Strong Light of Day (3 page)

The fact that the EPA's efforts were as well intentioned as the ranchers' protests were strident probably hadn't registered with Ilg, who'd paid none of the two dozen citations he'd been issued, amounting to nearly fifty thousand dollars in fines. In fact, he'd been purposely setting his cattle to graze near those waterways on a regular basis, including the day the sheriff's department came to serve him with an arrest warrant for the unpaid levies. The first of the militiamen who'd come in expectation of exactly that moment sprang from positions of cover, training their guns on the four deputies, who had the sense not to draw theirs in response.

By the time the reinforcements they summoned arrived, more militiamen had spilled in, and more continued to show up, seemingly by the hour. They formed a perimeter around the area Ilg had staked out and returned with his cattle every day to graze, further inciting the potential for violence the militiamen seemed to thirst for while pawing the triggers of their AR-15s and hunting rifles. One had been arrested during a routine traffic stop after a highway patrolman had spotted a Gatling gun in the back of his pickup.

The stand-off had been going on for three days now, with neither side showing any signs of giving in or up. For his part, Ilg had no reason to acquiesce either to the demands of the EPA to stop grazing his cattle amid federally protected waters or to the attempts of the Bureau of Land Management rangers to collect the bulk of the fines levied against him. For their part, the militiamen who'd gathered at Ilg's ranch not far from Uvalde likely saw his faux crusade as another last stand to preserve the so-called real and free America. They wore the fatigues and gear of real soldiers, imagining themselves to be as brave and skilled as true servicemen fighting real wars instead of imaginary ones. Anointing themselves as the only just moral arbiters, when all they really wanted was an opportunity to parade around with their weapons in the hope of someday getting an actual chance to use them.

Caitlin saw the second roadblock at the head of a side road off the highway leading straight to Christoph Russell Ilg's ranch. From this distance, the scene had the look of a child's play scene with toy soldiers staged to confront each other on a papier-mâché battlefield. Drawing closer, Caitlin was able to see the true scope of the danger. Heavily armed highway patrolmen were poised in flak jackets behind their vehicles, while even more heavily armed militiamen peeked out from behind various boulders, trees, and thick fence posts. A television truck bearing the markings of a national cable news channel, meanwhile, was parked between the rival fronts. A technician unloaded equipment while a reporter Caitlin thought she recognized looked on casually.

She pulled her SUV over and was met by a highway patrol captain she'd worked with before, as soon as she climbed out.

“Morning, Frank,” she said to Captain Francis Denbow.

“You got no call to be here, Caitlin,” he said, mopping the sweat from his brow with a sleeve.

“That's what they told me at the checkpoint back up eighty-three.”

“Well, you should have listened to them.”

“Thanks, anyway.”

“For what?”

“Not telling me you have the situation under control.”

“Because we damn well don't. A car backfiring could set off a whole shooting war here over waters not fit to drink. Last thing we need is you stirring the pot. Hope you don't mind I called Austin to get them to call you off.”

“Too bad my cell phone's not working,” Caitlin told him, reaching back inside the SUV to grab a set of trifolded pages from the visor.

 

3

Z
AVALA
C
OUNTY,
T
EXAS

Caitlin continued into the open space of road and land between the two armed camps, ignoring the threats shouted her way by the militiamen. She walked on without slowing, heading straight into more guns than she could count, while making sure her SIG Sauer P-226 remained in plain view in its holster. She held the pages before her as well, feeling them rustle in the breeze lifting off the prairie. It picked up briefly, hard enough to whisk the hat off a militiaman lying prone over the rim of an arroyo, holding a rifle with telescopic sight fixed on her. She caught the heavy
whomp-whomp-whomp
of a helicopter circling overhead—this network or that sure to be getting shots of the stand-off.

That's when she spotted the man with the light-colored suit and graying, ginger-shaded hair, striding her way from the side of the road where most of the media had gathered, hands tucked into his pants pockets.

“Well, well, well,” grinned Congressman Asa Fraley, who represented Texas's seventeenth district, voice droning as if he were still giving an interview. “Look who it is. Just what we need right now, some gasoline sprayed on the fire.”

“I'm just here doing my job, Congressman,” Caitlin said, standing stiff before him.

Fraley stopped close enough to Caitlin for her to be able to smell the spearmint lacing his breath. “The problem, Ranger, is I'm here doing my job, too. In this case that means putting out a fire, not fanning the flames.”

Caitlin nodded. “I couldn't help but notice which side you're standing with, sir.”

“I'm just trying to defuse the situation. That man's a patriot, Ranger,” Fraley said, looking back toward Christoph Ilg, who was holding court with any media type who'd listen. “I would've thought you of all people would see that.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because the Texas Rangers were birthed to lend justice to a frontier not all that much different than this one.”

“Oh, it was plenty different, Congressman,” Caitlin said, blowing out her own breath to chase the spearmint back. He'd stopped close enough to leave them contending for the same space, Fraley treating her more like another reporter with whom he needed to establish an instant familiarity. “Back then, my ancestors had their hands full with Mexican bandits and marauding Indian tribes. They never had to deal with the likes of antigovernment militias and politicians looking for any soapbox to shoot off their mouths.” She spotted a man glaring at her, having drawn closer to Ilg's right flank, and packing a cannon-size pistol. “Do you have a brother, sir?”

“That's none of your business.”

“Because I just noticed a man who looks an awful lot like you. That twin of yours, maybe, the one who can't keep himself out of trouble? As I recall, even in Texas a felon carrying a gun is a violation. Maybe I should run him in.”

Fraley took a step back, aware suddenly that the space wasn't his to command as he was normally accustomed. His gaze grew flat and harsh, his eyes narrowing to mere slits barely revealing his grayish pupils. Caitlin had never seen a man with gray eyes before, nor one with a dye job gone so wrong; Fraley's strands of coarse hair were evenly mixed between shades of orange and corn yellow.

“How many men have you killed, exactly, Ranger?”

“One less than maybe I should have, Congressman.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No more than that subpoena you keep promising to slap me with to drag me before that committee of yours in Washington.”

“It's called the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and you're going to find that we take our work very seriously.”

“So do I, sir,” Caitlin said, peering past him. “Speaking of which, please step aside so I can do my job.”

 

4

Z
AVALA
C
OUNTY,
T
EXAS

Fraley fell into step behind her as Caitlin headed straight for Christoph Ilg, who'd just started his interview with the cable television reporter. He held his big, thick hands on his hips, bracketing a stomach that stretched the bounds of his plaid shirt well over his belt. Ilg was bald and had pinkish, babylike skin that made his utterly round head look like an unfinished basketball with a cowboy hat riding its top. The wind was stiff enough to make him use a hand to keep it pinned in place.

“Christoph Russell Ilg,” Caitlin said, in range of both Ilg and the reporter, interrupting their interview, “I'm here to serve you with a warrant for your arrest.”

Ilg grinned, clearly unbothered by the warrant she'd extended toward him. His gaze locked on her badge.

“They got girl Texas Rangers now?”

The cable news camera swung her way, making Caitlin realize that the sounds of a chopper overhead had grown louder as it hovered closer to the ground, likely so the cameraman inside could get a better shot of whatever was transpiring. She noticed that the man she took for Asa Fraley's twin brother had slipped away.

“Apparently, sir.”

Ilg took off his cowboy hat and fanned the air with it. “Well, I'll be a pig in a poke. Now I've seen everything. Little lady like you with such a big gun. And I ain't taking your warrant.”

Caitlin was conscious of the camera still on her, ignoring it. “That's okay, sir, because I'm gonna arrest you anyway.”

Time froze, seized up solid. And in the moment before it jump-started again, the color seemed to wash out of the scene. Everything was reduced to grayish halftones as hushed whispers were exchanged on the backs of gun barrels being steadied on both sides. It was like watching a storm racing across the sky while waiting for the first clap of thunder.

“Those highway patrol and sheriff's deputy boys out there already tried that and didn't fare so well. What makes you think you can do any better?” Ilg smirked with the bluster of a man who had a hundred guns backing him up.

“Oh, my presence has nothing to do with those federal trespass charges. I'm here on a state matter. This warrant here details the charge, if you'd like to read it.”

“And what charge is that, Ranger?”

“Cattle rustling,” Caitlin told him.

*   *   *

Ilg stared at Caitlin for what seemed like a very long time, the camera now shifting back and forth between them. The microphone the reporter had stuck out toward her was now hanging in a kind of limbo. Around her, Caitlin was aware of the almost preternatural quiet that had descended on the scene. No sounds whatsoever, other than what the breeze could rustle up, Caitlin imagining she could hear the gravel and light stone being blown across the two-lane.

That silence scared her more than anything as she continued to eye Ilg, gauging his intentions.

“That blue truck over there yours, sir?” she asked him, noting the old Chevy with a pair of Ilg's teenage sons, both armed with hunting rifles, poised behind it for cover. “I'm going to assume that it is,” Caitlin continued, when the rancher remained silent. “This warrant entitles me to search it. But I don't have to do that to know I'll likely find a running iron somewhere inside. You know what that is, sir?”

Ilg swallowed hard, his expression confirming that he did, but Caitlin resumed anyway.

“You seem like an old-school sort to me, Mr. Ilg, so running irons would be just your style. Allow you to brand freehand under cover of night.” She cocked her gaze toward the teenage boys with rifles laid over the bed of Ilg's truck, having to raise her voice over the still-descending chopper now. “Something you could teach your boys to do, making them accessories subject to the same ten years in jail as you. I'm betting your iron's got a hooked tip, since the anonymous tip we got says you been changing esses to eights and bars to fours. My warrant also entitles the Rangers or other designated authority to impound your cattle for evidence.”

Ilg cupped a hand over his brow and pretended to stare back down the two-lane, trying so hard to look casual and nonchalant that the gesture had the look of a badly rehearsed stage move. “Well, I don't see no trucks. You fixing on squeezing my herd into that German half-track of yours?”

“It's a Ford Explorer, sir, and the trucks will be here any minute to haul your cattle away, accompanied by federal marshals who won't take to you as kindly as the local sheriff's deputies.” Caitlin let him see her run her eyes about the gunmen protectively enclosing Ilg in a wide semicircle. “And those marshals have orders to arrest any of your friends here who attempt to impede their efforts, on accessory charges—meaning they'd face the same ten years as you, too. How do you think that'll sit with them? Guess you're going to find out just how good friends they are.”

“This won't wash, Ranger,” Ilg said slowly, and so softly the reporter had to stick the microphone closer to his mouth.

“Maybe this will,” Caitlin told him, extracting a set of pictures from her pocket. “The resolution of these isn't great, but you'll notice that they're all close-ups of the brands on the cattle you claim to be yours. The tampering is evident in all that discoloration.”

Caitlin extended the pictures forward but Ilg didn't take them, tried not to even look. Then he swept a hand out and brushed them from her grasp. They fluttered through the air and landed, all face up, strangely, on the bleached concrete.

“Pictures is pictures,” was all he said. “And if it interests you any, I got plenty pictures of my own, showing what the government did to half my herd. Picked 'em clean to the bone to make it look like aliens or something, to scare me off. Well, I ain't scared of them and I ain't scared of you, neither.”

Caitlin stooped to retrieve the pictures, never taking her eyes off Ilg. “I've also got an affidavit from a local vet who inspected your cattle and found a number of the brands to have fresh scarring. How do you think that could be, exactly?”

Ilg's pale skin had turned a shade of sunburned red, and he was breathing noisily now through his mouth. He seemed to suddenly remember the microphone stabbing the air before him and he cleared his throat, trying to get back the bravado that had won him his sudden celebrity.

“This is free land, Ranger,” Ilg spoke her way, going back to his canned lines and raising his voice to be heard over the increasing volume of the helicopter that was just a few hundred feet over them now. “My cattle can graze on it as I see fit. You hear?”