Vengeance Is Mine

by William W. Johnstone

  “You plan to rent a boat at the marina on the other side?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Watch out for the buoys in the middle of the reservoir, especially if you’re out there after dark.”

  “Will do,” Finnegan promised. He gave the agents a little wave as they motioned him on across the dam.

  He turned right toward the marina when he reached the other side. The marina was some six miles up the shoreline of the reservoir, but Finnegan turned again before he reached there, this time onto a dirt road that led to the southwest and curved back toward Cuidad Acuna. Earlier he had called up topographical maps of the area on his computer and they had planned out their rendezvous and the route they would follow to Ramirez’s compound on the southeastern edge of the Mexican border city.

  The plumbing truck was parked at a lonely crossroads in the middle of some semiarid farmland where a few Mexican families managed to scratch out a living. Sheffield and Threadgill got out when they saw the rental car approaching. Dusk would be upon them soon.

  With the group together again, Stark took the wheel of the car and led the way to an isolated draw. He parked there. If they made it back to recover the car later, all well and good. If not, some Mexican who chanced upon it would find himself the recipient of some good fortune.

  Safe from prying eyes in the back of the truck, the men uncovered the armament and combat gear and began getting ready for the assault on the Vulture’s nest. They shrugged into the Kevlar vests, strapped on helmets and body armor, buckled on web belts and hung flares, flash-bangs, and H-E grenades on them. They holstered Heckler & Koch 9mm pistols and loaded the assault rifles and shotguns. Threadgill tucked his old hog leg behind his web belt. “These newfangled guns are pretty nice,” he said, “but I want this ol’ man stopper o’ mine with me, too.”

  “I’m just thankful you don’t refer to it as Old Betsy,” Finnegan said with a grin.

  When they were ready, Stark said, “I’ll drive the rest of the way. Rich, you’re with me. The rest of you, in the back.”

  “Good luck, John Howard,” Macon said.

  “Yeah,” Sheffield echoed. “Good luck.”

  “To us all,” Nat added.

  “Let’s go get them motherfuckers,” Threadgill said.

  Jack Finnegan just looked at Stark and nodded. The banker’s wry attitude had vanished after his quip about Threadgill’s old revolver.

  The four who were riding in back climbed into the truck. Stark pulled the door down and dogged its catches in place. He and Threadgill went to the front of the truck. Stark paused before stepping up into the cab. He looked off to the west, where the sun had dropped behind the low mountains that sprawled across the landscape. The afterglow remained, painting the sky with stripes of brilliant orange and red and streaks of pale blue that faded almost to white on the edges. It was a beautiful sunset. Stark knew that one reason the sunsets were so spectacular these days was the increased amount of pollution in the air from heavy industry in northern Mexico. That knowledge wasn’t enough to detract from the sky’s beauty at this moment.

  Any sunset would seem beautiful, Stark thought, when there was a good chance it was the last one a fella was ever going to see.

  He would have given anything if Elaine could have shared this one with him.

  That was when he seemed to sense her presence beside him and feel her breath warm against his ear. I’m with you, John Howard, she seemed to whisper. I’ll always be with you.

  “John Howard?” Threadgill said.

  Stark took a deep breath. “Let’s go,” he said as he pulled himself up into the cab and settled behind the wheel.

  A moment later, the truck bounced away over the rough desert road as the brilliant colors began to fade from the arching sky behind it.

  “What have you found?” Ramirez demanded. “Who is responsible for this debacle?”

  As always when he visited Ramirez, Sheriff Norval Lee Hammond wished he could stop sweating so much. It was a hot night, of course, but that wasn’t the cause of his discomfort. Not the sole cause, anyway. Ramirez looked mad enough to chew nails. He could certainly chew the head off a corrupt civil servant who had failed in his duties and let down everyone who had ever believed in him.

  Willa Sue and the kids had been gone when he stopped by the house on his way over to Cuidad Acuna. No note, just some sort of legal paperwork saying that she was filing for divorce from him. Who the hell would’a thunk it? He never would have believed that the bitch had the balls to do such a thing.

  The angry thoughts were hollow, though. Deep inside, he was hurting. This was just one more case where life hadn’t worked out the way it was supposed to for Norval Lee Hammond.

  “We still don’t know who broke Stark out of jail,” he said. “My deputies never saw whoever knocked them out. The guys who tricked up that tanker truck and wrecked it were hired to pull the stunt for a movie, they said. They were paid in cash, and well paid, at that. We’re looking for the guy who hired them, but I doubt if we’ll ever find him.”

  Ramirez pointed a finger at Hammond. “You had better find Stark, that’s all I can say. You’ll be damned sorry if you don’t, Hammond.”

  Hammond was already sorry that he’d ever had anything to do with the Vulture. He wished he could change it, take it all back. But people wished that all the time, about all sorts of things, and nobody had ever succeeded in doing it yet.

  “We’ve got another problem,” Hammond said.

  Ramirez frowned. Silencio Ryan, who lounged against the wall of Ramirez’s den, never changed expression. Problems apparently meant nothing to him.

  “There are some feds in town who worry me,” Hammond went on.

  “There were already federal agents involved, according to what I’ve been told. And it was a federal judge who raised Stark’s bail and moved the case out of local jurisdiction.” Like most criminals, Ramirez was fairly conversant with the ins and outs of the law.

  “I’m talking about different feds,” Hammond said. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure they even work for the government at all. I don’t know who they are. But they seem to pop up all over the place, and they do what they want to like they’re even more used to getting their way than the usual run-of-the-mill bureaucrat. I think they’re spooks.”

  “Ghosts?” Ramirez said, confused by the terminology. He spoke English fluently, but it wasn’t his native tongue.

  Hammond shook his head. “No, some sort of . . . secret agents, I guess you’d say. Anyway, we’ve already got the Texas Rangers and Justice Department investigators and God knows who else poking around Del Rio. We don’t need anybody else.”

  “You worry too much,” Ramirez said with a chopping motion of his hand. “Just find Stark. That’s your only job right now.”

  Hammond nodded. “I’ll do my best, Senor Ramirez. Can I go now?”

  “Go,” Ramirez said with a contemptuous flip of his wrist. He turned toward Ryan. Clearly, he had already forgotten Hammond. “Silencio, I am so tense with anger I think I may have a stroke. Bring me a girl.”

  “I’m not a pimp, Don Ernesto,” Ryan said.

  Ramirez looked surprised. Hammond felt that way. He had never heard anyone deny Ramirez anything he wanted, not even Ryan. Hammond lingered, curious to see what was going to happen.

  “Silencio, I am hurt,” Ramirez said, but it was anger that smoldered in his eyes, not hurt feelings. “You have brought girls to me before.”

  “No, if you’ll think back, I haven’t. You’ve ordered your servants to do so in my presence plenty of times . . . but I’m not one of your servants.”

  Ramirez looked like he wanted to argue with that statement, but he controlled himself and said, “If you feel that such a task is beneath you, I understand, mi amigo. I’ll summon Pablo and have him bring me what I need.”

  Ryan nodded curtly. “You do that.”

  Well, well, Hammond thought. The lapdog that Ramirez had been so eager to sic on everybody els
e had shown some teeth to his master. Ramirez’s grip on everything had been slipping for weeks now, slowly but surely. This show of defiance on the part of Ryan was just another sign of that.

  Ramirez glared at Hammond. “You are still here?” he snapped.

  “I’m just goin’, right now,” Hammond said. He turned toward the door and put on his hat.

  But before he could leave, the ground suddenly rocked under his feet. For a split second he thought it might be an earthquake. Such things occurred occasionally in this part of the world.

  Then the roar of a huge explosion rolled over the compound, and Hammond knew it wasn’t an earthquake that had caused the ground to shake. It was something even worse, something he had been halfway afraid of in the back of his mind.

  “Stark,” he whispered.

  Stark had driven to within a quarter mile of the compound before parking the plumbing truck on a side road next to an auto junkyard. Ramirez’s estate was on the other side of the junkyard, across a small creek, and up a bluff on the far side. It wouldn’t have much of a view, but Stark doubted that Ramirez cared about that. Judging by the aerial photos, the junkyard was the best avenue of approach. It was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, but there were no alarms of any sort. A pair of wire cutters made short work of the fence.

  Of course, the junkyard’s real protection was of the four-legged variety. The men hadn’t penetrated more than a hundred yards into the auto graveyard before three snarling, slavering, half-starved dogs came loping around a pile of smashed cars and charged toward them.

  Stark bounced a tear-gas grenade at the dogs. It went off with a muffled bang, hopefully not loud enough to alert the guards at the compound on top of the bluff. The dogs got one whiff of the stuff and took off whimpering, their tails between their legs. Stark and his companions waited a moment for the gas to dissipate in the night breeze, then moved forward again. Enough of the stuff was still in the air so that their eyes stung a little, but that cleared up in a hurry.

  They reached the far side of the junkyard, cut the fence there, and splashed across the shallow creek. The bluff wasn’t so steep that it couldn’t be climbed, though the task was more difficult in body armor, carrying the load they were carrying. The night was hot enough so that they were wet with sweat by the time they reached the top.

  At the top of the bluff was another barbed wire fence. Stark was sure this one was rigged with alarms, so they couldn’t just cut it and waltz through. The six men separated, spreading out around the perimeter.

  Stark crouched beside the fence, peering through the strands of barbed wire at the main building about a hundred yards away. It was a low, sprawling adobe house in the Spanish style, with foot-thick walls, a red tile roof, and wrought-iron gates that opened into an interior courtyard. Several other smaller but similar buildings were scattered around. One of them would be the quarters for Ramirez’s gunners; another was where the various vehicles were garaged. There was a tennis court, dark at the moment.

  And a building that housed a generator, because Mexican electric power was notoriously undependable. They had studied the photos and seen the heavy wires leading from that building to the main house, and Stark had recognized them as the sort of power line that was hooked up to a generator. Most ranch houses were rigged the same way.

  A generator required gasoline. One big enough to power Ramirez’s entire compound would need a lot of fuel. Stark didn’t think Ramirez would be satisfied with less than the best. It made sense that the gasoline supply would be stored in the same building as the generator, so it would be handy for refueling.

  Macon had a backpack full of grenades, all of them wired together to make a powerful bomb. His job was to get into that generator building and blow up the gasoline. The only way to do that was to cut the wire and set off the alarms, but it wouldn’t really matter.

  Once that gasoline went up, everybody would know they were here anyway.

  Stark was counting off the seconds in his head and knew that the other men would be, too. They had figured on three minutes for everyone to get in position. Then Macon would make his move.

  Time was up.

  Stark suddenly heard the shrill sound of alarms going off and knew that Macon had cut the wire. He readied his own cutters. If the wire had been electrified, it no longer was, because the circuit was broken. Macon had taken the pair of heavily insulated cutters, just in case. As he came to his feet, Stark listened for shots. It was always possible that Macon would encounter a guard on his way into the generator building. But no shots came, and Stark hoped that meant luck was with them. They had figured it would take at least a minute for Macon to get inside, set the jury-rigged bomb, and get out of there, paying out the wire that he would use to pull the pin on one of the grenades and set off all the others, that blast exploding the gasoline tanks in turn. Stark was counting in his head again . . .

  Fifty-nine . . . sixty . . . sixty-one . . . sixty-two . . . sixty-three. . .

  Had something gone wrong?

  The world rocked and the generator building came apart as huge gouts of flame burst through the walls and the roof. Stark said, “Yes!” and leaped to the fence. The wire spanged and coiled on itself as he swiftly snipped the strands.

  Then he was through, assault rifle cradled in his hands as he charged toward the hacienda.

  Jack Finnegan was glad he was wearing gloves. His hands were so sweaty that without them he might have dropped the wire cutters. His sense of humor seemed to have deserted him. Before she left him, that was one of the things his wife had hated about him. She’d always said that he would rather crack some wiseass joke than concentrate on their problems and really listen to what she was saying. “Hell yeah” had been his response. Who wouldn’t?

  Well, try as he might, he couldn’t come up with any jokes as he waited for Macon to blow up the gasoline supply. In just a minute or so, he was going to be cutting that wire and then charging into a compound full of heavily armed men who wouldn’t hesitate to gun him down. He was heavily armed, too, of course, and he was counting on the element of surprise to counteract the advantage in numbers that the defenders would have. But still, the odds weren’t good.

  That had never stopped him before, he thought. He had gambled plenty of times in his life. He’d lost more than he had won, too. But he was still here, wasn’t he? Sure, he was a drunk fighting to hang on to hard-won sobriety, and he was pretty much alone in the world now, with no one to care about and no one to care about him, but he was still alive and kicking.

  And it wasn’t really true that he was alone. He had friends, good friends. They were out there in the darkness, waiting like him for the explosion that would signal the beginning of the battle. A smile tugged at Finnegan’s mouth. He had taken what should have been a good life and turned it into shit. But now he had a chance to do something worthwhile again. Maybe, if he came through this night alive, this would be the beginning of a whole new life for him—

  Then there was no time to think anymore, because the earth was shaking and fire lit the night and the smile was still on Finnegan’s face as he went into battle.

  There was a book in this, Will Sheffield told himself as he crouched beside the fence. Definitely. Even a writer without much talent, like a guy who published a small-town newspaper, ought to be able to get a compelling story out of six friends, six comrades-in-arms, banding together again after thirty years to take down an evil drug lord and avenge the murder of an innocent woman, not to mention all the other deaths Ramirez had ordered. This was the stuff of high drama. Not even he could mess it up.

  Of course, he had to live through it first, before he could write about it.

  He was crazy to be risking his life like this. He knew it. He had a wife, kids, a career that was important to a lot of people, even if it wasn’t exactly what he’d set out to do. Somebody had to get the pictures of the senior class in the special graduation supplement every year. Somebody had to take the picture of twelve-year-old Bobby R
ay Simmons holding up his record catfish that was almost as big as he was. Somebody had to write the obituaries and the birth and wedding announcements and attend the school board and city council meetings. Ask people what was most important to them about the town where they lived, and hardly any of them would mention the local newspaper. But there would be a big hole in their lives without it, and Sheffield knew that even if they didn’t.

  No, it wasn’t the Great American Novel. That was just a myth, anyway, something dreamed up by college professors.

  Still, if he lived to write it . . . in highly fictionalized form, of course . . . this would make one helluva yarn.

  Sheffield was trying to come up with a good opening line when the generator building blew up. Creativity would have to wait.

  Now he had to go destroy stuff.

  Nat Van Linh had always had the ability to mentally transport himself to another place, a better place. Not really, of course. He wasn’t a teleporter like in some science fiction movie. But he could close his eyes for a moment and conjure up an image so real, so vivid, so lifelike that it was almost as if he were really in that other place. It was a skill that had come in handy when he was growing up in Vietnam.

  He took advantage of it now as he waited in the darkness next to the fence.

  In his mind he was back down on the Gulf coast, with a warm, salty sea breeze in his face, sand under his bare feet, seagulls gliding overhead as the waves lapped and bubbled on the shore. Though he had spent his youth first in the crowded confines of Saigon and then in the steaming, deadly jungles, he had known the first time he had walked out on the beach in Texas that he had truly come home. This was where he was meant to be.

  Everything that had happened in the years since then, the love of family and friends, the success in business, all confirmed that initial impression. His life had achieved a harmony, a tranquility that resonated all the way to the core of his being. Now, as he waited for that tranquility to be shattered, he took a deep breath and drew strength from the peace that spread throughout his body and soul.