Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels) (25 page)

Juan Ramon Castillo, fourth in the chain of command for the Sinaloa cartel, but currently number one given that the three ahead of him were all in prison, was rail thin and bookish-looking thanks to a pair of spectacles he wore on the tip of his nose. Caitlin noticed that one of the lenses was cracked and his belt was struggling to hold his trousers over his narrow hips. Nonetheless, the intensity of his gaze and general flatness of his expression mirrored Rojas’s in both respects, the two of them looking as if the emotion, the very life, had been washed from their features. There was no fierceness, no hatred, no unnerving sense of awareness of the power each held, not even any grief. Caitlin guessed the unusual nature of this meeting was to blame, both these men and Sandoval at a loss to find the proper face to wear for a tragic occasion that, however temporarily, had joined them in a common purpose.

“I want to thank all you gentlemen for coming,” she said when she reached the table. At that point, Caitlin cautiously eased the SIG Sauer from its holster, ejected the shell from the chamber and popped out the magazine, laying all three down before her. “Seems like the right thing to do given what’s brought us here, and I appreciate the three of you all coming alone.”

“Anything that helps us find the killer of our children,” said Rojas, the last of his words spoken softer through a lump that Caitin saw was actually visible in his throat.

“Perhaps the guilty party sits at this table now,” Castillo followed, holding his gaze on Sandoval. “I would not put it past some to have orchestrated this entire ruse to cloak their own part in weakening our operation.”

“You think I’d sacrifice my own son to such a cause?” Sandoval asked him.

“The only body I’ve seen is
my
son’s. I have no way of confirming the other deaths, do I?”

Rojas nodded slowly in assent, echoing Castillo’s words.

“I saw the bodies,” Caitlin told all three of them. “It was the Rangers working with Mexican authorities who made the IDs. If this were a trap, it’d already be sprung. And I got my own reasons for wanting this to go smoothly.”

“Perhaps you should share them with our new friends,” Sandoval suggested, eyeing both of them.

“Two boys have been targeted north of the border as well, two boys who mean a lot to me.”

“Spoken in the present tense,” Castillo noted, “while we speak in the past.”

“You have other children, don’t you,
Señor
Castillo?”

Castillo bristled at Caitlin’s remark.

“Two to be exact,” Caitlin continued, “both born to your mistresses. How long you think it’ll be before the killers catch on to that fact and come after them too?”

“I can protect my own without help from
los diablos tejanos
.”

Caitlin held his stare. “Well, right now this Texas devil needs to remind you that wasn’t the case four days ago, sir.”

Rojas leaned forward, his hands coiled into fists so tight that the veins looked like branches growing out of his skin. “So what do you want from us?”

“To find out what the three of you, and
Señor
Aguilar, have in common, because that’s why five children are dead and others are in danger.”

“You think we haven’t searched for that answer ourselves?” challenged Castillo, shaking his head. “You think we wouldn’t have found it if such a thing truly existed?”

“Reason for that being,” Caitlin told him, “is that you’ve been looking in the wrong place.”

62

S
AN
A
NTONIO

“I’ve gotta be back in time for the game tonight,” Dylan told Cort Wesley, pulling his boots on. His hair was still damp from the shower and he smelled like the liquid soap Caitlin used because he said it made his skin feel better.

“So you don’t want to come along.”

“No, Dad, I do. We just have to make sure I’m back. It’s the district championship.”

“Still?”

“Huh?”

“I thought maybe something had changed from the first fifty times you told me.”

“Ha-ha. Very funny, Dad. Remind me to laugh later.” He pushed his foot the rest of the way into his boot and stood up. “Where we going again?”

*   *   *

It wasn’t anything like boosting refrigerators with Boone Masters, but this was still the first time Cort Wesley had ever taken Dylan with him on a trip like this, specifically to the Rio Grande Valley and the farm where the daughters of both Mateo Torres and Enrique Cantú had been born in 1973. He hadn’t asked Luke to join them and his younger son would’ve likely rejected the proposition anyway since he hated missing any school, a freshman now already thinking of grades, college, and test scores.

Man oh man, is this really my kid?

The night before he’d gone downstairs as soon as Leroy Epps was gone to find Caitlin sleeping by the window in front of which she’d moved an old upholstered armchair. Instead of rousing her, Cort Wesley had covered Caitlin with a blanket and smoothed her hair.

“I’m taking Dylan with me tomorrow,” he said softly. “Figured it’s time the boy sees how the world works.” Or maybe he’d said “how I work,” his actual words blunted by memory.

Cort Wesley was glad Caitlin was asleep so she couldn’t argue the point with him any more than his mother had when Boone Masters took Cort Wesley on his first job, where he’d watched his father pick the lock on a storage depot overhead door and boost a bunch of major appliances.

“Reason we pick instead of cut, son,” his father had explained, “is on account of the fact the owners won’t know they been robbed right away. And by the time they do, these fridges, ranges, washers, and dryers’ll be in people’s homes at a serious discount. Hell, we might be back another couple times before they notice anything’s missing at all.”

Cort Wesley had to ride atop the big boxes piled into the truck bed on the way to the dusty warehouse where Boone Masters stored his merchandise. Maybe today he’d tell Dylan all about that. Something to pass the time on the hundred-thirty-mile drive that couldn’t pass slowly enough.

Except Dylan lost himself in iTunes playing through earbuds that tuned him out to the rest of the world, including Cort Wesley. His eyes were closed five minutes after they hit the 101 going south, and Cort Wesley couldn’t tell whether he was asleep or awake, since the earbuds shut out pretty much all ambient sound that included anything even remotely passing for a conversation.

Once, after stealing another glance toward his oldest son, Cort Wesley caught a glimpse of Leroy Epps in the backseat.

“Bright idea I had, champ,” he said, shaking his head, “real bright.”

Epps shrugged, just about to respond when Dylan opened his eyes and plucked the buds from his ears. “You say something, Dad?”

Cort Wesley checked the rearview mirror to find Leroy gone. “Just thinking out loud, son.”

Dylan nodded and glanced into the backseat. “Hey,” he said, holding up his iPhone, “you want me to play this over the Bluetooth?”

63

N
UEVO
L
AREDO,
M
EXICO

“… you’ve been looking in the wrong place.”

The eyes of all three men remained fixed on Caitlin after she said that.

“Which assumes you’ve been looking in the right one, Ranger,” said Castillo, his hooded eyes still trying to size her and her intentions up.

“I believe I’ve got a notion, sir, yes. I believe this is about revenge for something you gentlemen had nothing to do with yourselves.”

Rojas and Castillo started to look at each other and then stopped, the bond between them broken momentarily by a sudden awareness of their violent rivalry.

“¡Eso no tiene sentido!”

“No,
Señor
Rojas, it doesn’t make any sense, at least no more than murdering innocent children.”

“You really think you need to keep reminding us of that?”

“Yes, yes, I do, given that priorities could change in a hurry otherwise.”

“So if it was not something we did…”

Caitlin looked toward Sandoval. “You remember telling me what you knew about the formation of Strong’s Raiders back at the Four Seasons in Austin?”

“Of course.”

“Most important being the part about those three generals from Pancho Villa’s army William Ray Strong, my granddad, and the others met over the border not far from this very spot. They gathered around a campfire to figure out how they were going to defeat
esos Demonios,
” Caitlin said. “Hatched a plan to flush them across the border and take them down in El Paso. But I’m guessing things didn’t go as planned, did they?”

“No, Ranger,” Sandoval said, while the cartel leaders exchanged a wary glance, curious as to where this was going. “Not at all.”

Caitlin finally took the chair set at the head of the table. “Why don’t you tell us why, sir? Why don’t you tell us what went wrong?”

64

E
L
P
ASO,
T
EXAS; 1919

“What the hell is this?” William Ray Strong wondered, as soon as Strong’s Raiders pulled into El Paso just after dark on the evening of June 14, the day before the plan to take the fight to
esos Demonios
was to happen.

Pancho Villa’s three generals, who had spoken only through Major Lava, would marshal all their forces in mounting a daring attack on the
esos Demonios
stronghold in Juárez. The object of the raid was to force the enemy to retreat in the only direction available: north, over the International Bridge into El Paso, where Strong’s Raiders would be waiting. At that point Villa’s troops would hold their position on the Mexican side of the bridge to prevent
esos Demonios
from staging a return or retreat, boxing them in and leaving the rest of the battle in the hands of the Rangers.

“Six against a hundred, maybe twice that number if we’re lucky,” William Ray mused to Earl Strong, as they rode into El Paso in a boxy Ford with two rows of seats inside and one on the out. “Lousy odds … for them.”

Earl had smiled back at him. The trailing car, being driven by Monroe Fox with Manuel Gonzaullas riding shotgun, had its backseat occupied by four Thompson machine guns and three Browning automatic rifles. The plan was for Fox and Frank Hamer to set up two of the BARs on rooftops at the south end of El Paso’s main drag, a stone’s throw from the International Bridge, while Gonzaullas and old Bill McDonald aimed Thompsons out fifth-story windows on both sides of the street nearer the center. The Strongs, for their part, would be on the ground, ready with both their twelve-gauge pumps and Thompsons slung from their shoulders by thick leather straps.

The idea, as William Ray explained it, was to catch
esos Demonios
in a classic crossfire. By the time they recovered their wits, he and Earl would move in from the head of the street and treat the enemy with the same consideration with which they had treated the residents of Willow Creek.

“You okay with this?” William Ray asked the newest Texas Ranger before they’d set out, struggling not to mix too much worry with his words.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“’Cause it means killing lots of men.”

Earl fished William Ray’s chewing tobacco pouch from his lapel pocket and packed a wad into his mouth. “These stopped being men when they gunned down women and children. Shooting them ought to be no different from shooting a rabid dog.”

William Ray slapped his son in the back, sending the wad of tobacco jetting from his mouth and leaving Earl spitting out the leftover juice.

“That’s what I needed to hear, boy. Just like ducks on a pond.”

Earl was still trying to rid his mouth of the awful taste, hocking up more and more spittle to little effect. “Except in the daylight we’ll be ducks too.”

William Ray winked at him. “Didn’t tell you what else I got planned, did I?”

The “what else” turned out to be “smoke candles” of the sort invented by Robert Yale in 1848 and based on the principles of seventeenth-century Chinese fireworks. The smoke candles he and Bill McDonald had mixed up the night before were simple enough contraptions consisting of cylindrical cardboard topped with an inch-long fuse. A Comanche Indian chief with whom William Ray had made peace had taught him how to make a slightly different version, calling them “magic balls” because they were round in shape. William Ray improvised on that, but not the relatively simple ingredients that included sugar, sodium bicarbonate, and a chemical called potassium chlorate.

When the time came, he explained to Earl, the four Rangers with the high ground would light and hurl them into the cluster of
esos Demonios
already reeling from the heavy onslaught of fire. William Ray and Earl would then use the camouflage provided by the smoke to take the fight to the Mexicans, while the other Rangers mowed down any who escaped the death circle.

But all that had gone to shit as soon as they reached the outskirts of El Paso and glimpsed what awaited them there.

*   *   *

“What the hell you mean?” William Ray said to the first army officer brave enough to approach the leader of Strong’s Raiders when he reached the head of Central Square in El Paso.

Before them the entire area—streets, rooftops, plazas—had been taken over by elements of the United States Army. And not just the relatively token force assigned to guard the city from any possible intrusion or attack from across the nearby border. From the look of things, this was a major detachment of troops and ordnance that included artillery out of Fort Bliss, seeming to William Ray like preparations for a full-scale war.

“We’ve got our orders—that’s what I mean, sir.”

“Well, son, so do we. From the governor of Texas himself.”

“Well, ours come from the president of the United States. I believe he outranks your governor.”

“Who’s in charge here, son? I need to give him a piece of mind and find out what the hell is going on.”

*   *   *

The officer in charge was Brigadier General James B. Erwin, who’d set up his field headquarters in a makeshift command post to the rear of the Eighty-Second Field Artillery regiment in El Paso’s Union Stockyards.