Strong Darkness (34 page)

And they hadn't today.

The plane was already at the gate when Dylan and Kai arrived, and they were granted immediate access by just flashing their boarding passes. Left alone in the cabin in the moments prior to general boarding.

“What's waiting for us in Texas, Kai? What's all this about?”

“My father,” she told him.

 

90

A
LAMO
H
EIGHTS,
T
EXAS

Li Zhen was still shaking when Qiang's men arrived to dispose of the body, unable to quell the tremors that rose with the thoughts of what he'd done. Exacerbated further by the fact that he had stood for endless minutes under a stream of frigid water in his shower to punish himself for his indiscretion.

He had lost control. He never lost control.

“It's her,” the freshly dressed Zhen said to Qiang as a pair of men carried the body of the dead girl, wrapped in plastic, past them. “The Texas Ranger.”

“I … don't understand,” Qiang told him.

“Did you check the grounds?”

“I have men posted.”

Zhen moved to the window. “I think she's coming.”

“We are prepared.”

Zhen swung away from the glass that had misted up with the condensation formed by his rapid breathing. For some reason his thoughts turned back to coming before the Triad council on the night that changed his life forever sixteen years before. They'd thought the advantage theirs, but he'd shown them different, just as he'd been forced to do so many times over the course of his life. A man of low station, peasant scum, avoiding the defensive posture he so loathed by always attacking. Seizing the advantage, any advantage, to get what he wanted.

But not now, not with Caitlin Strong.

Those moments in the basement when he thought he was killing her were wonderful, rekindling memories of his unlikely, unprecedented rise to power, drawing imaginary lines to envision destinations he wouldn't be denied. And now, on the verge of his penultimate triumph, Zhen found himself a frightened, cowering man reduced to peeking out of windows.

“I want her dead, Qiang,” he heard himself say in words that emerged in more of a hiss.

“In time,” the giant said.

“I want to do it myself. I must feel the life pass out of her. Stare into her eyes as it fades from them.”

“You still believe she is coming?” Qiang asked him.

Zhen started to turn back toward the window, then stopped. “No,” he said, massaging his temples as his head started to pound, “I realize she's already here.”

 

91

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

“Let me help you back inside,” Caitlin said to Jones, twilight having turned to darkness in the sky beyond.

“Fuck that, Ranger,” he said, trying to stand on his own. “I don't run from a fight, no matter what.”

“You couldn't even walk away from this one.”

“You got any more guns stashed in your SUV?”

“A shotgun and an AR-15, only whoever flattened the tires is sure to have taken them.”

“Still worth a look.”

“The painkillers must be affecting your brain, Jones. You think they're not watching the house right now?”

He looked toward her holstered SIG Sauer. “So we got one pistol…”

“And two backup magazines to go with it. Unless de la Cruz has weapons lying around.”

Jones focused on the shape of the cell phone pushing out from the pocket of Caitlin's jeans. “Get Paz on the phone. Let me speak to him.”

She shrugged. “He's too far away. He'll never get here in time. Captain Tepper's marshaling the forces. Right now, best we can hope for is that the shots-fired call I made holds them off until then.”

And that's when the gunfire began.

“Guess we can forget about that,” Jones spoke though a grimace as Caitlin dragged him back inside the house.

*   *   *

The gunfire was constant, blistering the air. Plaster and wood rained down on her and Jones from all angles, the glass shards that struck them feeling like icicles. They'd dropped to the floor once back within the house proper, hugging a worn shag carpet.

Caitlin cracked the door back open and, staying on the floor, poised her pistol through it and aimed for the door leading into the screen porch from the outside. She heard shuffling behind her and twisted awkwardly to find Jones lumbering toward the kitchen in a crouch. Fresh blood leaked through his dressings, his face pale and expression frozen in an agony he held back to avoid crying out in the pain that racked him.

“Jones!” she called out.

But he didn't acknowledge her, didn't even turn back.

Caitlin heard a muffled thump and turned back around. A figure sheathed in black lurched toward a window on the house's left side, just crashing through when she planted a bullet dead square in his forehead.

One down, but how many more left to go?

She held her position, the scream of sirens approaching in response to her shots-fired call into SAPD minutes before. Response time to this part of the city tended to be slower, but D. W. Tepper would have the whole of Texas law enforcement here anytime now too, if they could just hold out.

But for how long against firepower that continued to rain bullets into the house, seemingly from all angles at once? The echoes reached Caitlin as muffled rasps, her hearing having taken too much of a beating in the initial onslaught. It was one of the many things nobody tells you about a gunfight before you've actually been in one. Maybe because the people who knew held back the information in the hope you'd never have to experience it yourself.

Caitlin had been in more than her share of gunfights, but never one that found her totally on the defensive, pinned down this way. Forced to rely on the intervention of others for her very survival. She hated that feeling of helplessness, of dependence, more than anything.

She thought she saw another figure dart up the front steps, his head covered in some kind of ski mask caught in her vision. Caitlin fired off four shots in rapid succession, but heard no satisfying grunt or thud of a body falling to the ground.

Then she heard the crash of another door, the back one, bursting open followed by the
pffffffffffts
of silenced rounds, how many she couldn't say, before an awful high-pitched wailing erupted, fading to a sound like an animal whimpering. Caitlin lunged back to her feet, darting through the fire and emptying the rest of her magazine through the two windows looking out from the house's front room to keep the shooters at bay. She'd just gotten a second magazine jammed home, round jacked into the chamber when she spun into the kitchen ready to start firing anew.

The harsh chemical scent assaulted her an instant before her eyes started to burn. She glimpsed the wounded Jones crouching over the body of one of their attackers, the man's exposed eyes frozen open and colored an awful red. Jones turned toward her, submachine gun with attached sound suppressor in hand.

“Ammonia and bleach, Ranger,” he rasped. “There's deadly shit you wouldn't believe under the typical kitchen sink.”

What little remaining strength he clung to seemed to bleed away in that instant and he keeled over to the floor that was slick with the deadly, noxious compound he must have hurled into the gunman's face.

“Jones,” she started.

He looked up at her, but that was all.

The blare of sirens screeched through the house, followed by the squeal of brakes and, almost immediately, a hail of heavy, automatic fire.

Caitlin felt sick to her stomach, these cops dying because she had called them and they'd come in response having no idea what they were driving into.

What was I thinking?

She wasn't; the instinct to survive and triumph had won the moment. She'd fallen into what her grandfather had once called a “gunfighter haze” where normal rudimentary thought didn't apply.

Caitlin left Jones where he was with the submachine gun and surged back into the front room, SIG ready to fire on anything that moved. Holding to the hope the cops might still be miraculously alive and that she could somehow keep them that way. The gunfire continued to pierce the night, pinging through her restored hearing and sounding curiously like that old-fashioned popcorn you cooked by shaking it over a stove burner. The night beyond was lit by muzzle flashes tracing toward the house, accompanied by the thuds of impact and crackling of more window glass giving way. Impossible to tell how many guns or how many men firing them. More than she'd ever faced down, that was for sure.

And then some kind of rolling light pierced the darkness, growing in intensity and brightness as an engine's roar drowned out the gunshots and something that looked like a tank thundered into her vision.

 

92

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

The lights seemed to be everywhere, turning night to day, leaving Caitlin to wonder if some ephemeral moment was blending heaven and earth. That maybe she'd been shot and this was the great white light that everybody talked about guiding you to the next world when your time was done.

But her time wasn't done.

And these were no heavenly lights; they were attached to a massive truck, not a tank, a whole day-glow bright bank of them that seemed to freeze the gunmen in their steps.

But not Caitlin. She watched the truck just manage to skirt the shot-up SAPD cars and plow into two of the black-clad men without slowing. Impact hurdled them airborne and then the truck slammed into and crushed a third. This as it twisted across Juan de la Cruz's tiny lawn, kicking up a fountain of dirt and grass.

And then the massive shape of Guillermo Paz emerged from the cab, wielding twin assault rifles that looked like toys in his huge hands and seeming to fire everywhere at once. Caitlin burst out through the screen porch door, adding her fire to his, concentrating on the gunmen at the outskirts of his firing angle.

They were on opposite sides of the yard, seemed to have moved around closer to the back, escaping the spray of day-glow brightness that split the night. Caitlin rushed to her right because the gunman on that side seemed to have better hold of his gun, his moves suggesting high-grade military experience. Along the way she glimpsed one of the shooters still in Paz's sights drop down for cover behind a big bulky trash receptacle deposited on the curb. Maybe not registering it was made of plastic until Paz's fire literally blew it apart, pulverizing it back into and over the man, exposing him for the rain of fire that seemed to lift him airborne and toss him free of the light's spill.

By then Caitlin had come to the corner where the house bent to the left on an awkward angle, likely to conform to the property line. She caught the gunman who'd rushed that way just snapping a fresh magazine home and jacking back its slide to fire. Two bullets to the face and one to the throat ended that ambition for good, and she kept her charge in that direction going, hoping to run straight into the other gunman who'd fled Paz's fire.

She could still hear the echoing rattle of his twin fusillades, a brief pause for reloading during which she detected several individual rounds fired off by his remaining targets. The fact that his return fire came immediately and relentlessly made Caitlin wonder if maybe the pause had been a trap meant to get the shooter to do exactly what he'd done, exposing himself to certain death at the colonel's incessant fire.

Caitlin rounded the rear of the house to find the final gunman taking up a shooter's stance with his cut-down assault rifle, likely in Paz's direction. She opened fire without the split second it took to aim and steady, knowing she didn't have it. As a result, a few of her bullets missed and a few more thudded into his high-tech body armor and drew barely a flinch. Just a couple bullets left in this magazine and no time to trade it for her third, when fresh fire from inside the house spun the black-clad gunman one way and then the other.

Jones!

She could barely acknowledge him doing something positive, having put the submachine gun she'd left with him to good use. The gunman he'd shot wobbled one way and then the other, Caitlin just steadying her SIG on him when twin barrages by Paz literally lit up the air before twisting him around and dropping his body in a bloody heap.

Caitlin's mind recorded additional gunfire that was nonexistent, echoes of it banging up against the sides of her mind. It didn't end so much as recede, as if the volume was being turned down slowly. She found herself on the side of the house facing Guillermo Paz with no memory of having walked there, the colonel still surveying the scene with his all-seeing eyes that glowed like a cat's and twin assault rifles held at the ready.

“You told me you were too far away to help, Colonel,” she heard herself saying.

“Get behind me, Ranger,” he urged, turning so he was backpedaling toward his truck right into the center of the light spill. “I lied, in case they were tuned in to your phone.”

“I wouldn't put it past them,” she said, when a fresh shape popped up in the rear of Paz's truck, wide-eyed and terrified.

“Luke?” Caitlin managed. Then, to Paz in disbelief, “You brought him with you?”

“There was no time to stop, no place safe to leave him.”

Caitlin gazed about her, into the carnage left behind in the bright haze cast by the truck's light array as an army of sirens blaring with flashing lights just reached the outskirts of her vision.

“No place safer than this, Colonel? Really?”

“I'm here and you're here, Ranger,” Paz said. “You tell me.”

 

P
ART
N
INE

“No peace is too quick, no task too difficult or hazardous. Night and day will the ranger trail his prey, through rain and shine.”