not if it’s connected to the shooting up here tonight, I haven’t.”
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br />   “Those gunmen aren’t exactly in a position to get anywhere fast, Detective. Four of them, most ever killed in a gunfight up in these parts, remember?”

  Finneran’s gaze tilted toward the picture sealed in an evidence pouch. “That picture is evidence. It still belongs to us.”

  Caitlin slid the picture back toward him, a picture not of her.

  But of Dylan.

  One of the killers carrying it to make sure their target was properly identified. Caitlin could visualize them checking the picture back outside Brown University’s athletic complex, making sure they had the right kid. Because Dylan must’ve been who they’d been gunning for at WaterFire tonight, not her.

  An eighteen-year-old kid who happened to be the son of a man who had as many enemies as she did.

  And if Dylan was a target, it stood to reason that Luke might be too. But neither he nor Cort Wesley were answering her calls or texts, meaning they must be somewhere with them turned off, leaving her to place all her hope in her enigmatic protector, Colonel Guillermo Paz.

  “I’m talking to you here,” Finneran was saying, when Caitlin’s phone rang at last, UNKNOWN lit up in the Caller ID.

  “Hello, Ranger,” said Guillermo Paz.

  * * *

  Caitlin pictured Paz’s huge shape on the other end of the line as she laid everything out for him.

  “I don’t know where Cort Wesley is, Colonel,” she finished. “I think his cell phone’s turned off.”

  “I can still trace its location, Ranger,” Paz said, leaving it there.

  Caitlin pretty much figured he was still in the nebulous employ of a mutual acquaintance of theirs in Washington, accounting for his newfound skills.

  “Make it fast, please,” she told him, ending the call and turning back to Finneran. “You need to take me to Dylan, Detective. You need to do that now, because he’s still in danger.”

  “This is a police station, Ranger. I think we’re capable of keeping him safe.”

  Caitlin moved right up into his space, tilting her head back just enough to look him in the eye. “You have any idea what we’re dealing with here?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, neither do I, and until I do that boy isn’t safe anywhere.”

  “Anything else?” Finneran asked her.

  “Yes, sir. I need my gun back.”

  8

  SAN ANTONIO

  Luke was eating a funnel cake slathered in whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate, Cort Wesley’s stomach still too queasy to even think about food.

  “You feel any better, Dad?” the boy asked, biting off another wedge that left swipes of chocolate where his mustache had just begun to sprout.

  Cort Wesley shifted on the picnic bench in an area of tables set on a blacktop promenade between food stands wedged in amid the rides and attractions. He positioned himself to avoid eyeing people munching on anything, a sight that for the time being continued to make his own stomach flutter.

  “Sure,” he told his son anyway. “Plenty.”

  “How about we try the Rattler roller coaster?” Luke suggested. “It only goes sixty-five miles per hour.”

  Cort Wesley caught the amused glint in the boy’s eyes and just nodded. The SkyScreamer had spun him around in a hundred-foot arc at only forty miles per hour, the San Antonio skyline passing by faster and faster until it became a blur at the same time his stomach began to rumble in protest. It hadn’t settled down yet, but Cort Wesley refused to let himself spill up the contents that had turned bitter and were now bile-laced. If he disappeared into the men’s room, he wouldn’t be able to face his younger son for a week.

  “Why don’t we try the shooting gallery over there?” Cort Wesley suggested instead.

  “’Cause I suck at shooting and you know it.”

  “Caitlin’s lessons haven’t helped?”

  “Not much. Pistol keeps jerking in my hand and my thumb keeps getting torn to shreds.”

  “That’ll pass.”

  Luke blew the hair out of his face with his breath, just like Dylan. “Who taught you how to shoot, your dad?”

  “Well, he gave me a gun and told me to go learn for myself, if you call that teaching.”

  “Would I have liked him?”

  “My dad? When he was sober, yeah. He was a good enough man without any drink in him. But he had a peculiar idea of parenting.”

  “Like what?”

  Cort Wesley took a moment to reflect on the fact that he’d seldom spoken to Luke, or Dylan for that matter, about their infamous, and in some circles notorious, grandfather Boone Masters. “Like the fact,” he answered finally, “that for my dad being a role model meant having me help him lift stolen goods into the back of his truck and then riding atop it to hold everything steady. You know what he gave me for Christmas one year?”

  “No.”

  “A television I’d dropped at the place where he stored all the stuff. He told me breaking it cost him the money he was going to use on my gift, so I got the busted TV instead.”

  “That’s not nice,” Luke said.

  “Line at the shooting gallery’s next to nothing.”

  Luke frowned, his lips puckering. He wedged the last of the funnel cake into his mouth and rose from the bench. “I don’t want you telling me all the stuff I’m doing wrong. Just let me mess up on my own.”

  “Son, this is the night you win yourself a Kewpie doll.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind,” Cort Wesley said, as fireworks erupted in the sky over another section of the park.

  He felt his stomach muscles seize up, flashback memories of his time in the Gulf War hitting him hard and fast. Just like they always did when something bad was about to happen.

  But not tonight. No odd feeling or misplaced memory was going to spoil tonight.

  “Something wrong, Dad?” Luke asked, sensing him stiffen.

  “No, son,” Cort Wesley said, believing it even less, “not at all.”

  9

  SAN ANTONIO

  Cort Wesley liked mowing down the figures moving and rotating against the shooting gallery’s rear wall, each recorded hit drawing a ping and a boost to his LED score readout on the overhead board. These carny-like attractions didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the park, the space they’d been squeezed into looking carved out of the grounds only on a temporary, maybe trial, basis. For tonight, though, the feel of pulling the trigger followed by the satisfying sound as another moving target bit the dust refreshed him to the point of even settling his stomach.

  “Sir,” a voice said from somewhere behind him, as Cort Wesley watched Luke step up to take his turn, “you can’t be wearing that in here.”

  “You’re holding it wrong, son.”

  “That’s what Caitlin always says.”

  “Well, maybe you should start listening.”

  “Dad,” Luke spat at him, elongating the word and shooting him a glare that brought the rumbling back to Cort Wesley’s stomach.

  “Sorry.”

  “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to stop.”

  Cort Wesley heard the man’s voice again in the back of his mind, the front devoted to watching his son begin pecking away at the bad guys, the gallery rifle clacking off pellets a bit bigger than what he remembered as a boy. Missing more than he hit, the soft click of a shot followed every second or third time by the clang of a strike. Luke’s concentration was intense, so much so that he looked like he was trying to squeeze the paint off the rifle and Cort Wesley had to gnash his teeth to avoid telling him to ease up on his grip. Luke’s current score was a fraction of what he’d managed, making him think he should have missed more on purpose.

  “Sir, the park has a strict no guns policy!”

  For Cort Wesley, the night changed then and there. The cool, comfortable breeze turned hot against his skin, and suddenly the smooth darkness became nothing more than a ribbon of black set against the bright lights piercing it. The scents of popcorn, co
tton candy, barbecue, and grilling food all got sucked into the vacuum of Cort Wesley’s defenses snapping on. He spun just as a lanky Latino shoved an unarmed security guard aside and drew his pistol in the same motion.

  Cort Wesley yanked the gallery rifle from Luke’s grasp and steadied it on the gunman, opening up with full awareness of the load’s minimal capabilities. Because he targeted the man’s sunglasses, all wrong to be wearing at night, which made Cort Wesley remember the same man standing across from him at the SkyScreamer talking on his cell phone.

  The pellets cracked the glass of both lenses and sent flecks flying toward his eyes. The man used his free hand to tear the glasses off and swipe at his now red and watery eyes, even as he opened up wildly with his nine-millimeter pistol.

  Cort Wesley shoved Luke up and over the game’s heavy wood, waist-high front wall and then pulled himself over with his legs swept to the sides. The gunman’s initial shots found nothing as a result, his next bullets flying even more askew with his aim further upset by the unexpected turn of events.

  “Dad…”

  “Stay down!”

  “Dad!”

  “Down!” Cort Wesley ordered again, yanking a pair of freshly loaded gallery rifles down from the counter.

  Ridiculous to think their rounds could accomplish much at all, but Cort Wesley figured this was the best time to try, with the gunman’s original intentions thrown all out of whack. He timed his lurch upward to coincide with a time lag he took to mean the gunman was jacking a fresh magazine home, and found the man in his sights just as he was bringing his pistol back up from fifty feet away.