Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(8)
Alcantara managed to tear free, but instead of running, he launched himself at her, so enraged that his one functioning eye looked ready to bulge out of his head. Caitlin tried to bring her gun back around, only to have him knock it from her grasp. She tried to snatch it out of the air, then heard a plop as it smacked the pool water, which looked like a pocket of refined oil shining in the night.
Alcantara came at her again, and Caitlin realized he’d never gone anywhere at all—he was latched to her by a watchband that had become ensnared in her denim shirt. The shirt was soaked with perspiration and dappled with vapor spots that dragged the rancid stench with them. Alcantara fired a jab-like blow, which she managed to deflect. But his next strike landed in the side of her neck.
Caitlin shrugged off the stinging pain just in time to duck under the next blow and shoulder him hard into the aboveground pool. Her intention was to spill Alcantara over into the water, but the impact buckled the framing and, instead, unleashed a torrent of water from a tear she’d cut in the liner. Its force separated and pushed both of them backwards, Caitlin feinting one way and then launching a palm strike from the blind spot created by the marble-sized fake eye wedged into his eye socket, straight into his nose.
Bellowing in pain and blowing out a torrent of blood from his nose to match the water still cascading around him, Alcantara barreled in toward her, his one working eye as big as an eight ball. Caitlin let him get close—close enough that he practically rammed that big eye straight into the thumb she plunged forward and twisted.
Caitlin had never heard a scream as deep and as shrill as Alcantara’s. She grabbed hold of both his shoulders when he sank to his knees, and began dragging him toward the side street parallel to J Street, where the bangers had gathered. The fight had stripped her cologne-soaked bandanna free. The stench and bite of the old Ranger’s skunk-stench concoction pushed tears from her eyes.
Caitlin could barely see when she reached the side street. Sirens were screaming everywhere, and bright lights poured through the haze that had settled before her vision.
“Stop right there!” an SAPD uniformed officer screamed at her, pistol trembling in his hand instead of steadying on her. “Stop, or I’ll shoot you dead!”
5
HOUSTON, TEXAS
“I’m sure you understand my position, Mr. Masters,” Julia De Cantis, head of the Village School, said, from behind a desk that seemed much too large for her.
“I don’t think I do, ma’am,” Cort Wesley told her, fidgeting anxiously in the easy chair. The color of its leather had apparently been selected to match the wood tones of both the desk and the impressive array of bookshelves, which looked ready to swallow the room.
“Call me Julia, please. Everyone does, even the students.”
“I still don’t understand your position, Julia.”
De Cantis started to lean forward, then stopped suddenly, as if hit by a force field separating Cort Wesley’s space from hers. Outside, the early morning sun seemed to twinkle off the dew-rich grass of the school’s spacious twenty-eight-acre grounds. There was no one about yet, except a few of the boarding students out jogging. Fortunately, Cort Wesley’s son Luke wasn’t among them; he had no idea of his father’s presence here, and would have forbidden it if he had known.
“While it is customary for rising junior students to select their own roommates, the issue of your son boarding with Zachary Russo presents the school with several issues.”
“Keep talking, Julia,” Cort Wesley prodded, after De Cantis had stopped, as if that were the end of things.
“Well,” she started, stopping again just as fast. She was the one doing the fidgeting now.
The discomfort didn’t seem to suit her. It was like a set of clothes that didn’t fit right, Cort Wesley figured. Julia De Cantis had a sheen to her, a kind of persona that she slapped on for meetings with board members, alumni, fund-raisers—and parents too, to some extent. She appeared to him to be cut from a more natural cloth, stitched in the classroom, absent of political or financial pressures. The freedom to mold young minds was what she’d signed up for. In the natural order of things, Cort Wesley guessed, she’d likely become a victim of her own success and popularity in that venue, fueling her rise to the administrative level.
“Rule seems plain and simple to me,” Cort Wesley said matter-of-factly.
“There is nothing either plain or simple about the relationship between these two boys.”
“The relationship, as you call it, is over, ma’am. They’re just friends now,” Cort Wesley corrected, even though he wasn’t so sure himself.
Nearly a year before, Luke had come out about himself, and then about his relationship with Zach.
Came out.
How Cort Wesley despised that term, though he supposed there was no easy way to classify the experience of learning that his youngest son was gay. That revelation had been sprung on him at the same time that he had learned an equally difficult truth about his own father, who, it turned out, wasn’t nearly the bastard Cort Wesley had figured him for. Not even close. More a hero, during his final days, in fact.
Realizing he’d had both his dad and his youngest son all wrong filled him with a new respect for the truth. Now he welcomed it, in spite of the anxiety and tension it had wrought initially. Hell, he was about Luke’s age when he started boosting major appliances with Boone Masters.