Hawke's Target

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  My .45 came up, the sight picture lining up on his ear. Planting my feet, I fired three fast times. Two of the three missed, but the third caught him at the tip of his shoulder. He dropped the pistol and slumped forward. The angle was such that I no longer had a clear target, so the next best thing to do was empty the magazine into his left front tire. It exploded with a dull pop, wrenching the wheel from Navarro’s suddenly limp hand at the same time Deputy Frank Malone roared up in his cruiser in the open lane and slammed into the Ford head-on.

  Navarro disappeared into the expanding airbag in an instant.

  At that point, lawmen appeared from between the logjam of idling cars. With nothing but empty desert on the opposite side of the Ford truck, they weren’t worried about collateral damage and opened up with a fusillade.

  Muscle memory took over, and I thumbed the magazine release on my Colt, slapped in a fresh one, and raced toward Malone’s steaming car. At the same time, the passenger door on the truck popped open, and Torrez tumbled out on the opposite side, taking cover behind their now well-ventilated pickup. He stuck the machine pistol over the bed and held the trigger down, spraying rounds in still another random arc that kept both innocents and lawmen scrambling for cover.

  The passenger door to Malone’s cruiser creaked open, and he crawled across the front seat to roll onto the hot pavement with a pump shotgun in his hands. Once outside, he crabbed toward the rear of his cruiser to keep it between him and Torrez. “What’n hell!!!??”

  I ducked down behind the car and joined him at the rear. “Bad guys.”

  His face was red from the deployed airbag in his cruiser. “No shit!”

  “Driver’s dead, I think. There’s another one.”

  Gunfire rose.

  Malone flicked off the shotgun’s safety. “I saw him just before we hit.”

  I pointed toward the passenger side of the wrecked truck. “He might pop up over here.”

  “Hope he does.”

  Staying low, we duckwalked behind the steaming cruiser, and I peeked up through the back glass. Thinking himself protected by the pickup’s open passenger door, Torrez was changing magazines beside the truck’s right front fender.

  I waved for Malone to follow. “Move now!”

  Struggling to insert a fresh magazine in the little machine pistol, Torrez was intent on the weapon and didn’t see us closing in. There wasn’t any shouting from us to throw up his hands or surrender. We got the angle and stopped the threat when Malone’s 12-gauge joined in with my .45. Hit with a full load of Number 4 Buck and the rounds I threw in, Torrez dropped to the hot, sandy shoulder and was still.

  I rose and saw Navarro slumped over the steering wheel. One look at his dull eyes told me he was forever out of the picture, too. “Clear!”

  Ethan and the deputies eased around the truck, not really taking my word for it, but I didn’t blame ’em. I watched Ethan kick the Mac 11 out of the dead man’s reach. Through my gunfire-damaged ears, the sound of screams and crying filled the silence. The helicopter circled overhead, adding to the chaos, and I realized my side was on fire.

  Holstering the pistol, I felt around to see if I was shot again, but it was only the half-healed wound that had woken up.

  Shaking his head, Ethan joined us beside the wrecked cruiser. “What’n hell was that all about?”

  “There was paper out on those two this morning and they saw I’d made ’em. You’re gonna have to speak up a little, though. My ears are ringing to beat the band.”

  A DPS State Trooper opened the truck’s back door and whistled. “Good goddlemighty! Y’all take a look in here!” He waved to the other officers. “I bet there’s a million bucks in cash back here.”

  “Drug money, I bet.” Taking his Stetson off, Ethan wiped the sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand. “Looks like you’re back on the desk again, and I think I’m gonna recommend that Major Parker keeps you there for the rest of the year.”

  “Can I count on you for that?”

  Chapter 3

  Daddy Frank Wadler leaned over the back of his pickup bed, scratching a three-day growth of chin stubble and talking with his oldest son Jimmy Don and Sheriff Buck Henderson. Surrounded by tall East Texas pine trees, they were parked on a remote blacktop road in Jasper County, in the old-time tradition of country friends. “Let me get this straight, them two Mexicans got themselves killed out there in the Big Bend and lost my money?”

  Sheriff Henderson’s Police Interceptor was parked on the shoulder behind the pickups, as if he’d pulled them over. His lights were off. “I told you it was a bad idea to hire outside contractors.”

  The old man, who was in good shape for his early eighties, grimaced in disgust. “What happened?”

  “They made the delivery in Arizona like they were supposed to, but got caught in some kind of protest outside of Alpine.”

  “What the hell were they doing in Alpine?” Daddy Frank’s eyes blazed. Fingers laced and forearms resting on the bed of his white truck, Jimmy Don stared at the ground under his feet.

  “One of ’em must’ve got the idea to get off the interstate and run the back roads.” Buck adjusted his straw hat. “Frankly, it kind of makes sense, unless they had an idea to head for Mexico and take the money, which they might have been doing. I sure as hell never trusted ’em in the first place.

  “Anyway, we’ll never know. From the report I read, somebody recognized one of ’em and they lost their damned minds and opened up with automatic weapons. They should have turned around and gone back the other way and nobody would have known, but they got themselves killed. Now here’s what I think. You need to quit with these experiments and go back to how we’ve done it for years.”

  The old man’s eyes flashed. “That ended when that damned BranCo oil company showed up, them and their damned pipeline. Things have to change around here whether we want it to or not.”

  Buck waved at the thick pines around them. “Hell, they offered you enough money for the easement. I don’t see how a cut through the woods can cause trouble. It’ll be cash in your pocket.”

  “Sixty thousand dollars ain’t shit, and it’s my land.”

  “They’ll take it under eminent domain if they want to.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “So, take the money.”

  “No. I don’t stand aside for no man, and I damned sure ain’t steppin’ aside for that damned BranCo bunch.”

  “Dad, I don’t see what it’d hurt.” Jimmy Don scratched under his gimme cap and reset it higher on his forehead. “All we’ll need to do is move the storage containers deeper in the woods. We can have that done long before they start cutting the easement.”

  “Well, for one thing, I don’t want no easement through our place. You know as well as I do they’ll clear off a road that we don’t have no control over. That means company people’ll be driving through here any time they want. We can’t have that.”

  “They’ll mind their own business.”

  “Like hell they will, son. Didn’t you see where that line’ll be laid? It’s too close to the fertilizer barn for one thing, and the truth is I don’t want no feds this close to the business.”

  “Ask them for more money, then, it it’ll make you feel better, and then buy off the crews who come through here. They’ll look the other way if they see anything. Hell, put them on the payroll and they’ll be double happy.”

  “No, I ain’t paying for my own land over’n over again.”

  Buck lit a smoke. “There’s nothing you can do about it. They’ve already cut all the way up to your line from the north, and I found out last week they’ve closed a deal with the Simpsons just south of the Morris land. That means it’s just you and that Morris, and I heard they’re about to take the deal for more’n sixty thousand. BranCo’s coming through here come hell or high water, and you need to make the deal and figure a way around ’em.”

  “Oh, I’ve got an idea all right. I’m gonna shut this whole damn projec
t down and make ’em move the line west of us.”

  “That makes sense, since the Sabine’s too close to the east.” Jimmy Don laced his fingers. “But how you gonna do that?”

  “Alonzo’s bringing me back a present from California, along with my money. Plastic explosive.”

  The sheriff’s eyes widened. “What are you gonna do with that?”

  “I’m . . . we’re gonna blow their damned pipeline up in half a dozen places, along with that Beaumont refinery BranCo owns. They might force their way through here, but they’re gonna pay for it in more ways than one.”

  “What makes you think you can get away with it.”

  “Because I’m the meanest sonofabitch in East Texas, that’s why.”

  Chapter 4

  A week after the shoot-out between me and the two fugitives out on Highway 67, Major Chase Parker sat in an antique wooden chair on the opposite side of the coffee table in my living room. Legs crossed and his Stetson hanging from the toe of his boot, my lanky supervisor studied the black-and-white photos of my ancestors on the opposite wall.

  “I swear, I never saw a Ranger who spent more time on the desk than you.”

  “People keep telling me that. It’s not like I want to be there.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You gonna offer me a beer?”

  I didn’t have a chance to answer before my wife Kelly came around the kitchen island and crossed into our recently converted, open-concept living room. We agreed on most of the renovation and subsequent decorations, including whitewashing the original shiplap revealed when we took down the sheetrock, but I held the line on the oversize words, letters, and cotton bolls that were all the rage.

  She handed him an ice-cold Coors, the original yellowbelly. “You want lime with that?”

  He grinned at my petite bride. She may be small in stature, but she sure fills a room when she walks in. “No ma’am. This isn’t a Corona, and thanks for that, by the way, because I never liked those skunky Mexican beers.”

  The screen door opened, and my dad pushed through with a paper bag full of groceries in each arm. He saw the Major and grunted. “Well looky here, another real-life Texas Ranger.”

  It was funny hearing it come from him, a retired Ranger who’s damn near as famous as Joaquin Jackson. He passed one of the bags to Kelly. “You’re spoiling these boys. Neither one’s worth it.”

  The screen door opened again, and in came Mr. Beck Tillman, waddling like a duck from the missing big toes he’d lost in Korea. Though the old war veteran looked to be on his last skinny legs, he was still as tough as boot leather.

  Major Parker’s eyes flicked to the pair and then to me. “The bus from the old folks’ home just pull up?”

  Dad laughed and took off his hat, now that his hands were free. “All right. We deserve that. Howdy, Major.”

  “Mr. Herman. Mr. Beck.”

  Mr. Tillman put his hat on the coffee table, crown-side down, and settled onto the couch with a grunt. “We interrupting anything?”

  The suddenly full living room was silent while the Major took a long swallow of beer. “Naw, I just came by to check on Sonny and talk to him about an assignment. He missed our last meeting because of that little altercation out at BranCo.”

  He had my interest. I’d been sitting around too long. “Tell me more.”

  Arms full of groceries, Kelly headed for the kitchen. “I’ll get y’all a beer, too, Dad.”

  “Much obliged,” Mr. Tillman said.

  Major Parker plowed ahead. “I need to get you busy and away from anything in this part of the world that can shoot. I was thinking of assigning you to investigate a couple sexual-harassment claims against elected officials, now that the governor’s gotten approval from the legislature.”

  The Major watched my reaction. In the past, those kinds of allegations by folks in office, and that included judges and lawmakers at the capitol, were investigated in-house, in the legislature, then reported to the Senate and House leadership. The governor’s idea was to guarantee that claims were taken seriously and charges filed when the Rangers found reason to make arrests. I must have looked like I’d swallowed something bad, because his eyes glinted, and I knew he’d been pulling my leg.

  “I wouldn’t do that even to you, Sonny. There’s a case I want you in on. It fits this new position I made for you. When we talked on the phone last week, I mentioned we’re tracking an individual who’s executing known felons who’ve gotten off on technicalities.”

  “Vigilante?”

  “Yep, and we don’t have any idea who he is, but we’re finding his work. The first person he killed was a paroled felon named George Crawford out in California. Our guy put an end to his career by sticking a knife in his heart in a parking garage.”

  Dad chuckled. “That you know of.”

  The Major frowned. “Huh?”

  “You think he was the first.”

  “Good point, Mr. Herman.” A flicker of a smile crossed the Major’s creased face. He’s like all of us in the law-enforcement brotherhood, and the way it used to be when people revered older folks with a lifetime of experience to draw on. “We’re thinking the first one was Crawford. Second guy, we think, was Nicholas Barbour. He’d been in and out of institutions most of his teens and diagnosed as delusional.”

  Dad opened his mouth to ask a question, and I cut him off. “How so?”

  The Major turned back to me. “He tried to break into the governor’s house out in California to make him pay for what he said the governor had done to him. Then he was in and out of jail for five years before he completely lost it and killed an entire family. Institutionalized again for five years, they let him out on early parole, and he got drunk and ran over a woman, killing her.

  “Barbour was released on bond, and they found him wearing a bullet hole in the Coconino National Forest out of Flagstaff. He shouldn’t have been out of the state, but then again, he’d already proven himself untrustworthy.”

  Now that Dad was retired, he didn’t believe in being politically correct. “Sounds to me like your vigilante did us all a favor.”

  Mr. Tillman grunted an agreement.

  The Major raised that eyebrow again. It was one of the few ways he ever expressed emotions. “Some people say so.”

  The Old Man leaned forward to ask another question, but the Major stopped him. “We figured out they were connected after another felon who should have been in jail in New Mexico was murdered. Same thing. A lifetime of crime, out of prison when he should have been serving life, and then found dead in a car in a Walmart parking lot with his brains leaking out of a twenty-two-caliber-size hole behind his left ear.”

  “If it’s the same guy, then he’s coming thisa way.” The Old Man took a beer from Kelly and grinned his thanks. She handed Mr. Tillman another and went back to put away groceries. She’s usually not that kind of Susie Homemaker. My bride’s the strongest, most intelligent woman I’ve ever known, but she loved the Old Man and Mr. Beck and would do anything for ’em.

  “That’s what we think. No one had any idea they were connected at first. Local law enforcement was working on individual cases until he killed another released felon up in Amarillo and a sharp detective there remembered something he’d read a few days earlier about the murder in New Mexico. He started putting the pieces together and contacted the FBI because the guy’s crossing state lines. They called us.”

  “What happened in the panhandle?”

  “Guy named Shanquille Clay Gibson murdered a college girl at West Texas A&M in Canyon. They arrested Gibson because of a video that showed him talking to her in a Subway restaurant that night. Detectives in Canyon held him and continued to question the guy for several hours even after he said he wanted a lawyer. Apparently, he’s diabetic and started to break down because he didn’t have his meds, and finally confessed. They searched his house, found the victim’s underwear and a scarf containing both their DNA. They also found more than a dozen pairs of other panties that they’ve s
ince tied to past murders, but the whole thing was thrown out when the judge determined that the evidence was tainted fruit.”

  When a case is dismissed on a technicality in the criminal-justice system, it often means that a court has determined that the evidence sought to be used against the defendant was obtained in violation of his constitutional rights. It was obvious that the Canyon detectives should have stopped their interrogation when Gibson asked for a lawyer, so anything they found after that was what the legal system calls “fruit from a poisonous tree.”

  I watched the expression on Dad’s face. He’d left the Rangers years earlier when he and every other lawman in the state failed to find the man who’d killed my mother. I knew what he was thinking, that if he’d arrested Mom’s murderer, he couldn’t have stood it if the guy had gotten off.

  “Where’d they find Gibson’s body?”

  Major Parker nodded. “Laying between two cars in the side parking lot of an adult club in Amarillo called The Bare Den out on Loop 335. It was a twenty-two to the back of the head again.”

  “So he’s finished there, according to his past kills, and is headed somewhere else.”

  “Yep.” The Major tilted his beer. “Now the question is which way did he go. We have no idea.”

  I pictured a map in my head, thinking of the main roads and interstates radiating from Amarillo. “If he takes 40 or goes north, he’ll be out of the state already, in Oklahoma or even Kansas.”

  “That’s a possibility, but he could be headed deeper into the state. Even if he’s already in Oklahoma or somewhere else, I need you to look into this.”

  He was asking a lot. There were already nineteen Rangers in Company C up there. Though we’re all one family, those guys were going to wonder why a Ranger from Company E was sent to dig around in their territory.

  It was bound to happen at some point, though, because the Major put me in a new position not long before as a “roamer.” The idea was to send me out for specific assignments wherever I was needed in the state. Governor Randal Bridges and Ranger Division Chief Jeff Harrison had signed off on it, giving me more autonomy in decision making than the other Rangers. We hadn’t advertised it much, and this assignment was the one to break in the idea.