Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(4)
The trapper’s gaze fixed on a telegraph machine as he peeled off his gloves. “Does that work?”
“Why?”
“Because we must get off a message to the Mounties,” Labelle said through still-frozen lips.
“Sure thing, soon as we get you warmed up with blankets, and fed right.”
“No!” Labelle barked, grasping the ranger’s forearm so hard it seemed the cold bled into him as well. “Now! Before it’s too late!”
The ranger yanked his hand away, stumbling backwards in the process. “Too late for what?”
Labelle peered through the closest window. The morning sun had melted away enough of the ice crust for him to see the path down which he’d come. “For us. Before whatever’s coming gets here.”
PART ONE
The depredations of your enemies the W. [Waco] and T. [Tawakonis] Indians and their hostile preparations, has driven us to the necessity of taking up arms in self-defense.… The frontier is menaced—The whole colony is threatened—under these circumstances it became my duty to call the militia to the frontier to repel the threatened attacks and to teach our enemies to fear and respect us.
—Stephen Austin, 1826, in Mike Cox, The Texas Rangers
1
EAST SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“Nobody goes beyond this point, ma’am,” the tall, burly San Antonio policeman, outfitted in full riot gear, told Caitlin Strong.
“That includes Texas Rangers…” She hesitated long enough to read the nameplate over his badge. “Officer Salazar?”
“That’s Sergeant Salazar, Ranger. And the answer is yes, it includes everyone. Especially Texas Rangers.”
“Well, Sergeant, maybe we wouldn’t need to be here if a couple of your patrolmen hadn’t gunned down a ten-year-old boy.”
Salazar looked at Caitlin, scowling as he backed away from her Explorer. A few blocks beyond the checkpoint, a grayish mist seemed to hover in the air, residue of the tear gas she expected would be unleashed again soon. That is, unless the youthful crowd currently packed into the small commercial district at the near end of Hackberry Avenue dispersed, which they were showing no signs of doing. The third night of trouble had brought the National Guard to the scene, in full battle attire that included M4 rifles and flak jackets. Caitlin could see that more floodlights had been set up to keep the street bathed in daylight brightness. They cast a strange hue that reminded her of movie kliegs, as if this were a scene concocted from fiction rather than one that had arisen out of random tragedy.
Sergeant Salazar came right up to her open window, close enough for Caitlin to smell spearmint on his breath as he worked a wad of gum from one side of his mouth to the other.
“Those patrolmen found themselves in the crossfire of a gunfight between a neighborhood watch leader and gangbangers he thought were robbing a convenience store where most pay with their EBT cards. The clerk who chased them down the street just wanted to return the change they’d left on the counter for their ice cream, but the watch leader, Alfonzo Martinez, saw the scene otherwise and ordered the bangers to stop and put their hands in the air.”
Neighborhood watch leader Martinez, a lifelong resident of J Street, who’d managed to steer clear of violence all his life, started firing his heirloom Springfield 1911 model .45 as soon as the gangbangers yanked pistols from the waistbands of their droopy trousers. The only thing his shots hit was a passing San Antonio Police car. The uniformed officers inside mistook the fire as coming from the gangbangers, and the officers opened up on them so indiscriminately that the lone victim of their fire was a ten-year-old boy who’d emerged from the same convenience store.
It was almost dawn before everything got sorted out and the investigative team, comprising San Antonio police and highway patrol detectives, thought they’d managed to get control of the situation. Then, relatively peaceful protests by day gave way to an eruption of violence at night, spearheaded by rival gangs who abandoned their turf wars to join forces against an enemy both of them loathed. Violence and looting reigned, only to get worse by the second night, when eight officers ended up hospitalized—one injured by what was later identified as a bullet rather than a rock. And now, the third night found the National Guard on the scene in force, along with armored police vehicles from as far away as Houston, barricading the streets to basically shut the neighborhoods of east San Antonio’s northern periphery off from the rest of the city.
“You’re still here, Ranger,” Sergeant Salazar noted.
“Just considering my options.”
“Only option you have is to turn your vehicle around and leave the area, ma’am. You’re not needed or welcome here.”
“On whose orders, exactly?” Caitlin wondered aloud.
“Mine,” a female voice boomed, a moment before Caitlin heard a loud pop, like a shotgun blast, crackle through the air.
2
EAST SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
A few blocks beyond the checkpoint, one of the spotlights fizzled and died, more likely the victim of a well-thrown rock than a bullet. Caitlin was out of her Explorer by then, hand instinctively straying to her holstered SIG Sauer P-226 in anticipation of more shots to follow.
“Get back in your vehicle, Ranger,” said Consuelo Alonzo, deputy chief of the San Antonio Police Department, as she strode forward, red-faced from the exertion of rushing to the scene from the police line upon learning of Caitlin’s arrival.