Strong Darkness (7 page)

“… if you're not gone by midnight, Ranger.”

Finneran's threat seemed a better fit for the Old West, but Caitlin knew it was to be taken seriously nonetheless. The last thing she needed, especially in the wake of plowing members of the Beacon of Light Church into a drainage trench, was to get embroiled in yet another fiasco certain to draw unwelcome attention to her and the Rangers.

From Rhode Island Hospital, Caitlin and Cort Wesley went to Spats, the bar just off the college-dominated Thayer Street, where, according to Detective Finneran, Dylan was last seen before he was attacked.

“Sure, I remember him,” the manager, a stout muscular man named Theo, said, handing Dylan's picture back to Cort Wesley. “Comes in a lot with his friends. Always smiling. Good with the girls.”

“He was in here with some friends last night,” Caitlin picked up. Theo's olive skin and slight accent made her peg him as being from the Middle East, Lebanon or maybe Turkey. “Before he was attacked.”

“Oh, man,” Theo said, shaking his head. “Just goddamn awful.…”

“My son,” Cort Wesley said, still holding the picture.

Theo shifted his shoulders and stretched his arms, trying to find comfort in the sports jacket that fit him too snugly. “For what it's worth, I'm sorry.”

“For what it's worth, what was an eighteen-year-old kid doing drinking in a bar?”

“Nobody said he was drinking.”

Caitlin let her eyes drift over the tables squeezed below the bar area beneath a host of wide-screen televisions where kids who looked to be little or no older than Dylan were filling glasses out of tall plastic tubes with beer foam clinging to the empty portions. “What else do people do here?” she asked Theo.

“You didn't let me finish,” he said. “Sunday night that kid—Dylan—came in here and met some friends at a table in the back over there and ordered a tube.”

“One of those,” Caitlin said, pointing toward the tables in the lower area of the bar where a hockey game was projected on one screen and a basketball game on the two others. She didn't notice who was playing.

“Yes. But before it got to the table, a girl showed up. Dylan must have recognized her because he joined her at the bar right away.”

“You tell this to the Providence police detectives?”

“Sure. They asked the same questions you are pretty much.”

“Did it look like Dylan was expecting her?” Caitlin asked, thinking of the text message Dylan supposedly received.

“I couldn't say. Sorry.”

“Can you describe the girl?” Cort Wesley asked him.

Theo hedged.

“What's wrong?”

“I just want to choose my words carefully here. The girl wasn't a Brown student. Only time I ever saw her she was alone and not just here either.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I manage the place across the street too. I've seen her at the back bar there, when we open it as a nightclub called Viva. I had her pegged as, well, a working girl.”

Caitlin and Cort Wesley exchanged a wary glance.

“That's why I noticed when she walked in here last night,” Theo continued. “College kids aren't her kind of crowd, especially a kid like your son who could probably have any girl he wanted. I don't know how old she was, but I'd guess twenty-four, maybe twenty-five. Always very well dressed. Reminded me of a model, something like that.”

Caitlin could see Cort Wesley's mind veering in a different direction.

“How'd my son get in here exactly, Theo?”

“He's got an ID.”

“A fake ID, you mean.”

“They all have fakes, Mr. Masters.”

“Dylan didn't have one when he left Texas.”

“You sure about that?”

“Could you describe the girl for us?” Caitlin interjected, before Cort Wesley could respond to Theo's challenge.

“Are you a cop or something?”

“Something. A Texas Ranger.”

“You got any jurisdiction up here?”

“So long as Providence is part of the United States. You mind describing the girl now?”

“Long dark hair, not much over five feet tall. Very beautiful and exotic-looking,” Theo finished. “Oh, and she was Chinese.”

Caitlin felt her cell phone vibrating in the pocket of her jeans and drew it out. “It's Paz,” she told Cort Wesley.

 

13

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ROVIDENCE,
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HODE
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SLAND

“How's the boy, Ranger?”

“How'd you know to ask, Colonel?”

Of all the relationships Caitlin had ever enjoyed, the one she maintained with Colonel Guillermo Paz was by far the strangest and most inexplicable. It had begun under violent circumstances over five years ago now with them on opposite sides and had continued with them having joined forces ever since.

Paz, a former colonel in the Venezuelan secret police and Hugo Chavez's personal attack dog for a time, said it was because he'd seen something in Caitlin's eyes that had changed his life forever. He seemed single-mindedly and resolutely committed to protecting her at all costs to himself. That protection now extended to Cort Wesley and his two sons and probably anyone else who was important in Caitlin's life. When a secretive hit squad had attacked Caitlin, Cort Wesley, and his boys on the streets of a Texas town, Paz paid a visit to the squad's headquarters in Houston where he proceeded to pour an experimental explosive down their throats that blew them up from the inside. When a kill team composed of Mexico's worst killers launched an attack during one of Dylan's high school lacrosse games, Paz rode to the rescue wedged out of a sunroof firing twin assault rifles. The list went on.

The colonel had a small private army in his charge now, operating under the auspices of a Homeland Security spook whose name varied by the assignment and who believed Paz was beholden to him, whereas Caitlin knew Paz was beholden to no one. They didn't see each other very much but he always seemed to know when she needed him, or was about to.

“I had a vision,” Paz told her. “I used to see things only in my dreams, like my mother, who had the sight. But now I get them when I'm awake too. I saw the outlaw's oldest boy in this one consumed by flames.”

“Dylan was attacked last night. He's in a hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. That's where Cort Wesley and I are right now.”

“Providence, Rhode Island?”

“The boy goes to school here now, Colonel. College.”

“I'm teaching at one of those myself now.”

“Really?”

“English to those who don't speak it yet,” Paz said, not bothering to elaborate further.

“What else did you see in that vision, Colonel?” Caitlin asked him.

“This is just the beginning, Ranger. But I don't think I'm telling you anything you don't already know.”

“What about a young Chinese woman? Anything about her?” Caitlin asked, not believing she was actually posing the question.

“Not that I've seen yet,” Paz told her.

He tried to recapture the broader message of his vision in his mind. But it was more a series of still shots than a moving portrait, denying him a clear picture. Then he recalled what had come after the flames had receded, leaving a scent on his nostrils like scorched wood and earth and flushing heat through his blood that made his skin feel oven-baked. He'd gazed out the window at nothing where the shifting trees enveloped the parklike grounds of San Antonio College beneath a moonlit sky, nothing at all.

“Darkness,” Paz heard himself say softly.

“Say that again.”

“I saw darkness, Ranger.”

“Nothing we haven't seen before, Colonel.”

“This is different. You've heard of the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger?”

“Only that the Nazis were rather fond of his teachings.”

“That's because he wrote extensively on the connections between being and action, that by undertaking actions which do not support that being a man risks degeneration. Heidegger believed the wasteland was not so much a place as a state of mind we effectively banish ourselves to if we don't stop resisting the nature of our being and just accept it.”

“What's the point here, Colonel?”

“Goes back to the point you raised about the affinity the Nazis held for Heidegger. They saw in his writings moral justification for their actions because they were acting upon the natures they perceived themselves to possess. Following the path they were meant to take. You see where I'm going with this?”

“Nazis represent as dark an evil as man has ever known,” Caitlin assumed.

“There's a new darkness coming,” Paz told her. “I saw it take the outlaw's boy in its grasp when he crossed its sweep. Be warned that it's not about to stop with him. This darkness is hungry for more and I could see no end to its reach in my vision.”

“There's something bigger involved here. That's what you're saying, Colonel.”

“Isn't there always?”

 

14

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ROVIDENCE,
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HODE
I
SLAND

Theo provided Caitlin and Cort Wesley with the names of the two Brown University students Dylan met up with at Spats the previous night. He also provided one of their phone numbers and the information that neither played football, in contrast to Coach Estes's assertion that Dylan had been with some fellow freshmen players prior to the attack.

“Are we in trouble?” Salaar Khan asked when they met in the Delta Phi fraternity house lounge, inside a brick-walled quadrangle draped in ivy where Greek life on campus was centered.

“That depends,” Caitlin told him and fellow Delta Phi brother Ross Julian beneath the glow of a video game frozen on a big wide-screen television hanging from a wall over the room's fireplace mantel.

“Is this official?” Salaar picked up. “I mean, you're a Texas Ranger and this is Rhode Island.”

“We're here because Dylan's my son,” Cort Wesley interjected.

“Do we need a lawyer?” Salaar asked.

“What did I just say?”

“We heard what happened,” Ross said, speaking finally. “How can we help?”

What struck Caitlin most about these two Brown University juniors was how young they looked. Then she thought of Dylan lying in a hospital bed and started to feel the heat building inside her again. The video game frozen on the mounted wide-screen television looked to be one of those shoot-'em-ups where players with soldier avatar figures got points for each kill. She'd seen Luke playing similar ones, cringing every time a fake gunshot rang out through the surround sound, wondering what it might do to the video-game industry if every player had to witness what real violence looked like. Luke, Cort Wesley's fifteen-year-old younger son, was enrolled at a Houston boarding school now, and she found herself starting to worry whether something bad was about to befall him. Maybe she should've asked Paz about that too.

“You were with Dylan in Spats last night,” Caitlin said, after clearing her throat in the hope it might do the same to her mind.

“He showed up there after his football meetings,” the one named Ross said.

“But this isn't the football fraternity. Have I got that right?”

“You do,” Ross told her. “Football players join Thete—Theta Delta Chi. Dylan will probably end up there, but he fits in better here.”

“Get back to last night,” Caitlin told him. “You said you met up with Dylan after his football meetings.”

“We didn't exactly meet up with him,” Salaar answered instead. “We were already inside when he arrived. He sat down with us, but he was waiting for a girl.”

Cort Wesley eased himself forward on the couch he'd pulled out and tilted on an angle so he and Caitlin could better face the boys. It still smelled of fresh leather. Caitlin noticed that the room's sole light, other than that emanating from the television screen, spilled from two tracks missing half their fixtures.

“This would be the Chinese girl we heard about,” Cort Wesley said to them both. “Was she his girlfriend or something?”

Ross and Salaar looked at each other, then shrugged in virtual unison.

“Something,” Ross said.

“And what's that exactly?”

“Definitely not his girlfriend,” Salaar tried to elaborate.

“I believe we're straight on that much. Now tell me what's bothering the two of you about this. What's got you so uncomfortable?”

“He recognized her,” Salaar managed, while Ross was still collecting his thoughts. “From another night, the first time he saw her.”

“Recognized her from where?” Cort Wesley asked them.

The two boys looked at each other, as if to determine who would answer.

“From where?” Cort Wesley repeated.

“A video,” Salaar responded.

“The kind you may not want to hear about,” Ross added.

 

15

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ROVIDENCE,
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HODE
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SLAND

They watched what could only be described as a pornography video right there, projected wirelessly via laptop onto the widescreen mounted over the fireplace. Caitlin told Salaar to hit pause as soon as the young Chinese woman made her first appearance, still fully clothed.

The bar manager's description didn't do her justice. Her beauty was as natural as it was ravishing and exotic. Her black hair was long, tumbling past her shoulders in light waves. Her complexion seemed fair and pristine, like a porcelain statue until the screen froze on her smiling, which exaggerated her beauty and made her look a notch beyond seductive.

Caitlin supposed that was the point. She hadn't had much dealings with pornography, Internet or otherwise, but any experience was too much. Especially when it involved what could only be equated as a modern form of slavery. A seminar Caitlin had taken last year at Quantico pegged human trafficking as a thirty-five-billion-dollar-a-year international industry with the vast bulk of that being spent in the United States. That seminar had provided samples of various brands of pornography, and as things went, this looked relatively high-end as opposed to the underground variety that ranged from kiddie porn to even higher up on the demented scale.