The Tanner Series - Books 1-11: Tanner - The hit man with a heart

by Remington Kane

  After a round hit him in the left thigh, McKay fell to the floor and was showered by glass, as the large picture window behind him shattered. Although he was wounded, cut, and bleeding, McKay was able to reach up and grab his gun from off the desk.

  He crawled across his office floor amid debris from the splintered walls and shelves and ran smack-dab into two of Martillo’s soldiers in the doorway. Their weapons were aimed at his face.

  McKay dropped his puny revolver and begged for his life. “Don’t shoot! I’ll pay! Oh Lord, don’t shoot. I’ll pay triple, I’ll—”

  The two men emptied their guns into McKay, then one of them spoke into a radio.

  The gunfire outside grew sporadic before finally ceasing, and after looting the home of anything of value that they could carry, one of the men set the charge. The bomb he was preparing had been stolen from a military truck and was of an incendiary nature. It was a bomb designed to burn illegal crops, such as marijuana and opium poppy plants. It could defoliate up to twenty acres. Inside the confines of the McKay ranch house, it would burn everything to ash.

  With the charge set to detonate, the men left the McKay land in the vehicles of the men they had just killed and headed for the Parker Ranch to join their brothers.

  They were an overwhelming force intent on slaughter and revenge, and on this night, they would have both.

  The bomb exploded when they were a mile away, and the flash of the explosion could be seen.

  When they heard the booming sound of a rifle coming from the Parker Ranch at their approach, they looked at each other in amazement that the fight was still going on. They would later learn that eight of their fellows had perished before their arrival, and that a sixteen-year-old boy had killed them.

  Cody Parker was the last man standing, and he was determined to kill them all.

  Alas, it was not to be.

  Tanner was pushing Sheer’s car to its limit as he sped back to the Parker Ranch. He had a bad feeling in his gut that was increasing with each passing second.

  His lone hope was that the presence of a police officer would act as a deterrent, but he knew that it wouldn’t, not if the men attacking were from one of the cartels.

  He had called the Stark Police Department and the person that answered assured him that the deputy on site was one of their best and that Sheriff McKay would be given his message as soon as he called in.

  Tanner pounded the dashboard and cursed the incompetence of small-town law enforcement. Then he cursed the car for not moving faster, even as the logical part of his brain was telling him that nothing was wrong, and that the odds of Martillo attacking the ranch at that very moment were slim.

  But Tanner knew, he knew, and he only hoped that he could make it in time. He thought of Cody, whispered, “Hang on, kid,” and drove down the highway like a madman.

  While seated together at the kitchen table, the Parkers had just finished eating a late dessert of apple pie when the first shot broke one of the living room windows and shattered the glass front on the grandfather clock, a clock that had been handmade by Frank’s late father.

  The shot was the first, but the next seventeen that followed were separated by less than a second of time.

  Frank Parker had startled at the sound of breaking glass, but as the barrage continued, Cody knew the sound for what it was. He yelled, “Everybody get down!” and then he dived beneath the table, to reach across and pull his sisters from their seats and onto the floor.

  The next ten seconds were chaos. Hundreds of rounds entered the house and did to it what a similar attack had done to the McKay home.

  Claire was the first to die. A bullet struck her in the head as she was reaching down to free the baby from his high chair. Cody caught her before the body could hit the floor, as his father grabbed the baby.

  Frank let out a wail of grief and Cody told him to guard the kids, as he sprinted for his rifle, which he kept in a rack on the rear porch.

  “No Cody, stay down!” Frank yelled, but it was too late. The headstrong boy had ahold of his rifle and was headed out the back door.

  Cody shot two men, rolled, and shot two more, while a round cut across his left arm. He hadn’t felt the wound, hadn’t felt anything, except the urge to kill everyone who threatened his family.

  At the rear of the home was a decorative metal trellis. Cody climbed up it as if possessed of wings, with the rifle strapped to his back and spare shells jingling in his pockets.

  He made it onto the roof of the wraparound porch, and three more men died in the front yard. The others realized where the shots were coming from, and they sent a barrage of bullets into the corner of the house where Cody had been firing from.

  Cody kicked in the glass of his father’s bedroom window, climbed inside, and before leaving, he reloaded the rifle and removed his father’s .44 Magnum from the bedside table.

  The sound of the baby’s crying seemed to come from everywhere at once and filled the house, giving speed to Cody’s legs, as he flew down the steps to rejoin his family.

  The front door was kicked in as Cody reached the foot of the stairs. He used his father’s gun to send a .44 slug into the chest of the first man he saw, which caused the man to stumble backwards and knock down the two men behind him.

  It gave Cody time to make it into the kitchen. His breath caught in his throat when he saw that the walls had been shredded by gunfire, then his heart nearly stopped as he saw that Claire’s body had been joined by that of his sister, Jill. The little girl had taken a shot to the chest and the exit wound left a gaping hole in her back.

  “Dad!”

  “We’re in the dining room!”

  Cody went low through the swinging door that separated the two rooms and found his father beneath the table with his sister Jessie, and baby James, who was wailing like a banshee.

  Frank took his gun from Cody and wiped away tears with his sleeve.

  “How many are there, boy?”

  Cody spat the words out. “It’s a goddamn army.”

  “That many?”

  “I killed seven or eight of them and it was like I didn’t even make a dent.”

  Jessie hugged her brother tightly as she sobbed in spasms of grief. Cody wrapped an arm around her and kissed the top of her head.

  “They got Jill, Cody,” Jessie moaned.

  “I know, baby, and I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  The sound of feet crunching over glass came from both the living room and the kitchen. Frank thrust the baby at his daughter and got in front of her to face toward the living room, as Cody took aim at the doorway to the kitchen.

  When the sound of the footsteps ceased, Cody intuitively knew what was about to happen.

  “They’re going to shoot through the walls, get—”

  His words were drowned out by the chaotic sounds of destruction and death.

  Cody heard his father cry out, his sister scream in pain, but it was the abrupt silence of his baby brother that sickened him. When he turned his head to the right, he saw the obscene wounds, and although they twitched as their bodies shut down, he knew that all three of them were dead. The black grief nearly made Cody give up, but a scarlet fury fired him up to press on.

  He’d been hit in the right leg and the lower back during the barrage, but Cody dragged himself toward the windows, and while cutting himself repeatedly, he crawled through broken glass and debris.

  When the guns fell silent for reloading, Cody propped up against the windowsill and flipped over to fall to the ground outside.

  Limping, his back on fire, he came across two men bent over near the porch. They were looking at a device of some kind. It was a second firebomb, and they were getting it ready to use. Cody shot them both from behind before falling to one knee, as his wounded leg gave out.

  As a man ran out the front door, Cody took aim, but he was shot in the chest by Martillo before he could fire. Cody collapsed onto his back with a groan, as the worst pain he’d ever felt took hold of h
im, and he realized he was dying.

  Martillo walked over, pressed the tip of the silencer against Cody’s forehead, and said five words.

  “You fought like a king.”

  An instant later, Martillo pulled the trigger.

  Martillo had arrived with forty men and left with eight dead and two wounded.

  They had killed over a dozen men, destroyed a family, and slaughtered a police officer. The repercussions of the attacks would turn the community of Stark, Texas, into little more than a ghost town for over a decade, and scar both the town and the county forever.

  And for a young man calling himself Tanner, it would be a turning point, and the greatest failure of his life.

  219

  Coming Clean About Being Dirty

  Tanner had called ahead and told Doc to go to the kitchen and stay there, and that if Javier entered the room, he was to watch him like a hawk.

  On his way home, Tanner bought new clothes, ones free of microscopic particles of biker blood and gunshot residue. He changed into them in the dressing room, before discarding his other clothes with the plastic garbage bags he had sat on as he drove the truck.

  When he did return to the ranch, he found Javier seated on the porch steps and looking deep in thought. Were it not for the fact that he was Maria’s son, Tanner would have wasted him with the rest of the Diablo Boys and ended the threat cleanly.

  He approached Javier with a scowl and held out his hand. “Give it to me.”

  Javier had been so lost in thought, that he hadn’t realized Tanner was there.

  “What?”

  “I said, give it to me.”

  Javier’s bronze face turned almost white, and he licked his lips several times. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tanner. Now get away from me.”

  Tanner leaned over and spoke softly. “If you don’t give me that bottle, I will make you eat it.”

  Javier opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and then reached into his pocket and removed the bottle. As he was laying it into Tanner’s palm, he began sobbing.

  “I couldn’t do it. Not that, I just couldn’t do it.”

  Javier pointed at the plants beside the porch and Tanner saw the yellowish powder that was laying in the dirt. He then looked inside the bottle and saw that it was empty.

  “What were you supposed to do with this?”

  “They wanted me to put it in my mother’s wine. Jefe' said that it would be like she went to sleep and never woke up.”

  “What was in this bottle?”

  “I don’t know, but it came from a bigger bottle that will be planted in Chuck Willis’s office. One of the gang, Georgio, he has a cousin that works on the night cleaning crew at Willis’s company. She was going to plant the evidence and then call in an anonymous tip.”

  “So, Willis had nothing to do with this?”

  “No, but how did you find out about the Diablo Boys?”

  “Never mind that. You need to talk to your mother. If you don’t, I will. She needs to know what a piece of shit you are.”

  Javier straightened his back at that, but then slumped his shoulders in resignation of Tanner’s insult, and the truth it contained. A moment later, he reached out and grabbed Tanner by the arm.

  “The Diablo Boys will come here when they find out that I couldn’t do it. They’ll come here and try to kill my mother. You have to do something.”

  “Don’t worry about it; I’ll handle it.”

  Javier covered his face with his hands, as he began crying again. “Oh God, I fucked up. I fucked up so bad.”

  “What’s going on here?”

  It was Maria. She had just opened the front door and froze when she saw Javier crying. She came down the porch steps with concern lighting her face.

  “What’s wrong? Were you two fighting again?”

  “No,” Tanner said. “But Javier has something to tell you.”

  Javier talked to his mother in the living room with Tanner watching, and Tanner was surprised when the boy didn’t attempt to sugarcoat anything.

  He had begun hanging around the gang six months earlier. They used him as a gofer to fetch coffee and food, as they hung around their makeshift clubhouse at the old Taco Queen.

  The Diablo Boys made mule runs or acted as security for a San Antonio drug lord whenever they were needed, which was seldom. However, the mule runs made them more in a day of transporting drugs than most people made in a month. Javier rode along with them once, and that was when Jefe' learned about the ranch.

  “He kept asking me if the ranch would be mine someday. I said yeah, that I guessed that you would leave it to me and Romina.” Javier paused and looked at his mother with a sad expression. “A week later, Jefe' started saying how nice it would be if you were out of the way, and that with Romina being underage, I would inherit the ranch alone, or at least be in control of it. He had given it a lot of thought and wanted to place an airstrip on the ranch, so that drug planes could land here and turn it into a distribution center. He wanted you out of the way, and he was going to make it happen one way or another.”

  Maria stood and walked about the room for a moment before she came to stand before Javier.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?”

  “Jefe' said that if I told anyone it would just be my word against theirs, and that someday soon, Romina would be killed.”

  “They wanted you to choose between the two of us?” Maria said.

  “Not really, they wanted you dead, but they said that if they weren’t tied to it, that they would let Romina live.”

  “And all these ‘accidents,’ they were all caused by you, even the knife that nearly killed Mrs. Salgado?”

  Javier stood and took his mother’s hands. “I swear to God I thought that it would just fall out and frighten her, but I guess it flipped when it fell, and the blade end hit her first.”

  Maria looked stricken. She freed her hands from Javier and settled back on the sofa. After nearly a minute passed, she wiped tears away and spoke to her son, as disappointment showed in her eyes.

  “You’re going to the police and tell them everything.”

  “But Mom, they’ll hurt Romina, they will.”

  Tanner spoke up. “No, they won’t. I’ll make sure of it, but your mother is right. You need to go to the police, and you need to do it as soon as possible.”

  Javier and Maria spoke to the cops. The next thing Javier knew, he was a suspect in the murders of the Diablo Boys.

  Before leaving the gang’s clubhouse, Tanner had used Jefe'’s phone to dial 9-1-1, before placing the phone back in the gang leader’s hand. After tracing the call, the police dispatched a patrol car to the Taco Queen, found the bodies, and the time of Jefe'’s death was fixed as occurring after the call was made.

  Traffic cameras confirmed that Javier was miles away at the time and a Paraffin test gave the result that his hands were clean of gunshot residue. Also, no trace of blood was found on his clothing. He was back at the ranch with his mother that night, and he no longer had to fear the Diablo Boys Biker Gang.

  Javier joined Tanner on the porch around midnight and sat across from him at the card table.

  “How did you learn what was going on?”

  “Does it matter?” Tanner said.

  Javier was silent for several moments before asking the question that was on his mind.

  “You killed them, didn’t you? Jefe' and the others, it was you?”

  “Goodnight, Javier.”

  Javier walked back to the door, but before he closed it behind him, two words left his lips.

  “Thank you.”

  Tanner rose from his seat to patrol one last time before settling down for a full night’s sleep.

  220

  The Gift

  THE PARKER RANCH, SEPTEMBER 1997, TWO DAYS AFTER THE MASSACRE

  At dawn, Tanner pushed aside the yellow police tape and walked down the driveway that once led to the home of the Parker family.


  Where a home had stood, there was just a foundation and the remains of a crumbled red brick chimney. The blaze that destroyed the structure was so intense that some of the bricks had melted.

  He had been too late.

  Too late to save them.

  And so what?

  He was a killer, wasn’t he? Not a bodyguard, not a cop, not a savior, but a taker of lives. He would have been truer to himself had he agreed to do the job in the first place, marched over, and massacred the Parker family himself.

  It would have been simpler.

  It would have been cleaner.

  And he wouldn’t have the faces of the dead haunting his dreams as they did now, because they would have been strangers. The faces of the twins, Jill and Jessie; of the woman, Claire; of Frank; and even the baby, the goddamn baby that the bastard calling himself Martillo felt it necessary to kill.

  “I let you down, Cody,” Tanner whispered, and then he thought about his mentor and wondered what the old man would think of this mess.

  The name Tanner had been passed down from one assassin to another for nearly a hundred years, but Tanner’s mentor, the fifth Tanner, had held the name the longest, and had given him the honor of bearing it when the old man believed he was dying.

  “But I’m too young,” he had said.

  The old man smiled at him and grabbed his hand. “You’re the one, boy, because you’ve got the gift, that rare combination.”

  “What gift?”

  “You’re smart and you’re deadly, both are needed, but you’ve got something else. Despite the ice in your veins, there’s also a fire deep in your heart. I’ve known some stone-cold killers who thought they were the baddest thing going, but they were nothing more than killing machines. To be the best, to be a Tanner, that takes heart.”