Vengeance Is Mine

by William W. Johnstone

  That pride was one reason he was so angry when he spotted a kid he had never seen before shoplifting some perfume from the cosmetics area.

  For a moment Macon considered letting him go. The kid was about fifteen, and he was probably stealing the perfume to give to his girlfriend. Macon remembered being fifteen and in love.

  But then he checked the kid’s feet and saw the hundred-dollar sneakers that had probably been bought with drug money, and he thought that if the kid did have a girlfriend, she was probably knocked up by now, and he came out from behind the counter and covered the ground between himself and the thief with the long strides of a man who was six five. He reached out and his hand came down on the kid’s shoulder. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I think you forgot to pay for something.”

  The kid twisted around and said, “Pay f’ this, mo’ fucker.” His left hand had stuck the perfume down one of the large pockets of the drooping jeans. His right came out of the pocket on the other side holding a gun.

  Macon’s eyes widened. He had been robbed several times at gunpoint during the years he had owned the pharmacy. Before that he had gone through the hell that was Vietnam. So he was no stranger to violence.

  But now, as time was shaved into tiny fragments of seconds, he saw how fast the kid was moving and knew that he wouldn’t have time to get out of the way of the shot. He was going to die right here in the store he had worked so hard to make a success, shot with a cheap, nickel-plated Saturday night special by a punk kid. The gun was probably stolen, and the ID numbers would have been filed off of it. The kid would run out the door while Macon fell bleeding to the floor and his life leaked out all over the place, and oh God, Edith was upstairs and would probably hear the shot and come rushing down to see her husband lying there, dying, and if they were both very fortunate there would be just enough time for her to cradle his head in her lap and say good-bye to him . . .

  Or screw it, he could just take the gun away from the punk kid and shove it up his ass. His hand went down as the gun came up, and the long thick fingers closed around the cylinder as the hammer snapped on the web of skin between Macon’s thumb and fingers. He wrenched the gun out of the kid’s grip and backhanded him with it, sending him flying backward into a greeting card rack. The kid went down, tangled with the rack.

  Macon said to Lois, the girl who worked the register at the cosmetics counter, “Call nine-one-one.”

  Her head jerked in a frightened nod. “Are you all right, Mr. Macon?”

  He looked down at his hand. It was bleeding and it hurt, but he felt fine. He smiled and said, “I’m all right.”

  The kid had a broken jaw. He was also wanted for questioning in a couple of drive-by shootings. After getting Macon’s statement, the police hauled the kid off to the hospital to get his jaw wired up before they took him to jail. Macon worried a little that the kid’s friends might try to retaliate against him for what he’d done. It wasn’t like he’d had a lot of choice in the matter, though. Once he had decided not to let the kid get away with shoplifting, events had taken their own course.

  He was thinking about that when the phone rang and he scooped it up and said, “Macon Drugs.”

  “Henry?” A woman’s voice.

  “Yes, ma’am. Can I help you?”

  “Henry, it’s Elaine Stark. I hope you remember me.”

  Macon remembered her, all right, and when he hung up the phone thirty minutes later, he hoped Edith would understand when he told her that he had to go to Texas.

  The shrimp boats left early in the morning, before dawn, worked the beds out beyond St. Charles Island, and were back in the small town of Fulton by midafternoon, tying up in the boat basin across the road from the tourist cabins. This part of the Texas coast had two main industries, fishing and tourism, and those two merged along the several-mile-long stretch of Fulton Beach Road, with its dozens of small motels and restaurants along with the boat basin and several wholesale seafood companies. Rockport, the somewhat larger town right next to Fulton, was even more touristy with its long beach and maritime museum and annual art festival during the summer. By and large, though, the area was one of the most unspoiled anywhere along the Gulf coast. As soon as Nat Van Linh had seen it, back in the middle seventies, he knew this was where he wanted to settle and raise his family.

  Of course, at the time he’d been barely out of his teens and had neither wife nor children—or a job or any prospect of one, for that matter—but he had known that everything good would come to him in time. He had the boundless optimism of an immigrant from hell—or in his case, Vietnam, which in many ways was the same thing.

  He stepped out onto the back porch of his restaurant, the Blue Gull, to watch the shrimpers come in. The porch overhung the water and was a popular place for lunch and dinner, but it was deserted now since the restaurant closed between two and four in the afternoon. Behind him the dining room was being cleaned up, and in the kitchen the cooks were getting ready for dinner. Most of the people who worked in the Blue Gull were family in one way or another.

  Nat leaned on the railing around the porch and looked out over the bay, his eyes picking out the familiar shapes of several of the boats chugging slowly toward the basin. He owned six fishing boats, a nice-sized little fleet. Two of them were captained by his sons, the others by cousins. Nat’s three daughters ran the restaurant, and his wife kept the books. These days, he was mostly just a figurehead, he supposed. He greeted the people who dined there and knew by name just about everyone in the area who came in, even occasionally. He knew many of the tourists who returned year after year, the people who always made a point of stopping in at the Blue Gull at least once during their stay.

  “What’re y’all doin’, Uncle Nat?”

  Nat looked around and saw his nephew Jimmy sweeping up around the tables, cleaning the porch after the lunch rush. Jimmy had been born and raised here in Fulton, spoke very little Vietnamese, and had a Texas twang in his voice that was the equal of any cowboy’s. He was even on the high school rodeo team.

  “Just watching the boats come in,” Nat explained. Jimmy had worked here for only a short time, so he didn’t know yet that Nat made a habit of this.

  Jimmy paused in his work and leaned on the broom. “I worked on one of your boats last summer, did you know that?”

  Nat shook his head. “No, I didn’t.” His captains took care of hiring their own crews.

  “Man, it was hard. Gettin’ up that early and workin’ out in the hot sun all day . . . I like it here at the Blue Gull a lot better.”

  Where you can stand around and shoot the breeze with your uncle instead of doing your job? Nat thought. But he didn’t say it. He knew you couldn’t expect this younger generation to have the same work ethic that he and those like him had brought with them to their adopted country from Vietnam. Jimmy and his friends had no idea what it had been like living there: the grinding poverty, the constant fear, the never-ending struggle against the Communists . . . Nat’s father had been an educated man, a professor of mathematics, who had died in a bombing in Saigon when Nat was ten years old. His mother had died not long after, and Nat had always wondered if grief had caused her passing. His older brother, who was seventeen at the time, had tried to keep the family together. His older sisters, who were fourteen and twelve, had sold their bodies to buy food. Nat and his younger brothers and sisters had become adept thieves.

  By the time Nat was fifteen, he was out in the jungle, working as a scout and interpreter for the Americans. His older brother was in the South Vietnamese army. His older sisters had vanished somewhere in the quagmire of sex and drugs that was Saigon’s red-light district. Nat never knew what happened to the three of them after the fall of Saigon. The chaos had swallowed them whole. But he had managed to get himself and his four younger siblings out of the country before the Communists caught them. Like thousands of others, they had set out into the South China Sea in a little boat barely worthy of the name. They had almost drowned more than once befor
e finally reaching safety in the Philippines. From there it had been a long hard struggle for them to immigrate to the United States, but determination and luck had been on their side. They had reached Texas at last, penniless, with little education, and except for Nat none of them spoke much English. The local fishing industry needed willing workers, though, and Nat and his family brought a willingness to work that paid off. In the short run it had kept them together and kept them eating; in the long run it had made them well-to-do, even rich by some people’s standards.

  So he couldn’t get mad at Jimmy for loafing. Jimmy had never been hardened in the crucible that was Vietnam. But neither was Nat going to let him get away with being lazy, at least not for very long.

  He was about to tell the boy to get back to work when one of the waitresses, his niece Kathy, came out onto the porch and said, “Phone call for you, Uncle Nat.”

  Kathy was in high school, too, a beautiful girl who was a cheerleader and also was on the math and science team. Nat smiled at her and asked, “Who is it?”

  “A woman named Mrs. Stark.”

  Nat took a sharply indrawn breath. “Elaine Stark?”

  “She didn’t say,” Kathy said with a shake of her head.

  It had to be Elaine, Nat thought. She was the only Mrs. Stark he knew. He had thought about calling John Howard a few times during the past few weeks, when he’d read in the newspaper about what was going on down in the Rio Grande valley, but he hadn’t. He realized now that he should have, because Elaine wouldn’t be calling if something wasn’t wrong.

  As he walked into the restaurant and headed for the office to take the call, his mind flashed back to Vietnam, whether he wanted it to go there or not. Those had been dark, desperate, and dangerous times. Though Nat had worked for the Americans, he never really trusted any of them until he met John Howard Stark. John Howard had been different, a big, honest, tough man who didn’t take any crap from anybody, as the Americans put it. By the time Stark left Vietnam, Nat had come to believe that everything good about America and Americans was embodied in him. If the foolish politicians and the so-called peace protesters who had actually lengthened the war had put someone like Stark in charge, Saigon wouldn’t be known now as Ho Chi Minh City and thousands of people would not have been murdered in the Communist takeover.

  But that was decades in the past, though often the hurt of it still seemed fresh, and Nat had learned to think more about the future. He picked up the phone in the office and said, “Elaine? This is Nat. What’s wrong?”

  “How did you know—” she began.

  “The same way I always knew what John Howard was thinking during a firefight, and he knew what I was thinking. Just tell me what I can do to help.”

  She told him, and although it was an amazing, unbelievable story, he believed it. He had long since learned that in America, nothing was too outlandish or far-fetched to be true.

  “I’m on my way,” he said without hesitation when she was finished.

  “Thank you, Nat.”

  “John Howard never let me down when there was trouble. I won’t let him down.” Nat paused. “Have you called any of the others from the old bunch?”

  “Jack Finnegan, Will Sheffield, and Henry Macon. They’re all coming, too.”

  Nat nodded. Good men, all of them, though from what he’d heard, Jack had had his troubles. “What about Rich?”

  “I tried the last number John Howard had for him. It had been disconnected.”

  “Rich never stayed in one place for too long,” Nat mused. “I might be able to find him, though. If I can, I’ll bring him with me.”

  “All right. Thank you again, Nat.”

  “Don’t worry, Elaine. We’ll get this straightened out.”

  He hung up the phone and stood there for a long moment, his mind back in Vietnam again. What was it Rich Threadgill had always shouted when a firefight started? Oh yes . . . “The fuckin’ marines have landed, asshole!”

  The fuckin’ marines were about to land on Del Rio, Texas.

  Thirty-one

  The arraignment was once again before Judge Harvey Goodnight. Sam Gonzales immediately objected to the search warrant signed by Justice of the Peace Louise Bates. District Attorney Albert Wilfredo immediately defended its legitimacy. Judge Goodnight studied the warrant in question for several minutes and then said, “I wouldn’t have signed this thing, but the justice of the peace was within her rights to do so. I’ll allow the evidence. Whether or not the trial judge will do the same will be up to him.”

  Sam looked over at Stark like something good had happened, but for the life of him, Stark couldn’t see what it was.

  The rest of the proceedings went quickly, and once again, although it was obvious Judge Goodnight thought the state’s case was flimsy and probably shouldn’t have been brought in the first place, it was enough to cause him to bind Stark over and send the case to the grand jury. The defense’s motion for bail turned out differently, though. “Due to the seriousness of the charges and the high-profile nature of this case, I’m setting bail in the amount of two million dollars,” Goodnight announced.

  “I can’t get anywhere near that,” Stark muttered to Gonzales.

  “We can arrange for it through a bonding company, but it may take a day or two.” Sam tried to smile reassuringly. “Don’t worry, John Howard. We’ll have you out of jail before you know it.”

  After court was adjourned but before Stark was taken back to his cell, he got a chance to ask, “What was that you looked pleased about when the judge ruled the search warrant was legal?”

  “He mentioned the trial judge,” Gonzales explained. “If a trial was held here in Del Rio, it would be in Judge Goodnight’s court. He was telling me that if I ask for a change of venue, he’ll grant it.”

  “Is that what you plan to do?”

  “If it ever gets to that point, yes. The farther we can get away from the valley, the better chance you’ll get a fair trial.”

  “People won’t know me somewhere else,” Stark pointed out.

  “Yes, but in Lubbock or Fort Worth or some place like that, Ramirez won’t find it nearly as easy to intimidate witnesses or jurors. Strangers will be able to see right through the obvious attempt to frame you.”

  Stark still had his doubts, but he nodded. Sam was just trying to put as good a face on things as he could. Stark didn’t blame him for that.

  “I’ll get to work on the bail,” Gonzales promised as the deputies came up to lead Stark away.

  Stark just nodded again. The whole thing was so surreal, like a bad dream, that at times he had to remind himself it was actually happening.

  The clang of the cell door closing served as a reminder of its own. Stark sat on the bunk, leaned his head back against the wall, and closed his eyes. It was happening, all right. It was all as real as it could be.

  He wondered if his life would ever be normal again.

  Devery Small sat on the front porch of the Diamond S ranch house with a rifle across his knees and looked out at the night. There was an armed guard standing watch on each side of the house, but Devery was nervous anyway. So much had happened, so much that he never would have believed was even possible. Hubie and W.R. and Everett were dead, and John Howard was in jail, charged with their murder. That was crazy, of course. Devery didn’t have to be told that John Howard hadn’t had anything to do with those killings. He knew it with his gut. There were good guys and bad guys in the world, and John Howard Stark was one of the good guys. That was the way Devery saw it, anyway.

  Sam Gonzales had been out here earlier, filling Elaine in on what had happened in court today. It had come as no surprise that John Howard was still in jail. Ramirez had pulled out the big guns on this. He was going to make sure that his enemy, John Howard Stark, suffered the torments of the damned.

  Elaine had wanted to go into town and see her husband, but Sam had talked her out of it. John Howard would rest easier, he’d said, if he knew she was out here at the ranch, sa
fe and sound. Grudgingly, Elaine had agreed.

  She had told Devery that she’d called some of John Howard’s old friends from the marines, and all of them had agreed to come down and do what they could to help. One of them, a banker from Chicago, had promised assistance in the form of a high-powered law firm from his hometown. One of the other guys was a newspaper editor, and when you were in trouble it never hurt to have a member of the press on your side. Devery didn’t know about the others, but he figured John Howard could use all the friends he could get right about now.

  Devery heard a faint noise from the other end of the porch and turned his head in that direction. He didn’t see anything. He’d had the chair leaned back against the wall with only its back legs on the porch, balancing himself with a foot against the porch railing like Henry Fonda playing Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine. Now he sat up straight, letting the chair’s front legs come down on the porch with a thump. He called, “Anybody there?”

  No answer. Devery told himself he was just being jumpy. He was nervous, of course, and didn’t mind admitting it. What fella in his right mind wouldn’t be nervous in a situation like this? He stood up and pointed the rifle at the far end of the porch.

  “If anybody’s there, you better speak up, or I’m liable to go to shootin’,” he warned.

  The shifting darkness came from behind him. Some instinct must have alerted him, because he jerked his head around in time to see the black-clad shape lunge at him. He had just enough time to think, It’s a goddamn ninja! before the cold steel pierced his body from behind. The knife thrust felt just like a hard punch, but the icy pain that penetrated far into his body told him he hadn’t been hit with a fist. He arched his back in an involuntary effort to get away from the agony, but he couldn’t escape it. The knife twisted inside him. He dropped the rifle. It fell to the porch with a clatter. An arm locked across his throat, holding him in place as the knife was withdrawn and then thrust into him again and again. Devery jerked hard a couple of times and went limp. He was no longer aware of anything except the pain that filled his consciousness. It blossomed like a flower, or like ripples in a pond spreading ever outward and outward. It grew until there was nothing else.