Vengeance Is Mine Read online

  “I never have understood what would make a fella want to shoot that crap into his arm,” W.R. said. “It just don’t make no sense to me.”

  “The ones who do are too gutless to face up to life,” Stark rumbled. “They’d rather run away, and they use the dope to do it.”

  “What’s bad is that our daddies and our daddies’ daddies and on back fought and died to tame this land,” Devery went on. “They had to take on the Comanches and Mex bandidos—no offense, Tommy.”

  “None taken,” Tommy said. “But there were Anglo bandits, too, you know.”

  Devery nodded. “Damn right, King Fisher and his like were every bit as bad, if not worse. Then you got your rattlesnakes and your scorpions, and the heat and the dust storms and everything else that those old boys had to put up with. But they beat all of it and made this valley a decent place to live. Now, though, it’s bein’ taken over by the same sort of bandidos who got run out of here a hundred years ago. They got cell phones and fancy guns and GPSs now, but they’re still bandidos as far as I’m concerned.”

  There were mutters of agreement from the men. Hubie said, “Looks to me like somebody ought to do something about all this.”

  “Who?” Devery shot back. “The government?”

  “Government?” a harsh voice repeated. The men looked around to see that old Newton Stark, John Howard’s uncle, had come up to join them, all six feet, three inches of his cantankerous self. Newt continued, “All them fellas in Washington are a bunch o’ black-suited, black-hearted bureaucratic robber barons, if you ask me. They ain’t interested in helpin’ anybody but their own selves.”

  “You don’t think there are any good politicians?” W.R. asked.

  Newt snorted. “I reckon there could be, but I ain’t never seen ’em.”

  “It’s not just the ones in Washington,” Devery said. “There are plenty of ’em right here in Texas that I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw ’em. Like Norval Lee Hammond.”

  The sheriff of Val Verde County, Hammond was nearing the end of his second term in office. His first had been marked by controversy, but he had been reelected anyway, some said because of the campaign money that had poured into his coffers from unknown sources. Rumor had it those sources were heavily involved in the drug trade, but nothing had been proven. All anybody knew for sure was that arrests for drug trafficking weren’t made very often, and when they were made, more of them were thrown out of court than seemed natural.

  Stark and the others nodded in solemn agreement with Devery’s comment about the sheriff. They might have gone on talking about the increased drug traffic across the border if Chaco hadn’t called out at that moment, “Barbecue’s ready!”

  Certain things go with barbecue. Nobody sits down to a big plate of brisket and arugula. But you’ve got your beans, your potato salad, your coleslaw and sliced onions and corn bread, and for dessert peach cobbler or apple cobbler or both, topped with homemade ice cream from a freezer with a hand-turned crank, not one of those electric jobs. Wash it all down with a cold bottle of beer or a big glass of iced tea with sweat dripping off it. That’s eatin’, son.

  John Howard Stark was pleasantly full as he sat on one of the benches with his back to the picnic table and his long legs stretched out in front of him. He thought about unfastening his belt buckle and the button of his jeans, but he knew if he did that Elaine would notice and likely swat him one on the back of the head. Country music played from the portable stereo he’d set up earlier, and a few couples were dancing as George Strait sang about getting to Amarillo by morning. Stark sipped his beer, content.

  He watched Tommy Carranza dancing with Julie. Tommy was handsome enough in a rough-hewn way, but Julie was really a beauty, taut and tanned with hair as black as a raven’s wing hanging straight down her back. Her high cheekbones and piercing dark eyes bespoke her Indian blood.

  Elaine sat down beside Stark and said, “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking about how pretty Julie Carranza is.”

  She punched him lightly on the arm. “What kind of a man says something like that to his wife?”

  “The honest kind?”

  “Well, if you want to put it that way . . . and she is awfully pretty.”

  “You know you don’t have anything to be jealous about. I never said she was prettier than you. Nobody is.”

  “Thank you, John Howard. You never were a man with a smooth line of talk, but you say what you mean and mean what you say, and a woman appreciates that. This one does, anyway.”

  Stark put his arm around her shoulders and she rested her head against him. They sat there like that for several minutes, happy to be with each other and to be surrounded by their friends. At moments like this, all thoughts of trouble went away.

  The problem was that moments like that never lasted long enough. In this case, the song ended, the dancing stopped, and Tommy and Julie came over to the bench where Stark sat with Elaine.

  “John Howard, I need to talk to you for a minute,” Tommy said.

  “Uh-oh, I know that tone,” Julie said. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

  Tommy shook his head. “Of course not. I just need to talk a little business with John Howard here.”

  “Man talk, he means,” Elaine said as she stood up. “You’d think they’d know by now that it’s the twenty-first century and such chauvinistic attitudes are totally outdated.”

  “They’re a couple of throwbacks,” Julie said, but she was grinning as she said it.

  Stark got to his feet, too, and jerked a thumb toward the barn. “Come on, Tommy, let’s go get that cow and her calf and load ’em up. That’ll give us a chance to talk in peace.”

  As they started toward the barn, Tommy asked quietly, “Elaine wasn’t really upset, was she?”

  “Naw, she was just hoo-rawin’ us. She’s feisty that way.”

  Tommy changed the subject by asking, “You hear anything from the boys lately?”

  “Got e-mail from both of ’em a couple of days ago. They say they’re doing fine, but they don’t know when they’ll be back from over there.”

  Both of John Howard and Elaine’s sons were in the military. The older boy, David, was in the navy, a pilot flying off an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Middle East. Stark didn’t know where, exactly. The younger one, Peter, was a lieutenant colonel in the marines, a leatherneck like his old man, and he’d been pulling a tour of duty in Iraq for the past year.

  “You must worry about them being in harm’s way,” Tommy said.

  Stark grunted. “This day and age, with all the evil loose in the world, every American is in harm’s way no matter where he is or what he’s doing. I reckon we’re safer here than the boys are where they are, but at least they’ve got the weapons to fight back. Over here we’re supposed to just roll over and take whatever’s dished out to us, no matter how bad it is. Otherwise we ain’t bein’ sensitive enough to other folks’ beliefs and cultures.” He shook his head. “Just once I’d like to see other folks give a little respect to our beliefs and culture.”

  “Roger that,” Tommy said.

  Stark stopped, and the younger man did likewise. They were in a patch of shadow, and even though Stark couldn’t see Tommy’s face all that clearly, he looked at him head-on and said, “You didn’t ask to talk just to hear me rant about such things. Something’s bothering you, Tommy. What is it?”

  “You can tell?”

  “Hell, I’ve known you for over thirty years. Of course I can tell.” Stark made a shrewd guess. “It’s something about all the drug smuggling that’s been goin’ on. I saw the way you reacted when Devery brought it up.”

  Tommy shifted his feet uneasily. “When I was in Del Rio yesterday picking up those rolls of fence, a guy talked to me.”

  “What guy?”

  “A lawyer from Dallas. He gave me his card. His name was J. Donald Lester.”

  “I never did really trust a man who uses his first initial and middle name like tha
t. Seems like he’s puttin’ on airs. What did ol’ J. Donald want?”

  “I won’t beat around the bush, John Howard. He works for the Vulture, and he wanted to pay me ten grand a month to look the other way while Ramirez’s couriers bring drugs across my land.”

  Stark let out a low whistle. “The Vulture, eh? That ain’t good. What did you do?”

  “I’m ashamed to say I thought about it. I wouldn’t admit that to anybody else, John Howard, not even to Julie.”

  “Thought about it for how long?” Stark asked grimly.

  “About half a second.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I busted him a good one in the mouth.”

  Stark couldn’t hold back an explosive bark of laughter. “Good for you. I knew you wouldn’t ever go for any sort of deal like that.”

  “Well, I’m glad you know that, because like I said, for a minute there I considered it. And it’s been eatin’ me up ever since.”

  Stark put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “No need for that. You did the right thing.”

  “Did I? I’m not so sure.”

  “You mean you think you should have taken the deal?”

  “No, of course not. But doing what I did . . . it’s bound to make an enemy out of Ramirez.”

  Stark rubbed his jaw, feeling the calluses on his fingertips scrape against the bristles of his beard. “Yeah, there is that. I didn’t think about it at first.”

  “Neither did I. But now I wonder if I’ve put my family in danger.”

  One thing was sure, thought Stark. The Vulture was a bad man to cross. Just about the baddest man possible.

  Three

  The man in the white suit smiled. It was not a pretty expression.

  “You know what to do, Alfonso,” Ernesto Diego Espinoza Ramirez said.

  The thick-bodied gunner nodded. “Sí, jefe.”

  Ramirez—also known on both sides of the border as El Bruitre, the Vulture—picked up the drink from the round glass table beside him and sipped from it. “And take Ryan with you,” he added.

  Again Alfonso Ruiz nodded his assent. He glanced somewhat nervously over his shoulder at the man leaning indolently against the adobe wall around the courtyard. Electric lanterns shone in the trees around the pool, and in their yellow glow the man called Ryan looked half-asleep. But Ruiz knew that to be a false impression. Ryan was always alert, no matter how he looked, and he could kill in the blink of an eye. Ruiz knew that to be true, because he had seen it happen on numerous occasions.

  Across the table from Ramirez, J. Donald Lester took a drink from his glass and winced at the pain from his swollen lips. The indignity of being assaulted like that, in the middle of a parking lot in broad daylight, still burned inside him. But that damned greaser Carranza would get his comeuppance. Carranza had attacked J. Donald Lester while the lawyer was acting on behalf of Ramirez. That was just like attacking the Vulture. Ramirez would never let that pass. He was Colombian, and his pride would never allow him to be challenged like that without retaliation, fierce and swift. A Mexican might let the affront go out of sheer laziness, Lester thought, but not a Colombian.

  “Let me know when it’s done,” Ramirez said.

  “Sí, jefe.”

  Ramirez waved a hand in dismissal. Ruiz faded back away from the table. Ryan straightened from the wall and joined him as they went inside the hacienda. That left Ramirez and Lester alone with the two girls stroking sleekly through the water of the pool.

  They were watching Ramirez, and when he made a slight motion with his hand they swam over to the edge of the pool and pulled themselves out of the water. Both girls were nude, and neither was over the age of sixteen. Water streamed from their long black hair as it hung down their backs, and droplets gleamed on their bare, silky, olive-tinted skin.

  “You have been through a great deal, my friend,” Ramirez said to Lester. “You have suffered on my behalf. Therefore you deserve to be rewarded.” He waved a hand toward the girls. “I give you your choice. Both are virgins, so you will not be disappointed.”

  Lester swallowed hard. “Well, I . . . I don’t know.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the girls as they lifted their arms and ran their fingers through their dripping hair. That made their high, firm breasts rise even more. They smiled.

  “I can’t decide!” Lester burst out. “I want them both!”

  Ramirez chuckled. “Then take them both,” he decreed. “And enjoy them to your heart’s content, amigo.”

  Lester stood up. The girls approached him. Each of them took one of his hands, and laughing they led him into the house. Lester stumbled a little in his excitement at what was about to happen.

  When he was alone, Ramirez picked up his drink and finished it. He had planned to take one of the girls himself tonight, but he didn’t really mind giving up that opportunity. There were other virgins in the world he could deflower, thousands of them, in fact. For a man with sufficient money, there was never a last chance for anything. The heart’s desire could always be bought again. This lesson he had learned and learned well, in the years since he had crawled out of the gutters of Bogota a starving boy and set out to transform himself into a great man.

  In many ways that transformation had been easier than he had believed it would be. The drug cartels that made up far and away the largest segment of the Colombian economy, larger even than the coffee industry, were like hungry machines, endlessly devouring the lower-level couriers. Ramirez had started small, working for the neighborhood dealer who supplied his whore mother with the drugs she needed to dull the pain of her existence. The job had gone well and Ramirez had been given more responsibility. Once one of the runners tried to steal from the dealer and had even gotten the drop on him with an automatic pistol. Ramirez, who was thirteen years old at the time, came up silently behind the man and cut his throat with a single swift stroke of a machete, killing him before he could even squeeze off a burst from the machine pistol. That was the first time Ramirez killed anyone.

  It would not be the last.

  Seeing how coldly and efficiently Ramirez could deal out death, his employer had given him more such jobs. Ramirez carried them all out to the best of his ability, and before he was eighteen years old he was known as El Bruitre, the Vulture, because wherever he went death was sure to follow.

  Curiously, while he did not mind killing, he took no particular pleasure in it. Unlike some men whose eyes shone with a bright, sick excitement when they took a life, who were granted an almost sexual release by the sight of their victims’ blood, Ramirez regarded the whole thing as a necessary part of the business he was in, nothing more. That detachment meant that he always weighed the odds and never took risks he didn’t need to. His own urges never forced him into doing anything foolhardy.

  And so he rose in the cartel, moving up more quickly than even he would have dreamed possible, because each killing removed an obstacle to attaining his ultimate goals. He wanted money and power, of course, and he wanted people to fear and respect him, not so much because he could kill them but because he could crush them if he chose to do so.

  Now he was thirty-five years old and had come to Cuidad Acuna, to this magnificent hacienda, because right across the river was the United States of America, the source of nearly all the money that eventually made its way into his offshore bank accounts. Getting the drugs across the border was really the most crucial step in the entire process, and while he had not killed anyone personally for quite a few years, Ramirez still thought of himself as a hands-on manager. He was in charge of the smuggling and made all the decisions. Though simple at the heart of it—the drugs were taken from one side of the river to the other and then sent on their way into the distribution channels that would carry them all across the continent—the process was surrounded by a fairly complex maze of law enforcement and political corruption on both sides of the border. It took a skilled, intelligent man to keep up with everything, and Ramirez was that man.

  Earlier toda
y he had flown back into Acuna from a meeting with some of the other cartel leaders in Mexico City. While he was away from home, he had left his attorney with a simple matter to take care of. Lester was to arrange with the rancher Tomas Carranza for the unrestricted passage of Ramirez’s couriers across Carranza’s land.

  Lester had failed miserably, and for a moment Ramirez had been tempted to have him killed as punishment for that failure. At the very least, he should have had his lead gunner, Alfonso Ruiz, cut off a couple of the lawyer’s fingers. He might do that yet. Lester thought he was off the hook—what else could he think, when he had been rewarded with two teenage virgins?—but his ultimate fate was still to be decided.

  In the meantime, Ramirez had turned his rage on Tomas Carranza. That fool had had the effrontery to strike the personal representative of Ernesto Diego Espinoza Ramirez. That was like slapping the face of Ramirez himself. There was no question about Carranza being punished. He would pay for his prideful, foolhardy gesture. Lester had a file on Carranza; the rancher had a wife and two children.

  He drank the last of the liquor in the glass and stood up to stroll toward the house. By now Lester would have the two girls in bed in the guest quarters and would have them doing wanton things to him and to each other. Ramirez decided he would watch for a while on the monitor that was hooked up to the hidden camera in Lester’s room. He was not a voyeur, really, but he did appreciate beautiful things, and watching those two girls would be no different from gazing at an exquisite painting or a splendid piece of sculpture.

  There were five men in the crew, in an old Lincoln Town Car. Ruiz drove, and Ryan sat up front with him. The other three men—Guzman, Mendez, and Canales—rode in the backseat, jammed together rather uncomfortably. Ryan didn’t feel sorry for them. Better them than him.