Nacho moved closer to him, nudged him with an elbow.
“You nervous, Antonio?”
Antonio managed to shake his head and keep his voice level as he said, “No, man, I’m fine.”
“You’ll be finer when this is over. You’ll really be one of us then. It’s gonna be good. You’ll see.”
“You sure we’re not gonna kill him? Just rough him up some, right?”
“Yeah, man. We don’t want no real bloodshed. Just teach him a lesson, so he don’t even think about holdin’ out no more.”
Antonio swallowed hard, hoping that Nacho wouldn’t notice. He had to do something about the lump in his throat, though. He nodded.
“Sounds good,” he said.
“You get in some good licks, that’s all you gotta do. We’ll know then you one of us.”
Before Antonio could say anything else, Jalisco announced quietly, “Here he comes.”
A pair of headlights had turned off the highway and were bouncing toward the house over the rutted dirt road. Once again Antonio fought down the urge to be sick. At least this would be over soon, he told himself.
The four men crowded into the thick shadows behind the shed. The approaching car’s engine was loud, and so was the Tejano music blasting from its stereo speakers through the open windows. When both of those noises cut off abruptly, the night suddenly seemed painfully quiet.
A car door slammed. Antonio and the others started to emerge from their concealment behind the shed.
Another door slammed.
Jimmy Rodriguez wasn’t alone.
Nacho paused for a second, muttered, “It don’t matter,” just loud enough for his companions to hear, and moved out again, pulling a gun from under his shirt as he did so. It was a Glock nine millimeter, and Nacho was proud of it and showed it off every chance he got, like it was his baby.
Jalisco had a gun, too, Antonio knew. He and Chuckie carried only knives. The guns were just to make sure Jimmy didn’t put up too much of a fight, Nacho had said. He would have to take what was coming to him.
Two figures were moving toward the porch. Nacho called out, “Stop right there.”
They froze, and at that instant, Chuckie clicked on the powerful flashlight he had taken from the car. Its beam washed over the two people standing there, hands raised in an attempt to shield their eyes from the unexpected, blinding glare.
Jimmy Rodriguez stood there, and next to him was his fourteen-year-old sister, Sonia. Antonio’s stomach clenched as he recognized her. They hadn’t gone to school together—Antonio had graduated several years earlier, and Sonia was only about to start high school as a freshman—but he knew her anyway. She was really pretty and sweet, and it wasn’t her fault that her older brother had gotten mixed up with some bad hombres.
“Nacho—” Antonio began.
“Well, this is a surprise,” Nacho said, ignoring him. “You bring your hermana along to protect you, Jimmy?”
“Sonia, get back in the car,” Jimmy snapped.
She took a step, then stopped as Nacho said, “No, no, no, you stay right where you are, little one.” He and Jalisco split up, Nacho going right, Jalisco going left, as they approached the two frightened teenagers. They stayed on the edges of the cone of light so that the guns they held would be visible.
Jimmy said, “Nacho, I don’t know what you want, but Sonia’s got no part in it. Lemme give her my keys. Let her drive away from here.”
“Why, I can’t do that,” Nacho said in a tone of mock surprise. “She’s only fourteen years old. She got no driver’s license. You wouldn’t want me to let somebody break the law like that, would you?”
“What do you want?”
“You been skimmin’, man. You five grand short over the past couple weeks. The hombres can’t have that.”
“It’s a lie,” Jimmy said indignantly. “I been straight up. I always been straight up, you know that, Nacho. We go way back, you and me.”
“Back far enough I know not to trust you.”
Jimmy said, “Look, I got two thousand in the house. I’ll give it to you, you give it to the hombres. I don’t mind doin’ that if it’ll fix things, even though I never skimmed a cent, man. You’ll do that for me, won’t you, Nacho?”
Nacho grinned and said, “Oh, we’ll take the two grand, all right . . . after we’re finished with you and little Sonia.”
“I told you—”
Nacho cut in on Jimmy’s angry, desperate outburst by turning his head and calling, “Antonio!”
After another hard swallow, Antonio stepped forward. This was his part, he supposed. He’d give Jimmy a beating, and then they could get out of here. He hoped they wouldn’t hurt Sonia before they left.
Hands clenching into fists, he said, “I’m sorry about this, Jimmy—”
“Hold on,” Nacho said. “You’ll need this.”
He pressed the Glock into Antonio’s hand. Antonio stood there shocked, unable to move.
“Shoot him in the head,” Nacho said quietly, his voice little more than a whisper. “Walk up to him, point the gun at his face, and pull the trigger. That’s all you gotta do.”
Sonia burst out, “No!” and then put her hands over her face in horror as she began to sob.
Antonio forced words out of his mouth.
“You said . . . you said . . .”
“You should’ve known better, man,” Nacho told him. “Why’d you think we brought along the machete?”
Jimmy broke and ran.
He made it two steps before Jalisco drilled a bullet through his thigh. Jimmy cried out, grabbed at the wound, and tumbled to the ground, raising a little cloud of dust as he landed.
“Sonia, run!” he screamed through his pain.
She was too scared to move, though. She stood rooted to the ground between the car and the house.
“Go ahead now,” Nacho told Antonio. “You can do it. He’s squirmin’ around, though, so you’ll have to aim good.” Nacho caught his breath. “No, wait! I got a better idea. We’ll make him watch while I give Sonia to Chuckie. Then you can shoot him.”
“I . . . I . . . I can’t.”
The Glock slipped from Antonio’s fingers and thudded to the dirt at his feet.
Nacho’s arm whipped up and around and his knuckles cracked viciously across Antonio’s face. He screamed curses in Spanish.
“You drop my gun!” he screeched. “You drop my gun in the dirt, you—”
Jalisco’s gun spat fire twice. Jimmy jerked as the bullets struck him. The little automatic he had dug out of the top of his boot fell from nerveless fingers, unfired.
The shots made Nacho stop his frenzy. He looked expressionlessly at Jimmy’s body as blood continued to well from the wounds in his chest.
“Well, I guess we won’t make him watch after all,” Nacho said.
“But I still get Sonia, right?” Chuckie asked.
Nacho jerked his head toward the girl and said with a sleepy smile, “Go for it, brother.”
Sonia ran then, terror finally galvanizing her muscles, but she was much too late. Chuckie dropped the flashlight and lunged after her. The light hit the ground, and the brilliant beam broke the landscape up into weird shadows as it illuminated the chase. Within a few yards, Chuckie caught up to Sonia, loomed over her like a great bird of prey, and swooped down on her.
Antonio caught a glimpse of that terrible sight over his shoulder as he looked back. He was running, too, toward the highway, and he expected to feel a bullet from Jalisco’s gun smash into his back at any second.
No more shots rang out, but Sonia started screaming and kept screaming. Even over the pounding of his heart, Antonio could still hear the sound all the way to the highway, where the rumble of passing trucks finally, thankfully, drowned it out.
CHAPTER SIX
Stark was standing at the counter that separated his kitchen from the living room. He had just poured his first cup of coffee for the day and was breathing in the aroma of it when somebody knocked
on the door of his mobile home. Carrying the coffee with him, he went over and opened the door.
Hallie Duncan stood there, looking trimly efficient and businesslike in a gray suit, yet still very attractive. She smiled and said, “Good morning, John Howard.”
“Hallie.” Stark lifted the cup. “Want some coffee?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got a latte in the car.”
“Didn’t offer you a milkshake,” Stark said with a smile. “Asked if you wanted coffee.”
She laughed and said, “You’re determined to hang on to being a dinosaur as long as possible, aren’t you?”
“They ruled the earth for a long time, depending on who you believe.”
“And eventually they died out, too.” Hallie grew more serious and said quickly, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. It didn’t really come out like I meant it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Stark told her. “Come on in. A gentleman shouldn’t leave a lady standing on his porch.”
He stepped back to let her into the mobile home. As she came in, she asked, “Have you had the TV on this morning?”
“No, it’s a little too early in the day for me to have my intelligence insulted.”
“I suppose you’d say the same thing if I asked you if you’d been on the Internet.”
Stark just chuckled.
Hallie reached into her purse and took out her phone. She touched the screen, started swiping her finger across it, and said, “I’m sure I can find the clip I want on Google News. . . . Ah, here it is.”
She turned the phone so that he could see it as a video clip started playing. The sleekly handsome, smug features of a man Stark recognized as the attorney general of the United States were in close-up.
“. . . concluded that there was no basis for any sort of federal prosecution in the incident,” the attorney general was saying. “This is solely a matter for the state of Texas to handle, and I assume the local authorities will do so in a proper and prudent manner.”
Stark went over to the front door, opened it, and stepped out onto the porch. He tilted his head back and surveyed the sky.
“What are you doing, John Howard?” Hallie asked with a note of exasperation in her voice.
“Lookin’ for pigs,” Stark said as he squinted upwards. “That was a federal official saying that there was something the state could handle better than the federal government, wasn’t it?”
Hallie burst out laughing. She put her phone away and said, “It’s not really funny, you big old galoot. The Justice Department has cleared you of civil rights violations in the case of those three punks who tried to steal your truck.”
“As well they should have,” Stark said as he came back inside and closed the door. “I didn’t do anything wrong by protecting my property and my own life.”
“These days, a lot of people would disagree with you.”
Stark shrugged.
“They can disagree all they want,” he said. “That doesn’t make them right.”
“Maybe not, but you’re still lucky. I’m convinced that they never would have been able to make a case against you with that many witnesses on your side, but they could have made your life very unpleasant for a long time if they’d wanted to. And one thing about a case going to trial . . . you can never be one hundred percent certain how it’s going to turn out.”
“Unless you’ve got a good lawyer, and I happen to know one,” Stark said. He raised his coffee cup in a little salute.
“I’ve been keeping a pretty close eye on the investigation these past few weeks,” Hallie said. “I have an old friend from law school who works in D.C. He’s not in the Justice Department, but he’s got a pipeline in there, and he’s been monitoring the situation for me.”
“He?” Stark repeated. “Old boyfriend? Somebody you used to go skinny-dipping with at Hippy Hollow there in Austin?”
He was just teasing her, but the pink glow that suddenly spread across her face told him he’d inadvertently hit the mark. She muttered, “You wouldn’t think that a woman of my age who’d been married for twenty years of her life would be embarrassed by anything, would you? But yeah, I may have flirted a little on the phone with him. I figured it was for a good cause.”
“Thanks, Hallie,” Stark said. “I appreciate that, and I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
She waved that off.
“Don’t worry about it, John Howard. What’s important is that the whole weight of the federal government isn’t going to come crashing down on you.”
“I’m grateful for that too, don’t get me wrong,” Stark said. “There’s no mess like a government mess, and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it.”
“I just wanted to let you know.” Hallie started to turn away, but she stopped and looked down at the newspaper sitting on the little table next to Stark’s favorite recliner. She picked up the folded paper and held it so the main headline was visible. “Did you see this already?”
Stark nodded and said, “Yeah. Terrible business.”
The headline read BODIES FOUND IN BURNED-OUT FARMHOUSE. That was bad enough, but the real horror was contained in the story below the headline. Stark had scanned it enough to know that volunteer firemen called to the scene of a blaze had found the bodies of a young man and a girl in the ruins of the burned house. It was pretty obvious, though, that their deaths hadn’t been a result of the fire.
The heads of both bodies were missing. Someone had chopped them off, possibly with a machete, according to sheriff’s department investigators. Despite that, the bodies had been identified, although those identities were being withheld pending notification of next of kin.
“We’re just going to keep seeing more and more things like this,” Hallie said as she set the newspaper back on the table. “Unless the government decides to secure the border and stop the cartels from moving in—”
“Might as well go check the sky for flying pigs again if you’re gonna start talking like that,” Stark advised her.
Hallie sighed.
“I’m afraid you’re right.” She put a smile back on her face. “I need to get to work. Congratulations on not being railroaded.”
“I don’t plan on getting too worked up about it,” Stark said as he set his coffee beside the chair and opened the front door for her. “I’d like to think they backed off because they didn’t have a case, but I can’t help but wonder if they’re up to something else.”
“That’s a good question,” Hallie agreed. She paused on the porch. “Pop’s going to be barbecuing Saturday night. I assume you and the Gomezes will be there?”
“You bet,” Stark said. “I wouldn’t miss one of your dad’s barbecues—”
A shrill, horrified scream interrupted him.
Stark’s head jerked up at the sound. The screams continued, coming from across the street. The neatly kept mobile home over there belonged to an eighty-year-old widow named Dorothy Hewitt. She had a small vegetable garden at one side of her lot, and thanks to her constant tending of it, the garden produced enough tomatoes, green beans, peppers, squash, and cabbage that everybody in this part of Shady Hills shared in the bounty.
Dorothy was standing at the edge of her garden, a hoe at her feet where she had dropped it, her hands clapped to her cheeks as she continued screaming.
Stark shouldered past Hallie and said, “Stay here!” He hit only one step on his way down to the ground. His long legs carried him at a run across the street. He heard Hallie’s high heels clicking on the pavement behind him and knew she had ignored his order to stay put, which didn’t particularly surprise him.
Other people were emerging from their homes, drawn by the sound of Dorothy Hewitt’s screams. As far as Stark could see as he came up to the elderly woman, she was all right, just scared out of her wits as she stared into her garden. He took hold of her shoulders and turned her to face him.
“Dorothy, what is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
She couldn’t fin
d the words to answer, but she flapped a hand at the garden. Stark realized she was indicating a row of cabbage plants. Some of the cabbages nestled in their leafy bowers had grown pretty large.
But a couple of them were gone and had been replaced by one of the grisliest sights Stark had ever seen. Despite everything that had happened in his life, he was still shocked to the core as he stared into the empty, lifeless eyes of the two human heads that had obviously been placed with great care in Dorothy Hewitt’s vegetable garden.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hallie called her office to let her secretary know she would be late; then she took charge of Dorothy, putting an arm around the older woman’s shoulders and leading her away from the garden. Stark posted himself at the edge of the street to keep everybody else away from the gruesome scene while he took his phone from his pocket and called 911.
His efforts didn’t do a lot of good. People might not be able to approach the garden as long as he stood there glaring at them, but they could still look past Stark and see the grim, bloody “produce” being grown there. A few of the neighbors turned green and ran off to throw up, but more remained to stare in horrified fascination and babble questions.
Stark didn’t want to look at the heads again, but he had already seen enough to know that they had belonged to a young Hispanic male and an even younger Hispanic female, and it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that they went with the two bodies that had been recovered from that burned-out farmhouse northwest of town.
Since the Shady Hills Retirement Park was located well outside the city limits of Devil’s Pass, Stark’s 911 call was directed to the sheriff’s department. He told the operator where he was and what Dorothy had found in her garden and was told to remain where he was.
“I don’t plan on going anywhere,” Stark said.
Fred Gomez and Alton Duncan came over to him. Alton said, “Hallie’s got Dorothy over at my place trying to calm her down. That poor woman. What a terrible thing to find first thing in the morning.”
“Or any other time,” Fred added. “You know where they came from, John Howard?”
The Bleeding Edge Page 3
