by Land, Jon
“Well,” he said, “that’s not what brought me here tonight.”
“No? What did, then?”
“Wind’s kicking up, fixing to blow in something big.”
“All the things you can see, you gotta tell me something I already know?” Cort Wesley said to him.
“It’s different this time. What’s brewing seems to come from my neck of the woods.”
“The dead?”
“The past, bubba. You gonna be running into plenty from my side of the fence along the way.”
“Nothing new there.”
Epps took his eyes off Cort Wesley and gazed into the night. “Gotta buy a ticket there are so many whose attention you’ve grabbed. Yup, you and the Ranger have done spun the wheel of time backwards, that’s what you’ve done.” Epps looked back at him. “So I figure I better stop by and let you know you’re playing to an audience.”
“You mind asking them what was it Maura Torres did that’s put my boys in danger?”
“They don’t talk much, bubba. Not nearly as social as me and more than a little jealous that I’ve got a foot in both worlds.”
Cort Wesley swallowed hard. “What about Maura?”
“She’s here. Not right now but she checks in from time to time. And she’s much appreciative of the work the Ranger gal’s been doing with her boys.”
“I’m going to Phoenix to speak with Maura’s sister.”
“This the one that hates your guts?”
“The very same.”
“Well, that oughtta go well, bubba.”
“I’m hoping maybe she knows something that can help.”
“The dead sure can be a pain in the ass, can’t they?”
Cort Wesley just looked at him.
“Maura wishes you’d felt for her the way you feel for the Ranger.”
“Different times, champ, and I was an altogether different man.”
“Yup, you done proven the old at-tage wrong, bubba.”
“What’s that?”
“The one saying that people don’t change, not really. Well, whoever wrote that book didn’t know you, that’s for sure. Your life’s got so many different curves, even one of them race car drivers couldn’t follow the course. But this stop’s the one I fancy most.”
“Nervous father without a clue who’s trying to kill his kids?”
“Father who loves his boys more than life itself and will stop at nothing to protect them. You mind if I asks you a question?”
Cort Wesley’s eyes answered for him.
“How come you don’t just ask the Ranger gal for the money you need?”
Cort Wesley considered a range of responses before opting for the truth. “Pride.”
“Stupid.”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I get the point, champ.”
“You mind if I asks you another question?”
“Maybe I should say no this time.”
“If things were switched, wouldn’t you want her to ask you for help?”
“That’s not fair, champ.”
“Oh no?” Leroy Epps paused long enough to nod a few times, his tired eyes looking even more watery in the night. “I ever tell you I broke horses back in the day?”
Cort Wesley held Epps’s milky, bloodshot gaze. “As a matter of fact, no.”
“Was just a boy myself at the time, working on a ranch in Alabama. They always brought me the toughest cases, not just because I was the best at breaking ’em, but also because if a nigger like me got busted up, nobody’d care much.” Epps stopped, looking past Cort Wesley or maybe through him. “Reason I mention that is it’s kinda what the Ranger’s done for you, except the comparison’s off: Ranger didn’t break you, bubba, she fixed you.”
Cort Wesley waited for old Leroy’s stare to meet his again. “You say you can see things.”
“Not everything all at once, bubba. More like the view through a telescope, all narrow and confined. Guess there’s limits, but I really don’t get all the rules ’cept there’s less of them than you think.”
“Reason I raise that is I’ve never asked you before what that view’s showing. But this is different, just like you said, champ.”
Epps nodded, looking sad. “Would if I could, bubba, but there’s too much blur right now.”
“But my boys, just tell me they’re going to be all right.”
Epps shrugged, his bony shoulders poking up through his shirt, the yellow tint to his skin making him look more sickly than dead. “End’s not written quite yet, bubba.”
“Then maybe a pen would do me more good than a gun this time, champ.”
Epps’s expression remained flat, the bug light staining the whites of his eyes yellow. “You’re gonna have to spill blood to win this one, not ink.” Then he looked back into the night again.
“What is it you’re not saying, champ?”
“I’m not saying.”
“Too late for that now.”
Epps continued to stare straight ahead. “I was here last night when you got home with your youngest after that gunfight.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“No, but I believe he did.”
“That can’t be good,” Cort Wesley said, feeling something sink in his stomach.
“No,” Epps agreed, his grim tone lacking its typical reassurance. “It ain’t good at all.”
33
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO
“They normally don’t let visitors in this late.”
“They made an exception in my case,” Ana Callas Guajardo said to the man seated across the table from her.
“It’s also the wrong day.”
“Is it now, Locaro?” She leaned forward, undaunted by the manacles chaining the man’s wrists to the table and legs to the chair. “Maybe I should leave, eh?”
Locaro’s face was a mass of scars and stray patches of beard stubble stuck between ridged layers of tissue that looked like callus. It might have been more dramatic, even fitting, to say these were the product of one battle or another. The truth, though, was that they were a genetic defect, something to do with the skin malfunctioning at the cellular level. Kept reproducing cells and storing them inside the clumps that made his face look like a mogul-laden ski slope. The clumps were like boils, occasionally leaking pus that made people seated or standing near him in public relocate in a hurry. As a teenager, Locaro had once taken a tweezers and nail file to them, succeeding only in making things worse.
The half-light of the small room cast shadows over Locaro’s face that seemed to get trapped between the ridges. After only a few moments in the room with him, Guajardo found herself nearly retching from the stench of his unwashed body and oozing pus, which looked shiny when the meager spill of light found it dotting his face.
“You want me to leave?” she repeated.
“Did I say that?”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“What are you doing here, mi hermanita?”
“I’ve arranged for your release. You’ve been granted a full pardon.”
Locaro showed no reaction or emotion at all. He just sat there, rocking his chair back as far as his manacles would allow. “What do you need me to do?”
“No thank-you, no show of appreciation after three years in solitary confinement?”
“I like being alone.”
“And you haven’t been allowed in the yard, even alone, for nearly a year after killing, what, your fifth prisoner?”
“Sixth. And two guards,” Locaro added, almost proudly.
“I need you to kill two children,” Guajardo told him.
Locaro scratched at the ridges dotting his face, wiping the pus off on his prison-issue trousers. “You spring me from here to take out a couple kids?”
“They’re protected.”
“By who?”
“Texas Ranger and her boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?”
“The Ranger’s a woman.”
; “Caitlin Strong…”
“You know her?”
“I know she’s a woman.”
“Her boyfriend did a stretch in Cereso not too long ago.” Guajardo held Locaro’s gaze to see if a spark of recognition flared, continuing when it didn’t. “Cort Wesley Masters.”
His eyes widened slightly. “He killed almost as many men as me while he was in here. Got away with it clean ’cause it was in those death fights. I offered a guard mucho dinero to let me fight him. Tough hombre.”
“Too tough?”
“Nobody’s too tough.”
“There’s more.”
Locaro leaned forward again. “You got my attention.”
“Colonel Guillermo Paz.”
Locaro’s cheek quivered, like a nervous tic.
“And he’s got backup of his own,” Ana told him.
“Then I’ll need some too.”
“Tell me where to find it.”
“You won’t have to go far.” Locaro looked about dramatically. “Here in Cereso. Men almost as bad as me, just not as pretty,” he said.
Guajardo waited for a smile to accompany the quip, but none came. “How many?”
“A dozen, ten maybe. I’ll give you the names.”
“That’s a lot of pardons to pull off.”
“You want these kids dead, that’s what it’ll take given the opposition, mi hermanita.”
Ana Guajardo stiffened. “I haven’t been your sister for a very long time.”
Locaro smiled, starting to cross his arms until remembering the manacles that creaked under the strain. “Tu eres el motivo de mi existencia,” he told her. Then, adding with a smirk, “You are still the fountain of my being.”
She needed him and he knew it. Guajardo hated needing anyone. But there were limits to everything, even money and power, and it was left to the likes of her brother, Locaro, to deal with those limits.
“After all,” Locaro added, taunting her, “la familia lo es todo.”
“I’ll need the names of the men you want released.”
“Do you have a pen?”
“They wouldn’t let me bring one in here. Said you killed a man with one by stabbing him through the eye.”
“Almost forgot that one, mi hermanita.”
“Prison can make a man soft. So tell me, mi hermano, are you still the man I remember?”
Locaro laid both hands on the table and stretched the chain binding them together. He grinned as he squeezed his fingers into fists, the veins bursting from his wrists and forearms, his hands trembling, as he began to force them further apart. Guajardo thought she heard a grating sound, followed by a crackling before the chain split at a link in the center.
Still grinning, Locaro folded his hands behind his head. She could smell his sweat now, adding further to the stench that rode him like a swarm of insects.
“Any other questions?” he asked his sister.
But her eyes were fixed on the smartphone that had just beeped with an incoming message.
“I have to be going,” Guajardo said, rising after she’d read it.
“Trouble?”
“There is always trouble, mi hermano.”
Locaro grinned. “This is different. I can tell. Ever since we were children, I’ve been able to tell.”
“Tell what?”
“The face you make when someone crosses you. So calm, pleasant. Almost like you’re grateful to have a chance to destroy them.”
But Ana Guajardo’s expression remained flat. “And there are several now I must destroy.”
PART FOUR
Boots above the knee and leather leggings, a belt three inches wide with two rows of brass-bound cartridges, and a slanting sombrero make a man appear larger than he really is, but the Rangers were the largest men I saw in Texas, the State of big men. And some of them were remarkably handsome in a sunburned, broad-shouldered, easy, manly way. They were also somewhat shy with strangers, listening very intently, but speaking little, and then in a slow, gentle voice; and as they spoke so seldom, they seemed to think what they had to say was too valuable to spoil by profanity.
Richard Harding Davis, The West from a Car Window
34
AUSTIN, TEXAS
Caitlin Strong was standing in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel Austin the next morning, when Fernando Lorenzo Sandoval emerged from the elevator enclosed by three of his bodyguards. He spotted her a few moments after her eyes fixed upon him, enough time for her to see his appearance was dapper and polished as always. Not a single black hair out of place and bronze skin so even in tone and shade that his face looked to be sprayed on. His cream-colored linen suit fit him perfectly over tasseled loafers with no socks. Caitlin imagined in another life he might have been a movie star, bearing a strong resemblance to a famous Latin actor whose name she couldn’t recall but thought might have begun with Fernando as well.
Sandoval smiled in recognition, but the gesture seemed forced. As he moved to approach her, casting an unspoken signal to his bodyguards, Caitlin could feel the confident air and swagger befitting the most hunted man in Mexico nowhere to be found, sucked out of him by worry over the fate of his missing son. His gaze held hers, seeming to grasp some meaning, some portent, in it, enough so that his eyes had begun to mist up by the time he reached her.
Caitlin had been to the elegant Four Seasons before, but remembered the lobby being brighter. This morning it seemed only half the lights had been turned on, casting the rich mauve, cream, and olive tones in a twilight-like glint, Sandoval’s face looking shiny under the spill of a single fixture that found him as he reached her. He stretched his right arm outward, she thought to shake her hand, but then his grasp fastened on her elbow instead, the grip flaccid and quivery.
Caitlin held his stare as long as she could, more passing between them in those moments than any words could produce because there were no words that could capture the pain of the news she had brought with her. Looking at him in the glare of a bulb that seemed ready to burn out, she felt glad she’d insisted on being the one to do it.
Sandoval had separated himself from his family to keep them safe under new identities layered so deeply even the cartels wouldn’t be able to find them. Every step he’d taken, every move he’d made in the last few years had been done to make his own children safer, looking forward to the day when he could put all this behind him and return home.
Over now. Finished. Done. All for naught.
“Let’s go outside, Ranger,” Sandoval said, his voice cracking and hand slipping off her elbow.
35
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA
“Why we going to visit someone none of us even likes?” Dylan had asked that morning after Cort Wesley told him and Luke where they were going.
“Figure it out,” Cort Wesley said, not in the mood to parse words.
“’Cause you don’t want to leave us alone.”
“Close enough.”
“What else?” Luke asked.
“I’ll explain later.”
“What’s wrong with now?”
Cort Wesley shot his younger son a look, normally enough to silence him but not anymore, not today.
“You figure Aunt Araceli might know something that can help you figure this out,” Luke surmised, “why someone’s after us.”
“Help?” Dylan chimed in, rolling his eyes and flipping the hair from his face. “She didn’t like Mom, she could care less about us, and she hates Dad.”
Luke looked to his father to say his brother was wrong about that, but Cort Wesley could only muster a shrug.
* * *
He’d called Araceli Ramirez, Torres being her maiden name, the night before.
“What do you expect me to do?” she’d interrupted, before he was even finished explaining things to her.
“Help me figure this out, that’s all,” Cort Wesley said, keeping his tone low and measured.
“Here’s what I’ve figured out so far: my sister’s dead because of you.”
“And somebody tried to kill your nephews two nights ago.”
“Wouldn’t have happened if you’d let me have custody like I asked.”
“You were a stranger to them.”
“And what the fuck were you? How about a criminal, an ex-con, a contract killer, a mob enforcer, a drug dealer? How’s that?”
“I was never a drug dealer. And none of that had anything to do with Maura getting killed.”
“No? Then what did?”
“Something else. My fault, all the same—I’m not denying that. I just wish you’d keep your facts straight,” Cort Wesley finished, immediately regretting the break in his tone but unable to stop himself now. “I’m going to say it again. Someone came after your nephews and it was because of Maura, something in her past.”
“How the hell you know that?”
“I do, that’s all. You may not think you know anything that can help, but you’re the only one who might. Just let me know if we can head out your way tomorrow,” Cort Wesley said, emphasizing the “we.”
“Knock yourself out,” Araceli Ramirez told him.
* * *
She’d been married twice, the first time to a Major League baseball player whose arm she’d broken in a tussle after he’d come home drunk and belligerent one night too many. Her second marriage was to a Phoenix-area businessman who owned a chain of car washes and was president of the local Chamber of Commerce. Cort Wesley thought they had two kids, but it might have been three.
They’d taken a seven a.m. Southwest flight to Phoenix, arriving in really no time at all given the time differential. Cort Wesley rented a car, insisting on printed-out directions because he hated the talking monstrosities that seemed to enjoy telling him that he’d missed his turn. Bad enough his kids were already smarter than he was; he didn’t need a machine that was too.
