As scared people began piling into their vehicles, Ford and Earl ran over to join Parker and Callahan in the open double doors of the barn.
“Come on!” Ford said. “We’ve gotta get outta here now, while everybody else is scattering. Maybe they won’t be able to pick us out on the satellite footage.”
“Those sons of bitches!” Callahan said bitterly as he looked at the wreckage of his home. “They blew up my house!”
“Yeah, and they’ll figure out that you know who we are and what we’re after,” Parker said. “You’ve got to come with us, Rye. It won’t be safe for you to stay here.”
Callahan glared at him. “This place has been in my family for generations. I won’t abandon it.”
“You’re not abandoning it forever,” Ford said. “You’re just giving yourself a chance to stay alive so you can reclaim it later.”
“Well …”
“Come on, Mr. Callahan,” Earl urged. “We don’t have any time to waste.”
That was true enough. With the skidding of tires on gravel, the guests were getting the hell out of there while the getting was good.
“All right,” Callahan said abruptly. “I don’t like it, but I reckon you fellas are right.”
The four of them crowded into the pickup. They wouldn’t have made it if Earl hadn’t sat on Ford’s lap.
“I don’t like it any better than you do, you big ape,” Earl said.
“Remind you of sitting on Santa’s lap, does it?” Ford shot back.
“Shut up, both of you,” Parker grated from behind the wheel. He stomped the gas and sent the truck racing out of the barn. They fell in behind the others who were fleeing from the devastation.
Sitting in the middle, Callahan twisted his neck to look back at the burning ranch house. “By God, I got a score to settle with them FPS varmints now, too, and I intend to settle it!”
“You’ll probably get your chance,” Ford said. “But for now, you’re coming with us while we check out things in Home.”
Knowing that it was possible they were being watched and that a small army of cold-blooded killers might be moving to intercept them at that very moment, the four fugitives headed west across the Texas plains, into the dwindling light of a dying day.
BOOK FIVE
CHAPTER 36
Except for a few fluffy white clouds over the mountains to the west, Sunday morning dawned clear and beautiful. It was a late summer day with a hint of coolness in the air that presaged the autumn and winter to come.
The Federal Protective Service troopers manning the checkpoint on the state highway approximately five miles east of Home had painted the words STOP HERE in big letters across the westbound lane of the highway. A couple of orange traffic cones were set up behind the words. One of the black RVs was parked beside the road to serve as the command post for the checkpoint, and also as a place for the men who weren’t on duty at the moment to sleep, eat, and chill out.
As the sun rose, two men in full gear were standing beside the road, watching for traffic. There hadn’t been much. Not many people other than the media were going in and out of Home these days, and the troopers didn’t have to worry much about the media, although they checked all the vehicles. The reporters were on their side.
Hector Reyes stifled a yawn. It was contagious. Adam Sutherland, on the other side of the highway, yawned, too. Hector grinned across at him.
“I don’t know why we’re out here,” Adam said. “Nothing’s gonna happen today. Everybody knows they can’t get away with bringing guns into town.”
“You can never be sure of that,” Hector said. “Sometimes things happen to surprise you.”
Adam shook his head. “Not on this mission. Nobody even wants to come to this backwater town anymore. It wouldn’t surprise me if the whole place just dries up and blows away in a few years.”
“Me, neither,” Hector agreed.
Adam suddenly stiffened and peered off into the distance to the east. “Something’s coming,” he said. “Can’t tell what it is yet.”
Hector stepped out into the road and shaded his eyes with his hand. The sun hadn’t been up very long and was still low to the horizon.
“Looks like a truck,” he commented a moment later.
“More than one, I’d say,” Adam responded as he joined Hector in the middle of the highway. “Looks like a couple.” He shrugged. “Not too surprising, I guess. The people in Home may not have their guns anymore, but they still have to eat. I’ll bet those are grocery trucks.”
“Maybe.” Hector shrugged. “We’ll find out in a minute.”
It was true. The trucks advanced at a steady speed, the growl of their engines audible now in the early morning air.
Adam started to frown. “Are … are they not slowing down? Surely they’re not going to try to bust through here!”
But then he relaxed as the whine of brakes joined the engine sound. The two trucks slowed gradually. Adam and Hector moved to opposite sides of the road again and covered the vehicles with their assault rifles. The sound of the brakes grew louder until the pair of trucks finally came to a stop. The front wheels of the first one sat on top of the words painted on the highway.
Adam walked toward the driver’s door while the man behind the wheel rolled down his window. “You’ll have to step out, sir,” Adam called up. “These trucks and their contents will have to be inspected before you can continue, by order of the Federal Protective Service.”
Hector came around the front of the truck and stepped up beside him. Adam didn’t do more than glance at him. Most of his attention was centered on the man behind the wheel of the truck.
So he never saw the silenced pistol in Hector’s hand. He just felt the muzzle of it press against his ear for a second before Hector pulled the trigger and sent a.32 round bouncing around inside Adam’s skull. The beautiful morning turned red and black and then went away forever for Adam Sutherland.
Hector caught the body and lowered it to the ground. He nodded to the driver, who pressed a button on the truck’s dashboard that lit up a light in the enclosed back.
Hector walked around the truck again and went to the RV. He opened the door and called, ȌHey, guys, come out here for a minute and give us a hand.”
The other four members of the detachment emerged from the vehicle a moment later, a couple of them yawning sleepily. Hector waited until all four of them were out, then shot the last one in the head, just as he had Adam.
Before the other three realized what the coughing sound behind them really was, several men armed with automatic weapons stepped out from behind the first truck parked on the highway and covered them. The FPS troopers reacted instantly and started to swing their own weapons up, but Hector said, “No! Stand down!”
The men were well-trained, so they hesitated. Only for a second, but in that second, every hope of fighting back was lost. Hector said, “Put your guns on the ground.”
“Reyes, you son of a bitch,” one of the men said as they reluctantly complied. “What’s going on here?”
“Destiny,” Hector said.
A few minutes later, all the troopers except Hector were dead, each shot once in the head after Hector made them remove their helmets. The men from the trucks stripped their uniforms off them, and five of the men from the cartel began to put them on. Hector handed around lists of the day’s call signs and radio broadcast protocols.
“There are three more checkpoints,” he said. “One on the state highway on the other side of town, and on the farm-to-market road north and south of town. Colonel Grady talked about how there would be checkpoints on the smaller roads, too, but that was just a bluff. General Stone decided it wasn’t necessary to go to that much trouble.”
“Why not? “ one of the killers asked.
Hector waved a hand toward the town, which was out of sight in the distance except for the barely visible water tower. “Because those people have given up. Hell, they let the government come in and take their guns. Most
of them swore they’d never do a thing like that, but when it was their own skins on the line, they caved. They’re beat, man. Beat down all the way. They got no fight left in ’em anymore.”
“I hope you’re right,” the other man said as he settled one of the FPS helmets on his head. “But in the end, it won’t really matter, will it?”
Hector smiled. “Not one bit, man.”
The ringing of the phone on the table beside the bed woke Alex. She groaned and rolled over, reaching blindly for it. She couldn’t find the phone and had to open her eyes and, when she did, the first thing she saw was the clock. It was only a few minutes after seven. She had planned on sleeping in this morning in hopes of making up for some of the sleep she had lost over the past few days, and she had gotten a start on it, but now that plan was ruined.
Because nobody was going to be calling at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning with good news.
She finally got a hand on the phone and lifted it from its base. She thumbed the Talk button and said, “Yeah?”
“This is Ed Ruiz, Alex. Sorry to call you so early, but I thought you’d want to know.”
Alex sat up and pushed tangled hair out of her eyes with her free hand. “Know what, Ed?” Why couldn’t the mayor just spit it out, whatever he wanted to tell her.
Ruiz did. “Pete McNamara died early this morning, about an hour ago.”
Alex drew in a deep breath and blew it out. “Damn,” she said softly.
“Yeah,” Ruiz agreed. “I guess we all knew it was coming. Nobody expected him to last this long, especially the doctors. But it’s still hard.”
It was. Pete had never really regained consciousness after the stroke that had felled him in the courtroom, although he had shown signs of awareness on occasion. He didn’t have a DNR order on file, and he and Inez hadn’t had any kids to make the decision for him. So after his condition had been stabilized enough for him to be moved, he’d been brought back to the small nursing home near the hospital and placed under Dr. Boone’s care. They’d put a feeding tube in his stomach and waited for nature to take its course, one way or another.
Now, several months later, it had finally gotten around to finishing the job of killing Pete McNamara, Alex thought, the job that Jorge Corona and Emilio Navarre had begun the night they broke into his house.
“All right, Ed. Thanks for telling me.”
“I kept hoping and praying that maybe the doctors were wrong, that maybe one of these days Pete would wake up and be himself again.” A hollow laugh came from Ruiz. “But if Pete had been aware enough to know what was going on in his hometown, he wouldn’t have wanted to live. He would have been so sickened by all of us that he would have rather been dead.”
“We don’t know that,” Alex said. “And we did what we had to do to keep a bunch of our people from getting thrown into some secret prison or worse. Nobody knows where they took Wendell Post and Elmer Davis. Dave Rutherford doesn’t think we’ll ever know … or see them again.”
“Maybe not. Maybe we don’t want to know. There’s nothing we can do about it, is there?”
Alex didn’t answer that. There was no answer she could make, not one that she wanted to admit to, anyway.
She said goodbye to Ruiz and hung up the phone. Knowing that she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, she got up and pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt. Jack would still be asleep—the phone wouldn’t have awakened him, since he could sleep through anything short of an earthquake—so she thought she might as well have a look around town before coming back here to fix some breakfast.
She clipped her holster to her belt, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and put on a cap. As she went out to her patrol car, she slipped on a pair of sunglasses. She drove downtown and parked in front of the bank.
Nothing was much quieter than a little town this early on Sunday morning. In a little while, people would start moving around more, pulling into the parking lots of the Baptist Church, the Methodist Church, the Catholic Church. One of the convenience stores at the crossroads was closed; the other was open but didn’t have any customers. A gasoline truck was parked at the side of the road, its driver filling the convenience store’s tanks. Alex leaned against the fender of her car and looked up and down, both ways along the highway and the farm road. Peace and quiet.
The whup-whup-whup eggbeater sound of a helicopter suddenly intruded on the tranquility. She looked up, searching the pale blue sky for the aircraft. When she spotted it off to the east, she realized it was coming toward Home.
It was low, too, and getting lower. Alex straightened from her casual pose, her muscles stiffening with tension. It looked like the blasted chopper was going to land somewhere in or near the town. She hurriedly got into the car as the helicopter dipped out of her sight.
The high school, she thought. It looked like the helicopter was landing on the high school parking lot.
And whatever it was carrying couldn’t be anything good, she thought as she gunned the patrol car in that direction.
CHAPTER 37
She was right. She recognized the tall, slender, expensively-dressed figure standing next to the helicopter with his longish dark hair blowing in the propwash. As she entered the school parking lot with a squeal of tires, the man turned his head to peer at the patrol car through a pair of sunglasses even darker than the ones Alex wore.
What the hell was that slimy weasel Clayton Cochrum doing landing in Home in a helicopter?
A moment later, Alex told herself she should have known the answer to that question. All became clear as an attractive blond woman climbed down from the chopper and joined Cochrum, followed by a cameraman.
Cochrum was here for a photo op, and he had brought his own tame news crew with him.
That bastard, Alex thought. He’s heard about Pete McNamara dying, and he wants to get some publicity out of it.
Cochrum motioned for the reporter and the cameraman to follow him and strode toward the police car as Alex got out. He wore his usual arrogant smirk as he raised his voice to be heard over the still-turning blades of the helicopter and called, “Chief Bonner! Good morning!”
“There’s nothing good about it,” Alex snapped.
“I suppose you must have heard about Pete McNamara’s death?”
Alex jerked her head in a curt nod. “I have.”
The blond reporter, who managed to look perky and attractive even this early on a Sunday morning, said into her microphone, “And how do you feel about Mr. McNamara passing away, Chief Bonner?” She thrust the mike toward Alex.
Reining in her temper, Alex said, “How do you think I feel? I’m mourning a friend. Pete McNamara was a good man.”
“According to the courts, he was an unstable, gun-wielding vigilante.”
Alex took a step toward the reporter. She couldn’t stop herself.
Smoothly, Cochrum got between them. “This isn’t really a legal matter anymore,” he said. “The courts have ruled, and the case will be disposed of properly in due time. Right now, I don’t think we should intrude on the good people of Home.”
“Then what are you doing here?” Alex asked tightly.
“When I heard about Mr. McNamara’s passing, I knew I had to fly right over here from San Antonio and convey my client’s sympathy to Mr. McNamara’s friends and neighbors. Mr. Navarre bears no personal ill will toward anyone involved in the tragedy that crippled him and killed his good friend.”
Alex wanted to ram those words back down Cochrum’s throat, but she knew if she did, the video would be viral worldwide in less than an hour.
Cochrum went on, “If there’s anything I can do to help, perhaps with the funeral arrangements …”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Alex said. “Put on a big show for the cameras.”
Cochrum shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Chief. If you doubt my sincerity, then that’s your problem, not mine.”
“Why don’t you get back in that chopper and go back to S
an Antonio?” Alex suggested. “We don’t want you here.”
Cochrum shrugged and shook his head. “This is still a free country, Chief.”
“Did the school district give you permission for that thing to land here?” Alex nodded toward the helicopter.
“Well, no, there wasn’t time to obtain permission, and this is really the best place in town to land—”
“Then you’re trespassing,” Alex cut in. “Either get out, or I’ll arrest you.”
Cochrum’s face hardened as he stared at her through the dark sunglasses. “You can’t do that.”
“Try me,” Alex said.
She didn’t know how the standoff would end. In a way, Cochrum would probably relish being arrested. That would get him even more publicity.
The rumble of a truck engine intruded on her thoughts and made her turn her head to look along the highway. A couple of unmarked trucks rolled past, evidently on their way through town. Truck traffic through Home wasn’t an uncommon sight, but the early morning hour and the fact that these vehicles were unmarked struck Alex as odd. She heard their brakes engage and watched curiously as the two trucks slowed to a stop in the middle of the crossroads.
“What in the world?” she muttered as she started toward her car. Her instincts as a law enforcement officer had kicked in, and for the moment she had forgotten about Clayton Cochrum, the reporter, and the cameraman.
“What is it?” Cochrum called from behind her. “Is there some sort of trouble, Chief?”
She ignored him and got in the car. She had left the engine running, so all she had to do was put it in gear and head for the center of town.
She wasn’t the only one who had noticed the trucks’ arrival, she saw as she approached. Jerry Houston was already on hand, pulling up next to the lead truck in his patrol car. He got out and approached the cab, lifting a hand in greeting to the driver. The cab door opened.
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