For a second Hawker thought the girl was going to break into tears again. But then her face became a stoic mask, and her brown eyes burned. She jerked at her cuffs. “Get me out of these,” she hissed. “Let me loose. Free us all, and the moment they open that door—”
“I can’t,” Hawker cut in. “Those two Mexican guards are almost sure to check us one more time before they pull out.”
“But you’ve freed yourself!”
“Keep your voice down, Cristoba,” Hawker whispered calmly. “I’ll fix my cuff so it looks like it’s still locked, and they’ll think I’m still passed out, so they won’t even bother to check me. But I can’t take that chance with the others. Don’t you see? We have to make this trip tonight. I have to find out where they’re taking you people and who’s involved. Sure, I could probably fight our way out of here right now. But that’s not going to help the people they’ve already kidnapped—and the people they’ll kidnap in the future. When they’ve taken us to the very source of this slavery ring, Cristoba, I’ll free you.” Hawker leaned across the truck and patted her warm shoulder gently. “You’ll be safe with me. I promise you that. But I have to do it my own way.”
The girl leaned her weight briefly against his hand. Her head was bowed shyly, and she looked up at him. “There is something in your eyes that I trust.”
“And you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Then tell the others, Cristoba. Tell them what I have planned, and tell them to obey my every gesture. If they do, we’ve got a chance to get out of this thing safely—”
Hawker was interrupted by the sound of the truck starting: a sputtering diesel roar. And then the bolt on the trailer door slammed open, and the two Mexicans shoved the boxes away.
Hawker settled back beneath his hat, as if still unconscious. He expected them to check a few of the cuffs and take a head count.
But that’s not what happened.
He heard an unfamiliar voice yelling in Spanish, and just as it came to him that one of the “slaves” handcuffed with him in the truck was really a plant, he heard Cristoba de Abella scream, “James, look out! They know!”
Hawker jerked his left hand free from its chain while sliding his right hand beneath the serape. He rolled hard across the trailer deck as two ear-shattering explosions ricocheted slugs off the metal floor behind him.
He heard a familiar scream, and his peripheral vision registered that the beautiful Indian girl’s arm now oozed blood as she writhed beneath her chains.
Hawker brought his customized Colt Commander .45 to bear on the face of the smaller of the two Mexican guards and squeezed the trigger.
The revolver the Mexican had been holding slammed against the ceiling as his thick face splattered gore. The scream that had materialized on his lips was never uttered as the impact of the heavy .45 slug jolted his head back, broke his neck, and knocked his corpse to the floor.
In the same instant the bigger of the two Mexicans charged Hawker and kicked the Colt savagely from his hand.
Hawker tackled him around the ankles and wrestled him to the deck. The Mexican brought his revolver up to fire, but Hawker twisted it away with his left hand while putting all his weight behind a right fist that crushed the man’s throat closed.
The Mexican’s eyes bulged, and his feet kicked wildly on the deck as his throat hissed, fighting for air.
“James, look out!” screamed Cristoba de Abella.
The warning was unnecessary. The man who had obviously been planted inside the trailer to keep an eye on the kidnap victims was a huge man with massive shoulders. Earlier Hawker had noticed him only in passing: a man who looked like a prime slave candidate for the fields.
Now he was kneeling to pick up the revolver that had been knocked from the smaller Mexican’s hands.
Hawker jumped to his feet and charged him. In the same instant he felt the truck jolt as some unseen driver—probably aware that they now had trouble—shoved it into gear and began to pull away.
Hawker hit the big man with a waist-high tackle, knocking him into the wall nearest the double doors. There was the heavy, reassuring clatter of the revolver hitting the deck. Hawker drew back his right fist to swing, but before he got the punch off, the big man nailed him with a crushing blow to the chest that ignited popping blue lights in Hawker’s head.
Hawker heard a second punch whistle past his ear and bang off the aluminum siding of the trailer.
A thin hiss of pain escaped the man’s lips, and Hawker realized that he had probably broken his hamlike hand. Hawker slammed his elbow into the man’s ribs, then hit him with a cracking overhand right that would have knocked out any ordinary man.
But not this man.
Hawker hit him with a rapid series of punches to the body, then slid under a powerful left hook. It was hard to keep his balance now, because the truck was gaining speed, pulling away.
Hawker locked his arms around the man’s heavy waist and tried to trip him to the deck. The man launched an elbow at Hawker’s head, and as the vigilante ducked away, the sudden shift in momentum sent them both crashing against the double doors of the trailer.
There was a tremendous impact, and Hawker was aware of the doors opening and then of being airborne, flying through the night.
With a searing jolt he hit the asphalt highway, and then he was rolling through gravel. James Hawker got shakily but quickly to his feet, ready to continue the fight with the Mexican.
But the huge shape in the middle of the road did not stir. The Mexican was knocked out cold by the fall or dead.
Hawker hoped that he was dead.
Experimentally Hawker moved both his arms and then his legs. Nothing seemed to be broken.
They had been carried about three hundred yards from the bar, and Hawker was aware of men running toward him. There was the muted flash and cough of gunfire and the nearby whiz of lead slugs scraping the highway.
They were shooting at him.
North on the desert highway, the semi-tractor-trailer’s lights were bright, taunting eyes as the truck sped its slaves toward Texas.
Hawker’s words to the girl haunted him: “You’ll be safe with me. I promise you that.”
Right.
Somehow he had to find her. Somehow he had to save her from the living hell that awaited her and the others.
As the men running toward him grew nearer Hawker threw back the serape and unstrapped the brutal-looking little Ingram submachine gun.
He couldn’t allow himself to think about the girl now. Before he could save her, first he had to survive.…
two
As James Hawker waited on the tarmac, waited in the balmy Mexican night for his attackers to fall within range of the Ingram, he thought, It can’t end here. I’ve worked too hard tracking these bastards down, worked too many lonely weeks to see them slip through my fingers. Plus, there’s now the girl to consider … if she lives.…
It had been his most unusual assignment to date.
And one of his toughest.
He had spent a long winter in Chicago doing a dangerously good imitation of the sterotypical suburban male. He had allowed himself to be sucked into the cozy trap that cold weather so easily sets: It’s ten below outside, so let’s just skip the run and calisthenics today … and tomorrow … and next week. There’s a hell of a blizzard blowing in, so why not curl up on the couch and watch a little television. With a beer, maybe … and a couple of sandwiches now that you’re in the kitchen … and maybe a piece of pie, too, because you don’t want to hurt the landlady’s feelings.
It had gone on and on like that, through January and February, and then into the long, gray sopping month of March.
And he deserved it, didn’t he?
He’d put his damn neck on the line too many times during the last assignment: that run-in with the Nazis of New York and their crazy plan to rebuild the Third Reich.
And he’d damn near lost one of his best friends to boot: Jacob Montgomery
Hayes.
It had been Hayes’s idea to put Hawker’s unique cop skills to work in a nation that was quickly being destroyed by crooks and killers and con artists who no longer feared—or needed to fear—the American court system.
It had been Hayes’s idea to seek out selected areas of the nation where innocent people were being bullied and then send in Hawker to help them fight back.
Hayes, one of the richest men in the world, would provide whatever financial backing was needed.
Hawker would provide the experience, the muscle, and the street sense.
And it had gone well. Almost too well. None of the missions had been easy, but they had all been successful … until they ran into the Nazis of New York.
It was the first mission in which Hayes had gotten personally involved. And it had almost cost him his life. Hawker and the inimitable butler, Hendricks, had spent long nights by Hayes’s bedside, waiting while he hung by a thread between life and death.
But finally the tough old Texas billionaire started to come around. Started to respond to the nursing and the around-the-clock doctors’ care. Started to draw on the innate subbornness that had driven him from the poverty of his south Texas youth to the top of the business ladder and far, far beyond.
Hayes began to heal, and then he began to get crotchety, souring in bed. And when they finally let him get up, his old good humor began to return, and then he began reading his esoteric books on Zen and began tying his beloved trout flies, and finally Jacob was his old, sweet, imposing self.
And that’s when winter set in and Hawker used the weather as an excuse to go on his extended vacation.
After a month of too much rest and too much food, he made a couple of halfhearted efforts to get back into shape. Each effort started with a muscle-wearying flurry, then ground to a slow halt.
After about the fourth failed attempt, Hawker began to get scared.
He knew all about the sweet trap of middle age: eat when you feel like it; drink all you want; and someday, when the time is right, get back into shape because there’s always time.…
Someday. But Hawker had too many old friends who lived for “someday.” They were overweight and out of shape, and because they took little pride in their own physical well-being, they took little pride in their lives. To wait for “someday” Hawker knew was to settle for that slow decline that led only to the coffin.
And James Hawker had no desire to die of old age.
So, on a bleak March morning, he put himself back on the old routine. No excuses. No whining. And damn the wind, snow, and rain.
He started slowly, feeling the fat bounce on his sides during the morning run, feeling the deteriorated muscles burning during the hour of calisthenics. Feeling the shame of the slowed reflexes during the brutal sparring sessions at the old Bridgeport gym.
But he stuck with it. And by April he was beginning to feel he was approaching that nicety of speed, litheness, and endurance that meant he was in top shape.
It was after one of these morning workouts in late April that Hawker returned to his second-floor apartment in the Irish section of Chicago to find he had a visitor.
He knew who it was before he even went inside.
The beige Mercedes 450-SL outside told him who it was: Andrea Marie Flischmann, his ex-wife.
Ex-wife but still an old friend.
He’d known her since junior high school. Andrea with the silken hair, olive skin, and the fashion-model face. Andrea with the burning brown eyes that seemed to see to the very core of Hawker.
They had been opposites in every way. Hawker was the Irish jock, the tough red-haired kid who preferred to hang around with the guys. Andrea was the Jewish-American princess who excelled at academics and dabbled in art and politics.
Their marriage had been a bad risk. But for a sweet year it seemed they had it all. During the day they each followed their chosen occupations. Andrea was an art teacher at an exclusive private school; Hawker, a Chicago cop. At night they met on a field of mutual interest and affection: the bed.
In bed nothing else mattered. In bed Andrea was transformed from a prim, sarcastic intellectual into a wanton lioness.
But then the hours Hawker put in as a cop began to get to her. And the danger he faced. And the pressure of the near misses and close calls. As she put it, “I love being the wife of James Hawker, but I despise being the wife of a cop.”
As the pressure built, the marriage began to wobble and stagger like an injured animal. Finally it collapsed.
They divorced amicably, still a little bit in love.
So when Hawker returned from his workout to see her sleek Mercedes outside, he was surprised but not shocked.
Toweling his face off, he trotted up the stairs and swung open the door of his apartment.
She stood by the window, looking out toward the gray haze of the Chicago skyline. She wore designer jeans and a green sweater over a pale green blouse. She was tall, and her dark hair was cut short and boyish. She was one of those rare women who seemed to become more beautiful as she aged. And though she would never have admitted it, her great beauty and searing wit were prime factors in the tremendous success of her exclusive art and antique shop, Reflections Gallery, in downtown Chicago.
Thus the new Mercedes. And a penthouse apartment. And a snobby group of jet set friends.
“Out slumming?” Hawker kidded as he came into the room. He tossed the towel onto the couch and began to remove his Nikes. It had been almost three months since he had last seen her. And, as always since the divorce, the beauty of her produced a sharp stab of regret in him.
She turned from the window, hands in pockets. “I’ve got an artist who wants a middle-aged jock for a model. Interested?”
There was a hollowness in the joke and an emptiness in her voice that Hawker caught immediately.
He walked toward her. “What’s wrong, Andrea?”
She tried to force a smile, but then her face went slack, contorted, and suddenly she was in his arms, sobbing uncontrollably.
All she could do was repeat over and over, “Oh, James, they’ve murdered him, they’ve murdered him, they’ve killed my dear little brother.…”
three
It took Hawker a careful two hours of nursing and consoling to get the whole story out of her.
He held her in his arms until the bawling slowed to long sobs and shudders. Finally she turned gently away from him, rubbing a fist at her eyes, her mourning spent.
“You need someone to talk to?” Hawker asked softly.
“Yes. Yes, I do.” She turned and looked up at him, her dark eyes glistening. “It’s … funny, but when I first heard the news, you’re the one I wanted most to see. You’re the shoulder I wanted to lean on.”
Hawker held her face in both hands and kissed her tenderly on the lips. “Both shoulders open. No waiting.”
He sat her on the couch with a stiff Scotch and soda while he set the fireplace and lighted it. When the fire was crackling, he steamed himself clean in the shower and dressed himself in soft jeans, T-shirt, and an oiled wool sweater.
By the time he returned, she had gotten control of herself. And she was ready for another drink. While getting ice, he decided a month and a half of strict abstinence was enough. He indulged in a cold Tuborg.
Beer had never tasted better.
They made small talk. Hawker knew he had to let her work into it her own way.
Finally she did.
Her youngest brother’s name was Jonathan. Hawker had seen him at a few family functions: a tall, gangly young man; jet-black hair worn longish; horn-rimmed glasses; an endearing air of innocence; and a fierce sense of indignation.
But Hawker knew him better by reputation. Jonathan had gone the Ivy League route. B.A. at Yale. Harvard Law School. Ninth in his class. He had returned to Chicago and worked for the D.A.’s office.
There he became known for his high moral values, his intense hatred of injustice, and the zeal with which he crusaded.
>
There was talk around town that he had a shot at becoming the youngest District Attorney in Chicago’s long and sullied history. He knew all the right people, had all the right connections. But more importantly he was as tough as he was good. Apparently his talent and popularity were too much for the current D.A.’s ego to handle, and Jonathan was given his notice.
So Jonathan had put up his own shingle. Because of his reputation, he had no trouble getting private work. And according to Andrea the biggest job of his career came from an unlikely source: the Houston, Texas, District Attorney’s office.
She sat on the floor now, her knees pulled up against her chest. The flame on the grate caught the depth of her brown eyes and the childlike texture of her skin. The Scotch and soda was molten amber in her right hand.
There was a sad and dreamy expression on her face as she talked, and Hawker interrupted as little as possible.
“I got word this morning,” she began. “The D.A.’s office in Houston called. A man named Blakely. Somehow they knew my parents weren’t in the best of health, so he wanted me to break the news.” Her voice trembled slightly, and she went on. “I knew that Jonathan had been working down there for the last eight months, but I didn’t know on what. The man from the District Attorney’s office told me as delicately as he could. He seemed a little surprised that I didn’t break into a million screaming pieces, and maybe it was relief on his part that made him so willing to explain to me what had happened and why. I’m sure a lot of what he told me was classified.”
She sniffed and sipped at her drink, peering deep into the fire. “Nearly two years ago the Houston D.A.’s office got word of a slavery ring operating near the city. It was highly organized, yet it kept a very low profile. The slavers preyed on Mexicans who had entered, or wanted to enter, the United States illegally.
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