The calm voice of the dispatcher came through. “They’re on the way, Buck. You hurt?”
“No.” He forced himself to breathe hard. “I . . .” He swallowed. “I’m fine. Y’all hurry. He might still be alive.”
“Ain’t Willy your cousin?”
“Ten-four. Looks like that don’t mean nothin’. Hurry it up.”
Satisfied with his performance, Buck replaced the mike on the bracket and located two of the hulls that had ejected from his pistol. The third was hard to find, and he was starting to get worried that someone would show up before he was ready. He finally found it inside one of his own shoeprints.
Sighing in relief, he dropped them into his pocket and leaned against the SUV to wait, trying to get his nerves back under control and decide whether he needed to do anything about the boy on the horse and the hunter he’d passed on the road.
Did they recognize Willy in the passenger seat, and if so, would they remember to tell any investigators about it? This was the kind of thing that might draw a Ranger in to investigate, but he doubted it. He’d make sure his number one deputy, the most well-paid and loyal, kept the focus on Willy’s guilt in the DEA murders.
He lit a cigarette, noting his hands were calm and steady. Inhaling, he decided against dealing with them. Those people stayed to themselves, and none of his deputies would interview them about a white murderer’s death.
Chapter 31
A massive thunderclap shook the courthouse with the force of an explosion, knocking the electricity out. Sheriff Gomez looked out the window to see another bolt of lightning bathe the town of Comanche in a cold, harsh light. Though it was impossible, Gomez would have bet money he could smell ozone in the office.
“Dammit! Daryl!”
His deputy appeared in the doorway with his flashlight in hand. “I bet everything that plugged in was fried.”
“We don’t need this right now.” Gomez sighed in frustration. “Anyway, this building’s supposed to be hardened against lightning strikes.”
“Does low-bid mean anything to you? There’s also supposed to be a backup generator, and that hasn’t kicked in yet.” The words were barely out of Daryl’s mouth when the lights flickered, went out, and then came back on. “Well.” He returned to the outer office.
Sheriff Gomez tapped the speaker button on his phone and was pleased to hear a dial tone. He punched in a number from the Rolodex on his desk for Ranger Enrique Elizondo, the Ranger assigned to Company A who he’d worked with in the past.
A clipped, no-nonsense male voice answered. “Elizondo here.”
“Enrique, this is Sheriff Ed Gomez.”
“I’ve been expecting to hear from you.”
Surprised, the sheriff paused. “Why?”
“I’d be willing to bet you’ve met another Ranger named Sonny Hawke.”
“Well, yeah, he was here a few minutes ago.”
“Any trouble yet?”
“Trouble? No, why?”
“Well, it seems to follow that boy everywhere he goes.” Enrique chuckled. “He’s a helluva Ranger, but that boy’s snakebit.”
Gomez grinned at the expression. “How’d you know he was here?”
“My phone blew up yesterday when he tangled with some sex traffickers out in Dimmitt. He said he was heading in your direction.”
“He just came in and told me what he was doing.”
Another hard clap of thunder rattled the building. Ranger Elizondo heard it through the phone. “Sounds like that front’s made it there.”
“Yeah, hit just a little while ago.”
“We got it here, too.”
“Where you calling from?”
“Abilene, why?”
The sheriff explained the phone call he’d received. Elizondo listened without comment until he finished. “Was Hawke there when it came in?”
“Yeah, funny thing, he showed up not more’n five minutes before the call came through.”
“That’s what I was talking about, him and trouble.”
“Well, he’s chasing some vigilante that’s going around taking out released felons. He was interested, but that’s all.” Gomez swiveled in his creaky wooden chair to see the café’s lights through the gloom and falling rain. “He’s eatin’ breakfast across the street right now.”
“You better hope he stays there. He was in Dimmitt, chasing that vigilante he was telling you about, and they’re still mopping up the blood. Listen, I need to finish up here, and then I’ll be out. By that time the kid might get back to you, or you’ll know something else. Probably just a prank call.”
Deputy Daryl blew into the office as if pushed by a giant hand. “Sheriff! Got a call from the Evening Star RV Park. They’ve had a shooting out there and the lady on the phone said there’re dead people all over the place.”
“Shit! Are they still on the line?”
“Yeah, I told ’em to get every’body away from the camper, if that’s the one the call was about. Told ’em to get out of the park because if that camper blew up, it might leave a hole the size of this whole town. The fire department’s on the way. I told them, too.”
The deputy disappeared back through the open door and Gomez leaned into the phone. “Guess you heard all that?”
“I did.” Ranger Elizondo snorted. “You sure Hawke’s not in the middle of that? Knowing him, that’s where he’d be.”
“Pretty sure. He won’t know anything about this.”
“I’m on the way. I’ll meet you out there, and Ed, don’t you tell that sonofabitch what’s going on. I don’t want him involved.”
“I won’t.” Shaking his head and grabbing his rain gear, Sheriff Gomez charged out the door, hoping to find the Evening Star still there when he arrived.
Chapter 32
A shaken Alonzo Wadler pulled onto the two-lane highway. The green, limber mesquites in the pastures on both sides thrashed in the wind. Sheets of rain slashed across the road, bending cedars over bobwire fences.
The air inside the closed cab was thick with the scent of Betty’s decomposing body and the various perfumes Alonzo had sprinkled on the sheet that covered her corpse. He cracked the window on the opposite side of the storm and opened the vents to admit as much fresh air as possible.
“Sorry, baby. It won’t be long now.”
He pressed the accelerator, punching a hole through the rain. A gray rooster tail of water blocked his view in the side mirrors. The red-hot wound in his side didn’t hold a candle to what the badger had put him through, but he knew good and well he was bleeding internally. There was no telling how long he could stay conscious.
He used a bloody bandana to put pressure on the bullet hole. “I don’t have the strength to stop.”
The statement floated in the silence.
“I was gonna just pull up in Mundy’s yard and knock on the door. It’s worked before.”
They passed the city limits sign.
“But they have a description of the truck.” He paused as if listening to her answer. “It’s all changed. It’s all over, but we’re not gonna do what Daddy Frank says anymore.” He stopped talking for a moment when the badger woke up and scratched around, adding still another layer of suffering to the dying man. “It’s his fault, what happened to you. I didn’t want to haul all that coke out here. I told him that. I wanted out and by God, that’s what’ll happen when we get back home.”
He took his eyes off the highway for a moment to make sure the simple detonator wired to the Semtex under his seat was riding safely in the nearest cupholder. It wasn’t hard to do. He learned how to set charges during his military service as a young man.
It was the perfect way to deal with Daddy Frank. The plastic explosive had arrived inside a shipment of Olomouc Cheese, a pungent, ripened soft cheese from the Czech Republic. The shippers used the cheese’s strong scent and yellowish color to disguise the Semtex that had no identifiable odor.
The originators in Moravia packed the putty-like material in the sam
e wrapping as real cheese and put it on a ship that eventually arrived at a dock on the northeast side of San Francisco Bay, where customs and importers checked the contents.
Their contact, an overworked, underpaid customs official named Jim Young, passed the shipment to a distributor who took his cut, separated the explosive from the real cheese, and offered it to Alonzo for a quarter of the money from the drug sale.
The badger slashed and Alonzo gasped, jerking the steering wheel. The truck rocked as the cancer tore his insides once again, sharp claws cutting deep, as if an animal were trying to claw its way out of his stomach. Alonzo’s eyes watered and he folded into the steering wheel, releasing some of the pressure on the wound in his side. More blood leaked out and covered his fingers.
The fierce spasm of pain passed, and he took several deep breaths before his trembling fingers gripped the prescription bottle in his shirt pocket. He fought the child-proof cap for a moment, weaving on the highway even more. The stubborn cap finally turned and he shook two pills into his mouth, anticipating the coming relief.
Dry swallowing them, he pulled up to a stop sign at the outer edge of town and sat there a moment, gathering himself until another wave of agony washed over him. “Ohhhhh . . .” Teeth clenched against the pain, he was dimly aware of an approaching siren.
He closed his eyes until the tsunami passed. The siren grew closer, joined by more in the distance. A Comanche sheriff’s car slowed at the intersection, lights flashing. Seeing the way was clear, it shot by and disappeared into the rain. Before Alonzo could press the gas, a fire truck appeared from his left. It slowed, turned, and passed in the same direction.
More sirens wailed in the distance. It was the perfect time to kill Mundy for all he’d done. Every first responder in the area would be headed for the campground, but it was impossible. Either the lightning-hot pain or the effects of the pills he was already feeling would prevent him from shooting Mundy.
He was also afraid he wouldn’t be able to drive all the way to Gunn that day, either, but there was nothing to do but try. He turned right and headed southeast as more cars and trucks passed with their lights flashing in the storm.
Another deep burn joined the other two, red hot as a branding iron. It was time to end Daddy Frank’s reign, and Alonzo had exactly what he needed to do it. The old man didn’t know what was headed in his direction. Alonzo was driving directly to Daddy Frank’s barn, and when he set eyes on that mean old bastard, they were all going to vaporize.
Chapter 33
“You have a description of the shooter and the truck? A name?” Sheriff Gomez looked about half amused, probably because I looked like a drowned rat and had been held at gunpoint by a creaky old guy with an antique hogleg pistol.
We were standing under umbrellas out on the blocked-off two-lane highway a quarter mile from the Evening Star RV Park. John Jefferson, the elderly man who’d drawn down on me, was sitting inside an ambulance, looking miserable as the paramedics checked him out. He and I both were soaked from the rain, and my general disposition wasn’t exactly sparkling. Too much valuable time had been wasted while I stood behind my truck, talking fast to convince him that I really was the law.
He wasn’t taking any chances, and we argued until blue and red lights came into the park. I was watching my coffee-drinking friend Deputy Daryl from Comanche who was changing the front tire on my Dodge. A stray bullet had caused the flat. Against everyone’s wishes, I drove it out onto the highway when Sheriff Gomez and his deputies ordered everyone out of the park.
I cut my eyes at Jefferson, both admiring the old coot for getting involved, and aggravated enough to pull his damned head off.
The description I gave Gomez was the kind that drove me nuts when I was interviewing victims or witnesses. “Graying white male, late fifties or so. Registered as Lon Wadler, but there’s some discrepancy. Late-model Dodge. Folks can’t agree on the color. I got white, light gray, and one guy says pale green.”
I saw the same look of irritation I’d have felt at the description pass through Sheriff Gomez’s eyes. “Anything else?”
“As far as the other two are concerned, all we know is two males pulled into the park in a truck. One suspect bald as a baby’s butt, but tatted up, wearing shorts and a wife-beater-style shirt got out and made a circuit around the park. Cut through a couple of empty sites, like he was trying to decide where they might park a rig.
“Suspect Number Two got out of his truck, and Ward started shooting. Number Two drops, and while me and Mr. Jefferson are having our little disagreement, the suspect in shorts ran over and picked up a gun that Number Two dropped. Fired several times at Wadler, threw a couple in our direction, then anchored Number Two before jumping in the truck and leaving.”
I saw the obvious answer. “So Suspect Two wouldn’t talk.”
“Yep, either that or he didn’t like him one damned bit. Baldy won’t be hard to ID with that big ol’ spider and its web tattooed on his scalp.”
“The others prison tats?”
“Didn’t get that close enough to look.”
“You have tags on both trucks?”
Even though I knew it was coming, I sighed. “No. Things happened so fast no one had a chance to get the assailant’s tag. Wadler gave fake tags for both the truck and trailer on the registration.”
Deputy Daryl’s phone rang, and that wasn’t unusual because it looked like everyone around me was on the phone at some point while I was there. He tapped Gomez’s arm. “You need to take this, I think.”
“Who is it?”
“The bomb guys. They’re on the way.”
Gomez was afraid there was Semtex wired up inside the trailer. They were in the process of escorting the rest of the campers into town for the time being. He took the phone and put the heel of his hand over the end. “I’m gonna need a statement.”
“I know. I’m supposed to write one for my supervisor, too. How about I send it to you when it’s finished.”
“When will that be?”
“Once I catch this guy, I ’magine.”
“You need anything else?”
“I don’t believe so.”
He started to put the phone to his ear and paused, still talking to me. “I talked to Ranger Elizondo. He wanted to know if you were here and when I told him, he said there’d be trouble because you’re snakebit.”
“He wasn’t kidding. Hey, do me a favor, will you?”
“Do you a favor? What’n hell can that be?”
“I’m not going to take Mr. Jefferson in for holding me at gunpoint. He did what he thought he should do. I’d like for you to do the same.”
Sheriff Gomez angled his body to see into the ambulance where Mr. Jefferson and his wife were sitting. “He cost us that guy.”
“Maybe. Maybe they’d have shot me if he hadn’t gotten involved. Everybody else ran and hid. He stood up. Let him go.” My phone rang, and I answered. It was Yolanda and Perry Hale. “Where are y’all?”
Her voice came through first. “You’re on Perry Hale’s Bluetooth in the truck. We’re on the way to East Texas.”
“What for? Aren’t y’all moving a little early?”
“We think that’s where the plastic explosive could be headed, but I checked something else on your caller. You said his name’s Wadler.”
“Wadler is what the kid said.” I told them about the shoot-out in the park. “One of the guys called a name, ’lonzo which I bet is Alonzo.”
“So you got him?”
“Well, no.” I explained what happened. “I have a pretty good idea I had the guy right here, but now he’s gone.”
“I think I know where.” I heard Yolanda clacking on her iPad in the background.
“Where?”
“I ran the last name through the online white pages. Now what I did isn’t exactly scientific or even thorough. It’s more a sampling.”
“Of what?”
“Of addresses or at least the ones that popped up. Most websites re
quire you to pay for the information you’re looking for, but there’s a couple of half-assed pages that gave me most of what I want.”
“What’s that?”
“The Wadlers that popped up for the most part are here in Texas and Louisiana. For us, I concentrated on Texas, and the biggest cluster is in one place. I think it’s where the plastic is headed, and maybe even our guy, if it’s the same person. The kid who called didn’t say gun when the phone was breaking up, he said Gunn, with two Ns. It’s a little one-horse town about twenty or thirty miles from Jasper.”
“Where those DEA agents were murdered.”
Her voice was full of excitement. “Gunn, Texas, fits with this big ’ol target right there. I have the name of Alonzo Wadler who lives there.”
We were quiet with our thoughts, but my pessimism reared its head once again, and I watched Deputy Daryl finish changing the flat. He threw the punctured tire in the bed. “He’s in the Big Thicket. Sounds to me like the vigilante and the Semtex are headed in the same direction.”
It all fit. Wadler drives out to California in an RV, picked up a load of plastic explosive, and then had some kind of meltdown on the way back and started killing other criminals. It made sense. A weak-minded man had some kind of revelation sitting there behind the wheel and decides his newfound cause is higher than the people he’s working with.
“She’s right.” Perry Hale’s voice was full of determination. “You’ve been tailing a guy who’s killing people left and right at the same time hauling enough Semtex to start his own country. There’re refineries all up and down the coast. Tankers use the Intracoastal Waterway to get in and out. They’re scattered all the way from Corpus Christie to Mobile, Alabama. He could be a terrorist planning to hit a refinery.”
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