Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels) (29 page)

“
Lo encontré, jefe
,” Locaro heard through the tiny wireless bud in his ear that looked like a hearing aid. “I found
el muchacho americano
.”

Locaro raised the hand holding a similarly small transmitter.
“Prepárense para disparar,”
he told his snipers camouflaged on the school roof. “Prepare to fire.”

*   *   *

“The two little girls in those pictures were sisters, Ranger,” Cort Wesley continued.

Caitlin looked at him, forgetting the game and the noise.

“Twins,” he elaborated, “both born to Carmen and Mateo Torres. But they couldn’t afford to raise both of them, so the Cantú family offered to take one in.”

“A third sister,” Caitlin realized, “along with Maura and Araceli. That means her life’s likely in danger too, and her family’s. What was her name, Cort Wesley? Did Jan McClellan-Townsend tell you that?”

Cort Wesley nodded. “Ana.”

“Ana Cantú.”

“Not Cantú, remember? Ana
Guajardo
,” Cort Wesley said, the row just behind them jostling as a small Latino man wearing a baseball cap squeezed into a seat behind Luke.

74

S
AN
A
NTONIO

With his man in the crowd now in place, Locaro saw no reason to wait any longer. His snipers’ instructions were to take out as many players as they could measure in their sights in rapid succession. Two of them, placed strategically apart from each other on the rooftop. In the chaos that followed, Locaro and his remaining men would storm the field blazing an indiscriminate path through the resulting panic while Locaro himself took care of Dylan Torres. By then, he fully expected the protective forces of Guillermo Paz to have joined the fray as well, and it unnerved Locaro no end that neither Paz nor his men seemed to be anywhere about. He could only hope that the guise formed by the wheelchairs and fake military uniforms complete with various medals awarded for distinguished service would hold long enough.

Locaro shifted positions again, stretching his arms high over the wheelchair to better ready the draw of his machete, his chosen instrument of death since he’d killed his first man while working citrus fields as a boy in Texas.

*   *   *

In that moment, Ana Guajardo was thinking about that very same day. Remembered because it was just after her seventh birthday, in 1980. Ana had watched as the man, a newly hired American work foreman, had pushed her mother. Then slapped her. Then shoved her to the ground. Then dragged her off into the nearby fields.

Her father had been taken away a few weeks before by
la policía.
Ana didn’t know what her father had done, and refused to cry when her father had been arrested and handcuffed to prove she was brave, eyeing the uniformed figures with contempt. Locaro had come to her then, wrapping an arm knobby with muscle for a boy around her shoulder and leaving it there to reassure her she was safe, that he would protect both her and her mother.

The day the man had dragged her mother off into the citrus fields was hazy, more like a dream than a memory. Ana remembered following them into the groves of thick stalks that smelled like skunk, clinging to the hope that Locaro would somehow follow to keep his promise. She remembered looking about for Locaro, thought of crying out his name but didn’t.

Her mother and the new foreman whose clothes smelled like piss were mostly lost to the shadows cast by the thickly congested plantings that shifted slightly in the breeze. He was lying prone over her, Ana following his strangely gyrating motions. As he moved up and down over her mother, an old shriveled orange appeared amid the plantings, sent rolling toward her until it came to a halt against the sandaled foot of her brother, Locaro.

He held a finger to his lips to signal her to be quiet. Then Ana watched through the strange haze as Locaro moved soundlessly into the thick foul-smelling grove. Watched as he stooped to retrieve a machete another worker had left behind. Watched him bring the machete, which looked absurdly large in his grasp, overhead and lash it downward.

It stuck in the neck of the new foreman who stank of piss and Locaro pulled it out, the man jerking a hand up to the bloody gash. Ana remembered that Locaro’s next strike partially severed the hand, and his third strike found the original gash and dug deeper.

The blood became a spurt, a fountain, the new foreman falling over sideways when he tried to rise. Ana watched Locaro leap over their mother onto him, slicing down with the machete again and again until he was covered with the blood and what was left of the man no longer moved. In the haze of memory today, Ana remembered wiping blood from her own face and clothes, wondering how it had sprayed so far. She had no recollection of her mother from that point, only of Locaro leading her back to their small shack that seemed so empty since their father had been taken away. Her mother had taken her out back and hosed off the blood, Ana figuring she must have done the same to herself first. So brave and strong, the way Ana would be someday too. Locaro had hovered nearby the whole time, her protector then and forever.

Ana often dreamed of that day but never recalled all the details upon waking. As if her brain sought to hide it from her to spare her further pain. What happened that day remained cloaked by a sheer curtain that revealed only shapes. Ana supposed she should be grateful for that much, and yet sometimes she woke at night screaming with some terrible truth revealed by the dream lost before she caught her next breath.

*   *   *

Locaro was only just beginning to realize how different he was from other children when he’d killed the new work foreman, how much bigger and stronger he was than they. But there was something more, something Locaro found in the mirror in the wake of killing for the first time with the machete he’d washed in the clothes trough and hidden under his bunk. His head looked funny even to him; block-shaped with a ridged, almost simian forehead that seemed to hang out over his brow. His neck was too small for his squat, barrel-like frame, making it seem as if his head was an extension of his shoulders. His fingers were short, stubby, and strangely gnarled. One of his eyes hung noticeably lower than the other and always drooped.

Only the older boys dared make fun of him and, after killing the work foreman, he began responding to their insults with unbridled attacks, launching himself on them in unrelenting fashion until others pulled him off. Locaro learned then the lesson that size was not nearly as important as will, translating desire to action without hesitation. It was a lesson that stayed with him all the way into an adulthood that saw his appearance neither change nor worsen, but merely stay the same. A blown-up version of the very same frame and features that made him reviled as a boy, save for the unfortunate addition of a skin condition that left his face marred with oozing boils and the pockmark scars left behind when Locaro picked at them with a knife.

His sister was the only one who viewed him without revulsion. From the day that he’d killed his first man, they became inseparable. But even Ana couldn’t grasp how much he had enjoyed the feel and smell of blood upon him. He began to thirst for it, never happier than when it spilled or sprayed from his victims.

Blood
was
life, after all.

“
Fuego,
” he ordered his snipers, hand at his mouth, finally ready. “Fire.”

Just as the Torres boy whipped another blistering shot with his webbed stick into the goal.

75

S
AN
A
NTONIO

Caitlin and Cort Wesley joined the rest of the crowd on its feet, cheering for the goal that put St. Anthony’s up two to nothing.

“You need to explain this game to me again, Cort Wesley.”

But Cort Wesley’s eyes had darted back toward the school building to their right, gaze canting upward.

“Something’s going on up there,” he said without looking back at her. “Someone’s on the roof. Something’s wrong.”

Then he was in motion, shoving his way through the crowded row still celebrating Dylan’s second goal. Caitlin reached over to Luke to take him in tow with her to follow, when a shape from the row above lunged over her for the boy.

*   *   *

Something
was
wrong, Locaro realized.

The sniper fire hadn’t started, even as a commotion broke out in the stands right around the location of the other Torres boy.

Locaro looked to his men gathered in wheelchairs, dressed as American Army veterans, which had provided them field access to view the game. They had been saluted instead of searched, the players on the home team making a show out of shaking all their hands in a kind of reception line before pregame warm-ups.

The unexpected gesture had unnerved Locaro, especially when he shook the hand of Dylan Torres, though not as much as the current state of affairs here and now did.

Something had happened to his snipers. His plan had gone to shit.

Which meant it was time for a new plan. His snipers were gone, taken out. But he had his men. He had his machete.

And Guillermo Paz was somewhere about.

It could only be Paz, Locaro thought as he lurched out of his wheelchair, yanking the machete from beneath his fatigue jacket and charging toward the playing field.

His men fell into a surge behind him, whipping out their guns.

*   *   *

Jesus Christ,
Cort Wesley thought, recognizing what was coming in the last moment before the men disguised as disabled veterans launched their attack.

He’d reached the aisle by then, thundering down it with Glock drawn, the crowd just starting to realize that something was about to go terribly wrong, rising to its collective feet, prepared to flee en masse when the staccato din of automatic fire sounded from high in the bleachers. The entire crowd forced downward, the attackers steadying their weapons as they charged over the edge of the field.

Cort Wesley’s thoughts came in fragments, snippets. He felt his feet stop churning amid the jostle of bodies around him, saw his own pistol coming up, thought having yielded to instinct, trying to find Dylan amid the burgeoning chaos.

Ready to fire when he thought of Caitlin and Luke now trapped somewhere behind him.

Ready to fire as a pickup truck with double rear tires crashed through the fence surrounding the complex from the near side and tore onto the field.

*   *   *

Caitlin intercepted the figure in midair, the blade he held glinting in the bright stadium lighting just inches from Luke. She grabbed him by the hair and shoulder at the same time and flung him backward, where he crashed into seated patrons not yet aware of the maelstrom about to consume the field.

She lost her grasp on him, but never lost sight of the knife, lunging up and over her row of seats as gunfire erupted somewhere below.

*   *   *

Cort Wesley was living the nightmare. Again. It came to him often in the uneasiest nights of his sleep when worry over the future of his sons consumed his thinking. He’d finally slip off to find himself in a firefight with the Iraqi Republican Guard back in the Gulf War. In the dream, they kept coming no matter how many he shot or how many fresh mags he jammed into his M16. It was like being trapped in a video game, only the ground was sinking beneath his feet and Cort Wesley found himself fearing the eternal promised darkness more than the Iraqis’ Russian-made bullets or shrapnel.

Tonight the stands remained firm beneath him as he fired, emptying the Glock’s magazine toward the dark-clad men disguised as disabled veterans. He thought he counted seven in total, including one who looked like the base of an oak tree in motion, reddening blotches on his face shimmering in the stadium lights.

From this distance he managed to drop only two of the seven, taking them in the face or skull above their body armor. Their fall had no effect on the remaining five, neither slowing nor stopping them from opening fire into the sudden rush of panic that had overtaken the field with St. Anthony’s home burgundy jerseys and the white uniforms of the visiting team.

Where was Dylan?

That thought formed as breath bottlenecked in his throat and misty froth burst from several visitors’ uniform tops as they were hit with bullets that spun the still-helmeted players around or felled them where they stood. Now the stands had erupted in full-fledged panic, Cort Wesley struggling to hold his ground, not even remembering slapping a fresh magazine into the Glock.

No way he could reach the field to stop the madness before it converged on Dylan, he thought as Guillermo Paz burst up through the pickup truck’s sunroof, opening fire on the gunmen disguised as veterans with twin submachine guns as its double rear tires thumped across the field.

*   *   *

Caitlin lost track of Luke in the crowd surge that seemed to be moving in all directions at once. It was like getting sucked into the funnel of a tornado, but the knife-wielding man had got sucked into it too.

She shoved a woman aside and then yanked on someone’s ponytail to reach the attacker again after he’d briefly broken free. His knife must have been knocked from his grasp on impact and he was just retrieving it from the floor of the steel bleacher when Caitlin pounced on him. She got his knife wrist pinned with her left hand and began whaling at him with her right. Hand laced into a tight fist with fingers pressed high into the pads. She led with her knuckles, pounding him again and again and again, long strands of his blood coughed into the air until his nose mashed under her fist and the strands gave way to a geyser. She was vaguely aware her hand looked painted red and could feel the stray flecks spraying up into her face.

“Caitlin!”

Luke’s voice. Luke hugging her, trying to pull her off, the man’s features unrecognizable below, his face a mass of pits, hollowed and broken flesh. Caitlin felt the boy tugging at her, her gaze shifting in search of Dylan to the field now awash in panic, muzzle flashes, and the echoing din of gunshots.