Strong Cold Dead (3 page)

Alonzo had overcome an appearance that was often referred to as “masculine,” even by her supporters, and much worse than that by her detractors, who seemed to put no stock in the fact that she was happily raising three young children with her husband, who was a professional boxing referee. This was Texas, after all, where a woman needed to work twice as hard, and be twice as good, in a profession ruggedly and stubbornly perceived to be for men only. Caitlin and Alonzo had had their differences over the years but had mostly maintained a mutual respect defined by their professionalism and the sense that their own squabbles only further emboldened those who sought their demise.

At least until Alonzo assigned Caitlin all the blame for Alonzo losing out on a job that was likely never going to be hers now. Since then, Alonzo had used her position as deputy chief to wage subtle war on the Rangers' San Antonio-based Company F whenever possible, seizing upon any bureaucratic conflict or jurisdictional dispute she could in a hapless attempt to make Caitlin's life miserable.

Alonzo ran a hand through her spiky hair. She was heavyset and had once set the women's record for the bench press in her weight class. She'd also done some boxing and was reputed to be the best target shooter with a pistol in the entire department. But Caitlin had beaten her three times running when they'd gone up against each other in state-sponsored contests, winning the overall title in two of those, instead of just the women's division. Caitlin had stopped entering after her most recent victory, figuring the last thing she needed was to draw more attention to herself than her exploits already had.

“You're not moving, Ranger,” Alonzo told her.

Caitlin gestured toward a figure pressed tightly against the waist-high concrete barrier erected to close off the street to unauthorized vehicles. “See that woman there? That's the mother of the boy who was killed by the fire of those SAPD officers. She's the one who called me, asked me to see what I could do about the violence being done in her boy's name. She doesn't want the city to burn on his account. She wants this resolved peacefully.”

“And you think I don't?”

“No, ma'am. It's a question about how you're going about things.”

“And how's that?” Alonso asked, not sounding as if she was really interested in Caitlin's answer. “We got a full-scale riot brewing back there. What exactly do you think you can do about it that we can't?”

“I've got an idea or two.”

“Care to share them?”

“Ever hear of Diego Ramon Alcantara?”

“Can't say that I have.”

“He goes by the nickname Diablo. Leader of a gang running drugs for a Mexican cartel that sees the riots as their opportunity to solidify their hold on the business throughout the state. And Diablo Alcantara has united the city's normally warring gangs toward that purpose, on the cartel's behalf. I take him off the board, all this goes away.”

Alonzo shook her head, her expression a mix of resentment and disbelief. “You alone?”

“That's right. Just give me a chance. What have you got to lose, Deputy Chief?”

“How about this city?”

Caitlin turned her gaze in the direction of the rioting. “Seems to me it's already lost. Thing at this point is to get it back.”

Alonzo's lower lip crawled over her upper one, her cheeks puckering, until she blew out some breath that hit Caitlin like a blast from a just-opened oven. “We've got five hundred personnel on scene who haven't been able to manage that.”

“Would it really hurt to listen to what I've got to say?”

“It hurts me, standing here right now instead of commanding the front line. The governor just approved an assault. We move inside the next hour, if the crowd doesn't disperse as ordered.”

“Just give me a chance.”

Alonzo shook her head again. “You know the saying ‘stone cold dead,' Ranger?”

“I do.”

“Maybe you haven't heard that among Texas law enforcement types it's called ‘
strong
cold dead' now.”

Caitlin smiled slightly. “Is that a fact?”

Alonzo was left shaking her head. “Tell me, when you look in the mirror, how big's the army that looks back?”

“Well, you know how the saying goes, Deputy Chief,” Caitlin said, backpedaling toward her SUV. “‘One riot, one Ranger.'”

 

3

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AST
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AN
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NTONIO,
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EXAS

Caitlin skulked about the outskirts of the neighborhoods just outside the riot zone. Through windows not boarded up or covered in grates, she spied more than one family following the simmering violence just a few blocks away on their televisions while they huddled against a wall.

According to the information she'd obtained from a trio of informants, Diablo Alcantara was running the show from his sister's home, near J Street, two blocks from the brewing riot's front lines. The cartels had trained Alcantara well, had taught him the tricks of their own trade, to inspire everyday people to turn to violence to the point that it came to define them. By the time a person found himself on this road, he was too far down it to turn back. So here, in east San Antonio, closing the schools for the day had turned hundreds of teenagers into virtual anarchists, looting and destroying for its own sake. Right now, Caitlin could still smell the smoke from a Laundromat that had burned to the ground after local firefighters and their trucks had been chased back by crowds hurling bottles and rocks. Three firefighters had been hospitalized, and one of the engines had been abandoned at the head of the street, where it too had been set ablaze.

The chemicals and detergents stored in a back room of the Laundromat had turned the air noxious for a time, the strange combination of lavender soap powder mixing with the corrosive bleaches to form the perfect metaphor for the city of San Antonio. Watching those white curtains of mist wafting through the flames to chase the rioters away—more effective than any efforts the authorities had mounted—had given Caitlin the idea to which Deputy Chief Alonzo had refused to listen.

Holding her position against a house, in view of the main drag, Caitlin checked her watch, then the sky, and finally her cell phone, to make sure she had a strong signal. Because word was the gangs were communicating via text message, there had been talk of shutting down the grid, but nobody could figure out a way to do it quickly—something Caitlin was glad for now.

Above the fire smoke and tear gas residue staining the air in patches, the night sky was clear, and she made out a collection of news choppers, their navigation lights flashing like the stars millions of miles beyond them. Creeping closer to J Street and the home of Diablo Alcantara's sister, Caitlin froze. She was just beyond the spray of a streetlight, which showcased a block packed with gang members proudly and openly displaying their colors.

Amid the gangbangers unified in this unholy alliance was a stocky figure, more bulk than muscle, holding court near the rear. Diablo Alcantara had gotten into a knife fight while in high school and had ended up losing an eye to a slice that split the left side of his face right down the middle. Even in pictures, it was hard for Caitlin to look at the jagged scar, and the translucent orb visible through the narrow slit Alcantara had for an eye socket, without feeling a flutter in her stomach.

Caitlin knew that the stocky figure was Alcantara the moment he turned enough toward the streetlight for its spray to reflect off the marble-like thing wedged into his skull in place of an eye. She counted fifty bangers in the vicinity, armed with assault rifles and submachine guns no intelligence report had made mention of, meaning such firepower must have only just reached the scene, courtesy of the cartels.

The bangers, under Diablo Alcantara's leadership, looked ready to launch the assault that would push the rioting from this neighborhood into the city proper. They were intent on turning San Antonio into Juarez. Caitlin's plan hadn't accounted for going up against heavy weaponry, but the reality made the plan's implementation all the more necessary. Giving the matter no further consideration, she lifted the cell phone closer and pressed out three words in a text message:
Come on in.

Caitlin figured she had three, maybe four minutes to wait. She spent the first of them following the gang members' antics in preparation for what was to come. Some of them wore military-grade flak jackets, in odd counterpoint to the pungent scent of marijuana smoke gradually claiming the air. She watched beer bottles drained and smashed, a few stray shots fired into the air to the cheering of the most chemically altered in the bunch.

Caitlin checked her watch one last time before she stepped out from the darkness and into the street, light glinting off her badge, holstered pistol in plain view as she continued toward the center of the block.

“I'm a Texas Ranger,” she called out to the gang members, whose gazes fixed on her in disbelief. “All of you, stay right where you are.”

 

4

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AST
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AN
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NTONIO,
T
EXAS

Caitlin stopped thirty feet from Diablo Alcantara and swept her gaze across the other fifty or so gang members, who were armed to fight a small war.

“Diego Alcantara?” she called, breaking the silence that had settled over the block.

“Who wants to know?” Alcantara asked, emboldened by having a veritable army to back him up.

“Texas Rangers, sir. You're under arrest.”

The silence returned, until it was broken anew by laughter. Just a ripple at first but quickly spreading, some of the gang members literally doubling over, slapping their knees, their assault weapons all but forgotten.

Alcantara joined in, clapping. Closer up, Caitlin saw he had a bullet-shaped head to go with the horribly scarred face, which seemed to come to a point at the top, where his black hair was bunched together with dried gel. Caitlin thought she could actually smell the oily pomade from this far away, the aroma not unlike the Brylcreem her grandfather Earl Strong had used every day until his last.

Alcantara's eyes, both the good one and the bad, were set too far back in his head, as if some cosmic force had realigned the sockets while he was still in the womb. Caitlin watched the good one narrow.

“Hey, you're that famous bitch Ranger,” Alcantara said in recognition. “The one put a whole bunch of men in the ground.”

Caitlin's mental clock continued to click down. The gang members started to encircle her, still giggling and chortling, seeing no threat whatsoever in her presence. The dueling aromas of weed smoke and stale sweat intensified as they drew closer.

Alcantara approached through the crowd, his misshapen features tightening and one eye narrowed, like a dog trying to figure out what it was seeing.

“You're a bitch with balls, I'll give you that, and now you're gonna have to—” He stopped midthought, puzzlement sprouting on his features. “Hey, anybody else hear that?”

The gang members exchanged glances, shaking their heads uniformly, providing no relief for Alcantara, who swept his eyes about the night sky.

“What the fuck, man. What the fuck…”

The faint buzzing Caitlin too had detected on the air had now grown to a whine, and finally a screech. Only then did the gang members swing around from both Caitlin and Alcantara to look farther east, toward the sky. Still unable to see anything, because the crop duster was flying without any lights. It was, for all practical purposes, invisible, until it opened its dual tanks to send the first wave of a thick, white, paste-like cloud dropping toward the ground.

By the time Alcantara had swung back toward Caitlin, she'd pulled a plaid kerchief soaked in her dad's old cologne up over her nose and mouth. And two, maybe three seconds later, the dense white cloud unleashed by the crop duster settled over the area like a blanket, spreading straight down the street toward riot central, at the head of the neighborhood's commercial center.

Of course, it wasn't called crop dusting anymore, Caitlin knew. The new term was “aerial application,” and the plane that had just soared overhead, not more than fifty feet off the ground, cost more than a million dollars and was outfitted with an advanced turbine engine and sophisticated GPS system to allow for just this kind of flight. The pilot was a former Texas Ranger who'd taken up the practice to supplement his pension. He also had come up with an especially noxious formula that mixed corn starch and soap powder with a scent most closely resembling skunk oil. He'd used a version of it to repel a riot of his own, back in the day, and was more than happy to come out of retirement to return favors done for him by both Earl and Jim Strong, Caitlin's grandfather and father.

“Hell,” he'd told her, “they saved my life more times than I care to remember. Just tell me where and when, Ranger.”

He didn't own a cell phone, so Caitlin had provided him with one, to ensure he could receive her signal via text message.

Caitlin made her way through the vapor, which was thicker than any fog, brush fire, or West Texas dust storm she'd ever seen, dodging bodies, to Diablo Alcantara's last position. The gang members were desperately fleeing the street all around her, grunting and gasping, some doubled over with nausea from the stench. Those sounds drowned out the last of the crop duster soaring overhead, the fading drone of its turbine engine matching the cadence of its arrival on the scene.

She reached Alcantara just as he managed to unsling the assault rifle shouldered behind him. Caitlin clocked him on the side of the skull with the butt of her SIG Sauer and watched his grasp go limp as his knees buckled. She caught his dazed form halfway to the roadbed and dragged him from the street with one arm, the whole time keeping her SIG ready in her free hand.