Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(7)
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.
The soupy, stink-riddled mist had dissipated enough for a few of the gang members to clear their watering eyes and follow the trail Caitlin blazed toward the thick congestion of houses and yards. She shot two, and then a third, in rapid succession, all shots aimed low, for the legs, since incapacitating the bangers was as good as killing them, under the circumstances. More followed those three, and then still more, until Caitlin felt she’d entered some crazed video game, she was clacking off so many shots.
Everything was going just fine until a police helicopter sweeping overhead blazed its spotlight down over the scene. The beam pierced what was left of the thick, soupy vapor and exposed her for all to see. A dozen bangers, maybe, left to give chase. More bullets needed than she had left in the magazine, Caitlin thought, as they struggled against their own retching to sweep their weapons around.
The police chopper was hovering directly over them, its spot as big as an oversize truck tire, carving a cone-shaped ribbon of light into the night. Caitlin aimed her SIG up toward it, instead, and clacked off three shots. A poof sounded, as the big bulb exploded and a shower of glass rained down onto the remaining gang members, slowing them up enough for Caitlin to continue dragging Diablo Alcantara into the dark cover of a yard adjoining a pair of multifamily houses.
Her back slammed into the frame of an aboveground swimming pool sturdy enough to steal her breath, just as Alcantara regained enough of his senses to try to wrench himself free of her grasp and then to launch an elbow backwards. It struck Caitlin in her left cheek, rattling her jaw and smacking her teeth against each other.