Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels) (12 page)

Villarreal wanted to laugh, but all that emerged was a chortling chuckle. “You really think you can defeat the United States of America?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Ana Guajardo said, reaching for the door handle. “Absolutely.”

P
ART
T
HREE

Boys, you have followed me as far as I can ask you to do unless you are willing to go with me. It is like going into the jaws of death with only twenty-six men in a foreign country where we have no right according to law but as I have [gone] this far I am going to finish with it. Some of us may get back or part of us or maybe none of us will get back.… I don’t want you unless you are willing to go as a volunteer.… Understand there is no surrender in this. We ask no quarter nor give any. If any of you don’t want to go, step aside.

Texas Ranger captain Leander McNelly (1875)

24

S
AN
A
NTONIO

“That boy look familiar to you at all?” D. W. Tepper asked as Caitlin Strong studied the picture he’d handed her, a typical school photograph taken of a boy in a standard school uniform, his smile showing braces over his teeth.

Night had fallen just as her chopper had landed back in the city, and the result was to cast Tepper’s office in even darker tones. He held a fresh cigarette in his hand, the smoke sifting in and out of the narrow light as it wafted upward. He hadn’t turned on his desk lamp, choosing instead to leave the blinds open to let in the meager spill of the streetlights beyond to supplement the single bulb in the overhead fixture. He’d switched off the air-conditioning in favor of leaving the window open, explaining why the office smelled lightly of the hibiscus trees and flowering bushes down below. Tepper always said he hated the smell of fresh air, but the clacking of the blinds against the window frame indicated he was getting used to it.

“Put it out, D.W.”

“I just lit it.”

“Can’t blame me for trying. Damn,” Caitlin said, giving the photo another look. “It was the smile that threw me. This boy wasn’t smiling when I saw him in Willow Creek, but he had braces for sure, wearing the same school uniform,” she added, certain this was the oldest boy Frank Dean Whatley had examined at the crime scene, the one who’d been killed first likely trying to protect the others.

“Would’ve celebrated his fourteenth birthday next week.” Tepper shook his head, his expression wrinkling to the point it looked like he was chewing on razor wire. He took a hefty drag on his Marlboro and blew out the smoke to follow the last wave in floating upward to hover over the half-lit room. “So don’t tell me to put my goddamn cigarette out, Ranger.”

The clacking of the blinds against the window frame seemed to get louder as Caitlin regarded the picture again, the boy framed against a stock background looking younger than fourteen. “Hell, I’m close to asking you for one myself.”

“You’re gonna need more than one, Caitlin,” Tepper said, his steely eyes drooping a bit.

Caitlin started to flap the picture, then stopped when she felt it was disrespectful. “Where’d you get this, D.W.? And what’s it got to do with what you told me over the phone?”

“The boy disappeared from his school two days back, the morning of the day he was killed. His name, according to school records, is Daniel Sanchez. But that’s not his real name, Ranger. His real name is Daniel
Sandoval
.”

“Jesus Christ” was all Caitlin could say.

*   *   *

She’d first met the murdered boy’s father, Fernando Lorenzo Sandoval, while he was a patient at Thomason Hospital in El Paso, where he’d been transported after a bomb narrowly missed killing him just across the border in Juárez. The cartels gunning for Sandoval, then one of the few Mexican government officials willing to confront them, sent a hit team to finish the job but ended up taking a whole intensive care ward hostage. Caitlin had rectified the situation pretty much on her own and, as a result, began a lasting relationship with Sandoval, who understood the meaning of a debt.

Before long, he had risen to chief of the Chihuahua State Investigations Agency and declared an all-out war against the drug cartels he firmly believed were tearing apart the fabric of his country. That made him even more of a target for them than he already was, the only Mexican official Caitlin had ever met with the
cajones
to battle the cartels on their own violent terms. He’d become a virtual phantom, as a result. No one knew where he lived, and one legend said he slept in a different place every night. Another insisted that the government had built an elaborate network of tunnels beneath the country that Sandoval and other officials now used to get around without ever showing their faces. Caitlin figured the mythology suited Sandoval well, and he exploited it to the fullest in his capacity as the country’s chief drug enforcer. He even once recruited Guillermo Paz to build a private army to aid his efforts, an army that somehow had ended up in the service of a shadowy division of Homeland Security.

*   *   *

“Has Sandoval been informed yet?” she asked Tepper.

“We only just got what I’d call a positive identification,” Tepper told her.

“I’d like to be the one who gives him the news, Captain.”

“Not necessary, Ranger.”

“I didn’t say it was. I want him to hear it from somebody he knows, somebody he knows will make sure the right thing gets done for his boy.”

Tepper rolled his eyes, the motion so drawn out it looked as if they had gotten stuck halfway around his forehead. “Sure. And for you the right thing always involves folks getting shot.”

Caitlin held up the school picture of Daniel Sandoval. “You didn’t see what somebody did to this boy and the others.”

“I saw the pictures.”

“There’s something else: Willow Creek, Captain.”

Tepper shook his head and smacked his perpetually chapped lips. “Where you going with this, Ranger?”

“That those kids were killed in Willow Creek for a reason. The site was chosen. The crime scene had the sense of something like a ritual to it. We need to find out why, we need to find the connection to what happened in that town a century ago.”

Tepper shook his head and lit a fresh cigarette. “And why’s that exactly, Hurricane?”

“Because the original massacre happened on April twenty-four, nineteen-nineteen, D.W.”

“Oh boy…”

“Yeah,” Caitlin nodded. “Those Mexican kids in Willow Creek were murdered on the same day.”

25

W
ILLOW
C
REEK,
T
EXAS; 1919

The riders continued to storm toward William Ray and Earl Strong, emerging out of the dust cloud as three figures riding abreast of one another. The Strongs relaxed only slightly when the riders slowed at the outskirts of town and approached the Rangers’ position in the center of the single thoroughfare, lifting their hands into the air and slowing their horses to walking speed.

“
Buenos días,
” the man in the center greeted, much of his face hidden in the shadows of a huge sombrero and further obscured by the coming of night.

“
Buenos días,
” William Ray returned, noting the Mexican’s disdain at the sight of the
cinco pesos
badge pinned to his shirt lapel, shiny amid the patches of sweat that had soaked through. “I’m Texas Ranger William Ray Strong and this here’s my son, Texas Ranger Earl Strong. You can lower your hands now, but don’t let that give you any wrong ideas. I’m a pretty fast draw myself but my boy, Earl, here’ll shoot you as you sit ’fore your hands clear your holsters.”

The leader climbed down off his horse, brushing back his wind-blown and dirt-encrusted poncho that looked too thick for the season. “I am Captain Fernando Lava of the Mexican Federal Army.”

“This be the same
federales
disbanded after Huerta was forced out of office in nineteen-fourteen?”

Lava took off his sombrero, revealing a nest of thick, sweat-dampened hair and a crease halfway down his forehead where the sombrero had left its mark, along with a scar on his right cheek shaped like a question mark. He had icy eyes that seemed colorless at first glance and an almost crystal shade of blue at second. The other
federales
remained on their horses.”

“Some of us proved more stubborn than others; this scar you see on my face came from a branding iron.”

“What happened to the guy wielding it?”

“He came to a violent end later,” Lava said, noting the even older Ranger badge young Earl was wearing. “Something I imagine any
el Rinche
can understand.”

William Ray saw no point in mincing words or making conversation. “Since you’re here, I imagine you know the rest of the town is dead.”

“Not exactly,
señor
. See, we are trailing the men who did it.”

*   *   *

Night had taken firm hold of the sky by then, the lessening light making the mesas look like jagged walls rising for the sky. Having no desire to continue their discussion near so many dead bodies, they found an arroyo maybe a mile out of Willow Creek secure and defensible enough to let them build a fire. The three
federales
and two Rangers sat down on opposite sides of the fire in the cooling air. This as the now confirmed lone survivor of the massacre rocked nervously back and forth atop the barn coat Earl had spread out for him beneath a makeshift lean-to he’d built against the base of a blue oak tree as heat lightning lit up the sky to the west.

William Ray showed Lava the drawing the boy had made of skeletal demons wearing bandoliers. “So if it wasn’t monsters, who was it exactly, Captain? I’m thinking maybe more of Pancho Villa’s boys,” he added, referring to the Mexican revolutionary leader who’d already staged several cross-border incursions.

“We are some of Pancho Villa’s boys,” Lava told him. “We fight for him now, because of the
monstruos
we are tracking and what they are bringing out of our country.”

Lava reached into the single pocket William Ray had mistaken for a patch on trousers that billowed in the night breeze. He emerged with a small husk of what looked like dark blown glass, sealed with a tiny stopper at its one open cylindrical end.

“Christ on a crutch,” William Ray muttered, rising to extend his hand over the fire to take it.

“Opium,” Earl said, before his father had gotten himself settled back down.

“The young
hombre
is right,” said Lava. “These men must have intended to use Willow Creek as a staging ground for their business north of the border, setting up what we believe is a distribution network.”

“Distribution network? That’s a mighty fancy term for the captain of a disbanded outfit.”

Lava used a stick to adjust the logs on the fire, spraying glowing embers into the air that flamed out before reaching William Ray. “Forty years ago, the Chinese brought opium with them to Mexico. It has thrived, thanks to our climate and the fertile lands of the Sinaloa province, ever since then. Export into your country through California out of Mexicali and Tijuana has been thriving since nineteen-sixteen thanks to that region’s governor, Esteban Cantú. Now Cantú is expanding his territory through Texas and towns like Willow Creek, and he does this with the blessing of none other than Mexico’s president, Venustiano Carranza.”

“Now why would Carranza do that?”

“Because he and Esteban Cantú are cousins,
señor
.”

*   *   *

The fire framed William Ray’s face in its light, making his wrinkles look more pronounced and deeper, while hiding the sudden intensity his glare had taken on as Lava continued.

“
Señores,
if Carranza isn’t stopped, he will crush the revolution with more drug money and spread his poison all across your country.” Lava swallowed hard, the air sticking in his throat. “I have seen what opium has done to my country, the lives it has destroyed, the families it has ruined. I have seen how men like Carranza and Cantú use it to line their pockets and control the weak and less fortunate.”

William Ray leaned close enough to the fire for its reflection to seize his eyes. “How much of this opium we talking about exactly?”

Lava shrugged, looking grim. “It is grown all over Mexico now. Poor and peasant farmers have been enlisted as slave laborers, their land taken from them, their crops uprooted so opium can be grown in their place. They live in fear of
esos Demonios.
”

“
Esos Demonios?”

“
Sí,
” Lava nodded. “Killers recruited from the very worst of Carranza’s soldiers, now assigned to his cousin as a private army. They are called that for good reason, reasons you have now seen firsthand.”

William Ray Strong slapped his knees and rose, his face suddenly out of the firelight’s reach, which made him look headless. “Least we know who we’re up against.”

“
Sí,
but some say
esos Demonios
are invincible, that they cannot be killed.”

“Guess we’ll see about that,” William Ray told him as the crackling flames rose enough to frame his eyes in their glow, “won’t we?”

26

S
AN
A
NTONIO

“There it was, D.W.,” Caitlin finished. “The virtual beginning of the Mexican drug trade. By the nineteen-thirties, marijuana had pretty much replaced opium as the smugglers’ drug of choice, but the original supply routes remained in place.”

“You got me on the edge of my chair, Ranger,” Tepper said.

“My granddad never told you about all this?”

“Him being there when pretty much the bane of our modern-day existence got started? Bits and pieces maybe,” Tepper frowned. “Maybe I just forgot. I’m older than dirt, you know, so I am entitled.” He hesitated, making the clacking of the blinds against the window frame seem louder. The single bulb in the overhead fixture flickered, then locked back on. “Except I don’t see how this all squares with those murdered kids in Willow Creek, ’sides the date.”