Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels) (2 page)

Earl gave the boy a better look, dabbing his kerchief in his mostly full glass of whiskey before patting it against some of the blood matted on the boy’s shirt. “Day old at most,” he reported to his father.

“How you figure that?”

“Whiskey got it off quick. Any more than a day, it would have taken some wiping or swabbing.”

“Is that a fact? ’Course, I didn’t need to know that to see that the soles of his boots got close to a full day’s worth of red sand stuck in their grids. Any more than a day, and it would’ve turned a brownish shade by now. Any less, it’d be more orange.”

“Is that a fact?” Earl echoed, drawing a smile from his father.

William Ray returned his attention to Constable Salise. “We can’t get a name out of the boy, let’s see if we can get a rise. Earl, what towns be a fair day’s walk here through the desert?”

Earl Strong aimed his answer at the boy. “There’s Franklin Notch, Bald Pass, Willow Creek—”

Earl stopped when the boy’s eyes narrowed in fear at the mention of Willow Creek. He shuddered just once and then lapsed back into whatever trance had overtaken him.

Earl crouched his gaunt six-foot frame down so he was eye to eye with the boy. “That where you’re from, son, Willow Creek?” he posed as gently and reassuringly as he could manage.

The boy rubbed his nose with a pair of fingers that were black at the tips, leaving a smudge that looked like soot.

“You got nothing to fear. You’re safe now.”

“No,” the boy rasped, eyes swinging for the doors as if expecting someone to burst through in the next moment. “They’ll be…”

“Yeah?”

“They’ll be…”

“What, boy, what?” William Ray asked, his own gaze and Earl’s cheating toward the saloon doors now too.

“… coming.”

“Who?” Earl Strong asked this time.

The boy didn’t look at him, didn’t seem to be looking at anything when he drew a tattered piece of thick paper, folded in quarters, from his pants pocket. He started to extend it forward, but stopped halfway to Earl, who plucked it from his grasp. Earl laid the piece of paper atop the bar table and smoothed it out.

“What the hell?” William Ray said, squinting at the sight of its contents.

It was a drawing rendered in the same black ink that stained the boy’s fingers, a drawing of man-sized skeleton figures wearing pistol belts and bandoliers. Some of the skeletons in the drawing wore sombreros over their exposed skulls and some didn’t.

Now it was William Ray who knelt down in front of the boy, holding the drawing close for him to see.

“What’s this exactly, son?”

No response.

“You see something that looked like this back home in Willow Creek?”

The boy muttered something.

“What was that, son?”

“Night,” the boy rasped.

“How’s that?”

“They come at night.”

William Ray looked up toward Earl. “How far a ride you figure it is to Willow Creek?”

“Six hours if we push things, eight if we don’t.”

William Ray held his son’s stare as he stood back up. “Then we better get a move on if we wanna get there ’fore nightfall, Ranger Earl.”

W
ILLOW
C
REEK
, T
EXAS
;
THE PRESENT

“You have no reason to be scared,
muchachos
and
muchachas.”

But the woman’s assurances did nothing to soothe the fears of the five children huddled before her, tear-streaked grime from the dusty air coating their faces.

“Do you know why you’re here today?” Ana Callas Guajardo asked them.

The children shrugged, shook their heads. They’d been taken from their schools back in Mexico without explanation and driven to what had once been a town over the Texas border, where the woman was waiting, introducing herself simply as “Ana.” She was in her early forties, boasting the tight lines and features of a younger woman at ease in the white silk blouse and snug-fitting jeans aged off the rack. The boots she wore looked comfortably worn, new soles belying their true age. Her raven black hair was streaked with gray and bound up in an elegant chignon.

“Because this is where it all began … and now, where it will begin again. Do you know what Steve Jobs once said? ‘Have the courage to follow your heart.’ It was one of his primary lessons of business, one I follow religiously. That is why I had you brought here. This way,
muchachos
and
muchachas
.”

The children trailed her down what was little more than an outline of what had been the central thoroughfare of a town long dead. Three boys and two girls ranging in age from nine to thirteen from four different schools. Their dark hair and full, deep-set eyes of an identical shade made them look like siblings, cousins at the very least, when in fact none save for one brother and sister were even related. Their young faces glistened under the sun, their school uniforms marred by wrinkles from the trip there and the dust sprayed through the dry desert air. The ground roasted beneath their feet in the merciless afternoon sun, fluttery heat waves rising where the town’s residents had once traipsed.

“Your lives all share a legacy that calls Willow Creek home,” Guajardo continued, her tone flat and firm. “Ever since hell rose to take the town in its grasp. Willow Creek died that day at the hands of creatures known as
esos Demonios
. Now you will learn of that day, and your place in it.”

Moving through the center of what had been a town, the children could see debris in the form of rotted, dried-out wood collected in areas where buildings once stood. The ground was darker in these spots, looking sallow and dead, unable to reclaim the life the structures had once stolen from it. Besides the stray patches of debris, the only evidence of civilization ever having been there was a set of train tracks lost to moss and blown gravel. Those tracks remained unfinished, unconnected; no train had ever touched them, making them seem even more ghostly, as if the brambles and brush were actually trying to draw the rails and ties into the earth to bury them forever. And yet over this scene of decay rose the sweet scents of juniper and piñon wafting in from a desert watched over by sentinel-like mesas that gleamed beneath the white puffy clouds floating across the sky. The sun cast those mesas a soothing shade of red that would darken further as evening bled the heat from the air.

Guajardo stopped in view of the raised lip of the railroad tracks and faced the children, some of whom were sniffling, wiping away the tears that had begun to fall anew. Her upper lip flirted briefly with the semblance of a snarl, the muscles in her jaw tightening visibly and a vein that had risen on the left side of her neck starting to pulse. “What you need to know today,
muchachos
and
muchachas
, is that
esos Demonios
are real, that monsters are real. And the monsters that killed this town all those years ago have returned to embark on a new beginning, so that old scores can be settled at long lost.”

She turned to face north, beyond Willow Creek, beyond Texas.

“
Esos Demonios
will be unleashed again, this time on a country that has to be called to account for its crimes.
Esos Demonios
will show the
Estados Unidos
what true pain is like, so much that she will never recover. Not in my lifetime or yours. She will drop to her knees and beg for mercy from the wrath
esos Demonios
will visit upon her.”

“There’s no such thing as monsters,” the oldest boy said to her, standing defiant as if assuming the mantle of leadership for the others.

“What if I could prove that you’re wrong?” Ana Guajardo asked him.

“Señora?”

“It’s like I told you,
esos Demonios
are real and I can prove it,” she said to all five of them now. “Come, let me show you.”

Some still sobbing, the children resisted at first, but then, with a collective shrug, followed in step behind her. Guajardo led them toward a grove of Mexican blue oaks on the south side of town, shaded by a large stone mesa to the west. The trees were wild and overgrown, their thick-leafed branches scratching against one another in the breeze. They’d risen higher in the patches where the sun remained over the mesa deeper into the afternoon, looking like gnarled fingers reaching for the sky.

Guajardo stopped half in the sun and half in the shade, her back to the children.

“What are we supposed to be seeing,
señora
?” the oldest boy prodded.

Guajardo turned and held all the children in her stare, making sure they could see her eyes. “Proof that monsters really do exist, because one of
esos Demonios
stands with us now,
muchachos
and
muchachas
,” she said, something shiny appearing in her hand. “Right before you.”

A cloud slid before the sun, darkening Guajardo’s silhouette as she started forward, to the oldest boy, who’d stepped out in front of the others first.

The screams that followed stole the breath of even Ana Guajardo’s hardened gunmen standing vigil at the other end of the former town. High-pitched wails that merged into one another to become a single screeching banshee-like cry, echoing off the rock walls of the canyon before following Willow Creek into oblivion.

P
ART
O
NE

Men in groups with long beards and moustaches, dressed in every variety of garment, with one exception, the slouched hat, the unmistakable uniform of a Texas Ranger, and a belt of pistols around their waist, were occupied drying their blankets, cleaning and fixing their guns, and some employed cooking at different fires, while others were grooming their horses. A rougher looking set we never saw.

Scouting Expeditions of McCulloch’s Texas Rangers
, as quoted in Mike Cox,
The Texas Rangers

1

P
ROVIDENCE,
R
HODE
I
SLAND

Caitlin Strong was waiting downstairs in a grassy park bisected by concrete walkways when Dylan Torres emerged from the building. The boy fit in surprisingly well with the Brown University students he slid between in approaching her, his long black hair bouncing just past his shoulders and attracting the attention of more than one passing coed.

“How’d it go?” Caitlin asked, rising from the bench that felt like a sauna in the sun.

Dylan shrugged and blew some stray hair from his face with his breath. “Size could be an issue.”

“For playing football at this level, I expect so.”

“Coach Estes didn’t rule it out. He just said there were no more first-year slots left in the program.”

“First year?”

“Freshman, Caitlin.”

“How’d you leave it?” she asked, feeling dwarfed by the athletic buildings that housed playing courts, training facilities, a swimming pool, a full gym, and the offices of the school’s coaches. The buildings enclosed the parklike setting on three sides, leaving the street side to be rimmed by an eight-foot wall of carefully layered stone. Playing fields took up the rear of the complex beyond the buildings and, while waiting for Dylan, Caitlin heard the clang of aluminum bats hitting baseballs and thunks of what sounded like soccer balls being kicked about. Funny how living in a place the size of Texas made her antsy within an area where so much was squeezed so close.

“Well, short of me growing another four inches and putting on maybe twenty pounds of muscle, it’s gonna be an uphill battle,” Dylan said, looking down. “That is, if I even get into this place. That’s an uphill battle too.”

She reached out and touched his shoulder. “This coming from a kid who’s bested serial killers, kidnappers, and last year a human monster who bled venom instead of blood.”

Dylan started to shrug, but smiled instead. “Helps that you and my dad were there to gun them all down.”

“Well, I don’t believe we’ll be shooting Coach Estes, and my point was if anybody can handle an uphill battle or two, it’s you.”

Dylan lapsed into silence, leaving Caitlin to think of the restaurant they’d eaten at the night before, where the waitress had complimented her on having such a good-looking son. She’d felt her insides turn to mush when the boy smiled and went right on studying the menu, not bothering to correct the woman. He was three quarters through a fifth year at San Antonio’s St. Anthony Catholic High School, in range of finishing the year with straight A’s. Though the school didn’t formally offer a post-graduate program, Caitlin’s captain, D. W. Tepper, had convinced them to make an exception on behalf of the Texas Rangers by slightly altering their Senior Connection program to fit the needs of a boy whose grades hadn’t anywhere near matched his potential yet.

Not that it was an easy fit. The school’s pristine campus in historic Monte Vista just north of downtown San Antonio was populated by boys and girls in staid, prescribed uniforms that made Dylan cringe. Blazers instead of shapeless shirts worn out at the waist, khakis instead of jeans gone from sagging to, more recently, what they called skinny, and hard leather dress shoes instead of the boots Caitlin had bought him for his birthday a few years back. But the undermanned football team had recruited him early on, Dylan donning a uniform for the first time since his brief stint in the Pop Warner Football League as a young boy, when his mother was still alive and the father he’d yet to meet was in prison. This past fall at St. Anthony’s he’d taken to the sport again like a natural, playing running back and sifting through the tiniest holes in the defensive line to amass vast chunks of yardage. Dylan ended up being named Second Team All TAPPS District 2-5A, attracting the attention of several small colleges, though none on the level of Brown University, a perennial contender for the Ivy League crown.

Caitlin found those Friday nights, sitting with Cort Wesley Masters and his younger son, Luke, in stands ripe with the first soft bite of fall, strangely comforting. Given that she’d never had much use for such things in her own teenage years, the experience left her feeling as if she’d been transported back in time, with a chance to relive her own youth through a boy who was as close to a son as she’d ever have. Left her recalling her own high school days smelling of gun oil instead of perfume. She’d been awkward then, gawky after growing tall fast. Still a few years short of forty, Caitlin had never added to that five-foot-seven-inch frame, although the present found her filled out and firm from regular workouts and jogging. She wore her wavy black hair more fashionably styled, but kept it the very same length she always had, perhaps in a misguided attempt to slow time, if not stop it altogether.