Cody kicked in the glass of his father’s bedroom window, climbed inside, and before leaving, he reloaded the rifle and removed his father’s .44 magnum from the bedside table.
The sound of the baby’s crying seemed to come from everywhere at once and filled the house, giving speed to Cody’s legs, as he flew down the steps to rejoin his family.
The front door was kicked in as Cody reached the foot of the stairs, and he used his father’s gun to send a .44 slug into the chest of the first man he saw, which caused the man to stumble backwards and knock down the two men behind him.
It gave Cody time to make it into the kitchen, and his breath caught in his throat when he saw that the walls had been shredded by gunfire, then, his heart nearly stopped as he saw that Claire’s body had been joined by that of his sister, Jill. The little girl had taken a shot to the chest and the exit wound left a gaping hole in her back.
“Dad!”
“We’re in the dining room!”
Cody went low through the swinging door that separated the two rooms and found his father beneath the table with his sister, Jessie, and baby James, who was wailing like a banshee.
Frank took his gun from Cody and wiped away tears with his sleeve.
“How many are there, boy?”
Cody spit the words out.
“It’s a goddamn army.”
“That many?”
“I killed seven or eight of them and it was like I didn’t even make a dent.”
Jessie hugged her brother tightly as she sobbed in spasms of grief. Cody wrapped an arm around her and kissed the top of her head.
“They got Jill, Cody,” Jessie moaned.
“I know, baby, and I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
The sound of feet crunching over glass came from both the living room and the kitchen. Frank thrust the baby at his daughter and got in front of her, to face towards the living room, as Cody took aim at the doorway to the kitchen.
When the sound of the footsteps ceased, Cody intuitively knew what was about to happen.
“They’re going to shoot through the walls, get—”
His words were drowned out by the chaotic sounds of destruction and death.
Cody heard his father cry out, his sister scream in pain, but it was the abrupt silence of his baby brother that sickened him, and when he turned his head to the right, he saw the obscene wounds, and although they twitched as their bodies shut down, he knew that all three of them were dead. The black grief nearly made him give up, but a scarlet fury made him press on.
He’d been hit in the right leg and the lower back during the barrage, but he dragged himself towards the windows, cutting himself repeatedly as he crawled through broken glass and debris.
When the guns fell silent for reloading, he propped up against the windowsill and flipped over to fall to the ground outside.
Limping, his back on fire, he came across two men bent over near the porch, and they were looking at a device of some kind. It was a second firebomb, and they were getting it ready to use.
Cody shot them both from behind before falling to one knee, as his wounded leg gave out.
As a man ran out the front door, Cody took aim, but he was shot in the chest by Martillo before he could fire. Cody collapsed onto his back with a groan, as the worst pain he ever felt took hold of him, and he realized that he was dying.
Martillo walked over, pressed the tip of the silencer against Cody’s forehead, and said five words.
“You fought like a king.”
An instant later, Martillo pulled the trigger.
***
Martillo had arrived with forty men and left with eight dead and two wounded.
They had killed over a dozen men, destroyed a family, and slaughtered a police officer.
The repercussions of the attacks would, in short time, turn the community of Stark, Texas into little more than a ghost town for over a decade, and scar both the town and the county forever.
And for a young man calling himself Tanner, it would be a turning point, and the greatest failure of his life.
CHAPTER 31 - Coming clean about being dirty
Tanner had called ahead and told Doc to go to the kitchen and stay there, and that if Javier entered the room, he was to watch him like a hawk.
On his way home, Tanner bought new clothes, ones free of microscopic particles of biker blood and gunshot residue. He changed into them in the dressing room, before discarding his other clothes with the plastic garbage bags he had sat on as he drove the truck.
When he did return to the ranch, he found Javier seated on the porch steps and looking deep in thought.
Were it not for the fact that he was Maria’s son, Tanner would have wasted him with the rest of the Diablo Boys and ended the threat cleanly.
He approached Javier with a scowl and held out his hand.
“Give it to me.”
Javier had been so lost in thought, that he hadn’t realize that Tanner was there.
“What?”
“I said, give it to me.”
Javier’s bronze face turned almost white and he licked his lips several times.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tanner, now get away from me.”
Tanner leaned over and spoke softly.
“If you don’t give me that bottle, I will make you eat it.”
Javier opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and then reached into his pocket and removed the bottle. As he was laying it into Tanner’s palm, he began sobbing.
“I couldn’t do it. Not that, I just couldn’t do it.”
Javier pointed at the plants beside the porch and Tanner saw the yellowish powder that was laying atop the dirt. He then looked inside the bottle and saw that it was empty.
“What were you supposed to do with this?”
“They wanted me to put it in my mother’s wine. Jefe' said that it would be like she went to sleep and never woke up.”
“What was in this bottle?”
“I don’t know, but it came from a bigger bottle that will be planted in Chuck Willis’s office. One of the gang, Georgio, he has a cousin that works on the night cleaning crew at Willis’s company. She was going to plant the evidence and then call in an anonymous tip.”
“So Willis had nothing to do with this?”
“No, but how did you find out about the Diablo Boys?”
“Nevermind that, but you need to talk to your mother, if you don’t, I will. She needs to know what a piece of shit you are.”
Javier straightened his back at that, but then slumped his shoulders in resignation of Tanner’s insult, and the truth it contained. A moment later, he reached out and grabbed Tanner by the arm.
“The Diablo Boys will come here when they find out that I couldn’t do it, they’ll come here and try to kill my mother. You have to do something.”
“Don’t worry about it; I’ll handle it.”
Javier covered his face with his hands, as he began crying again.
“Oh God, I fucked up, I fucked up so bad.”
“What’s going on here?”
It was Maria; she had just opened the front door and froze when she saw Javier crying.
She came down the porch steps with concern lighting her face.
“What’s wrong? Were you two fighting again?”
“No,” Tanner said, “But Javier has something to tell you.”
***
Javier talked to his mother in the living room with Tanner watching, and Tanner was surprised when the boy didn’t attempt to sugarcoat anything.
He had begun hanging around the gang six months earlier. They used him as a gopher to fetch coffee and food, as they hung around their makeshift clubhouse at the old Taco Queen.
The Diablo Boys made mule runs or acted as security for a San Antonio drug lord whenever they were needed, which was seldom, but made more in a day of transporting drugs than most people make in a month.
Javier rode along with them once, and that
was when Jefe' learned about the ranch.
“He kept asking me if the ranch would be mine someday. I said yeah, that I guessed that you would leave it to me and Romina.”
Javier paused and looked at his mother with a sad expression.
“A week later, Jefe' started saying how nice it would be if you were out of the way, and that with Romina being underage, I would inherit the ranch alone, or at least be in control of it. He had given it a lot of thought and wanted to place an airstrip on the ranch, so that drug planes could land here and turn it into a distribution center. He wanted you out of the way, and he was going to make it happen one way or another.”
Maria stood and walked about the room for a moment before she came to stand before Javier.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“Jefe' said that if I told anyone it would just be my word against theirs, and that someday soon, Romina would be killed.”
“They wanted you to choose between the two of us?” Maria said.
“Not really, they wanted you dead, but they said that if they weren’t tied to it, that they would let Romina live.”
“And all these ‘accidents’, they were all caused by you, even the knife that nearly killed Mrs. Salgado?”
Javier stood and took his mother’s hands.
“I swear to God I thought that it would just fall out and frighten her, but I guess it flipped when it fell and the blade end hit her first.”
Maria looked stricken. She freed her hands from Javier and settled back on the sofa. After nearly a minute passed, she wiped tears away and spoke to her son, as disappointment showed in her eyes.
“You’re going to the police and tell them everything.”
“But Mom, they’ll hurt Romina, they will.”
Tanner spoke up.
“No, they won’t. I’ll make sure of it, but your mother is right, you need to go to the police, and you need to do it as soon as possible.”
***
Javier and Maria spoke to the cops, and the next thing Javier knew, he was a suspect in the murders of the Diablo Boys.
Before leaving the gang’s clubhouse, Tanner had used Jefe'’s phone to dial 9-1-1, before placing the phone back in the gang leader’s hand.
After tracing the call, the police dispatched a patrol car to the Taco Queen, found the bodies, and the time of Jefe'’s death was fixed as occurring after the call was made.
Traffic cameras confirmed that Javier was miles away at the time, and a Paraffin test gave the result that his hands were clean of gunshot residue, while no trace of blood was found on his clothing.
He was back at the ranch with his mother that night, and he no longer had to fear the Diablo Boys Biker Gang.
***
Javier joined Tanner on the porch around midnight and sat across from him at the card table.
“How did you learn what was going on?”
“Does it matter?” Tanner said.
Javier was silent for nearly a minute, before saying,
“You killed them, didn’t you? Jefe' and the others, it was you?”
“Goodnight, Javier.”
Javier walked to the door, but before he closed it behind him, two words left his lips.
“Thank you.”
Tanner rose from his seat to patrol one last time before settling down for a full night’s sleep.
CHAPTER 32 - The gift
The Parker Ranch, September 1997, Two days after the massacre
At dawn, Tanner pushed aside the yellow police tape and walked down the driveway that once led to the home of the Parker family.
Where a home had stood, there was just a foundation and the remains of a crumbled red brick chimney. The blaze that destroyed the structure was so intense that some of the bricks had melted.
He had been too late.
Too late to save them,
And so what?
He was a killer wasn’t he? Not a bodyguard, not a cop, not a savior, but a taker of lives,
He would have been truer to himself had he agreed to do the job in the first place, marched over, and massacred the Parker family himself.
It would have been simpler.
It would have been cleaner.
And he wouldn’t have the faces of the dead haunting his dreams as they did now, because they would have been strangers. The faces of the twins, Jill and Jessie, of the woman, Claire, of Frank, and even the baby, the goddamn baby that the bastard calling himself Martillo felt it necessary to kill.
“I let you down, Cody,” Tanner whispered, and then he thought about his mentor and wondered what the old man would have thought of this mess.
The name, Tanner, had been passed down from one assassin to another since the 1920s, but Tanner’s mentor, the 5th Tanner, had held the name the longest, and had given him the honor of bearing it when the old man knew that he was dying.
“But I’m too young,” he had said.
The old man smiled at him from his deathbed and grabbed his hand.
“You’re the one, boy, because you’ve got the gift, that rare combination.”
“What gift?”
“You’re smart and you’re deadly, both are needed, but you’ve got something else. Despite the ice in your veins, there’s also a fire deep in your heart. I’ve known some stone-cold killers who thought they were the baddest thing going, but they were nothing more than killing machines. To be the best, to be a Tanner, that takes heart.”
“But we kill people for a living, how much heart does that take?”
The old man smiled again, even as his eyes began to close from exhaustion, exhaustion caused by the disease that was killing him.
“There will come a day when you’ll either have to follow your heart or your head, and you’ll choose your heart and risk everything for a cause. Not money, but a cause, a just cause, mere killers run from insurmountable odds, but Tanners, we overcome them.”
“Because we’re the best?”
“No, because we have heart, and where others run from a fight, we win, and that makes us the best.”
Tanner left the Parker Ranch and headed for Mexico.
It was time for Martillo to die.
CHAPTER 33 - Matchmaker, matchmaker
With the ranch safe once more, Tanner no longer had to babysit Romina, who was now riding to and from school with her boyfriend, Chaz Willis, and with it being a Saturday, the two kids were off somewhere with friends.
Tanner was planning to leave the ranch soon, but stayed on a few days longer to regain his strength after being shot. Doc had removed his stitches the night before and declared that the bullet wound was healing nicely.
Things seemed settled at the ranch, and so Tanner was surprised when, while out on a run, he spotted Chuck Willis parked on the side of the road.
The man was staring out at a meadow on the Reyes property, where Maria was riding her horse. His car window was down and when Willis raised his hands and took aim, Tanner ran towards him while reaching for the gun at the small of his back.
However, when he got a good look at what Willis was holding, he relaxed and shook his head in dismay.
“Just ask the woman out already,” Tanner said, and his sudden appearance startled Willis so much that he dropped the camera he was holding.
“Mr. Tanner, um, hello,”
“Do you spy on women often, Willis?”
“No, but I saw her riding and I... Hell Tanner, I like the woman and she’s so beautiful I can barely speak when I’m around her.”
“You’re giving me a lift back to the ranch and then you and Maria are going to talk.”
Willis gave him a pained look.
“The woman hates me.”
Tanner opened the passenger door.
“She doesn’t hate you, and anyway, there’s something she needs to say to you. Now get moving. I want to be there when she returns from her ride.”
***
Doc took the horse’s reins from Maria as she dismounted, and then she walk
ed towards Chuck Willis with her hand extended.
“Mr. Willis, welcome to my ranch.”
Willis appeared startled by her civil greeting. When he took her hand, Maria held him in both of hers and offered an apology for the way she acted at their last meeting.
Tanner suggested that they move things inside, and soon they were having coffee in the living room.
***
“A biker gang?” Willis said.
“Yes and... I’m sad to have to admit it, but my son was responsible for most of what went on, the things I blamed you for, and again, I apologize.”
“Willis has a new offer for you, Maria,” Tanner said.
Maria’s demeanor grew colder, as she stared at Willis.
“I won’t sell at any price.”
“Tell her, Willis,” Tanner said.
“Oh, yes, I no longer want to buy your land, but I would like to lease its use for one month every year, not all of it, just the southern pasture.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I’m building on the last of my land, the property that used to be the McKay Ranch, but for the past several years I’ve let the town use it each October for the Fall Fair, and I was hoping that you’d be kind enough to let me lease your land, so that the fair can be held here instead.”
Maria looked thoughtful for a moment before speaking.
“No, I won’t lease it to you, but I will let the town use it for free, and I love the Fall Fair.”
Willis smiled.
“Excellent, the mayor will be happy, and I’ll tell her to give you a call.”
“Mr. Willis?”
“Please, call me Chuck.”
“All right, Chuck, would you like to come by for dinner tonight? Your son will be here, and I think as neighbors that we should get to know each other better.”
Willis said nothing for a moment, but then nodded emphatically.
“I would love to have dinner with you, Mrs. Reyes.”
“Call me, Maria.”
Willis smiled.
“I’ll do that, Maria.”
Tanner stood.
The TANNER Series - Books 4-6 (Tanner Box Set Book 2) Page 22
