Hellhound On My Trail

by J. D. Rhoades

  She walked to the door. “I’ll see you in the morning.” She stopped as if she were about to say something else, then took another drink of her beer and left.

  RIDDLE SAT in the car by the road a half mile down the fence. He watched the lights from inside the house shimmer and glitter in the night. From time to time, he raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and examined the place more closely. There was no way to sneak up on the house; before the sun went down, he’d spotted multiple surveillance cameras on the building itself and others scattered on the property. The people in the house would be armed, smug and complacent behind their layers of security. That would be their mistake. He had taken down people better armed and protected than these.

  A light in the house went off. A light in another room went on. He was lowering the binoculars when he felt his cell phone vibrate against his leg. He answered. “Yes?”

  “Tell me where this Jack Keller is,” said a voice he didn’t recognize, one with a heavy Spanish accent.

  “You want him?” Riddle said.

  “I have some business to discuss with him. I hope to have a very long conversation.”

  Riddle smiled in the dark. “I think we can help one another. Let’s talk.”

  THE SUN was just peeking over the edge of the horizon when Riddle saw his opening. The gates swung wide and a small red pickup headed out. He caught a glimpse of the young Latino guy he’d observed working around the house. The road was long and straight; there was no need to hurry. He let the truck get nearly out of sight before he began to follow. He had an idea where the young man was going. He caught up a few miles down the road, as the truck was pulling into a small roadside market. A hand-lettered wooden sign out front advertised FARM FRESH EGGS AND COUNTRY HAM.

  Riddle didn’t slow down until he was a mile or so past the store, then he pulled over. He picked up the cell phone, dialed a number he’d been given the night before, and said one word into it when someone picked up on the other end: “Vamanos.” He closed the phone and turned his truck around. He drove back to the store, slowly. He’d timed the errand perfectly; the truck was pulling out as he approached. He fell in behind, following at a safe distance until they reached a stretch of the desert highway out of sight of the store and of the house.

  Riddle pulled out to pass. He’d previously rolled down his passenger side window and laid a long-barreled .357 magnum on the passenger seat. As he pulled abreast of the red truck, he slowed slightly. As the young man turned his head to see who was passing, Riddle raised the gun, steering with his left hand, and fired. The first shot shattered the driver’s side window in a spider web of glass that quickly collapsed. The truck swerved drunkenly as the startled driver nearly lost control. He over-corrected and nearly collided with Riddle’s vehicle. The lurching vehicle came close enough so that Riddle had a clear shot; his second round snapped the driver’s head to one side and sprayed his blood and brains across the passenger window. The truck slowed, drifted toward the center, then back toward the shoulder before shuddering to a stop.

  Riddle pulled behind it and got out. As he approached the vehicle, gun held down by his side, a large black Cadillac Escalade with windows heavily tinted pulled up. A nondescript white van pulled up behind it. The passenger side window of the Caddy rolled down. Riddle tensed. A hard-faced young man with a shaved head looked out at the scene with dark, impassive eyes.

  “Don’t just sit there,” Riddle snapped. “Help me get him out of the driver’s seat.”

  The man didn’t answer at first, then he said something in rapid Spanish to someone in the back of the SUV. A pair of young Latino men in nearly identical blue jeans and white T-shirts got out. One had the ripped muscles and crude tattoos of someone who’d spent a lot of time behind bars. The other was younger and wirier, wearing sunglasses and a blue bandanna. The three of them muscled the driver’s dead weight out of the truck. They didn’t react to the mess inside. “Get his coat off.” In a moment, they’d stripped off the dead man’s chef’s coat. The shoulders and back were spattered with blood and brain matter.

  As Riddle shook and snapped the coat to try and get as much of the detritus off as he could, he saw that the two were dragging the body to the side of the road. “No,” Riddle said. “In the truck bed.” They looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. He motioned with his head insistently. The two looked at each other, then shrugged. They tumbled the body into the back of the truck as Riddle donned the soggy chef’s coat.

  “Bueno,” Riddle said.

  The two looked at each other again. “We speak English, homes,” Blue Bandanna said.

  “Good. That’ll make this easier.” He quickly explained his plan. It didn’t take long.

  When he was finished, Jail Tats frowned. “You say this lady inside…she has lots of guns?”

  “Yeah,” Riddle said. “At least I assume she does. She certainly brags about them enough on TV. They’re all yours when we’re done. Along with Keller.”

  “Sure, man, sure,” Blue Bandanna said. “But you know, this plan of yours…” He shook his head. “Seems more like a suicide run than anything.”

  “If it is, I’ll be the first one who finds out. You’ll have plenty of time to turn tail and run.” The tightening in their shoulders and their deepening scowls let him know he’d stabbed their pride. “You in or out?”

  The two men glanced as one back toward the hard-faced man in the passenger seat. He nodded.

  “Okay,” Jail Tats said. “We’re in.”

  MARTA LOOKED at the kitchen clock and frowned. Alex was running late. If he didn’t get back soon, the Señora would have to wait for breakfast. She liked it as soon as she got up. She wouldn’t say anything, but her entire demeanor would let them know that she had found them wanting. Marta was too proud a woman to allow that to happen. If that boy—Alex was in his mid-twenties, but Marta still called him “that boy”—didn’t move his behind, he was going to get a talking to. She walked to the front door and looked out. Through the narrow glass windows beside the door, she could see the gate at the end of the long driveway. The air above the paved drive was already beginning to ripple in the first blast of heat from the morning sun.

  There. She saw the little red truck Alex was so proud of and pressed the large gray button beside the door that activated the gate. Muttering to herself, she went back to the kitchen to finish chopping the vegetables for the morning omelets. When she heard the front door open, she called out in Spanish. “You took your time about it. Bring me those eggs so we can—”

  She looked up. The man standing there in the chef’s coat wasn’t Alex, and he was holding a gun in his hand. There was a long suppressor affixed to the barrel of the weapon. She gasped. It took her a few seconds to recall the gun in her apron, the gun the Señora demanded she carry, even though it made her uncomfortable and weighed her down. Those seconds made all the difference. The gun in the man’s hand gave a soft cough, the soft-nosed round striking Marta in the forehead and killing her instantly.

  IN ALL his years of taking out heavily armed and highly motivated people, Arlen Riddle had learned one unyielding truth: All the guns in the world will not save someone if you kill them before they can point the guns at you. The secret to taking out an armed group was speed and surprise. With those on his side, one man could wreak havoc.

  Before the body of the maid hit the floor, he was moving. He crossed the kitchen, into a dining room, and beyond that into a living room with huge tinted picture windows facing out across the desert. He stopped and looked around to get his bearings before noticing the metal staircase going up. Without hesitating, he took the stairs two at a time, not bothering to be quiet. Moving quickly from the top of the stairs and down a carpeted hallway, he picked out the room with the light coming from beneath the door. Without a moment’s hesitation, he burst into the master bedroom.

  There was a woman in the king-sized bed across from the bedroom door. Riddle recognized her as the woman from the Liberty Arms billboards
and TV commercials. She was sitting up, in mid-stretch as he kicked the door open, and she barely had time to turn and look at him before he fired. Once. Twice. A fan-shaped pattern of red and gray appeared as if by magic on the wall behind her and she fell across the expensive-looking sheets. He stepped into the bedroom, scanning back and forth with the pistol in his outstretched arms.

  A door opened into the bedroom. He swung the gun to bear on the figure who stood there. It was a woman with short blond hair, dressed in a light gray robe. She was brushing her teeth. She stopped as she caught sight of him and her eyes widened.

  “Don’t move,” he said.

  Her hand, still holding the toothbrush, dropped to her side, but her mouth still gaped open soundlessly as she turned toward the bed. She saw the body sprawled there, the spray of gore across the wall, and blinked stupidly for a moment. That was all it took for him to cross the room, grab a handful of the woman’s short hair, and jam the gun into the side of her neck. She gave a startled cry and dropped the toothbrush, still rooted to the spot by uncomprehending shock. He leaned over and whispered in her ear.

  “Scream.”

  She screamed.

  THE SOUND of the scream jolted Keller out of sleep. He was rolling out of bed and crouched on the floor before he was fully awake. He waited there, listening. He heard nothing at first, then the sound of steps on the stairs. It sounded like two people, but descending clumsily. He strained his ears, trying to catch some noise that would tell him what the hell was going on. A thought made him lean back and slide open the drawer in the bedside table. Of course there was a pistol there. It was a 9MM Glock, of a model he was familiar with. He pulled the gun out and checked it. Loaded but not cocked. The footsteps were coming closer, down the hallway toward his room. He could make out another sound approaching with them.

  It was the sound of a woman weeping.

  Keller gritted his teeth and racked the slide on the pistol to chamber a round. The footsteps stopped outside his door.

  “Mr. Keller?” a male voice said.

  Keller didn’t answer.

  “I know you’re in there, Mr. Keller,” the voice said. “She told me.” The sobbing grew louder. Keller waited.

  “I’m going to open the door,” the voice said. “She’ll be in front of me. If you try anything, she’ll die.”

  Which she? Keller wondered, then realized the import of the man’s words. It was most likely that everyone in the house was dead except for him, the unknown voice, and whichever of his hosts was still alive. He looked over at the windows, wondering if he could break one of them and get out that way. But where would he go? Across the desert? Whoever this was could pursue him across the open space and shoot him down like a dog. He straightened up slowly, gun held out in front of him, as the door swung gradually open.

  A man was standing there, with his forearm across the neck of Erin Alford, holding her in front of him. He was taller than she was, his face partially exposed. His eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. Keller measured the chances of taking the head shot, dropping the unknown man, and getting them both out of here. The man’s next words stopped that speculation.

  “I’m not alone. Kill me, and it won’t make a bit of difference in what happens to you. But it might have an effect on what happens to her.”

  He looked at Alford. Her eyes were red rimmed and tears rolled down her face. “He killed Becca,” she sobbed. “He shot her, Jack.”

  The man acted as if she hadn’t spoken. “In about two minutes, a group of men are coming in here. They work for some people down in Mexico. Some people you’ve managed to really piss off, Mr. Keller.”

  “You’ll have to be more specific,” Keller said. “I piss a lot of people off.”

  The man smiled. “I heard you were kind of a smart-ass. We’ll see how funny you are when Jerico Zavalo’s people get hold of you.”

  “Sorry,” Keller said, “I can’t place the name.”

  “Seems his brother Andreas had a nice little smuggling operation going. Across the border. I hear you screwed that up. And then someone killed Andreas.”

  Keller shook his head. “Still not ringing any bells.” But he was beginning to get an idea what this was about. He’d helped his closest friend, Oscar, find his sons, kidnapped by a white-supremacist cult who’d been capturing illegals coming across the border and redirecting them into a slave labor camp in the swamps of South Carolina. The FBI, the Border Patrol, and a mysterious group of operatives who appeared to have no official existence had dismantled the operation. A lot of people had died, including the man responsible for getting the illegals into the US.

  “Jerico stepped into the power vacuum that was left after his brother and Auguste Mandujano got killed,” the man said. “Frankly, I think Jerico ought to thank you. But he apparently thinks you’re partially responsible.” He shrugged. “Thing is, one way Jerico established his hold over the old operations is by hiring a guy that used to work for the Sinaloa cartel. They called him the Soupmaker. Ever hear of him?”

  “No,” Keller said, still looking for an opening, “but I guess you’re going to tell me.”

  “The Soupmaker got rid of enemies of the cartel by putting them in a big tub of acid. If they were really lucky, the cartel boys would shoot them first. I don’t think you’re going to be that lucky, Mr. Keller.”

  Keller could hear the sounds of people in the corridor outside, voices raised in Spanish.

  “In here,” the man called back. He looked at Keller. “Set the gun on the floor and I let her live.”

  “I think you’re lying,” Keller said. “I think the plan is to leave a trail of dead bodies with me disappeared, so I get blamed. That doesn’t work if she’s alive to tell a different story. So whatever I do, you’re going to kill her.”

  The man smiled tightly. “You’re a pretty smart hombre. But there’s different ways to die. Some a lot worse than others. She could always go into the soup first, while you watch.”

  As the import of the words sank in, Alford began to struggle wildly. “NO!” she screamed. “NO! NO!”

  The man clouted her on the side of the head with the gun. “Shut up,” he snarled.

  The momentary distraction gave Keller his opening. He fired once, aiming over her shoulder to the man’s face, but Alford’s desperate thrashing caused her to jerk sideways at the wrong moment, and the bullet struck her in the throat. Blood, bone, and gore exploded out of the back of her neck in a spray that drenched the face and upper body of the man behind her. Her body began to convulse and the man dropped her to the floor, raising the gun and snapping off a shot at Keller. The bullet went wide, but so close Keller could hear the snap as it passed. He flinched to one side and pulled the trigger again as the man threw himself to the side and out of the doorway. The babble of voices grew louder; whoever the man had brought with him was coming down the lower hallway. It sounded like a good-sized group.

  Keller stayed in a crouch, but moved slowly toward the door, hoping he could at least close it. He didn’t know what he was going to do then. All he’d be was trapped inside with an unknown number of armed men just beyond the door. One of the unidentified Spanish voices was raised in what sounded like a question. The man he’d just seen answered back in the same language.

  There was a shuffling of feet, as if people were getting into position. Keller tensed. He was probably going to be gunned down, but he preferred that fate to the one the unknown man had described. Maybe he could take at least one or two of the bastards with him. He looked at Alford’s body lying in the doorway, eyes wide and staring as if in shock. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I should never have come here.” There was no answer. There was no way to shut the door with her body blocking the doorway. Keller looked up. There was no sound from the hall. He waited. First one to move, he thought, will be the first to die.

  It didn’t work out that way. All he saw was an arm coming around the edge of the doorjamb. The arm jerked back, but not before tossing a sm
all cylindrical object into the room. Keller had only a moment to register grenade before it went off, blinding him with a brilliant flash and deafening him with a dull concussion that he could feel in his whole body. He staggered to one side, trying to keep his hold on the gun.

  The doorway filled with bodies as men poured into the room, brandishing long guns and shouting at him. He couldn’t hear them through the ringing in his ears but he saw the mouths working spasmodically, the dark eyes narrowed in hate and anger. He tried to raise the pistol with an arm that suddenly felt like it belonged to someone else, the seemingly unconnected hand raising the weapon in slow motion. A hand snatched the weapon away and Keller looked up to see a brown wooden gun stock swinging toward his face.

  The explosion of pain didn’t knock him unconscious, but stunned him into immobility. He barely resisted as he was yanked to his feet. The man who’d struck him swung the gun again, jamming the butt of the weapon into Keller’s solar plexus. He doubled over in agony, gagging as last night’s dinner threatened to come back up. The third blow to the back of his skull drove him to his knees and finally, mercifully, into darkness.

  WHEN KELLER awoke, he thought at first he’d gone blind.

  He was still groggy from the blow to the head, but he was aware enough to know his eyes were open. However, all that he could see was blackness. He shook his head to clear it, then immediately regretted the motion. His head felt as if might burst open. He wondered if the blow had fractured his skull and injured the vision centers of his brain. When he tried to raise his hands to his head to check for damage, he discovered a new pain in his wrists, which were secured behind him. It felt like they’d used zip ties. There was a low humming in his ears and the feeling of vibration along his body.

  Gradually, as full awareness returned, he realized that he was lying on his side, bound. He was in some kind of vehicle. When he breathed out, he could feel the soft puffs of his exhalation against his face, as if they were rebounding off something. It was then that he realized his captors had put a bag over his head. He felt around tentatively with his legs until his foot encountered metal. He was in the back of a van or truck of some kind. The humming he could hear and feel was the tires on asphalt.