Strong Light of Day (38 page)

“On three, Ranger!”

And on three, together, they managed to tip her tank over, barely hearing the slosh of gasoline hitting the ground to begin its spread along the land's natural grade forward. Then the two of them slid along the rusted steel frame, reached the tip of her tractor, and jumped together back onto Cort Wesley's, before which Paz continued his fiery stand.

The colonel looked back at them long enough to acknowledge their presence, then swung again to the front, without seeing Caitlin whip her hands around in the air to signal the SUVs on. The wave of bugs had almost entombed the entirety of their tires, stretching over the wheel wells in patches, and Caitlin wondered if they'd even be able to find traction. But there was a lot to be said for having four thousand pounds under you and, after an initial bout of fits and starts, both SUVs started rolling, sweeping around the stalled tractors.

Jones and the other driver both accelerated through the flames, Caitlin jumping onto the running board of one and Cort Wesley the other, both holding to the luggage rack while pinning their feet higher against the frame to stay above the beetles. That left Paz to continue clearing a path for them, black waves parting for the route of his flames like the Red Sea did for Moses. No way their SUVs would have any more chance than the horses, if it weren't for him. And Caitlin had to shake off the illusion that thinner waves of the black swarm scurried from his own path blazed through them, as if frightened and intimidated by Paz's mere presence.

Caitlin felt heat that reminded her of dipping her hand into scalding water, as the flames clawed at her hair and grazed the fabric of her clothes. She sucked in her breath to make herself as small as possible, trying not to think about the possibility of the fire stealing her in its grasp. Pressed up tight against the SUV, she watched the world through the flame-shrouded reflection in the vehicle's windows.

Guillermo Paz shrank in that reflection, his huge shape dwindling from sight when she turned to look directly toward him, while still clinging to the roof rack for dear life. She stole a moment to glimpse Cort Wesley doing the same, the incessant clacking chatter of the beetles starting to lower in volume the closer they drew to the road.

Caitlin looked back toward Guillermo Paz again to find nothing but a shifting darkness and shroud of flames within the reach of her vision, no sign of him anywhere among them. The SUVs thumped and bucked past a trio of mailboxes, the sound and smell of the swarm decreasing until only the night itself lay before them.

 

90

G
LASSCOCK
C
OUNTY,
T
EXAS

“The address in question is a warehouse, and it belongs to Dane Corp, all right,” Captain Tepper told Caitlin, Cort Wesley, and Jones over the speaker of her cell phone.

They were riding in one of the SUVs after a brief stop at a service station five miles up the road from the farm, where authorities were already en route to meet them. The first order of business was to get the kids reunited with their families. Everything else, all the explanations and such, could be sorted out later.

For her part, Caitlin needed to get to that address in Midland, where, hopefully, she'd find Calum Dane himself.

“Wish I could tell you more,” Tepper continued. “What's the play here, Ranger?”

“Let you know when we make it, D.W.”

“For once, just for once, can you let me send in the cavalry before you storm the place?”

“No, sir, because it could risk squandering the advantage we have on Calum Dane right now. He's the key to all this, Captain—everything, including those goddamn bugs. We're thirty minutes away. You tell me you can get the cavalry ready to charge by then and we'll talk.”

“Well, you're going to do whatever you want, no matter what I say, so I'm just going to tell you to have at it and don't shoot any more men than you have to.”

“You can tell Cort Wesley and me something else, sir. The rest of the story about what happened to our fathers.”

 

91

L
OLO,
T
EXAS; 1983

“Is this the way you do business, comrade?”

Boone Masters swung with Jim Strong to find Anton Kasputin standing twenty feet away, a trio of thugs flanking him on either side with guns drawn.

“Call the play, Ranger,” Boone said, just loud enough for Jim to hear.

“You're all under arrest,” Jim Strong said, hand over his still-holstered .45.

Kasputin grinned and broadly waved his finger in Jim's direction. “I've seen cowboy movies about men like you. They shoot and never miss. That gun fires eight bullets. There are seven of us. I like our odds.”

“All the same,” Jim said, not even flinching, “you're still under arrest, sir.”

“What's the charge, exactly?”

“I'll throw a whole bunch in a hat and pick one out. Let's start with receiving stolen goods and move all the way up to possession of a deadly weapon.”

“And what weapon would that be?”

“Whatever's in all those tanks, Sergei.”

“That's not my name.”

“But you look like a Sergei to me,” Jim told him, fingers still dancing over the butt of his holstered .45. “And, you're right, maybe I won't be able to get all your men with my eight bullets, but I'll get you for sure.”

Kasputin's gaze moved from side to side, then forward again, assessing his prospects. “You could just walk out of here, and we go about our separate ways.”

“That the way it's done back home in Russki land? Not so here in Texas. When I walk out of here, it'll be with you in cuffs.”

The smile slipped from Kasputin's expression. “Take your best shot, Ranger.”

“Exactly my intention.”

But it was D. W. Tepper who opened fire first, his presence catching the Russians utterly by surprise. He pushed all eight shots from his .45, diving to the floor behind a column of packing crates to snap home a fresh magazine. He was pretty sure he'd dropped two of the Russians with those shells, though it was hard to tell.

Because Jim Strong used his initial shots to take out the overhead lighting, plunging the warehouse into darkness.

“Kill them! Shoot them!” Kasputin cried out to his still standing thugs. “Don't let them get away!”

By then, Boone Masters had unslung the tank labeled Propane from his shoulder and sent it rolling down the aisle, straight at the Russians. He had his .357 Magnum out in the next instant, firing toward the sound of the thing's roll and the slight gleam its shiny steel made in the darkness. If the contents had really been propane, a
boom
and accompanying flame burst would've followed. Instead, there was a hiss of something contained under pressure escaping, something that felt like a liquid and a gas at the same time, bringing a harsh chemical odor with it.

The light sneaking in through the hold door Kasputin had left open was enough for Boone to spot him and his men scurrying away, still with superior numbers and firepower, even with the addition of a second Ranger's gun.

“Ranger!” Boone yelled out to Jim Strong.

“We need to waste those tanks!” Strong's voice chimed back through the darkness.

“I got a better idea.”

Boone's shape flitted through the darkness, illuminated in splotchy fashion by muzzle flashes trained his way. The darkness of the warehouse swallowed him, as the two Rangers kept Kasputin and his thugs at bay in a crossfire that would last only as long as their bullets.

“Masters!” Jim cried out.

When no response followed, he slid sideways, ducking down one aisle, between stacked major appliances, and then up another. It was like being trapped in a maze, his ears burned by the constant din of the Russians returning their fire on D. W. Tepper. Jim was down to his last magazine, eight bullets, with the pounding steps of Russian gunmen tracing him through the dark. He couldn't see them, meaning they couldn't see him, meaning …

Thought and action merged, Jim leaping up onto the irregularly stacked crates and firing down on a trio of thugs who'd been converging upon him. They dropped like ducks in a shooting gallery, not about to rise again, when Jim's .45 locked open and empty. In the same moment a torrent of machine-gun fire flared his way. The shells penetrated the crates and clanged against the metal of the appliances inside. The sound puffed out his ears, Jim recognizing the distinctive din as coming from a Thompson, of all things, drum-fed .45-caliber shells turning fridges and ranges, washers and dryers, to paste.

The fire of a second Thompson blared his way from another angle, the tinny, echoing blare reaching him in stereo now. All he wanted to do was drop and cover his ears. Instead, he kept darting and weaving atop the crates, twin streams of fire blistering the air around him. He thought he might have been screaming, was conscious, too, of the barrage aimed well in front of him, around where D. W. Tepper must've made his stand. He thought there must be gunmen who escaped his original count, wielders of the Thompsons, held back by Kasputin to slice him down once he'd risked exposure.

Man was smarter than he thought. KGB for sure, and Jim cursed himself for underestimating his opponent, not putting enough stock in the brutal, merciless manner in which his men had gunned down Stanko and his gang in a park fronting the MacArthur-Rain building in Houston as he and Boone Masters had looked on from the rooftop level of the parking garage.

Along with his daughter, Caitlin, who'd hidden under a tarp in the bed of his truck.

Thinking of her recharged Jim's batteries but left him assessing the dire nature of his plight, the reality that he was never going to see her again. There were just too many Russians, and they were too well armed, to expect he and D. W. Tepper would be able to take them alone.

Only they weren't alone.

Jim Strong heard an engine grinding an instant before Boone Masters burst through a stack of appliances, piloting a massive, large-capacity pneumatic forklift running on four truck-size tires. Its scaffold was piled high with tanks balanced precariously upon its lift forks, looking ready to tumble off at any moment. Jim wasn't sure of Boone's intentions, until he spotted the lit cigarette in the man's mouth. Only one hand was on the wheel, while the other clung fast to what looked like the wand of an acetylene torch. Jim watched him jam it forward, toward the tanks that he now realized were shiny and wet with something Boone Masters must've sprayed or doused them with.

Jim had just recalled that the inventory of one of Masters's more recent heists included a bevy of remanufactured kerosene stoves, when the forklift smashed through the crates on which he was perched, sending him flying. His last thought before he hit one toppled box and rolled down onto another was of the rich scent of something like lighter fluid hanging in the air. He'd lost sight of Boone Masters by then, but pictured him touching his cigarette to some makeshift fuse soaked in kerosene, then watching it flare and burn down toward the similarly soaked tanks.

The flame burst that blinded him on the floor was more like a flash, the tanks rupturing in a series of rumbles instead of a single explosion. The entire front section of the warehouse was awash in white-hot flame that spread like a curtain over the floor, blocking the path to the hold door through which they'd entered. There were exits behind them as well, but Jim Strong didn't even look toward them, charging into the heat and flames, dancing past the fire pooling on the floor and setting the stolen merchandise ablaze.

He found D. W. Tepper first, aiming his empty .45 at nothing, his eyes glazed beneath eyebrows that had been burned from his face. Jim got a shoulder under Tepper and dragged him along until he spotted Boone Masters lying half on and half off a stack of appliances tumbled by the blast, his clothes and hair soaked by whatever had sprayed out of those tanks marked Propane. It had a bitter, corrosive, chemical stench to it, something like a mix of turpentine and motor oil that rode Jim, too, all the way to a rear exit that he burst through with both Tepper and Masters in tow.

“Neither of you is gonna die on me tonight, hear? Neither one!”

He dropped them down in the cool of the night to catch his breath, then resumed dragging them far as he could from the warehouse before the blast he was anticipating came. Fortunately, the back portion was spared the initial inferno that spread in rippling fashion from the front, the roof seeming to peel away and the walls blown both out and up. Jim dropped over both Tepper and Masters to shield them, woozy from breathing in whatever had soaked Boone to the gills from those tanks, now gone forever.

Jim watched Masters's eyes flicker, fixed on him when they finally opened. “Well, this oughta keep my boy Cort Wesley out of jail, anyway.”

“Who's Cort Wesley?” Jim asked him, the two of them somehow managing to share a smile.

 

92

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

“I take no pleasure in telling you all this, Mr. Masters,” Tepper said, his voice sounding tinny over the cell phone's speaker. “You deserved to hear the truth a long time ago, but your dad made Jim Strong promise him you'd never hear it from him or any Ranger.”

“He must not have wanted me to think of him that way.”

“As a hero, you mean?”

“Because he did it for me. He wouldn't want me to bear the burden of his death. Would've preferred me hating him for the way he went out. Wasting away to nothing, all weak and all.”

“Guess it makes perfect sense when you say it that way,” Tepper told him.

“Maybe he didn't just do it for you, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin said suddenly.

“How's that, Ranger?”

“Your dad boosted appliances. He carried a gun, showed it a few times, but never shot anybody in the commission of one of his crimes. I don't think the poison in those tanks made him sick. I think he was already sick, and this was his way of trying to go out on his own terms.”