“Well,” Earl Strong said to his father, “I wonder who we’ll be taking down today.”
* * *
“You smell that, son?” William Ray asked as they approached the outskirts of Willow Creek.
Earl realized the boy was digging into him tighter with his fingers, as if he’d caught the scent too. “Afraid I don’t, sir, not yet.”
The breeze was blowing up from the southwest, the town’s direction. Earl Strong couldn’t smell a thing besides the heat dust baked into the air, his own sweat, and the fear on the boy, who clung tighter to him the closer they drew to the home he’d fled.
As soon as they hit the end of the town’s single main road, Earl caught the aroma on the air he knew could only come from dead bodies. The main thoroughfare was rimmed by a few nests of small homes set back on either side and dotting the surrounding flatlands. All were colored brown to match the mud that dominated the streets in the rainy season. Today, though, dust hung in the air like a cloud, whipped up by the wind into mini-tornado spouts to leave residue on everything it touched. Remnants of the railroad were still in place in the form of piles of rails and ties gathering dust and a partially dug bed that looked as if it had been abandoned almost the very day it had been started.
Both Rangers saw the buzzards circling overhead and swarms of black flies hanging above the street like storm clouds. A number of bodies grew visible once they drew to within a couple hundred feet of the center of the street, mere dark specks at first growing rapidly until the shapeless, flaccid forms of what had been human beings little more than a day before became clear. The Strongs’ horses caught the scent on the breeze and fought their riders a bit, flaring their nostrils and whinnying.
“This ain’t good,” said Earl, feeling the boy’s fingernails digging into his flesh through his shirt now. The kid was whimpering, sobbing, mumbling words Earl couldn’t discern.
“About what I expected,” William Ray followed.
The boy was shaking terribly by the time they stopped and dismounted well short of the bodies that had attracted the flies and buzzards.
William Ray crouched before the boy this time. “Son, we’re gonna leave you in charge of our horses. Now, what you gotta know is that, like Rangers, these horses are duly sworn to protect innocent Texans from harm. Anybody tries to hurt you is gonna have to go through a couple tons of angry muscle to get it done. Nod if you understand.”
The boy nodded. Once.
“Blackie,” William Ray said to his horse, “you know the drill.”
And the horse flipped its head, shaking its mane, as if to acknowledge the Ranger’s words, before moving closer to the boy and nuzzling him with its mouth.
“Atta boy,” William Ray muttered, yanking his Winchester rifle from its saddle sheath and jacking a round into the chamber.
“Guess that explains the real reason why you don’t cotton to those motorcars much,” Earl said, as they moved down the center of the street through the last of the day’s sun.
“How’s that?”
“Can’t train a car to babysit.”
William Ray’s hand stayed close to his .45. “How many reside here, Ranger Earl?”
“Fifty these days, maybe give or take ten. The rest of civilization lies more to the north, from where we came, plenty safer from Mexican bandits. Means any other survivors probably would’ve lit out that way too.”
“Yup, that’s what I was thinking. Why don’t we go see what we can see, Ranger Earl.”
The first body they came upon lay in the center of the street between a saloon on one side of the street and a shuttered livery on the other. A big man wearing suspenders but missing his boots, a double-barreled shotgun still in his hands when William Ray turned him over.
“Man’s been shot front and back, Dad,” Earl noted.
William Ray was checking the shotgun. “Both chambers empty, meaning he got off at least two shots. You see that brighter patch up where his heart used to beat?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m guessing there was a badge there and we’re looking at the local law. Came out of the saloon after somebody, when he got opened up on from both directions.”
“So they took his badge as a souvenir.”
“Sound familiar?”
Earl was about to say it did indeed, from the many battles Rangers fought against Mexican bandits, when William Ray spotted something glinting in the sun atop the gravel street. “Well, look what we got here.…”
He knelt down and plucked a shell casing from the street. “Looks like somebody put one more into him for good measure from in close. Give me a read on the caliber, Ranger Earl,” he followed, handing the shell to his son.
“Seven millimeter,” Earl noted.
“Keep talking, son.”
“Fired from a Mauser pistol, kind unique to Mexico. Standard army issue, as I recall.”
“Carried by Pancho Villa’s men too, I seem to recall.”
Earl handed William Ray back the shell casing. “Kind of bullet you see displayed in those bandoliers Mexican gunmen and soldiers are known for wearing.”
That was enough to push them both into silence, recalling the boy’s drawing, until William Ray finally rose and tilted his gaze toward the saloon. “Let’s go see what they left for us next, son.”
* * *
If Earl’s count was correct, most of the remaining townspeople had gathered here, the body count inside stretching into the dozens. Black flies swarmed wildly about, making the air look stained dark in patches. William Ray and Earl figured the heat had started turning the bodies sour ahead of normal timing. It was one thing to see the remains of outlaws, criminals, or would-be gunmen made brave by drink. It was another to see women and children among the fallen. It was enough to make William Ray and Earl feel their mouths go dry and stomachs quake with bile and gas.
“What you make of the spacing of the corpses, Ranger Earl?”
“I’d say a bunch were lined up against the wall and executed.”
“Anything else tell you that?”
“Well,” Earl said, feeling about that wall, until he came to what he was looking for and pried it out. “How about this?” he asked and handed his father the bullet he’d pried free. “Seven millimeter,” he added.
William Ray nodded in agreement. “Yup, a Mauser for sure.” Then he shook his head, his expression that of a man who’d just eaten an onion and washed it down with straight lemon juice. “But what could account for a massacre like this?”
Earl was crouching over the bodies now, moving from one to another. “Well, to start with, I don’t believe this was Pancho Villa’s work, sir.”
“Son?”
“His ammo supply’s dried up to just about nothing since he mixed it up with General Pershing. I heard told to save bullets he took to executing two prisoners at a time with a single bullet.”
“Bet that didn’t go so well.”
“Point being that whoever mowed these folks down was firing about as random as it gets.” Earl tilted his gaze behind him now. “As many rounds found that wall back there as did flesh. They were firing like they enjoyed it, like it was sport.”
“What in hell were they doing in Willow Creek? Better question being what the hell went wrong when they got here?”
Earl rose, brushing off his pants as if to ward off the stench. “Maybe we got the timing wrong. Maybe that sheriff and his shotgun started things and the killers didn’t want to leave any witnesses after they took down the bodies we saw in the street. Or maybe they were making the point that they were just not to be messed with.”
“Maybe that boy can tell us,” William Ray had just added when Blackie neighed loudly outside.
He held his son’s stare as they moved for the door and burst out from the saloon side by side, the dusk sky giving up riders coming in fast from the south and the Mexican side of the border.
Earl and William Ray stood their ground, Earl with the Colt drawn now and his father with the Winchester grasped so tight his hands had turned bright red.
“You remember what I told you before?”
“No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.”
“True enough. Now let’s kill us some men,” said William Ray Strong, eyeing the badge pinned proudly to his son’s shirt.
“That’s if they are men,” Earl replied, thinking of that drawing the boy had done of skeletons wearing bandoliers. “You can’t kill something that’s already dead.”
“You ever try that, son?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you can’t be sure, can you?” William Ray hocked up some spittle and steadied the Winchester higher, as the oncoming riders kicked up a torrent of dust in their wake. “Anyway, welcome to the Texas Rangers.”
16
S
AN
A
NTONIO, THE PRESENT
“I never heard old Earl tell that one,” Tepper said when Caitlin had finished. “I’m guessing it wasn’t zombies with skulls for heads that came riding in.”
“That’s besides the point.”
“What is the point, Ranger?”
“Five kids found dead in the very place where a whole town preceded them over ninety years ago? You trying to tell me that’s a coincidence?”
“Here we go again.…”
“Where’s that exactly, Captain?”
“To a place where the legendary Caitlin Strong sees the forest but not the trees.”
“And your point is?”
Tepper just shook his head. “Know why I can’t retire? Because Austin can’t find a single man willing to become your superior. I think they might start Texas Ranger Company G with you as the sole solitary member.”
Caitlin looked across the desk at him. “By the way, I never did thank you, Captain.”
“For what?”
“The lights at St. Anthony’s school.”
Tepper pretended to be baffled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Ranger. And you best get a move on; chopper leaves for Willow Creek in twenty minutes.”
17
W
ILLOW
C
REEK,
T
EXAS
Caitlin covered the four hundred miles to Willow Creek in the helicopter recently allocated to Ranger Company F. The airborne route was a straight line over what to a great extent was a scrub-riddled wasteland dotted by the shells of towns along the Mexican border that had died when their water dried up and the modern world seemed to forget them. It was like an alley of emptiness and despair roasting in the sun, lifeless save for prairie dogs, mule deer, grazing pronghorn antelope, and small piglike animals called javelinas that thrived amid the brush of this semiarid desert.
She’d been told the helicopter had come from an allotment dispensed by Homeland Security, and she could see her old friend Jones’s prints all over the deal, a lame attempt at making nice after he’d hung her out to dry the year before. Accompanying Caitlin was Frank Dean Whatley, who’d been the Bexar County medical examiner since the time she’d been in diapers. He’d grown a belly in recent years that hung out over his thin belt, seeming to force his spine to angle inward at the torso. Whatley’s teenage son had been killed by Latino gangbangers when Caitlin was a mere kid herself. Ever since then, he’d harbored a virulent hatred for that particular race, from the bag boys at the local H-E-B to the politicians who professed to be peacemakers. With his wife first lost in life and then death to alcoholism, he’d probably stayed in the job too long. But he had nothing to go home to, no real life outside the office, and remained exceptionally good at performing the rigors of his job.
“You seen the crime scene photos local authorities forwarded to us on this yet?” Whatley asked her.
“I didn’t even know there were any.”
“Got transmitted this morning via e-mail. I’d show them to you,” Whatley said, tapping the worn and cracked leather case in which he carried the tools of his trade, “but the ride’s hard enough on the stomach as it is.”
He left things there and Caitlin didn’t press him for more. Instead, she let her mind wander to the times these lands would have been occupied by all manner of bandit and renegade Indian whom the Texas Rangers had battled alone for decades. Before her great-grandfather William Ray Strong had come to Willow Creek, he’d served in the famed Frontier Battalion after the battalion’s glory days were done and the ranks of their enemies had been decimated. The years that followed had been especially hard on the last of the old-school Rangers, what with the appearance of motorcars and organized crime. The Frontier Battalion, she guessed, didn’t know how good they had it compared to twentieth-century Rangers, who were up against as many guns to go with far more sophisticated criminal networks thanks in large part to the drug war Captain George W. Arrington never had to fight. Yet she knew that men like Arrington would have adjusted just fine, because that’s what Rangers did.
Caitlin hadn’t realized Frank Whatley had pulled a manila folder full of pictures and was reviewing what they were about to find in Willow Creek right now.
“Prepare yourself, Ranger,” he warned.
“For what?”
He looked up at her, face ashen, folder trembling in his free hand. “The worst thing you ever saw in your life.”
18
S
AN
A
NTONIO
“Those your sons?” Miguel Asuna asked Cort Wesley, wiping the grease from his hands with an already soiled cloth.
“Dylan and Luke,” Cort Wesley told him, watching a mechanic go over the finer points of a street rod’s engine with the boys, all their heads hidden by the raised hood.
In all probability, of course, the street rod had been stolen. Back when Cort Wesley was working for the Branca crime family, Asuna’s body shop had doubled as a chop shop where stolen cars were brought to be disassembled for parts. He’d once heard Asuna boast he could strip a Mercedes in thirty minutes flat, something confirmed by Miguel’s younger brother, Pablo, who was as close to a best friend as Cort Wesley had until he was tortured and killed by having his face jammed up against a fan belt.
Miguel Asuna was twice the size of his little brother, and by all accounts was still living and working on the fringe of the law. He also maintained great contacts south of the border, since that was where the bulk of his pilfered parts, and entire cars jacked to order, ended up.