“It’s true, Quirt. I’m sure of it. You saw the leaves I brought back from the greenhouses at Ranch Number Three. Hell, it took me longer to recognize them than it did you. Jonathan Flischmann found out—and they murdered him. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Williams could have beaten a slavery rap. You know that.”
Evans’s mouth was grim. “I know, Hawk, I know. I spent a year and a half infiltrating the operation and gaining that bastard’s confidence, only to realize that his Hispanic slaves would never testify against him. They live in too much fear. To a court of law they would just look like more wetbacks content with any damn work they could find.”
Hawker was impressed. “A year and a half? You must really have it in for that guy.”
Evans gave him a strange look. “You don’t know the half of it, Hawk. Skate Williams is a psychopath. Cares about no one but himself. If it took ten years I’d still get the bastard.”
Hawker nodded and said nothing. There was something in the big Ranger’s tone that said he didn’t care to talk about it anymore.
So Hawker drifted off to a fitful sleep while Quirt Evans went to work on the phone. Before calling his fellow Rangers, he contacted the state patrol and notified them of the shipment that might have left Williams’s ranch despite Hawker’s attack. Then he went to work waking up state officials. They were prim and officious until Evans told them what it was about—and then they were outraged with disbelief.
Finally he placed a call to the governor. The governor was asleep, of course. Evans insisted that he be awakened.
Ten minutes later the governor returned his call. At first the governor refused to believe him. And then the disbelief became shock. And the shock became disappointment.
The Governor admitted that he loved Rio Bravo Burgers. He said now he understood why he felt “antsy” if he didn’t have them at least a couple of times a week.…
James Hawker awoke late in the morning. Outside Sancho Rigera’s adobe ranch house, he pumped water over his head.
The sun was pale yellow, flat against the old western sky.
Juanita Rigera and her mother were washing clothes in a wooden tub. He noticed the graceful lines of the girl. Her blue-black hair was tied in a ponytail, and she wore a white cotton dress that emphasized the tautness of her body. She was lovely indeed, and seeing her made him think of Cristoba.
Tonight, he thought. You’ll be free tonight.
Hawker found Sancho in a sand-and-cactus swale just beyond the village. He and a dozen other men squatted on their haunches, Mexican-fashion, before a makeshift oil drilling rig.
The men wore no shirts, and they glistened with sweat.
They had planted four old telephone poles as the rig’s foundation. High atop the poles was a platform and a block and tackle. Hooked to the block and tackle was a chunk of metal that must have weighed two hundred pounds. Centered beneath it was a section of long pipe fitted with a high-tensile-strength driving head so that the pipe would not split.
Hawker wondered where Juan Probisco had stolen it.
Before they would allow Hawker to organize them into a truck caravan for the night’s assault, they insisted on giving their “honored vice-president” of Chicago Fossil Fuels Ltd. a tour of the operation.
Hawker humored them. They joked about his growing a new arm. They suggested that the black eye and swollen face were not the result of a fistfight but of a passionate love affair instead. Hawker laughed, enjoying their company. He complimented their efforts at great length. And why not?
After all, in a few hours they would be risking their lives to free people they had never met.
Shortly afterward, the ten Texas Rangers arrived. Probably because he had seen too many late-night westerns, Hawker expected them to come by horse, dusty after a hard ride.
Instead they arrived in immaculately kept trucks, their horses in trailers behind.
The Rangers varied in shape and size, but they all seemed to have that ruddy, rugged look of humor and confidence that he had first liked in the face of Quirt Evans.
It was Evans who called them together for a briefing. It was Evans who showed them maps of the Williams’s ranch, told them how they would present the search warrant to the guards, and what the next steps would be if the guards refused to let them pass.
Hawker was only briefly introduced, and then only as a private citizen who would be going along because of his familiarity with the area.
But Hawker could see that the other Rangers knew who he was. Could see it in their eyes. And he understood why Evans had gone out of his way to purposely ignore him. It was for his own protection. So that later, when the Senate committee of investigation was formed, he would be just a faceless, nameless man none of them remembered.
Or pretended not to remember.
They left at dusk, the horses saddled and fed in the trailers behind the trucks that they would drive to the Star County line.
Just before they pulled out, Hawker placed a long-distance call to Andrea Marie Flischmann.
He wanted to tell her he had found her brother’s murderer.
There was no answer.
seventeen
So it had been a long ride. Especially for Hawker, who was no horseman.
Twice on the narrow dirt road to Williams’s estate fast trucks had passed them but paid them no mind.
The horses were disguises in and of themselves.
To people in the trucks the twelve men on horseback probably just looked like wranglers from Ranch #4.
Fortunately they couldn’t see what the riders were carrying in their saddlebags and beneath the rolled tarps.
Hawker wore a black cotton watch sweater, jeans, and worn Nike running shoes. His face and hands still hurt from the fights he had had the night before. Evans had found him a gray, weathered cowboy hat with a rattlesnake band. The knapsack stuffed with ordnance was strapped to the back of the broad-chested Arabian he rode.
When the guardhouse and high adobe fence came into view, they pulled into tighter formation, two abreast. Three hundred yards from the guardhouse, the bright searchlight flashed on. Hawker shielded his eyes and looked at Evans.
“You still insist on trying to serve that damn warrant?”
Evans winked, but Hawker sensed fear behind the calm facade. “That’s the law, Hawk. That’s what I get paid for.”
“You don’t get paid to die, Quirt. And that’s just what’s going to happen. Once they know you’re a Ranger, you won’t make it three steps from the guardhouse. Why in the hell go through the formalities?”
Evans smiled as he kicked his horse ahead. “I think you know. You were a cop once. And a damn good one, from what I’ve heard. You would have done the same thing, Hawk.”
As Hawker watched his friend trot toward his rendezvous with the guards—and probably death—he pulled open his knapsack. From it he took an electronic detonating device. It was about the size of a television remote control. But instead of buttons on its face there was a frequency dial and two toggle switches. Hawker set the frequency, then took a flare gun from the knapsack. He snapped it open and inserted a single 12-gauge-size signal cartridge.
The searchlight followed Evans as he pulled up to the guardhouse: a single man on horseback. Ol’ Quirt. The trail boss who worked over at Ranch #4 and sometimes came to doctor Skate Williams’s horses. There would be perfunctory smiles and thoughts of conversation.
But then they would notice that Quirt had changed. They would see there was something different about him.
It was the badge on his chest: the shield that identified him as a Texas Ranger.
And then they would have to kill him.
Hawker watched nervously as Evans slid down off his horse. Behind him, Hawker heard the rifle bolt click as the other Rangers readied their weapons to provide covering fire.
The two guards stepped out to meet Evans. Hawker was aware of movement behind the guardhouse: four or five more soldiers waiting in the darkness. He saw Quirt E
vans reach into his shirt and pull out the warrant. Holding it in both hands, one of the guards turned into the light so he could read it.
And then everything happened very damn quickly indeed.
There was a blur of movement, and the guard holding the paper went for his holstered automatic. But Evans got to his Colt faster, and there were two sledgehammer kerwhacks, and the guard was blown backward into the adobe wall.
As the second guard went for his gun Hawker fired the flare. It exploded over Skate Williams’s mansion with a fiery red light. It was beneath that weird crimson glow that Hawker saw Evans drop the other guard with a single shot, then turn to run to his horse. As he ran, the soldiers materialized from the shadows. They opened fire on Evans.
Quirt stumbled, spun, and fell. Somehow he managed to get up on his horse. Sitting at a sickening angle, he kicked his horse into a gallop away from the guardhouse.
Hawker didn’t hesitate. He hit the first toggle switch, and the guardhouse was pulverized by a blinding yellow explosion. The impact threw the soldiers high into the air. Backlighted by the fiery glow, they looked like tumbling rag dolls.
Hawker’s Arabian spooked as the other Rangers charged by him; the Rangers leaned low over their horses, reins in their teeth, automatic rifles in their hands. They galloped through the hole where the guardhouse had been, and when more soldiers materialized from the shadows, they opened fire.
Hawker changed the frequency on the detonator and touched the second toggle switch.
The explosion was more like an earthquake. It came in a ribcage-vibrating series: first the processing plant; then Williams’s mansion, the back wall, and the fence outside the slave quarters went up. Then the tank of red gas apparently detonated another tank, and still another. Somewhere within the plant was a store of munitions, and these, too, went off, sputtering and whacking and flaring.
Hawker no longer needed moonlight by which to see. An orange, gaseous ball of fire roared high above the trees, illuminating the whole estate.
From within the compound Hawker could hear the high shrieks of agony mixing with the battle whoops of the Rangers as they cut through the panicking mercenaries.
He hoped none of the shrieks came from Quirt Evans. He had been hit, there was no doubt about that. How bad, there was no way of finding out until it was over.
And that wouldn’t take long.
Hawker’s assault the night before had softened them. And now it became quickly obvious that the mercenaries didn’t have the heart to stand toe-to-toe with a fast-moving band of hell fighters on horseback.
In the heat-charged light, Hawker could see that the soldiers were both running and fighting—but mostly running.
He just hoped the escaping slaves didn’t run into the fleeing soldiers. If they didn’t, if they kept their heads, they should have been able to find their way through the ruptured back wall and to the first dirt road—where Sancho Rigera and the other men from the village would be waiting with their trucks.
Hawker put the detonator and flare gun into the knapsack and pulled the Colt Commando from the rifle scabbard attached to the saddle. Then he kicked the Arabian into a smooth canter and rode into the estate grounds. Unlike the Rangers, he wasn’t a good enough horseman to fight from a saddle, so he dropped to the ground and let the horse go free.
Before him, the ground floor of Skate Williams’s mansion was aflame. Hawker was tempted to fight his way upstairs to make sure Williams wasn’t hiding there.
But there was something else he had to do first. Something he had waited too long to do.…
With the Colt held at hip level Hawker sprinted around the burning house and through the ornamental garden where he had killed the guard the night before.
The cottage that imprisoned Cristoba de Abella was brightly lighted. It looked snug and neat and safe in the shadows of the trees.
Hawker knew better.
There was the silhouette of a man against the front curtains. A gigantic man. He made a familiar motion with his hands, which Hawker recognized immediately: Skate Williams was buckling his belt.
Not unbuckling it. Buckling it.
Hawker lengthened his stride, running hard toward the front porch. Too hard.
He didn’t expect any guards to be still standing at their posts.
He was wrong.
As he came charging down the path, a single figure stepped out in front of him. The figure was holding something in his hand. A gun. A military .45 automatic.
Hawker was going too fast to stop. He collided with the figure, and a microsecond later, the automatic spewed fire. Hawker felt a sledgehammerlike blow against his left thigh. And then he was tumbling, falling, his whole left leg numb. He knew he had been shot, but he didn’t have time to worry about how bad it was.
The figure was on top of him, pummeling him with his fists, and then the barrel of the .45 was pointed directly at his face. Hawker knocked it aside with his left elbow just as it exploded a second time, and he hit the man in the face with a sizzling right hand.
The man tumbled over backward, still holding on to the .45. Hawker smothered him with his body, then cracked him with two more rights. Through his broken mouth the guard half-cried, “I’ll blow your fucking head off for that, you bastard!”
The voice hit one of his memory electrodes, and Hawker realized it was Roy Dalton, the manager of Ranch #4, the sour-looking man with the black mustache who had hired him.
Why would he be outside the cottage guarding it for Williams?
And then the answer came. He wasn’t standing guard while Williams raped Cristoba—he had probably been involved in it. A treat awarded him by his employer, like throwing a dog a biscuit.
Dalton brought the automatic up once again, but Hawker locked his hands around the man’s wrist and turned it until he heard the delicate carpus bones pop. As Dalton’s wrist gave way the .45 swung downward and went off.
Beneath him, Dalton kicked wildly, then lay still.
Half of his face had been shot away.
Hawker rolled off the corpse and touched his thigh. The wound was not bad. Blood seeped out steadily, but the artery had not been shot away. The slug apparently had cut a swath of flesh away on a downward course, narrowly missing his right foot.
The pain was beginning to come now: a deep, throbbing ache.
He pulled out the metal stock on the Colt Commando and, using the weapon as a short crutch, got shakily to his feet. He fully expected to see Skate Williams standing on the porch, a gun in his hand.
But the porch was empty, the front door open.
Hawker knew that if the front door was not locked, Cristoba would be gone.
He hobbled up the front steps, anyway, and looked inside.
For long nights afterward he would wish that he had not.
The girl lay inside on the bed. She lay on her back. The sheer white nightgown had been ripped from her body. Her breasts were paler than her shoulders, and they were flattened and rounded by their own weight.
Williams had been here, all right. And Dalton, too. Maybe others. Hawker wondered how long the horror had gone on for her.
Her nut-colored legs, long and graceful, were smeared with dried blood that had pooled in splotches beneath her on the sheet. There were scratch marks on her neck and arms. A great many scratch marks.
Yes, it had gone on a long time. Gone on and on until Cristoba had finally ended it by her own hand.
The pillow beneath her head was soggy with blood. Unlike the blood on her legs, it was fresh. Her right fist was locked around the butt of a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. The pressure of the slug entering her right ear had blown her facial structure into a bloated mask of horror. Only her eyes remained oddly unchanged: dull brown orbs that bespoke great knowledge but no emotion; bespoke the inexorable understanding of her ancient people, as if all the tragedy, madness, and cruelty of life was beneath their comment.
Hawker heard a weak, involuntary sob and realized that it originated w
ithin him.
Why hadn’t she used the gun on Williams? Or one of the others?
He would never know.
He hobbled across the room and touched her eyelids, closing them, then covered her with a sheet.
“I’m sorry, Cristoba,” he whispered. “You should have never trusted me. I’m so damn sorry.”
Hawker stood over the ruined body of the girl for another anguished moment before turning and leaving at a fast hobble, punishing himself with the agony of using his left leg.
Outside, the stars were a brilliant veil above the orange haze of smoke from the fires that now consumed the ranch. In the air was the stink of burning gasoline, and the flames glowed eerily above the trees.
Hawker thought he had been to hell before.
But nothing had ever quite compared to this.
Hawker headed off into the shadows along the path that led to the factory. He half-ran, dragging his left leg along behind.
Skate Williams couldn’t have gotten far. And when he found him, Hawker would show him what hell was all about. He would show him and show him and show him.…
eighteen
Skate Williams jumped him as he passed the first greenhouse, coming out of the shadows like a grizzly, all arms and fists and beefy weight, knocking Hawker to the ground.
Hawker had been slowly wilting from shock and loss of blood. He knew he could not go much farther. He had, in fact, begun to rationalize the urge to lay down and rest. He told himself his mission had been a success in one way—the slave compound had been empty when he’d passed it. They had all escaped. And what would happen if he did find Williams? He was too weak to do anything but simply shoot him, and Hawker wanted to make it last a hell of a lot longer than that.
But then he remembered the girl. Remembered the way she looked when she was alive. Remembered the tilt of her head, the glint of her brown eyes, and the fine bravery in her that night outside the Bar of the Unknown Souls.
Then Hawker remembered the way Williams had left her. And suddenly, the weariness and weakness were gone, fired by his own fresh anger.
A moment later Williams took him by complete surprise. He hit Hawker four strides into a lumbering sprint, hit him waist-high with his massive right shoulder. The impact catapulted the Colt Commando from his hands, snapped his head sideways, and almost knocked him out.
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