Male voices chuckled again, and they spoke Spanish. This time the Mideast guy cut loose with a string of gobbledygook that I couldn’t understand, but it was the tone of voice that shut the others up.
I figured there were at least three nearby, but wondered how many others were scouring the area. I’d only heard the one rifle that shot me, and two other fully automatic weapons on the way over, but that didn’t mean anything right then. For all I knew, the country was alive with men carrying automatic weapons.
I thought I’d been ambushed by drug smugglers with backpacks full of marijuana and cocaine. They humped those loads weighing as much as sixty pounds or more at a time, making their way north from Mexico. Truthfully, we didn’t see that many mules in Big Bend National Park, but they went through from time to time, as sure as shootin’, and I’d seen the trails to prove it.
Most of the trouble down our way usually involved illegals trying to slip in to make their way north. Despite what Americans heard on the television news, the border area in Texas was infested with a steady stream of illegals crossing into the country. Every now and then the park rangers, and even tourists, would come across evidence of a trail. Most of the illegals avoided the park, though, because there are nearly four hundred bluffs and cliffs on the Rio, and that makes for hard walking.
Every now and then an illegal or two would try to cross down near Boquillas, but the roads funneled them toward places where they’d get caught. Another easy cross was at the Langford Hot Spring on the Texas side of the river. They usually found themselves sticking out like a sore thumb among the tourists.
Okay, check that. Probably not mules.
What then?
Coyotes. Not the four-legged kind, but hard, ruthless men paid to lead illegals into the country and, hopefully, to a rendezvous point that might be as far as three days away on foot. There they made contact with those who would move them farther or provide jobs. They sometimes left their clients, men and women, to die alone in the desert. Those guys didn’t care if kids were with them, either. They often carried guns, but usually tried to avoid any kind of altercation with U.S. law-enforcement officials. But then again, there was always that one guy who didn’t follow the norm.
I wonder if I stumbled across a whole covey of those trigger-happy idiots.
Anything was possible.
Chapter 7
Long shadows from a row of cottonwood trees and Faxon Yuccas bordering a cactus garden stretched across the Hawkes’ arid front yard in Ballard. Yolanda Rodriguez and Perry Hale stepped onto the wrap-around porch of the farmhouse-style home. Yolanda stopped short of the door to let him do the knocking.
Kelly Hawke was expecting them, but peeked through the peephole just to be safe. She opened the iron door with a smile. “Hey! Y’all come on in.”
Yolanda hugged her neck as she flowed inside with the grace of a dancer. That grace impacted everything she did, even when she practiced shooting outside of town with Perry Hale and his friends. Her long black hair and olive skin contrasted with a white silk blouse. Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots were as dressed up as she got.
The walls of what everyone called a “comfortable house” were filled with photos of the Hawke family dating back to the late 1800s. Several were of Sonny’s dad Herman cheesing for the camera beside a number of high-profile officials and famous entertainers when he was a Texas Ranger.
Knowing Kelly’s fondness for wine, Yolanda handed her a bottle of cabernet. “My mother told me never to go to someone’s house without bringing a gift.”
“You’ve been here dozens of times.”
“Yep. This is my favorite cab right now. It was a good year with a hot summer and lots of rain.”
Perry Hale followed them through the living room, past the leather sofa and easy chairs, and into the kitchen. Lean and roped with tendons and muscle, he looked more like a cowboy than a veteran marine. Sonny once told him that their daughter Mary described Perry Hale’s walk as like that of Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid movie. Crow’s-feet formed at the corners of his green eyes, listening to the women talk. “You’ve been here dozens of times? They’ve only invited me twice.”
Kelly hugged his neck and stepped back. “Come in this house. That’s because Yolanda drops by for coffee pretty regular, and you meet Sonny over at the Chat ’N Chew.”
He took off his straw Stetson and hugged her back. “Fine, then. I get café eggs with a sorry Ranger and some dried-up old ranchers while y’all get to hang out on the porch and drink Folgers. That ain’t right.”
Yolanda raised a black eyebrow. “We drink Kona coffee, my friend.”
Kelly was a teacher and had first met Yolanda and Perry back in November when terrorists held her hostage in the Ballard courthouse, along with the twins Mary and Jerry, their high school class of students, and nearly a dozen adult citizens who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yolanda and Perry were only two of the responding citizens who rescued the hostages held at gunpoint that snowy day.
“I better get Hawaiian coffee after supper then.” Perry Hale’s growl didn’t fool either of the women.
The two military veterans became good friends after the Ballard takeover, and had a lot in common. Yolanda and Perry Hale were part of Sonny’s new Texas Ranger Shadow Response Team that didn’t officially exist and hadn’t yet been tested in the field. Though they weren’t Rangers, they operated as law-enforcement officers under the vague umbrella that sheltered Sonny’s SRT. The Texas governor issued badges to them with the admonition that they produce the authorization only when absolutely necessary, and he told Perry Hale they were never to be used to get out of a traffic ticket.
He growled that day in the governor’s office in Austin and scratched his three-day-old beard. “All Yoli has to do is bat her eyes and she’ll get a pass. I should at least get something out of this.”
“You call me that again, I’ll bat something else, Big Boy.”
The governor agreed with Perry Hale’s opinion. “You will, with a check once a month.”
The tough military veteran hadn’t known what to say to that.
The twins joined them in the kitchen. Kelly grinned when Jerry shook Perry Hale’s hand, looking down on the man, who was a good four inches shorter. Yolanda hugged them before Mary sat at the table across from Perry Hale after barely saying hello.
“How’s high school these days?” He leaned both elbows on the table.
Jerry rolled his eyes and dropped in his dad’s chair at the head of the table. “The teachers are crazy. All they want to do is teach us stuff we don’t need to know.”
“Careful there, bubba.” Kelly sat a platter of spaghetti in the middle of the table and juked around Yolanda, who pitched in to bring the sauce. “Remember what your mama does for a living. And don’t you let your daddy catch you sitting there.”
“Yeah, well, besides that, all we hear about at school is that stupid statewide test we have to take . . .”
“. . . and I’d like to know more. Even in our class, Mama.” Mary often completed his sentences. Kelly taught civics at Big Bend High, and because the campus was so small, one class of American History, which was the twins’ favorite subject. Mary glanced down at the cell phone in her hand. The device glowed for a moment when her fingers flew over the screen as she answered a text and talked at the same time. “You know, no one ever told me that Christopher Columbus never really discovered America, and besides, the Indians had been here for maybe forty thousand years and back east they had villages and complete societies . . .”
“That’s right.” Jerry jumped in and they exchanged a look that revealed their connection. “Why didn’t you tell us they . . . what do you call it?”
“Assimilated.”
“Right, Sis. The Cherokees assimilated and owned grist mills and land by the 1830s . . .”
“. . . and those were the ones left after 90 percent of their population died a couple of hundred years earlier from the diseases they caught
from the first white men, and that’s 90 percent of one hundred million, and I had to learn all that at the library, on my own.”
Kelly thumped the open bottle of Robert Mondavi Bourbon Barrel wine onto the table. “That, my son, is the reason we have libraries, so you can take the initiative and learn on your own. That’s enough, you two. We have guests, not a captive audience. Mary, try your daddy again and see how close he is, then get off the phone.”
Mary punched at the screen, her thumbs flying. She still hadn’t truly acknowledged Perry Hale’s presence other than a side glance from the corners of her eyes. Anyone else would have thought she was being rude, but Kelly had already realized that her daughter had a serious crush on the man ten years her senior.
Her attention flicked from one to the other while Mary studied the screen. The high school junior keyed in a quick text, then switched to a different view to check two more social-media apps, all the while moving a bowl of salad from the island dividing the kitchen and the table in the open concept living area.
Yolanda raised an eyebrow. “Sonny in the middle of something?”
“He’s late, as usual.” Kelly poured three glasses. “He left yesterday and was supposed to be back this morning, but I haven’t heard a word. Knowing him, his phone probably ran out of juice. He never plugs it in like he’s supposed to.”
It wasn’t a surprise to any of them that Sonny wasn’t there. Chronically late, his personal interest in the recent murder investigation made it different from the other crimes he handled, more intense and timely due to his friendship with the Cartwrights and the Hutchinses.
“He headed into the backcountry.” Jerry jerked his head to the south. “He won’t give up on what the TV calls the Big Bend Shooting. He took Red, so that means he’s probably out of range.”
Kelly shivered, fighting off a wave of sadness. “That’s because we knew them.”
Losing such good friends had been a shock. She and Sonny spent the following week grieving in their own way over the murders. Kelly stayed busy during the investigation, using her days of teaching at Ballard High to stave off wave after wave of tears.
Sonny handled it with anger at first and kept up a calm front with the family. But Kelly saw him more than once after the kids went into their rooms at night sitting on the back porch with a tall Bombay Sapphire and tonic, staring with wet eyes at the bright stars above.
The fact that they had originally planned to join the others on the hike added another level of fear and uncertainty.
“I tried to call, too.” Mary punched the screen with her thumb and tucked the phone into the back pocket of her jeans. “It went to voicemail.”
Perry Hale plucked a piece of French bread from a shallow wooden tray and dipped it into a bowl of seasoned oil. “You can get out of cell service pretty fast back in there.”
“Well, let’s eat.” Kelly took her seat to the right of Sonny’s empty chair at the farm table. “He’ll be here when he can.”
Chapter 8
“Over there. You, skinny one, Yooko, check up there on that ledge. The rest of you spread out and keep those lights in front, not in my face.”
The voices told me those guys down below weren’t too worried that I might be alive. Pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. The odd man out spoke English as a common language so the Mexicans could understand.
“He has to be here somewhere.”
I rolled onto my stomach, biting back a groan. The bullet wound under my arm shot jolts of hot pain down my side and into my armpit. My stomach rolled and I thought I was going to puke, but it passed. At least the nausea took my mind off the other hurts that were throbbing to beat the band. I’d knocked a lot of bark off my hide on the way down, and my right knee ached like the devil.
Getting to a position where I could see, I raised my head. At first there was nothing until I rose a little higher. That angle let me see over a rock the size of one of those old console TV sets. Six distinct flashlight beams played over the ground below, probing under bushes and behind boulders the size of my first apartment. They were working the area pretty hard, expecting that I’d rolled all the way to the bottom.
Well I hadn’t. A boulder stopped my tumble and saved me from making a final long, sheer plunge. It was a wonder I’d survived as it was, but the straight drop would have probably finished me off.
I don’t know how long I’d laid there unconscious in the cold, but it couldn’t have been more than an hour. That’s the amount of time I figured they needed to hike down from the canyon rim. I didn’t know that part of the country, and for all I knew it was so rough it might’ve taken them two or three hours.
Look at your watch, dummy.
The Old Man’s voice was loud in my ear and I took his advice, but my wristwatch that Kelly’d given me for Christmas was long gone, replaced by a pretty impressive gash that showed the white tissue below. It still leaked a little blood, but not as much as you’d expect.
I’d laid a finger open on a piece of bob-wire once when I was about twelve, and the sight of the white tendons then caused me to get swimmy-headed. I felt a little better that at least I’d grown tough enough not to swoon at such a sight.
The sounds coming from below told me those guys were getting frustrated. One of ’em finally had the sense to look up. “Maybe he stopped up there.” His Mexican accent was heavy, but I’d been around Hispanics most of my life and understood his words that were clear as branch water.
His flashlight beam danced over the scrub brush covering the steep slope over my shoulder. He kept it moving pretty fast, and soon it skipped up into the darkness.
A second beam joined his and I ducked as it explored the rocks below and above where I lay. “See anything?”
They spoke in Spanish between the two of them.
I knew enough of their language to work out that ver cualquier cosa meant they were looking for me. Most folks in Ballard knew a little Spanish, and I was like them, understanding more than I could speak.
“I would have said so, wouldn’t I?” One of the guys launched off in a stream of curses that would have made my good friend and the Old Man’s hired hand proud. Gabriel Nakai had worked for my dad as a ranch hand for years and was part of the family. He spoke English as well as most of us, but he never learned to cuss, and that kept us laughing whenever we pitched in to help work cows or fix fences.
This guy was a pro at cussin’ in Spanish and only quit when the voice with the Middle East accent had enough. “Yooko! Why don’t you stop talking and check it out?”
Ol’ Yooko switched back to English. “You want me to climb up there in the dark?”
“We are not waiting until sunrise. I expect someone to come looking for him as soon as it’s light.”
“It will be easier with the sun. I am hungry. Let us sit here and eat our tortillas. Then we can get some sleep and be fresh in the morning.”
The man’s voice went cold. “You will do as I say, comprende?”
Yooko hesitated for a moment and I knew he was as scared of that Middle East feller as I was of a bear. “Sí, jefe.”
My little hidey-hole was about to get real unsafe. Shivering both from fear and the cold, I crawfished backward on the sharp stones to get my back against the slope. It real fast proved to be uphill and didn’t work especially well with the bullet wound catching fire every time I flexed my arm. Stifling a groan, I pulled myself up into a crouch and peeked through the brush again. A narrow beam of light worked its way to my left, darting around like a little kid playing with a flashlight.
Yooko was making slow progress. Every now and then I heard him slide and cut loose with another string of curses. It was hard work that told me there wasn’t a trail to where I was hiding, so he was making his way up a raw slope, avoiding cactus, and trying to be quiet all at the same time.
They were expecting a body, not a live person, and that worked in my favor, or would when the time came. I lay still, hoping he’d fall and break his damned n
eck.
The one that concerned me was the leader. Ahab the Arab, as I thought of him, was in charge, and that usually made those guys the worst of them all. Oh, I really didn’t think he was Arabian. He could have been Syrian, Iranian, Iraqi, for all I knew. No matter who his daddy was, he had to be a terrorist and from my experience, that made him dangerous as hell.
I remembered I hadn’t checked to see if the 1911 was still in my holster. I gave the .45 a pat and found that the thumb-break had done its job. The semi-automatic on my gun belt was still there. My two spare magazines on the left side were where they were supposed to be, though the entire Ranger rig was up around the middle of my waist and not riding snug like the companion belt holding my britches on.
Knowing the snap was bound to be loud in the desert night, I waited to release the weapon until Yooko slipped and cursed again, sounding like he’d taken a knee on the steep rise. Rocks rattled to the canyon floor, and he struggled to stay on his feet. The snap was barely audible when it released. Even that slight movement pulled the gunshot wound and I stifled a grunt.
The smooth Sweetheart Grips on Granddad’s old Colt 1911 were comforting and it calmed me. During World War II, American soldiers replaced the textured grips on their pistols with clear, lightweight Lucite from the viewing ports of warplanes. To personalize the handguns, they put photos of their gals beneath the grips. The photo was also an easy way for a soldier to identify his pistol from others. Sometimes they put photos on both sides, but Granddad left one side of the grip clear so he could see at a glance how many rounds were left.
I tried not to look into the lights to preserve my night vision as the men continued their search. My thumb found the cocked hammer, and I shook the pistol a couple of times to jiggle out any rocks or dirt.
It was hard to tell in the dark if the action was clear. Letting the hammer down would have been the best way, but I was afraid my thumb’d slip and fire off a round, so I stuck my little finger in the tight space to be sure there were no rocks or dirt between it and the striker pin. I ground my teeth and almost squealed when I discovered that the fingernail had been ripped off in the fall. By then I knew I’d be finding even more dings and scratches that hadn’t yet woken up.
Hawke's War Page 5