“It wasn’t, sir. We’ve now identified the other four kids who were found in Willow Creek with your son,” Caitlin continued, easing her smartphone from her pocket and locating the pictures Captain Tepper had e-mailed her the previous night. “Could you check these out and tell me if you recognize any of the faces?”
“I thought you said they’d already been identified.”
“They have. But I want to see if they’re familiar to you.”
Sandoval scrolled through the pictures in cursory fashion before handing the phone back to Caitlin. “I don’t know any of them. Who are they, Ranger?”
Caitlin jogged through the pictures herself as she responded. “Three are children of two of the biggest drug cartel leaders in Mexico.”
37
S
COTTSDALE,
A
RIZONA
Cort Wesley saw the bodies first, then the blood. Araceli Ramirez and her businessman husband lying facedown on the stone tile floor. He felt chilled, immediately conscious of the central air-conditioning filling the house with supercooled air and recalled Maura saying how much her sister detested the heat.
“You want me to check upstairs?”
Cort Wesley turned toward Dylan, now standing just inside the open doorway with Luke peeking out from behind him. “No,” he said, instead of reprimanding the boys for disregarding his instructions. “Not much doubt what’s gonna be up there and I don’t want you seeing it.”
Cort Wesley moved from the foyer into the sprawling living and dining room combination, careful not to disturb the crime scene. Funny how having a Texas Ranger in his life had changed his thinking in such things.
This was bad, very bad. It wasn’t about Maura Torres at all, but her whole family. Someone exacting revenge, payback, comeuppance—whatever—for something that must have happened long before that Maura had never shared with him.
“Ain’t this a mess?”
said Leroy Epps, suddenly standing between the two corpses, avoiding the blood pools.
“How’d this go down, bubba?”
“Happened early this morning.”
“How you figure that?”
“Kids’ backpacks are still in the foyer, like they were packed for school.”
Old Leroy cast his bloodshot gaze back that way. The backpacks were out of sight from here, but Cort Wesley thought maybe ghosts had no trouble seeing around corners.
“Two backpacks meaning two more bodies upstairs, boy and a girl judging by the colors. What else, bubba?”
Cort Wesley continued forward, close enough to Leroy Epps to smell the talcum powder slathered over his skin and fresh root beer soda on his breath. “Low-caliber shots to the head. One each. Very professional.”
“Dad?” Dylan prodded.
“Whoever did this,” Cort Wesley continued to Leroy Epps, “didn’t need to do any more than that to make their point, champ.”
“Who you talking to?” Dylan persisted.
“Just thinking out loud.”
“Then who’s ‘champ’?”
Cort Wesley swung toward his oldest son. “Maybe you should take your brother back outside.”
“We’re safer in here.”
“Killers are long gone.”
Dylan and Luke both looked past their father toward the bodies, stray clumps atop the polished tile. Both wearing light-colored clothes that beneath the dull recessed lighting looked like extensions of the floor.
“He’s right, son,”
Leroy Epps said, and for an instant, just an instant, Cort Wesley thought he caught Dylan looking the ghost’s way.
“You make your way into the kitchen, bubba, check and see if there’s any root beer in the fridge.”
His big, dull eyes regarded the corpses again.
“Don’t suppose they’ll be drinking it anytime soon.”
“Maybe he can help protect us,” Dylan was saying now.
“Who?”
“Whoever it is you’re talking to.”
“Myself. I told you that.”
“Sure, Dad,” the boy scoffed, “whatever you say.”
“Boy’s got himself an attitude, don’t he?”
“Guess he takes after his father, champ.”
Dylan rolled his eyes. “There you go again.”
Old Leroy looked from the bodies to Dylan and Luke.
“Whoever did this likely ain’t finished. And if they happened to be figuring on you coming here…”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“How ’bout help just arrived, bubba.”
And Cort Wesley turned to find Guillermo Paz looming in the doorway.
38
A
USTIN,
T
EXAS
“The second-oldest boy and youngest girl were brother and sister, the children of Alejandro Luis Rojas, second in command of the Juárez cartel. That leaves one boy and one girl, each ten years old. The boy was the son of Juan Ramon Castillo, ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel cadre. The girl was the daughter of a high school teacher from Mexico City who’s currently sick in the hospital.”
“A teacher,” Sandoval repeated.
“Which tells me this isn’t about drugs, sir. It’s about something else, and I want you to know I won’t rest until I determine exactly what that is.”
“It makes no sense,” Sandoval said, sounding like someone else entirely to Caitlin. “Risking the wrath of some of the most powerful men in Mexico…”
“No, sir, it doesn’t.”
“
Ay Dios mío,
” Sandoval managed, drifting backward until his shoulders sank into the rear cushion.
“What is it, Mr. Sandoval?”
His eyes found hers again. “Willow Creek, Ranger.”
“I imagine you don’t believe that’s a coincidence any more than I do,” Caitlin said, recalling the rise she’d gotten out of him when she mentioned the town’s name.
“Not at all, Ranger,” he told her, leaning forward. “Not at all.”
39
A
USTIN,
T
EXAS; 1919
“I don’t believe I heard you correctly,” Adjutant General James Harley said, after taking a hefty swig from his bottle of milk of magnesia.
“I believe you did,” said William Ray Strong, leaning as far back as the stiff, high-backed wooden chair set before Harley’s desk would let him.
Harley held the bottle of antacid up for William Ray and his son, Earl, to see. “You know why I been living on this stuff? On account of the shit pulled by the likes of you.”
William Ray knew full well he was referring to the most infamous episode in the Rangers’ storied history, that being a massacre of fifteen Mexican civilians the year before in the tiny community of Porvenir, Texas, on the Mexican border in western Presidio County. His son, Earl, had shown him a widely circulated picture of Captain Monroe Fox and two other Rangers on horseback with their lariats around the bodies of dead Mexican bandits. That past January, numerous similar reports had led to an investigation by the Texas Legislature in the person of Representative José T. Canales of Brownsville. After hearing testimony, the legislature passed a bill that reduced the number of Rangers, pretty much bringing an end to the days of glory that had culminated with the exploits of the Frontier Battalion in which William Ray had served.
For his part, Adjutant General Harley, the de facto supervisor of all Ranger companies, had fought to preserve as much of their legacy and number as he could. Try as he may, though, he was unable to convince lawmakers that the breakdown of law and order on the border during the Mexican Revolution necessitated the appointment of hundreds of new special Rangers without sufficient training or seasoning in keeping with the organization’s storied tradition. The fact that these “wildings,” as Harley called them, were the true culprits fell on deaf ears and he announced his retirement effective in just a few months’ time once the hearings had concluded. As a result, his modest office in the State House was already littered with boxes in various stages of packing.
“You know how many Mexicans Rangers are accused of killing in the last decade?” Harley challenged William Ray, laying his bottle of milk of magnesia back on the desktop.
“No, sir.”
“As many as five thousand. That’s five with three zeroes. You people still think this is the last century, with Rangers having free rein to kill as you see fit.”
William Ray turned his gaze to the boxes strewn about the room. “We can talk like this ’til it’s time to haul that cardboard out of here, or we can get down to business.”
“Business being this plan of yours to pretty much declare war on Mexico.”
“Not really, since they already declared war on us by bringing their poison over the border and heading back south with cash in its stead. It’s spreading east from Baja and if we don’t do something about it, this will be the last century again for sure, with waves of Mexican bandits crossing the border to move opium through Texas and beyond with no Rangers there to stop them.”
Harley wrinkled his nose and stifled a belch. It was raining outside and the windows rattled under the force of the wind and hail pellets that sounded like marbles when they smacked up against the glass.
“You trust this Lava?” he asked William Ray.
“I trust he’s telling the truth about these
esos Demonios
. I trust that they murdered the entire town of Willow Creek. I trust that we’ll see more of the same if we don’t act fast.”
Harley reached for his bottle of milk of magnesia and unscrewed the cap. “What do you need exactly, Ranger?”
* * *
What William Ray needed arrived in Austin over the course of the following three days in the form of a select group of Rangers.
“No one can ever know about this,” Harley told him. “Governor finds out and he’ll find call to hang both of us.”
“He won’t find out and there’ll be no call.”
Harley gave William Ray a long look over his desk. “I’m trusting you with what’s left of my career, Ranger. Don’t let me down.”
“You can count on it, sir.”
The first to arrive in Austin was Captain Frank Hamer, still serving a suspension for allegedly stalking, and even threatening, Representative José T. Canales for daring to besmirch the Ranger name and reputation. Hamer had already made his name as a throwback to the old-school Rangers, who used whatever methods were necessary to get whatever was needed done.
Arriving just behind him was the same Monroe Fox who had been relieved of his Ranger command and duties following the investigation into the massacre that had followed bandit raids on a number of farms. Fox had fallen on his sword, making no excuses for his actions while knowing full well he was being made the scapegoat for a decade of brutal indiscretion on the part of the Rangers, who had decided to fight fire with fire in what had become an all-out border war. A former Austin policeman, Fox was big-boned and heavyset, but with a baby face that belied the violence that, rightly or wrongly, had come to define his Ranger career.
The next member of the team was an utter stranger, given that he had only recently applied for entry into the Rangers. Manuel Trazazas Gonzaullas was the one name added by Adjutant General Harley, who requested he be reassigned from his current position as a special agent for the U.S. Treasury Department. Gonzaullas had been born in Cádiz, Spain, of naturalized American citizens visiting that country at the time of his birth. He’d actually spent several years in the Mexican army prior to going to work for Treasury and, as such, was well acquainted with the tactics and thinking William Ray’s team would be facing.
The final name on his list had drawn a raised eyebrow and smirk from James Harley. “Great choice, ’cept he’s been dead for a year.”
William Ray scribbled an address on a piece of Harley’s official stationery and handed it to him. “Then it’ll be his ghost who gets the telegram.”
Two days later, in response to that telegram, famed Ranger captain Bill McDonald became the last of the group to arrive, even though his death from pneumonia had been widely reported nearly a year before.
“Hell of a thing, reading your own obituary,” he told William Ray Strong and his son, Earl, when they picked McDonald up at the train station.
“Something that could have been corrected, sir,” Earl noted, stopping just short of asking the Ranger legend for his autograph.
“Thought about that for two seconds maybe,” McDonald relayed wryly, flashing a wink. “Then I figured I could use the privacy for a change.” A laugh dissolved into a retching cough that left him red-faced and heaving for air. “Not that the damn pneumonia won’t get me eventually, ’less of course something else does first.”
“Not on my watch,” William Ray assured him.
As a legendary Ranger captain, McDonald had taken part in a number of celebrated cases, including the Fitzsimmons-Maher prize fight, the Wichita Falls bank robbery, the Reese-Townsend feud, and the Brownsville Raid of 1906. A man, it was said, “who would charge hell with a bucket of water.”
“Got a question for you, sir,” Earl Strong chimed in. “Did you really come up with the phrase ‘One riot, one Ranger’?”
McDonald stifled another cough and winked. “If I didn’t, son, I sure as hell should have.”
* * *
Adjutant General Harley put “Strong’s Raiders,” as they came to be known, up in the Driskill Hotel on Sixth Street in the center of downtown Austin. The showplace hotel had been built by cattle baron Jesse Driskill in 1886 and was the choice locale of any number of dignitaries, including Texas governor William Hobby, who held his first inaugural ball there. Strong’s Raiders met in a side meeting room adorned with ferns left over from the celebration.
“Must be allergic or something,” the famed Bill McDonald said, after a fresh coughing spasm overcame him.
“Not bad for a dead man,” chided Frank Hamer.
“We’re all gonna be dead sooner or later. Can’t control that, son, but we can control the terms of the arrangement.”
“I thought you’d be bigger,” Hamer told him.
McDonald looked the hulking Hamer in the eye. “Just like I thought you’d be smaller.”
“You finished, ladies?” said William Ray, the lone among them standing now. “Good. Now you all know what brought you here, leaving us to consider where we go next. What you don’t know is that we’re not in this fight alone. There’s Mexicans my boy, Earl, and I believe are in it with us who’ve got damn near as much to lose as we do.”