“I trust you. Not them who use their men the wrong way.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
The Old Man nodded, and I could almost hear his thoughts. You better not.
The Major turned back to me. “But that’s not all, Sonny. Peel back the layers of this onion and find out who these undercover agents work for, if you can.”
I nodded. “That part’s even more personal.”
“I understand.” The Major stood and picked up his hat. “Just don’t cause another international incident.”
“So you’re telling me to stay on this side of the border.”
“I didn’t say that. Cross if you need to, but let the Mexican authorities know you’re coming.” He grinned. “But don’t go roaring up on anybody without thinking about it. Know what I mean?”
He was talking about my impulsive side. I sometimes act first when things get tense, a tendency that works for me only about half of the time.
Setting the hat just right on his head, the Major left at the same time the air conditioning kicked on, the gust of dry, cold air as chilly as a blue norther.
Chapter 8
The hospital in Ft. Stockton smelled the same as every other medical facility I’d ever been in, the astringent odor of disinfectant, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. From my most recent stay in just such a facility, a rough-edged old gal named Nurse Maggie told me that these days the odor comes from something called Lodoform. It doesn’t really matter; it smells like misery.
Border Agent Manual Trevino was tethered to his hospital bed by a tangle of tubes and what looked like electrical lines. Flowers filled every available space except for the couch full of bags and the obligatory light brown recliner occupied by a tired but attractive blonde woman I assumed to be his wife.
Hat in hand, I entered the room. She looked up. In the elevated bed to my right, Trevino’s swollen eyes were closed. His face a mass of purple and bluish bruises. His bottom lip was stitched, as were several lacerations. It looked like he’d been hit with a truck.
Her immensely sad, dark and moist eyes went to the badge on my shirt, then the Sweetheart Grips on the Colt 1911 on my belt. “Can I help you?”
Rangers are used to such an examination from those who seldom see us. I stepped closer to the foot of the bed. There was no way to tell if he was unconscious or asleep. Clicks and hums came from the equipment plugged into the wall above Trevino’s head. A flat-panel TV on the opposite wall flickered, the tinny sound coming from a handset looped over the bed’s side rail.
“I’m Sonny Hawke. Texas Ranger. I came to see if I could speak to Agent Trevino about what happened last night.”
I’d gotten the call about the incident right after breakfast from Major Parker. The murder of one agent and Trevino’s severe beating was the lead news story on the radio as I drove to Ft. Stockton.
“You’re his wife?”
“Yes. He’s asleep.”
Relief washed through me. Sleep is better than unconscious. “That’s good. He needs the rest. Has he been waking up very often?”
Her Texas accent was soft. She pulled a strand of hair behind one ear. “He’s in and out.” She glanced over at her battered husband, and her face softened either in love or sympathy. I couldn’t tell which. “The doctors have him on some pretty heavy pain medication.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I doubt he can tell you anything more than he’s already told the other officers who’ve been here this morning.”
“I bet there was a line. Was he awake long?”
“Long enough to answer the same questions over and over.” Her voice sharpened, a wife defending her husband in any way she could.
“That’s how we are.” I tried not to give her what my wife calls my puppy-dog look. I knew she was hurting, but I didn’t want to make her think I was being patronizing. “Who was here besides his commander?”
“How about Border Patrol, the sheriff’s department, highway patrol, FBI, Homeland Security . . .”
“Everyone, huh?”
“Yep. Even another Ranger. You’re the second. Why don’t you read his report? I can boil it down for you. In a nutshell, Rosie says he doesn’t remember anything after he and Frank went on duty.”
We were skating on thin ice, and I could tell she was barely holding it together. “I’ll probably read it, but I need to speak with him myself, if that’s okay with you.”
Her face softened and I could tell I’d scored one with her. I was probably the first guy who actually asked permission, instead of seeing it as their duty.
“I don’t want to wake him up.”
I realized I’d been fiddling with the brim of my straw hat and dropped my arm. “Look, I know you’re give out. Why don’t you take a break for a few minutes, go get some coffee, or go to the bathroom.” I watched her unconsciously reach for her cell phone. “Or go call and check on the kids. I heard you had three. Get some air and talk to them outside. The sunshine’ll make you feel a little better. If he wakes up, I’ll talk to him. If he doesn’t, then you get a break.”
She hesitated, then came to a decision. Gathering her purse and the phone, she stood. She glanced at her husband lying still as death. “He’s been asleep for a while. He might wake up.”
“It won’t be me that does it.”
Agent Trevino’s lips parted, but his eyes remained closed. His voice was weak, but you could tell he was the kind of man who had a sense of humor and was full of determination. “Who can sleep with you two yakking over there. Lucy, you go on out for a few minutes while I talk to this Ranger.”
She gently took his hand. “Will that be okay?”
“Sure.” A crease appeared at the corner of his mouth. “I’m fine right now, at least until the drugs wear off.”
She gave his hand another squeeze and met my gaze with a determined look that spoke volumes before she left the room. I took her place on the vinyl recliner positioned at an angle beside Trevino’s head and put my hat on the tray beside the bed. “Did you hear who I said I was?”
“Hawke.” He licked his lips with a dry tongue.
Seeing a plastic mug the size of a water barrel beside my hat, I picked it up and angled the adjustable straw. “Here’s some water. Can you turn your head? Or I can raise you up some.”
He turned enough to take the straw between his lips and drank like a horse. “Thanks.”
“I didn’t think to ask. Are you supposed to have that much water?”
“We’ll know in a little while.”
I liked the guy. “Feel like talking?”
“It’s about all I can do right now. I’m pretty light-headed, but ask your questions.”
“Tell me what happened last night.”
His story was simple, but the words came slow and hesitant. He recalled starting their shift and pulling onto the highway. The next thing he remembered was waking up in the emergency room and hearing that his partner Frank Nelson was dead.
“Do you remember which highway you were on?”
“Like I said, nothing.”
“They found you laying on the shoulder of Highway 1776, not far from Coyanosa.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“How long were you and Frank partners?”
“About a year.”
“Who usually drove?”
“Me.”
“You were driving that night, then.”
“Yep.”
“You pulled out of the lot. Which way did you turn?”
“Right.”
“Good. Where were you going? Do you remember any conversation y’all had? Anything as simple as the weather, sports, sick kids? Maybe you guys said you intended to patrol one particular stretch of road.”
The wrinkles in the corners of his blackened and swollen eyes deepened for a microsecond, but enough to let me know there was something he remembered or didn’t want to discuss.
“What?”
“Nothing. I don’t remember
what we talked about.”
“You guys were found on the side of the road. There were fresh tire tracks in the sand in front of your vehicle. It looks as if y’all pulled somebody over.”
Instead of answering, he gave a tiny shake of his head. “Don’t remember it, if we did.”
“Who usually called it in when you made a stop?”
He swallowed and didn’t answer immediately. A prickle at the back of my neck told me something wasn’t right. “Frank.”
“S.O.P.?”
“Yes.”
I wished I could see his eyes, but they remained closed. I wondered if he wasn’t able to open them, if it was too painful. “So he would have called it in, if you’d stopped anyone.”
“Yes.”
I waited in the silence broken only by the sounds of the equipment monitoring his vitals, and the EID, or electronic infusion device that regulated the flow of liquids flowing into his arm.
The question finally came and it seemed like he was playing a role, doing what I should have expected. “Did he always make the call. Was there any time he didn’t?”
I waited, not trying to give the poor guy grief, but to see what his reactions were. Something wasn’t adding up, and I couldn’t figure what it was. “No.”
“He didn’t this time.”
I knew then that he was hiding something, because a single tear rolled from the least swollen eye and his chest hitched. Once.
Agent Frank Nelson committed a vital sin. Tracks in the sand told the story. They made a stop, but he didn’t call it in. We always, always, call in a stop. It’s ingrained. Frank had a reason not to follow procedure, and I wondered what it was.
The machine hummed again, dispensing a dose of clear liquid into his IV tube. I figured it was for pain, because Trevino sighed. His voice softened. “He should have, but he recognized . . .” His eyes rolled like a tired toddler and he slipped into a deep sleep.
Dammit!
The drugs almost caused him to slip and tell me what I needed to know. It was obvious that Frank didn’t want anyone to know they’d stopped a vehicle that night. But for what reason, and why did Trevino look the other way?
Frustrated, I sat there beside the bed, thinking, until his wife came back. I hugged her neck and left, hoping Agents Trevino and Frank Nelson hadn’t been playing some dangerous game that had already cost one man his life.
Before I had time to ponder that thought, I got a call that Frank Nelson’s foster mom and her sister had been involved in an attempted murder at the same time Frank was killed. I knew where I was headed next.
Chapter 9
It’s not a long way from Ballard down to Del Rio in Texas terms, a little over three hours. I headed down there as quick as I could to check out such an odd coincidence.
Travel in the Lone Star state is usually measured in hours instead of miles. For example, if I was telling someone how far it is between Ballard and Brownsville, on the southern tip of Texas, I’d say nearly twelve hours instead of 656 miles. It’s our way of dealing with the vast distances Texans have to travel.
The time alone gave me time to figure out all the fancy technology in the new Dodge dually. The white truck replaced my old champagne-colored pickup after I was forced off the road a few months earlier into an East Texas bayou, not far from Jasper, way back behind the Pine Curtain.
I’m not a technology guy for sure. Even cell phones bumfuzzle me, and I have trouble enough with ’em when things get hot. Learning to use the radio and cruise control on the truck was aggravatin’ enough, but there were bells and whistles I didn’t know I had.
The Michelins whined on the empty highway as I finally got the radio to working. George Strait was singing about cowboys like us when the phone rang. The large screen on the dash showed it was Major Parker, and all kinds of things happened. The words “Accept,” appeared on the touch screen, so I took my eyes off the road long enough to tap it with a forefinger.
“Hello?”
“I didn’t think the call was going through.”
“Took me a second to figure out how to answer it.” The dually punched a hole through the air in the barren South Texas landscape near Langtry. Best known for Judge Roy Bean and his Law West of the Pecos, I always thought he was nothing but a con man of questionable sense and quality.
I was running along the Rio Grande in a hardscrabble caliche world of heat, catclaw cactus, creosote, and a variety of armed desert plants I couldn’t identify on a bet. In Mexico, across the river on my right and beyond the bleached, crumbling cliffs cut by the river eons ago, it was even rougher and harder to live.
Papers rattled on the other end of the call and Major Parker cleared his throat. “I got some more info for you.”
“Go ahead, but I can’t write it down.”
He grunted into the phone, knowing what I meant. Rolling along at eighty-five miles an hour, I couldn’t chance taking my eyes off the shimmering two-lane.
“Nelson has no one else but a daughter in Hawaii. With her permission, our investigators searched his house and found two hundred thousand in cash. All hundred-dollar bills. The house had a high-end security system on it, too. This whole thing smells to high heaven, so I’m not going to tell you what I think. I need your assessment of the situation.”
“What situation is that?”
“The one that’s about to be your full-time job until you get to the bottom of it.”
* * *
Crime scene tape was a flimsy barrier around a neat little frame and stucco house in Del Rio. Two police cars were parked on the street outside the scene. I killed the diesel engine and stepped out, adjusting the new O’Farrell hat that replaced another one I’d replaced months earlier.
It seemed like I was keeping that little Santa Fe hat shop in business.
The yellow tape was wrapped around whatever they could find to cordon off the area, trees, posts, and the radio antenna on a tired-looking Ford Pinto parked in front of the house. Police, sheriff’s department, and DPS cars lined the street. I lifted the tape with one finger and ducked underneath. A uniformed police officer came out of the house at the same time and started to read me the riot act until he saw the cinco peso on my shirt.
He straightened a little as I walked up the short, cracked walk leading to the front door. A dry breeze rustled the tall palm in the yard. “I’m surprised to see a Ranger here.”
I shook his hand. “Sonny Hawke. I just got the call a little while ago.” That specific time frame is acceptable in Texas. “What’s up?”
“I’m Ybarra.” He was a good-looking kid. They all look like kids to me these days.
“What can you tell me?”
“Damnedest thing. Three individuals made entry through the back door and ran into something they didn’t expect.”
“What’s that?”
“Two tough little old ladies with revolvers, and those old gals won. Forensics is through shooting pictures. C’mon in.”
Banana trees grew up against the tiny porch, shading the entry. The interior was what I expected, a once neat house that now contained half a dozen cops trying not to step in congealing pools of blood. I took my hat off and paused just inside the door. The ladies were sitting in comfortable-looking chairs in front of the windows.
The one farthest away noticed me first and perked up. She wiped her eyes and it looked as if she’d been crying. “Ruby, looky here what just walked in.”
The other saw me and grinned, but it wasn’t as bright as I figured it should be. “Settle down, girl. I recognize that badge. You’re a Texas Ranger.”
I admired those two old gals. They’d been in a shootout the night before and had killed the intruders, but they didn’t seem any the worse for wear.
“Yes, ma’am.” I looked around for another chair, but there was nothing but an ottoman with a complex needlepoint top. It didn’t look like it’d hold a toddler, so I stood. I’m glad I did, because a huge calico cat flowed onto the ottoman like a panther, glaring at
me as if she knew I’d considered sitting down.
A detective in black slacks and a sport coat stepped out of the kitchen with a notepad in his hand. I met his gaze. “I’m Sonny Hawke. I’d like to talk to these ladies and then visit with y’all outside, when you’re finished.”
He nodded. “Lieutenant Cordova. I’m supposed to meet with Sheriff Ortiz in a little bit. He should be here by the time you’re finished.” He gave the sisters a little wave. “Ladies.”
“See you out there.” I turned to the Nelson sisters who hadn’t taken their attention off me for a minute. I knew one had a different last name, but the Nelson Sisters came to mind easy as pie. “Y’all want to tell me what happened?”
I took notes while Miss Ruby and Miss Harriet alternated like my twins do when telling a story. They’d been together so long I figured they could finish each other’s sentences on any topic. Their routine was seamless, and I just listened.
“All right. You’re telling me you’ve never seen these guys before.”
“No.”
“You sure they’ve never been to the house. You haven’t seen them at the grocery store, maybe accidentally cut ’em off with your car?”
They shook their heads in unison.
An old-fashioned black push button phone rested on a telephone table not far from the television setup. “Have any calls come in from people you don’t know?”
“Why, honey, that happens about three times a day. It’s usually people trying to sell us something or get a donation.”
“We don’t give ’em a dime.” Miss Harriet set her lips in a straight line.
“I need to ask this question just right. Y’all know about Frank.”
Their eyes brimmed over at the same time. Miss Ruby nodded. “We know, hon. We got word this mornin’.”
Relieved that I didn’t have to give them the bad news, I plowed on. “When was the last time you heard from Frank, Miss Ruby?”
“Why, it’s been years. We were hoping to see him this coming Christmas.”
Miss Harriet dabbed at her eyes with a tissue she plucked from an embroidered holder on the table between them. “He was a good boy, but he always had an edge on him I didn’t like.”
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