Hawke's Target

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  “Good to hear. I kinda got worried that something went wrong. We expected you to be back by now.”

  “Me, too. Betty’s been sick and I haven’t been up to snuff myself. We’re taking our time.”

  Jimmy Don was silent for a long time. Just when Alonzo thought his phone had dropped the signal, his uncle’s voice came through clear and loud. “Taking your time? Now? Daddy Frank’s about to bust a gut waiting to hear from you, and you know how he is. You have something to tell me? I heard there might have been trouble.”

  The badger in Alonzo’s stomach woke up and started tearing at his guts. That was just like his family, knowing everything there was to know about him. “What’d you hear?”

  “Got a call from California. A detective working a case and needed to talk to you.”

  “A case ’bout what?”

  “That’s what we want to know.”

  “I don’t have no answer to that. Me and Betty’re on the way.”

  “Son, you should have already been here.”

  “I’m trying to fit in and drive the speed limit. I don’t want to get pulled over with all that cash in here. I suspect a drug dog would still smell what we hauled, and I don’t want to take the chance.”

  Alonzo and Betty were the initial test run, joining the thousands of other vacationers and retirees driving the roads and staying for a night or two in low-cost national forests, state and national park sites, or private campgrounds.

  “Well, you need to hie on back here or we’re both gonna answer to Daddy Frank.”

  Alonzo remained silent, thinking about the man he despised.

  “Is there something else you need to tell us?”

  “Nothin’ right now.”

  Jimmy Don snorted. “We were thinkin’ you may have triggered somebody’s alarm bells somewhere along the way, and that’s why you’re being so slow. Any idea how that coulda happened? Maybe when you bought the cheese?”

  He was giving Alonzo a way out, if something was really wrong. Daddy Frank, the meanest man in Southeast Texas, scared everyone but Jimmy Don, the old man’s elder son. If Alonzo was dragging his feet because he suspected someone was following, Daddy Frank would completely understand and move Alonzo’s stock in the family to a much higher level.

  “Come on, Jimmy Don. Let me do my job.” Despite the badger clawing at his guts, Alonzo couldn’t up and tell Jimmy Don the truth, that he’d lost his spirit. To do so would be a death sentence, and even though he was dying a little more each day, he had business to attend to before settling in for the long sleep. “Y’all just hold your water. I’ll be there soon enough.”

  A Buick LaCrosse sedan cruised slowly past and parked near the park’s stucco restroom building. Alonzo kept his eye on the car until the doors opened and an elderly couple creaked their way out of the car and into the restroom.

  “Well, hurry up and get home. He needs the cash for that big delivery from Colombia and that cheese, though I think he’s out of his damned mind wanting to use that shit to stop the pipeline from coming through. You can make it in a day and a half. Those South American boys don’t like to wait, you know.”

  “Fine.” Alonzo thought fast and a lie formed. “The tires on this rig are wearing faster’n they should, so I’m gonna have to keep it around sixty the rest of the way. I don’t want to have a blowout and risk having the highway patrol stop to help. I have a new set waiting on us in Comanche. Then I can book it the rest of the way in. I have reservations at the Evening Star RV Park there tomorrow night.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Get it done, and we’ll see you when you get here.”

  “Sure.” Alonzo thumbed the phone off and slipped it into his shirt pocket. Flinging the cold dregs of his coffee onto the bare sand, he rose and went inside. He set the cup on the dining table by a plastic CVS bag full of cosmetics.

  “Hey girl. That was Jimmy Don.” He paused, waiting for a response that didn’t come. “Well, anyway, I got you some different cover-up that’s closer to your skin tone. It might be a little darker’n what you’ve been buying, but I think it’ll work.”

  He unwrapped a Glade Plugin and replaced the old one in the outlet over the kitchen counter. “This says it smells like cashmere. Didn’t know cashmere had a smell.” Alonzo carried another into the fifth-wheel camper’s upper bedroom, where it was needed the most. “We’re leaving in the morning. I have a couple more stops to make before we get back home. I don’t care what Daddy Frank wants, I’m takin’ my time.”

  Chapter 8

  In Gunn, Jimmy Don punched off the burner phone and thought about pitching it into the smoking burn barrel beside them in the timber yard. “Something’s wrong.”

  Standing in the middle of an odd dichotomy, a wide, barren graveyard full of stripped timber stacked as far as the eye could see, the yard was surrounded by the thick piney woods of the Big Thicket. Skinny paved roads radiated outward in half a dozen directions, winding through the thick green forest to clear-cut leases where not a tree stood upright.

  Log trucks crawled back and forth on those roads, hauling stacks of pine logs that sometimes hung ten feet beyond the end of the long, forty-five-foot trailers. There in the mill yard, they were stacked like behemoth toothpicks until their time came to meet the giant saws.

  Willy Henderson, Sheriff Buck Henderson’s second cousin, circled the barrel to get out of the smoke. Taking off his gimme cap, he pulled a strand of long dark hair into line with the rest of his greasy mop and replaced it. A jagged white scar ran from his forehead, across a dead eye as white as a marble, and down his cheek, where it ended at the corner of his mouth—the result of a steel cable that snapped when he was a logger. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because of the way Alonzo sounded, and the things he said. I know for a fact that Betty’s dead. I got a call at the house from the funeral home in California. Alonzo wrote a check to ’em and didn’t sign it. They weren’t mad about it, more like they’re used to people making mistakes in times like that. I made out like I was him and gave ’em a credit card number to pay for the embalming and casket.”

  “She’s dead? How’d . . .” Willy’s mouth opened and closed like a fish. He switched to another train of thought. “They believed you?”

  “They believed in the money that came through. Them people that deal with the dead don’t care who pays, as long as they get what’s owed ’em. I told ’em I didn’t remember the day she died because it was all a fog for me, and the lady out there was more’n helpful. She told me Alonzo buried her out there, but I can’t understand why he didn’t let us know, or why he won’t admit she’s gone.”

  “I ’magine he’s all tore up.” Willy sat back down. “That woman expired him. What’d she die from?”

  “Didn’t ask, and I think the word you want is ‘inspired, ’ she inspired him. Remember, I was supposed to be Alonzo on the phone, but then I Googled her name and it came up on one of them small-town police beat reports that little papers do. She was killed out there in California when some drunk ran her down in a crosswalk, murdered by a feller with a long list of convictions. He kept getting out over and over again . . .”

  “That sounds like some of our kinfolk and half the guys on Daddy Frank’s payroll.”

  “Sure does, but anyway, this was one bad dude.” Jimmy Don grunted. “He bonded out, again, and I got that from the detective I talked to. And now I’m wondering if Alonzo didn’t settle with him on his own. That could be why he’s running so far behind schedule. You know how he is.”

  Willy absently stroked his beard and stared with his one good eye into the fire, watching the crispy red embers pulse in the heat. “That’s what our people’d do.”

  “Yeah, but he don’t need to be doing that right now. He could’ve waited until we got done in a couple of weeks, and one or two of us woulda gone back out there with him.”

  “So what happens now?”

  Jimmy Don studied the stacks of stripped pine logs. Brass nozzles sent streams of wat
er into the air, raining moisture onto the timber so it wouldn’t dry out and crack or split before they were ready to process. It also kept beetles from causing damage.

  “We keep on keeping on with the plan to pick up the delivery that’s sitting on that ship out on the Intracoastal right now. Personally, I’m more interested in hearing how easy it was to move the product in the camping trailer.” He looked around to be sure no one was within earshot. “If it works, we can move that shipment in a week. That’s money, son!”

  Willy bit his lip. “Well, don’t count your chickens before they’re gathered. And you ought not talk like that right out in the open. I wouldn’t put it past Daddy Frank to have somebody else working here that we don’t know. You never can tell who’s listenin’.”

  “That’s eggs.”

  “Huh?

  “You said count your chickens before they’re gathered. You meant count your chickens before they’re hatched.”

  Willy shrugged. “Whatever. We’re still making good money on the thing we’ve been doing all my life. I still think we need to quit diddlin’ with a good thing. We expanse this operation even more, and not even the sheriff can cover for us.”

  “Don’t let Daddy Frank hear you say that, and the word is ‘expand.’”

  “Whatever.”

  Chapter 9

  Had anything been tall enough, the late evening shadows would have stretched across the two-lane. As it was, there was little on the edge of Dimmitt, Texas, that stood more than twenty feet. Most of the scrub around the dying plains town of less than four thousand people an hour south of Amarillo was sage, cedar, and a few scattered houses.

  Alonzo steered the fifth-wheel rig into a barren pull-through site in Archie’s RV Park on the southern edge of town. A feedlot provided the thick odor of decomposing cow manure and urine.

  Alonzo didn’t mind the aroma one little bit for reasons of his own.

  He positioned the trailer on the gravel pad, killed the engine, and had the landing gear down in only minutes. The tiny RV park had only two dozen sites, and four of them were occupied by dusty trailers that had been there for months.

  He had the trailer set up and was inside thirty minutes later. The Spring Fresh plug-ins weren’t doing their job, but the smell of the feedlot helped. Cattle always drew flies, and they swarmed thick against the trailer’s screen door. Two or three got in every time he went in or out, and that caused problems with Betty.

  Once inside, Alonzo washed two pills down with a glass of water and picked up a flyswatter. He killed two in the kitchen and scraped them onto the floor, where they mixed with the dried carcasses of their kinfolk. There were still plenty of cosmetics on the counter that he hadn’t taken out of a plastic bag. He collected a handful and carried them along with the flyswatter into the master bedroom in the raised front section of the trailer. He cranked the air-conditioning up to reduce the odor and remove as much moisture as possible from the air.

  A bluebottle fly buzzed the bed and lit on the mirrored closet door. The swatter whistled through the air, leaving a dark smear on the glass.

  He sat on his side of the bed. “Honey, I’m gonna freshen you up some before I go out.” He waved at still another fly that buzzed her head, which was the only thing not covered by the sheets and blanket. “Your hair still looks good, but I think you need a touch-up.”

  He opened a jar of flesh-toned cream and applied it to her cold cheeks. He couldn’t bear the inevitable process of decomposition that was taking a toll despite the embalming process. He’d smeared her lipstick that night he pulled her out of the casket and hadn’t been able to correct it to his satisfaction. By that time he was careless and almost exhausted from both the physical labor of digging up the grave and the emotional toll it took to complete the job.

  “I have a guy to visit here in town, and then we’re heading out in the morning. We both need to get home. The boys are waiting for what we have down in storage.” He finished with the dark makeup, wiped his hands on a stained towel, and unscrewed the brush on a container of mascara. He’d brushed her face with his elbow during the night and needed to repair the damage.

  “I’m getting’ pretty good at this, you know.” He chuckled and ran the tiny brush through her eyebrow “I watched you enough to know how to do it.”

  Finished, he leaned back to study his work. “I know you wouldn’t like what I’m doing, but that’s okay. A man has to do certain things, and this is my calling; besides, I don’t have that much longer to make amends anyway.” He doubled over in a wash of pain. “I just wish I didn’t hurt so bad. It’d make this a lot easier.”

  He paused as if listening to her response. “I ’magine you’d have trouble seeing the difference between what me and the family do, and these criminals we’re sending to Hell, but there’s a clear difference. We supply a product, or that’s all we did before Daddy Frank lost his damn mind.

  “It’s him that put us here, and if that sonofabitch Barbour that ran over you’d been in the pen where he belonged, then I’d still have you.” He wiped at his overflowing eyes. “What we do for a living ain’t that bad. People want it. They pay for it. None of us ever saw anything wrong with providing something people ask for.”

  He wiped at the tears that welled in his eyes. “It’s all right, though. I’ll be with you directly, probably faster than I ever imagined. But before we get back home, there’s a few more who needs killin’, but I’m runnin’ out of steam.”

  He rose, gathered the cosmetics into a flowered makeup bag, and zipped it shut. He paused, taking in the shape of her body under the covers and thinking about the man with a rap sheet as long as his arm who’d killed her the night he was meeting with the men who paid them for the cocaine he’d hauled from East Texas.

  Guilt had overwhelmed him that night in the emergency room when he’d arrived too late. The sheet covering her face was too much, and he collapsed on the floor, knowing he’d trade all the cash in the truck and everything he had to get her back.

  If only.

  If.

  If he’d been there to take her to the convenience store she never would have left the trailer. Supper was cold on the stove when he got back around midnight. An empty box of black pepper was sitting on the Corian island. Knowing how much he enjoyed pepper, she’d decided to walk the three blocks to the grocery store while he was trading money for Semtex plastic explosives on a San Francisco dock. He hadn’t taken her with him, because he didn’t want to put his sweet wife in danger.

  Not putting her in danger got her killed.

  Alonzo snorted at the irony and tucked the blanket tightly around her still form. “This next one’ll pay, honey. We’ll save the state some money.” Finished, Alonzo returned to the dining area. He slapped another fly on the table and picked up his iPad. Punching it alive, he reread a news item on the screen.

  KVII in Amarillo reported 40-year-old Eric Lang was convicted three times in the 2010 death of Terry Moore in a capital murder-for-hire charge.

  Each conviction was appealed, which resulted in the awarding of new trials due to various legal technicalities such as improper documentation, failure to maintain a proper chain of possession of evidence, contradictory evidence, and juror misconduct.

  Lang’s case was retried a third time for a lesser included charge of felony murder. His defense team appealed the offering of felony murder after the conviction, citing felony murder and not a proper lesser included charge for capital murder.

  The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed. They set aside the conviction and vacated the sentence; however the Court was legally unable to grant a new trial for capital murder.

  The judge then granted Lang’s motion to acquit on the capital murder-for-hire charge, ensuring that he could not stand trial for capital murder again. He was released from jail in January. In an interview with KVII, Lang again stated his position.

  “I told you I was innocent. The justice system did its job and now I’m going home to Dimmitt and resume
my life.”

  “Well, yes and no.” Alonzo typed Lang’s name into a directory search engine that brought up the man’s home address and landline phone number. “You’re here in Dimmitt all right, but the resumption of your life is about to end. Like I said, you just think you got off.”

  The sun was going down when he steered the truck onto Lang’s street at the outer edge of town.

  Chapter 10

  Jimmy Don Wadler and half a dozen friends and relatives were gathered in a ring of light around the tractor-rim firepit eight miles outside of Gunn, Texas. A thick line of pines fifty yards across the freshly mown lawn sparkled with the flashes from hundreds of lightning bugs. Crickets called from the aromatic damp grass and a chorus of tree frogs serenaded the evening. A great horned owl’s hoots filled the still air.

  The gray frame house sitting on ten acres of mixed hardwoods and pine had been in the Wadler family for three generations. The back porch mirrored the front, except for the rust-stained freezer filled with venison, ducks, and wild pig, and a rusting refrigerator full of beer.

  The men ringing the firepit lounged in a variety of seats ranging from aluminum lawn chairs to cast-off dining chairs to one old cane-bottom antique that kept settling into the soft ground.

  In a canvas folding chair, Jimmy Don Wadler waved at an annoying mosquito, sipped from a bottle of beer. “We got troubles with Alonzo.”

  His eyes flicked toward the house and dark gravel road beyond. No one could drive up without being noticed, but you never could tell when a government man would come creepy crawling up through the woods with one of them parabolic microphones.

  “They should have been back here a week ago. I know we told ’em to take their time and act like all them other people dragging trailers around the country and wasting money just to look at scenery, but now I’m worried. Betty’s dead, and he didn’t call one of us. I’m afraid he’s gone off the deep end.”

  The announcement wasn’t news. They’d all heard about her death and wrote it off as an inevitable part of life.