Strong Light of Day (41 page)

Because it was a real body, not a prop at all, and Cort Wesley tumbled over it, hitting the floor hard. The giant was tearing a pistol from beneath his jacket and was sweeping it steady when—and Cort Wesley had to blink to make sure this was really happening—the game's unified teams of gunmen seemed to record the giant as a hostile threat and opened up on him with weapons both traditional and futuristic. He was swallowed in a constant spray of light, splashing and flashing around the entire building. Cort Wesley could see the giant's steely eyes waver, suddenly trapped in confusion and uncertainty.

Cort Wesley seized the moment to go for the gun pinned beneath the dead man's body. But the strap caught, and the giant was righting his pistol again, when the biggest shape of any of the projected warriors rushed the giant, certain to go right through him.

But it didn't.

Instead, the giant was there and then he wasn't, lost to a massive shape even bigger than him, swathed everywhere in what looked like steaming tar and smelling of something Cort Wesley's memory told him was that beetle shit.

He couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't real anymore. He half expected Dylan and Luke to join the fun—and Leroy Epps, too, since this whole crazy environment would probably suit him just fine. He tried to remind himself to focus, and managed to lock his gaze on the sight of the giant's hands and feet twitching, halfway up the pillar directly over Cort Wesley, where the dark figure coated in tar, real or unreal, had impaled him.

He realized the air smelled like an overheating car engine. He heard a
poof,
after which the creatures and landscapes vanished. The blank warehouse scene returned, with only a whole bunch of bodies littering the floor. Then Caitlin was by his side, still wary and ready with her pistol.

“Paz,” Cort Wesley managed. “I think I saw him.”

“Just settle down, Cort Wesley. You're bleeding.”

He reached up found the warm blood spilling from the gash on his forehead, more of it leaking out through his midsection, where the giant's knife had grazed it. Caitlin helped him to his feet and supported him as her eyes swept about the confines of the warehouse, empty save for the eight or so bodies spilled on the floor, testament to the carnage the real bullets had left behind.

“Well, Cort Wesley,” she said, gun still held at the ready, “I know one thing the boys aren't getting for Christmas.”

 

P
ART
T
EN

I think the reason the Rangers have survived since 1823 is our ability to adapt. The Rangers went from single-shot pistol to the Colt, from the horse to the automobile, and now we've grabbed onto the computer age, DNA, and new crime scene technologies. You know, you can move forward or you can stay still and die.

—Former Texas Ranger Tracy Murphree as told to Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss, Jr., eds.,
Tracking the Texas Rangers: The Twentieth Century

 

96

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

“It was Paz, Ranger,” Cort Wesley insisted, “it had to be. He'd smeared that beetle shit all over him to confuse the sons of bitches. I'm telling you, he was in that warehouse.”

Caitlin stood next to him over the grave of Boone Masters, a few days later, after picking him up at the hospital, where he'd been treated for blood loss and a concussion. “If he was, you were the only one who saw him, and I haven't heard a word from the colonel, not a peep.”

“How many human skeletons did they find at that farm in Glasscock County?”

“Nobody's talking much.”

“Paz is alive, Ranger,” Cort Wesley said adamantly, “and he saved my life.”

Caitlin gave him a closer look, especially the bandage covering the stitched wound on his forehead and the bulges where similar wraps covered the slash wounds under his shirt. He was moving the slowest she'd ever seen him, each step seeming to bring a grimace.

“You suffered a concussion, Cort Wesley,” she told him. “Why don't we pass what you think you saw off to that?”

“Then how…”

He let his words trail off when they both spotted Captain Tepper approaching slowly over the grass, smoking a Marlboro, which he discarded and stamped out with a boot as he neared them.

“I tried to switch to those e-cigarettes,” he said, “but I couldn't find the goddamn switch.” Tepper regarded the small headstone quickly, then looked back at the two of them. “I figured you'd be here. Brings back faded memories of my own dad's funeral. Son of a bitch was so ornery even the undertaker couldn't coax a smile out of him.”

Cort Wesley didn't remember his father's funeral very well, the memories shrouded in a fog of guilt over not feeling the kind of regret he felt now. Boone Masters hadn't been the churchgoing type, but it turned out he'd given more than his share to the diocese—enough so a spot was reserved for him here in the Holy Cross Cemetery, located a mile outside Loop 1604, on Nacogdoches Road. It was a beautiful site, the graves taking up only a small portion of the spacious, beautifully landscaped grounds, which looked even more pristine because most of the sites featured ground-level headstones. Somehow, standing here today, the setting seemed to fit Boone Masters for the first time.

“You didn't come out here to enjoy a picnic lunch, Captain.”

“Nope,” Tepper told them both. “I'm here 'cause I wanted to hear how your little talk went with Calum Dane, firsthand.”

 

97

M
IDLAND,
T
EXAS; EARLIER THAT DAY

“It's good to see you alive, Ranger,” Dane had greeted, when Caitlin caught up with him at an oil well just about to strike, halfway between Midland and Odessa in the Permian Basin. “Good to see both of us alive.”

“That's why I wanted to thank you in person for your help the other day, sir.”

“Any sign of Zhirnosky?”

“None, I'm afraid. He's probably back in Russia by now, which makes him their problem.”

“He killed some of my men. He tried to take control of my company. Maybe we should go over there, hunt him down together. He told me something I think might help.”

“What's that?”

“You think wiping out most of this country's farmland was all he had in mind? Far from it, Ranger.”

“Can you be a bit more specific, sir?”

Dane spit a half-chewed toothpick to the ground and wedged another between his lips. “Why don't you tell me about those two men in the car parked next to your truck first.”

“They're New York City police detectives,” Caitlin told him. “They've got a few questions for you. I'd recommend you have a lawyer present.”

“You brought them here.”

“They asked for my help. Professional courtesy.”

“Am I missing something, Ranger?”

“Not here, back in New York,” Caitlin said, reaching out to pluck the fresh toothpick from his mouth. “One of these, sir.”

Dane shook his head. “This about the young man who disappeared after disrupting my shareholders' conference?”

“It is. Your people did a great job of sanitizing the crime scene. Problem was, they forgot to check the elevator. That's where the NYPD found one of these,” Caitlin told him, flashing the toothpick she was still holding. “Those detectives are here with a warrant for your DNA. If it matches the toothpick that was found in the elevator, I'd say you're gonna be in a heap of trouble, Mr. Dane.”

Dane smirked, pretending not to be particularly bothered by that notion. But then the smirk slipped from his expression, which flattened to the point where his face suddenly looked frozen in a still shot.

“Anything you can do on my behalf with them, Ranger?” he asked her. “As a fellow Texan?”

“Help a man who beats his own son?”

Dane scowled, shaking his head. “We back to that again? You should've seen what my daddy did to me.”

“For different reasons, I suspect.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Dane said, stiffening.

“Those pictures I saw of the damage you did to your boy didn't include his face. But a few others I dug up did. I believe his name is Zach, isn't it?”

 

98

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

“Zach, as in…” Cort Wesley let his words tail off, still processing what Caitlin had just said.

“That's right.”

“The kid who got lost in the woods with Luke!” Tepper realized, stopping just short of slapping himself in the head.

“Dane beat him because he was gay. The boy as much as told me so, without mentioning names.”

“Oh,” Tepper said, fidgeting a bit.

“Explains why Dane risked everything to save those kids in Armand Bayou. He knew his son was on that field trip,” Caitlin said, leaving it there. “Anyway, Dane's fighting the warrant.”

“Well, Ranger, at least you didn't shoot him.”

“That was my second choice, Captain. We can't get him for the chemical plant fire and we probably can't get him for the billions of dollars in damage his bugs did to the state. But New York can get him for killing that kid with his prosthetic leg. Kind of fitting, I guess.”

“Why's that?”

“Because Dane Corp manufactures the plastic it was made out of.”

The three of them looked each other, struck by the twisted, macabre irony of that.

“And what exactly did Dane give you on Zhirnosky?” Tepper asked her.

“You owe me something first.”

“What's that?”

“The rest of the story, Captain. What you and my dad did to those Russians who got Boone Masters killed.”

 

99

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS; 1983

Jim Strong stood over the bed of Boone Masters in San Antonio's University Hospital.

“It's blowing up a storm outside, Ranger,” Masters noted, gaze drifting to the window.

“Thanks to Hurricane Alicia, ready to make landfall around Houston.”

“Bitch of the bunch, it seems.” Masters turned from the window. “Thanks for getting me home,” he said, more of a message in his eyes than in his words.

“Least I could do.”

“Well, there's something on top of that you can do, too. Nobody ever needs to hear about how all this went down, least of all my boy.”

“He won't hear it from me, Mr. Masters.”

“Call me Boone … Jim.”

“Guess after stopping the Soviets in their tracks, we should be on a first-name basis.”

“For a time, anyway.” Masters's expression sombered. “I'm not gonna ask you to look out after my boy.”

“I would, if you did.”

“I know that, but it'll do more harm than good in my mind. I like the fact of him not thinking too fondly of me, so my being gone won't cause more than a blip in his life. I've lived my life without regret, Jim, and I'd like Cort Wesley to do the same.”

Jim Strong shrugged. “Just because you lived it that way doesn't make it right, Boone.”

“Best I can do, all the same.”

Masters's gaze turned steely against the infamous criminal once more. “We didn't get all of them, Ranger.”

“What happened to ‘Jim'?”

“Business is business and you need to finish this.”

D. W. Tepper stopped in the doorway, looking toward Jim Strong like Masters wasn't even in the room. “We've got a lead.”

*   *   *

They literally raced the storm to Houston, heading north along an otherwise abandoned highway, while the lanes heading south were a parking lot of cars that had followed a late evacuation order. The rains and wind were already bad, and got steadily worse the closer they drew to the city, until the torrents came in sheets that seemed to pucker the windshield glass and freeze the wipers midsweep, time after time. The visibility had turned so bad it was like driving through the smoke of a brush fire.

Closer to Houston, D. W. Tepper's truck was hammered by flying objects big and heavy enough to obliterate the fenders and hood and to smash the windshield to the point where the windswept rain hammered them in the cab, soaking both men clean through to the upholstery. Jim looked over then and spotted Tepper lighting a cigarette.

“You're kidding me, right?”

“Always told you smoking would never kill me.”

“But you thought it'd be a bullet instead.”

“Nobody's right all the time.”

In response to their all points bulletin, a report had come in from Hobby Airport in Houston about four Russian-speaking men buying plane tickets in cash. One of them matched the description of Anton Kasputin and, since the airport had been officially declared closed, he wasn't going anywhere. Jim Strong had instructed Houston officials to stand down until his arrival, told them that this was Ranger jurisdiction.

“You want Kasputin for yourself,” Tepper concluded, voice a bit gnarled by the cigarette clenched between his lips as his hands hung on to the steering wheel for dear life.

“Least I can do for Boone Masters.”

“Old school never goes away, does it?”

Jim Strong looked across the soaked seat toward him, swiping a wet sleeve against his even wetter face. “We're driving through a hurricane to get into a gunfight. You tell me, D.W.”

*   *   *

The normally bustling airport was eerie in its desolation, closed to air traffic but not shut down, due to the mass of travelers stranded there. The gates remained open and functional, but no planes were coming in, and almost all those that had been grounded had been flown out to airports further inland, to avoid being damaged.

Hobby's naked exterior belied the congestion of the stranded inside. Hurricane Alicia was bearing down on the city with a force that could leave tens of billions of dollars of damage in its wake; the Lone Star State offered no protection against natural disasters.