High Desert Vengeance (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 5)

by Peter Nealen

  “That doesn’t look like a soccer mom getting home from practice to me,” he murmured.

  “Nope,” Curtis replied. Their earlier byplay had been forgotten, the current situation turning both men into cold, calculating killers. They were predators, taking in details and filing them into a plan to kill anyone in their path.

  Rather as he’d expected, the two vehicles slowed and stopped in the street just outside the Ramos house.

  The doors swung open, and four young men piled out of each vehicle. Flanagan felt his adrenaline spike as he saw a combination of shotguns, pistols, ARs, and what looked like a couple of submachineguns in their hands.

  “Definitely not a soccer mom,” he said, lifting his OBR out of its place alongside the seat.

  “Brazen bastards, aren’t they?” Curtis commented, as he did the same, cracking his door.

  “From what we’ve seen, it’s not like they need to worry much about the sheriff, do they?” Flanagan asked. “Across the street, to the shadows behind that tree. We engage as soon as we’ve got a shot. Preferably before they can make entry. And let’s try not to put any bullets into the house itself.”

  “There’s eight of ‘em,” Curtis pointed out.

  “And I doubt they’re expecting to get flanked,” Flanagan said, as he got out of the truck, closing the door gently behind him and starting around the hood.

  “I hear you,” Curtis said. “Let’s do it.”

  Moving at a fast glide, the two men moved across the darkened street, their rifles in their shoulders, as the gangsters swaggered toward Joaquin Ramos’ door.

  Chapter 17

  The lead gangster, a tall, bulky guy with a high-and-tight haircut and wearing a leather jacket, was just about to kick in Ramos’ door when Flanagan brought his rifle to his shoulder, canted it slightly to one side to bring the angled iron sights that jutted out to the left of the scope to bear, and fired.

  The suppressor coughed loudly, and the gangster staggered, looking down at the sudden pain in his side in confusion. Flanagan hadn’t been leaning quite as far into the shot as he might have, but he quickly brought the muzzle down from recoil and put a second round into the man’s torso with the next step.

  He was already dragging the sights to the next one, a fat kid with a shotgun, as the first man crumpled and Curtis opened fire. Curtis wasn’t quite as precise as Flanagan; he rapid-fire dumped five or six rounds into his first target, near the back of the little group of would-be home invaders. That one went sprawling, at least four holes in his torso, falling on his side and halfway knocking the man next to him off balance.

  Flanagan was already engaging his second target, putting a rapid, controlled pair into the young man’s chest as he swung around, looking for the gunfire that had felled the first man. The two of them were somewhat in the shadows, but probably partly silhouetted by the glow of the streetlight behind them. It was too late for the guy in the puffy parka with the MAC-11, though, as Flanagan’s rounds punched bloody holes out his back with puffs of red-stained pile stuffing.

  The third man back managed to get a shotgun blast off, the roar of the report sounding like thunder that echoed down the street, as the pellets hissed too close to Flanagan’s head, clipping branches off the tree next to him. Flanagan dropped to a knee and shot that one in the face, the man’s head snapping backward as the bullet punched through his eye and blasted out the back of his skull. He dropped straight down to the grass as his brain stopped sending signals to the rest of his nervous system, the sound of the shotgun hitting the dirt almost muted by comparison with the rest of the noise that was echoing down the street.

  Curtis had dropped another, but the driver had stayed in the Escalade, and suddenly appeared around the back hatch, an AR pistol in his hands. He fired half a dozen shots as fast as he could pull the trigger, the muzzle flash a brilliant strobe on the darkened street and the harsh reports echoing almost as loudly as the shotgun blast. Bullets snapped over both men’s heads, thumping into the tree on the front lawn where they were crouched and slamming into the front of the brick house next door.

  Both Blackhearts were forced to drop to the ground to avoid the unaimed gunfire, and Flanagan found that his line of fire was cut off. Curtis was twisting to engage the driver, but at the same instant, the slightly shell-shocked gang-bangers who had survived were getting their wits about them again.

  He snapped off a shot at one of the remaining three, just as that one leveled an Uzi at him. He was a split-second faster, and his bullet took the man in the clavicle, staggering him and making him twist backward with the shock and the pain, his burst of 9mm going high and wild.

  Flanagan dropped his sights minutely and finished him with a round through the heart. He swayed for a second, then fell on his face.

  The harsh cracks of 5.56 fire had stopped, and the driver was down behind the Escalade. The last two were running for it.

  For a moment, Flanagan had his sights square on the taller one’s back. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  Letting out a breath between clenched teeth, he took his finger off the trigger. In some circumstances, shooting the squirters might be legit. Here, Stateside, it would be murder, no question about it. And Flanagan wasn’t ready to cross that line.

  “Grab what brass you can,” he whispered. “Then we need to get out of here.” He was already digging in the grass with his off hand, searching for his expended casings. They weren’t quite as useful for law enforcement as TV and movies made it seem, but he’d been through a lot of training that emphasized never leaving target indicators behind.

  He scooped the seven brass cartridge cases, a couple of them still warm, into his pocket, and got up on a knee. Glancing around, he didn’t see any other activity on the street, no lights coming on or people sticking their heads out to see what was going on. The Espino-Gallo gang must have been running roughshod over this town long enough that everybody just hunkered down when they heard gunfire.

  Curtis was having a harder time finding his brass. Flanagan dug another magazine out and swapped it with the half-expended mag in the rifle, then just waited, scanning, his rifle held ready. They weren’t in a good position to drop security right at the moment.

  “Hurry up!” he hissed as his own sense of urgency to get off the X intensified. They were sitting ducks out there, and he had little doubt that somebody was calling the sheriff’s department right then and there. He wanted to be away from the place by then. He doubted that the gangsters would send anyone else after Ramos that night. This bloodbath would serve as a hell of a warning.

  Curtis straightened suddenly, stuffing something in his pocket, just as a phone rang.

  Both of them froze, glancing at each other, then at the bodies strewn across Ramos’ front yard. The ringtone, sounding more than a little like some Northern Mexican narcocorrido, repeated itself. It was one of the gangbanger’s phones.

  “Do we risk it?” Curtis whispered.

  Flanagan frowned toward the pile of corpses. “Fuck it,” he muttered, and dashed forward, deciding that the risk of exposing himself in the bluish light of Ramos’ front porch light was worth the potential intelligence.

  The phone had actually fallen out of a pocket, and was lying in the grass, the glow of its screen forming a faint halo around it. Flanagan reached down, scooped it up, and shoved it in his jacket pocket. “Let’s go.”

  The two of them moved rapidly away from the scene of the carnage, heading straight for Flanagan’s truck. They both piled in and Flanagan started the engine, putting the vehicle in gear and pulling away from the curb almost as soon as the engine had caught. It was a short movement to the intersection, and he quickly turned south, away from the scene and heading toward the open desert, out of town.

  Behind them, red and blue lights started to flash behind the houses, and sirens wailed in the night. The sheriff’s office was already on the way.

  ***

  Santelli looked up at the police flashers whirling past, headi
ng toward the east side of town. He’d heard the gunfire, faintly, what there had been of it. He was already pretty sure that Brannigan’s hunch had been correct, and furthermore that Flanagan and Curtis had succeeded in stopping the hit.

  Jenkins was craning his neck to try to see where the sheriff’s department cars were going. Santelli punched him in the shoulder. “We know where they’re going,” he said. “Focus on the target.”

  The target was Acosta’s house. A sprawling, red brick L-shape, on an expansive lot encircled by a low stone and wrought-iron fence, it was probably the nicest house in Lordsburg. At the very least, it was the nicest house in Lordsburg that Santelli had seen. An arched carport housed two cars and a pickup, all of them almost immaculate, gleaming slightly in the light of the streetlights and porch light.

  A light came on inside the house, dimly visible through the windows from where Santelli and Jenkins were sitting in the rental Frontier, halfway down the next block. “Well, he’s up,” Jenkins commented. “Though I imagine that just about everybody in town is up, after that.”

  “Depends,” Santelli said. “I’ve lived in neighborhoods where you hear gunfire, open one eye, see that it’s not aimed at your house, and roll over and go back to sleep.”

  Jenkins just shrugged, and kept watching the house.

  It had been almost twenty minutes since the shooting had stopped when the door opened and Francisco Acosta, fully dressed and wearing a thick black coat, came out of the front door and hurried over to the carport, where he climbed into the big dually pickup and fired it up with a roar. In moments, he was backing out of the driveway and turning down the street.

  He was heading toward the flashing red-and-blue lights and the scene of the shooting. Jenkins put their rental pickup in gear and followed, keeping the headlights off for the moment.

  “Well, looks like it’s all coming together,” Santelli said.

  “You think so?” Jenkins asked.

  “He’s going to the crime scene, isn’t he?” Santelli pointed out. “He wants to know what went wrong.”

  “Or maybe he’s just being the ‘pillar of the community,’ and checking on things, offering his support to the sheriff, or something,” Jenkins countered. “We’ve only got Gomez’ cousin’s word that he’s dirty, and the Colonel’s hunch because of the way he was acting yesterday afternoon. I mean, he’s obviously the most well-off guy in this hick town, if not the county. What’s he really got to gain?”

  “You might be surprised,” Santelli said dryly. “My uncle was a Boston cop. You wouldn’t believe the stories he used to tell. Rich guys, with hot wives, girlfriends, more money than they knew what to do with, penthouse apartments, mansions on the Cape, connections out the ass. And they’d go down because none of it was enough. They’d cheat, they’d steal, hell, some of ‘em would even try to get people killed.” He snorted. “I have no doubt whatsoever in my mind that Acosta could be cut from the same cloth. And this seems to corroborate it.”

  They followed Acosta across the railroad tracks and to the edge of the sheriff’s department cordon around the block. Jenkins kept his distance, and parked a block back from where Acosta had stopped, just short of the yellow police tape.

  The two of them sat in the dark, watching. There were three sheriff’s cars parked on the street, their spotlights on the side of the Ramos house, the parked Escalade and Impreza, and the bodies sprawled grotesquely in attitudes of violent death on Ramos’ front lawn. The man who had to be Ramos himself was standing on the sidewalk, talking to Sheriff Thomas, while the deputies cataloged the entire scene, taking pictures and marking everything they found. The whole scene was wildly lit by flashing red-and-blue lights, in addition to the bright white spots.

  Acosta got out of his truck and walked to the police tape, ducking under it. Nobody stopped him, and he didn’t act furtive in the least.

  “Still thinks he’s untouchable,” Santelli muttered. “Look at the nerve of this guy. Doesn’t know what happened, but he walks right into the scene of the hit he set up like it’s nothing. Snow couldn’t melt in his mouth, I bet.”

  “Again, assuming that he’s as dirty as we think,” Jenkins pointed out.

  “You really are a contrarian son of a bitch, aren’t you, Jenkins?” Santelli asked, without taking his eyes off Acosta.

  “It’s just a point that should be considered,” Jenkins protested. “We’re operating Stateside. The rules are different here.”

  “Horseshit,” Santelli said. “Right is right, and intel is intel. Gutierrez fingered him, he appears to get in a fight with Ramos, and lo and behold, a bunch of shooters show up at Ramos’ house. And he immediately runs over to see what happened. I’ll grant you that he’s not a smart bad guy, but he’s definitely a bad guy.” He snorted again. “I know you, Jenkins. You still gotta get that SEAL chip off your shoulder. You’re no better or worse than any other guy on the team. You’re not in the Navy anymore. Accept it, and quit trying to push back just to try to be on a different level than the Marines and Rangers.”

  Jenkins didn’t reply, though he crossed his arms as he sat back behind the wheel, frowning as they watched Acosta.

  Whatever he was saying to Thomas didn’t look like it was going over all that well. Thomas, for once, appeared to be actually doing his job, and didn’t look like he wanted to talk to Acosta at that moment. He brushed the older man off, and moved to take another look at the bodies as one of his deputies spotted a detail and called him over.

  Acosta stood where Thomas had left him, looking over the scene. He ran a hand over his face as he stared.

  “Damn,” Jenkins muttered. “How many bodies, you think?”

  “Can’t really see well enough from here to count,” Santelli said. “But knowing Joe and Kevin, they put in some work here tonight.” He glanced at Ramos, who was standing with his arms around his wife and kids. He didn’t know how many kids Ramos was supposed to have, but given that they were standing there outside the police line, watching the crime scene that had been their house, instead of speeding to the hospital, told him that it was pretty likely that none of them had gotten hit. Flanagan and Curtis had moved fast.

  Acosta took a step toward Thomas, hesitated, then stopped. He stood there for a long moment, then looked down at his phone. Then he looked around him for a moment, ran his hand over his face again, tucked the phone back in his pocket, and started for the perimeter. He ducked back under the police tape and climbed back into his truck. His brake lights flared red, then the white backups lit, and he backed away from the barricade, as Jenkins and Santelli both shrank down to avoid the illumination that glowed inside their own vehicle.

  Acosta backed up until he got to an open driveway, then turned in, using it to turn around and head back down the street the way he’d come.

  “Shit,” Jenkins muttered, looking around. “We’re not going to be able to turn around without being spotted.”

  Santelli sighed. “And rolling without headlights is probably going to get the sheriff’s deputies on us. That’d look suspicious as all hell.” He dug his phone out of his jacket pocket. “Time to hand him off.”

  ***

  “Yeah, I got him,” Wade said. “We’ll take it from here.”

  Bianco was sitting next to him, behind the wheel. Wade looked at him. “How are you at discreet follow, Vinnie?” he asked.

  “I can figure it out,” Bianco said. “Never did it professionally before. I was a machinegunner, then a bit of a tech guy.” He didn’t mention that his “tech” career had primarily been game coding for an app company. He’d quickly discovered that he would have preferred being a machinegunner, which was why he’d signed on with Brannigan in the first place.

  “Just keep back far enough that it’s not immediately obvious that we’re following him,” Wade said. “As soon as he gets out of town, we’ll turn off and kill the lights, then turn back in blacked out.”

  “I’m not going to be able to see much without the headlights,” Bianco a
dmitted. “My night eyes ain’t that great.”

  “Neither are mine,” Wade said, reaching into the back and pulling out a “skullcap” mount with a PVS-14 tube attached to it. “That’s what these are for. And we’re already stalking a dude, on top of Joe and Kevin getting in a firefight in a residential neighborhood, so I wouldn’t be too worried about illegally driving blacked out.”

  “Hey, I got a friend of mine to illegally track cell phones,” Bianco said. “Believe me, I’m not too worried about driving blacked out.”

  Acosta’s truck disappeared around a corner, but Bianco kept his pace. When he took the turn, the truck was ahead of them by a couple of blocks, but still quite visible. It was close to midnight, so there was little to no traffic on the streets. And even what there was wasn’t going to be enough to disguise that truck. It was probably the biggest, newest, and most expensive truck on the streets of Lordsburg, and its running lights were easy enough to pick out. Clearly, Acosta had no problem with flaunting his wealth.

  Bianco glanced over at Wade, who was watching Acosta’s taillights with his characteristic unblinking intensity. He had to wonder about the guy. He’d gotten to know Wade as well as any of the Blackhearts over the last year or so since Burma.

  He knew that Wade might or might not share the moral outrage about the scumbags victimizing Lordsburg. He was sure that he was pissed about Gomez’ family, but mainly because it was Gomez, and you don’t screw with a teammate’s family without inviting the team’s ire. That was just the way it was. But the rest of it? He suspected that Wade was mainly focused on the hunt, because it was the hunt. The reasons why didn’t matter that much to him.

  There were a lot of guys like that in the business, he’d found. In some ways he could sympathize with it; there was something about the job that spoke to him in a way nothing else ever had.