Stand Your Ground Read online

  “Yep. It was a pretty exciting game.”

  “Sure was. You didn’t happen to notice anything going on in the parking lot afterward, did you?”

  Stark frowned and shook his head.

  “No, I’m afraid not, Chief. Did something happen?”

  “Just a fight,” Cobb said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Three sore losers from McElhaney jumped some folks from here in town. Somebody pitched in to give them a hand.”

  “The sore losers?”

  “No, the hometown folks. They didn’t know the guy, but they said he made short work of a couple of the guys from McElhaney. Sounded like something you might do.”

  Stark shook his head again and said, “I don’t know a thing about it, Chief. George and I were together right after the game. Went to the café and got a little something to eat. You can ask him about it if you want.”

  “No need for that,” Cobb assured him. “I didn’t really think you were mixed up in it, but since I saw you here—”

  “You thought you might as well ask.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What will you do if you find the guy?” Stark asked. “You said those sore losers started it. Wouldn’t seem like they’d have any real grounds for filing a complaint.”

  “Maybe not, but I’d still have to question whoever was involved.” Cobb grinned. “Then thank him for a job well done . . . off the record, of course.”

  Stark returned the chief’s smile. Cobb lifted a hand in farewell, got into the police car, and drove off.

  Stark resumed his walk. He didn’t know if the chief had believed him or not, and he didn’t really care.

  Whatever had happened in the parking lot after the football game, it didn’t have anything to do with him.

  The two men arrived at mid-morning. They didn’t give Jerry Patel their names, just came into the motel office and said in English, “Judgment.”

  Patel’s hands were resting on the counter, palms down. Although outwardly calm, he involuntarily pressed down hard with them for a second as he tried to bring his rampaging emotions under control. He believed in the glorious cause, he truly did, but he had never really thought he would be called on to do the things he had done.

  The things he still had to do.

  He called to his wife, who was back in the office, and said, “Lara, keep an eye on the desk, please. I’ll be right back.”

  “All right, Jerry.”

  Patel came around the counter, nodded to the two men, and said, “Come with me.”

  He led them along the sidewalk in front of the ground-floor units until he reached the one on the end. A few years earlier, the motel had been renovated and all the old door locks had been replaced with the electronic card key type. Patel had a card that would open any of them and he used it now, sliding it into the slot and pulling it out. He twisted the handle and opened the door.

  A middle-aged couple had rented the room the previous afternoon. They were driving from Dallas to see their son and his family in Arizona and seeing some sights along the way, the man had told Patel as they were checking in.

  Patel had said that he was sure the trip would be a good one.

  Ten minutes later, another man had walked through the office door, and everything had changed.

  Now Patel saw the woman lying on the floor next to the bed, curled in a ball around the pain that had filled her in her dying moments. The man was half in the bathroom. Maybe he’d been trying to reach the toilet and make himself throw up before he collapsed.

  Even if he had made it, it wouldn’t have done any good. The poison was too fast-acting.

  Patel hadn’t been able to bring himself to go into any of the rooms until now. Some of the guests had survived ; he knew that because he had seen them pack up their cars and leave. That meant they hadn’t used any of the ice.

  That was true of Mr. Stark, as well, but he hadn’t checked out. That might cause a bit of a problem before this was all over, but that didn’t really matter. When the time came to act, Stark would be greatly outnumbered. One man couldn’t make a difference.

  “Put them in the bathtub,” Patel told the two men who had just arrived. “They’ll be out of the way there.”

  The man’s trousers were lying on a chair. Patel dug in the pockets and found a set of car keys. He had all the license numbers on the registration computer, so he could tell which car belonged to whom. In a little while one of the men would drive the couple’s car out into the badlands south of town. The other man would follow in their vehicle and bring him back.

  This was just the beginning, Patel thought. The day would be spent piling bodies in bathtubs and disposing of vehicles. By the next morning, several hundred men would have arrived here. The motel would be very crowded, but it wouldn’t be for long.

  There were a number of other rendezvous points in Fuego, but the largest group of fighters would be gathered here at the motel. In the morning—Sunday morning— while the Americans were either sleeping in or attending their churches, all the men would converge . . .

  And Judgment Day would arrive for one town full of infidels, anyway. The Americans would pay for all their affronts to the one true religion. Patel knew he was doing the right thing. He was just carrying out the will of Allah.

  But many of the people who would die . . . they had been his friends and neighbors. He had talked with them, laughed with them. They had done no real harm.

  “You are all right, brother?” one of the newcomers asked after he and his companion had dropped the woman’s body on top of her husband’s in the bathtub. “You look ill.”

  “I’m fine,” Patel said. He tried to put a fierce look on his face, but he thought he probably failed.

  By the time he got back to the office, two more men were waiting. Patel sighed and took them to the next room in line to clean up that mess.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Just be sure the camera crew is there tomorrow,” Alexis Devereaux said as she wheeled the powerful sedan through a long, gentle curve in the highway. The speedometer needle hovered right around 90.

  “The producer promised me they would be.”

  The reply came from the car’s speaker, through the built-in phone.

  “Well, stay on him,” Alexis told her assistant back in Washington. “This place is way out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t want them getting lost.”

  “Yes, ma’am. By the way, Colin Evans from the State Department called.”

  Alexis took her right hand off the wheel, clenched it into a fist, and hammered it down on the seat beside her.

  “By the way?” she repeated. “By the way? You didn’t think that was important enough to lead with, Crystal?”

  “I—I’m sorry, Ms. Devereaux. There’s an awful lot to keep up with—”

  “That’s why you make the big bucks,” Alexis said coldly, although she knew perfectly well that Crystal didn’t make big bucks. She did. But Crystal ought to be happy earning what she did, because a lot of people didn’t have jobs these days, and many of the ones who did worked part-time for minimum wage and no benefits. “What did Evans want?”

  “He didn’t really say, but I got the impression he’d found out somehow about that court order you got—”

  “Well, that’s no surprise. The administration can promise all it wants to that they’ve stopped reading everybody’s emails and listening in on everybody’s phone calls, but nobody believes that for a second. And with good reason. Is State going to try to quash the order?”

  “He didn’t say. He just told me to have you call him.”

  “Fine.”

  “Do you want me to give you the number?”

  “No, I’ve got it,” Alexis said, without explaining how she happened to have the cell phone number of an undersecretary at the State Department. It was none of Crystal’s business that she banged Colin Evans twice a week when they were both in town.

  Alexis added, “Just stay on that news producer,” and then broke the c
onnection.

  She would call Colin later. She wasn’t in the mood to do it now. If she did, she might say things she would regret later. He was a good source. Better as a source than he was in the sack, when you got right down to it, although Alexis couldn’t really complain about that part of their relationship, either.

  She had come up behind a truck. Without slowing down, she swung out into the other lane and zoomed past it.

  That was one good thing about this godawful state, maybe the only good thing, she thought. You could see a long way on these flat, straight, mostly empty highways. You didn’t even have to take your foot off the gas.

  Alexis didn’t like taking her foot off the gas, on the road or in life.

  She had gone to Washington as a very junior White House counsel, a member of the legal staff working for the first female president. By the time that chief executive’s two scandal-marred terms were over, Alexis had risen to the position of senior White House counsel. Her rise in power had been fueled by intelligence, hard work, and a great deal of subtle, discreet back-stabbing.

  Once that administration had drawn to an ignominious close, Alexis had gone to work for a K Street lobbying firm and done good work for it for several years before becoming an associate at one of the city’s most prestigious law firms. She had assisted in several cases at the Supreme Court. She took advantage of her blond, slightly square-jawed, girl-next-door good looks to get plenty of airtime on the cable TV news networks as they began seeking her out to appear as a consultant on their broadcasts. Eventually she had left the firm and established her own practice, smaller but more visible, and it wasn’t long before most of the country knew her as a beautiful, tireless crusader for liberal causes.

  Those prisoners who had just been transferred to Hell’s Gate were tailor-made for her.

  Alexis had been campaigning for years to have Guantanamo and the other military prisons closed down and the so-called terrorists moved to civilian facilities where they belonged. The military had too much power and couldn’t be trusted.

  Of course, a previous president had promised to do that very thing, but that was just one more broken promise in the tsunami of broken promises that had swamped his administration. Healthcare reform disaster? What healthcare reform disaster? Nothing to see here, move along, move along. This wasn’t the healthcare reform you were looking for.

  And so Gitmo and the political prisoners being held there illegally—as far as Alexis was concerned—had been all but forgotten as just one more scandal among many.

  Or they would have been if not for Alexis and a few others continuing to beat the drums. Writing magazine articles, appearing on TV, organizing fund-raisers complete with Hollywood stars. Until finally somebody got around to doing something about the things Alexis and the others had been demanding.

  It hadn’t taken her long to realize what a terrible development that was for her.

  She had lost the main thing that kept getting her on TV.

  But it also hadn’t taken her long to figure out a way to salvage the situation. Now she could use her standing as one of the nation’s top celebrity lawyers to make sure that the prisoners were being treated properly and that their rights weren’t being violated. That ought to be worth some airtime, and a producer at one of the news networks agreed. He had promised Alexis that a field reporter and a camera crew would be in Fuego to document her unannounced and unexpected visit to Hell’s Gate.

  Now, she thought as she sped across the flat West Texas landscape, if only she could discover that the guards were mistreating the prisoners. Mistreating them physically and disrespecting their religion.

  That would be a wonderful example of just how bigoted and intolerant those awful Christians were.

  A lot of what was on TV these days bored Stark, unless he happened across a channel that showed old movies, so he always traveled with several books stuck in his suitcase. His favorites were Western novels.

  He read one of them Saturday afternoon. The motel seemed to be busy, with lots of people coming and going, although he didn’t really pay much attention to it. When he left to go to dinner, he frowned slightly as he saw that the parking lot was full.

  More than full, really. A number of vehicles were parked on the vacant lot next to the motel, and the No Vacancy sign was lit up. It appeared the Patels were doing a booming business. Nobody was moving around the complex, though. Stark couldn’t help but wonder where they had put all those people.

  It was none of his affair, he decided, so he walked on to the café and enjoyed a good chicken-fried steak for dinner.

  He was lingering over a cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie when a good-looking woman came into the café and asked the cashier behind the counter, “Is there another motel in town besides the one right over there?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m afraid not,” the cashier replied.

  The stranger blew out an exasperated breath, shook her head, and said, “Great. Where am I supposed to stay? Who would’ve dreamed that every room would be booked in a place like this?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the cashier said with the sort of genuine sympathy one found in small towns. “You might find something in McElhaney. It’s ninety miles farther west—”

  “My business is here,” the blonde interrupted. She reached into the pocket of her tight, stylish jeans for a phone.

  Stark was about as far from being a member of the fashion police as anybody could be, but he thought the jeans went well with the dark blue silk blouse the woman wore. The outfit suited her. She wasn’t young anymore, but she was still extremely attractive.

  And he wasn’t so old that he failed to notice that.

  Something about the woman interested him besides her looks. She seemed familiar somehow, as if he had seen her before. He was trying to figure out if they had ever met when he suddenly realized who she was.

  He left a twenty and a five on the table with his ticket to pay for the meal and a generous tip. Then he stood up, carried his Stetson, and walked over to the counter.

  “Hello, Ms. Devereaux,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said, nodding distractedly in his general direction without really looking at him. Clearly, she was used to people recognizing her and coming up to her to say hello. Why wouldn’t she be? She had been on TV quite a bit, after all. Everybody knew people who had been on TV.

  “I couldn’t help but overhear about your problem,” Stark went on.

  She had her phone out now and was scrolling through something on its screen.

  “Unless you’ve got a motel room in your pocket—” she began.

  “I might,” Stark said.

  That prompted her to look at him, finally. Interest sparked in her eyes at the sight of his tall, broad-shouldered form.

  “What did you have in mind?” she asked.

  Not the same thing she obviously believed he did, he thought, but he was flattered that she hadn’t rejected the idea out of hand. He said, “I have one of the rooms over at the motel—”

  “You do, do you?”

  “And I thought maybe if I could find somewhere else to stay, I could give it up and let you have it,” Stark went on.

  “Oh.”

  He wasn’t sure if she sounded disappointed or relieved—or both.

  Then a look of recognition appeared on her face, and she went on, “Wait a minute. I know you. Don’t I?”

  “We’ve never met in person,” Stark said, “but you’ve talked about me on television, when you were being interviewed as a legal expert, and before that as a spokesman for the White House.”

  “Oh, my God,” she breathed. “You’re—”

  “If I recall correctly,” Stark said, “you called me a murdering, right-wing, vigilante lunatic.”

  “You’re him. John Howard Stark.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And you’re Alexis Devereaux. And this—” Stark waved the hand holding the Stetson to indicate their surroundings. “I think this is what they call in the movies a meet-c
ute.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Phillip Hamil arrived in Fuego that evening, as well. He had caught the red-eye from Washington to Dallas, where one of the members of his organization had a car waiting for him. Then he had spent the day driving across Texas, one of the places he hated most.

  This was one of the last bastions of Republican strength in the country, and even it threatened to turn purple because of the growing liberal enclaves of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin.

  Over the past decade, the Democrats had become as adept at getting the illegal alien vote as they always had been at turning out the dead vote, so it was only a matter of time until a tipping point was reached.

  Hamil didn’t really care about American politics except for putting the system to use in furthering his own cause, the cause of Islam. The Democrats were the most useful because they were the most easily manipulated. Appeal to their emotions and they would fall into lockstep behind any idea, no matter how stupid and obviously unworkable it might be, especially if it involved raising taxes and soaking the evil rich.

  The Republicans came in handy, too, because they gave the Democrats an enemy and kept them united. The pundits kept saying that the Republican Party would eventually wither away and disappear because of demographics.

  Hamil hoped that wouldn’t actually happen. If the Democrats ever attained complete control, with nothing to hold them back from implementing their ideas, the United States would collapse into complete and utter chaos, probably within twenty years.

  That was obvious to anyone who looked at the situation with clear, unbiased eyes. Hamil and those like him needed the country to stay at least somewhat functional.

  Who wanted to take over a madhouse? That would be more trouble than it was worth.

  None of which kept Hamil from despising Texas and everything that it stood for. Thanks to the relentless politically correct drumbeat of the American media on both coasts, “cowboy” was an insult these days, but that didn’t stop many of the people in Texas from continuing to embrace what it had originally stood for.