“Now you’re talking, son,” said Frank Hamer.
“
Señores,
” began Lava, as the Mexican generals shook their heads vociferously, “taking
esos Demonios
on in Mexico would be suicide, even for the likes of you.”
“Who said anything about taking them on in Mexico?” raised William Ray Strong.
52
S
AN
A
NTONIO
“The Battle of Juárez,” Tepper realized.
“Happened just the next month, in June of nineteen-nineteen,” Caitlin told him.
“What you’re saying doesn’t exactly match how history ended up weighing in on the subject, Ranger.”
“Truth be told, my grandfather never said much about things beyond that. It was one of the last tales he ever told me, like he was saving it for the end. Turned out to be the one he never got to finish,” Caitlin said, suddenly sad over the memories stirred of her legendary grandfather, making her miss the man who’d practically raised her even more.
Tepper ran a finger in and out of the furrows lining his face before responding. “You ever figure Earl never finished the story ’cause he had reason not to?”
“I suppose that’s why I never looked for all the answers before.”
“But here you are doing that now.”
“Something connects the attempts on Dylan and Luke Torres’s lives with the other murdered children in Willow Creek. And that something is somehow related to Mateo Torres and Enrique Cantú stealing marijuana from Regent Tawls’s farm back in my father’s day. I find out how all that fits together and I can get to the bottom of who’s behind the killings.”
“Same party is likely to try for Cort Wesley’s boys again, Ranger.”
“I’ve thought about that too.”
“Not even your friend Paz can keep them safe forever,” Tepper said, a degree of both caution and harshness framing his words.
“Who said anything about Paz?”
“You didn’t have to. Man walks on water now, thanks to your friend Jones…”
“
My
friend?”
“… like he’s been given a damn free pass for every bad thing he’s done. In my mind, a man saying he’s sorry for shooting you in the gut don’t make it hurt any less.”
Tepper shook his head and looked for a fresh cigarette to light, as Caitlin’s cell phone rang and she excused herself to answer it.
“Regent Tawls calling, Ranger,” said the familiar gravelly voice. “I believe there’s something I left out of our conversation yesterday.”
53
G
UADALAJARA,
M
EXICO
Ana Callas Guajardo always took a security detail with her when she traveled to visit her business interests in Guadalajara. Two cars, one leading and one trailing the bulletproof Lincoln Town Car in which she rode. Kidnapping was big business in this part of the country and Guajardo knew the power she held didn’t render her immune to that.
For any number of years Guadalajara had escaped the drug violence that plagued the rest of Mexico. That was, until relatively recently, when the Zetas, a cartel composed primarily of former soldiers from Mexico’s Special Forces, saw an opportunity to take over the city’s methamphetamine trade lurking beneath the surface of what many called the Silicon Valley of Mexico.
With good reason. Sitting on a mile-high plateau in western Mexico, Guadalajara had sprouted into the country’s main producer of software and electronic and digital components. Guajardo knew that telecom and computer equipment manufactured in the city accounted for over a quarter of Mexico’s exports in electronics and that companies like General Electric, IBM, Intel, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, Flextronics, and Oracle had set up shop there. All welcomed by Guajardo in no small part because they enabled her to better keep her own modest software company under the radar.
She’d named the company Zuñiga after Tlajomulco de Zuñiga, the sprawling slum-riddled county where both her parents had been born. Zuñiga was nestled amid other companies and buildings just like it in a software park located on the western edge of the city. Guajardo’s convoy passed through security en route to an underground garage where more armed security personnel would be waiting.
A captain in the
federal
police saluted her stiffly as she emerged from the rear of the Town Car and escorted her into an elevator with two more of his men and three of hers. They rode not up, but down, to a secret, secured floor of the Zuñiga building where two-dozen software engineers toiled without distraction or danger, including the two Americans who’d been supervising the final stages of this part of her operation for over a year now.
The elevator doors opened and Guajardo felt immediately chilled by a blast of reprocessed air. Strange how, as she grew older, she found herself colder more times than she could ever remember. A priest whose church she’d leveled because it sat on land too valuable to leave to God had once told her the depths of her soul were a frozen wasteland. In moments like these, when she felt so chilled, Guajardo couldn’t help but take him literally.
The lighting down here was dimmer than above, more ambient and less harsh, as she let the entourage lead her along the hallway to an open door at the end.
“No way, dude,” she heard emanating loudly from within, “Chamberlain’s got Russell beat six ways to Sunday.”
“Chamberlain?” a second voice came back.
“Wilt the Stilt, man, Wilt the Stilt. Scored a freaking hundred points in a single game.”
“Oh yeah. But how many championships did he win? No, dude, Bill Russell is the man!” A brief pause followed as Guajardo neared the door, then, “He shoots and …
scores
! Game over, man, game over!”
The two young men high-fived each other and then quickly stiffened, spotting Guajardo standing in the doorway, her guards stationed just out of sight beyond.
“And what about the game I hired you to play?” she asked them.
54
G
UADALAJARA,
M
EXICO
One of the young men switched off the 3-D video game as Ana entered the room and closed the door behind her. In the brief glimpse Guajardo had caught, the basketball players had seemed amazingly lifelike, right down to the sweat dripping off their bodies to disappear into some virtual ether. She actually found herself looking at the top of the conference table to see if the basketball was still resting there.
“You developed this,” she said to the two young men. They’d turned the room’s lights down to better enjoy the video game, an ashtray on the table lined with the refuse of marijuana cigarettes rolled in cigar paper. A sweet grape smell hung in the air, mixing with stale cannabis yet to be washed out by the air-conditioning that hummed softly in the background.
“Sure did,” said the taller, bushy-haired one, whose eyes were glassy over the grin that looked painted onto his face. John. Last name not important.
“In our spare time,” added the squatter one, whose khaki pants fit him too snugly. David. Last name not important.
“Spare time,” Guajardo noted, not bothering to hide her displeasure. “I’m surprised you had any, given the responsibility with which you’ve been entrusted.”
“That’s because we’re the best,” John said, rising to pull a chair back for Guajardo. “Let us demonstrate, my lady.”
She took her seat, holding his gaze sternly the whole time. The other one, David, took a fancy remote control device in hand and began working the buttons. Suddenly, a three-dimensional map of the United States appeared before her, the state of Texas even with Guajardo’s face until the map began to rotate.
“First subject of the day,” John said. “Population distribution.”
Working in tandem with him, David pressed some keys on the remote and various shades of red, ranging from pink to rose to scarlet, appeared in varying swatches across the map. The largest centers of population were the darkest.
“Here’s a simple fact, my lady,” John continued. “Eighty-two percent of the population of the United States is concentrated in roughly ten percent of the country’s landmass. You can see why that’s important to our plan.”
“I believe I do.”
“Second subject of the day: what this means exactly. Let’s look at things in terms of sports. Baseballs, basketballs, and footballs.”
“Because we’d already created the icons,” David chimed in, looking up from the remote. “For those games we’ve been working on.”
“In your spare time,” Guajardo echoed.
“Right. Sure.”
“Basketballs first, fifty-eight hundred of them.”
With that, tiny basketballs appeared all over the moving map. Tightly clustered and even layered over one another in the more populated areas, but with space to spare in the light-colored pink places.
“Next,” Jon picked up, “footballs. There are about ten thousand of those.”
The footballs flashed on the map as green oblong shapes with almost identical distribution density as the basketballs.
“And now baseballs, numbering just over a hundred thousand.”
The baseballs appeared as mere pinpricks across the map.
“For our purposes, let’s eliminate the baseballs,” John told Guajardo. “That leaves us with only the footballs and the basketballs. Focus on that ten percent area accounting for eighty-two percent of the total population, and this is what you’re left with.”
“How many basketballs?” Guajardo said, rising to better acquaint herself with the three-dimensional map.
“Roughly two thousand.”
“And footballs?”
“Thirty-five hundred would be a fair estimation.”
“And if you reduced the number of basketballs to fifteen hundred or so?”
David worked the keys on the remote, doing just that. Guajardo watched basketballs drop off the projected map into nothingness.
“Seventy-five percent of the population would still be affected,” John told her.
“But the remaining twenty-five wouldn’t be far behind,” David added. “Thanks to the ripple effect. We’ve done a lot of research into the ripple effect.”
“Show me,” Guajardo ordered. “Show me this ripple effect.”
John took a hefty swallow before nodding to David, who returned the map to its original scope with the total number of all three balls displayed at once. The result was a congestion of colors and shapes that made for a vast rainbow-like blotch.
“Zero hour,” John said.
And a few keystrokes from David later, a large percentage of the footballs, baseballs, and basketballs concentrated in the most populated areas of the United States vanished.
“Zero hour plus one day.”
Another hefty portion of balls dropped off the map, spreading beyond the brightest population grids.
“Zero hour plus three days.”
And with that the rest of the balls in those areas were gone, leaving only those concentrated in rural and less populated areas in place.
“Zero hour plus four days.”
The balls were all but gone.
“Can’t be a hundred percent sure of the time frame,” John reported, “but this is well within the margin of error, my lady.”
Ana Callas Guajardo found herself staring at the map spinning slowly over the table before her, all but a very, very few of the balls that had formed all that clutter missing.
“Game over,” from John, grinning now.
“Yeah,” David echoed, summoning the best Spanish he could muster with a slight giggle. “
Se acabó el juego.
”
55
S
AN
A
NTONIO
“You’re kidding, right?” Cort Wesley said to Dylan.
“It’s the district championship, Dad. I’m captain of the goddamn team.”
“I believe I already know that, and I’d appreciate you not taking that tone with me.”
The last of the afternoon sun was fading from the sky, the first signs of dusk appearing to appear in the form of shadows stretching over the lawn and beginning a steady climb up the porch steps. Cort Wesley hadn’t switched the porch light on yet, making Dylan’s face look darker and older. Too much like his mother, especially today. Last thing Cort Wesley needed.
He realized he was blocking what little light there was and stepped aside to little effect.
“What tone?” his oldest son asked him.
“There you go again.”
“What?” Dylan snapped, exasperated.
“Rolling your eyes.”
“I didn’t roll my eyes.”
“Yes, you did.”
Dylan blew the long hair from his face. The fading light seemed to steal the whites from his deep-set eyes, narrowed harshly now on Cort Wesley.
“You see me do that too?” he asked, before storming into the house, stopping on the lip of the doorjamb. “I just wanna play in the championship game. I just want a normal life. Is that too much to ask?”
“Right now it is, yeah.”
He slammed the door behind him, and Cort Wesley turned around to find Caitlin Strong standing there on the grass just short of the porch.
“Thought I heard you,” he managed.
“I tried to be quiet.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t chirp up to take Dylan’s side. Good thing he didn’t notice you, or I’d have someone else to be pissed at.”
Caitlin started up the stairs, drawing even with the edge of the shadows. “Cort Wesley—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Ranger.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“Dylan wants to play in the lacrosse game at St. Anthony’s tomorrow night.”
“I know.”
“You
knew
?”
“That there was a championship game at the school tomorrow night.” She reached him on the porch and laid her hand on a shoulder that felt like banded steel, hot to the touch, as if it had been baking in the sun. “But that’s not what I’m here about.”
“Like you need a reason to come by?” he asked shaking his head, his emotions twisted like cheesecloth.
“I had another talk with Regent Tawls, Cort Wesley.”
56
S
AN
A
NTONIO
“What can I do for you, Mr. Tawls?” Caitlin had asked earlier in a day spent mostly following up on leads buried long in the past. She’d put her phone on speaker and laid it between her and D. W. Tepper atop the Denny’s booth.