First, thought Stark, he needed to find out just what, and where, the Blue Burro was.
He had a Ciudad Acuna phone book in the desk along with the Del Rio book. He hauled it out and flipped through the pages until he found a listing for El Burro Azul, which translated to the Blue Burro. The address was on Boulevard Guerrero. Stark had made many trips across the river as a young man and knew the town fairly well. He thought this Blue Burro must be somewhere on the southeastern edge of town, not far from the Plaza de Toros, or bullfight ring. Stark stared at the phone book for a long moment, then pulled the telephone over to him and punched in the number.
A loud, male voice answered in Spanish. The voice had to be loud because so was the music that was playing in the Blue Burro. It sounded like a Tejano version of hard rock and confirmed Stark’s suspicion that the Blue Burro was some sort of bar or strip joint, something like that. He hung up without saying anything.
Though he still couldn’t be certain of who Guzman, Mendez, and Canales were, it was obvious whoever sent him that e-mail wanted him to go to the Blue Burro tomorrow night.
It was equally obvious that the whole thing might be a trap.
Stark had left the computer alone long enough so that the screensaver had come on. It was a constantly shifting, panoramic landscape of west Texas scenery that Pete had programmed into the machine. Stark sat there for a long time, staring at the beauties of the land he had grown up in and thinking.
With the funeral over and the rest of the Carranza family safely ensconced in Cheyenne—Stark had gotten a call from ’Berto the night before, confirming that they had reached their destination without actually revealing what it was, just in case anybody was listening in—things ought to get back to normal around the Diamond S, Stark thought the next morning. He spent the afternoon doing chores around the ranch headquarters, and then, after lunch, drove out to work on one of the ranch fences. He had to replace a cedar post that Newt had accidentally backed into with the pickup, breaking it off at the ground. He had a new post in the back of the pickup, along with a roll of barbed wire in case some of the old wire had to be replaced.
With the post being broken off, that meant he had to dig the lower part out of the ground. He dug around it with a sharpshooter shovel, then reached down with gloved hands and worked the piece of post back and forth until he could pull it up. The new post would go back in the same hole, so that was no problem. Then he had to take the upper part of the broken post loose from the field fence and barbed wire to which it was attached, set the new post in the hole, and reattach the fencing.
He worked hard, enjoying the heat of the sun and the sweat that flowed freely and the way his muscles loosened up until he felt twenty years old again. A little hard work always made him feel his age; a lot of it seemed to make the years fall away so that for a time he almost recaptured his youth. Of course, he would pay for it with some soreness the next day.
The only other break he took was to talk briefly with Newt and Chaco, who rode by on horseback, making their usual rounds of the place. Newt was on his old Biscuit horse, his favorite mount.
In late afternoon, Stark loaded up everything. He had tossed the broken pieces of cedar post into the back of the truck earlier, next to the roll of barbed wire, the shovel, and a posthole digger he hadn’t needed. Stark wasn’t sure what he would do with the pieces of post. He never threw away anything that was still potentially usable, though. One of his father’s favorite expressions, which could refer to almost anything, had been, “You never know when you might need something like that,” and Stark still lived by that doctrine.
As he drove back toward the ranch house, he wondered if in the back of his mind had been the idea that if he worked hard all day, he would be too tired to go down to Cuidad Acuna tonight and pay a visit to the Blue Burro. If that was what he had been thinking, it hadn’t worked out too well. He felt as vital and alive as he had in a long time. He was rarin’ to go, in fact.
Elaine had supper ready by the time he had cleaned up and changed clothes. As they ate, she commented on how cheerful he seemed. “You’re definitely more chipper today, John Howard,” she said.
“Yeah, I feel pretty good,” Stark agreed.
He couldn’t tell her that he felt good because he had finally reached a decision. He couldn’t forget or ignore what had happened to Tommy. There had to be some sort of reckoning, and it was up to him to do it. He couldn’t get to Ramirez; Stark knew that and accepted it, although it was a pretty bitter pill to swallow. But if those men who were going to be at the Blue Burro tonight worked for Ramirez and had had something to do with Tommy’s murder . . .
Well, he could get at them, sure enough.
When he was finished eating, he shoved back his chair and said, “I’ve got to go into town for a while.”
“What for?”
“Just to pick up a few things.”
“If you’re going to Wal-Mart, I’ll go with you—”
Stark shook his head. “I’m not going to Wal-Mart.”
Elaine looked a little surprised at the curtness of his voice. “Oh. Well then, how long are you going to be gone?”
“I don’t know, but it shouldn’t be long. An hour or two, maybe.” In truth, he had no idea how long this trip would take.
“All right. I’ll wait up for you.”
He didn’t tell her not to. That would just worry her more than she was worried already.
As he got his hat, she said, “John Howard . . . you’re not about to do something foolish, are you?”
“Me?” He managed to smile. “When did I ever do anything foolish?”
“Oh my God,” she said, but by the time the words were out of her mouth, he was already out the door. He got in the pickup and drove off. He almost stopped when he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her standing on the porch, one hand lifted to her throat in alarm. But his foot came down harder on the gas. He knew that if he stopped now, he might never go on, and that would be the end of it, the end of any justice for Tommy Carranza.
Night was settling down over the Rio Grande valley by the time he reached Del Rio. He drove on through town toward the International Bridge. Stark had Mexican insurance on all his vehicles, since he sometimes had to cross the border to do business, so taking the pickup into Cuidad Acuna was no problem. Nor was the traffic too bad. This border crossing wasn’t as heavily traveled as the ones at El Paso and Eagle Pass and Brownsville, so the approaches to the bridge didn’t get clogged with cars and trucks. Stark was able to make it across in short order, telling the guards at the Mexican end of the bridge that he would be staying less than seventy-two hours. They waved him through, figuring he was just another gringo in search of cerveza and pussy.
He drove along brightly lit Hidalgo Street, the main tourist drag, for several blocks until he came to Boulevard Guerrero. Waiting for traffic to clear, he hung a left and drove past the bullring. Cuidad Acuna had a larger population than its sister city across the border did, but its citizens were packed into a much smaller area. Town ran out in a hurry, giving way to scrubby grassland. Not all the vestiges of civilization disappeared, however. Up ahead, blue neon blazed in the night.
As Stark came closer, he saw that the neon tubes were curved into the shape of a cartoonish donkey, with blue letters underneath that spelled out EL BURRO AZUL. The sign went with a sprawling, one-story adobe building with a large gravel parking lot in front of it. As Stark pulled in, he saw that the lot was only about half-full. The vehicles ranged from battered pickups, some of them so old they had running boards, to newer SUVs and sedans. Stark found a place to park without any trouble.
When he had killed the lights and the engine, he sat there for a long moment, hands tight on the steering wheel. He could still leave, could turn around, and head home without ever going into this sleazy club where God-knows-what awaited him.
But if he did that, he would never know why someone had wanted him to come here tonight. He took a deep breath, opened the pickup door, and g
ot out.
He heard the music pounding out of the place even though all the doors and windows were closed. Stark walked determinedly toward the entrance. A burly young man with a ponytail and a dark Indio face, wearing a black T-shirt, was stationed there. “Hey, man,” he greeted Stark. “You looking for pretty girls?”
“Sure,” Stark replied, even though strippers were about the last thing he had on his mind right now.
“We got plenty. You not gonna cause any trouble, right?”
“Right,” Stark lied.
“Go on in.” The arrogant smugness in the kid’s voice said that he had seen plenty of middle-aged gringos down here before and would again. The Blue Burro probably made a lot of its money off visitors from the other side of the border, slumming tourists and locals who had left their wives behind for a night of excitement.
In a way, Stark thought, he supposed he fit into that last category.
The air was thick with tobacco and marijuana smoke, along with the sharp tangs of whiskey, beer, and cheap perfume. Stark’s jaw tightened as the stink assaulted his senses. The lighting was dim, with shadows interspersed with garish bursts of illumination from colored spotlights that played over the nude, writhing flesh of dancers atop elevated stages on both sides of the room. In front of him was a big U-shaped bar that enclosed another stage where two girls danced together. As Stark approached the bar the dancers rubbed their breasts against each other and kissed openmouthed, with plenty of tongue action visible. The patrons at the bar shouted their appreciation.
What the hell was he supposed to do now? Stark thought.
Getting a drink seemed to be the logical place to start. He had already looked around the room as best he could in the dim, smoky light and hadn’t seen anyone he recognized. He found an empty place at the bar and ordered a beer. The bartender was a Mexican woman, older and heavier than the young, slender dancers but still attractive with a wild mane of midnight-black curls and big breasts with dark brown nipples that were clearly visible through the almost sheer blouse she wore. Stark tried not to look at them, but it was damned difficult with them poking out that way.
“Howdy,” a voice with a Texas twang said from beside him. “Quite a place, ain’t it?”
Stark glanced over and saw a middle-aged man in jeans, a cowboy shirt with silver snaps, and a black Stetson. The man grinned and went on, “Your first time here?”
“Yeah,” Stark replied. He lifted the bottle of beer that the woman placed in front of him. It wasn’t too bad, and was surprisingly cold.
Stark’s newfound drinking buddy grinned and inclined his head toward the dancers who were now licking each other all over as much as they were dancing. “Pretty hot stuff, huh?”
“If you like that kind of thing.”
“If you don’t like it, why are you here?”
Stark shrugged. “Just getting a drink.”
“Well, it’s good to see another American face in here.”
“Looks like quite a few Americans around to me.”
That was true. Probably 25 percent of the customers were Anglo, ranging from cowboys like the man talking to Stark to businessmen in suits and loosened ties.
“Well, some folks in here don’t much like us. In fact, I just heard . . . Nah, it ain’t none o’ my business.”
“You just heard what?” Stark asked, turning to look at the man.
After a moment’s hesitation, the man said, “There are some guys back there at that table in the corner who are . . . well, they’re braggin’ about killin’ some guy on the other side of the river a few nights ago. I heard ’em talkin’ about it, and I don’t mind tellin’ you, it scared me. I’m thinkin’ I might ought to get out of here while the gettin’s good.”
“Maybe so,” Stark said. “They mention the name of this guy they killed?”
“I think they called him Tommy.”
That came as no surprise to Stark. He had already figured out this stranger in the black hat must be the one responsible for that e-mail he had gotten. It would be just too wild a coincidence otherwise for him to have waltzed in here and found the men he was looking for so quickly. Stark took another drink of his beer and asked, “Which ones exactly are you talking about?”
“The ones right under that Dos Equis sign,” the man said.
“Thanks,” Stark said. He drained the last of the beer, set the empty on the bar, and turned to walk out of the noisy strip joint.
Hodge Purdee had set this up. Stark was sure of it now. Frustrated, Purdee couldn’t do anything directly about Tommy’s murder, but he had located some of the men responsible for it and now through this intermediary, probably one of his informants, he was pointing Stark right at them, as if Stark were some sort of human weapon.
Well, maybe he was, he thought as he reached his pickup. He put his hat on the front seat, then relocked the door, went to the back, and lowered the tailgate. He reached into the bed and picked up the pair of work gloves he had left there earlier. He had put the shovel and the posthole digger back in the toolshed at the ranch, but the broken pieces of cedar post were still in the back of the pickup, as was the roll of barbed wire. He drew the gloves on and then picked up the longer length of cedar post that was still rattling around back there. It was solid, about four feet long. Stark hefted it and nodded in satisfaction.
He started to turn away, but then he stopped and reached back into the bed of the pickup, getting the roll of barbed wire. He took hold of the end and pulled out a couple of feet of wire, using a pair of pliers that were also in the back of the truck to cut it off. He started twisting the wire around the length of post in his other hand, bending it around itself to fasten it in place. When he was finished, he had about eight inches of the post covered in barbed wire.
There, he thought. That ought to do it.
Still wearing his gloves, carrying the barbed-wire-studded piece of fence post, Stark walked toward the door of the Blue Burro.
Eleven
The guy in the black T-shirt at the door saw Stark coming with the piece of post and took a quick step toward him, holding up a hand and saying, “Hey, man, you can’t—”
Stark moved fast, muscle memory kicking in as all the hand-to-hand combat techniques the marines had taught him came back to him. He rammed the end of the post into the guard’s stomach with a quick, hard jab that knocked all the wind out of the guy and made him double over in pain as he gasped for breath. Stark used his hand to chop a short, hard blow down on the back of the man’s neck. The guy collapsed, his face hitting the gravel hard. He let out a groan but didn’t move. He was out of the fight for a while.
Stark reached for the door handle. Leaving an enemy alive behind him went against the grain, but even though the guard was a thug and probably had committed crimes of his own in the past, Stark was here for Tommy’s murderers. That was all. He would take care of anybody else who got in his way, but he wouldn’t deliberately try to kill them.
Stark pulled the door open and stepped inside. The noise and the stink assaulted his senses again as he let the door swing closed behind him. Holding the length of fence post down beside his leg so that it wouldn’t be so noticeable, he stalked across the room toward the men who had been pointed out to him. They still sat at the table under the Dos Equis sign, drinking and talking and laughing, having a fine old time. A couple of the strippers who weren’t up onstage at the moment had come over and joined them, sitting at the table in skimpy, tasseled costumes, rubbing the thighs of the men under the table, and sipping twenty-dollar “drinks” that were really just weak iced tea.
A glance at the bar told Stark that the cowboy who had pointed out Tommy’s killers was nowhere to be seen now. He had done his job and had probably taken off so that he wouldn’t get caught up in the trouble. Stark didn’t blame him. He wouldn’t be here himself, if not for the fact that if he didn’t do this, nobody else would.
Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to him. Most of the eyes in the place were fixed on th
e erotic gyrations of the strippers. Stark had known girls like them before, back when he was single, and he knew that they were more likely to be thinking about such things as late car payments and kids with the sniffles and what they needed to buy at the grocery store on their way home after work, than they were about the lust-charged fantasies of the men watching them. That knowledge sort of took the appeal out of it for Stark. Not that it really mattered right now. All his attention was focused on the three men sitting under the neon beer sign. The sign had a small electrical short in it, so that one section flickered from time to time.
Stark turned his body slightly as he came up to the table, keeping the post out of easy sight against his leg. The Mexicans looked up with sullen, resentful expressions at the tall, muscular gringo standing there, and one of them said in a surly voice, “What you want, man?”
“I think you boys know an amigo of mine,” Stark said. Somewhere inside himself he found the self-control to keep his voice steady. He had to be sure he was doing the right thing, had to be certain these were the men who had tortured and killed Tommy before he started flailing away at them with the barbed-wire-wrapped fence post.
“We don’ know anybody you know, cholo,” one of the other men said disdainfully.
“I think you do,” Stark said. He noticed that the strippers were starting to edge their chairs back away from the table. They had a keener instinct for trouble than these half-drunk thugs did. “His name was Tomas Carranza.”
The shocked, wide-eyed stares the men gave him, the startled curses that ripped from their mouths, the way they started up out of their chairs and reached hurriedly for the weapons in their pockets all told Stark that his information was correct. He brought the piece of fence post up in his right hand, and as he did his left reached across his body and wrapped around the post as well, and he pivoted at the hips and brought his hands back and it was just as if he were back on the baseball field, stepping to the plate in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded, the home team three runs behind, the only hope a grand slam.
Vengeance Is Mine Page 10