Hawke's Prey Page 3

“Glad I didn’t marry her when I had the chance.”

  It tickled me to think of her and Ethan as a couple. “Y’all were boyfriend and girlfriend in the third grade, thirty-nine years ago.”

  “Yep, and that was enough for me. She was too bossy.”

  “There ain’t no other name for it.”

  Ethan picked up the cup of to-go coffee Dolores brought without being asked. “I got to git. It’s gonna be a long day. Tell her to put both of these on my tab. I’ll see you after a while.”

  Ethan left and I went back to frowning at the weather forecast of what they were calling the West Texas Storm of the Century. It was going to be a long day.

  I didn’t know the half of it when I paid anyway and followed him a few minutes later.

  Chapter 3

  All five members of Lorenzo DeVaca’s Syrian team had been in the country for months on student visas, there to study at the Holy Church of the Trinity in Berkeley.

  None of them ever stepped on the campus grounds.

  Joining the ranks of more than one million foreign nationals who entered the United States on student visas, the radical Muslims vanished as soon as they walked out of customs. Mohammad Hani Kahn and the other Syrians met their contact in the parking lot of the Ground Zero coffee shop not far from campus. They’d holed up in a house in a suburban neighborhood until DeVaca contacted them with a special code phrase that wouldn’t trigger alarms if their cell phones had been hacked by Homeland Security.

  In a text suggesting titles to study at the academy, DeVaca listed several classic American novels including Alas Babylon by Pat Frank, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. For extra credit, he suggested Something Wicked This Way Comes, a popular Ray Bradbury novel.

  Kahn had no interest in the other titles. The “Wicked” reference told him everything he needed to know. The operation was a go. To avoid suspicion, each man bought his own ticket, boarded at the Greyhound station in Oakland, and scattered throughout the bus headed east.

  The ride to El Paso was uneventful. The future terrorists separated at their destination and later met at a mercado, or Mexican market a couple of blocks from the station. A Cadillac sedan was waiting. It didn’t matter the driver’s name was one word, Owaiss.

  He was proud to consider himself a homegrown warrior and ready to do his part after declaring jihad following 9/11. The radicalized American’s instructions were simple. Pick up five Syrian students and drop them off at a rest stop on the outskirts of Ballard.

  Three hours later, they stepped out of the warm, comfortable car in the early morning darkness. The night was freezing and the only thing waiting for them was a dented and dirty slant-load four-horse trailer. His job done, Owaiss pulled back onto the highway. His lights disappeared in the falling snow.

  * * *

  Burt Bowden opened the trailer’s back doors. Kahn flicked on a tactical flashlight and lit the disillusioned rancher’s unshaven face. Noting his scowl, he snorted and scanned the trailer. The solid sides and closed windows broke the wind, making the interior feel warm. The beam lit dozens of boxes and cases stacked against the front end.

  The others surrounded him as Kahn leaned in. “I know what pig shit looks like, you know. What animals do you carry in here?”

  Bowden was paid a lot of money to pick up the Syrian students and drive them into Ballard, but it hadn’t been enough to take any guff off a raghead with a scraggly beard, wannabe mustache, and bad breath. “Hey, we don’t raise pork out here. I haul horses in this, and get that damned light out of my eyes. There’s enough room for all y’all, and the rest when we pick ’em up.”

  Kahn skipped his light around the interior as if he’d missed something on the first pass. He longed to get inside and out of the frigid wind, but he still didn’t trust the rancher whose mouth was hidden by a thick mustache. “How long will we be in there?”

  “Not long enough to freeze to death, if that’s what you’re worried about. There’s all the gear you need, compliments of your boss.” He slapped the side of the trailer. “I’m making a loop around town here, to get the rest of y’all. An hour at the most. You’ll be fine with the windows closed.”

  “I ride in front with you.”

  “No way. You get in the back. Ever’body knows me in this one-horse town.”

  Kahn maintained eye contact with Bowden while his men examined military cargo boxes and crates. He repeated the emotionless statement. “I’m riding in the front with you.”

  Bowden’s gaze slipped away. “Fine, then.”

  Chapter 4

  Most of the traffic in our little West Texas town was tourists and local pickups, with a Cadillac or two driven by some of the community bluehairs. We recognized the strangers in Ballard by their unfamiliar cars, and a lot of those folks stayed at the art deco 1930s Posada Real Hotel, a hundred yards down Charles Street from the courthouse.

  I parked my Dodge dually in an angled slot on that same street in front of the Palace Theater where there’s more room for her big hips. The other parking spaces were empty, so it didn’t make any difference, because snow covered the lines. I would have walked up from the café, but decided to drive because of the falling weather.

  A gaudy movie poster for a high school angst movie curled under the cracked glass beside the ticket booth. I knew the twins would be worrying at me to give ’em money to see it.

  Even though the Palace still looked like it did when I first came to Ballard as a high school freshman, the theater seemed tired and aged in the gloomy light, without any of the glamour that appeared when darkness fell and the lights came on over the ticket booth and entrance. I’d crossed the black-and-white penny tiles on the floor a hundred times with buddies and girlfriends, and liked the theater more for the memories than anything else.

  “Sonny!”

  I turned to see Andy Clark across the street. The skinny little owner of the Posada who always reminded me of Barney Fife without the twitches was standing beside a wooden stepladder. Though Thanksgiving wasn’t far away, he was untangling one end of a plastic holiday garland that was half hanging from the awnings jutting out between alternating Mexican palms and tall Italian cypress trees growing in the narrow strip of grass separating the sidewalk and the street.

  Andy always tended to lose his direction in a conversation and never learned how to end a sentence or wait for a response. Instead, he’d yap along just fine before drifting off to an odd stop like he just ran out of steam. More sentences than not ended with “and ever’thing.”

  My curiosity nearly got the better of me because I really wanted to know why he was standing there like he had good sense, staring upward at the building with that garland in his hand. Folks stop and visit when they can, but I was late to the courthouse to see Judge Dollins. I gave him a quick wave across the street. “I’ll see you in a little while!”

  He waved in return and went back to studying on his decorations. The wind whipped down the alley between the theater and a realty office, blowing snow down my collar. I set the hat tighter on my head and buttoned my coat higher, wishing I had a scarf around my neck. I keep a silk wild rag in the truck, but I’d forgotten to dig the colorful scarf out of the console.

  Pressed for time, I wouldn’t go back and hunt for it Instead I hurried down the street toward the three-story county courthouse to meet the judge and my wife’s high school civics class.

  Built in 1886, the Renaissance Revival courthouse with its peach-colored stucco exterior was a long rectangular cracker box with entrances on all four sides. A short hallway across the width of the building intersected with a grand rotunda stretching three stories overhead. Above that, an ornate central dome reached two stories higher.

  Dormers jutting out on all four sides, and Roman towers high above the roofline on each corner of the building, made it resemble a medieval castle. My seventeen-year-old twins, Mary and Jerry, said it looked like a fort to them when they were little, but that’s becaus
e they knew the history of our area. They were convinced that Apaches raided the town even when I was in high school.

  But they refused to believe that a band of Geronimo’s descendants invaded the U.S. from their hideout in Mexico as late as 1924. Go figure. I always expected kids to be the death of me.

  Our Texas landmark housed everything from historical documents, to 100-year-old minutes of city council meetings, tax rolls, land records, and criminal records. The second-floor courtroom handled most of the minor legal infractions through the years. In the third-floor Grand Jury room built on the same footprint directly above the municipal courtroom, tough judges with huge white beards and mustaches once sentenced rustlers, horse thieves, and murderers to the gallows.

  On the ground floor, the County Court, Commissioners Court, District Clerk, Tax Assessor-Collector, Justice of the Peace, County Judge, County Treasurer, Game Warden, and County Surveyor all did a brisk business each week.

  The second floor housed the District Attorney’s offices and the district court, plus Licensing.

  Judge Arthur Dollins occupied the county bench and fined the folks my friend Sheriff Ethan Armstrong brought in. Most were for speeding and such, but we got a fair amount of business from the Border Patrol stations.

  Those agents were always on the lookout for drugs and illegal immigrants that a lot of folks still called wetbacks. Whenever the Border Patrol found someone with, say, an ounce or two of marijuana, they’d call Ethan to come take the prisoners off their hands.

  Judge Dollins fined ’em two hundred and fifty or so, to make it sting a little, plus twenty-seven bucks in court costs. I never did figure out why the odd amount.

  Snow squeaked under my feet as a long, mournful whistle filled the air. The Union Pacific rail lines ran past or through every town in West Texas, carrying coal, automobiles, or manifest cargo, double-stack containers, tankers, coal, gondolas, and boxcars. Amtrak passenger trains shared those same rails, hauling folks from one end of the country to the other and stopping on the shoofly to let an express pass.

  They clattered past all times of the day, slowing down to about forty miles an hour in town before accelerating to their usual sixty once they got past the city limits. They’d been part of life since the 1850s.

  The wind threatened to snatch the hat off my head again. I picked up my pace down the sidewalk, glad I’d fed our lab, Buster, and put him inside with Willie. The twins had rescued the little Shih Tzu two years before, but the cute little mutt decided he liked me best. I figured he was curled up with Buster on my bed, all nice and warm.

  Chapter 5

  Team Three crossed from Mexico into Texas the day before Burt Bowden was supposed to pick them up. Aided by other illegals who had entered months, sometimes years earlier, they established a GPS system of water and supply caches across the dry desert to ensure the health and well-being of those who crossed.

  The first members of the Bloque de Celda 10 gang waited in the storm just out of sight from Highway 90 until a late-model four-door Dodge pickup pulled onto the shoulder near a wire gate leading into the Hawke Ranch. A blond-haired, meth-depleted skeleton of a woman named Melanie Cooper jumped out of the cab without a coat. She shuddered as snow caught in her greasy hair.

  She checked the right front tire as if it were going flat.

  The team’s tattooed leader, Enrique Rivas, had been waiting for that incident. He worked for La Serpiente, a rising cartel flexing its muscles south of the border in Chihuahua. He and his men rose like ghosts from the desert scrub, startling Melanie. She tumbled into the side of the truck.

  “You’re late. We’re freezing to death.” Angry, Rivas glanced up and down the snowy highway. “Are you drunk?”

  Shivering, she crossed both arms under her almost nonexistent breasts and took an immediate dislike to the man with the sparse whiskers and bad skin. The woman twitched with the constant hyperactivity of a tweaker jonesing for the next hit.

  Her broken and rotting teeth chattered. She smoothed stringy hair off her forehead with a shaking hand. “I’m fine. You just scared me.”

  “No reason to be scared.” Rivas checked the highway again.

  “Fine. You guys get in.”

  “Uno momento.” Rivas waved his snow-covered men forward from behind a low wave of rocks hidden by a thick stand of prickly pear cactus several yards away. Shivering in cast-off second- and thirdhand clothes, they hurried toward the inviting warmth of the truck cab.

  As they passed, Rivas gave Melanie a grin. “Come with me.”

  She planted her feet, refusing to take her eyes off the tattoos up the side of the man’s neck and onto his cheek. “No.”

  “Bien entonces. Fuentes.”

  Fine, then.

  The whipcord-thin Mexican’s fist lashed out, catching the tweaker flush on the jaw with a crack of broken bones and teeth. Rafael Fuentes, the shortest and stockiest man of their group, caught her before she fell and heaved her on his shoulder.

  “Volver allí.” Rivas jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward where they’d been hiding.

  Without responding, Fuentes jogged toward the ridge as if Melanie’s limp body was weightless. He returned moments later, shoving a long knife back into its sheath on his belt. He climbed into the front passenger seat and slammed the door against the blowing snow.

  The truck pulled back on the highway with Rivas behind the wheel, but the meth-head from Dallas didn’t care. She lay beside a barbed-wire fence, and snowflakes melted on her open eyes.

  Rivas glanced into the mirror at his tatted, scarred, and dangerous C-10 gang riding in the back. Cell Block 10 had been the Mexican government’s experiment in sociology and the American way of humane incarceration that went totally wrong. Anyone with any sense knows that even though a lake is calm on the surface, that doesn’t mean something deadly isn’t waiting in the depths.

  He and his men were the only survivors of one disastrous day when the guards in the test block had become to lax. They escaped after dozens died on both sides. Once free, C-10 became a dangerous ring of butchers on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.

  They parked the Dodge an hour later in front of a closed taco shop on the outskirts of Ballard and waited with the engine and lights off, hoping the meth-head’s tardiness hadn’t caused them to miss their connection.

  The truck and horse trailer made a second pass minutes later.

  Chapter 6

  The heavy snow was such a distraction that I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing. I stepped off the icy curb without looking both ways like my mama taught me. A white conversion van nearly ran me down.

  I gave a little “feel good” jump onto the sidewalk and waved, trying to be courteous. The driver and his sullen female passenger didn’t even lift a finger. Tourists frustrated by the snow, maybe. They followed the one-way street around the corner, past the sheriff’s office and out of my sight.

  With both hands in the deep pockets of my ranch coat, I felt the leather work gloves I’d put in there a week earlier. I thought about pulling them on, but it was too much trouble for such a quick walk. I ducked my felt hat brim to block the falling weather and turned back to the courthouse.

  The walk was a short distance across the street that circles the square. The closest door was the east entrance that most tourists used. Law enforcement tended to use the north entrance, across the street from the sheriff’s office.

  A feller as old as the hills intersected my path from the sidewalk that circled the building. Mr. Beck Terrill gave me a grin and a wave. “Well dog my cats. If it ain’t Sonny Hawke.”

  He hadn’t been around for a while, and it tickled me to see him. The gang over at the café said he’d been down in his back for almost a month. “Mr. Beck.” I hunched my shoulders against the wind. “Ain’t this somethin’?”

  Instead of shaking hands, we bobbed our heads at one another. “It sure is, but we need the moisture.” He paced me down the sidewalk, rocking back and forth with an odd duck
walk caused by the lack of both big toes he left behind in the Chosin Reservoir back in 1950. Despite the storm, I slowed down to match the Korean War vet’s pace.

  He cut his eyes at me from under his Stetson’s three-inch brim that did little to block the snow catching in his gray mustache. “I been meanin’ to ask you about that little scrape with a bad guy.”

  My stomach flipped again. I’d known Mr. Beck since the Old Man moved us to Ballard. I usually took his good-natured ribbing. This time, though, I cut him off. I’d heard enough about it for one day. “I’m not a great shot at long distance. He was a ways off and I didn’t account for the bullet drop.”

  “I never heard of such a thing.”

  “Whatever works.”

  “I reckon. Some folks just need killin’ anyway, especially if they’re shootin’ at the laws. Heard you’re straddlin’ a desk these days?”

  “Yep, they call it administrative leave. It’s just a formality until they get finished with the investigation.”

  We weren’t moving fast, and the conversation slowed us even more. “Hell, I’d be inside by the fire, then, if I’s you. It’s too cold a day to be out.”

  “Yep. Wouldn’t be here, but I’m running errands for my boss. I need to drop off a check for Judge Dollins, too. He’s gonna need some help come election time.”

  Mr. Beck had always been involved in local government. He was proud of the opportunity, because his parents emigrated from Ireland through Ellis Island when he was barely two.

  The leather sole of his boot slipped on the snow. I steadied him by grabbing one arm. “Haven’t seen it like this here since I was a pup.” He kept talking as if he hadn’t noticed. “Can’t stand the cold since I lost them toes in Korea. I’d just as soon never see a winter storm again.”

  “At least it’s not supposed to last long.”

  “I hope, but the TV weatherman says thissun’s gonna be a booger.”

  A dull roar came through the brass and glass doors as we neared the building. I answered his question before it came out of his mouth. “Kelly brought her civics class today, and I’m gonna help her out while I’m here.”