“The truth, or I have no use for you.”
Sheer took a minute to recover as he spit out the blood that was filling his mouth, and after touching a loose tooth, he answered the question.
“Martillo, he’s part of a Mexican cartel and he’s the one who sent those men to Parker’s ranch.”
“Martillo means hammer, is that really his name?”
“No, but he sometimes kills with a hammer, and you know how that goes, the name stuck and now Martillo is pissed that his men are dead and he blames McKay.”
“How did McKay contact him, and don’t lie.”
“It was me, I knew Martillo from the old days, but he’s moved up inside the cartel. Now I’m not sure what he’ll do, but I wasn’t sticking around to find out and—where’s my duffel bag?”
“I tossed it out at the ranch.”
“Shit, all my stuff was in there, and money too, almost five grand.”
Tanner wasn’t listening anymore, as a thought came to him.
“This Martillo, how many men will he send to kill McKay?”
“I don’t know, but it will be a shitload more than the four pawns he sent last time.”
“Pawns?”
Sheer explained about Martillo’s code talk and then began rambling about the first time he’d met him. He was trying to buy time to delay what he knew was coming.
Tanner asked a question and cut him off.
“When will Martillo come?”
“Any day now, it’s why I got out of there. I tried to talk sense into Andy, but he won’t take Martillo seriously, and Martillo’s no joke.”
“You’re right,” Tanner said, while wondering if the sheriff’s deputy parked outside the Parker Ranch would be enough to turn Martillo away once he killed McKay.
He doubted it. What’s the death of one cop after you’ve just slaughtered over a dozen men?
Sheer was just able to say the words, “No, don’t—” before Tanner shot him twice in the head and left him to rot in the desert.
He had to get back to the Parker Ranch before it was too late, and as he drove along, he did something that he hadn’t done since he was a child.
He prayed.
CHAPTER 29 - No appeals
The Taco Queen in the neighboring town of Culver looked as if it had been closed for years, and graffiti and gang signs marred its formerly white exterior.
With Romina back home and safe, Tanner decided to have a look at what was reportedly the hangout of the motorcycle gang Javier belonged to.
After leaving the pickup truck in the parking lot of a diner, Tanner walked across desert scrubland and approached the old Taco Queen building from the rear.
No one was in the area except those passing by in cars on the road in front, and the back door of the Taco Queen had been kicked in long ago, so Tanner entered and looked around.
The place was a mess, and food containers and pizza cartons littered the floor.
There was one area near the boarded-up front windows that was cleared of debris, and had a table and chairs set up inside it.
Tanner looked down at the tabletop and saw magazines that were about guns, drug paraphernalia, and motorcycles. All of them had beautiful women showing lots of skin on every cover. Sex sells.
There was a denim vest draped over one of the chairs; it had a patch that showed a grinning skull and the words Diablo Boys. Rich Harvey had been right; the club name did contain the word, Diablo.
The building had a large storage area inside that had once been a freezer, but all of the components had been removed when the place shut down. Anything of value, such as the copper tubing, had been stripped by someone and sold as scrap metal,
There was a large, crude bulls-eye spray-painted on the rear wall of the freezer, and over a hundred rounds had perforated it, while 9mm shell casings decorated the floor.
Tanner marveled at the stupidity.
Granted, the sheet metal comprising the rear wall was thin, but the cinder block behind it wasn’t, and could have easily sent a ricocheting round back towards the person who fired it. Add to that the fact that the building had a steel frame construction, and the gang’s firing range could be a death trap if a bullet struck one of the steel girders.
A rumbling noise reached his ears and he figured that the Diablo Boys had returned. Earlier, he had looked inside an empty storage closet that was on the left side, near where the counter once stood. That was where he decided to go, so that he could listen in on them and maybe discover what was going on.
Before stepping into the storage closet, he watched as five motorcycles drove around to the rear and parked. Javier Reyes was riding on the last bike, and he was the only one that wasn’t wearing a T-shirt or jacket with the gang’s insignia.
Tanner also saw that the boy wasn’t wearing his helmet, but had it strapped down behind him. Apparently, he only carried it around so that his mother wouldn’t worry, but kept it off to appear more macho in front of the gang.
Tanner stepped inside the closet and left the door cracked just enough to see out, as the first of the men walked inside, past his position, and plopped into a seat at the head of the table.
He had a name stitched over the pocket of his vest which Tanner at first thought said Jeff, but then squinted and could see that it read, Jefe', as in boss. How original.
The other men followed and took seats, all but Javier, who Tanner assumed was made to stand because he wasn’t yet a member.
The other four men all looked alike, mid to late-thirties, with faded denim clothes, worn boots, and scruffy beards, but the one at the head of the table, Jefe', was a head taller than the others and the most muscular.
Jefe' looked around the large room with contempt on his face.
“Look at this shithole. How much longer do we have to stay here, Javier?”
Javier mumbled something that Tanner couldn’t make out, nor could the gang’s leader, as his next words indicated.
“Speak up! What excuse do you have now?”
“I said it’s that guy, Tanner. He ran off the Harvey brothers and even took my mother to see Willis.”
Tanner raised an eyebrow at the mention of Willis’s name and wondered if maybe he was involved somehow.
“What happened?” Jefe' asked.
“Nothing, and my mother still blames Willis for everything.”
“Good, but you have to make your move soon, son, and didn’t you say that Tanner dude was still there?”
“Yeah, the asshole wants to move in as far as I can tell.”
“It don’t matter, he was there when you rigged that knife to fall and he won’t be able to stop this either.”
Javier nodded, but shuffled his feet.
“Isn’t there some other way?”
Jefe' stood, and when he walked over to Javier, Tanner saw the boy flinch, but Jefe' smiled and placed a muscular arm across Javier’s shoulders, then, he spoke to him in a fatherly manner.
“I know it won’t be easy, but once it’s done, you’re in. You’ll be one of us and everything gets made new. Then we can leave this shithole behind and start making some fat dollars, you hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear you.”
“Do it tonight and it’ll all work out, you’ll see.”
Javier reached in his pocket and removed a small bottle that held a yellowish powder.
“You’re sure it’s painless?”
“Absolutely, and there’s no way to tie it back to you, and hey, you don’t want us to have to do it, do you?”
Javier shook his head vigorously.
Jefe' took Javier by the shoulders and turned to speak to the other bikers.
“Look at this guy, he’s making moves like a man, and the next time we see him, he’ll be one of us.”
The men cheered Javier and told him he was taking control of his life the way a man should, and then Jefe' slapped him on the back.
“Go home, act like everything’s cool and do what you got to do. I have faith in you, so
n, and you’re the future of the Diablo Boys.”
Javier said goodbye, and seconds later, Tanner heard his bike start up, and then the sound faded as he rode off.
Jefe' returned to the table and the man at his right asked a question.
“Do you think he’ll really do it?”
“Yeah, I do, he did everything else I asked. The little shit wants to be one of us and he knows that this is the only way that happens.”
“That’s one dumb motherfucker,” one of the other men said. “Once we move in there, I’m gonna get real friendly with his sister. The girl is fine, and I bet I can turn her out and have her doing blow jobs for twenty bucks, or maybe I’ll just make her my bitch.”
The other men laughed along with their friend, but the laughter died when Tanner stepped from the closet and shot the man in the back of the head.
He killed a second man by the time the other two reacted. They dived beneath the table while reaching for their guns.
Tanner sent two shots through the tabletop to kill the third man, before Jefe' could clear his weapon, and Tanner told Jefe' that he wanted to see his hands.
As Jefe' raised his hands up, Tanner saw a wet spot spread across the tough guy’s jeans.
“What is Javier supposed to do tonight?”
“You’re... you’re Tanner, aren’t you?”
Tanner fired a bullet that hit Jefe' in the left shoulder.
“Answer my question.”
Jefe' did answer the question, and several more after that, before Tanner left the leader of the Diablo Boys with a bullet in his head. He was tired of playing bodyguard and it felt good to kill.
Killing was something he had always understood.
It was final.
It offered no appeals, no plea-bargaining, and no second chances, and second chances were something that Tanner normally didn’t grant. The gifting of one to Romina’s crazed ex-boyfriend had put him in a bad mood.
He was determined to keep the Reyes family safe, and after learning the truth about Javier, he now knew that the real threat had been coming from within all along, and that Willis must have just been a convenient scapegoat.
Tanner wondered if Javier was a cancer that could be treated, or if he had to be cut out with a knife.
In either event, the Reyes family was in for grief, but at least two of them would still be alive when it was all over, and that was more than could be said for the Parkers.
Tanner strode back to the pickup truck he’d left at the diner, ditched the gun in a dumpster, and drove back towards the ranch, as thoughts of the past filled his mind once more.
CHAPTER 30 - Massacre
The McKay Ranch, September 1997
The big red tractor-trailer came to a halt just past the driveway, and the two ranch hands stationed there, men that McKay had turned into guards, assumed the driver would get out and ask them for directions.
When the driver did approach, he held a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun with a sound suppressor attached. He emptied the entire thirty-round magazine into the two men and watched as they fell to the ground dead.
With the guards at the entrance eliminated, the man unlatched the rear doors of the truck and swung them open, so that twenty of the forty men aboard could get out and head for the ranch. Each man held his own MP5.
With half of his cargo delivered, the driver got back in the truck and moved along the three miles separating the McKay Ranch from the Parker Ranch. He drove with the rear doors still opened and secured, as the men in the back held on to straps fastened to the wall, as they sat atop crude benches made from wooden planks.
Once there, the driver eased the truck around the police car and slowed to park.
When the men at the rear of the truck spotted the cop inside the cruiser, they opened up on him, shredding both the man and the vehicle with over a hundred rounds.
The silenced guns worked so efficiently that death was delivered in an eerie muffled violence, which sounded something like a hundred people all spitting at once.
If not for the discordant sounds of breaking glass and rending metal accompanied by the officer’s screams, the death and destruction would have seemed surreal.
The remaining twenty men disembarked and joined the driver, who was already headed down the Parker’s driveway.
The driver’s name was Martillo, and tonight his cargo was death.
***
The four men standing guard on McKay’s porch died before they could ever give voice to warn the other men on the property, but no warning was needed, as bullets shredded everything in sight, and only the dead could have missed the fact that they were under attack.
Martillo’s men spread out and just kept firing, as they reloaded their weapons repeatedly. The attack was so devastating that McKay’s men only got off five shots and caused only one injury.
In less than a minute, the home resembled a cheese grater, as over a thousand rounds perforated the structure, to pass through furniture, inner walls, and people.
By the time Martillo’s men had finished reloading for the fourth time, the baffles inside the sound suppressors began to fail, and the volume of the shots grew much louder.
McKay had stood up behind his desk at the beginning of the assault, and wondered what was causing the screams and odd sounds he was hearing.
Then, several of Martillo’s men reached the side of the home. When their silenced rounds entered McKay’s office, he finally realized that he was under attack.
After a round hit him in the thigh, McKay fell to the floor and was showered by glass, as the large picture window behind him shattered. Although he was wounded, cut, and bleeding, McKay was able to reach up and grab his gun from atop the desk.
He crawled across his office floor amid debris from the splintered walls and shelves and ran smack-dab into two of Martillo’s soldiers in the doorway, and their weapons were aimed at his face.
McKay dropped his puny revolver and begged for his life.
“Don’t shoot! I’ll pay! Oh Lord, don’t shoot, I’ll pay triple, I’ll—”
The two men emptied their guns into McKay, and then one of them spoke into a radio.
The gunfire outside grew sporadic before finally stopping, and after looting the home of anything of value that they could carry, one of the men set the charge.
The bomb he was preparing had been stolen from a military truck and was of an incendiary nature.
It was a bomb designed to burn illegal crops, such as marijuana and opium poppy plants, and could defoliate up to twenty acres. Inside the confines of the McKay ranch house, it would burn everything to ash.
With the charge set to detonate, the men left the McKay land in the vehicles of the men they had just killed, and headed for the Parker Ranch to join their brothers.
They were an overwhelming force intent on slaughter and revenge, and on this night, they would have both.
The bomb exploded when they were a mile away, and the heat could still be felt.
When they heard the booming sound of a rifle coming from the Parker Ranch at their approach, they looked at each other in amazement that the fight was still going on.
They would later learn that eight of their fellows had perished before their arrival, and that a sixteen-year-old boy had killed them.
Cody Parker was the last man standing, and he was determined to kill them all.
Alas, it was not to be.
***
Tanner was pushing Sheer’s car to its limit as he sped back to the Parker Ranch.
He had a bad feeling in his gut that was increasing with each passing second.
His lone hope was that the presence of a police officer would act as a deterrent, but he knew that it wouldn’t, not if the men attacking were from one of the cartels.
He had called the Stark Police Department and the person that answered assured him that the deputy on site was one of their best and that Sheriff McKay would be given his message as soon as he called in.
T
anner pounded the dashboard and cursed the incompetence of small-town law-enforcement, and then he cursed the car for not moving faster, even as the logical part of his brain was telling him that nothing was wrong, and that the odds of Martillo attacking the ranch at that very moment were slim.
But Tanner knew, he knew, and he only hoped that he could make it in time.
He thought of Cody, whispered, “Hang on, kid,” and drove down the highway like a madman.
***
While seated together at the kitchen table, the Parkers had just finished eating a late dessert of apple pie when the first shot broke one of the living room windows and shattered the glass front on the grandfather clock, a clock that had been hand-made by Frank’s late father.
The shot was the first, but the next seventeen that followed were separated by less than a second.
Frank Parker had startled at the sound of breaking glass, but as the barrage continued, Cody knew the sound for what it was.
He yelled, “Everybody get down!” and then dived beneath the table, to reach across and pull his sisters from their seats and onto the floor.
The next ten seconds were chaos, as hundreds of rounds entered the house, and did to it what a similar attack had done to the McKay home.
Claire was the first to die, as a bullet struck her in the head, as she was reaching down to free the baby from his high chair. Cody caught her before the body could hit the floor, as his father grabbed the baby.
Frank let out a wail of grief and Cody told him to guard the kids, as he sprinted for his rifle, which he kept in a rack on the rear porch.
“No Cody, stay down!” Frank yelled, but it was too late. The headstrong boy had ahold of his rifle and was headed out the back door.
***
Cody shot two men, rolled, and shot two more, while a round cut across his left arm.
He hadn’t felt the wound, hadn’t felt anything, except the urge to kill everyone who threatened his family.
At the rear of the home was a decorative metal trellis, and he climbed up it as if possessed of wings, with the rifle strapped to his back and spare shells jingling in his pockets.
He made it onto the roof of the wraparound porch, and three more men died in the front yard. The others realized where the shots were coming from, and they sent a barrage of bullets into the corner of the house, where Cody had been firing from.
The TANNER Series - Books 4-6 (Tanner Box Set Book 2) Page 21
