by Glenn Trust
Road
To
Justice
Glenn Trust
Sole Justice
Book 2
Copyright © 2019
Road to Justice
By Glenn S. Trust
All rights reserved
Road to Justice is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Products and services mentioned in Road to Justice were used to give realism and authenticity to the story. Their use in no way implies that the manufacturers or producers of those products or services agree with, or endorse, the author’s opinions on any subject.
This publication, in electronic and/or printed version, is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The publication may not be resold, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author/publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
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Dedication
For those who go into the storm
Table of Contents
Road to Justice
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1.The Light Was Gone
2.Meanest Son of a Bitch Around
3.Creosote
4.Encounter on the Rio Grande
5.Business is Good
6.Unfinished Business
7.Another Niche
8.Networking
9.Welcome to Creosote
10.Time to Go to America!
11.Not Overloaded with Brains
12.Die Now, or Die Later
13.Soon
14.Dust
15.Dreams
16.Paid in Full
17.Interesting
18.Downright Rude
19.Work to Do
20.Not so Bad
21.The Devil’s Door
22.Shake on It
23.Savior
24.Friends
25.Which Dumbass
26.From the Mouths of Babes
27.A Chancy Thing
28.The Most Beautiful Prison
29.Everything Returned to Normal
30.Be the Hawk
31.Call it a Hunch
32.A Little Less Like an Asshole
33.A Brave Smile
34.Job Interview
35.News
36.The Hog Was Out of His Sty
37.First Things First
38.The Music
39.Some Mex Gonna be Happy
40.La Guerra
41.Recon
42.So Many Secrets
43.Rats
44.Close
45.It Doesn’t Matter
46.Interlude
47.Still Breathing
48.More Disagreeable Dead than Alive
49.She Wept for the Girl
50.Cut!
51.No Expression at All
52.Nothing Could Change That
53.Good Cheer
54.Someplace Safe
55.Enough was Enough
56.Raging Maniac
57.The Innocent
58.Foolish
59.An Advantage
60.No One Would Ever Know
61.Focused
62.I Expect You Know About These Things
63.Time to Go
64.More Important Business
65.Words Were Cheap
66.The Streets of Laredo
67.Possibilities
68.Rat Trap
69.A Lie
70.Settling Scores
71.Justice
72.Odds
73.Plans
74.You’re an Idiot
75.Very Unfair
76.Suicide
77.Damnedest Thing
78.More Comfortable
79.Side by Side
80.Under the Stars
81.No Time
82.Betrayed
83.The Saddest Part
84.Dead Man Running
85.Road to Justice
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1.
The Light Was Gone
He was going to be a rich man. A broad grin spread across his face as the cantina door slammed shut behind him. The music and din from inside faded. The grin remained. Visions of the US dollars that would soon fill his pockets fluttered around in his alcohol-fogged brain.
He stumbled a little in the dark, making his way toward the curb, feeling the desperate urge to take a piss. He looked up and down the narrow street. It was empty.
“Not here, in front of the cantina, you tonto,” he mumbled to himself, lifting a finger to his head and tapping it to remind himself that good manners required him to at least move away a few feet.
With his hands at his crotch working down his trouser zipper, he shuffled stiff-legged to a point about ten feet down the street from the cantina entrance. A final look around to ensure no one was watching, and he exposed himself, letting loose a stream that splashed happily in the gutter. Mario Acosta sighed and smiled, a happy man.
Shaking out the last few drops, he zipped up and arched his back with a pleasing shiver he always got after a good piss. Then he wiped his hands on the sides of his pants and turned to stagger toward his car parked in a side alley halfway down the block.
He passed the stuccoed wall of a residence, and the fragrance of gardenias hit him in the face. The sickly sweet odor on top of the tequila made the bile rise a little in his throat, and he hurried past the house. Pissing in the street was one thing, but puking out your guts was something else. He was no little girl whose stomach was turned by a few shots of tequila.
Of course, a few was a relative term, and Mario had lost count hours ago. He had been drinking at Rosita’s, his favorite cantina in Torreón since noon. It was now past eleven in the evening.
He stumbled along the pavement, squinting with one eye shut at a single street light. There, he thought. There in that bright light, just in the alley is where I left my car. Not so far, is it? First, move one leg and then the other.
Like a man on stilts, Mario wobbled and walked, two steps, then three then, mierda—shit, a step backward and to the side. He put a hand out to steady himself against a building. For a moment, he considered resting his back against the wall and sliding down to
the pavement to relax a little, maybe take a short nap.
No. He shook his head. No. Get to your car. You can sleep there until you feel better. If you sleep here on the street, los policías—the cops—will find you.
Yes, but they probably won’t arrest you, he thought, reasoning with himself. That would make too much work for them.
True, but it was more likely they would take turns pissing on you as you slept. That would be sport for them, not work.
Mind made up, Mario continued his slow, unsteady progress toward the street lamp and his car in the adjacent alley.
“Too much tequila,” he mumbled and laughed. “But why not? I am going to be rich! I deserve a night to party. No working in a grimy factory making car parts for American Chevrolets like mi papa.”
Not Mario Acosta. No, Mario Acosta had found a way to become rich, and by the grace of God and the Virgin Mary, he was going to be un hombre rico como un puto rey!—rich as a fucking king!
He grinned and pushed himself forward. Almost there, a few more steps and then…
Mario stopped just outside the circle of light thrown by the street lamp and breathed in the warm night air. With great deliberation, he lifted his right leg and planted his foot in the light. He stood for a moment, relishing his victory at navigating all the way down the street without falling and breaking his neck.
He turned to the alley. Sure enough, there was his car, a cheap Japanese model ten years old. That would change, he thought. Soon a better one that always starts and with tires that don’t go flat from driving over stones in the road.
With a hand extended, he leaned toward the car until his fingers made contact with the warm metal. Ah, success. He rubbed his hand back and forth over the dusty surface as he searched with the other for the keys in his pocket.
There, they are. He pulled the leather key fob out and held the jingling bits of metal, sparkling in front of his eyes, squinting at them in the light from the streetlamp.
“There you are,” he giggled.
A rush of feet over the pavement behind him caught his attention. He turned in time to glimpse three figures in dark clothes run into the circle of light and toward him. Something heavy and hard, struck him in the temple, sending blinding white pain through his eyes. Then the light was gone.
2.
Meanest Son of a Bitch Around
The rifle shot cracked like a bullwhip in the hot, dry air. Across the green ribbon of water, a half-dozen people scurried around on the bank searching for what scant cover there was. There wasn’t much along this part of the Mexico-United States border.
A woman waved a hand from behind a low, dense pile of brush. Her voice carried plainly across the river. “¡Por favor! No dispares ¡Hay niños aquí!”
“What she say?” Ralph ‘Lucky’ Martin levered another .30-30 round into the Winchester Model 94, western-style carbine and squinted through the scope, sighting on the pile of brush.
“Didn’t get it all, but I heard niños. That means kids. They got some young’uns with ‘em, I suppose.” Stu Pearce stood up on the toes of his boots to peer across the hundred yards of water. “I don’t see ‘em, but there’s a lot of rustlin’ about in the brush.”
“Fuck, I didn’t hear no shit about no kids. Maybe she was trying to say she got beenos … you know, frijoles for super.” Martin gave a mean, short laugh.
Kneeling with one knee on the ground and the other supporting his elbow, he settled the butt of the Winchester into his shoulder. With a quick turn of his head, he shot a stream of tobacco juice from his brown-stained lips. It sailed in a long arc into the dust as he turned back to the scope and rested his finger on the trigger.
“Hold on, Lucky!” Pearce stepped closer and looked down at Martin. “I heard her say niños … children. We ain’t supposed to be shootin’ children. Shit, we ain’t supposed to be shootin’ no one.”
“I ain’t shot no one … yet.” Martin looked up, and the same nasty smile was on his face. “Besides, who’s gonna tell? You?”
“Boss says hold ‘em on the other side of the river. That’s all.” Pearce shook his head. “No bloodshed and no killin’. Just make ‘em cross like they’s supposed to … where they’s supposed to.”
The woman who had called out took advantage of the interlude to change position. She scrambled along the ground towards a mesquite that would offer more protection than the pile of brush and river grass along the bank.
“Fuck!” Martin jumped to his feet.
He let loose a shot that kicked up dirt about a yard from her feet as she scurried towards the tree tugging two small children by the hands. They were toddlers and couldn’t keep up. By necessity, the woman dragged them over the stony ground through the briars and brush as they wailed in pain from scratches and bruises.
“Dammit, Lucky!” Pearce shouted. “Range is too far for that cheap-ass scope of yours. Hold your fire, or you’re liable to be off and hit one.”
He’d seen Martin like this before. When his blood was up there was no calming him down short of killing him, and Stu Pearce was not going to try that.
“Who gives a fuck?” Martin shouted back.
He jacked another round into the chamber and fired at the mesquite. The smack of the bullet into the trunk was audible on the U.S. side of the river.
A man stood up from the brush and waved his hands. “Hey, gringos!” He jerked his forearm up in the universal obscenity. “Fuck you, gringos! Vete a la mierda Tu madre es una puta!” He jumped up and down to draw Martin’s attention away from the woman trying to conceal herself and her two children behind the small tree. “Fuck you, man! Your mother is a whore!”
It worked. Lucky Martin levered round after round into the Winchester, firing them off in rapid succession.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered as he tracked the man scrambling along the river bank on his hands and knees away from the mesquite.
Some of the rounds hit the water along the shore, raising little geysers that sprayed down on the man. Others thudded into the surrounding mud.
A howl of pain echoed across the water. The man rolled over on his back, his hands holding a bloody knee as he rocked back and forth in pain.
“Hijo de puta! You son of a bitch!” he shouted then turned on his side to stare at the rifle pointed at his face from three hundred feet away.
“Goddammit, Lucky!” Pearce shouted. “You hit him! How we gonna explain that to the boss?”
“Ain’t gonna be nothin’ to explain when I finish them off.”
“Be sensible,” Pearce tried to reason. “Somebody will report it. Word will get out.”
“Won’t be no one to report it.”
“You mean …” Pearce shook his head. “No, Lucky. You can’t do that. I don’t want no part of murderin’.”
“Then stay the fuck away, and you won’t have no part in it.” Eyes on fire with rage, he turned to Pearce. “Don’t get in my way, Stu.”
The man on the ground shouted something toward the pile of brush. Two more children popped up, these older, nine or ten, Pearce figured. They ran headlong to the mesquite where they huddled down beside their mother and siblings. The narrow tree could not hide the squirming mass of bodies that sought cover there from the Winchester’s bullets. It was only a matter of time.
Pearce tried one more time. “Lucky, you can’t do this. I know your blood is up, but later, when things calm down, there’ll be hell to pay, and you’ll be wishin’ you hadn’t.”
Martin swiveled, bringing the rifle to bear on Pearce from a distance of three feet. Hands stretched out, palms up, Pearce shook his head and backed away. “Take it easy, Lucky!”
“Warned you once, Pearce. I won’t say it again. Get in my way, and I’ll put one in you and tell the boss them Mexes over there did it, and I had to take care of them for it.” He sneered. “I’ll bet there won’t be no problem then … me defending one of his men and all. Probably give me a bonus for it.”
Pearce wished he hadn’t left
his rifle in the truck. He wouldn’t have used it except in self-defense, but right now, he was defenseless. He backed up another ten feet, watching the muzzle of the rifle and Martin’s finger on the trigger.
The argument was over. Lucky Martin had won, as he always did. It was one of the reasons he had earned his nickname.
Thick and stocky of build Martin was a bully at heart. Most people gave him a wide berth, but that wasn’t why they called him Lucky. In truth, although he was far from being the smartest man around, he still managed to win at things, whether it was cards, betting on horses or claiming the prettiest, youngest whore for himself over in Creosote. He always managed to come out on top.
Today he won the debate with Stu Pearce. What started as some mean spirited, but harmless, plunking with the rifle to scare them was about to turn into a blood bath. Pearce knew that Lucky wasn’t really all that lucky. He was just the meanest son of a bitch around, and most people gave him a wide berth, for safety’s sake.
Lucky turned back to the man still lying across the river, holding his leg. Their eyes met across the distance. The man was unflinching, awaiting his fate.
“That’s right,” Martin whispered, resting his cheek on the butt stock. “You hold still for just a minute.”
The man did. It was the only means he had left to protect his family.
Lucky Martin raised his nose for a second checking the wind. There was none.
At a range of a little over a hundred yards, there was no need to adjust the scope’s elevation for the angle. He let the crosshairs rest on the center of the man’s face.
Through the scope, he could see the man’s eyes, intent, watching, waiting. He nodded. Martin jerked his eyes away from the scope.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“What?” Stu Pearce asked, hopeful that Lucky had changed his mind.
“Motherfucker nodded at me like I need his permission to put a round through his head.”
“He’s just trying to protect the woman and little ones.”
“Yeah, well it’s too late for that.”
