Strong Light of Day (30 page)

“Nope.”

“That's why you'll never make captain.”

“Who needs all that administrative shit anyway? I prefer working a gun, not an office.”

Tepper dug into his meal but didn't seem to enjoy it much. “Bump in pay might be helpful to a man raising a daughter. Old Earl still taking Caitlin to the shooting range?”

“More often than I'd prefer. She smells like gun oil, when most little girls are discovering perfume.”

“The smell of which she'd probably hate.”

“For sure, D.W.”

Tepper leaned forward over his plate, seeming to forget about it. “Tell you what else is for sure, Ranger. We're gonna need more than just two of us to stage a full-scale raid.”

“Who said anything about a raid?”

*   *   *

Tepper's only condition for coming on board was that he wanted no direct contact with Boone Masters, insisting he couldn't stand the sight of the man and didn't want to mix with him. So, the next day, Jim Strong met Masters alone at the Blue Bonnet Café for the pie happy hour the restaurant had been hosting almost since its founding in 1929.

“Why couldn't we just meet in a bar?” Masters said to him, seeming uncomfortable in such a mundane, homey setting.

“Someone like me meeting someone like you in a bar is bound to raise eyebrows. Could even get back to the Russians, which would do neither of us any good.”

“That's for sure. You don't drink, do you?”

“Not a drop anymore. I'm done with those demons.”

“My dad said never to trust a man who didn't drink.”

“Is this before or after he beat you senseless?”

“Sounds like a man familiar with the scorecard,” Masters told the Ranger.

“The mother of my little girl was murdered by Mexican druggers. I got myself in a bad way for a time after it happened, until I realized the booze made me not much good to myself or anybody else. I drank because it gave me the illusion I was in control, but I never really was. The booze was doing all the controlling.” He saw Boone Masters look away and leave his gaze aimed away from him, as if afraid Jim might see something Masters was. “It would appear I've touched a nerve here.”

“I've had some issues too.”

“Past them, I trust.”

“Or what, you'll arrest me?”

“Not so long as we're playing for the same team.”

“That won't last, Ranger.”

“I suppose not,” Jim said, as a waitress set their pie plates down before them. “So let's make the best of it while we can.”

“What's next?” Boone asked him. “What is it you need me to do, exactly?”

“What you do best, Mr. Masters: steal something.”

*   *   *

Jim Strong and D. W. Tepper stood off the road a ways, what they judged to be a safe distance from Anton Kasputin's warehouse in Lolo.

“I can't see a goddamn thing,” Tepper groused, lowering the binoculars. “How about a hill or rooftop, anything to better the angle?”

“There's a truck coming,” Jim said, instead of responding. “It's Masters.”

They watched Masters park the truck outside the darkened slab of an abandoned gas station, its pumps still advertising prices gone for more than a decade, in numbers placed manually on a once-lit marquee. Jim thought it said fifty-five cents, but couldn't be sure from here.

“Tell me again why we're not just raiding the place,” Tepper said, handing the binoculars over.

“Because we can't be sure this is all the tanks that say ‘Propane.'”

“What if they
are
propane, Jim?”

“Then I'm an asshole, and probably a former Texas Ranger, too, who got bit by excess diligence.”

“Excess diligence,” Tepper repeated. “I like that. You ever use it in court to justify a shooting?”

“I never had to justify a shooting.”

Tepper turned his naked eye on the warehouse complex, following the shape of Boone Masters edging his way through the darkest reaches, all the way to the entrance. “First time for everything, like that little girl of yours becoming a Texas Ranger.”

“That's her grandfather's intention, not mine.”

“But how's it sit with you?”

“Well, that little girl is already as good a shot as I am, so I guess it sits just fine.”

*   *   *

Boone Masters reached the same door through which his last boosted supply of major appliances had been loaded into the warehouse. The lock was a standard Master, which he worked his picking tools through with ease. It was fastened waist high in the door, latched to a security bar that extended across the door to prevent it from being raised. He worked in the dark, by feel, picturing the workings of the lock as he manipulated the tumblers into place.

While waiting for them to click into place, for some reason his thoughts turned to his fifteen-year-old son, Cort Wesley. Out here in the cold and dark, wondering if this was what he wanted for the boy twenty-five years from now. It wasn't a topic that crossed his mind much. But he'd been mostly sober for weeks, and working with the Texas Rangers to keep the kid out of jail had turned his thinking in that direction. Cort Wesley was a fine athlete and smart as a whip when he wanted to be. This whole experience had left Boone looking at his son a whole different way. He wasn't a man to preach change to himself or promise something to anyone he couldn't deliver.

It came down to a future he'd considered no more for his boy than he had for himself, never really thinking Cort Wesley could or would amount to any more than he had. No reflection on the kid as much as on himself.

Click.

The tumblers fell into place and Boone eased the lock off. Pocketing it, he eased the door up enough to scoot under and then slid it down quietly back into place again.

*   *   *

“Uh-oh,” D. W. muttered beneath the binoculars he was holding against his eyes again. “We got one guard, no two, checking the entrance. Appears they noticed the picked lock.”

No way, of course, Boone Masters could've locked the garage-style door behind him again, since the logistics required him to lower it back into place to disguise his presence.

“Your boy's a sitting duck,” Tepper continued, extending the binoculars out toward Jim Strong.

Jim didn't take them. “My boy?”

“Would you prefer partner?”

“Just stay here and keep me covered,” Jim said, slipping out toward the street.

“What exactly you planning on doing, Ranger?”

“You'll be the first to know, D.W.”

*   *   *

At that moment, Masters was illuminating his path through the cluttered warehouse floor with a thin flashlight that fit in his pocket, the beam remarkably bright.

Merchandise, in the form of major appliances—fridges, washers, dryers, and ranges, mostly—was jammed in tight as sardines, no call or quarter given to potential damage. The whole scene, even in the dark, seemed to indicate that Anton Kasputin didn't give a shit about the stuff. That this whole gangster thing was just a front for his true purpose, rooted somehow in those tanks containing something other than propane.

But what?

Not his concern right now. He was here to keep his kid out of jail, so Cort Wesley could have a chance to do and be better than him. Strange how that never occurred to him while the boy was riding in a truck bed keeping stolen goods from toppling out the back. How old had he been the first time Boone had taken him on a job? Twelve maybe? Boone had been drunk that night and couldn't really say. He'd had his share of bad times, and the booze only made things worse. And he'd never told anybody, not a soul, that he'd really cut back 'cause of his kid.

The older Cort Wesley got, the more he started to look like his father, and that gave Boone even more cause to rethink his own choices. He didn't want the boy to look in the mirror in twenty years and see the same thing Boone did now. The reddish veins painting both cheeks, the bloodshot, tired eyes, the thick hair that seemed to hang limp all the time these days. Boone had never really thought or cared about embarrassing anyone, and now here he was, hating the fact that he might embarrass his son. Maybe he wouldn't be thinking twice about it if Jim Strong hadn't enlisted his particular services after their bar fight. He didn't really care about being a great father; he just wanted to make sure his son became a better man than he was.

Boone's beam finally reflected off the gray steel assortment of tanks stacked on shelves against the far wall. All he needed was one, and he let the flashlight guide him there to grab it.

*   *   *

Jim Strong could see one of the two guards raising the unlocked door as quietly as he could, then drew his gun as the other man led the way inside. He picked up his pace, first to a jog and then to an all-out dash. He reached the door to find it still propped up halfway, and he bent at the waist to slip beneath it inside.

Jim could see a single flashlight sweeping lightly through the air near a side wall half the length of a football field away. That light, added to the slight bit sneaking in from the parking lot, proved just enough to catch a glimpse of the guards and follow their motion across the floor littered with stolen merchandise. Local police would've had a field day with the contents, but this was about plenty more than that. There was a whole lot of hurt in whatever was really inside those tanks, and he was the only one right now standing between it and a whole lot of hurt, if he didn't do his job.

The two guards were hanging close, one leading the other forward. That was good because it provided an opportunity to take them out together, but bad because … he had to take the men out together.

Jim didn't give the situation much more thought than that. He had his Model 1911 .45-caliber pistol in hand, but he holstered it in favor of a jagged two-by-four that must've broken off a loading pallet or something. It was a yard long, the length of a baseball bat basically, which was just the way Jim intended to use it.

The Russian bringing up the rear never saw or sensed him. Jim cracked the stray two-by-four into his skull and felt the wood splinter on contact. That left him with less board than he'd started with but still enough to deal with the other man. The angle was all wrong for a roundhouse strike, so Jim jabbed the splintered end forward, driving it into the other Russian's guts hard. The man uttered a wheeze and doubled over, freeing Jim to shatter what was left of the two-by-four on the back of his skull. He crumpled over and hit the floor. Both men were down now, and neither had even gotten a decent look at him.

Boone Masters spotted Jim Strong before he noticed the bodies, rotating his flashlight from one side to the other.

“You been busy, Ranger,” Boone noted, a single tank labeled Propane strung from his shoulder by a makeshift harness. “Any idea what's really in this thing?”

“Thanks to you, that's what we're gonna find out.”

And that's when the warehouse's overhead lighting snapped on.

“Is this the way you do business, comrade?” Anton Kasputin asked Boone Masters.

 

70

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

Tepper stopped his tale when his phone beeped with an incoming text message.

“You're kidding, right?” Caitlin prodded. “You can't stop there.”

Tepper held the phone farther away from his eyes and then tried squinting. “Looks like I got no choice. Doc Whatley wants to see you, and he's got Young Roger in his office, waiting right now. He put nine-one-one at the end of the e-mail.”

“You mean text.”

“Sure, whatever you say.”

“You owe me the rest of the story, Captain.”

“Speaking of which, you still haven't told me how exactly you know I was there.”

“Because you'd be the only man my father would've trusted.”

“Not counting your granddad.”

“Earl was busy babysitting me at the time.”

“And not doing a very good job at it, based on the fact that you ended up hiding in the back of your father's pickup when a gunfight broke out.”

“Well…”

Tepper stuck a fresh Marlboro in his mouth but stopped short of lighting it. “Wait a sec. Earl
knew?
And he still let you go?”

“It was a vacation day, so it wasn't like I was missing any school.”

“Tell that to Child Services, Ranger.”

“I was born for this, D.W. My grandfather knew that. So did my dad.”

“Was me, I would've put you over my knee.”

“I was already pretty good with a gun, don't forget.”

Caitlin realized she'd lost track of time while Tepper had been telling his story. Hearing it, thinking of her father again, had left her feeling more relaxed, the gunfight seeming very far away. Her shoulder and neck muscles had loosened and it no longer hurt her chest to breathe. She'd stopped perspiring and had the presence of mind to check her SIG and snap a fresh magazine home before sliding out from the backseat again.

“Toss me your keys, D.W,” she said, eyes falling on her shot-up SUV. “Doesn't look like I'll be using my vehicle for a while.”

“They're in the ignition. And I'll be expecting you to return that shirt.”

She climbed behind the wheel and fired up the engine. “Just like I'll be expecting you to finish that story,” she said through the open passenger-side window.

“Where's all this headed, Ranger?”

“Nowhere good, Captain. But that doesn't mean we can't stop it.”

 

P
ART
E
IGHT

Charlie Miller started out as a Ranger around 1920. He actually was a bodyguard at one time for Pancho Villa, and he was a tough, tough old guy. After he retired, he asked a Ranger I knew named Bob Favor to come see him, and Bob later told me this story. When Bob stopped by, Charlie Miller was laid up in bed with a broken leg he had set himself. He told Bob that his horse had kicked him in the jaw and busted a couple of his teeth. He said, “Go out to my pickup and get my pliers.” Bob brought him the pliers, and Charlie Miller said, “Hand me that mirror there.” Bob handed it to him. Then Charlie Miller stood there with those pliers, and he pulled out three teeth, one by one. He had no whiskey or tequila or nothing, and he didn't make a sound. He told Bob, “Pain's never really bothered me much.”