Strong Darkness (39 page)

Zhen smiled tightly. “What about a man with rheumatoid arthritis?” he said, holding his hands up to reveal gnarled, swollen fingers and knuckles that looked like lumps of mottled flesh even without the bruising suffered yesterday. “Do you really think a man with hands like this could manage the kind of murders you're describing?”

Caitlin felt the breath seize up in her chest, recalling how much trouble Li Zhen had had working the pruning snips out in his company's garden. As much as the condition of his hands, she could tell he was telling the truth from his eyes, the gleeful gleam that flashed at refuting the most strident allegation she'd come to level against him.

But if Zhen wasn't the one leaving bodies along the old rail line, then who was?

She had gotten it wrong today, just as William Ray Strong had in 1883 when he suspected David Morehouse of that spate of killings.

“You've lost,
Cat-lan
Strong,” he said, and moved toward the far wall beyond all the display cases lining the floor. “Come witness the price of your defeat.”

Once there, Li Zhen waved a palm in front of what must have been some kind of scanner, because the wall receded to reveal a wide, crystal-clear, wall-length window overlooking the front of the complex.

Caitlin joined him before it, readying a pair of plastic handcuffs.

“Look down,” Zhen told her.

Caitlin spotted her SUV parked in front of the entrance, a trio of shapes barely discernible inside. Beyond, Old San Antonio Road had now been closed off entirely by the swelling protest that had forced her to loop all the way around in approaching Yuyuan. And then she glimpsed a trio of black-clad figures rush toward the three figures inside her SUV, opening fire with their submachine guns.

Zhen came up alongside her. “I think I will accelerate my plans.”

 

P
ART
T
EN

REWARD!

 

FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR DEAD BANK ROBBERS NOT ONE CENT FOR LIVE ONES

—From a placard in a Texas bank window, 1928

 

103

N
EW
B
RAUNFELS,
T
EXAS

The trio of black-garbed shapes had cut through the light, sweeping past a FedEx truck parked by the entrance. Eerily miniaturized from this distance looking down, the whole scene was rendered even more surreal by the fact that the thick glass muffled all sound of their gunfire.

Orange flashes burst from the muzzles, followed by a constant stream of color burning through the sun-drenched air. The men moved as they kept shooting, no quarter or square inch of space spared. Their bullets tore into the SUV, Caitlin following the three figures inside jumping and jerking about as the bullets pulverized them.

“Now, you are alone,” Li Zhen taunted. “How does it feel, Ranger?”

She drew her own pistol and leveled it straight at him. “We're leaving, sir, with you under arrest.”

Zhen didn't move, his gaze still focused downward through the window, not even bothering to regard her as if unaffected by her intention.

“I'm not going anywhere,” he told her.

“You just murdered three Texas Rangers. You just declared war on the state of Texas.”

Zhen finally turned her way again, his expression flat and smug. “I will never see the inside of a jail or a court, and you know it. It will be reported that you and the other three Rangers died in a traffic accident, something like that. Your vehicle exploded, leaving no remains at all.”

Caitlin held her SIG Sauer steady on him. “How's that exactly, sir?”

“Turn around, Ranger.”

Caitlin did, found herself facing two average-sized men flanking a giant bald figure in the middle. All three had guns trained her way, their thick swatches of Triad tattoos visible in exposed patches of their skin.

“The big guy's name is Qiang, I believe, Mr. Zhen,” Caitlin said, holding her gun just as steady. “There's an international warrant out for him for the bombing of a government building in Taiwan. I guess I'll just have to arrest him too.”

“Arrogance inevitably destroys those who let it consume them.”

“You should know, I suppose. Not that it matters, because you're always going to be the man who took his own daughter to bed and fathered a second one. No amount of money or power can ever change that. And you know what's worse? Given the chance, you'd do it all over again, without any hesitation at all. Have I got that right, sir? Look at me and tell me I'm wrong.”

“You think you're any different, hiding your weakness behind your gun? Shooting anyone who opposes you so you need not face the truth.”

“You're talking about self-loathing, Mr. Zhen, and the truth is I've known my share of it. And by acknowledging that, you learn to stop hating yourself. You should really try it sometime.”

The two smaller Triad gunmen were approaching now, while Qiang hung back. Caitlin eased her hands into the air, SIG dangling from a single figure looped through its trigger guard. She felt one man take it from her grasp while the other jerked her arms down behind her back, quickly fastening her own set of plastic wrist cuffs in place.

“There is no dam to bring down on me,
Cat-lan
Strong,” Zhen said, taking the SIG in a swollen hand that seemed to have trouble holding it. His porcelain expression bent into a snarl that morphed into a tight, toothless grin.

The two Triad soldiers dragged Caitlin between a set of display cases toward the elevator.

“Take another look out that window, Mr. Zhen,” she said, twisting toward him.

Zhen turned his gaze back out through the glass just as the Triad gunmen outside down below jerked open the pockmarked, bullet-riddled doors of Caitlin's SUV to inspect their handiwork. They froze, backing off with guns lowered, gazing at one another in befuddlement at the sight revealed before them.

Zhen squinted, seeing what they had seen but still not believing it. He twisted round, the elevator door sliding open even though none of his men had pushed the button. He was still searching for words when Guillermo Paz burst from the elevator cab, submachine guns held in either hand spitting bullets.

 

104

N
EW
B
RAUNFELS,
T
EXAS

Paz had entered the parking garage through a storm drain built under it that connected a catch basin to a nearby river for run-off to avoid flooding. He'd found the elevator just about where the architectural plans for the complex revealed it to be, following it to the floor where tracking software installed on his smartphone indicated his Texas Ranger was located. The phone and software had been provided by Homeland Security, and Paz never bothered himself about how it worked exactly.

He only cared that it did.

His initial bursts took out the men on either side of Caitlin Strong, Paz swinging toward the massive shape recorded at the edge of his consciousness in the same moment pistol fire opened up his way. He launched himself airborne to avoid it, hitting the floor still in motion, sliding across the tile toward the cover of the larger display cases holding various kinds of insects and reptiles.

Paz heard glass shattering, display cases ruptured by his fire, the big man's, or both. The rupture of the case had freed thousands of fire ants to scurry across the floor, the pack seeming to move as one, converging on him. Paz swept wave after wave of them aside as he positioned himself to return the big man's fire.

But that fire, he realized, was trained not on him, but on the case behind which he rested. More glass shattered, freeing a trio of snakes Paz recognized as black mambas, infused with venom that could kill a man within seconds, two of them with just-swallowed mice bulging from their skin, and a third with a mouse still inside its open mouth. They slithered across the floor, riding atop the fire ants with tongues sweeping the air.

Other shapes seemed to dance before him, skirting his line of vision. The man Paz recognized from pictures as Li Zhen glided past him and took Caitlin Strong by her cuffed wrists, dragging her with him into the elevator with the Ranger's own pistol pressed against her skull.

Before Paz could react, the door started to close and the giant he now recognized as an extremely well-regarded assassin and killer named Qiang opened fire, blowing apart the glass of an aquarium filled with fat-faced fish that paralyzed larger prey so they could enter and eat them from the inside out. The jets of water from the tank propelled the fish across the floor, turning it slick and murky with the fire ants swept away while the fish flopped, clinging desperately to life. A similar variety native to South America were known to kill a few fishermen every year for doing no more than trying to extract the hook from their mouths. More seasoned men of the sea had learned never to dump the product of their nets without wearing gloves thick enough to resist such toxic bites.

Paz remained pinned to the floor, below the next line of the big man's fire. But he stayed in motion, sliding through the water, his clothes soaking up fire ants while he was careful to avoid touching the fat-faced smiley fish whose grins promised death. He rammed into another display case, toppling it over backward and freeing what looked like some kind of toads with horns rising over their faces to hop across the floor, drawn to the thickest pools of water.

Paz steadied one of his submachine guns on Qiang's position, opening fire to find the big shape nowhere to be seen an instant before two terrariums standing side by side were spilled over in unison. Paz pushed himself backward across the floor, his palms torn bloody by shards of shattered glass, leaving a splotchy trail in his path as the enraged black mambas slithered across the floor toward him.

 

105

N
EW
B
RAUNFELS,
T
EXAS

The three gunmen were backing up toward the FedEx truck when Cort Wesley burst out the rear doors, flak jacket buried beneath his blue uniform top and assault rifle clacking away. He saw enough of them to know they were Chinese, Triad soldiers in all probability, but not enough to tell anything else.

But he could feel their shock, the very thing that had helped render them vulnerable to his surprise attack. Shock at what they had viewed inside Caitlin's SUV after shooting the hell out of it:

Mannequins, seated inside in place of men. Decoys.

Cort Wesley had wielded an M16 more times than he could count, had killed with the deadly rifle pretty much every time he'd fired it. Today that fire had a hollow ring to it, drowned out in large measure by the protest that had shut down the road directly in front of Yuyuan. He kept the trigger working until the magazine emptied, slapping a fresh one home just in case before starting forward.

The three Triad soldiers lay in blood pools so thick, the coppery stench almost made him gag. It was a smell Cort Wesley had never gotten used to. That was the thing about gunfights; everything in life seemed to change, evolve, except them. They were always the same, as far back as Cort Wesley's experience allowed him to recall. The sense of the assault rifle jerking slightly in his grasp, its weight much heavier than anyone who'd never wielded one could possibly imagine. The feel of super-heated air from the expended bullets pushed back at him by the forward gravity created by the expended shells.

Cort Wesley wanted to smell the flowering dogwood trees and the fresh scents cast by the elms and oaks layered into the ground around the complex. He wanted to suck that into his nostrils to replace the blood stench taking root there now. But it wouldn't go away, lingering and loitering in his nose as well as consciousness as if to remind him he'd just snuffed out three lives. He wished it hadn't been necessary. He wished somewhere down deep it bothered him more.

In the road fronting Yuyuan, meanwhile, as many as five thousand protesters had gathered for a rally against Zhen's company. Cort Wesley realized the police detail assigned to secure the area was understaffed and woefully unprepared to deal with such numbers and ferocity. Barely a thousand were expected to show up and the additional four thousand left the participants pressed shoulder to shoulder, all facing a stage that was currently empty.

Cort Wesley reached the SUV's shot-out windows to find the stench of burned plastic replacing that of spilled blood. The three mannequins dressed as Texas Rangers right down to the Stetsons and badges had taken so many bullets, parts of them had practically melted. Charred holes marked bullet entries in dangling plastic limbs. Two of the mannequins' heads were missing and the torso of a third had taken so much fire that it was mostly just a jagged hole where its chest and much of its stomach should have been.

Li Zhen had taken the bait just as hoped for and expected. Caitlin was right; the man's weakness lay in his arrogance, his sense of invincibility and entitlement. Cort Wesley figured there must be some Chinese proverb counseling against just that. But he wasn't much for quotes and proverbs, much more comfortable with a rifle than a moral and, with that, he swung back around and charged toward the building's entrance.

 

106

N
EW
B
RAUNFELS,
T
EXAS

Zhen slammed Caitlin's head against the elevator cab wall once and then again, as it bottomed out like a Disney ride, zooming downward. His breathing had picked up, turning rapid and shallow, noisy through his mouth. His eyes continued to glow hatefully, wide with indecision and uncertainty over encountering the utterly unexpected.

“I want you to
see
!” he hissed into her ear. “To bear witness!”

The plastic ties binding her wrists together from behind left her unable to deflect or counter his blows.

“Where we going?” she asked, finding her voice. “Hell?”