Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels)
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For the brothers of Delta Phi Fraternity of Brown University,
past, present, and future.
As the song says, “Long life to Delta Phi!”
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Must be that time of year again, and I promise you a great ride this time. Before we start, though, I need to give some much-deserved shout-outs.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but let’s start at the top with my publisher, Tom Doherty, and Forge’s associate publisher, Linda Quinton, dear friends who publish books “the way they should be published,” to quote my late agent, the legendary Toni Mendez. Paul Stevens, Karen Lovell, Patty Garcia, and especially Natalia Aponte are there for me at every turn. Natalia’s a brilliant editor and friend who never ceases to amaze me with her sensitivity and genius. Editing may be a lost art, but not here, and I think you’ll enjoy all of my books, including this one, much more as a result.
Some new names to thank this time out, starting with Mireya Starkenberg, a loyal reader who now suffers through my butchering the Spanish language in order to correct it. My friend Mike Blakely, a terrific writer and musician, taught me Texas firsthand and helped me think like a native of that great state. And Larry Thompson, a terrific writer in his own right, has joined the team as well to make sure I do justice to his home state.
SPOILER ALERT! I’d be very remiss if I didn’t mention a pair of terrific books that were crucial to my research on this one. They are noted below next to the
*
but you may want to ignore them until you finish so as not to give anything away. A major thank-you also to Professor John Savage of Brown University, a true expert on the book’s subject who offered his two cents that were worth a million to me.
Check back at
www.jonlandbooks.com
for updates or to drop me a line. I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank all of you who’ve already written or e-mailed me about how much you enjoyed the first four tales in the Caitlin Strong series. There may be big news to report soon on the Hollywood front (knock wood!), so rest assured that your opinions are being echoed and I never would’ve gotten even that far if not for your support. Rest assured you will be even more pleased with this latest adventure. To find out if I’m as good a prophet as I am a storyteller, just turn the page and begin.
P.S. For those interested in more information about the history of the Texas Rangers, I recommend
The Texas Rangers
and
Time of the Rangers
, a pair of superb books by Mike Cox, also published by Forge.
*
Clarke, Richard A., and Robert K. Knake.
Cyber War
. New York: Ecco, 2010.
*
Mark Bowden.
Worm: The First Digital World War
. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011.
C
ONTENTS
The world to me is like a lasting storm.
—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
,
Pericles
P
ROLOGUE
Then mount and away! Give the fleet steed the rein—
The Ranger’s at home on the prairies again;
Spur! Spur in the chase—dash on to the fight
Cry Vengeance for Texas! And God speed the right!
James T. Lytle, “The Ranger’s Song”
S
MOKEVILLE,
T
EXAS; 1919
The boy walked out of the desert, the late-afternoon sun in his face, his skin burned red, parched lips marred by jagged cracks. His tattered clothes carried the thick, smoky scent of mesquite mixed with the acrid stench of burned wood, as if his journey had taken him through a brush fire burning to the southwest.
But it was the flecks of blood staining his face, shirt, and sweat-soaked hair, tangled with wisps of tumbleweed, that caught John Rob Salise’s eye more than anything.
“You all right, son?” Salise, a town selectman and constable, asked with hands laid on the boy’s shoulders to hold him in place. “What’s your name?”
The boy continued to gaze straight ahead without regarding him, his shock-glazed eyes barely blinking. His breaths came in rapid heaves, his exhaustion showing in knees that had begun to buckle with the burden of his weight, and Salise thought the boy might keel over if he lifted his hands from his shoulders. Salise noted the boy’s boots were badly scuffed and sun-bleached, making him wonder how long exactly the boy had been walking, how far he’d come.
And whose blood had showered him as if it were the product of a spring downpour.
Salise handed the boy a small canteen he always wore clipped to his belt during his rounds. The kid snapped it up, peeled back the cap, and guzzled the water so fast twin streams ran down both sides of his mouth, the drops drying almost as soon as they touched the ground.
“Where’d you come from, son?” Salise asked, figuring him for ten or eleven, although his wan appearance made it difficult to tell.
The boy drained the rest of the water, still ignoring him.
Salise snatched the canteen from his grasp. “I’m trying to help you out here.”
When the boy remained unresponsive, hands dangling limply once more by his sides, Salise turned his own gaze down Smokeville’s single commercial thoroughfare. The street featured a strange combination of horses hitched to posts and motorcars parked awkwardly against a raised wooden walkway near a saloon, where legend had it Wild Bill Hickok had shot a man intending to do the same to him.
“Well, then it’s a good thing for you we got a Texas Ranger in town. What do you say we go find him?”
* * *
Ranger William Ray Strong sat across the table from his son, Earl, the boy having followed him into the Texas Rangers just short of his nineteenth birthday. A bottle of whiskey rose between them, two full shot glasses accounting for what was missing from it so far.
William Ray raised his glass in the semblance of a toast, eyeing the
cinco pesos
badge pinned to his son’s chest. “Here’s to you, Earl, on following me and your granddad into the Ranger service. ‘No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.’”
And upon finishing the quote from the great Ranger captain Bill McDonald, William Ray downed his whiskey in a single gulp, leaving Earl to sip at his glass, wrinkling his nose the whole time.
“I’ll tell you, boy, it’s a good thing you shoot a hell of a lot better than you drink, though I suspect such things have a way of catching up with each other over time.”
That’s when a man William Ray recognized as a town constable entered the bar with a boy in tow. He’d met the man a couple times but couldn’t for the life of him remember his name.
“Constable Salise,” his son, Earl, greeted, rising to his feet and brushing the holstered Colt further back on his hip, “what have we here?”
Salise noticed the badge originally worn by Earl’s grandfather who’d been killed in the Civil War not long after William Ray was born. The new Ranger looked like a younger version of his famed father, albeit thinner with sinewy bands of muscle instead of bulk and without the sun-dug furrows lining his face.
“I come in here expecting to find one Ranger,” Salise said, “and here there are two.”
“Believe you know my father, sir.”
“’Course I do. The great William Ray Strong, late of the Frontier Battalion.”
“Just for the final days, sir,” William Ray said, his eyes falling on the boy. “And if this is your son, I’d recommend a bath as opposed to a shooting lesson or an autograph.”
“He’s not my son, Ranger. I found him wandering in the street. Looked like he came plain out of the desert.”
“Is that a fact?” William Ray said, coming out of his chair to draw closer to the boy. “You got a name, son?”
The boy didn’t say a word, not even tilting his gaze to acknowledge the Rangers’ presence.
Salise laid a dust-covered hand atop the boy’s shoulder. “I can’t get a word out of him crossways.”