A cattle guard rattled under his wheels as he crossed into the big, fenced pasture. This wasn’t fertile country; it took quite a few acres to grow enough grass to feed his stock. He irrigated as much as he could from the branch of the Santa Cruz River that ran through his property, but a fella could take only so much water without causing his neighbors to do without. Madison was the sort of man who believed in looking out for his neighbors just like he did for himself.
The headlights were only a couple of hundred yards away now. They had stopped moving but still burned, even though the vehicle they were attached to had halted. The twin cones of brilliance reached out and washed over an airplane, a Cessna Caravan turbo-prop. Madison wasn’t sure how come that information had popped into his head so readily. It took him a second to remember that his friend and fellow rancher Warren Hendrix had one just like it. This wasn’t Warren’s plane, though.
Men trooped back and forth in the glow of the headlights, moving between the plane and the automobile. Madison was close enough to see that it was a van now. He put the pickup in neutral, cut the engine, and coasted to a stop in silence.
Madison was not by nature a profane man, but as he stared through the windshield of the pickup, he breathed, “Goddamn M-fifteens.”
Like everyone else in this part of the country, he had heard of Mara Salvatrucha, the deadly gang composed mainly of El Salvadorans and Guatemalans that had moved into the area along the U.S./Mexico border and taken over nearly all the illegal activity. An outgrowth of earlier, similar gangs, they were the worst of the lot so far, hundreds of the most violent criminal lowlifes to ever draw breath. Thieves, murderers, bank robbers, drug dealers, smugglers of illegal aliens, they took full advantage of the porous borders between the countries and went wherever they wanted, doing as they pleased and taking whatever struck their fancy. Little Tucson and the area around it had been spared the worst of M-15’s depredations so far, but Madison Wheeler thought that might be changing. Just the day before, two men suspected of being members of the gang had shot and killed poor old Burt Minnow, right on the sidewalk in front of his printing shop in town. Now, those were members of the gang walking around Madison’s south pasture, he was fairly certain of that, and they were unloading a huge shipment of drugs from the plane that had landed there, bringing the poison up from below the border.
How dare they! Fury filled Madison at the thought of these scum using his land this way. He picked up the rifle from the floorboard and then reached up to pop the bulb out of the dome light. When he opened the door, the light stayed dark. He slid out and Skeeter followed him, jumping to the ground. Leaving the pickup door open, Madison rested the Winchester’s barrel on the sill of the rolled-down window. He reached into the cab and pulled the knob that turned on the headlights.
They blazed into life, stabbing out into the darkness and washing over both the plane and the van, as well as the men clustered around them. “Hold it!” Madison yelled as he levered a round into the chamber. “I’ll shoot the first man who moves!”
He had the drop on them, sure enough. And at a range of fifty or sixty yards, he could carry out his threat. He was a fine shot with the old Winchester. Sure, they outnumbered him by at least ten to one, but he had the element of surprise on his side.
Still, maybe he should have called 911 first, he thought as he glanced at the cell phone lying on the pickup seat. It was still within reach, but he was going to have to stretch to get it . . .
Suddenly, Skeeter growled furiously behind him.
Madison stiffened as a voice said in heavily-accented English, “I swear, sometimes I think you gringos are just too damn stupid to live. So, I kill you.”
Madison tried to turn, but he was only halfway around when flame tore a gaping hole in the night. The banging of a million hammers filled the air as bullets spewed from the muzzle of an automatic weapon and slammed into the side of the pickup. Some of the slugs had ripped through Madison’s body first, flesh and bone and blood not even slowing them down on their high-velocity path. Madison’s body came apart under the terrible onslaught of lead like a giant bag of blood bursting at the seams. He died so quickly that he didn’t have time to feel anything, which was probably a blessing.
More automatic weapons opened up as the gunners who had been posted on guard in the low-lying brush of the pasture tried to shoot the dog. Skeeter scooted under the pickup, which was still being hosed down by the M-15 killers. One of the bullets found the gas tank, and the vehicle suddenly exploded in a giant ball of fire. The flames consumed what was left of Madison Wheeler’s body, which had slumped back through the open door against the front seat. The gunners laughed uproariously and traded quips about the man and his dog being barbecued like goats. They walked leisurely toward the plane and the van, where the work of unloading the massive drug shipment had resumed.
In the brush, Skeeter crawled along on his belly, his canine brain torn between survival and hatred for the men who had killed his master and friend. He had popped out from under the other side of the pickup just in time to escape the explosion, although he hadn’t gotten away unscathed. His hindquarters were burned, much of the short gray and black hair being singed off by the flames. His legs still worked, though, so he had been able to make it into the brush without being spotted. Instinct kept him low as he crawled away.
He paused once, looked back, and whined. Then, as the wind carried the scent of the men to his nose, he snarled quietly, the sound low and full of hate.
He might be just a dog, but he knew pure evil when he smelled it.
3
Thursday, 9:00 a.m.
The doors of the Little Tucson Savings Bank had just been unlocked for the day by Al Trejo, the security guard. Mrs. Ernestine Montgomery, eighty-eight, was waiting to come in, so Al held the door for her. Since it was the first of the month, he wasn’t surprised to see her. Mrs. Montgomery always showed up on the first to go into the safe-deposit room and get some bonds out of her box, which she then cashed in and deposited into her account. She had been following that routine for years, and Al didn’t expect her to stop any time soon. She was spry for her age and still drove all over the place. Drove better than a lot of younger people did, too, in Al’s opinion.
“Good morning, Mrs. Montgomery,” he greeted her.
“Good morning, Albert.” She always called him that, and had ever since he was in her second-grade class at Little Tucson Elementary School, nearly forty years ago.
“Gonna be a hot one today.”
“Yes, it certainly will. What do you expect from Arizona in June?”
Al laughed. “Yeah, you’re right about that.”
Mrs. Montgomery moved on toward the counter, and Al looked out the glass door toward Main Street. The bank building sat behind a small parking lot, rather than right up beside the street like many of the older buildings in town. It was a low, sprawling structure of beige brick, made to look sort of like old-fashioned adobe. A narrow cactus garden, enclosed in concrete curbs, divided the parking lot from the street.
Al liked working at the bank. After retiring from the Army—twenty years as an MP, and a damn good one if he said so himself—he had come home and worked for a couple of years as a deputy for Sheriff Buddy Gorman. Then this security guard job had opened up, and Al had taken it. He wasn’t a young man anymore. Chasing around after bad guys over the whole county was a little more responsibility than he wanted. Making sure the Little Tucson Savings Bank stayed safe was more his speed these days.
Most of the time, the bank wasn’t even very busy. Today would be a little different, being the first of the month. Quite a few retirees lived in and around Little Tucson, and they would be bringing in their Social Security checks to cash. A lot of people who got paid on the first would show up, too, especially at lunchtime and in the drive-through lanes later in the afternoon. Al didn’t mind. More customers meant things wouldn’t get boring.
Several more customers came into the bank. Al went behind his de
sk in the corner of the lobby and sat down. From there he could still see part of the parking lot, so he idly took note of the Ford Explorer that pulled up in one of the empty places. Two men got out while the driver stayed behind the wheel.
He should have noticed that, of course. Nine times out of ten, such a thing would have set off alarm bells in his head. But today he was thinking about the tragedy that had occurred out at the Wheeler ranch a couple of nights earlier. Madison Wheeler, who was a customer at the bank and had been a few grades behind Al in school, had been killed, and his wife and kids had barely escaped injury or even death when a van full of bastards had driven past their house and sprayed it with automatic-weapons fire. Cindy Wheeler, who would never be mistaken for a shrinking violet, had popped a few rounds after the van with a pistol, but she hadn’t done any damage as far as she knew. She and Justin and Dani were staying in Little Tucson’s lone motel at the moment, while the sheriff’s department, the Border Patrol, and the DEA investigated the incident on the ranch.
That was a waste of manpower, in Al’s opinion. He could have told all those hot-shot investigators exactly who was responsible for the atrocity—Mara Salvatrucha. Those M-15 sons of bitches were moving in on Little Tucson. Al hated them so much it made him sick to think that they shared the same Latin blood. Well, not exactly the same, he amended. They were from Guatemala and El Salvador for the most part, although they probably had some Mexicans working for them. Al’s grandparents had been naturalized American citizens, and he was a member of the second generation of his family born north of the border. But he considered himself both American and Mexican—a citizen of the world, really, since he had traveled all over it during his Army years—and was proud of the heritage of both cultures.
So with all of those thoughts filling his head, especially his anger over what the M-15s had done to Madison Wheeler, and Burt Minnow before that, he wasn’t paying as close attention to his job as he should have been and let two of the bastards walk into the bank right under his nose.
Carla May Willard glanced into the front seat of her red Nissan as she leaned over the car seat buckled into the back seat. “Andy!” she said as she saw her seven-year-old son scooting out of the car. “Get back in there!”
Her daughter Emily, who was fifteen months old, kicked and waved her chubby arms around, making it more difficult for Carla to strap her into the car seat. In exasperation, Carla blew back a lock of brunette hair that had fallen over her face. She finished tightening the straps so that Emily could ride safely. As she straightened from the task, pain twinged in her lower back. Damn it, she was only twenty-eight years old, she thought as she paused to rub her back for a second. She shouldn’t have all these aches and pains yet.
That was what being a mother did for you, she supposed. Stole your youth and made you so tired you didn’t give a damn about anything except getting through another day.
“Get in the car, Andy,” she snapped as she opened the driver’s door of the Nissan.
He had run off into the yard of the neat little brick house. “I don’t wanna go!” he called back to her.
“Well, you’re going whether you want to or not, so get in here right now.”
Andy was only seven, but he knew not to argue when his mother used that tone of voice. With an exaggerated sigh, he came over to the car, climbed through the open front door, and sat down hard on the seat.
“Close your door,” Carla told him.
He slammed it and pouted.
“And buckle your seat belt.”
“It’s hard. I have trouble with it.”
“Do it anyway.” Carla started the car and checked the rearview mirror before she backed out onto the street. She caught a glimpse of her face. She was still pretty. Wasn’t she? Her hair wasn’t bad, and her body was still okay. You couldn’t really tell she’d had two kids. Her husband Danny—ex-husband now—had been a fool to leave her. She could have made him happy. Well, it was his loss, she told herself, as she did at least half a dozen times a day. She had only been single for eight months. She would find somebody else. The fact that she was nearly thirty and had two kids and all the statistics she read in the women’s magazines were working against her didn’t matter. There was always Ray Torres, the owner of the insurance agency where she worked. She had seen him looking at her with interest in his eyes more than once. Of course, he was married, but she knew for a fact that he was having trouble with his wife and his marriage probably wouldn’t last. Maybe she ought to give him a little encouragement, try to speed things up . . .
“We’re gonna be late,” Andy said.
“I thought you didn’t even want to go.”
“Yeah, but if you’re gonna make me go to Bible School, I don’t wanna be late.”
“All right, all right, we’re going.” Carla backed from her driveway onto the street, then put the Nissan in drive and started toward the Little Tucson Baptist Church, which was about two miles away on the other side of town. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard. 9:15. Vacation Bible School started at 9:30. They had plenty of time to get where they were going.
The two men who walked into the bank were young, Hispanic, and dressed stylishly in baggy T-shirts and jeans. Al Trejo didn’t really pay any attention to them until they walked past his desk toward the counter. He didn’t remember ever seeing them in the bank before, and that brought a worried frown to his face. Al glanced through the glass of the front door at the Explorer the men had gotten out of. He saw the man behind the wheel and the faint ripple of heat rising from the engine.
The Explorer was still running.
There could have been other explanations, of course, but to Al’s mind all the factors had come together and could mean only one thing—the bank was about to be robbed. He started to his feet, his hand reaching toward the holstered gun on his hip, his mouth opening to shout at the two young men.
They must have been keyed up, expecting trouble. One of them turned swiftly toward Al, reached under his shirt, and pulled out a compact machine gun. The weapon flared and sent a short burst stitching across Al’s chest. The shout died in the security guard’s throat, forever unvoiced. He was thrown backward by the impact of the slugs as they ripped through his lungs and pulped his heart, killing him almost instantly. His body hit the plate glass wall between the lobby and the office of Walt Lauderdale, the vice-president of the bank, and smashed on through it, showering glass down around him. Al never felt the shards cut him.
The second robber had his gun out now, too. He bounded over to the counter where a couple of tellers were working. Mrs. Montgomery stood in front of the counter with the bonds she was going to cash in and deposit. The robber elbowed her roughly out of the way, knocking her off her feet. Her eighty-eight-year-old hip shattered as it hit the tile floor, and she cried out in pain.
The robber leaned over the counter and stuck the muzzle of his automatic weapon in the face of Sheila Garcia, the older of the two tellers, and said, “Don’t try nothin’ funny, bitch, or I’ll splatter your brains all over the place. Move back so you can’t step on no alarm button.”
The other robber, the one who had killed Al Trejo, leveled his weapon at Walt Lauderdale through the shattered glass and ordered, “Come outta there, man, unless you wanna die.”
Walt did as he was told, walking shakily into the lobby with his hands held where the gunman could see them. The robber shouted, “Down on the floor!” He turned his attention to the handful of stunned customers who looked at him with expressions of mingled horror and sickness. “Everybody get down! On your bellies!”
At the counter, the other robber took a folded canvas bag from under his shirt and threw it at Sheila, who caught it instinctively. “Fill it up,” he told her. “Nothing smaller than twenties.” He took out another bag and tossed it to the other teller, Maria Esquivel. “You, too, bitch.”
Maria tried to catch the bag but fumbled it. She reached down to the floor to pick it up, and while she was bent over her finger
touched the button that set off the silent alarm. She was standing far enough back in her cubicle that she didn’t think the robber would suspect she had triggered the alarm. As she straightened, her eyes touched the framed pictures that stood by her work station of her husband and her two babies. Lord forgive her if what she had just done cost those dear ones their wife and mother, she thought.
But these animals couldn’t be allowed to get away. They had murdered Al Trejo, one of the nicest men Maria had ever met, and now they were looting the bank of its customers’ hard-earned money. Somebody had to stop them.
Maria knew she had done all she could, though. She opened her drawer and began stuffing bills into the canvas bag while the M-15 brutes continued to wave their guns around and shout threats and obscenities.
Deputy Fred Kelso was in the sheriff’s cruiser at the edge of town, waiting for travelers on their way through not to notice that the speed limit dropped right at the city limits. Not that Little Tucson was a speed trap or anything like that. The speed limit went from sixty miles per hour to fifty, which was not a significant drop. Now, if it had gone from sixty to thirty, say, that would be a speed trap.
But nobody seemed to be driving through this morning, and Fred was getting sleepy. He yawned and looked at the dashboard clock. 9:19. It was too early for anybody to be in much of a hurry to get anywhere.
The voice that came over the radio was loud and excited. The dispatcher, Cecil Rhodes—everybody called him Dusty, of course—had to be practically yelling into the microphone.
“Bank robbery!” Cecil yelped, forgetting all about codes and proper radio procedure in his excitement. “We got a bank robbery! Silent alarm, silent alarm!”
Invasion USA Page 2