He reckoned Dave’s house was built by the rarest thing in the Alamo City building business: a builder with a heart.
Or at least a willingness to work around a regal tree instead of bulldozing it.
That builder, so many years before, never knew it was the perfect size and shape to provide cover for Ronald as he fired into the house.
It was even forked in just the right place. The fork created a cleft at chest height. Just high enough to give Ronald a place to rest and steady his rifle.
.556 bullets are powerful enough to go through several walls.
But they couldn’t go through a sixty-year oak to get to a shooter hiding behind it.
Ronald would have swapped the tree for another hundred rounds of ammo in a heartbeat.
But he didn’t have that option.
And the tree was a pretty good ally.
He looked up at the sky.
He wasn’t decided yet about the moon.
It was at three quarters phase.
Bright enough for him to have limited vision through the raised blinds, into a seemingly empty house.
But it also helped light him up and made him a better target.
He wouldn’t know until the shooting started whether the moon was friend or foe.
If it was foe he’d likely never know.
If it was foe he’d likely be dead from a bullet to his head.
Chapter 32
Dave Spear used to tell a great story to his friends about a seedy landscaper, his overly gullible wife and a pile of rocks.
“I came home from work one Friday afternoon exhausted and looking forward to starting my weekend and to relaxing.
“Instead I found my driveway full of boulders and my wife standing in the front yard, hands on her hips and almost in tears.
“My daughter Lindsey was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk mumbling obscenities.”
At that point Sarah usually took over the story to discount a few of Dave’s more glaring exaggerations.
“They were not boulders. They were rocks. And Lindsey was not cursing. I’d have washed her mouth out with soap if she had.
“She was just irritated and upset because she was late for her cheerleader practice and we couldn’t get the car out of the garage.”
Then she looked at Dave and said, “You may continue, o’ great storyteller.”
Dave would typically smile before picking up his story again.
“Sarah got a knock on the door a couple of hours earlier. It was a landscaper who’d finished a job somewhere in the neighborhood and had a bunch of rocks left over. He was trying to get rid of them.
“So Sarah was in the middle of doing her makeup, which by the way she doesn’t need because she’s beautiful without it, and she’s kind of in a hurry.
“At the same time, though, we’d been talking about maybe doing a little bit of landscaping in the front yard and had actually talked about buying a pickup load of lava rock to do it.
“So she figures one kind of rock is pretty much like another kind of rock, and asks the landscaper what his rocks look like.
“He goes to his truck and brings back a plain white rock about half the size as my head and she said, ‘How much do you want for them and how many do you have?’
“The landscaper says he has eight yards. And he wants two hundred dollars for them.
“So my lovely wife Sarah figures that a patch of rocks eight yards wide and eight yards long would look very nice surrounding the oak tree in the front yard. She takes two hundred dollar bills from her purse, hands them over, and tells the guy to dump the rocks beneath the oak tree.
“Then she goes back into the house to finish applying her war paint… I mean her makeup, so she can take Lindsey to cheerleading practice.
“An hour later she and Lindsey go into the garage and get into the car, and hit the button to raise the garage door.
“But she couldn’t get out. There was a mountain of rocks in the driveway as high as my head. It covered the whole driveway.
“I asked Sarah how many rocks he said he had. She said he had eight yards. I told her that when landscapers talk about eight yards of rock they’re talking about cubic yards.
“She said, ‘Oops.’
“But I wasn’t mad at her. I was mad at the landscaper for dumping them in the driveway instead of the yard.
“I asked her for the name of the landscaper’s company, so I could get them back out to clean up their mess.
“She said, ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’
“I asked her what company name was on the dump truck’s doors.
“She said, ‘I don’t know, I didn’t look.’
“So while I’m standing there trying to figure out what to do, Sarah grabs my car keys and tells Lindsey to jump in my car and they speed off to cheerleading practice and they leave me to deal with what has become known around our house as ‘Rock-Gate.’
“As I recall, that was to be my first weekend off in a month and the start of college football season. My plans were to sit on the couch all weekend eating potato chips and drinking beer and watching one football game after another.
“Instead I had to go to Home Depot and buy a wheelbarrow.
“Then I had to knock on every door in the neighborhood trying to give away rocks, and loading them up in the wheelbarrow and dumping them in my neighbor’s yards.
“Mrs. Sweeney, four doors down, wouldn’t let me just dump them, though. I had to line them up for her around her flowerbeds.”
At this point Sarah would typically interrupt him again.
“Hey, stop complaining. I made you your favorite thing for dinner. Lasagna.”
“Yes. But I was too exhausted to eat it. And stop interrupting me. This is my story and I tell it much better.”
“Sorry.”
“Anyway, after giving away rocks all weekend and pushing them all over the neighborhood, I finally got the pile down to just enough to surround the tree in our front yard.
“On Monday morning I had to call in sick to work because my back was hurting so bad I couldn’t get out of bed.”
At this point Sarah always had the last word.
“So in essence I got him a three day weekend instead of two. And yet he moans and groans and complains about it, even to this day. You see what an ungrateful husband I have?”
The story was told time and time again at gatherings and social functions and never failed to elicit some smiles.
Someone always nudged Dave afterwards and whispered, “Did that really happen?”
“Yes. It really happened.”
Ronald Martinez was standing on the rocks beneath the oak tree, trying his best to peer into the house with the low light the moon provided.
He didn’t know about Rock-Gate and never heard the rock story.
But as he picked up a rock and held it in his hand, he figured he’d put the rocks to use for his own devices.
Chapter 33
As they neared the New Mexico city of Clovis Sal stopped the rig long enough to scamper into the sage brush and relieve himself.
He returned with a question for Dave.
“I smell cattle poop. Does that mean there’s a herd of cattle nearby? I sure would like to barter some of our precious metals for some beef.”
Dave took a deep breath and he too caught the faint smell of cattle droppings.
“You’re right, my good friend. But cattle poop? What are you, five years old or so?”
“Well,” he nodded in the direction of Beth, who was sitting on the rig’s mattress reading a book, “There are sensitive ears around.”
“Don’t let that child fool you, Sal. She can curse as well as a drunken sailor when she wants to. She just tries not to do it when I’m around because she knows she’ll get in trouble for it.
“As for the cattle, you might be right. But I’ve driven through Clovis a couple of times before the blackout, and I seem to remember a very large stock yard very close to the city.
“I think that’s where the smell is coming from.”
“Do you think they’d barter a side of beef to us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But don’t get your hopes up. I doubt if it’s still open, since there are no more trucks to bring the cattle to the stockyard, no more trains coming through to put them on.”
“But… the smell…”
Dave smiled.
“You haven’t spent much time around cattle, have you Sal?”
“No, I have not. My brother Benny has always been the cattleman and horseman of the family. The only interest I’ve ever had in beef was being able to eat a big steak occasionally.”
“When I was a boy I used to spend most of my summers helping my Uncle Bill on his cattle ranch. They are smelly and obstinate creatures, but you get used to that.
“Every summer we used to load up cattle on his cattle truck and take them to a stock yard in central Texas. It was very much like the one here in Clovis.
“They would be kept at the stock yard and placed upon a train that came through three times a week. From there they would go to a slaughterhouse, where they’d be turned into steaks and hamburger.
“They closed down that railhead when I was fifteen years old, and of course when the railhead closed the stockyard closed as well. We had to drive Uncle Bill’s cattle about twenty miles to another stockyard.
“Anyway, about fifteen years later my uncle was in poor health and I took Sarah to visit with him.
“We drove right past that old stockyard, fifteen years after it closed, and the smell of cow droppings was still very evident.”
“Really? After fifteen years?”
“Yes sir. My point is that the smell permeates the ground and everything around it. And the stench lingers forever.
“Or at least for years.”
“So just because we can smell it doesn’t necessarily mean there are cattle there now?”
“It’s possible. But I can’t imagine why there would be. We’ll go right past the old stock yard in about half an hour or so. And it may be that some modern-day rancher is using the facility to raise his own cattle.
“But I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”
Dave noticed, when Sal reappeared from the brush after doing his business, that he was limping a bit more than usual and seemed to be in pain.
“Why don’t you crawl onto the mattress and get more comfortable, Sal? Beth will scoot over and make room for you. I’ll take over the driving.”
“But it’s not your turn yet.”
“It will be in an hour. We’re already stopped, so I might as well take over now so we don’t have to stop again.”
He turned to Beth and said, “Hey Peanut. Can you make room for Sal so he can get off the wooden bench for awhile?”
“Oh, he can have the mattress, Daddy. I’ll move into the cab. It’s easier to read sitting up anyway.”
“There you go, Sal. Lie down and get off your feet. Get comfortable. Take a nap if you want to.”
“Thank you, my friend.”
Sal made himself comfortable and Dave took the reins.
When they passed the closed stockyard several miles later Dave and Beth had to hold their noses.
The facility had ceased operations after the power went out over a year before.
But the pungent aroma of cow excrement still lingered in the air.
As Dave said, it seemed to permeate everything.
Dave turned around to tell Sal, “Sorry, no cows here.”
But the old man was sound asleep.
As for little Beth, she was sitting in the passenger seat of the old Ford Ranger, bored silly and killing time.
She’d grown tired of reading and decided to color for awhile.
Then she grew tired of that and got antsy.
She peeked beneath the bench seat to see what was under it.
The pickup was manufactured at a time when power windows were still optional. This particular truck had old-fashioned crank windows.
And Beth, being bored, rolled her window up and down forty or fifty times.
She took a black crayon and wrote her name on the window’s glass.
She kicked off her shoes and trimmed her toenails.
Then she painted them a bright blue, using a small bottle of nail polish from her backpack.
Finally, running out of things to do, she opened up the small pickup’s glove box.
And there she found something that wasn’t there the last time she’d opened the box a week before.
A white sealed envelope, marked with a few words in her father’s handwriting:
FOR BETH
DO NOT OPEN UNLESS YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE LEFT ALIVE
Chapter 34
Elizabeth Rachel Spear was many things.
A joy to both her parents. A trusted ally to her big sister Lindsey, but sometimes a pain in the butt as well.
She was loyal to her friends, generally respectful to adults. Precocious and exceedingly cute to pretty much everyone.
She was also a bit of a rebel.
She got the trait from her dad.
One sure way to get Beth to do something was to tell her not to do it, then to give her a little time to stew on it.
Her behavior typically followed a set pattern.
First she’d sit and wonder why she couldn’t do something.
Then she’d ponder the odds of doing it and getting caught.
She’d wonder what would happen to her if she was caught.
And she’d determine whether the punishment was worth whatever pleasure or treasure she’d gain by doing whatever she wasn’t supposed to do.
Then, sometimes, she’d throw caution to the wind and defy her parents.
Of course she didn’t disobey her parents every single time; that would be stupid.
Whether or not she defied them in a particular case was usually dependent on how much time she had and how many others were involved.
For example, her sister Lindsey, as much as she loved her, was a horrible snitch. Horrible as in disgusting; not horrible as in she wasn’t very good at it.
If Lindsey was in a position to witness Beth defying her parents’ instructions Beth would grow a halo above her head and an angelic smile and pretend to be everything holy and right.
Until Lindsey left.
Conversely, if one of her young friends was around, Beth was very susceptible to what youngsters call “being egged on.”
Old timers call it arm-twisting but it means exactly the same thing.
In a court of law judges and juries don’t give it much credence, and give it little weight as a mitigating circumstance.
But in the court of Mommy and Daddy it’s frequently used to try to lessen the severity of one’s punishment.
“But she told me to do it!”
In the court of Mommy and Daddy such a claim sometimes lessens the punishment.
Or at least results in a similar punishment for the alleged instigator.
Today, on this particular day, Lindsey wasn’t around to tattle.
Sal was sound asleep on the mattress behind her.
She could tell because she could hear his snoring.
Her father sat on the wagoneer’s seat, just a few feet in front of her.
However, he seldom turned around completely when he occasionally checked in on her. He typically just turned his head and yelled, “How’s it going back there, Peanut?”
Besides, she could watch him from the corner of her eye, and if he started to turn his head she could drop the note so it was below the dash board.
Now, Beth had gotten pretty good at carefully removing the tape from sealed envelopes, reading the contents, and then replacing the tape so it appeared intact.
She’d had plenty of practice from sneaking into Lindsey’s room and looting Lindsey’s dresser drawers when Lindsey wasn’t around.
Any time she found a sealed envelope with a boy’s name on the front she’d open and read all the mus
hy words it contained.
In Beth’s mind her sister was a shameless hussy, having expressed her “undying love and kisses” to three different boys.
And that was just in ninth grade.
Beth took the envelope and very carefully closed the glove box. Then she slowly peeled the tape from the envelope.
When the paper began to tear she went to the other side of the envelope and tried that tape instead.
It took a bit of doing, but she was able to get the tape completely off the envelope.
She stuck it to the dashboard and unfolded the message inside.
Dear Beth,
If you’re reading this Sal and I are dead and can no longer help you get to your mom and sister.
It means you’ll have to keep going alone.
You’re probably scared and sad.
But I want you to know that I’m so proud of you, and I’m so glad that you’re my daughter.
One of the main reasons is because you are the TOUGHEST little girl I’ve ever known. Way way tougher than your mom and your sister put together.
And you can do ANYTHING, sweetheart.
You can make it to them, I know you can.
Just keep following the signs to Lubbock. Once you’re in Lubbock follow the signs to Wichita Falls. Then follow the signs to Oklahoma City. Then to Kansas City. Then to Leavenworth.
Once you’re close to Leavenworth follow the signs to Ely.
In Ely find the sheriff’s office. There’s a little old man there who once helped me out so I could free your mom and sister from Mr. Swain and his gang.
His name is Lenny.
Tell Lenny your name and tell him your mom is staying in a bunker on the Dykes brothers’ property.
He’ll get you there safely.
I know you can drive the team all by yourself, honey. I know you can gather food and water and fish if you have to.
Be careful who you trust, and fight like a wildcat if anybody tries to do you harm.
You can do this honey, I know you can.
I love you so very much. I’ll see you in heaven someday, but take your time. I want you to be all grown up with your own little peanuts before you make that journey.
-Daddy-
A Stunning Betrayal: Alone: Book 9 Page 11