He ambled toward the service island, hoping that it wasn't Charlie Maddox, not at this time of the morning. That old boy could talk your leg off, and he had a damned opinion about everything. You couldn't wish him Merry Christmas that he wouldn't let you have both barrels, running down commercialism or the heathen nature of the holiday. Bud wasn't up to Charlie's shit this morning, and if it was Maddox, if he started in on some wild hare or other, Bud would have to tell him so.
Except it wasn't Charlie. Hell, it wasn't even close.
Four Mexicans, all piling out of a late-model Chevrolet with plates that put them on the wrong side of the border. Stancell didn't mind, if they were paying cash, but there was something in their eyes that made him just the slightest bit uneasy. Something hard and hungry, like a pit bull's eyes before he took a piece out of your leg.
"G'mornin'. Need ta fill 'er up?"
The tallest of the men shook his head. "We're looking for a friend of ours. We were supposed to meet him, but his car broke down back there." A lazy thumb was cocked across one shoulder, indicating some point farther south. "Maybe you've seen him, eh?"
"Can't help you," Stancell said. "Nobody's been in here today, besides you-all."
"This hombre would be gringo," the interrogator said, as if Bud had not answered him already. "Tall. He might be looking for another car. You seen a man like that?"
"I told you, you're the first ones in today."
The tall man rattled something off in Spanish, shook his head again as if in weary disappointment. "It's important that we find this hombre," he explained. "We got some business with him."
Stancell didn't want to know about their business. He was smelling trouble now, the short hairs rising on his neck. He wished that he was in the station's office, where he kept the Smith & Wesson .38 tucked in a drawer underneath the cash register.
"I wish that I could help you," he responded, hoping that he sounded earnest. "If I see your friend, I'll tell him you were lookin' for him."
"Maybe you won't mind if we should take a look inside?"
"What for? I told you that there's no one here."
"A little peek, okay?"
They were advancing on him, slowly, closing in a pincer movement. Stancell dared not turn his back to run. Instead he started walking backward, toward the open door of the garage. If he could make it that far, he could duck into the office, get his gun and hold them off until he raised Grant Vickers on the phone. And if he couldn't make it to the office, there were wrenches, other tools, with which he could defend himself.
One of the Mexicans was about to cut him off, when Stancell bolted. Never mind the office, he was making for the tool rack, fingers outstretched for the pry bar when a flying tackle brought him down. He hit the concrete deck with someone riding his back, the impact emptying his lungs.
Before he could recover, they had jerked him to his feet. Two of the goons immobilized his arms and held him upright, almost at attention. While a third began to poke around his shop, the leader took a stance in front of Bud and kicked him squarely in the groin.
He would have fallen if the goons hadn't been supporting him. They couldn't stop his throwing up, a hearty breakfast splattering the leader's shoes before he stepped back out of range. Bud Stancell's lower body felt like broken glass.
"We need to find this hombre," he repeated patiently.
Bud gasped for breath. "The bugger hasn't been here!"
"Ah."
The man stepped closer and swung from the cellar with a fist encased in brass. One punch broke Stancell's cheekbone, and he felt his mouth fill with blood.
From that point on, Bud Stancell couldn't have responded to their questions even if he knew the answers, and they seemed to know it. Three of them were on him all at once, with fists and feet, and then the fourth was wading in from somewhere, getting in his licks while there was something left to kick around. They worked in silence, angry, driven by frustration, as they played a brutal game of soccer with his body.
Somewhere in the middle of it, after something like a minute, Bud got lucky and lost consciousness. Another seven minutes passed before his visitors got tired and ambled back in the direction of their Chevrolet.
7
After an hour or two, the Southern California desert begins to look the same. So many yucca palms and Joshua trees, so many tumbleweeds and cacti that they start to run together, merging in the driver's eye and mind. The land is not precisely flat, but there is none of the relief from boredom that is found in trying to negotiate the mountains farther north. In air-conditioned cars, the drivers set their minds on automatic pilot, try to find a station on the radio, and concentrate on staying off the shoulder of the road. In cars that have to use the four-and-sixty system — all four windows down while driving sixty miles an hour — the drivers bake and curse themselves for being stupid enough to make their crossing in the daylight hours.
Johnny Bolan knew the desert, understood it, but it held no abstract fascination for him at the moment. He was focused on his mission, on his brother's need, already calculating odds and angles from the meager information he possessed.
Somehow the move against Rivera had gone sour. That was bad enough, considering the days of planning Mack had put into the raid, but these things happened from time to time. A rotten break, a sentry with the flu backed up by more alert replacements... anything at all. His brother had been stuck in tighter spots, and he was still alive.
It was the wound that worried Johnny. Mack would not have referred to it if it was just a scratch. He knew that much and nothing more, the lack of information taunting him with mental pictures of his brother bleeding in an alley, running from the hunters while his life ran out through ragged wounds. No matter how he held the pedal down, he couldn't get there soon enough, and he could only offer first-aid treatment when he did arrive.
There ought to be a doctor in the town where Mack was hiding, but you never knew for sure. His atlas told him Santa Rosa had 157 residents in 1980, but surrounding towns were larger, and they might be forced to drive the twenty, thirty miles each time they broke a bone or came down with a virus. Many larger towns got by without a full-time doctor of their own, but John would keep his fingers crossed for Santa Rosa, hoping that it might be the exception to the rule.
Locating Mack could be a problem, even in a one-horse town with fewer than two hundred residents. Rivera's people would be after him, of course. Between his wound and hostile gunners trolling the neighborhood, he couldn't very well hang out on Main Street, waiting for a ride. Determination of his hiding place would have to wait on an examination of the town itself, but John was free to speculate while he drove. He would avoid the local sheriff, that was obvious. The doctor — if there was one — might provide a sanctuary, but there were assorted regulations bearing on reports of gunshot wounds. Mack would not want to hold the doctor hostage, if he should be fortunate enough to find one, but he might be forced to lock the old boy in a closet, say, or tie him to a chair, just long enough to buy some time, some combat stretch.
If it was up to him, a little town like Santa Rosa was the last place Mack would choose to make a stand. Endangering civilians ran against his grain, and if Rivera's army hit the town in force, the innocent were bound to suffer. Mack would try to minimize the damage, Johnny knew, by any means available. The damned guy might just sacrifice himself, if there were other lives at stake, and it was something of the sort that worried Johnny as he pushed the Jimmy up to eighty, held it there, his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
He wondered how his brother might be armed. Mack would have carried ample hardware for the strike, but much of it would be expended, other items left behind when he was wounded, forced to ditch the car. It never paid to underestimate his brother; he had seen him work miracles from scratch, but even Mack could only do so much. Unfortunately courage didn't make a soldier bulletproof. Audacity could carry you against the odds, but it could only carry you so far. Once you had dazzled your
opponents with the fancy footwork, you had to deal with them in concrete terms. With bullet, blade and strangling wire. A wounded man, with only side arms to rely on, simply had no business taking on an army.
But you couldn't tell that to the Executioner. Hell, no.
Mack didn't see himself as a superman; it wasn't anything like that. He simply had not learned to run away from trouble, let the bad guys have their fun and count your blessings if they left you out of it. He lived by an entirely different code, demanding action in the face of savagery, resistance when the cannibals were in control. If he was well enough to run and absolutely empty-handed, Johnny knew his brother would have done his damnedest to defend the residents of Santa Rosa from the plague that he, unwittingly, had brought upon their heads.
It was a sense of duty that might get him killed this time. But not if Johnny Bolan had a thing to say about it. Not if he could reach the tiny town in time to stand beside his brother. They might die together, if it came to that, but he would have tried. And if he came too late to help, well then God help Luis Rivera and his jackals.
Johnny knew their numbers and the names that counted, knew where he could find them. And if he came too late to help his brother, they would have another opportunity to curse the Bolan name. Another opportunity to feel the cleansing fire.
* * *
The day was shaping up to be another scorcher, but Rick Stancell didn't mind the heat. Hot days meant warmer nights, and that was fine. He called it drive-in weather, when the desert breeze was soft and warm, the sky so vast and dark that you could count a million stars if you had time. It was the kind of night just made for drive-in movies, with your best girl at your side, and given time and a little luck, you wouldn't even care about the movie on the big old weathered screen.
Rick didn't feel like working, but he had already promised, and he had his father's pickup truck to use tonight, together with some spending money, if he kept his word. He had invited Amy Schultz to see a double feature with him at the Ajo drive-in, and she had agreed. The films were nothing special — D.C. Cab and Billy Jack Goes Hollywood, definitely B grade — but Rick was not devoted to the cinema. He was devoted to Amy Schultz, and he was certain that with time and the necessary patience, he could make her come around.
She wasn't prudish, not exactly, but she seemed to be the kind of girl who saved the heavy stuff for marriage. Stancell didn't mind. He knew she would be worth the wait, but when his mind coughed up a thought like that, it made him hesitate and wonder what was going on inside himself. He was a senior — would be, come September — and a lot of kids got married right away, as soon as they could shuck the cap and gown. But Rick was bound for college, something better than a dead-end job in Pima County, sweating out his days behind a gas pump or a check-out counter at the hardware store. He knew that Amy liked him — maybe "loved" would be a better word — and most times, Stancell felt the same. But marriage was a fair piece down the road, five years at least, and in the meantime... Well, a guy gets itchy.
There were other girls at Ajo High who would have given Stancell what he wanted. It would have been so easy, but something held him back.
He didn't like to call it "love," with all the trappings of commitment that that term implied, but what else could it be? He had been dating Amy, going steady for the better part of six months, and while he often got the urge, he seldom had it anymore for other girls. It disturbed Rick a little, when he thought about the bridges that he might be burning, but it made him feel grown-up, as well. It made him feel... well, like a man.
The other guys at school were always talking about how much they got, and all of that, but when they asked about his dates with Amy, Stancell shined them on or shut them up with glaring looks. He did all right with Amy, to a point, but what they did or didn't do was not up for discussion on the Ajo High School grapevine. A week before the summer break, that asshole Tommy Pendergast had started wisecracking about "Rick's virgin queen," and Stancell had been forced to rearrange his bridgework for him. That had been the end of idle chatter — in his presence, anyway — and after Amy heard about it, she rewarded him with one of their more memorable dates. But they were both still virgins, and Rick had come to wonder if there was some way to correct that, short of trooping down the aisle at seventeen.
The thought of marriage didn't faze him. He wasn't frightened by the thought of Amy Schultz becoming Amy Stancell somewhere down the road. But not just yet. They needed time to grow, to see a little of the world. Time to learn about each other, and decide precisely what they wanted out of life. But none of that precluded having fun along the way.
He reached the service station, found it open and with his dad nowhere in sight. The empty service island came as no surprise; a customer this early would have been unusual, and Santa Rosa was not known for deviations from routine. If they were lucky, half a dozen locals might stop by to fill up this afternoon, but it had been a week or more since anyone had needed engine work. He had suggested that his dad cut back on hours, trim his overhead by opening at noon instead of seven in the morning, but he might as well have offered his opinions to the wall. Bud Stancell was enamored of tradition. He believed in change and progress, but for others, never for himself. Rick sometimes wondered how his father stuck it out, how he could love this dusty little town enough to struggle by on a subsistence income, pumping gas for people who were so appreciative that they took their heavy business into Ajo or surrounding towns. His father should have pulled up stakes when his wife died... but, then again, if they had moved, Rick never would have had a shot at Amy Schultz.
He passed the silent pumps, the empty office, entering the main garage. Still no sign of his father, though he got a strange, uncomfortable feeling in the shop. Tools were disarranged along the workbench, as if his dad had skipped the nightly cleanup yesterday.
He saw the retreads now. They had been neatly stacked last night, around a wooden spindle, but the pile was toppled, and two of them had rolled across the shop floor to rest against the opposite wall. A cabinet full of hoses, belts and other gear was standing open, as if someone had been interrupted in the midst of taking inventory.
"Dad?"
No answer. He was on his way to check the lot in back when something like a muffled groan, no louder than a whimper, reached his ears. He froze, turned back to face the empty room and waited for a repetition of the sound.
It came again, and Rick took all of half a second to pin it down. There was a row of cabinets underneath his father's workbench, stocked with odds and ends of the mechanic's trade, and he would swear the weak, inhuman sound was emanating from those cabinets, like a whisper from the tomb.
He crossed the floor in three long strides and ripped the cabinets open, startled into jumping backward as his father's body rolled out at his feet. No, not a body — he was still alive. Still breathing. But for God's sake what had happened to him in the hour since he'd left the house to open up his station?
If he hadn't known the man, Rick never would have recognized his face. The Roman nose was flattened, lying over his cheek, with one eye swollen shut, the other rimmed in drying blood. His lips were split and mangled, parted so that he could breath, revealing jagged vacancies where teeth had been in place an hour earlier. On impact with the floor, he curled into a fetal ball, knees up, both hands tucked in against his chest. Rick didn't need a medical degree to know those hands were broken; perhaps "smashed" would be a better word.
With sudden, crystal clarity, Rick realized that this had been no accident. He had been beaten, thoroughly and brutally, perhaps by several people working as a team. But why? A robbery? In Santa Rosa? Rick was tempted to duck back and check the cash register, but he could not desert his father. There might be internal injuries, and time was of the essence. What if he was dying?
Rick thought about his ruined date with Amy, and was instantly ashamed. What did it matter if he saw a movie, if he stayed a virgin, when his father had been attacked by strangers, beaten like an
animal and left for dead?
But were they strangers? Was there someone here, in Santa Rosa, who might wish his father harm? He had not been aware of any enemies, but then again...
He broke the train of thought and let it slip away. The constable could worry over that, once Dr. Kent had finished working on his father. She was good, and she would know what to do.
"Come on, Dad, let's get up."
It took him several moments, but at last Bud Stancell made it to his feet, one arm around Rick's shoulders, grimacing at any accidental contact with his shattered hands. His steps were slow, his posture stooped, as though there might be broken ribs or other injuries, and Rick was weeping, seething, by the time they reached the pickup.
Someone had set out to maim his father, and if they had not succeeded, they had come damned close. Before the day was out, he meant to know their names and reasons for the cruel attack. If Vickers, with his badge and gun belt, could ensure swift justice, that was fine. If not... well, then, Rick Stancell just might have to take the law into his own hands. At that moment, as he slid in behind the pickup's steering wheel with angry tears still brimming in his eyes, the seventeen-year-old was looking forward to it.
* * *
Patience was a virtue that Luis Rivera had admired throughout his life, but always from a distance. He was not a patient man, had never been content to sit and wait when there was action to be taken, battles to be won. It chafed at him to sit beside the highway, smoking, while Camacho and the others scoured Santa Rosa for their prey, but he was not a fool. He knew that generals must rely on scouts and spies until their enemy had been discovered, his position and his strength reliably confirmed. That done, a field commander had the opportunity to plot his strategy and lead his troops to victory, instead of blundering around in unfamiliar territory, risking a fatal ambush.
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