Batter up.
Stark swung as a couple of switchblades came out and flicked open, the glare from the beer sign reflecting from the cold steel. The third man had a small, flat automatic, probably a .25. Stark wished he could have gone for the gunman first, but the other two were in the way.
The strippers screamed and flung themselves out of their chairs, stumbling into the crowd. The music pounded and the women still onstage twisted and posed in time to the beat.
The fence post slammed into the face of the nearest man. The barbed wire ripped his skin and gouged into his flesh, tearing off little chunks of meat as it pulled free. The force of the blow shattered his cheekbone and pulped his nose as well. He gave a strangled cry and slumped backward as blood spurted from his mangled face. The switchblade slipped from his fingers and fell unnoticed onto the table.
That first impact stole some of the speed and force from Stark’s swing, so that the second man was able to twist aside and avoid taking the post across the face like his companion. Instead it thudded against his left shoulder. The barbs dug in again, drawing a howl of pain. Stark knew he had probably broken the man’s shoulder. At the very least, that whole arm would be numb and useless.
Unfortunately the man held his knife in his right hand. Fighting through the pain, he lunged forward and jabbed the blade at Stark. The only good thing about that from Stark’s point of view was that the knife wielder’s move put him between Stark and the man with the gun. The guy was trying to line up a shot but had to hold off for fear of hitting his friend.
Stark felt the bite of the blade on his right forearm as he jerked the post back for another swing. He didn’t think the wound was a bad one, only a scratch, but in the middle of the fight, with his blood pumping so hard and his adrenaline up, he couldn’t be sure about anything. He swung the post again, a shorter swing this time, not the roundhouse going for the fences but more like just trying to punch the ball into the hole between third and short. He hit the second man on the left ear and tore it off. Blood poured down the side of the man’s neck. He clapped his right hand to the wound and shrieked. Worse luck for him, he was still holding the switchblade in that hand and accidentally sliced a deep gash in his head above where the ear had been. He slumped forward onto the table.
The third man’s little automatic cracked wickedly. Up until now the fight, while it hadn’t gone unnoticed, hadn’t attracted a great deal of attention. The thuds and screams had been partially drowned out by the loud music. Gunfire was a different story, though. People heard that, even through the heavy beat. With shouts of alarm and confusion and a lot of bellowed curses, many of the club’s patrons took off for the tall and uncut, heading for the exits as fast as they could without even waiting to see what was going on. There was a back door, down a little hall past the filthy bathrooms, but both it and the front door soon jammed up as the frightened mob tried to pour through them. The strippers had leaped down from the stages—the smart ones kicking off their spike heels first so they wouldn’t break their ankles when they landed—and joined the exodus.
Stark didn’t know where the first shot had gone, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t been hit. Recovering from the momentum of his second swing, he brought the makeshift club around in a backhand that swatted the automatic from the guy’s fingers just as it went off again. That bullet creased the right butt cheek of one of the fleeing strippers and made her yelp. Stark thrust the post out like a sword, jamming it into the third man’s belly. As the man bent over, Stark brought the post up so that the end wrapped in barbed wire caught him under the chin. Crimson drops of blood flew through the air like rain.
A heavy weight landed on Stark’s back, knocking him forward. He hadn’t expected that everyone else in the place would stay out of the fight. Whether the three killers had friends here or not, the club would have bouncers who would jump on anybody who started a fight; not to mention that some of the men in here would probably be glad to pound on him awhile just because he was an Anglo. The man on his back forced him down onto the table, on top of the man whose ear had been torn off. That one began to squirm and scream.
The coppery smell of blood filled Stark’s nostrils. He brought his right elbow up and back, driving it into the midsection of the guy who had tackled him from behind. He had to do that three times before the man’s grip came loose. Stark meant to put his hand down on the table so he could shove off of it, but he grabbed the back of the other guy’s head instead and rammed his face against the table. The man went limp. Stark shoved off anyway, rolling over onto his back, half on and half off the table.
He saw a chair coming at him and barely got the post up in time to block it. The impact was still enough to half stun him, but at least he was able to turn the chair aside so that it shattered against the table. Stark brought his right leg up and snapped a kick into the groin of the man who had swung the chair. The heel of his boot landed solidly, crushing the man’s genitals. He shrieked and fell back, clutching at himself.
Stark kept rolling, came completely off the table, and surged up onto his feet, stumbling a little as he caught his balance. Catching a glimpse of several men coming toward him, he whipped the post back and forth, driving them back. Part of the barbed wire had come loose, and when Stark swung the post the wire sang through the air like one strand of a cat-o’-nine tails.
The old combat instincts that never went away completely warned Stark. He whirled around to see two men coming at him. One of them was the guy who’d had the gun. He had snatched up the switchblade his friend had dropped. The other one was the first man Stark had clobbered. His face was covered with blood and grotesquely swollen from the broken cheekbone. He blubbered incomprehensible curses as he lurched toward Stark, arms outstretched, hands twisted into claws.
The one with the knife was more dangerous, but armed with the fence post, Stark could keep him at bay. He swung a couple of times, making the man dart back. That gave the other guy a chance to reach Stark, though. He crashed into Stark and fumbled at his throat, trying to get a death grip on it.
The end of the post Stark had been using as a handle was jagged where it had broken off. He reversed it and brought it up between them, driving the post into the man’s throat. The jagged wood tore through flesh and severed arteries. The man gave a hideous, bubbling scream right in Stark’s face as blood fountained from his ravaged neck. He fell away and landed in a heap, pawing at his torn-open throat for a couple of seconds before he jerked and quivered and gradually settled into the stillness of death.
Something bit into Stark’s side. The man with the knife was close again, too damned close. He had just sliced a gash under Stark’s ribs. Stark let go of the post with his left hand and jabbed that fist into the guy’s face. The blow knocked him back a step, and that gave Stark the room he needed to swing the post one-handed. The gnarled wood crashed into the side of the man’s head and shattered his skull. The bone collapsed under the force of the blow, and his left eye popped out of its socket and hung dangling on his cheek. He went down like a puppet with its strings cut, dead before he hit the floor.
Breathing heavily, Stark kept an eye on the other men and stepped over to the table where the final member of the trio that had killed Tommy Carranza lay facedown. The music had stopped sometime during the fight, so now an eerie silence hung over the place, broken only by Stark’s rasping breaths. He grabbed the man by the hair and lifted his head, only to see the glassy stare of death in the man’s eyes. Having his face smashed into the table like that must have driven bone fragments from his nasal cavity back and up into his brain. Stark released him and let his head thump down on the table again. Stark left the body there, splayed across the table.
Even though he was heavily outnumbered by the men still in the club, evidently none of them wanted anything to do with him. They watched him warily as he stepped away from the table, leaving the three dead men behind him. His side and arm throbbed where he had been cut, and he felt revulsion roiling in his stomach
as he realized that he was covered in the blood of those bastards. He hoped like hell that none of them had some filthy disease he could catch.
That was assuming, of course, that he got out of here alive. That outcome was still very much in doubt.
Stark limped over to the bar, a pulled muscle in his leg catching a little. He had no idea when he had suffered that injury. He hadn’t noticed it when it happened.
Men pulled back, keeping a good distance between him and them. He held the post down by his leg again and leaned his other hand on the bar. The lady bartender with the big nipples was still behind the hardwood, pressed back as far as she could get against the now deserted horseshoe stage.
Stark managed to hold up a finger and say, “Una mas cerveza, por favor, senorita.”
With shaking hands, the woman uncapped a beer and leaned forward to set it gingerly on the bar in front of the blood-covered, wild-eyed, gringo lunatic. Then she backed away again hurriedly.
Stark picked up the bottle and tilted it to his mouth. He had never tasted anything as good as the cold beer that flowed down his throat. He drank half the beer before he lowered the bottle. He set it on the bar.
Then he turned to face the silent, wary crowd. Lifting the fence post, he pointed at the dead men and said in fluent border Spanish, “Those three tortured and killed a good friend of mine and would have done the same to his wife and children if they had caught them. I have repaid them for their evil and avenged my friend’s death. My fight is with none of you.”
“Hombre, jus’ get outta here,” the woman behind the bar said in English. “We don’ wan’ no part of your troubles.” She added, “Those three, they work for . . .”
She couldn’t bring herself to say the name, but everyone in the place knew it, Stark sensed.
“They work for the devil now,” he said. Or maybe they always did.
He started slowly toward the door. It opened before he got there, and the man in the black T-shirt stumbled through it, groaning. His bleary eyes fastened on Stark, and he stopped and clenched his hands into fists as he growled a curse.
“No! Let him go!”
The sharp command came from the woman behind the bar. The man ignored her at first until she unleashed a rapid torrent of invective in their native tongue. Then, grudgingly, he stepped aside out of Stark’s way.
Stark trudged out of the place, halfway expecting some of them to come after him as soon as he was outside. That didn’t happen, though. Maybe what he had said about avenging a friend’s death had struck a chord in them. They were a people with a deep sense of honor. Scum like Ramirez were an aberration, and he reminded himself that Ramirez was Colombian, not Mexican.
He made it to his pickup, awkwardly fished out his keys—his left hand was swelling some from the punch it had delivered—and unlocked the door. After tossing the bloody fence post in the floorboard on the passenger side, he pulled himself up behind the steering wheel. It took him longer than usual to get the keys in the ignition and start the engine, but after a minute he was ready to pull away.
He paused to look at the flickering blue neon of the club’s sign. He was just as big a jackass as that blue burro, he told himself. He had taken a huge chance by coming here tonight, and he knew he was damned lucky to still be alive.
But he had made a start on settling the score, and it felt good. When he thought about that he forgot his aches and pains for a moment. People said that revenge was hollow, that all the retaliation in the world wouldn’t bring someone back after they were dead. And Stark couldn’t deny that Tommy was gone. No matter what he did, he couldn’t change that.
But there was a question of justice, too, and when Stark thought about the way the impact had shivered up his arm as that son of a bitch’s skull broke apart when the fence post hit it, he knew that justice had been served. A rough justice, an extreme justice, to be sure, but justified nonetheless.
They’d had it coming. Pure and simple, boiled down to its essence, that was all there was to it. They were bad men, and they’d had it coming.
Stark put the truck in gear and drove off into the night.
He wondered what the American guards at the other end of the International Bridge would say when he tried to reenter the country covered in blood.
The music hadn’t started up again in the Blue Burro. All the strippers were so shaken by what had happened, and upset because one of the girls had actually gotten shot in the ass, that there might not be any more shows tonight.
On the other hand, once the bodies were hauled out and the blood was cleaned up, enough of the night would be left so that more money could change hands, and that was the way of the universe, was it not?
Silencio Ryan emerged from the men’s room. He had watched the whole thing from there, through the door held open a few inches. After talking to Stark at the bar, he had stepped into the hallway beside the restrooms when the big gringo went outside, then retreated into the bathroom itself when the mob tried to get out the rear door. Ryan had known Stark would be back, and then all hell would break loose. Otherwise Ryan never would have sent Stark that e-mail and lured him here tonight.
That was exactly the way it had happened. Stark had waded in, swinging that fence post like a baseball bat, and when it was all over, Guzman, Mendez, and Canales were all dead. As far as Ryan was concerned, their lives were a small price to pay to find out just how much of a badass Stark really was. Ryan knew now why he had held off on pressing the trigger when he could have killed Stark the day before. It was curiosity. Ramirez might not like it, but a worthy enemy deserved more than a bullet in the head from four hundred yards away. A worthy enemy deserved to meet his fate at close range, and now Ryan knew.
John Howard Stark was worthy.
BOOK TWO
No man in the wrong can stand up against a
man in the right who keeps on a-comin’.
—William “Wild Bill” MacDonald, captain,
Texas Rangers
Twelve
Stark stopped before he got back to the bridge and dug around under the front seat for an old work shirt he’d remembered was there. It had oil stains on it and stank of sweat, but at least it wasn’t soaked with blood. He took off the shirt he had on and used the tail of it, which was fairly clean, to scrub as much of the blood off his face as he could. He checked the wounds on his arm and side while he was at it. Both of them hurt, but they didn’t look too deep and had already stopped oozing crimson. The wounds would need to be cleaned as soon as possible, but he thought that could wait until he was back at the ranch.
He checked himself in the rearview mirror and saw that he looked as presentable as possible under the circumstances. It was when he reached for the key to start the truck again that the reaction hit him. His shoulders hunched up and he had to grab the steering wheel to keep from shaking. He had killed three men tonight and possibly injured several others severely. The three dead men had deserved their fate, no doubt about that. Arguably they had deserved death more than the hundreds of men Stark had killed in Vietnam. Stark had never felt the sort of personal hatred for the enemy during the war that he had felt tonight for the men who had murdered Tommy. Morally he had absolutely no doubt that he had done the right thing.
But still, for the past thirty years he had been just a common man, a husband, a father, a rancher. He had worked at his living, raised his kids, and loved his wife. He had watched TV and gone to the movies and read books and pushed a cart up and down the aisles of the grocery store and written out checks each month for the electric bill, the insurance bill, the feed bill, the telephone bill. He had eaten Sunday dinner and midnight snacks, laughed at David Letterman, cheered at high school football games, and gotten a lump in his throat when the band played the National Anthem before those games. At times in his life he had known moments of heart-stopping danger, of desperate heroism and gallant bravery, but they were long in the past, the sort of things that a fella could go for months or even years without thinking about
too much. In short, there was nothing really special about him.
And yet, when push came to shove, when injustice had forced him into a corner, he had waded in and killed three men who were undoubtedly younger, quicker, stronger, and more ruthless than he was. How? How?
Stark lifted his hands from the steering wheel and held them in front of his face, staring at them in the light from the businesses that lined Hidalgo Street, turning them back and forth and studying them as if he would find the answers to all his questions engraved upon them in letters of fire.
But there was nothing there except dried bloodstains. Stark slowly closed his hands into fists and took a deep breath. He was all right now. For a second he had feared that he was going mad, but now he knew he was all right.
It was over. He had done what he could. Earlier he had thought that tonight’s work was a good start, but he knew now that was it, the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega. He prayed that Tommy was resting easier now. It was time for Stark to go home.
As it turned out, the customs agents on duty at the U.S. end of the bridge gave him no trouble at all about reentering the country. They just looked at his driver’s license, glanced in the back of the pickup to make sure he wasn’t hauling any obvious contraband, and waved him on through the checkpoint with a cheerful “Have a good night.”
Too late for that, Stark thought as he drove away. A productive night, yes, but he didn’t know that he’d call it good.
It took him half an hour to reach the ranch. During that time he pondered a question that he hadn’t really considered before: what was he going to tell Elaine? He had been so caught up in figuring out what, if anything, he ought to do about Tommy’s murder that he hadn’t even thought about what he was going to tell his wife.
And he would have to tell her something. He couldn’t come in wearing a different shirt, bruised and battered and with knife wounds on his arm and side, and expect Elaine just to ignore it. He knew her way too well for that.
Vengeance Is Mine Page 11