18 Wheel Avenger

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  His hand trembled a little as it closed around the neck of the bottle. Whether the tremor was from age, a neurological condition, or too much to drink was also impossible to say.

  The fat man spat a few curses in Spanish, lifted the machete, and slammed it down on the table in front of the gringo. The blade bit deeply into the old, scarred wood. The fat man’s lips drew back from his teeth in a snarl as he leaned forward.

  “I will not cut off your head,” he said. “The next time, my blade will cleave your skull down to your shoulders, viejo!”

  “Ain’t gonna be no next time. You really are stupid. Your little knife’s stuck, gordo!”

  At the same time, the big man moved up behind the fat man’s three compadres and said in a loud voice, “Hey! What’re you doing to that old geezer?”

  The fat man wrenched at the machete. The old man was right.

  The blade had embedded itself so deeply in the tabletop that it was stuck.

  The old man came up out of his chair like a rattlesnake uncoiling and swung the tequila bottle he held by the neck.

  The fat man tried to jerk back out of the way. The old man was too fast. The bottle smacked hard against the side of the fat man’s head but didn’t break. The impact made the fat man take a quick step to his right, but he caught himself and grinned.

  “I’m gonna mess you up, viejo.”

  The old man said, “Oh, crap.”

  The fat man’s three buddies turned toward the big hombre who had challenged them. He didn’t give them a chance to set themselves. Throwing his arms out wide, he charged them, grabbing the two on the flanks and bulling his shoulder right into the one in the middle. That bull rush swept them all backward, into the fat man who was trying to wrench the machete loose from the table.

  It was like a tidal wave of flesh washing over the fat man and knocking him forward into the table. The old man hopped out of the way with a nimbleness that belied his age.

  The weight of all four men came down on the table. Its spindly legs snapped and the whole thing crashed to the floor. The fat man and his amigos sprawled on the wreckage. One of the men howled in pain as he got against the edge of the machete and the blade sliced into his leg.

  With an athletic grace uncommon in a man of his size, the big hombre had caught his balance before he could fall on top of the others. He took a step back and looked at the old man.

  “We’d better get out of here.”

  “Not yet,” the old man said with a gleam in his eyes. “Pancho and me still got to settle up.”

  Chapter 2

  The big man rolled his eyes and then swung around to face the rest of the customers in the dim, smoke-hazed cantina. They were watching with a mixture of keen interest and trepidation, but none of them seemed to want to mix in.

  According to the bartender, the fat man and his friends worked for the Zaragosa drug cartel, and nobody wanted to mess in cartel business.

  The old man leaned over, caught hold of the fat man’s dirty shirt front with his left hand, pulled him up a little, and used his right hand to slap him hard, back and forth. Before that, the fat man had appeared to be a little stunned from being knocked down, but the sharp blows knocked his wits back about him.

  He roared in anger, used a foot to hook one of the old man’s legs out from under him. The two of them grappled together and rolled across the filthy floor.

  Two of the other three tried to get up and rejoin the fight. The third man was still yelling as he clamped both hands around his leg, which was bleeding heavily from the machete wound. It looked like he might have nicked an artery.

  As the two cartel members scrambled to their feet, the big hombre caught them by the neck from behind. The muscles in his arms and shoulders bunched as he slammed the two men together.

  Their heads clunked loudly. Both men came unhinged at the knees and crumpled to the floor again.

  The big man gestured toward the bleeder and addressed the room at large in decent Spanish. “Somebody better help him before he bleeds to death.”

  When he turned his head, he saw that the old man somehow was getting the best of his overweight opponent. The wiry old codger knelt on the fat man’s chest and punched him in the face again and again. Blood blurred the fat man’s features. The big hombre stepped up behind the old man and hooked his hands under his arms.

  “Come on,” he said. “He’s out of it. And we need to be out of here.”

  The old man was breathing hard. He glared down at the fat man. But after a few seconds, he said, “Yeah, you’re right.” He shook free of the big man’s grip. “Let’s go.”

  With the four cartel members out of action, no one else in the cantina made a move to stop the two gringos as they headed for the door. They stepped out into the hot night air. Gravel crunched under feet as they crossed the parking lot.

  The door of the squalid cinder block building slammed open behind them. The big hombre looked back and muttered, “Oh, crap,” again.

  The fat man stumbled out of the cantina and waved a pistol around in his hand. It spurted flame and thundered in the night.

  The big man sprinted toward the pickup he had driven across the international bridge from Texas earlier in the evening. The old man followed him.

  “Where’s your car?” the big hombre flung over his shoulder.

  “Don’t have one! I walked across the bridge!”

  That was actually smarter than driving in Mexico, although wandering around a border town at night wasn’t a very bright thing to do these days. Such places had always been hotbeds of crime, but now, with the so-called authorities virtually powerless when compared to the cartels, Norte Americanos risked their lives being anywhere near the border, let alone across it.

  At the moment, however, the big hombre was glad he had transportation out of here. The fat man was shooting wild, but there was no telling when he might the range.

  “Come with me!” the big man yelled to his new-found companion. He hoped nobody had stolen or slashed his tires while he was in the cantina, or damaged the engine in some way.

  The pickup had keyless entry, so both doors unlocked when he grabbed the handle of the driver’s side door with the remote in his pocket. The old man yanked the passenger door open and piled in while the big hombre threw himself behind the wheel.

  Gravel kicked up not far from the pickup as the bullets came closer. The engine cranked, caught. The big man slammed the truck into gear and peeled out, spraying gravel behind him. A wild turn onto the pot-holed highway and he was speeding toward the cluster of high-intensity lights that marked the international bridge a quarter of a mile away.

  The big man watched the rearview mirror. No headlights popped into view. That was good. Even if the bridge wasn’t busy, crossing would take long enough that the fat man and his friends could have caught up if they wanted to. Maybe they were back there attending to the guy who’d sliced his leg open.

  “Well, that was a mite exciting,” the old man said. He didn’t sound drunk anymore.

  The big man just glanced over at him and didn’t say anything.

  At the bridge, he guided the pickup in line in the Ready Lane behind two other vehicles. The American border guards passed those through fairly quickly. Still no headlights coming up behind the pickup. The old man handed the big hombre his driver’s license.

  He put it with his own and handed them to the guard as he pulled up to the now-lowered barrier.

  The guard scanned the RFID chips on the licenses and then nodded at the results that came up on his scanner. He asked the usual customs questions about regulated goods they might have with them.

  The big man said, “Nope, not a thing.”

  The guard handed the licenses back, nodded at his cohort in the control booth who pushed buttons and started the barrier lifting. The big man waited for it to clear and drove through at an unhurried pace, back onto Texas soil.

  He drove through the border city, a garish oasis of lights in the vast darkness of
the border country, and pulled into the parking lot of a nondescript motel on the north side of town, away from the border.

  He brought the pickup to a stop beside an 18-wheeler parked at the edge of the lot, a Kenworth long-hood conventional with an extra-large sleeper behind the cab.

  The big hombre killed the lights and engine and sat there in the darkness for a long moment before he turned to the old man and said, “All right, Barry, what the hell was all that about?”

  Chapter 3

  “Take it easy, Jake. It was all under control.”

  “It didn’t look under control to me,” Jake Rivers said.

  “Especially when blood started spurting out of that guy’s leg. He may have bled out by now.”

  Barry Rivers shrugged. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. Just bad luck the guy fell on the machete and cut himself. But I imagine Pancho got the bleeding stopped in time. If he didn’t . . . well, that’s one more Zaragosa foot soldier the good guys won’t have to worry about in the future.”

  He paused, then added dryly, “Anyway, what happens on the other side of the river isn’t your worry. You were a little outside of your jurisdiction, after all.”

  Jake leaned back against the pickup seat and sighed. “So were you.”

  “Nope, not really.” Barry shook his head. “I don’t have any jurisdiction. I just go where I need to go and do what needs to be done.”

  Jake might have argued with him out of habit, but deep down, he knew his uncle was right. Sometimes the good guys had to bend the rules a little.

  The trick was not to bend them so much that you became one of the bad guys.

  Unfortunately, that distinction was a pretty murky one sometimes.

  He pushed that thought aside and said, “What I want to know is what we were doing there in the first place. Why’d you ask me to meet you there? And why, in the name of all that’s holy, would you pretend to be drunk and pick a fight with a bunch of cartel enforcers?”

  “How do you know I wasn’t really drunk?”

  Jake made a skeptical noise. “You wouldn’t have sobered up this fast if you were. Anyway, in the five years I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you drunk. I doubt if you’d start now.”

  Barry chuckled. “You don’t know everything about me, kid. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of. I was pretty close to being a drunk for a while. But that was a long time ago.” Barry shook his head. “A whole other life, it seems like sometimes.”

  Silence lay between them for several moments. It was true that quite a bit of Barry’s shadowy existence was still shrouded in mystery to Jake. Up until a few years earlier, Jake had believed that his uncle was long dead, killed in an explosion when Jake was just a child.

  Barry had survived that murder attempt, though. Plastic surgery had turned him into the top-secret operative code-named Dog.

  He had worked for those at the highest levels of government.

  Sometimes he had worked against those at the highest level of government when they didn’t have the best interests of the country and its citizens at heart.

  Over time Barry Rivers—“Dog”, or as he was sometimes called, The Rig Warrior—had become part legend, part boogeyman in the intelligence community. Some people didn’t believe he even existed, or at least professed not to believe. There was a good chance they just didn’t want to draw his attention to them.

  Because where Dog went, death often followed.

  Jake might not ever have known any of that if a gang of vicious criminals and terrorists hadn’t taken over the university campus where he was taking post-graduate courses and trying to figure out what to do with his life.

  A decorated veteran, deadly with fists, blades, and guns, Jake hadn’t taken that atrocity lying down. He had fought back with everything he had, and along the way he had gotten some vital help from a mysterious figure who had turned out to be his long-lost uncle.

  Discovering the truth about Barry had led Jake to take up a similar mission of his own to right the wrongs in the world, only these days Jake was doing it through more established channels.

  With the backing of a special agent named Walt Graham he had met during that crisis at the university, Jake had joined the FBI, graduating at the top of his training class at Quantico.

  So far, it had been the best decision of his life. He enjoyed the work, liked the idea of taking down lowlife scum in all walks of life.

  The politics in the upper echelons of the bureau sometimes bothered him, but he ignored that aspect as much as he could and focused on catching the bad guys.

  He was good at catching them, too. He could have risen in the bureau’s hierarchy—if he had wanted to. But that would have meant playing those political games, and Jake was having no part of that.

  He had stayed in touch with Barry, though, and even helped him out now and then, when he could without straying too far from FBI protocols. He was a straight arrow, to use an old-fashioned, out of fashion term. He knew it. Couldn’t help it.

  So he hadn’t been surprised when Barry had contacted him through the usual back channels and requested a meet in that cantina on the other side of the border.

  Jake, who was working out of the Dallas field office these days, had been able to take a few personal days to make the trip down here. Barry had told Jake to pretend not to know him, at least until Barry gave him a sign that it was all right, so that was what Jake had done.

  “You could have gotten us killed, you know,” he said now, not caring for how irritable he sounded but unable to do anything about that, either. “Those cartel guys aren’t known for their tender mercy. That fat one wanted to cut your head off.”

  “Nah, I don’t think he really did. He was just fooling, showing off for his amigos.”

  “Are you crazy? After that he tried to shoot us.”

  “Believe me, Jake,” Barry said, “if Pancho really wanted to shoot us, we’d be dead now.”

  “You can’t know—” Jake stopped abruptly. He looked over at his uncle. The light from the motel’s neon sign painted Barry’s lean face in greed, red, and yellow shades.

  “You do know, don’t you?” Jake went on. “You know what kind of shot that cartel enforcer is.”

  “Pancho gets top marks on the range,” Barry said. “He’s one of the best shots in the DEA.”

  William W. Johnstone is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over 300 books, including the series THE MOUNTAIN MAN, PREACHER, , MACCALLISTER: , LUKE JENSEN, BOUNTY HUNTER, FLINTLOCK , THOSE JENSEN BOYS, SAVAGE TEXAS, MATT JENSEN, THE LAST MOUNTAIN MAN; and THE FAMILY JENSEN. His thrillers include Tyranny, Black Friday, The Doomsday Bunker, and Trigger Warning.

  Visit the website at www.williamjohnstone.net.