Knockdown

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  Jake slapped the silenced pistol aside with his left hand. His right shot out and closed around Reyes’s throat. Jake was a lot bigger than the scrawny cartel soldier, so he had no trouble lifting Reyes off his feet by the neck and slamming him against the wall. Reyes’s head thudded so hard that the Sheetrock cracked from the impact. He went limp.

  Jake let go of Reyes, and he slid down the wall to the floor. At the same time, Señora Molina and her pajama-clad daughters ran into the living room, saw the two bodies sprawled on the floor, and started screaming.

  Barry was in the doorway, gun in hand. The older Molina daughter threw herself at him, throwing wild punches as she cried, “You killed them! You killed them!”

  Jake turned from the unconscious Reyes and said, “No! We didn’t do this. Paco did. He’s the one who shot them.”

  Señora Molina had fallen to her knees beside her husband’s body. She lifted his bloody head and cradled it in her lap as she rocked back and forth, wailing.

  The younger daughter went to her brother and bent over to touch him tentatively, saying, “Carlos? Carlos? Please don’t be dead . . .”

  Still under attack by the older girl, Barry stuffed his gun back in its holster and caught hold of her wrists as she tried to claw his face. He said, “Listen to me, señorita, we just want to help. We didn’t shoot your father and brother. You need to calm down—”

  On the floor beside the overturned coffee table, Carlos Molina moaned and moved his head back and forth.

  “Barry!” Jake said. “He’s still alive.”

  “You hear that?” Barry said to the girl he was holding off as gently as possible. “Carlos needs help. Call 911! Now!”

  He took the chance of releasing her. She dropped her arms and stumbled back a couple of steps. Then she turned and ran to join her sister on the floor beside her brother.

  “Carlos!”

  The young man’s eyes fluttered open in response to her voice. Jake knelt on the other side of him. He leaned closer and said in an urgent voice, trying to get through the pain Molina must be feeling, “Carlos, listen to me. Why are the Zaragosas selling the explosives you stole to terrorists? What are Saddiq and his men going to do with them?”

  Some of what he said was speculation, of course, but he was convinced the assumptions were solid. He and Barry had connected up the items of information they knew in the only way that really made sense.

  Molina’s eyes were unfocused. He coughed and blood came out of his mouth. He said in a raspy voice, “Anita?”

  The older girl said, “I’m here, Carlos! I’m here!”

  “Make sure Papi . . . doesn’t go to work . . . today . . .”

  Molina sighed and his eyes started to glaze over. Jake knew he was gone.

  So did both girls, who collapsed onto his bloody chest and sobbed.

  Jake scowled. He was saddened and angered by Señor Molina’s murder and frustrated by Carlos Molina’s death. The young man had died taking the answers they needed with him. He started to rise to his feet and was halfway there when a scuffling noise behind him made him turn sharply in that direction.

  Paco Reyes had regained consciousness and was lunging at him with a knife extended in one hand. The blade scraped along Jake’s side, ripping his shirt but not slicing the flesh underneath. Instinctively, Jake brought his right elbow up in a sharp blow that caught Reyes under the chin. Reyes’s head jolted back—

  The crack of bone was loud in the room. Reyes dropped the knife. His eyes rolled up in their sockets. He fell to the floor again, and the limpness with which he collapsed this time made it plain he wouldn’t be getting back up. Jake had just broken his neck.

  Jake grimaced. Another possible source of information gone.

  Maybe not all was lost, though. Barry knelt next to the older woman and said, “Señora Molina, please listen to me. My friend and I are trying to stop whatever it is that Reyes got your son mixed up in. Reyes killed your husband and Carlos because he was afraid they would tell the authorities about something very bad that’s going to happen. You can help us keep that from happening. Tell me . . . where does your husband work?”

  Tears covered the woman’s face. Barry had to ask the question again before she looked up from her husband’s dead face and said, “Qué? Qué?”

  “Where your husband works, that’s where the bad thing is going to happen. That’s why Carlos didn’t want him going to work today. Where is that, Señora Molina?”

  “He . . . he works at . . . the rail yard.”

  Anita, the older girl, had been listening to the conversation. She used the back of her hand to wipe away some of her tears and said, “The Santa Fe Freight House, next to the yard where all the BNSF trains come through.”

  “Where’s that?” Jake asked. He knew that BNSF referred to the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway.

  “On Santa Fe Street,” the girl replied impatiently, as if that were the dumbest question ever.

  Jake and Barry looked at each other. Explosives and a train yard were a bad combination. Lashkar-e-Islami might be planning another derailment, and in crowded conditions like that, the damage and loss of life probably would be considerably worse than what had happened in Nevada.

  Barry said, “I’m sorry this happened, Señora Molina. We’ll stop them. We’ll make sure your husband and son didn’t die for nothing.”

  She just started sobbing again as she stroked her husband’s cheek.

  Jake started toward the door, but Anita got in his way. Her eyes still shone with tears, but they burned with an angry fire, too.

  “Who are you guys?” she demanded. “Are you cops? How do we know you didn’t kill Carlos and Papi?”

  “You know what kind of guy Reyes was, what he was mixed up in, so you probably have a pretty good idea what he was capable of,” Jake said. “And you know he was in here talking to them. We didn’t come in until after they were shot.”

  Anita still glared at him, but there was a note of uncertainty in her voice as she said, “He was part of the Zaragosa cartel . . .”

  “That’s right, and we’re trying to stop them. We’re not cops, though,” Jake added. “But we are good guys.”

  He could tell she wanted to believe him. He went on, “Before Carlos went AWOL, did he say or do anything that might tell us what the Zaragosas are mixed up in?”

  Anita started to shake her head, then stopped abruptly and stepped over to a desk in the corner of the living room. She pawed through some papers on it, then turned to thrust one of them toward Jake.

  “My father worked in the scheduling office at the freight house. Every time Carlos came by lately, he asked him about what trains were coming in. Last time he was here, Papi was showing him on the schedule.” She stopped and had to swallow hard. “Before that, Carlos never showed much interest in what Papi did. I . . . I think it made Papi happy.”

  That was a bittersweet thing to hear, and Jake knew it must have been painful for the girl to say. He nodded, took the printout she handed him, and said, “Gracias.” He could see pencil marks next to several items. “This may be a lot of help.”

  “We’d better get going,” Barry said quietly. The silenced shots wouldn’t have drawn any attention, but the screams might have. On the other hand, folks around here probably minded their own business. But there was no point in taking a chance.

  “Thank you again,” Jake said as he started after his uncle. “And we’re very sorry for what happened here.”

  “You . . . you’ll really stop the bad guys?” Anita said.

  “We’ll stop them,” Jake promised.

  CHAPTER 31

  Jake listened for sirens as he and Barry hurried back to the panel truck parked down the street from the Molina house. He didn’t hear any, but that didn’t mean nobody had reported the screams coming from the house. Their best course was to get out of here.

  “You’ve got that railroad timetable the girl gave you?” Barry asked as he slid behind the wheel.

&n
bsp; “Yeah, right here,” Jake said, touching his shirt pocket where he had stuck the folded paper. “You think they’re going to try another derailment at the yard where Señor Molina worked?”

  “The BNSF handles more freight than any other line in the country,” Barry said by way of reply as he drove along the street at a moderate pace, making sure to be a model driver and stopping at the stop sign at the end of the block. “They have more routes, more locomotives than anybody else. El Paso isn’t as important a hub as some of the other terminals they have around the country, but a derailment right there in the yard would disrupt a lot of shipments all over the southern half of the country.” Barry paused. “There’d probably be quite a few casualties, too. And no telling how much environmental damage, depending on which trains they’re targeting.”

  Jake pondered on that as they left the residential neighborhood behind them and started back in the direction of the garage where they had left Barry’s truck.

  After a few minutes, he said, “Something seems off about this, Barry. Terrorists usually go after targets that offer them the potential for the greatest number of innocent casualties. That’s why they call it terrorism, after all. They’re trying to scare us. Something like this . . . yeah, it’ll kill some people if they pull it off and hurt the economy some, more than likely, but it doesn’t seem . . . well, dramatic enough.”

  Barry nodded slowly and said, “Think about how they started, though, with one lone train in the middle of nowhere.”

  “That was a test run, clearly.”

  “Yeah, but it got people talking about railroads and terrorism. Like we talked about before, most people don’t naturally link those two things in their minds.”

  “But it drew more attention to the railroads, and that heightened awareness has got to make it harder for them to strike again.” Jake gestured at himself, then included Barry in the motion. “I mean, just look at us. If not for that incident in Nevada putting us on the trail, we might not have any idea what they’re up to.”

  “It’s a fine line,” Barry admitted with a shrug. “And you can’t ask for too much logic from fanatics. But going by everything we’ve found out, they’re planning something at that rail yard today. That’s why Molina didn’t want his dad to go to work.” Barry paused, shook his head, and added grimly, “So in trying to save him, he just put a target on him, and on himself as well.”

  “He didn’t think his own cousin would turn on him like that.”

  “A scorpion is always a scorpion.”

  A few minutes later, they reached the garage. Big Mike opened the door for them, their arrival having been announced by a pressure plate outside, a buzzer inside, and a closed-circuit TV camera to tell Mike who they were. The big man rolled the door down after them.

  As they got out of the old panel truck, Mike held his hands up and said, “I’m sorry, Barry.”

  “What’re you apologizing for?” Barry asked. He looked at the Kenworth. “You did just what I asked you to.”

  “Yeah, but it was like defacing a work of art!”

  The Z1000 didn’t look new anymore. There already had been dents and dings on the layer of steel over the armor plating due to the bullets that had struck the rig during the chase over by the Big Hatchets. Mike had added some scrapes on the paint job and daubed primer on them. The chrome looked tarnished in places. A patina of mud coated the whole truck, as if it been caught in a rain shower and then driven through a choking dust storm. Jake wasn’t sure how Big Mike had managed all the effects, but now the Kenworth looked like . . . just another truck.

  There hadn’t been anything he could do about the extra-large sleeper, of course; that was built in. And all the special additions inside were still there, too, but at least the rig wouldn’t instantly draw attention anywhere they went.

  “You did a fine job, Mike,” Barry told him. “Just what I wanted.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But it’s still a shame.”

  Barry clapped a hand on the big man’s shoulder.

  “Maybe when this is all over, you can put everything back the way it was before.”

  That brought a smile to Big Mike’s face. He nodded and said, “No, I’ll make it even better. You wait and see.”

  “That’s a deal. Now, Jake and I need to have a little council of war, if you’ve got a place we can use.”

  “Right over there in my office.” Mike pointed to a door at the side of the garage. “There’s coffee on, too. I’m gonna step out for a while. Whatever you guys need to talk about, it’s probably better if I don’t know anything about it.”

  Jake didn’t blame him for feeling that way.

  A few minutes later, they had poured foam cups of coffee for themselves and spread the printed-out timetable on Mike’s desk in the cluttered office. The coffee was mediocre, but mediocre caffeine was better than none.

  After studying the pencil marks on the paper—some of them so faint that it looked like somebody had merely rested the pencil point on it—for several minutes, Barry said, “It looks like Molina was interested in three trains.” He touched the listings with a fingertip. “These two are being made up in the yard this morning, and this one”—he moved his finger—“will be coming in from the north a little after eight o’clock.”

  “Yeah, and this tells us which tracks they’ll all be on, but we don’t have a map of the yard. We don’t know where exactly each of them will be.”

  “No, but you ought to be able to find out when you get there.”

  Jake frowned and said, “You mean when we get there?”

  “No, we’re going to have to split up on this one,” Barry replied with a shake of his head. “You’ll go out to the yard and have a look around, see if you can figure out their plan from what we know, and stop them if you can. You’ll have to borrow Mike’s panel truck for that.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m heading for Las Cruces in the rig to see if I can intercept that train coming in from there and stop it. That has to be the one they’re planning to derail, and if it doesn’t roll in on schedule, their attack won’t come off, either.”

  Jake nodded as he took in the plan. He asked, “Should I alert the people at the yard? I can use my FBI credentials, and they’ll pay attention to me, I guarantee that.”

  “Scout around some first. But make it official if you have to.”

  “Once I do that, though,” Jake said, “that’ll be the end of us investigating this discreetly.”

  “Yeah. Better that, though, than some sort of catastrophe downtown.”

  Jake agreed. He put the timetable back in his pocket since Barry had committed to memory the identification numbers of the train he was looking to stop before it reached El Paso. They left the office to find Big Mike standing beside the Kenworth, still shaking his head regretfully.

  “We need to borrow that panel truck of yours again, Mike,” Barry told him. “Will that strand you here?”

  “Naw, I’ll just call a buddy to pick me up if I need to leave. Anyway, I got enough work to do that it ought to keep me busy all day.”

  “We don’t know for sure when we’ll be back,” Jake told him.

  “That’s all right. I don’t know what it is you guys are doing, but if Barry’s mixed up in it, it’s bound to be something important. And with Barry, well, I know I’m on the side of the good guys.”

  “Appreciate that, Mike,” Barry said. He shook hands with the big man, then with Jake, and added, “Good luck.”

  “You, too,” Jake said.

  Big Mike looked back and forth between them, frowned, and said, “You guys sound like you’re goin’ off to war.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to that,” Barry said.

  CHAPTER 32

  The GPS on Jake’s phone took him to Santa Fe Street without any problem. The sun was up, painting the peaks of the Franklin Mountains just north of town with slanting red rays. Later, the day would be hot, but for now the air held a hint of coolness,
enough so that Jake enjoyed having the window down in Big Mike’s truck as he drove toward the BNSF freight yard.

  He cruised by the place first to get an idea of what he was dealing with, trying to be unobtrusive about it. The main building was beige stucco over cinder block to make it look like adobe. Long and narrow, it angled slightly as it stretched back from the street. Two pairs of railroad tracks running across Santa Fe Street and parallel to the building, acres and acres of the freight yard on both sides.

  A sign reading SANTA FE FREIGHT HOUSE was above the door, flanked on both sides by the old Santa Fe Railroad logo. A few cars and pickups were parked in the lot on the opposite side of the building from the tracks. Jake figured the place was open around the clock since trains came through at all hours of the day and night.

  He drove on past, turned at the next cross street, and made a block. This time as he went by, he looked out into the yard itself. The tracks split into numerous sidings, several of which had strings of freight cars and empty flatcars on them.

  Two such strings ran farther than Jake could see from his angle. They flanked one of the sets of main tracks. As he circled again and headed back toward the yard, he considered the situation.

  The sets of rails were all fairly close together. If a train heading down the main track between those two sidings where the strings were being assembled happened to derail, there was a good chance the jackknifing freight cars would take out the cars on both sidings as well.

  Such a catastrophe would cut a wide swath of destruction right through the heart of the yard. The loss of life might not be staggering, but Jake had seen quite a few people working out there—loading goods into parked freight cars with forklifts, coupling and uncoupling cars, making repairs, tooling around in golf carts and checking on things. No telling how many of them would be in harm’s way in the event of a major derailment.

  Jake drove on past. The tall buildings of downtown El Paso were visible directly in front of him, a few blocks away. All sorts of toxic fumes might be unleashed by an accident of the magnitude he was imagining, and if the wind was right, those fumes would sweep right over the city center. He couldn’t risk that happening.