Vengeance Is Mine

by William W. Johnstone

  And then there really was nothing else. For Devery, everything was gone.

  Silencio Ryan slid the knife out of the man’s back and lowered him to the floor of the porch. He wiped the blood from the blade on the man’s shirt and then straightened. This one had made a little more noise in dying than the others had, especially when he dropped the rifle. But it didn’t really matter. All the guards had been disposed of, and that left his way clear to his real target.

  Elaine Stark.

  He had parachuted in, leaping out of a plane flying high overhead, above the Stark ranch. Landing about half a mile from the ranch house, he had buried the black chute and then jogged easily toward his objective. As always, it felt good to be operating alone, with no one to depend on but himself, and more importantly, no one else along to make a mistake and jeopardize the mission.

  The first thing he had done was to move around the ranch’s outbuildings, unseen and unheard, leaving the deadly little packages he took from the backpack he wore. Then he closed in on the house itself and its pitiful guards who thought they could stop anyone from getting to the woman. Ryan had killed them all without even breaking a sweat. He was ready now to do the job that had brought him here.

  He turned away from the body of the last man he’d killed, toward the front door. It was locked, but he needed only a moment to get past that. As he eased into the house, he heard the soft murmur of voices. A television, he decided after a couple of seconds. No one was with Mrs. Stark. She sought distraction from her problems through the medium of television, like so many other people.

  The voices came from upstairs. She was in her bedroom, watching TV. Ryan came to the staircase. Smiling under the soft black hood he wore, he started up.

  “Freeze, you son of a bitch,” she said from behind him. “Don’t move, or I’ll blow you in half.”

  Elaine had come downstairs to raid the refrigerator, leaving the TV on in the bedroom upstairs where she had been watching it. She was a little surprised that she was hungry. With all the trouble that was going on, she would have thought that worry would rob her of her appetite. But that wasn’t the case, and so she had padded barefoot into the kitchen, wearing the oversize T-shirt that she slept in over her panties. She hadn’t bothered turning on the light. After thirty years, she knew where everything was. She opened the refrigerator door—

  And heard something out on the front porch.

  It wasn’t a very loud noise, but something about it made her stiffen with one hand still on the refrigerator door. She eased it closed, killing the light and plunging the kitchen into darkness again. She moved over to the door that led into the old-fashioned pantry. A loaded shotgun was just inside that door. She picked it up and then walked quietly toward the hall that led from the front door toward the rear of the house. The stairs to the second floor were about halfway along that hall.

  Elaine stood just inside the open kitchen door, barely breathing, listening intently. A part of her wanted to call out to Devery and make sure he was all right, but instinct warned her against it. She heard a rattling from the front door. Somebody trying to get past the lock?

  That proved to be the case. The front door opened, its hinges squealing a little, the sound so soft she never would have heard it if she had been upstairs. Elaine held her breath now, not trusting herself to be absolutely quiet if she didn’t.

  A dark shape moved past her, a deeper patch of shadow drifting toward the stairs. Up there on the second floor, the bedroom door was open, and enough light spilled out into the hall so that Elaine was able to make out the man’s silhouette as he started up the stairs. She had no idea who he was, but he was clad all in black and had a hood of some sort over his head, either as a disguise or to make him blend in more with the darkness or both. The one thing she could be sure of was that he was up to no good. She stepped into the corridor, her bare feet making no sound on the hardwood floor, and moved to the base of the stairs. As she lined the barrel of the shotgun on the intruder’s back, she said, “Freeze, you son of a bitch. Don’t move, or I’ll blow you in half.”

  The man froze. He stood stock-still, there on the stairs, his head slightly tilted at an odd angle. He looked almost like he was sniffing the air.

  That seemed to be indeed what he was doing, because a moment later he said, “Gun oil, some sort of fragrance—probably from soap or shampoo—and a touch of hair spray. That would make you Mrs. Stark, and I don’t doubt that you’re armed.”

  “Damn right I am. I’ve got a twelve-gauge pointed right at your back. Who the hell are you, mister?”

  He didn’t turn around to answer her. His voice was slightly muffled by the hood over his head. “My name is Silencio Ryan. I’ve had the pleasure of making your husband’s acquaintance a couple of times.”

  The man from the strip joint, Elaine thought with a sharply indrawn breath. The one who had shown up later at the hospital and tried to kill John Howard. The one who undoubtedly worked for Ramirez the Vulture.

  For a second, Elaine thought about simply squeezing the trigger, going ahead and killing him. She didn’t doubt that he deserved it. But that would make her a murderer, and while she had no trouble with the idea of killing to protect herself or someone she loved—she had already done that, after all—she couldn’t bring herself to gun this man down in cold blood, no matter who he was or what he had done. Instead, she said, “Back down off those stairs, slow and easy.”

  Ryan did as he was told, one step at a time, and as he did, Elaine backed away toward the front door. “Devery!” she called. “Devery, are you out there? I need some help!”

  “You won’t get it from him or any of the other guards,” Ryan said. He didn’t have to explain what he meant by that.

  “Devery!” Elaine cried, an edge of near-hysteria creeping into her voice. Was she alone out here with this black-clad killer? “Chuck! Rusty! Steve!”

  The other guards didn’t answer either. Elaine stopped as her hip bumped the small table in the hallway where one of the telephones sat. She could still call for help—if he hadn’t cut the wires into the house. Her cell phone was upstairs, where it wouldn’t do her a bit of good now.

  The phone was to her right, so she had to hold the shotgun in her right hand and reach across her body with her left hand to grope for it in the darkness. The move was awkward, and the shotgun weighed enough so that it was difficult for her to hold it steady with one hand. And all the time, she had to keep her eyes on Ryan. She realized now she should have told him to stay on the stairs. The light wasn’t as good down here, so she couldn’t see him quite as well. It might have been a good idea to keep more distance between them, too. But she wasn’t a former marine. She didn’t have the sort of tactical experience that John Howard did.

  She found the phone and picked it up. She heard the dial tone even without bringing it to her ear and heaved a sigh of relief that the line hadn’t been cut. Ryan had slipped up there, she thought. Holding the phone in her left hand, she used that same hand to fumble around for the numbers on the base. Working by feel, she found the 9 and pushed it. Now the 1 . . .

  The barrel of the shotgun had drifted off-target without her being aware of it. Ryan must have noticed it, though, because he spun and dove to his left. Elaine cried out and jerked the trigger instinctively as she tried to point the weapon at him one-handed. The roar of the shotgun going off in the hallway was deafening. She had no idea if she had hit Ryan or not. She wasn’t even aware that she had dropped the phone.

  Grabbing the shotgun with her left hand, too, she pumped another shell into the chamber and looked for Ryan. God, she couldn’t see him anymore! Where was he? Had he run off?

  He came up beside her, seemingly materializing from the floor like some kind of dark demon rising from the netherworld. His hand closed over the barrel of the shotgun and wrenched it to the side, even as Elaine jerked the trigger again. The charge of buckshot went into the wall, blowing a hole the size of two fists in it. Ryan twisted the gun. Elaine’s
finger caught in the trigger guard and broke with a sharp snap. She screamed in pain.

  His other hand closed around her neck and jerked her closer to him. She couldn’t get any air past his iron grip. Even though she tried to fight, her muscles didn’t seem to want to work right. She managed to punch him a few times, but the blows were weak and ineffective.

  With his other hand, Ryan reached up and pulled the hood off his head. With his face only a couple of inches from hers, he said, “There’s someone across the border who would like to meet you.”

  Bright red skyrockets were going off behind Elaine’s eyes. She was so desperate for air that although she heard Ryan’s words, she barely comprehended their meaning. Blackness was closing in her brain.

  She felt his other hand exploring her body through the T-shirt. He lifted it, reached around her, slid his hand down inside her panties to squeeze her flesh. “I wish there were more time,” he said, “but unfortunately, there’s not. Good night, Mrs. Stark.”

  The rockets were all gone now. No longer did they arch across the black velvet curtain inside her head. That curtain had closed all the way, shutting out all awareness from Elaine Stark.

  Ryan checked for a pulse in her neck. It was there, beating strongly and steady. His touch had been sure and precise, squeezing hard enough to cut off her air and make her pass out, but not enough to crush her larynx or do any other real damage. In a short time, she would wake up and be fine except for a certain amount of soreness and bruising on her throat.

  She was actually hurt less than he was, he thought. He hadn’t been able to avoid all the buckshot from the first blast. A couple of the pellets had torn into his right side. One of them had just cut a painful but shallow furrow in the skin, but the other had lodged there. When he pulled his shirt up and checked the wounds, he could feel it, a leaden lump under the skin. But he was in no danger from it, and it could be extracted later when he got back to Ramirez’s compound with the woman. The pain was nothing; he could ignore that.

  Bending slightly, he draped the woman’s limp body over his left shoulder and picked her up. Shouts came faintly to his ears from outside. He walked quickly to the front door, which was still open, and stepped out onto the porch. When he looked toward the bunkhouse, he saw that lights had come on in there. The ranch hands had heard the shotgun blasts and knew something was wrong. As Ryan reached into a pocket with his right hand and pulled out the little transmitter, he saw the door of the bunkhouse jerked open. A man started out.

  Ryan thumbed up the cover and pressed the button on the transmitter.

  The bunkhouse came apart in a huge, fiery explosion that sent a ball of flame soaring high into the night sky. The cowboy who had just emerged from the building was caught in the holocaust and thrown forward a good twenty feet, shrieking in agony as fire wrapped around him. His screaming didn’t stop when he hit the ground. He writhed for several seconds before he finally grew still and silent. His clothes and hair continued to burn.

  The explosion that had destroyed the bunkhouse and everyone inside it had been so large that it had drowned out the other blasts. But the rest of the ranch’s outbuildings, including several cottages where the married ranch hands lived with their families, were shattered and burning as well. The slaughter was complete. Every building at the ranch headquarters had been devastated except the main house, and no one was left alive but Ryan and Mrs. Stark.

  Ramirez would be very happy when he heard about this. But that would be just the start of his joy, because he would still have Elaine Stark to deal with. Ryan had heard Ramirez ranting about what he was going to do to the woman. It would be a kindness to her if he broke her neck right now and went back to tell Ramirez that her death had been an unavoidable accident.

  Ryan was not, however, in the business of being kind. He carried Elaine’s unconscious form well away from the house and laid her on the ground. As he straightened he heard the throbbing beat of wings over the crackling of flames. The helicopter’s pilot had been waiting for the explosions. They were the signal to him to come on in. As the sound of the chopper grew louder, Ryan walked back over to the house, took another bundle from his backpack, and tossed it through the open front door and down the hallway. He went back to stand beside Elaine as he triggered the explosives. The blast tore a fiery, blazing hole in the center of the house, and the flames began to spread rapidly.

  The downdraft from the helicopter’s blades beat at Ryan as the aircraft lowered to the ground nearby. There was plenty of light for the pilot to see by. Ryan picked up Elaine and carried her toward the chopper. She murmured and stirred slightly, but she didn’t regain consciousness. There was another man besides the pilot inside the helicopter. He leaned down to help Ryan lift Elaine into the craft. Ryan climbed in after her, and a moment later the chopper lifted off, banking and soaring into the night, leaving the Diamond S below and behind it. The ranch looked as though it had been hit by an artillery barrage or a bombing raid. The fires burned brightly, flames clawing at the darkness, smoke climbing high into the sky.

  Ryan never looked back.

  On the porch of the big house, Devery Small coughed and stirred slightly. He coughed again, and the pain that went through him dragged him out of the dark abyss that had claimed him and back into consciousness. He hurt like blazes, and for a second that was all he could think about.

  Then he became aware that a heat even worse than that of a summer day in Texas was pounding down on him from behind. He struggled to lift his head and look around. When he finally managed to do so, he saw through bleary eyes that the wall of the house was on fire. The flames had climbed all the way up the wall and were starting to eat away at the roof over the porch. Even in his stunned, pain-wracked state, Devery realized that if he didn’t move, the burning porch roof would soon fall right on top of him.

  He started to crawl. It wasn’t easy. His fingers scrabbled at the planks of the porch while his booted toes pushed feebly at them. He moved a little, a couple of inches, no more. Redoubling his efforts, he pulled himself along, getting a little closer to the edge of the porch. Again and again, he inched toward safety. The heat grew worse, until he felt as if he were inside an oven, roasting like a turkey.

  His fingers closed over the edge of the porch. He grasped it and pulled as hard as he could.

  With a cracking sound, the roof gave way and began to come down.

  Devery felt himself falling. Fiery debris pelted him, burning him, making him cry out in pain. He landed on the ground and more agony shot through him. He rolled, trying desperately now to get away from the heat. Somehow he wound up on his hands and knees and crawled for a short distance before he found the strength to surge up onto his feet and launch into a stumbling run. As badly as he was hurt, he knew he didn’t have much strength left. He staggered on, putting the blaze as far behind him as he could.

  When he tripped and pitched forward onto his face, he hardly knew it. But he felt the fresh burst of agony when he landed, that was for sure. He lay there, the taste of sandy grit in his mouth, and fought to hang on to awareness, but it was a losing battle.

  Once again a black tide washed over him, engulfing him so that he knew nothing more.

  Thirty-two

  Stark was eating his breakfast when the door of his cell opened. He’d spent a restless night, not surprising under the circumstances, and he wasn’t really hungry, but he was forcing down the scrambled eggs, sausage, and toast anyway. The coffee was a little better.

  He looked up, expecting to see one of the deputies, but Sheriff Norval Lee Hammond stood there instead, one hand grasping the edge of the door. Hammond’s face was ashen, and his voice was hoarse and strained as he said, “Come on out of there, Stark.”

  Stark set the plate aside as a chill went through him. Hammond looked like he had just gotten some terrible news. Maybe the charges against him had somehow been thrown out after all, Stark thought, and he was about to get out of here. He got to his feet and asked, “What is it?”
>
  “Your lawyer’s here.” Hammond inclined his head. “Come on.”

  Stark stepped out into the corridor. Two deputies had accompanied the sheriff, and they looked as pale and shaken as Hammond did. Stark frowned. He was starting to get the feeling that more was wrong than he had bargained for.

  “What’s going on here, Hammond?” he asked sharply.

  “Just go talk to Gonzales.” Hammond’s voice was dull now, as if beaten down by shock.

  Stark started walking toward the interview room where he always spoke with Gonzales. The deputies stood aside to let him by. Neither of them would look at him, Stark noticed.

  By the time he reached the open door of the interview room, he was almost running. He saw Sam Gonzales sitting at the table inside the room, staring down at his feet.

  “Sam?” Stark said. “Sam, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  Gonzales lifted his head, and Stark saw that the lawyer’s eyes were red. There were wet streaks on his face where tears had rolled down his cheeks. He tried to speak, but the words seemed to lodge in his throat.

  Elaine.

  The thought seared through Stark’s brain. Something had happened to Elaine. His guts went watery with a fear stronger than any he had ever known in his life, stronger even than the terror of a nighttime attack by the Vietcong.