Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  “I’m still listening, Mr. Sandoval.”

  “It goes back to his murder of American tourists. Montoya’s a full-blooded Mayan. Feels his career was derailed because Indians are looked down upon in Mexico, considered second-class citizens. He blames your people and the Europeans for that, for corrupting the native culture and all but destroying it. He wants Mexico returned to its original roots.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about that, ultra-nationalist or not.”

  “Montoya’s no nationalist, Ranger, he’s a psychopath. Trust me when I tell you he poses a far greater risk to your country than men flying airplanes into buildings. You believe your worst enemies are far away when they’re actually parked right on your doorstep.”

  Caitlin felt the sweat heating up the phone in her grasp. “He came after you because you stood up to him. That’s right, sir, isn’t it? You were willing to take Montoya on, while the rest of the government, from the president on down, was too afraid to try.”

  “I was lucky he sent drug soldiers instead of Zetas. I may not be as lucky next time.”

  “You leave that to me,” Caitlin told him.

  PART SIX

  When at the age of sixteen,

  I joined a jolly band.

  We marched from San Antonio

  down to the Rio Grande.

  Our captain he informed us,

  perhaps he thought it right,

  “Before we reach the station,

  we’ll surely have to fight.”

  —www.legendsofamerica.com

  60

  COSTA MAYA, MEXICO; THE PRESENT

  “You must see this for yourself, jefe,” his chief lieutenant said to Ismael Jose Alvarez in the back room of the restaurant his family had owned long before he became one of the chief narcotics producers in the country. Alvarez was a businessman first and foremost who did not play favorites and always delivered the best product available for the best price.

  A late-model American sedan was parked in the small square outside. Dust covered the finish and flies buzzed in and out of its open windows. As he drew closer, Alvarez saw four dead bodies slumped inside the car, the stench reaching him yards before he got there.

  “They are from the Juárez cartel, jefe,” his chief lieutenant explained. “I recognized two of the men myself.”

  Alvarez moved as close as his nose would allow. “Who would have done this, Miguel?”

  As if on cue, Alvarez’s cell phone rang and he jerked it to his ear.

  “Me,” a deep voice said, before Alvarez could say a word.

  “I’m watching you now,” Paz continued.

  “What do you want?”

  “Information.”

  “You leave four bodies outside my restaurant for information?”

  “And to make sure you understand you’ll be held responsible for the murders by the Juárez cartel if you don’t furnish it.”

  “Who are you?”

  “In Juárez they call me Ángel de la Guarda.”

  “Ma Dios . . .”

  “I see you’ve heard of me.”

  Alvarez’s eye swept the street, trying to buy time for his men to search it. “Why have you done this?”

  “Because they were planning to do the same to me. And if you don’t call off your men moving to search the street, I’ll kill them too. And then I’ll come after you. Feel free to ask your friends in Juárez about me before making your decision.”

  Located in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, Costa Maya had become a popular tourist spot for the cruise ships that had made it a regular stop thanks to its convenient proximity to the Mayan ruins in the Yucatán. To accommodate the massive vessels, a modern deep-water port had been built between a pair of ancient fishing villages, Majahual and Xcalak, that now relied on tourism for the bulk of their commerce. Whenever ships were in port small shops and jewelry stores battled pushcarts and hastily erected souvenir stands for business.

  Paz’s first day in Costa Maya had yielded nothing. No one in or around the village of Majahual knew anything about any family named Rojas matching the facts Paz gave them. Suddenly, he feared his search for the truth behind Caitlin Strong’s past would end here and now. The best information he could glean was that the former home of Juanita Rojas in Majahual was now an upscale shopping plaza. The trail had stopped there.

  The Cadillac Escalade Paz had stolen from the Cancún International Airport rental lot was still parked in the shade in view of that plaza, when a late-model sedan turned the corner and slid toward it. Paz stepped out after spotting it, waited until he saw the gleam of weapons being raised through the open windows before he yanked his pistol out and opened fire.

  He emptied his magazine as the gunmen’s wild automatic fire dug divots from the road and sidewalk and sprayed him with the chips of concrete. Killing his pursuers, the men who had gunned down an innocent old woman back in Texas, excised the demons of his frustration, revealing to him a potential next step in the gunfight’s wake.

  He’d shoved the driver aside and deposited the car outside the headquarters of Ismael Jose Alvarez, the only man with the contacts to help him in his quest and who now would have a reason to.

  “I believe I’ve tracked down this family for you,” Alvarez told Paz over the phone two hours later. “I’m not sure, but it’s the best I can do. It was so long ago, señor.”

  “If you’re right,” Paz told him, “our business is done.” He could hear Alvarez’s labored breathing on the other end of the line. “Si no, volveré.”

  61

  MAJAHUAL; THE PRESENT

  “Buenos dias,” Guillermo Paz said to the young woman who had opened the front door of the mud brick and adobe home to which he’d been directed by Ismael Jose Alvarez. He’d waited several hours before approaching to be sure Alvarez hadn’t sent anyone to greet him, finally satisfying himself that the narcotics supplier’s reputation for discretion in such matters was well deserved.

  “My father is at his shop,” the young woman said, gazing up at him in wonder. “If you have a problem with your car, you can find him there. . . . Señor?”

  Paz hadn’t realized how long he’d been staring at her until that moment. But he couldn’t help it, because the young woman standing in the doorway was the spiting image of Juanita Rojas as described by Earl Strong. Her features were fair and strong, her hair straight and black. Her skin was the color of fresh grain with nary a blemish. Paz looked at her and immediately thought of the Mayan tribes that had so long dominated Mexico, just as an offshoot had settled the mountains of Venezuela where he was born. The Mayans were born warriors, a hemisphere away from the famed Spartans in distance but much closer in tradition and attitude.

  He doubted the girl in the doorway had any idea of her likely heritage or of the resemblance she bore to a young woman who’d dominated Paz’s thoughts ever since Clara Beeks had spun the tale of Juanita Rojas’s rescue at the hands of Earl Strong. Then again, maybe he was looking at a ghost.

  “This is the Nieves home, sí?”

  “Sí,” the young woman replied, still clearly anxious.

  “But it was once Rojas and it’s a Rojas I’m looking for, specifically Juanita.”

  The young woman’s eyes widened. “Juanita Rojas was my great-grandmother.”

  “What do you want?” Rosario Nieves asked him, clearly unsettled by his unbroken stare.

  “I’m sorry,” Paz said, his trance broken. “I’d just like to ask you about your great-grandmother.”

  “It’s not like I ever met her.”

  “Of course not.”

  “And you’re not a cop or anything.”

  “Nothing like that. I just want to know what happened after a Texas Ranger named Earl Strong brought her home from Texas.”

  Suddenly Rosario Nieves’s expression grew warmer and more inviting. “You’re talking about the man who saved my great-grandmother’s life.”

  “Sí, in Sweetwater, Texas.”

  Rosar
io Nieves pushed the flimsy door open enough for Paz to enter.

  62

  MEXICO; 1931

  Hollis Tyree’s Plymouth had proven a loyal friend through the first leg of the journey southwest toward the Mexican border and the province of Costa Maya beyond. The car wasn’t even a year old when Constable Tyree handed Earl Strong the key and sent him on his way.

  “You understand this is a favor, not an order,” Earl reminded him.

  “Ranger Earl, I wouldn’t even be alive to drive this car if it weren’t for you, so I figure letting you borrow it leaves me well ahead of the game.”

  “Well, I do appreciate that and I promise to bring it back in the same condition as I took it.”

  Earl had already parked the Plymouth in front of the doctor’s office and eased Juanita Rojas gently across the backseat. The doctor had suggested providing a bottle of ether to make the long journey more tolerable for her, but Earl didn’t trust himself with chemicals and the girl insisted she wanted to stay awake for the duration. Just feeling the fragility of her bones and pain at his touch from the beating she’d taken at the hands of The Outfit’s pimp made his blood boil. Once he got her safely home, Earl was even giving strong consideration to using some of his vacation time to take the train to Chicago and pay Al Capone himself a visit.

  “I don’t figure those Chicago boys be bothering you none, Constable,” he told Hollis Tyree. “But if they show their pug noses anywhere within a hundred miles of here, the Rangers will know it and, rest assured, action will be taken.”

  “Thank you, Ranger Earl. It’s been a pleasure working with you.”

  Tyree extended his hand and Earl Strong took it in a tight, callused grasp.

  “You’re as brave a man as I’ve ever stood with, Mr. Tyree. I’m proud to know you.”

  Earl was on the road minutes later. He kept looking back to check on Juanita Rojas, speaking with her in both English and Spanish despite the fact she was too tired to respond or maybe even listen.

  The drive was long and, once south of the border, Earl could never remember a time when he’d felt hotter. The air outside seemed to sizzle, and driving through it was like pushing the car up a mountain. He’d topped off the gas tank at the last filling station and, just for good measure, filled three additional cans to store in the trunk in the likely event no more stations turned up along the way.

  He’d intended to drive straight through the cool of the night, but opted to stay over at a roadside motel well south of the border halfway to the village of Majahual for Juanita’s benefit. Earl laid her on one of the room’s two beds, stretching out on the other with no intention of sleeping himself. In the back of his mind was the possibility, however unlikely, that the Chicago boys had tailed him here and were preparing to storm the room with tommy guns.

  He came awake hours later in the pitch dark of the room, the one candle long extinguished, and the sensation of Juanita Rojas’s soft body curling up next to him. It took all of Earl’s resolve to leave himself just where he was, pretending to still be asleep, when she rolled over atop him and he felt her mouth upon his.

  The remaining hours before dawn were the best Earl could ever remember, made even more so by the fact that he knew it would never happen again and shouldn’t have this time. He was a lawman, after all, a goddamn Texas Ranger charged with the woman’s protection. And no matter how exactly things had gotten away from him, the fact remained he hadn’t resisted the young woman’s overtures nor could he had he tried.

  In those hours the dirt-stained, baked air of Sweetwater and the fiery bullets of the Chicago boys melted away behind a cloud of pleasure like none Earl had ever known before. He’d been in love with the Rangers for so long he’d forgotten it was possible to love something else too, much less a human being. Those hours changed him in ways too profound for him to fully understand, at least not then. He lay awake to the sound of birds chirping and Juanita still lying across his chest, hoping the sun would never rise and the day never came. But it did, the light on his face reminding Earl Strong of who he was and what he was doing in a godforsaken country in which his dad and granddad had each spilled more than their share of blood.

  It took all the gas he’d stockpiled to get Juanita Rojas home, not a word spoken through the remains of a journey that ended just after night fell once more.

  63

  MAJAHUAL; THE PRESENT

  “He returned my great-grandmother to her parents,” Rosario Nieves finished, “tipped his hat, and rode off with barely a word spoken other than to apologize.”

  “Apologize?”

  “For what he’d done. He said it made him feel as dirty as the men who paid for sex back in Sweetwater’s freight yard.”

  “Not true,” Paz defended.

  Rosario looked puzzled. “You sound as if you knew the man.”

  “But not what happened after he left here, after Juanita Rojas married a man named Nieves,” Paz told her.

  “She had three children, all boys, before she died of typhus,” Rosario said. “One of them, Rafael, was my grandfather. His twin brother Luis moved to America, became a citizen, and was killed in the Korean War.”

  “What about the third?”

  “Diego, my great-grandmother’s first.”

  “Diego,” Paz repeated, something occurring to him at the corner of his mind he couldn’t quite get a fix on.

  “Diego was just past one, the twins infants when Juanita passed. They say she went quietly and swore dead relatives had been surrounding her bed for days, ready to guide her journey to the next world.”

  “Do you believe that?” Paz asked Rosario Nieves.

  “Believe what?”

  “In angels, spirits.”

  “I believe there are things we’re not supposed to understand until it’s time.”

  “I believe there are things in this world we’ll never understand,” he told her.

  Paz thought from the way Rosario looked at him that his words had unnerved her. Then she started speaking again in a voice that had gone suddenly hoarse and dry.

  “Diego died just after Juanita; the poor boy had caught the fever from her. A little boy buried in the ground next to his mother. Is that what you meant by things we’ll never understand?”

  Paz cleared his throat, shifted on the chair that was compressing under the weight of his massive bulk. “Then your great-grandmother never saw Earl Strong again,” he said, returning to the subject at hand.

  “I’m getting to that,” said Rosario Nieves. “She wrote him often, gave her mother all the letters to mail for her to him care of Texas Ranger headquarters in Austin.”

  “But her mother never sent them.”

  Rosario Nieves’s eyes widened. “How did you know?”

  “Because having a woman in the family taking up with an el Rinche would have disgraced them.”

  “Earl Strong wrote plenty of letters to my great-grandmother, but her mother hid them with the others she never sent. I think not hearing from Earl broke her heart. She gave up right around the time the twins were born.”

  “But that’s not the end of the story, is it?”

  Rosario shook her head. “Earl Strong came back to Majahual one more time after she died.”

  “Not for the funeral.”

  “No,” the young woman said cryptically. “I never thought about it before. It didn’t seem important.”

  “Does it now?”

  Rosario Nieves rose from the chair and moved to an old maple desk, weathered by years of exposure to the harsh sea air nearby. She opened the bottom drawer on the left-hand side and removed an old cigar box; Cubans, Paz noted.

  “Juanita’s unsent letters are all in here. Plenty of Earl’s unread ones too.”

  She extended the cigar box toward Paz.

  “You never read them yourself?”

  Rosario shrugged, revealing pointy shoulder bones beneath her shirt. “Even in death, a person has the right to privacy.”

  “Then why are you
giving them to me, señorita?”

  “Because something tells me you have the right to see them. For my great-grandmother’s sake.”

  64

  YUCATÁN PENINSULA, MEXICO; THE PRESENT

  The jungle stank of men, Colonel Montoya thought as he climbed the steps of the ancient Mayan temple. Or, more accurately, men whose bodies had not adjusted to the tropical confines and the scorching humidity they brought. It was as if the jungle was marking them, rejecting them, wanting them gone from the world that had embraced Montoya. And why not? His own ancestors had been birthed in ruins much like these before they had crumbled. Back when Mexico was populated by those of pure Mayan lineage, before the Europeans led by the Spaniards descended to spoil the blood, and then the Americans to take everything else.

  But all that, Montoya thought as he entered the temple, was about to change.

  Inside, the officers he had culled from the ranks of the Mexican army stood studying the crude map of the United States he’d hung from the wall amid the drawings and glyphs Montoya had come to see as prophecies. The officers were roasting in their own sweat, so much so that Montoya could swear the sunlight revealed steam misting off their flesh. They saw him approaching and snapped to attention.

  “At ease,” Montoya told them.

  A major’s eyes remained riveted on the makeshift map. “These American cities that are highlighted . . .”

  “Our targets,” Montoya told him.

  The officers looked at each other, befuddled.

  “Please, do not worry,” Montoya continued. “We will be fighting the Americans on our terms, not theirs. The drug cartels we now control have pipelines into every city in America for men and equipment. Already plans are being laid for our soldiers to move in right under the Americans’ noses and strike them where they are weakest.”

  A colonel spoke for all the officers. “We do not understand.”