“Maybe they took her and the kids with them,” Lauren had suggested.
“If M-15 kidnapped them, they wouldn’t have had a chance to pack up all their stuff like that.”
Lauren had nodded in acknowledgement of that point, then asked, “You think they went after the Brannons, too?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out. I know one thing, though—Tom Brannon wouldn’t cut and run just because somebody tried to throw a scare into him.”
No, Buddy thought now as he neared the Brannon house, Tom wouldn’t run. He would fight.
And those damn gang members wouldn’t hesitate to kill him and Bonnie both.
Buddy saw smoke rising into the air behind the house as he drove up. He parked the cruiser in front of the garage, got out, and slammed the door. The sound brought Bonnie from inside the house. She was moving rather quickly, but she stopped short when she saw who the visitor was. “Oh, hello, Buddy,” she said with a smile. He thought she looked nervous, despite the friendly greeting.
“Mornin’, Bonnie,” he said pleasantly. “Where’s Tom? Around back burning trash?”
“That’s right. Do you have any news, Buddy?”
“What? Oh, no, no news. Just visiting.”
She didn’t believe that, and he didn’t blame her. He started around the house as she fell in step beside him.
Tom must have seen them coming, but he continued using a hoe to stuff something into the big trash barrel where the fire was burning. Then he turned and lifted a hand in greeting. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, which was a little unusual. “Good to see you, Buddy,” he called. “What’s up?”
Buddy stopped and looked at the thick black smoke coming from the barrel. An odd smell hung in the air, as if whatever was burning in there wasn’t the usual household trash. “Sendin’ smoke signals to the Navajos over in New Mexico, Tom?”
“You mean this? No, we’ve just been cleaning up. We’re a little late on our spring cleaning this year, I reckon you could say.”
“I see.” Buddy thumbed his Cubs cap farther back on his head. “There wasn’t any . . . trouble out here last night, was there?”
“Trouble?” Bonnie repeated quickly before Tom could reply. “Why should there be any trouble?”
“Just curious,” Buddy said. “I’ve got a mystery on my hands this morning. Two of them, in fact.”
“What sort of mysteries would those be?” Tom asked in apparently innocent curiosity.
“One of them is what happened to Carla Willard and her kids and her mother.”
“Carla May?” Bonnie said, a worried frown appearing on her face. “Something happened to her and her family?”
“I don’t know. They’re gone. Just up and vanished. No signs of a struggle or any other trouble at their house, but they’re sure enough gone.”
“Maybe they just went on a trip,” Tom suggested.
Buddy nodded slowly. “It did look like they had packed quite a few clothes to take with them. If they’re on a trip, they’re planning for it to be a mighty long one. That’s not good.”
“Why not?” Bonnie asked. “After what happened to Carla May, I don’t blame her for wanting to get away from Little Tucson for a while.”
Buddy scratched his chin. “Yeah, but we’re gonna need her to testify for the grand jury when Porfirio Mendez’s case comes up. I have to see if I can find her before then.”
“I don’t see why you have to bother with that,” Tom said. “I can testify against Mendez.”
“You didn’t actually witness anything except the end of that rape, and Mendez wasn’t even the one attacking Ms. Willard.”
“But he robbed the bank,” Bonnie said. “He and his friends shot poor Al Trejo and Deputy Kelso.”
“I went over all the statements from the folks in the bank yesterday. It all happened so fast, and they were so scared, a good defense attorney wouldn’t have any trouble shaking their identifications. Besides, some of those people are going to be too scared to testify against a member of M-15—especially after everything that’s happened lately.”
“What about the video cameras in the bank?”
Buddy shook his head. “Not working. Just bad luck.”
“You’ve got Carla May’s statement,” Tom pointed out. “Won’t that be enough for the grand jury?”
“Enough for an indictment, maybe, but without her testimony I don’t know if we can get a conviction at trial.”
Tom glared at Buddy. “You can’t mean there’s even the remotest possibility that that animal could go free!”
“Anything’s possible where the law’s concerned.”
Tom shook his head. “This just doesn’t seem right. Anyway, by God, he was an accessory to that rape. He was standing right there watching!”
“You seem to be the only one who can testify to that,” Buddy pointed out. “So I’ll ask you again, Tom . . . any trouble out here last night?”
Tom didn’t answer the question. He looked narrow-eyed at Buddy and said, “You mentioned having two mysteries to clear up this morning. What’s the second one?”
“Who dumped the bodies of three badly beaten men on the hospital parking lot in front of the emergency room entrance last night?”
Tom shook his head and said, “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea.”
“I talked to the staff at the ER,” Buddy said. “They all told me they didn’t get a good enough look at the vehicle that dumped those men to identify it, but they were all sure it was a big pickup.” He turned his head and looked pointedly at the garage where Tom’s F-150 was parked.
“There are a lot of big pickups in Arizona.”
“Yeah, but I’m wondering what would happen if I got a real forensics team down here from Tucson and had them go over the bed of your pickup, Tom. I’m wondering what they’d find inside your house.”
Tom and Bonnie both stiffened. Buddy didn’t miss the reaction. Tom’s eyes narrowed even more as he said, “I don’t think I like what you’re implyin’, Buddy.”
“Why don’t you let me go in there and take a look around?”
Tom shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“I can get a search warrant, you know.”
“You’d do that, after all the years we’ve been friends?”
Buddy’s temper finally got away from him. He snatched his cap off his head and said, “Goddamn it, Tom, I’m the sheriff of this county, and you’re puttin’ me in a hell of a bad position! One of those men is in such bad shape he’s liable to die, and if he does that means there’s likely to be a manslaughter charge against whoever walloped him!”
“That’s crazy!” Tom blazed back at him. “Men like that—”
He stopped short, but Buddy hadn’t missed it. “Men like what?” he asked. “I haven’t said anything about who they were.”
Tom didn’t say anything for a moment, just stood there with his face taut and angry. Then he said, “Do you even know who they are?”
“Not yet,” Buddy admitted, “but I hope I will soon. I’ve got my office working on it. Now, how about letting me look around inside?”
Tom shook his head and gave him a flat, “No.” After a second he added, “And for the record, Bonnie and I were home last night, and nothing happened.”
“That’s right,” Bonnie said. “It was just a quiet evening at home.”
Buddy just grunted. He didn’t believe them for a second. He had a pretty good idea of how the night had played out. Those M-15 bastards had gone to Carla Willard’s house first and thrown such a scare into her that she had packed up her kids and her mama and taken off for the tall and uncut. Then they had come out here, only to find that Tom and Bonnie Brannon didn’t scare as easily. He figured that Tom was responsible for beating the hell out of those goons, but he wouldn’t put it beyond Bonnie for her to have had a hand in the fracas, too. She would fight like a wildcat if she had to.
So he was left with the option of getting a search warrant and serving it on his oldest friend—or le
tting it go for now and waiting to see what else happened. Neither of those courses of action appealed to him, but he didn’t see what else he could do.
“All right,” he said at last. “If that’s what you two say happened, then that’s what happened.”
“Thanks, Buddy,” Tom said.
“But don’t think this is over,” Buddy went on. “I’ll have to keep investigating, especially if that fella in the hospital dies. I won’t have an unsolved homicide in my county if I can do anything about it.”
“I thought you said there might be a manslaughter charge. You didn’t say anything about homicide.”
Buddy shrugged. “If I don’t know the circumstances of a death, I have to regard it as a possible homicide. That’s just standard procedure.”
They didn’t say anything to that, but he thought he saw worry lurking in their eyes. They knew the trouble was far from over. He put his cap back on and started toward his car.
“Buddy . . .” Tom said.
He looked back. “Yeah?”
“Thanks for checking on us.”
“I plan to have a car out here more often from now on,” Buddy said.
“Watching out for us . . . or watching us?”
Buddy just shrugged and went on to his car. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, and he didn’t like it a bit. It wasn’t bad enough that those M-15 bastards had killed and terrorized some of the citizens of Sierrita County. Now the situation had driven a wedge between two old friends, so that things between them might never be the same again.
The radio crackled as Buddy drove away from the Brannon house. He picked up the microphone and said, “Go ahead.”
Lauren Henderson’s voice came back, which meant she had information she wanted to deliver herself, rather than entrusting it to Dusty Rhodes.
“I got a response back from NCIC, Sheriff, on those fingerprints I sent them awhile ago.”
That meant at least one of the three men had been in the U.S. criminal justice system at one time, or the National Crime Information Center wouldn’t have had their fingerprints on file. “Go ahead,” Buddy told Lauren again.
“The subject with the fractured skull is Guadalupe Laurenco Almovodar, an El Salvadoran national with suspected strong ties to Mara Salvatrucha. He was convicted of drug smuggling charges in California three years ago and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.”
“What was he doing in Little Tucson, then, if he’s supposed to be in prison in California?”
“He escaped nine months ago. There’s one report of him being spotted in Tijuana not long after that, but he hasn’t been in custody since then.”
So he had busted out of jail and gone running back to his masters in M-15. Not surprising. “What about the others?”
“Nothing on them yet. It’s a pretty safe bet they’re the same sort as Almovodar, though.”
Buddy couldn’t argue with that. He keyed the mike and said, “Stay on it, Lauren. You get that bulletin out on the Willard family?”
“Yes, but I don’t know if it’ll do any good. If they’re on the run from M-15, they’re going to be lying really low.”
“I know. Gorman out.”
He hung up the mike, took his cap off, and sleeved sweat from his forehead, sweat that had formed despite the air conditioning in the cruiser. Even though it had been the only logical conclusion, he now had proof that the three men in the hospital were connected to M-15. Those lunatics wouldn’t stop just because somebody—Tom Brannon, whether Buddy could prove it or not—had beaten the shit out of their men. On the contrary, that would probably just make them more eager to have their revenge on Little Tucson and everybody in it.
The sky was clear this morning, but Buddy felt like a storm was brewing. And when it finally broke, all hell would be busting loose.
12
Two days passed in relative quiet, although several members of the media from Tucson and Phoenix showed up in town, drawn by the outbreak of violence that had seen four deaths, five men badly injured, a kidnapping and rape, and an attractive young woman and her family missing. Buddy Gorman figured it was only a matter of time until the national media picked up on the story. Once that happened, the circus would come to Little Tucson. Buddy wasn’t looking forward to that.
Nobody had seen hide nor hair of Carla Willard, her children, or her mother since the day of the bank robbery. Every police and sheriff’s department in the state had been notified to keep an eye out for them, along with law enforcement agencies from Texas to California. Really, though, they could be anywhere in the country by now, especially if Carla had had enough money on hand to pay cash for some airplane tickets. Buddy had a feeling he might never see the Willards again.
Fred Kelso remained in his coma, as did Guadalupe Almovodar. The two men who had been dumped at the hospital with Almovodar had regained consciousness but they weren’t talking. Sullenly, they refused to identify themselves, and when Buddy had threatened to arrest them for vagrancy, they just sneered at him. He knew what would happen if he arrested them—they would make a phone call, and a short time later some high-powered lawyer would show up to get the charges thrown out. Even though Buddy was sure the men had threatened and perhaps even assaulted Carla Willard and attacked Tom and Bonnie Brannon, he couldn’t prove it.
The spots on the carpet in Carla’s living room were indeed blood, as Lauren thought. That didn’t prove anything, either. Lauren had sent samples of the blood off to the crime lab in Phoenix for DNA testing; if it matched the blood of any of the men in the hospital, that would be a start. It would at least place them on the scene. But the results of those tests would take a week or maybe two, and in the meantime Buddy’s hands were tied. All he could do was place a guard on duty at the hospital. Having a deputy there around the clock was going to put a strain on his manpower resources, as were his efforts to keep a closer eye on the Brannon place.
All through that breathing spell, Buddy continued to have the feeling that something was about to happen. He worried about it to the point that his wife Jean scolded him and told him he was going to have to relax. Buddy knew that was a lost cause. Something big was about to hit his town, none of it good.
Bonnie Brannon pulled into the parking lot at SavMart and looked for a place to park. The sprawling discount store was busy, as usual. While it was true that everybody in the county was nervous about the M-15 gang, they still had to do their shopping, and these days that meant a trip to SavMart.
Bonnie had to park quite a distance from the entrance, but at least the place was right next to a buggy corral, so she wouldn’t have to go far to return her buggy once she finished unloading it into the back of the Blazer. It was late afternoon, and heat blazed up from the asphalt of the parking lot. Bonnie felt it through the soles of her canvas shoes as she walked toward the entrance. She wore a sleeveless blouse and a pair of blue jeans. The denim purse slung over her shoulder was heavy from the .38 inside it, but she found the weight of the gun reassuring. Not that she expected anything to happen in SavMart, for goodness’ sake.
The past couple of days had been tense. Tom was upset because Buddy Gorman suspected him of being involved with what happened to those three men. Of course, Tom had been involved, and so had she. But Buddy’s suspicion was like a festering sore, and it got on Tom’s nerves. Bonnie knew that he wanted to tell the truth to his old friend, but that would just complicate matters.
Tom had patched the hole in the hallway and nailed some plywood over the damaged section of the garage door. Bonnie had gotten started on repainting their bedroom. Together they had driven into Tucson and picked out some new carpet at the big home improvement warehouse there. Carpet was one of the few things they couldn’t buy at SavMart. The roll was in their garage now, just waiting to be put down when they finished with the painting.
Those chores had occupied Bonnie’s mind for the most part, keeping her from dwelling on the danger that still loomed over them. But at unexpected times, the sheer terror she had e
xperienced that night came back to her and made her stop what she was doing. At those moments, she had to close her eyes and clench her hands tightly into fists, so tight that the nails dug into her palms, and wait for the trembling to pass. The first time Tom had caught her at one of those moments, he had tried to take her into his arms and comfort her, only to have her pull away. He had to understand that she needed to fight this thing herself. She didn’t want him holding her, not then.
In time this would pass, she told herself. But only if there was no more trouble from M-15. If the gang came after them again, which seemed likely, she didn’t know what she would do.
But until that happened, they had to carry on with their life in as normal a fashion as possible. This afternoon, for example, she had come to SavMart to buy groceries, while Tom was at the auto parts store, checking to see how Louly was minding the store.
Bonnie walked past an armored truck parked in the fire lane near the entrance. The automatic doors opened, and blessedly cool air washed over Bonnie as she entered the store. Carlos Flores, a retired physics teacher wearing the standard green SavMart vest with the “S” embroidered on it, gave her a big grin and said, “Hola, Señora Brannon. How are you today?”
“Just fine, Señor Flores,” Bonnie answered with a smile of her own. The elderly man had taught both of Bonnie’s kids in high school.
“Need a buggy?”
“Yes, please. Gracias.” She took the buggy he pulled out from a long row of them next to the wall and pushed it on toward the seemingly endless aisles of the store. Sarah Jeffers stood behind the little podium near the check-out stands, a walkie-talkie clipped to her belt next to a big ring of keys. She was the supervisor of the cashiers and was ready to perform any voids or overrides and provide extra change for any register that ran short. She was Bonnie’s age, and the two women had been friends for years. Sarah’s husband Millard was the manager of this SavMart, as well as the mayor of Little Tucson. He always liked to say that it was really Sarah who ran both the store and the town. He claimed he was just a figurehead.
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