Vengeance Is Mine

by William W. Johnstone

  Ryan never gave it much thought, but he would have said that the odds were against him living to be an old man. On the other hand, he had survived for this long, and considering some of the dangers he had gone through in his life, the odds must have been against that, too.

  John Howard Stark didn’t know it yet, but the odds against him living to see another sunrise had gone up considerably tonight.

  “I don’t care how you do it, just get in there and kill him,” Ramirez had said, his voice shaking with rage. The smooth facade that the leader of the drug cartel had constructed over the years was slipping. This damn gringo Stark had killed a dozen of his men now, and yet Stark still drew breath! It was insane!

  What was even worse, Stark’s activities had inspired some of the other foolish gringos to stand up to the drug runners, instead of hiding their heads in the sand as they had for so many years. Twice in the past few days, Ramirez’s couriers had been attacked as they crossed the river into Texas. Both times the drug runners had been forced to retreat in the face of deadly accurate fire from hidden riflemen. Ramirez had seethed when he heard the news. Those Texans were not supposed to have the cojones to defy him this way. They never had before—until Stark came along.

  So Stark had to die. Ramirez had allowed Ryan to set up the assault on Stark’s ranch, the assault that had ended with five more good men dead. Tonight Ramirez had said, “Kill him yourself, with your own hands. Watch him die with your own eyes. Or if you cannot do that . . . I have some rocket-propelled grenades I bought from an arms dealer. Blow up the whole fucking hospital if you have to. But kill Stark.”

  Ryan knew which window marked the location of Stark’s room. An RPG placed right through the glass would do the job, all right. He could kill Stark that way without leveling the whole hospital. Ramirez was too mad to be thinking straight. Blowing up a hospital was something even the sluggish, politically paralyzed American government could not ignore. Even one grenade might be too much. Better to slip in, accomplish the job, and slip back out with as little fuss as possible. A surgical strike, so to speak.

  That was why Ryan was approaching the back of the hospital now. The idea of killing an already wounded man in his hospital bed didn’t really appeal to Ryan’s aesthetic sense, but orders were orders. And once Stark was dead, chances were this whole newly organized civilian resistance to the drug trade would fall apart. Stark, after all, was the figurehead for the movement.

  Of course, they also ran the risk of making him a martyr, which might cause even more trouble. But Ryan would deal with that when and if the time came.

  A delivery truck was backed up to the rear doors of the hospital, and a couple of guys were using dollies to wheel in cases of institutional-sized cans of food. A hospital security guard—not even packing a gun, for Christ’s sake!—stood beside the doors. The guard glanced at Ryan, only slightly curious, and said, “Hey, pard, you’re not supposed to be back here.”

  “Where’s the emergency room?” Ryan asked as he came closer. He lifted his right hand, which had a bloody swath of cloth wrapped around it. “I cut myself pretty bad.”

  “Shit, I’d say so. Look, the entrance is around front, but I guess you can come through this way—”

  By that time Ryan was close enough. The little pistol had a noise suppressor screwed onto its barrel, and the cloth wrapped around his hand would muffle the sound of the shot even more, but all that played hell with accuracy, so he had to be close before he fired. He raised his hand and shot the guard in the right eye at a distance of about a foot. The pistol made hardly any sound at all. The bullet popped right through the guard’s eye and bored on into his brain. It was a small-caliber round and didn’t have the power to blow a hole through the skull, so it bounced and rattled around in there, mushing even more of the unlucky guard’s gray matter. Not that he felt it, since he was already dead and sliding down the wall behind him.

  One of the delivery guys came out of the hospital, saw the guard going down, and said, “Hey, what’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know,” Ryan said. “I think he passed out.”

  The deliveryman pushed his empty dolly aside and rushed over. Ryan moved aside to get out of his way, and as the man bent over Ryan shot him through the ear. That was just as effective. The man went down, sprawling across the dead guard’s body.

  That left just the other deliveryman. He came out a moment later and walked right into a bullet.

  Ryan piled all three bodies on the lift at the rear of the truck, thumbed the button, and rode up with them. He rolled them into the back of the truck, hopped out, and pulled down the door. As far as he could tell, no one had seen what had happened, and it would be a while before anybody realized there was something wrong back here. By that time, he would be long gone.

  He walked into the hospital, cradling his right wrist in his left hand so that the bloody bandage was prominent. He had rearranged the swath of cloth a little so that the scorched bullet holes weren’t as visible.

  It was late, after visiting hours, but a few visitors were still there, as usual. The nurses hadn’t gotten around to running off everyone just yet. Nobody paid much attention to Ryan, though. With that makeshift bandage on his hand, they just assumed he was supposed to be there. If anyone had asked him, he would have used the emergency room story again. Or told them he was looking for X-ray, as the mood struck him.

  He paused at a corner and looked around into a hallway where patient rooms were located. The nurses’ station was halfway along the corridor, at an intersection where another hall met this one. One nurse stood at the counter, writing on a chart. She didn’t glance toward Ryan. He knew that Stark’s room was three doors past the nurses’ station, on the right. Ryan didn’t have any doubt about that. He had always had a superb sense of location and always knew exactly where he was in relation to everything else around him. That innate talent was one of the things that had kept him alive this long.

  A buzzer sounded, and the nurse at the counter put the chart aside and walked around into the corridor. She went to a room on the left, several doors past the room where Stark was. She would probably be in there a few minutes, Ryan thought. He moved on around the corner and walked quickly, purposefully, toward Stark’s room. All his instincts told him he wouldn’t get a better chance than this.

  He had just reached the nurses’ station when he realized something was wrong. There was no deputy outside Stark’s door. Ryan had checked with contacts inside the sheriff’s office. Hammond still had a deputy assigned to guard Stark. But the deputy wasn’t there . . .

  Which meant he had to be somewhere else.

  “Hey! Can I help you, mister?”

  Ryan paused and looked over at the area behind the counter at the nurses’ station. The deputy was sitting back there in a swivel chair. He’d probably been flirting with the nurse who’d been writing on the chart. He wasn’t supposed to leave his post at the door of Stark’s room, but how much discipline could you expect from a force whose leader was firmly in the pocket of the biggest drug smuggler in Mexico?

  Ryan stopped, gave the deputy a pained smile, and lifted the hand with its bloody bandage. “Is the emergency room down this way?”

  “No, man, it’s back the way you came in. You blind?” The deputy stood up and came over to lean against the counter and point back along the corridor. “What’d you do to yourself, anyway?”

  “I guess I’m just careless,” Ryan said. He made as if to unwrap the bandage. “I think I cut it down to the bone. . . .”

  The deputy leaned over to look, and Ryan shot him through his mouth, which was hanging open. The man went up on his toes and then fell facedown across the counter. Ryan shoved him away. He fell limply behind the counter where he couldn’t be seen unless someone walked around there.

  Ryan looked down at the spots of blood on the counter and shook his head. That was messy. When the nurse came back she would see them right away. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped up the
blood, careful not to leave any smudges. That might give him a few more seconds, and a few seconds could be important.

  He already had a sense that time was slipping away. He couldn’t afford to waste any more of it.

  John Howard Stark had to die . . . now.

  Stark hated sleeping on his back, but with his left arm and his right shoulder both wounded, he didn’t have any choice. The left arm was much better, almost healed in fact, but it still twinged in pain if he rolled over on it during the night.

  His head jerked up on the pillow, and his eyes opened. He blinked as he looked around the room. The overhead light was out, but the light in the bathroom had been left on, with the door pushed almost all the way shut. That gave enough illumination for him to see that the room was empty. He had finally talked Elaine into going home and getting a good night’s sleep in her own bed while some of their friends stood guard. She had been sleeping in the chair in the hospital room every night, but nobody could get any decent rest doing that. As Stark looked around the room, he felt a touch of loneliness. He was used to having his wife around.

  He was curious, too. Something had woken him from a sound sleep. It hadn’t been a nightmare; at least he didn’t think so. He couldn’t remember even having any dreams, good or bad. But something had roused him from his slumber. Maybe one of the machines hooked up to him had beeped or something. They did that from time to time.

  The door began to hiss open on its pneumatic closer.

  Stark sat up in bed, figuring one of the nurses was coming in. She had probably made some noise out in the hall, and that was what woke him up. He hoped she wasn’t bringing him some pill to make him sleep better. He had never understood why they would wake you up in a hospital to give you a sleeping pill.

  But it wasn’t a nurse. It was a man in a baseball cap, with a bandaged hand. He stopped short when he saw Stark sitting up in the bed. “Sorry, pard,” he said. “I’m turned around.” He came closer and started to hold out the bandaged hand. “I was lookin’ for the emergency room . . .”

  “I know you,” Stark said suddenly. The hat and the clothes were different, but he recognized the voice.

  It belonged to the man he had talked to in the Blue Burro, the cowboy who had told him where to find the three men who had killed Tommy Carranza.

  Stark’s comment made the man pause, and that gave Stark the chance to throw himself out of the bed to the right, toward the window. The IV needle ripped out of the back of his left hand, but he didn’t notice the pain. He heard a couple of small coughing sounds, followed by the rattle of bullets hitting the metal bed frame after tearing through the mattress where he had been lying a heartbeat earlier.

  One of those tall, rolling carts found in hospitals sat to the right of the bed. Stark grabbed it and lifted it as the gunman fired again. He heard the wind-rip of the bullet past his ear. That just added to the chemicals coursing through Stark’s bloodstream. Despite his bad shoulder and wounded arm, he heaved the piece of hospital furniture up and tossed it across the bed at the would-be assassin.

  The man had to duck back to avoid the thing. It crashed against the door with a loud racket. Stark was tangled in the wires and leads attached to all the monitoring equipment. He yanked on them and pulled over a couple of pieces of apparatus. They fell with a huge crash. Stark crouched as the gunman thrust his hand in the door again. The door wouldn’t open all the way because of the cart Stark had thrown against it. A couple of shots spat out. Stark reached down, found a bedpan, and threw it at the door. It was plastic, of course, and wouldn’t do any damage, but the killer flinched instinctively, anyway.

  Then the guy disappeared, and Stark heard running footsteps out in the hall. The assassin was trying to get away. Stark’s anger boiled up inside him and urged him to give chase, but he knew he couldn’t. Adrenaline and survival instinct had saved his life, but the shape he was in, there was only so far he could push himself. He already felt a hot wetness at his right shoulder, as if the wound there had opened up again. Stark slumped against the bed and held himself up.

  People yelled and screamed out in the corridor, and a few seconds later the door opened part of the way, stopping with a jarring impact against the cart. “Mr. Stark! Mr. Stark, are you all right?”

  The voice belonged to one of the nurses. Stark recognized it. “I’m okay,” he called back. “Be careful. There’s a guy out there with a gun.”

  “He’s g-gone.” The nurse’s voice caught, and she muffled a sob. “He . . . he killed Deputy Reynolds!”

  Stark didn’t know any of the deputies by name, and since they worked for Norval Lee Hammond he didn’t have much respect for them, either. But he was sorry to hear that one of them had been killed.

  “Have you called the police?” he asked.

  “They’re on their way. My God, wh-why would anybody do this?”

  Because they were all in the middle of a war, Stark thought. A war that some people blamed him for starting. He knew that wasn’t really true. Ramirez had started this war.

  And God help him, Stark didn’t know how it was going to end. All he knew was that more people would probably die first.

  BOOK THREE

  He who follows in death’s wake

  risks all to gain little

  only his soul.

  —Ling Yuan, second-century Chinese warrior/philosopher

  Twenty-two

  All the uproar that had gone before was only a prelude to what followed the attempt on Stark’s life in the hospital. Sheriff Hammond would have preferred to keep things quiet, but there was no way even he could cover up four cold-blooded murders and an attack on a badly wounded patient.

  Dr. Lu was on duty in the emergency room that night, and when he finished changing the dressing on Stark’s wounded shoulder, he said that Stark was lucky not to have damaged himself even more. The wound had broken open again, but only slightly, and it hadn’t bled much. “You’ve set back your recovery, but only by a couple of days,” he had told Stark.

  “Better than letting that son of a bitch shoot me,” Stark had replied. “That probably would have taken a mite longer to recuperate from.”

  Lu could only shrug and nod.

  The hospital was crawling with cops and the street outside was clogged once again with the news media by the time Elaine arrived the next morning. “I heard about what happened on the news this morning,” she said as she hurried to Stark’s bedside. “Are you all right, John Howard?”

  “I’m fine,” he assured her. “Made the morning news on the radio, did I?”

  “The radio?” she repeated with a frown. “John Howard, you were on The Today Show and Good Morning, America. Probably on CBS and Fox and CNN, too, but I didn’t check.”

  Stark grimaced. “The story’s gone national, has it?”

  “That’s right. I guess the fact that you were almost murdered in your hospital bed caught the attention of the networks. And four innocent bystanders were killed.”

  “I know,” Stark said with a sigh. “I can’t help but feel sort of responsible for that.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Elaine said promptly. “Nobody’s to blame but Ramirez and that hit man he sent after you.”

  Her mention of the killer made Stark think of something. “Can you let Hodge Purdee know that I’d like to see him?”

  “The Border Patrol agent? Sure. I didn’t think you had much use for government types these days, though.”

  “Purdee’s different. He and I talk the same language.”

  “I’ll give him a call. In the meantime, the reporters are clamoring again, wanting to interview you.”

  “This time I’ll talk to them,” Stark said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and maybe a little publicity is just what we need.”

  “It won’t be a little. It’ll be a lot.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Stark said. “I want to talk to Purdee first, though.”

  Satisfied that he was all right, Elaine left to call Hodge Purdee. While she wa
s gone, the door opened again and Sheriff Hammond and District Attorney Wilfredo came into the room.

  Even though Stark wasn’t glad to see them, he decided he might as well try to be polite. “Sorry about your deputy, Sheriff,” he said.

  Hammond gave a curt shake of his head. “Not your fault, Stark.” The man looked haggard, and his eyes were haunted. He had to know that the man who’d killed the deputy, the security guard, and the two deliverymen worked for the Vulture. . . which in a way meant that they shared the same employer. If that fact gnawed at Hammond’s insides . . . well, he had it coming as far as Stark was concerned.

  “Mr. Stark,” Wilfredo began, “I’m here to inform you that there will be no charges filed against you as a result of the incident last night—”

  “Well, that’s good to know,” Stark broke in sarcastically, “especially since I was just trying to keep that bastard from killing me.”

  Wilfredo took a deep breath, controlled his temper, and went on, “And my office has determined that no charges will be filed against you in regards to the deaths of those men on your ranch. Your actions and those of your wife have been officially ruled self-defense . . . although the way you were waiting for them still gives me some concern.”

  “Just bein’ prepared,” Stark said. “What about the other charges?”

  “That case has already been sent to the grand jury. It’ll have to play out in due course.” The district attorney made a face. “To be honest with you, though, I don’t expect an indictment.”

  Something in Wilfredo’s voice told Stark that the man had given up. He knew this particular hand was stacked against him, and he was practical enough not to beat his head against a stone wall, to mix that metaphor, Stark thought. Wilfredo was telling him that for all intents and purposes, the official prosecution of him was over.