“Okay, I’m anxious.”
Caitlin shook her head. “You want to try this again?”
Fidgeting, Cort Wesley rose and moved back to the railing, squeezing it hard enough to flush his hands with blood. “Cut me a break here,” he said out toward the front lawn, “will you?”
She resisted the temptation to join him by the railing, knew she should’ve left things there but couldn’t help herself. “You can’t talk to me, who can you talk to, Cort Wesley?”
“Ranger, I’m not gonna say this—”
Her phone rang, sparing him the need to finish his statement. Caitlin wasn’t going to answer it at first, then changed her mind when the Caller ID read
HEADQUARTERS.
“Checking to see if I’m home safe, Captain?”
“Not exactly, Ranger,” said Tepper. “I hope you’re sitting down.”
“Why?”
“We got tentative IDs on the other kids found in Willow Creek and you’re not gonna believe it.”
32
S
AN
A
NTONIO
Cort Wesley decided to stay out on the porch, standing with his elbows perched on the wooden rail overlooking the front yard, when Caitlin went upstairs to try and sleep. The night was comfortably cool and clear enough to see just about every star in the sky if he’d been looking.
Suddenly, he smelled talcum powder layered thick and heavy to disguise a bad scent like a blanket tossed over a fire to smother it. He looked to his right to see the ghost of old Leroy Epps standing there, his thin, liver-spotted hands squeezing the railing in identical fashion to Cort Wesley’s. His lips were pale pink and crinkled with dryness. The thin light from the overhead fixture’s single low-wattage bug bulb cast his brown skin in a yellowish tint. He smiled when he saw Cort Wesley looking his way.
“’Bout time you noticed me, bubba.”
“How long you been standing there, champ?”
“Far as you’re concerned, since right now.”
“Guess you heard.”
“From where I stand, I hear everything. See it too. You should know that by now. Looks like the merry-go-round’s spinning again.”
“When’s it stop?” Cort Wesley asked his old friend’s ghost.
Leroy Epps had been a lifer in the brutal Huntsville prison known as the Walls, busted for killing a white man in self-defense; it was his friendship and guidance that had gotten Cort Wesley through his years in captivity. The diabetes that would ultimately kill him had turned Leroy’s eyes bloodshot and numbed his limbs years before the sores and infections set in. As a boxer, he’d fought for the middleweight crown on three different occasions, knocked out once and had the belt stolen from him on paid-off judges’ scorecards two other times. He’d died three years into Cort Wesley’s four-year incarceration, but ever since always seemed to show up when needed the most. Whether a ghostly specter or a figment of his imagination, Cort Wesley had given up trying to figure out. Just accepted the fact of his presence and grateful that Leroy kept coming around to help him out of one scrape after another.
“Well,”
he said,
“that’s not what brought me here tonight.”
“No? What did, then?”
“Wind’s kicking up, fixing to blow in something big.”
“All the things you can see, you gotta tell me something I already know?” Cort Wesley said to him.
“It’s different this time. What’s brewing seems to come from my neck of the woods.”
“The dead?”
“The past, bubba. You gonna be running into plenty from my side of the fence along the way.”
“Nothing new there.”
Epps took his eyes off Cort Wesley and gazed into the night.
“Gotta buy a ticket there are so many whose attention you’ve grabbed. Yup, you and the Ranger have done spun the wheel of time backwards, that’s what you’ve done.”
Epps looked back at him.
“So I figure I better stop by and let you know you’re playing to an audience.”
“You mind asking them what was it Maura Torres did that’s put my boys in danger?”
“They don’t talk much, bubba. Not nearly as social as me and more than a little jealous that I’ve got a foot in both worlds.”
Cort Wesley swallowed hard. “What about Maura?”
“She’s here. Not right now but she checks in from time to time. And she’s much appreciative of the work the Ranger gal’s been doing with her boys.”
“I’m going to Phoenix to speak with Maura’s sister.”
“This the one that hates your guts?”
“The very same.”
“Well, that oughtta go well, bubba.”
“I’m hoping maybe she knows something that can help.”
“The dead sure can be a pain in the ass, can’t they?”
Cort Wesley just looked at him.
“Maura wishes you’d felt for her the way you feel for the Ranger.”
“Different times, champ, and I was an altogether different man.”
“Yup, you done proven the old at-tage wrong, bubba.”
“What’s that?”
“The one saying that people don’t change, not really. Well, whoever wrote that book didn’t know you, that’s for sure. Your life’s got so many different curves, even one of them race car drivers couldn’t follow the course. But this stop’s the one I fancy most.”
“Nervous father without a clue who’s trying to kill his kids?”
“Father who loves his boys more than life itself and will stop at nothing to protect them. You mind if I asks you a question?”
Cort Wesley’s eyes answered for him.
“How come you don’t just ask the Ranger gal for the money you need?”
Cort Wesley considered a range of responses before opting for the truth. “Pride.”
“Stupid.”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I get the point, champ.”
“You mind if I asks you another question?”
“Maybe I should say no this time.”
“If things were switched, wouldn’t you want her to ask you for help?”
“That’s not fair, champ.”
“Oh no?”
Leroy Epps paused long enough to nod a few times, his tired eyes looking even more watery in the night.
“I ever tell you I broke horses back in the day?”
Cort Wesley held Epps’s milky, bloodshot gaze. “As a matter of fact, no.”
“Was just a boy myself at the time, working on a ranch in Alabama. They always brought me the toughest cases, not just because I was the best at breaking ’em, but also because if a nigger like me got busted up, nobody’d care much.”
Epps stopped, looking past Cort Wesley or maybe through him.
“Reason I mention that is it’s kinda what the Ranger’s done for you, except the comparison’s off: Ranger didn’t break you, bubba, she fixed you.”
Cort Wesley waited for old Leroy’s stare to meet his again. “You say you can see things.”
“Not everything all at once, bubba. More like the view through a telescope, all narrow and confined. Guess there’s limits, but I really don’t get all the rules ’cept there’s less of them than you think.”
“Reason I raise that is I’ve never asked you before what that view’s showing. But this is different, just like you said, champ.”
Epps nodded, looking sad.
“Would if I could, bubba, but there’s too much blur right now.”
“But my boys, just tell me they’re going to be all right.”
Epps shrugged, his bony shoulders poking up through his shirt, the yellow tint to his skin making him look more sickly than dead.
“End’s not written quite yet, bubba.”
“Then maybe a pen would do me more good than a gun this time, champ.”
Epps’s expression remained flat, the bug light staining the whites of his eyes yellow.
“You’re gonna have to spill blood to win this one, not ink.”
Then he looked back into the night again.
“What is it you’re not saying, champ?”
“I’m not saying.”
“Too late for that now.”
Epps continued to stare straight ahead.
“I was here last night when you got home with your youngest after that gunfight.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“No, but I believe
he
did.”
“That can’t be good,” Cort Wesley said, feeling something sink in his stomach.
“No,”
Epps agreed, his grim tone lacking its typical reassurance.
“It ain’t good at all.”
33
N
UEVO
L
AREDO,
M
EXICO
“They normally don’t let visitors in this late.”
“They made an exception in my case,” Ana Callas Guajardo said to the man seated across the table from her.
“It’s also the wrong day.”
“Is it now, Locaro?” She leaned forward, undaunted by the manacles chaining the man’s wrists to the table and legs to the chair. “Maybe I should leave, eh?”
Locaro’s face was a mass of scars and stray patches of beard stubble stuck between ridged layers of tissue that looked like callus. It might have been more dramatic, even fitting, to say these were the product of one battle or another. The truth, though, was that they were a genetic defect, something to do with the skin malfunctioning at the cellular level. Kept reproducing cells and storing them inside the clumps that made his face look like a mogul-laden ski slope. The clumps were like boils, occasionally leaking pus that made people seated or standing near him in public relocate in a hurry. As a teenager, Locaro had once taken a tweezers and nail file to them, succeeding only in making things worse.
The half-light of the small room cast shadows over Locaro’s face that seemed to get trapped between the ridges. After only a few moments in the room with him, Guajardo found herself nearly retching from the stench of his unwashed body and oozing pus, which looked shiny when the meager spill of light found it dotting his face.
“You want me to leave?” she repeated.
“Did I say that?”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“What are you doing here,
mi hermanita
?”
“I’ve arranged for your release. You’ve been granted a full pardon.”
Locaro showed no reaction or emotion at all. He just sat there, rocking his chair back as far as his manacles would allow. “What do you need me to do?”
“No thank-you, no show of appreciation after three years in solitary confinement?”
“I like being alone.”
“And you haven’t been allowed in the yard, even alone, for nearly a year after killing, what, your fifth prisoner?”
“Sixth. And two guards,” Locaro added, almost proudly.
“I need you to kill two children,” Guajardo told him.
Locaro scratched at the ridges dotting his face, wiping the pus off on his prison-issue trousers. “You spring me from here to take out a couple kids?”
“They’re protected.”
“By who?”
“Texas Ranger and her boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?”
“The Ranger’s a woman.”
“Caitlin Strong…”
“You know her?”
“I know she’s a woman.”
“Her boyfriend did a stretch in Cereso not too long ago.” Guajardo held Locaro’s gaze to see if a spark of recognition flared, continuing when it didn’t. “Cort Wesley Masters.”
His eyes widened slightly. “He killed almost as many men as me while he was in here. Got away with it clean ’cause it was in those death fights. I offered a guard
mucho dinero
to let me fight him. Tough
hombre.
”
“Too tough?”
“Nobody’s too tough.”
“There’s more.”
Locaro leaned forward again. “You got my attention.”
“Colonel Guillermo Paz.”
Locaro’s cheek quivered, like a nervous tic.
“And he’s got backup of his own,” Ana told him.
“Then I’ll need some too.”
“Tell me where to find it.”
“You won’t have to go far.” Locaro looked about dramatically. “Here in Cereso. Men almost as bad as me, just not as pretty,” he said.
Guajardo waited for a smile to accompany the quip, but none came. “How many?”
“A dozen, ten maybe. I’ll give you the names.”
“That’s a lot of pardons to pull off.”
“You want these kids dead, that’s what it’ll take given the opposition,
mi hermanita.
”
Ana Guajardo stiffened. “I haven’t been your sister for a very long time.”
Locaro smiled, starting to cross his arms until remembering the manacles that creaked under the strain.
“Tu eres el motivo de mi existencia,”
he told her. Then, adding with a smirk, “You are
still
the fountain of my being.”
She needed him and he knew it. Guajardo hated needing anyone. But there were limits to everything, even money and power, and it was left to the likes of her brother, Locaro, to deal with those limits.
“After all,” Locaro added, taunting her, “
la familia lo es todo.”
“I’ll need the names of the men you want released.”
“Do you have a pen?”
“They wouldn’t let me bring one in here. Said you killed a man with one by stabbing him through the eye.”
“Almost forgot that one,
mi hermanita
.”
“Prison can make a man soft. So tell me,
mi hermano,
are you still the man I remember?”
Locaro laid both hands on the table and stretched the chain binding them together. He grinned as he squeezed his fingers into fists, the veins bursting from his wrists and forearms, his hands trembling, as he began to force them further apart. Guajardo thought she heard a grating sound, followed by a crackling before the chain split at a link in the center.
Still grinning, Locaro folded his hands behind his head. She could smell his sweat now, adding further to the stench that rode him like a swarm of insects.
“Any other questions?” he asked his sister.
But her eyes were fixed on the smartphone that had just beeped with an incoming message.
“I have to be going,” Guajardo said, rising after she’d read it.
“Trouble?”