Vengeance Is Mine Read online

  He’d been too busy lately to think about the past. Like all the other ranchers in Val Verde County, he was struggling to make ends meet. In the summer this part of Texas resembled the ass end of hell—hot, dry, and dusty plains dotted with mesquite trees, scrub oaks, and all-too-infrequent patches of grass. The old saying was that hereabouts it took a hundred acres of land just to graze one cow . . . and if the summer was bad enough, you could count the ribs on that cow. Now, to top it off, beef prices were in the crapper, and ever-spiraling taxes and overbearing government regulations didn’t help matters, either. Most of the time he felt older than dirt.

  But like the old saying went, gettin’ old sure as hell beat the alternative. Most of the time Stark figured that was true.

  Elaine put a plate full of bacon, biscuits, and scrambled eggs in front of him. The eggs had a lot of peppers and cheese in them, just the way he liked them. He poked at them with his fork and said, “This ain’t some of that egg substitute stuff, is it?” He would have used a stronger word than “stuff” if not for the fact that Elaine didn’t allow any cussing at the kitchen table.

  “No, it’s the real thing, John Howard,” she said. “I’ve given up on trying to feed you healthy food. You kick up a fuss just like a little baby. Besides, you’re going to be just like your daddy and your uncle and your granddaddy and all the other men in your family. You all pack away the red meat and the grease and you’re still out reshingling the well house and roping steers when you’re ninety-five.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t drink much and only smoke one cigar a year, on my birthday.”

  She patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sure that’s the secret.”

  She started to turn away, but Stark reached out, looped an arm around her slender waist, and pulled her onto his lap. Despite her appearance, she wasn’t a little bitty thing. She was tall and had some heft to her. But Stark was six feet four and weighed two hundred and thirty pounds—only up ten pounds from his fighting weight—and his active life kept him vital and strong in spite of the aches and pains that reminded him of his age. He put his other hand behind Elaine’s head and kissed her. She responded with the eagerness that he still aroused in her. In fact, she was a little breathless by the time they broke the kiss.

  “That right there, that’s the secret,” John Howard said.

  “What, that all you Stark men are horny old bastards?”

  “Damn right.”

  She laughed and pressed her lips to his again and when she slipped out of his arms he let her go this time. “Eat your breakfast,” she said. “We’ve both got work to do.”

  Stark nodded as he dug the fork into the eggs and picked up a biscuit. “Yeah, I’ve got to go over to Tommy’s in a little while. One of his cows got over on our range yesterday and bogged down in that sinkhole on the creek. I had to pull her out, and I’ve got her and her calf out in the barn. I need to find out what he wants to do about them.”

  “You be sure and tell him hello for me. And remind him that we’re expecting him and Julie and the kids over here tomorrow evening.”

  Stark nodded. He couldn’t answer. His mouth was full of bacon and eggs and biscuit by now, and somehow his bad mood of a few minutes earlier had evaporated.

  Tomas Carranza—Tommy to his friends—owned the ten thousand acres next to John Howard Stark’s Diamond S. It was a small spread for Texas, but Tommy had a small herd. The ranch had belonged to the Carranza family for generations, just as the neighboring land had belonged to the Starks. There had been Carranzas in Sam Houston’s army at San Jacinto, fierce Tejanos who hated Santa Anna and the oppressive rule of the Mexican dictator every bit as much as the Anglos did. Later the family had settled along the Rio Grande, founding the fine little rancho on the Texas side of the river.

  John Howard Stark had always been something of a hero to Tommy Carranza. Tommy was considerably younger. When Tommy was a little boy, Stark was the star of the Del Rio High School baseball team, belting a record number of home runs. Tommy loved baseball, and it was special to have a godlike figure such as John Howard Stark befriend him back then.

  But John Howard had graduated and gone off to fight in Vietnam, and Tommy had feared that he would never see his friend again. He had prayed to the Blessed Virgin every night to watch over John Howard, and when Stark came back safely from the war, Tommy felt a secret, never expressed pride that perhaps his prayers had had something to do with that.

  Over the years since, the age difference between the two men, never all that important, had come to matter even less. They regarded each other as equals and good friends. John Howard and Elaine were godparents to the two children Tommy had with his wife, Julie. Hardly a month went by when the families didn’t get together for a barbecue. In fact, one of the get-togethers was coming up the next day, the Fourth of July.

  On this morning Tommy wasn’t thinking about barbecue. He had driven the pickup into Del Rio to get some rolls of fence at the big building supply warehouse store on the edge of town. His land stretched for nearly five miles along the Rio Grande, and Tommy tried to keep every foot of it fenced. The fences kept getting cut, though, by the damned coyotes who trafficked in human cargo and the even more vile drug runners who smuggled their poison across the river.

  Sometimes Tommy thought it would be easier just to give up and let the animals take over. But the spirits of his Tejano ancestors wouldn’t let that happen. A Carranza never gave up the fight.

  He wrestled the last roll of wire from the flatbed cart into the back of the pickup and then slammed the tailgate. He rolled the cart to one of the little corral places scattered around the big parking lot, and as he turned back toward his truck he was surprised to see a man standing beside it. The fact that the man stood there was less surprising than the way he looked.

  The guy was wearing a suit, for God’s sake!

  Part of a suit, anyway. He had taken off the jacket and had it draped over one arm. He had also rolled up his sleeves and loosened his tie. The man was stocky, with thinning pale hair. His skin was turning pink in the sun. The suit and the shoes he wore were probably worth more than the battered old pickup beside which he stood.

  Tommy thumbed back his straw Stetson with its tightly curled brim and nodded to the stranger. “Hello,” he said. “Something I can do for you?”

  “Are you Tomas Carranza?” the man asked bluntly.

  “That’s right. Oh hell, you’re not a process server, are you? I told Gustafson I’d pay that feed bill as soon as I can!”

  “Oh no, I’m not here to serve you with a lawsuit, Mr. Carranza. But I am a lawyer.” The man took a business card out of his shirt pocket and extended it.

  Out of curiosity, Tommy took the card and glanced at it. The name J. Donald Lester was embossed on it in fancy black letters. The address was in Dallas.

  “What’s a Dallas lawyer doing all the way down here in the valley?” Tommy asked with a frown.

  “I represent a client in the area. Across the river in Cuidad Acuna, in fact.”

  Tommy grunted. “A Mexican with a Dallas lawyer. Must be a rich guy. What is he, a drug lord?”

  “His name,” J. Donald Lester said, “is Ernesto Diego Espinoza Ramirez.”

  Tommy went stiff and tight inside as he drew air sharply in through his nose. “El Bruitre,” he said in a hollow voice.

  “Yes, yes, the Vulture,” Lester said impatiently. “It’s a very colorful name, but my client doesn’t care for it, so why don’t we just refer to him as Senor Ramirez?”

  Tommy dropped the lawyer’s card onto the concrete of the parking lot. “Why don’t we just call him a murdering, drug-running bastard and be done with it? And I think I’m done talking to you, too, Mr. Lester.”

  Tommy turned toward the front door of the pickup, but Lester stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Please, Mr. Carranza, I just want a few moments of your time.”

  Shaking off the lawyer’s hand, Tommy said, “I don’t talk to snakes, and if you work for Ramirez y
ou’re just as big a snake as he is, in my book.”

  “It’s a matter of money,” Lester said, raising his voice over the squeal of hinges as Tommy jerked the truck’s door open. “A great deal of money.”

  A voice in the back of Tommy’s head told him to get in the truck and drive away without paying any more attention to the gringo. But the mention of money piqued his interest. Not that he would ever take one red cent from Ramirez or his ilk. Any money they had would be indelibly stained with the blood and suffering of innocents.

  Still, he was a naturally courteous man. And his youngest, Angelina, needed five thousand dollars’ worth of orthodontic work to make her beautiful smile even more beautiful. That was what Julie said, anyway.

  “I’ll give you a minute,” he said to Lester, “but I can tell you right now, I’m not gonna be interested in anything you have to say to me.”

  “Ten thousand dollars,” Lester said.

  Twice as much as what it would cost for Angelina’s braces.

  “What?” Tommy asked.

  “Each month.”

  “You’re offering to pay me ten grand a month?”

  Lester nodded his sleekly barbered head. “That’s correct.”

  “What for?”

  “I think you know the answer to that, Mr. Carranza.”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said. That brief moment of hope he’d had came crashing down. No way would anybody pay that much money for something honest, especially not Ramirez. “You want me to look the other way while the Vulture’s couriers bring that goddamn shit across my land.”

  “It would be a perfectly legitimate arrangement, an easement, if you will—”

  “Easement this,” Tommy said, and he brought up a hard fist and smashed it into Lester’s mouth.

  He struck out of anger, furious that this sleazy Dallas lawyer thought he could be bought off with drug money. And he struck out of shame as well, because he hadn’t driven away without even listening to the bastard and because for a split second he had considered the offer. He didn’t know whom he was angrier with, himself or Lester.

  But it was the lawyer who got busted in the mouth. The blow sent Lester staggering back across an empty parking space. He slammed into another parked pickup. It had an alarm installed and activated, and the siren began to blare as Lester bounced off the driver’s door and fell to the pavement. He looked up at Tommy, stunned, with blood on his mouth. His bruised lips began to swell.

  “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, my daddy always said,” Tommy told him, raising his voice so he could be heard over the yowling of the alarm. “Go back to Dallas, Mr. Lawyer.” The words were filled with contempt.

  Lester couldn’t get up. All he could do was glare balefully as Tommy got in his pickup and drove away. Tommy didn’t look back.

  Two

  Stark knew Tommy Carranza well enough to recognize that something was on the younger man’s mind when Stark visited the Carranza ranch that day. Tommy didn’t seem to want to talk about it, though, so Stark didn’t push it. A man didn’t go sticking his nose in another fella’s business without being asked to.

  Tommy had just gotten back from Del Rio with a load of fence wire. Stark offered to help him stretch it in the places where his fences needed repair, but Tommy shook his head. “You’ve got your own work to do, John Howard. Besides, I’ve got Martin to help me.”

  Martin Carranza was Tommy’s boy, twelve years old and turning into a good hand. With school out for the summer, Martin was doing a lot of work around the ranch.

  Stark nodded. “All right, but if you need any help, you know where I am. What about that cow of yours and her calf?”

  “If you don’t mind keepin’ ’em another night, I’ll bring the trailer with me when we come over tomorrow and get them then.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Stark agreed.

  “I’m sorry they strayed onto your range, John Howard.”

  A grin creased Stark’s weathered face. “Don’t worry about that. Gettin’ bogged down like it did, that old cow gave Uncle Newt an excuse to practice his roping.”

  Newton Stark was John Howard’s uncle, brother to John Howard’s daddy, Ethan. As a boy he had grown up in the saddle, riding before he could walk. By age twelve he had been a top hand, able to do a man’s work and keep up with the cowboys who worked on the Diamond S. A few years later the Second World War had come along, and Newt had found himself trudging through the sands of North Africa behind some of ol’ Blood-and-Guts Patton’s tanks. Newt never talked much about the war except to say that parts of Tunisia looked a hell of a lot like west Texas.

  After the war he had come home like hundreds of thousands of other former GIs and gone back to work. In Newt’s case that meant cowboying. His like could have changed when his and Ethan’s father passed away, but Newt wasn’t having any of that.

  He had sold his half of the Diamond S to Ethan back when they both inherited the place from their father. To hear Newt tell it, he was a cowboy, and cowboys didn’t have no place in their lives for sittin’ in an office and doin’ book work. Any chore that couldn’t be done from the back of a horse wasn’t worth doing, to Newt’s way of thinking. Now in his eighties, he still lived on the Diamond S and did a full day’s work, blissfully ignorant of the business end of running a ranch.

  “I thought you pulled that cow out of the sinkhole,” Tommy commented.

  “Well, Newt and me together got her loose,” Stark said. “Anyway, her and the calf will be waiting for you tomorrow evening.”

  As Stark drove away in his pickup, he thought that he could just as easily have called Tommy and had this conversation by phone. Stark liked looking at a man when he talked to him, though. And he didn’t mind overmuch the way Tommy’s pretty wife, Julie, fussed over him and offered him lemonade when he visited. The lemonade had been cold and mighty good. Even though it wasn’t quite noon yet, the heat of a Texas summer was in full force and the temperature was already around ninety-five. It would likely top out at 105 or 106 later that afternoon.

  When Stark got back to the ranch he found a note from Elaine letting him know that she had gone into Del Rio to finish buying everything she would need for the Independence Day barbecue. She had left his lunch in the refrigerator since she would likely be gone most of the rest of the day. Stark got the bowl out and lifted the aluminum foil cover over it. Salad. He sighed. Elaine might have said she’d given up trying to get him to eat healthy, but she really hadn’t.

  Dutifully, he ate the rabbit food. Then he followed it with two thick peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches he made himself.

  With it being the Fourth of July and all, John Howard and Elaine had invited all their friends and neighbors. All the local ranchers from along the river and quite a few folks from town showed up at the sprawling, cottonwood-shaded ranch house on a small knoll that gave a view of the Rio Grande about a mile away. With help from Uncle Newt and Chaco Hernandez, one of the ranch hands who was Newt’s best friend and companion, Stark had set up several picnic tables in the yard. Those tables were packed with food, some of it prepared by Elaine, some brought by the guests. Chaco, who was pushing seventy, was in charge of the barbecue pit, and wonderful smells filled the evening air.

  It was hot, of course, because the sun was barely down and the air wouldn’t cool off much for a while yet. But there was a good breeze and almost no humidity, so the weather was bearable. Stark had once seen a T-shirt with a picture on it of two sunbaked skeletons conversing. One of them was saying to the other, “But it’s a dry heat.” That was meant to be sarcastic, of course, but there was some truth to it. One time Stark had visited Houston and felt like he was fixin’ to drown every time he took a deep breath of the humid air there. He hadn’t been able to get out of that place fast enough. It was the armpit of Texas as far as he was concerned.

  The ranchers naturally gravitated together while the women talked and the kids ran around yelling and playing. Stark found himself standing in a group of five of
his friends: Tommy Carranza, of course, plus Devery Small, W.R. Smathers, Hubie Cornheiser, and Everett Hatcher. The mood was glum despite the fact that this was supposed to be a celebration. All of the men had seen the newspaper and television reports about the latest outbreak of mad cow disease and knew what it would mean to their profits.

  “It’s not fair, damn it,” Hubie said as they sipped from bottles of Lone Star beer. “Ain’t never been a single mad cow found in Val Verde County. Every beef we raise is safe as it can be. But the buyers don’t ever think about that.”

  W.R. nodded. “Prices are down across the board. That’s what they always say, like it ain’t their fault. And they claim they can’t do a thing about it.”

  “They don’t want to do anything about it,” Stark said. “Naturally they want to pay as little as they can get by with.”

  “What they’re gonna wind up doin’ is starvin’ us all out,” Everett said. “Then they won’t have to pay anything, so I reckon they’ll be happy. But there won’t be any beef no more, either.”

  Devery rubbed his jaw and said, “Yeah, beef prices are worrisome, all right, but to tell you the truth I’m more concerned about those damn drug smugglers.”

  Stark saw Tommy flick a startled glance toward Devery and ask, “What do you mean?”

  Devery pointed toward the river with his beer bottle. “Hardly a night goes by when some o’ that shit don’t cross the range belonging to one or the other of us. You know, I really don’t mind the illegals all that much, especially the ones who come across on their own. They’re just tryin’ to make a better life for themselves and their families, and I can almost respect that. But those drug runners ain’t doin’ anything except bringin’ pure death across the river.”