The Bleeding Edge

by William W. Johnstone

  Nacho nodded.

  “Sí. But the police they have hired are not old. My sources tell me that several of them are former Border Patrol agents. They know what they’re doing, señor.”

  “So do I,” Espantoso snapped. “I am being frustrated at every turn! That town should not exist! Those old people should have fled! Now they are more entrenched than ever. We’ll never get them out of there!”

  Jalisco had been hanging back, letting Nacho do the talking, but now the lean, pockmarked man from south of the border stepped up and said, “There is a way, señor.”

  Espantoso glanced at the Arab, who was sitting off to the side watching, watching like a hawk as he always did. Nacho could tell that the señor hated the Arab and felt like he’d been saddled unfairly with this outside interference. Espantoso couldn’t afford to displease the Arab too much, though.

  “Tell me,” the señor snapped at Jalisco.

  In a surprisingly strong, assertive tone, Jalisco said, “You have waited for the gringos to defeat themselves, to weaken themselves and tear themselves apart because of their politics the way they always do. This time it has not worked, señor, so you must go back to the old ways. You must strike fear in their hearts, such fear that they will never dare to defy you again.”

  “Do not presume to lecture me,” Espantoso snapped. “You are a mere soldier in this cartel, while I am one of its leaders.”

  A true leader would not be afraid of some camel-humping Arab, Nacho thought . . . but of course he was too wise to ever say such a thing.

  “Still, a true leader cannot be unwilling to listen to the counsel of those below him,” Espantoso went on, unwittingly echoing part of the thought that had just gone through Nacho’s head. “What is it you think we should do, Jalisco?”

  The smile that curved Jalisco’s thin lips was enough to make even Nacho shudder a little inside.

  “Strike at them through their weakest link, señor,” Jalisco said. “Strike at them through their children.”

  Someone once said there are really only two sports in Texas: football . . . and spring football. Texans’ devotion to the gridiron wasn’t quite that fervent, but it was certainly true that they took their football seriously. So the home stands of the stadium were packed with students, faculty, and some visitors during the late afternoon pep rally before Joseph P. Gonzalez High played its opening district game of the year against Cibolo High School.

  The marching band was in the stands, playing the school fight song. Cheerleaders in short skirts did high kicks and backflips along the track that ran around the field. The members of the football team stood along the sideline wearing jeans and their uniform jerseys, waving at the crowd. In a minute, when the fight song was over, the head coach would step to the microphone that was set up at the edge of the field and give a rousing speech about how they were going to beat Cibolo that night, a victory that would be the first in a string of district wins carrying them all the way to the play-offs.

  Before the band could finish, before the coach could utter one inspiring word, before the football players could do more than get started good on their lecherous fantasies involving the cheerleaders, shots rang out and people began to scream.

  Figures with dark ski masks pulled down over their heads charged up the ramps into the stands, whirled to face the crowd, and sprayed automatic weapons fire above their heads. Shrieking in terror, students and teachers alike dived for cover, cowering between the long benches and trying to make themselves as small as possible. More gunmen rushed through gates in the chain-link fence around the field and surrounded the football team and cheerleaders, menacing them with guns.

  One of the teachers, a former Marine, grabbed an invader and tried to wrestle the gun away from him. Another of the masked figures stepped up and fired a short burst into the teacher’s head at almost point-blank range, blowing it apart like a watermelon.

  Out on the field, a couple of coaches tried to fight back as well and were gunned down for their trouble. Several of the football players started to make a run for it, only to have their legs cut out from under them by bullets.

  An engine roared and a dark-colored, nondescript van plowed through the fence, making its own gate. Two more similar vans followed behind it as it cut across the track and onto the football field. More men, also wearing ski masks, piled out of the vehicles as they came to a stop. They grabbed football players and cheerleaders, seemingly at random, dragged them kicking and screaming to the vans, and threw them in.

  Then, without a word ever being spoken, the attackers fled with their prisoners, leaving behind several bloody corpses and a stadium filled with terror.

  All in broad daylight.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  It was one of those terrible things that stuck in the mind. You never forgot where you were when you heard about it.

  In Stark’s case, he was in the community center, talking to Jack Kasek about how they were going to pay for the city’s expenses until they determined a tax rate and sent out notices.

  “You can’t keep paying for so many things out of your own pocket, John Howard,” Jack said. “I know good and well you couldn’t have gotten top dollar for your ranch when you sold it. Property values within a hundred miles of the border are way down and have been since the cartels moved in. That’s true all the way up and down the Rio Grande.”

  “Maybe, but I got enough to keep myself comfortable for the rest of my life with quite a bit left over,” Stark insisted. “I’d just as soon that extra go to help out Shady Hills. I’ve enjoyed living here and getting to know everybody. This is sort of paying that back.”

  “And we’re probably lucky there are enough people in the park who feel the same way you do and have some extra financial resources,” Jack admitted. “That way the city can keep going for a while—”

  A car door slammed outside. Stark and Jack looked around as Fred Gomez practically ran into the building.

  Fred and Aurelia had been keeping mostly to themselves since Antonio’s murder. Stark saw them occasionally, but he didn’t push himself on them, figuring it was better to let them deal with their grief in their own way.

  He could tell that Fred was upset about something now. His friend’s face was set in shocked, horrified lines. Stark jumped to his feet and hurried to meet him.

  “Fred, what is it?” Stark asked. “Aurelia—”

  “No, no, something’s happened,” Fred said. “Down at the high school—”

  “Gonzalez High?”

  “Yeah. There was a shooting.”

  “Oh, no,” Jack said. “One of the kids went on a rampage?”

  Fred shook his head.

  “They were having a pep rally. . . . Some masked men came up. . . . They shot some people . . . and took a dozen of the kids!”

  The words spilled out of Fred in bunches, and as Stark grasped what he was saying, a chill went through him. It seemed unbelievable, but he knew Fred wouldn’t make up a terrible story like that.

  “Maybe you heard it wrong,” Stark said, grasping at that hope.

  Fred shook his head again and said, “It’s on all the TV channels.”

  “Come on,” Jack said. “We’ll go to my house and check it out.”

  Jack and Mindy’s house was next door to the community center, so it took the three men only a moment to get there. When they came into the living room, Mindy was sitting on the edge of the sofa, staring at the television with tears rolling down her cheeks. She looked at the men and said in a choked voice, “It’s awful, it’s just awful. . . .”

  The TV showed a long shot of the school’s football field with the flashing lights of emergency vehicles all over it. Stark knew when he saw them that Fred hadn’t gotten confused about what he’d heard. The terrible tragedy really had taken place.

  They sat down and watched, listening to the breathless newscaster describe what had happened, as best it could be pieced together from the fragmentary reports that had come in. Six people were de
ad, three teachers and three students, and a number of others had suffered minor wounds and injuries during the violent incident, which had occurred while the school was holding a pep rally for that night’s football game.

  Eleven students, six boys and five girls, were missing. According to eyewitness accounts, they had been kidnapped, thrown into the vans that had crashed through the fence onto the football field. So far the authorities had not been able to locate any sign of the vehicles.

  “It’s Reuben,” Jack exclaimed as their young chief of police appeared on the screen. A graphic at the bottom of the screen identified him.

  “Because this case involves kidnapping, we’ve already requested assistance from the Texas Rangers and from the FBI, and Sheriff George Lozano and Devil’s Pass Chief of Police Dennis Feasco have pledged any help they can give us,” Reuben was saying. “We’re going to find the people who did this and bring them to justice, and more importantly, we’re going to find those kids and bring them home safely.”

  Reuben had a slightly shell-shocked look in his eyes, but his voice was strong and firm as he made that promise. Stark knew that he meant it.

  “I’ve got to get down there,” Stark said.

  “What can you do, John Howard?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know, but I’m the mayor of Shady Hills and the school is part of our town. I need to be there.”

  Without waiting for anybody to try to talk him out of it, he left the Kasek house, got into his pickup, which was parked at the community center, and headed south on the highway toward the high school.

  As he drove, his hands tightened on the steering wheel until it felt like they might tear it off the column. Nobody in a position of authority was saying anything about it yet, but they knew who was responsible for this.

  They all knew.

  The Texas Rangers were already on the scene when Stark got there. One of them stopped him when he tried to get close enough to the football field to find Reuben.

  “Damn it, I’m the mayor of Shady Hills,” Stark said. “I’ve got a right to talk to my police chief. You can ask Sheriff Lozano or Chief Feasco about me, too. They’ll vouch for me.”

  “All right, hang on, amigo,” the Ranger said. He stepped a few feet away and talked to someone quietly on a handheld radio, then came back to Stark and said, “Come with me.”

  The Ranger was either arresting him or taking him where he wanted to go, Stark thought, and either way that was better than standing around out here unable to do anything.

  Reuben was standing beside the gaping hole in the fence where the kidnappers’ vans had burst through the chain link, talking to several uniformed men. When he saw Stark, he finished the conversation and hurried over.

  “Mayor Stark,” he said after he nodded to the Ranger accompanying Stark that it was all right for him to be there. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to help,” Stark said simply. “These folks down here are citizens of Shady Hills.”

  Reuben sighed.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s anything any of us can do, despite those big promises I made on TV.”

  “You don’t have any idea where they went after they left here with those kids?”

  “Anybody who might know is too scared of the cartel to talk,” Reuben said grimly.

  “So there’s no doubt that the cartel’s behind this?”

  “Was there ever any doubt about that?” Reuben looked disgusted. “Nobody will come out and admit it, least of all the sheriff and the chief of police, but everybody knows the cartel is behind this outrage.”

  Stark had thought the same thing. It was nice to know they all agreed with him, he supposed, but that didn’t really accomplish anything.

  “We’ve got to find them and go after them,” he said quietly.

  Reuben frowned and said, “What are you talking about, Mr. Stark?”

  “Somebody’s got to know where the cartel headquarters are. Some of your old contacts in the Border Patrol, maybe, or the DEA.”

  Reuben thought about it for a second, then said, “They’d be risking their jobs to help an ex-con.”

  “You’re not just an ex-con. You’re a police chief, remember?”

  “I’m not sure that would make any difference. But I suppose I can give it a try. The problem is, you’ll never get the authorities to cross the border into Mexico. The feds will insist on appealing to the Mexican government for help, and the Mexicans will insist that they be the ones to deal with the situation. But they won’t. Half the government down there either works for the cartel or is too afraid to rock the boat. They’ll say they’re going after those kids, but they won’t do it.”

  “I know,” Stark said. “That’s why we’ve got to start thinking about something . . . unofficial.”

  Reuben looked intently at him for a long moment, then said, “I didn’t hear you just say that, Mr. Stark.”

  Stark smiled.

  “I didn’t figure you did, son. But that doesn’t really change things. If those kids have any chance in hell, it’s probably gonna come down to somebody who doesn’t give a damn about breaking the rules.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Despite the coast-to-coast, probably even worldwide, news coverage, despite the multitude of law enforcement agencies—local, state, and federal—throwing their resources into the investigation, despite the offers of rewards that poured in, despite the tear-streaked faces of desperate parents making televised appeals . . . by the next morning no one had any idea where the bloodthirsty kidnappers had taken their victims.

  Then the sun came up on horror.

  On a shallow bluff overlooking the Rio Grande on the Mexican side of the river, a short distance upstream from Devil’s Pass, three crude crosses made of heavy wooden beams were set up. Lashed to those crosses were the nude, battered bodies of three teenagers, two boys and a girl, each with a gaping chest wound where the heart had literally been cut out of them. Someone on the American side of the river noticed the crosses as reddish-gold sunlight began to spread across the landscape and trained a pair of binoculars on them, then threw up violently before making a frantic call to 911.

  Mexican police from the sister city to Devil’s Pass on the southern side of the border retrieved the cartel’s grisly trophies. Reuben Torres was on hand when ambulances brought the bodies across the bridge linking the two cities to turn them over to the American authorities. The Mexican officer in charge of the detail came up to the grim-faced Reuben and said, “Chief Torres?”

  “Yes?” Reuben forced himself to say. He felt sick from the knowledge that he had failed at least three of the kidnapping victims.

  “I remember you from when you were in the Border Patrol. You have my sympathy, señor. This is a terrible thing.”

  Anger welled up inside Reuben. The man sounded sincere, and maybe he really was. But Reuben also knew there was a good chance the officer had either taken payoffs from the cartel in the past or had been intimidated into doing their bidding, even if it was just looking the other way when something criminal happened.

  “Thanks,” Reuben said curtly. “Is there anything else?”

  “This, señor,” the officer said, holding out a piece of paper that had been slipped into a clear evidence bag. “We found it on the ground in front of the bodies, weighted down with a rock.”

  Reuben looked at the paper, on which Spanish words had been written in a bold hand. The message was shocking, but it came as no real shock to Reuben.

  The words threatened that if the town of Shady Hills was not dissolved, and the retirement park vacated, then the remaining prisoners would be killed as well. There was one other condition as well.

  John Howard Stark was to be turned over to the cartel.

  That last part was something of a surprise. Clearly, whoever was in charge of the cartel in this area felt a personal animosity toward Stark. Old grudges, maybe. Stark had frustrated the cartel’s plans in the past and been
responsible for the deaths of some of their leaders. Or maybe it was just that Stark was a symbol, Reuben thought, a symbol of an America that used to be, that wasn’t afraid to stand up to evildoers. That didn’t apologize to those who wished to destroy it. That didn’t throw its defenders into prison just for doing their jobs and let the criminals walk free, sometimes even arming them. Stark stood against all of that. He was a symbol, all right.

  “I’ll take that,” a man’s voice said.

  Reuben looked over at one of the FBI agents. The man stood there with his hand out. He nodded toward the piece of paper in the evidence bag.

  “It’s a message from the kidnappers—” Reuben began.

  “It’s evidence, and it belongs to the FBI now. Hand it over.”

  Reuben shrugged and gave the paper to the fed. It didn’t really matter now who had custody of the message. He had read it. He knew what it said.

  And he knew what he had to do about it.

  A large group of people had gathered this morning at the community center in the retirement park to pray together and comfort each other over the tragedy at the high school the day before. When the news of the gruesome discovery on the other side of the river reached them, the gathering became even more solemn. Stark was sitting at a table with Hallie Duncan and her father, Fred and Aurelia Gomez, Nick Medford and his wife Judith, and Jack and Mindy Kasek. When the door opened, he looked up and saw Reuben come striding purposefully into the room. The younger man caught Stark’s eye, and Stark knew that Reuben wanted to talk to him.

  “I’ll be back,” he told Hallie. He stood up and went to join Reuben near the entrance.

  “Mr. Stark,” the police chief said with a nod.

  “Any more news?” Stark asked.

  “Some, and it’s not good.”

  “More bodies?” Trenches were etched in Stark’s cheeks as he asked the question.

  Reuben shook his head and said, “Not yet. But the Mexican authorities found a note with the ones who were crucified and passed it along to us. The cartel is taking responsibility for this atrocity.”