The Bleeding Edge Read online

  He shook those thoughts out of his head as he reached the arched gate in the white picket fence that enclosed the twenty acres of the retirement park. He was home.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Located in South Texas, the Shady Hills Retirement Park was neither shady nor hilly. The former came closer to being true than the latter, because at least there were some small trees growing here and there among the mobile homes and modular housing that made up the park’s residences. Those trees provided a little shade. But there wasn’t anything resembling a hill anywhere in sight on these plains. You had to go farther west along the border to find that.

  It was evening when Stark reached the park, a little after supper time. His doctor’s appointment had been at one o’clock, he had come out of the office a little before two, and after the dust-up with Chuy, Angel, and the third would-be pickup thief, he had spent the rest of the afternoon being questioned by the police and the district attorney.

  Then Chief Feasco had caught him on the way out of the station and asked to talk to him for a minute. Dennis “Fiasco,” as he was sometimes called (as opposed to “Feesko,” as he pronounced it), was a good man. Stark didn’t know him all that well, but he was confident that Feasco was honest and did his best in a thankless job.

  By now the sun wasn’t quite down yet, but it hung big and red and low above the western horizon, and the heat of the afternoon was beginning to give way to the slightly cooler temperatures of evening. Some of the residents were sitting out on their covered porches and decks, sipping iced tea and getting some fresh air after supper. Others strolled up and down the neatly paved roads that divided the park into a grid. The park was owned by a retired aerospace engineer and his wife, and they did a good job of keeping it well cared for.

  Stark pulled up in the parking area next to his gray doublewide. The mobile home was bigger than he really needed, but after living all his life on the Diamond S, he liked to have some room to spread out when he wanted to.

  His neighbor to the right was Alton Duncan, who had been an insurance claims adjuster before retirement. The mobile home to the left of Stark’s was occupied by Fred and Aurelia Gomez. Fred had taught high school math and Aurelia had been a bookkeeper, so they had a love of numbers in common. The Gomezes were sitting in folding lawn chairs on the little patch of grass in front of their home while Alton Duncan had the hood of his ’64 Mustang raised and was doing something with the engine.

  Fred was on his feet by the time Stark got out of the pickup. Even though Aurelia called after him, “Now, Fred, don’t be a nuisance,” he hurried over to Stark.

  “John Howard, are you all right?” he asked. “We heard about you on the news.”

  “You and half the county, I expect, Fred,” Stark said. “I’m fine. Didn’t even muss my hair.”

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have to worry about that, no matter how much trouble I got into,” Fred said as he ran a hand over his head and grinned. Except for bushy gray eyebrows, he was bald as an egg, and shaped about like an egg, too.

  Alton Duncan came over to join them, wiping his hands on a rag as he did so. His hairline had receded quite a bit, but he still had a lot more hair than Fred. He said, “You shouldn’t have put those punks in the hospital, John.”

  “Oh?” Stark said.

  “No, you should’ve put ’em in the morgue. Lowlifes like that are a waste of perfectly good oxygen.”

  “Better be careful, Alton,” Fred advised. “All of them were Hispanic. Racist talk like that violates their civil rights. The feds will be coming here to arrest you before you know it.”

  Duncan’s eyes narrowed for a second before Fred grinned and punched him lightly on the arm, saying, “Hey, I’m just screwin’ with you, man. I hate punks like that even more than you do. You think it’s easy being named Gomez when it seems like every piece of gutter trash in the world is trying to drag your whole race down with them?”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Alton said. He turned to Stark again and went on, “Seriously, John, are you gonna be in trouble with the law over this? Because if you are, I know a really good attorney—”

  As if on cue, the front door of Alton’s mobile home opened and an attractive woman with short blond hair came out onto the deck. She said, “I guess I’ll be going now, Pop—oh, John Howard, you’re back.” Trimly built, wearing blue jeans and a silk blouse, she came down the steps and crossed the yard to join the group of men. “I heard about what happened. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Hallie,” Stark told her.

  Alton said, “I was just saying to John that if he needs a lawyer, I know where he can find a good one.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Pop,” Hallie Duncan said, “but I think I liked it better back in the old days before lawyers were allowed to advertise.”

  “Hey, that’s not advertising,” Alton protested. “That’s just good word of mouth.”

  “Your dad’s got a point, Hallie,” Fred said.

  Stark enjoyed the banter, even though he wasn’t really the sort to take much part in it, being more the quiet type. The strong, silent type, like Gary Cooper, Elaine had sometimes teased him.

  He was aware that Hallie was watching him. She visited her father often, nearly every day, and cooked a lot of meals for him. Stark knew that she was in her early fifties, although she looked at least a decade younger than that, and that her husband, who had also been a lawyer, had died of a heart attack several years earlier. She had always used her maiden name in their law practice, Alton had told Stark, so after she was widowed she just kept on using it.

  She was a pretty woman, and she looked at Stark with an interest that made him a little uncomfortable. He wasn’t searching for romance, but if he had been, he could have done a heck of a lot worse than beautiful, intelligent Hallie Duncan.

  But he’d been happily married for a long time, and although the pain of Elaine’s tragic death had faded somewhat, he knew it would never go away completely. His memories were companion enough for him.

  “I heard on the news that the Justice Department is going to investigate the incident,” Hallie went on. “Why do you suppose Washington is taking such an interest in a simple vehicle theft, John Howard?”

  “You know why,” Alton answered before Stark could say anything. “The man’s got some powerful enemies up there. They had to lay off him for a while because he was such a hero to people, but they figure enough time has gone by now that most folks have forgotten about what happened before. Those bureaucrats didn’t forget how you stood up to the government, though, John, and they never will.”

  “My dad’s right,” Hallie said. “This has all the makings of a vendetta.”

  “That’s crazy,” Stark said. “The government wouldn’t come after an innocent man that way, just to make a point.”

  Hallie, Alton, and Fred all looked at him as if they thought he had to know better than that. And truthfully, he did. The politicians running things now, and their willing accomplices in the mainstream media, liked to tout their sweeping, progressive ideas, but at the same time they could be as petty, spiteful, and vindictive as five-year-olds.

  They threw tantrums about like five-year-olds, too, when they didn’t get their way.

  “Right now, all I know is that the district attorney isn’t going to pursue any sort of case against me,” Stark said. “If that changes, or if anything else comes up, I’m liable to be giving you a call, Hallie.”

  “I hope you mean that, John Howard.” She leaned over and gave her father a kiss on the cheek, then told him, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “You don’t have to come over here and cook for me every day, you know,” Alton told her.

  She laughed.

  “If I didn’t, you’d live on Vienna sausages and Froot Loops.”

  “Throw in some beer and it’s a perfectly balanced diet,” Alton insisted.

  Laughing, Hallie waved at the other men and headed for her car, which was parked nex
t to her dad’s vintage Mustang.

  “Hell of a girl,” Alton said as she drove away. He glanced at Stark. “And she likes you, John.”

  “You’re only about twelve years older than me,” Stark pointed out. “You wouldn’t want an old geezer like me for a son-in-law.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that.”

  “Hallie just regards me as somebody to be looked after, the same way she thinks of you.”

  Alton shook his head and said, “That just shows how much you know.”

  Alton might have a point there, Stark thought as he said his good nights and went on into his mobile home.

  As crazy as the world was getting, he wasn’t sure he knew much of anything anymore.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Washington, D.C.

  The most powerful man in the world leaned back in the chair behind the big desk and cursed bitterly under his breath as he looked at the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. The huge screen was broken up into eight windows, each showing a feed from a different newscast. All the major broadcast and cable networks were represented.

  And every one of them was talking about John Howard Stark.

  “Were all these running at the same time?” the president asked the attorney general as he used the remote to mute the audio on the TV. The two men were alone in the Oval Office.

  “No, we put the feeds together,” the AG said. “I thought it might more effectively demonstrate the threat this way.”

  “One old man in Texas is not a threat.”

  The AG shrugged, making it clear that while he wasn’t going to openly challenge the president’s statement, he didn’t agree with it, either.

  “What do you think we should do?” the president asked.

  He hated asking questions like that, nakedly begging for advice. But he had to because deep down he knew that despite the trappings of the office, despite the very real power that he possessed by virtue of being commander-in-chief, he was out of his depth here. A few times early in his career, he had run for president, but he had never really, truly believed that he would be president.

  And he still wouldn’t be if one of his predecessors hadn’t gotten so carried away with his messiah complex that he believed he could order a nerve gas attack on American citizens and get away with it.

  The past decade had been a political roller coaster, with the country split almost evenly down the middle between right and left. The stranglehold that the left had on the news media and the courts, though, had been enough to ensure that they held nearly all the reins of power during that time. They should have been able to consolidate that power even more so that they would be assured of never having to give it up, but a series of unfortunate events had prevented that from happening.

  The first one had involved the very man whose face looked out now from that big screen, John Howard Stark. He had stood up to the Mexican drug cartels, stood up to the federal government as well, and embarrassed the president. That debacle had been followed by others along the U.S.–Mexico border, and the situation had gotten bad enough that the party had dumped the incumbent and elevated her vice president to the top of the ticket for the next election. He had won, of course, and then proceeded to make things even worse with his smug, arrogant, heavy-handed demeanor and his tendency to think that he could get away with anything because he was so adored by the public.

  That had all come crashing down with the trouble in the little town of Hope, Texas, and the revelation that the government was funding a secret biological and chemical weapons laboratory in the mountains of West Texas. When the president had ordered the unleashing of one of those weapons on American soil, with the intention of killing American citizens, it had almost ruined everything. He had been impeached and ultimately arrested when he refused to surrender power. Of course, he hadn’t been imprisoned but had been taken secretly out of the country. Now he lived in a luxurious villa in the south of France—paid for by the American taxpayers, naturally—and was writing a book about how he had been the victim of a sinister right-wing conspiracy.

  His vice president had taken over the presidency only long enough to resign, which meant the Speaker of the House had ascended to the office. She was hated virulently even by members of her own party and had been told in no uncertain terms that she would not be running for reelection when her term was over. The party was doing its best to distance itself from the extremes of the past two chief executives, and so they had turned to an obscure congressman who had been around just long enough to have some decent national name recognition.

  He’d had no business winning, and he probably wouldn’t have if not for the constant barrage of vicious attacks on the opposition candidate by the news media. It was a rip job, pure and simple, and a particularly savage one, and it had worked.

  And so the country had a president who sat in the Oval Office and didn’t have any earthly idea what he was supposed to do next.

  He could tell that the look the attorney general gave him was a pitying one, but there was plenty of scorn in the AG’s eyes, too. The attorney general said, “We’re already doing all we can do right now, sir. You haven’t commented on the matter yet, and it would probably be best if you didn’t. I’ll issue any statements that need to be made through the Justice Department.”

  “Are you going to bring charges of civil rights violations against this man, Stark?”

  “That will depend on what the investigation uncovers.” The AG grimaced. “It won’t be easy. There are several witnesses who have already told the police that the three suspects were trying to steal Stark’s truck and attacked him first. There’s, uh, even some security camera footage showing one of the men pulling a gun.”

  “The gun that Stark used to shoot the other two.”

  “That’s right. The fact that the three suspects all have records of violent crimes in their past doesn’t help, either. One of them, Chuy Mendoza, was on probation for the sexual assault of a minor.”

  “Good Lord,” muttered the president. “It’s going to be hard to portray them as innocent victims in all of this.”

  “Yes, it is,” the attorney general agreed. “There’s a good chance the matter never would have come to our attention if Stark hadn’t been involved.” The AG paused. “He’s red-flagged in all the computers at Justice, State, the IRS. . . .”

  “Well, I should think so.” The president reached a decision, although it was a pretty noncommittal one. “All right, Charles, use your own discretion in pursuing this. I trust your judgment.”

  “Of course, sir. Thank you.”

  The attorney general got to his feet and left the Oval Office.

  The president sat there watching the talking heads discuss John Howard Stark. The sound on the TV was still off. The president didn’t really know a lot about Stark, just what the general public knew: the war with the cartel, the tragic death of the man’s wife, that well-intentioned but horribly misguided business about turning the Alamo back over to Mexico. . . . Stark claimed that he just wanted to be left alone, but he had been a thorn in the side of the liberal establishment for years now. Something needed to be done about him. Maybe not now, maybe not over this particular incident. This might not be the right time.

  But soon, the president thought.

  No man could be allowed to stand in the way of social progress.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Several weeks later

  Antonio Gomez didn’t know what he wanted to do more, throw up or run. Maybe throw up, then run. That would work. That would get rid of the ball of sickness rolling around in his belly and get him out of here before things got bad.

  But he didn’t do either one of those things. He stayed right where he was, because he didn’t want Ignacio “Nacho” Montez to think he was a coward. If that happened, Nacho would do one of two things: be disappointed in him, which was bad enough, or kill him, which was worse. Maybe.

  Nacho had brought Antonio and two more young men out here to take care of a problem,
as he put it. Antonio knew what that meant. Nacho was going to hurt somebody.

  Their car was parked behind a shed so it couldn’t be seen from the road. The four young men had gotten out of the car and stood beside it, waiting in the darkness. It seemed like they had been here forever, but Antonio knew it had been only half an hour or so.

  Carlos Montez, Nacho’s hulking younger brother who liked to be called Chuckie, like the evil doll in that old movie they had seen one night when they were all stoned, dug a joint out of his shirt pocket and opened his lighter to set fire to it.

  “What the hell you doin’, man?” Nacho demanded.

  “I just thought it would make the time pass quicker,” Chuckie said.

  “You can’t do that,” Nacho said in a tone of mingled annoyance and tolerance, the way you’d talk to a little kid who didn’t know any better. “You don’t want anybody seein’ the light, and you don’t want Jimmy smellin’ no reefer when he drives up and gets out of his car. He’d know somebody was here.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Chuckie snapped the lighter closed and slid the joint back into his pocket. “Later, when we’re done, okay?”

  “Sure, man.” Nacho laughed. “You brought enough to share, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “He’s screwin’ with you, man,” Jalisco said.

  Antonio didn’t know what Jalisco’s real name was. That was all he’d ever heard anyone call the tall, pockmarked hombre. Unlike Antonio, Nacho, and Chuckie, who had all been born and raised on the Texas side of the border, Jalisco was from Mexico. He scared Antonio as much as Nacho did, maybe even more. He dropped hints that he was in good with one of the cartels, and Antonio believed him.

  The highway that ran from Devil’s Pass to San Antonio was about half a mile east of the isolated house where Antonio and the others waited. Antonio saw headlights going by on the road and wished he was over there in one of those vehicles. He wouldn’t care where it was going, as long as it was away from here.