Vengeance Is Mine

by William W. Johnstone

  “We’re both equally dedicated to our jobs,” Grayson said. “And I believe we’re through here.” She nodded. “Good morning, Mrs. Stark. Remember, you’re to be out by noon tomorrow.”

  Elaine didn’t trust herself to speak. She was too mad for that. She was afraid she might start spitting curses at the two visitors. She was even more afraid she might light into that Grayson woman and knock that smug expression off her face. The IRS agent was twenty years younger and probably worked out, but Elaine had spent thirty years working on a ranch. With an effort, she controlled herself and stood there silently, not moving, as Grayson and Littlefield left the house. Elaine heard the car doors shut, and then the vehicle drove off.

  “Well, I never heard so dang much craziness in all my life,” Devery said. “Hell, John Howard’s so law-abidin’ he’d even pay a parkin’ ticket if he got one, or an overdue fine at the library. He sure never cheated Uncle Sam on his taxes.”

  “No,” Elaine agreed quietly. “No, he didn’t.”

  Devery scratched his head. “What are you gonna do about it? I’ll take you into town if you want, so you can talk it over with John Howard.”

  “He’s got enough to worry about right now, especially if the IRS paid him a visit, too.” She summoned up a smile. “Devery, I may have to come and spend a few days with your family.”

  “You’re welcome as long as you want to stay,” Devery said immediately. “And don’t you worry about this. We’ll get it all straightened out. I’ll bet John Howard’s already talked to Sam Gonzales and got him workin’ on it. Sam’ll get an injunction against the government. You just wait and see. You won’t have to go anywhere.”

  Elaine appreciated Devery’s optimism, even though she didn’t think he believed those sentiments for a moment. Fighting the government was nearly always a losing battle.

  “Calhoun,” she said softly.

  “Who?”

  “The government man who came to see us before. The one who wanted to give John Howard a cushy job and shut him up. He’s behind this.”

  “Yeah.” Devery nodded. “Yeah, I bet you’re right.” He shook his head. “Lordy, it ain’t enough that we got to fight a bunch o’ bloodthirsty drug smugglers. Now we got our own government comin’ down on us. It ain’t right. It just ain’t right.”

  “No,” Elaine agreed, “it’s not.”

  But for the life of her, she didn’t know what they could do about it.

  That afternoon she sat in the book-lined study, behind the desk where John Howard worked on the taxes and all the other bookkeeping that was required to keep the ranch running properly. She had taken out the files and pored over the copies of everything she could find relating to this problem, and as far as she could tell, everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be. The problem was, the IRS had different documents.

  It was a frame-up, pure and simple, she thought. But even so, it might take years of work by high-powered attorneys to overcome the false charges. They didn’t have that much time, and they certainly didn’t have the money that a protracted court battle would take. The government would win in the long run, just through its sheer size. The Stark family would be ruined, no matter what the outcome.

  It wasn’t fair, she thought as tears rolled down her cheeks. They were good citizens, always had been. Good Americans. John Howard had served his country in Vietnam. Their sons were in the Middle East at this very moment, working to defeat terrorism and make the world a safer place for everybody. But evidently such sacrifices no longer counted for anything.

  Elaine’s gaze dropped to a framed photograph on the desk. It had been there for thirty years and showed a much younger John Howard Stark standing in front of a ramshackle tent with five other men. All of them wore military fatigues, carried rifles and machine guns, and had belts of ammunition draped around their bodies. Heavily armed like that, they should have looked like fierce warriors, but they were all grinning and somehow they looked like overgrown kids. The camaraderie was palpable between them, even in this old photograph.

  Elaine blinked a couple of times and then wiped away her tears. An idea had begun to form in her mind. She opened a desk drawer and took out a black leather notebook. When she opened it, the pages were full of names, addresses, and phone numbers. She looked at the notebook, flipping through some of the pages, and then looked at the photograph again.

  “John Howard,” she said aloud, “I know if you were here you wouldn’t want me to do this, but every instinct I’ve got tells me this is the right thing to do.”

  She pushed the welter of papers aside, pulled the phone closer, put her finger under one of the numbers written in the notebook, and began to dial.

  Thirty

  Jack Finnegan was lining up a putt when the phone rang. He knew how the nap of the carpet in his office broke; he had rolled thousands of golf balls across it over the years and ought to know by now. He ought to feel a little guilty about wasting his time on such things when he should be working, he thought, but he figured as long as he was using that shot glass for a target and not filling it with booze, that was a good thing.

  His AA sponsor had told him he shouldn’t even have a shot glass in his office. He should have gotten rid of it when he got rid of the wet bar. But some habits were even harder to break than drinking, and for Jack Finnegan one of them was stroking a golf ball across that thick carpet into a shot glass a few hundred times a day.

  At the moment, though, his concentration was broken, so he sighed and turned to the desk without putting the ball. He picked up the phone and said, “Yeah, Darcy?”

  The voice of his executive assistant said, “There’s a woman on the line for you named Elaine Stark, Jack.”

  For a second the name didn’t register with Finnegan. Then, as Darcy went on, “She said to tell you she’s married to John Howard Stark,” Finnegan remembered her on his own. Sure, Elaine. Trim little blond number, married to his old marine buddy from ’Nam. Finnegan had met her at one of the unit’s reunions, and he hadn’t even hit on her. That had been back in the days when he was still sober most of the time. Good thing, too, because John Howard Stark was a big, tough son of a bitch, Texan through and through, and he probably would’ve handed Finnegan his head if Finnegan had started messing with his wife.

  The banker took a deep breath. A call from the wife of an old friend wasn’t good news these days. It probably meant that ol’ John Howard had dropped dead of a heart attack or a stroke or something. And Finnegan was a year older than Stark, he reminded himself, and in a high-stress business to boot. He had smoked for years, drunk waaaay too much, and chased too much strange tail. Sure, he had given up the cigarettes and he’d been sober for four years, seven months, and nineteen days, but he still figured that he was about due for his own drop-dead moment. He didn’t need to be reminded of that by having another old friend die.

  “Jack? Do you want to talk to Mrs. Stark, or should I tell her you’re already gone for the day?”

  Finnegan glanced at the readout of the digital clock on his desk. Not quite two o’ clock. That would be carrying banker’s hours to an extreme.

  “I’ll talk to her,” he said as he placed the putter on his desk. The top of the desk was empty except for the clock, the phone, and a small notepad.

  A couple of clicks sounded in his ear, and then a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”

  “Elaine,” Finnegan said warmly. “This is Jack. How are you?”

  “Not doing too good these days, I’m afraid. I guess you’ve heard . . . about John Howard.”

  “No, I’m afraid not. No one’s called me.” Finnegan didn’t have to force caring and concern into his voice. He found that he really felt those emotions. John Howard Stark had been a good friend. A damned good friend. Not to mention one hell of a soldier. Finnegan was convinced there was a good chance he never would have gotten out of that jungle hellhole alive if not for John Howard.

  Elaine sounded a little confused as she said, “No, I, uh, mean
you probably saw him on the news, or read about him in the papers.”

  “Oh.” Stark was famous? He’d made the papers? This was the first Finnegan had heard of it. “No, I’m afraid I don’t read much except the financial news these days, and I don’t watch much TV.”

  That was because he couldn’t stand the sound of it. It seemed to echo too much in the big, empty house since his wife had left. The kids, of course, had gone off to college some years earlier and never come back. His only contact with them was an occasional phone call.

  “Jack, John Howard’s in trouble,” Elaine said. “He’s in jail, and he needs help. I thought maybe some of his old friends—”

  “In jail?” Finnegan exclaimed. A straight arrow like John Howard Stark? That seemed impossible. “What did he do? Do you need money? A good lawyer?”

  “Right now, I . . . I don’t know what we need.”

  Finnegan sat down in the big, padded executive chair. “Tell me about it,” he said, more businesslike and focused now. “Start at the beginning.”

  She did, and by the time she was finished, Jack Finnegan was sitting up straight in his chair. The puffy, dissipated lines in his face seemed to have vanished. His voice was brisk as he said, “Don’t worry, Elaine. I’ll be down there as soon as I can, and we’ll straighten all this out. Do you want me to call anyone else for you?”

  “No, I . . . I’ve got a list of names and numbers here, all the men who were closest to John Howard in those days. I thought it would be better for me to call them myself.”

  “All right. I’ll see you probably tomorrow. And again, don’t worry.”

  She laughed quietly. “It’s hard not to.”

  “I know,” Finnegan said. “I know.”

  When he had said good-bye, he got his assistant back on the line and said, “Darcy, get hold of Arthur Baldwin. And book me on the first flight tomorrow morning to Texas.”

  “Texas?” Darcy repeated. “Jack, you’ve got an important meeting tomorrow.”

  “It’ll have to wait,” Jack Finnegan said, and as he hung up the phone he marveled at how good it felt to actually give a damn about something again.

  It was deadline day, and Will Sheffield knew it would be a long, busy evening as he and the staff of the paper got it ready to e-mail to the printer. The whole process was easier now, of course, than it had been in the days before everything was done on the computer, but it was still a challenge to get everything into the paper that needed to be there and get it in the right place. Sheffield had spent the morning writing his editorial for this week’s edition, a call for the city council of the small Tennessee town to find a way around a zoning controversy that threatened to put an old black man out of the home where he had lived for more than sixty years, just because he raised a few pigs in his backyard. Hell, the old man and the pigs had been there for years before some land developer had carved up the acreage next door and built fancy brick houses on it and sold them to a bunch of snobbish rich folks who decided they didn’t want to live next to a pig farm. It wasn’t a racial issue; some of the new home owners were black, and they didn’t want the pigs there, either. As Sheffield had put it in his editorial, the whole thing stank, and not just because of the pigs. The line was a little too cute, maybe, but he hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to use it.

  When the phone on his desk rang, he took his attention away from the computer where he had been laying out the paper. “Banner, this is Will. Can I help you?” This was his private line, so it probably wasn’t somebody calling to put a want ad in this week’s paper. Although you never knew. No phone number was completely private in a small town.

  “Will, this is Elaine Stark from Texas. John Howard’s wife? We met a few years ago at a reunion?”

  “Of course.” Sheffield had no trouble remembering her. She’d been smart and pretty—he wouldn’t have expected John Howard Stark to marry anyone who wasn’t—and she had hit it off very well with his wife, Janet. “How are you? How’s old John Howard?”

  A sudden thought struck him. He wouldn’t have been that surprised if John Howard had called him, although several years usually went by between times when they talked. The fact that Elaine was on the phone instead meant that there might be trouble. Sheffield hoped his old friend and comrade-in-arms wasn’t sick . . . or worse.

  “John Howard’s in some trouble, Will. He needs help.”

  Sheffield frowned, leaned forward, and turned off the monitor. “Tell me about it,” he said without hesitation. “What can I do?” But before she could say anything, he remembered the wire service stories he’d read in the past few weeks, and he said, “Oh my God. This is about that drug smuggler, isn’t it?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  Sheffield ran his fingers through his thick brown hair. He had been distracted at first, but it was coming back to him now. He had seen reports on the network news about Stark’s crusade to stop the drug smuggling and how its influence was spreading along the country’s southern border. There had even been a tie-in with some sort of terrorist plot to blow up an oil refinery in Houston or somewhere. Being in the news business, he was ashamed that he hadn’t kept up with the story more closely, especially since it involved an old friend.

  But he lived in a small town and edited and published a small-town paper. News to him meant a bad wreck out on the highway, vandals breaking into one of the elementary schools, a record catfish being pulled out of the lake by a twelve-year-old boy, Little League games, and how the high school football team was going to look this fall. National news seldom if ever crept into the pages of the Banner.

  Elaine told him what had been going on. The whole story was crazy, fantastic, like something out of one of the thrillers that Sheffield had written after it became obvious to him that no publisher was going to buy his novel about a sensitive young man growing up in the hills of Tennessee during the sixties, deciding to be a writer, and then going off to war. Of course, nobody had bought the thrillers, either, and he had given up on them after writing three during his spare time. By then he had been working on the paper for a while and had gotten a bank loan in order to buy out the former publisher, who was retiring. Writing local news stories wasn’t the same as penning the Great American Novel, of course, but Sheffield had grown to like it, and the Banner had supported him and his wife and their growing family reasonably comfortably, especially after Janet had gotten her real estate license and started selling houses.

  None of which would have been possible if John Howard Stark hadn’t saved his ass on numerous occasions in-country.

  When Elaine finished telling him about it, he said simply, “I’m on my way.”

  She said, “Will, I hate to impose on you like this—”

  “I’m on my way,” he said again as he stood up. “And don’t worry about a thing. You’ve got the power of the press on your side now.”

  The only problem was, he thought, with all the enemies lined up against John Howard Stark, that might not be enough. It might not be anywhere near enough.

  “Now, don’t take these on an empty stomach,” Henry Macon said as he handed the bottle of pills to the elderly woman on the other side of the counter. “Be sure to eat a little something first. That’ll keep your stomach from getting upset.”

  “Thank you, Henry. You’re a good boy, you know that?”

  Macon smiled. “Yes, ma’am.” Aunt Luella Carson could call him a boy because she was eighty-five years old and had known him all his life, just like she knew most of the folks in this Cedar Rapids neighborhood. And it was a neighborhood, not a damn “hood,” like some of the kids had called it back in the nineties. The way slang changed, he supposed they called it something else by now, but Macon didn’t know the current terminology. He had long since stopped listening to most of the things that came from the mouths of morons who didn’t know which way a baseball cap was supposed to be worn. The backward caps and the baggy pants always reminded him of Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall and the rest of the B
owery Boys he had watched in old movies on a round-tubed Philco when he was a kid. He sometimes wondered how many of the local gangstas realized that their chosen fashion style had originated with a bunch of white, Jewish juvenile actors who had plied their trade more than sixty years earlier. Very few, he guessed. Actually, none.

  Philistines, he thought. Barbarians.

  Except for Alicia Keys. That girl could sing. He’d heard 78s of Billie Holiday when he was young, and Alicia was right there with her. The current generation wasn’t completely worthless. Just damned near.

  Macon watched to see that Aunt Luella got out of the pharmacy all right. She was spry for her age and went everywhere on her own, and nobody bothered her. Everybody on the street knew better. This was a good street, with thriving businesses and some nice homes farther down. The closest crack house that Macon knew of was six blocks over, and the people who haunted that area seldom drifted over here. But sometimes they did, so Macon worried that someday a couple of them might carry their turf wars over here and start shooting at each other. If that ever happened, innocents like Aunt Luella might be in the cross fire.

  He couldn’t protect everybody. He knew that, even though it had taken him some time to come to terms with it. He had come back from the marines with a whole new sense of self-worth and a determination to transform the world in which he had grown up. He had transformed himself first, working his way through college and getting a pharmacist’s degree. Then in the seventies, when the so-called urban renewal began, he had managed to lease an abandoned storefront and start his own business. The pharmacy had been successful, enough so that eventually he’d been able to buy the building in which it was located. He and his wife, Edith, had moved into the apartment upstairs. During the gentrification boom of the eighties, he could have sold the building for a considerable profit, but he had hung on to it. Now the neighborhood was racially mixed but still predominantly black. The yuppies had moved in, stayed awhile, and moved on, most of them. The ones who had stayed had grown out of that frantic, wealth-obsessed lifestyle and were now solid citizens, part of the community. It was a fine place to live most of the time, and Macon was proud to have been a part of it for so long.