Vengeance Is Mine Read online

  “Yes,” said the second man with a sigh. “All right. We might as well get started.”

  There were more than just two of them, of course. Several men gathered around Tommy. He could see them looming over him. The interior of the barn was thick with shadows but not completely dark. Enough light filtered in from the moon and stars so that he could make out the shapes of his captors. The first man took his foot off Tommy’s chest and moved back, as if his part was done and the rest was up to his companions. A couple of them leaned over to grab Tommy and hold him down. He tried to fight, but a fist slammed into his face, stunning him for long enough that they were able to get a good grip on him. He could still writhe around a little but no more as one of the other men leaned over the lower half of his body. He saw the flash of a knife, heard ripping sounds as his jeans were cut away, felt the cold kiss of the steel as it touched him.

  “Go ahead,” someone said.

  And then Tommy began to scream as the terrible sawing pain hit him.

  Silencio Ryan stood apart from Ruiz and the others as they slowly castrated Tomas Carranza, taking their time about it so the pain would last longer. Carranza fainted once from the agony of what they were doing to him, so Ruiz told Guzman, Mendez, and Canales to wait while he got a bucketful of water and dashed it into their victim’s face. That brought Carranza back to a gasping, sputtering consciousness, and he started screaming again. None of them cared how loudly he screamed. No one was around to hear it but them, and to their ears it was just an affirmation that they were doing their job properly.

  The Vulture would be happy when he heard how much Carranza had suffered.

  So they cut his balls off, and when they were done with that they severed his penis as well and stuffed it into his mouth, muffling what had by now turned into wretched sobs. Blood had flooded from the hideous wounds between his legs, mixing with the cow shit and forming a black, muddy pool around him. The men had to step in it to continue their work, but they didn’t care. One of them slit Carranza’s belly open, and they pulled out his intestines and piled them on his chest so that he could see his own guts through bleary eyes in which the life was fading. By now Carranza had lost enough blood so that death was only moments away. His breathing was a ragged series of wheezing sighs. They had to move more quickly. They had brought an ax with them. Canales used it to chop off Carranza’s hands and feet while Guzman sliced off his ears and nose and lips. Ruiz hunkered on his heels beside Carranza’s head and scooped out his eyes with a knife.

  Ryan leaned against the wall of one of the stalls with his arms folded across his chest. When he heard the distinctive rattle that he had heard so many times in his life, he said, “You can stop carving on him now. He’s dead.”

  Ruiz glanced up. “Senor Ramirez wanted him to suffer.”

  “Well, he can’t feel anything now.” Ryan hoped Ruiz wouldn’t make him say it again.

  Ruiz took a deep breath, as if he had just realized something. Ryan didn’t see how he could do that, leaning as he was over the stinking piece of butchered meat that had been Tomas Carranza. Ryan was off to the side, and he had to breathe shallowly because it smelled so bad in here.

  “Yes, we are done here,” Ruiz said. “I just wish we had found the woman and the children. Carranza should have had to watch what we would have done to them before we killed him.”

  Ryan started toward the open double doors of the barn. “Yeah, he’s a lucky bastard, isn’t he?”

  He stopped short, just outside the barn. In the distance, probably still at least a mile away on the river road, were several pairs of headlights. It was entirely possible those vehicles weren’t coming here . . . but Ryan knew they were. The instincts he had developed so keenly over the years told him that, and he trusted them.

  “Let’s go,” he barked at Ruiz and the others. “Company’s coming.”

  No one argued with him. Ruiz might give the orders most of the time, but when Ryan spoke in that tone, everyone did what he said. There was only a brief delay while Ruiz and Guzman emptied their clips into the trailer, the automatic weapons fire chopping up the cow and the calf as a last gesture.

  Less than two minutes later, the Town Car pulled away from the spot where it was hidden behind the barn. A small dirt road led away from the house and the barn and looped back through the ranch, circling around until it connected with the river road a couple of miles away. Ryan had scoped it out earlier, just in case they had to leave the back way. He was behind the wheel now, driving without headlights, sending the Lincoln bouncing along the rutted trail. He wasn’t worried about the car’s suspension; it was specially reinforced, just like the door panels were. The glass was bulletproof. The Lincoln was almost as much a tank as it was a car.

  They came to a locked gate where the trail met the river road. A burst of gunfire shattered the lock. Mendez swung the gate open and Ryan drove through. Once Mendez was back in the car, Ryan turned south. There was a place a few miles on the other side of Del Rio where the river could be forded. In the old days that would not have been possible, but now in many places the Rio Grande was only a pale shadow of the mighty stream it had once been. Dams and irrigation upriver, as well as the demands of industry in northern Mexico, had seen to that. The lowering of the river made it even more difficult for the Border Patrol to monitor all the possible crossings.

  Ryan drove on into the night. He wondered briefly if those headlights he had seen meant that Carranza’s friends were coming to check on him.

  Then he forgot about it, putting what had happened out of his mind. He thought instead about a morning he had seen once in Africa, during a lull in one of the countless wars, when clouds and the rising sun had streaked the sky with orange above a snowcapped mountain. It had been a pretty sight. So pretty. He told himself he would have to go back there someday, and look at it again.

  Five

  Stark drove the first pickup. Uncle Newt sat beside him, cradling an old .30-30 carbine in his lap. Stark’s shotgun was on the rack behind them. Following in three more pickups were half a dozen of his friends, all armed. They would be a match for any trouble they might find at Tommy’s place, Stark thought.

  Unless Ramirez had sent a small army up here to exact his vengeance.

  That possibility worried Stark. He didn’t really know what Ramirez was capable of. Like most folks along this stretch of the border, he had heard of the Vulture, but how much was true and how much was merely legend, he didn’t know. It would pay Ramirez to foster the sort of gruesome stories that were told about him, because fear was his greatest weapon in his effort to control all the drug smuggling in the region. No one dared to cross him because of the terrible revenge he might wreak on them. It was possible, though, that he didn’t really have that kind of power.

  But if he did . . . if everything that was whispered about the Vulture in awed, terror-stricken whispers was true . . . then Tommy could be in very bad danger indeed.

  The gate where the ranch road led off the river highway was closed but not locked. Newt hopped out of the pickup, swung it back, and then climbed in again as Stark drove past. Devery Small, in the last pickup with Hubie Cornheiser, got out and closed the gate once all the vehicles were through. In this country, even in a possible emergency, a man didn’t leave a gate open unless he absolutely had to.

  Stark led the little convoy on to the ranch house. The place was dark. His headlights washed over Tommy’s pickup and trailer, parked beyond the house near the barn. Stark swung his own pickup in that direction.

  His foot hit the brake and he stopped the pickup short as his headlights shone more directly into the trailer. The cow and calf were still in there, both of them dead, cut up so badly it looked as though slaughterhouse workers had been at them with chain saws. The floor of the trailer was awash with blood, and the stuff had leaked out and formed a black lake on the ground around it.

  “Son of a bitch,” Newt breathed in horror at what his old eyes saw in the trailer.

  Lea
ving the motor on and the headlights burning, Stark piled out of the pickup, snatching the shotgun off the rack as he did so. He reached under the seat and grabbed a powerful, heavy flashlight. He flicked it on and played the beam around as he shouted, “Tommy! Tommy, are you here?”

  There was no answer, just as Stark had feared. The other men were out of their pickups now, clutching flashlights, rifles, and shotguns, and the beams danced around like lances of light. They called back and forth to each other, their voices touched with nervousness. They were scared, and Stark didn’t blame them. These men were ranchers, family men, good citizens, tough as nails when it came to the everyday dangers of rural ife . . . but they were not professional warriors.

  Stark hurried toward the barn, thinking Tommy might be in there. His light touched something lying on the ground inside the cavernous building, but for a couple of seconds his brain didn’t recognize the huddled shape as something that had once been human. Then beside Stark his uncle Newt said softly, “Sweet limpin’ Jesus.” Stark went forward, but only slowly, with dragging footsteps, as if he were being compelled to advance while at the same time feeling so horrified that all he wanted to do was back away from something so bad his mind could not comprehend it.

  The thing on the ground, surrounded by blood and shit, was what was left of Tommy Carranza.

  In Vietnam, Stark had seen men blown to pieces by grenades and land mines and artillery fire. He knew firsthand how much destruction could be wreaked on the human body. But he had never seen anything like this before. This carnage had not been inflicted at a distance. It had been carried out up close and personal. Men had sunk knives in Tommy’s flesh and carved him up, and Stark knew from the look of agony and disbelief frozen on his friend’s face that Tommy had been conscious and aware of what was being done to him.

  Behind him, Stark heard somebody puking. He didn’t know which of his friends it was. Could have been any of them. He felt like doing the same thing himself.

  Uncle Newt’s voice was dry, raspy, as he asked, “You reckon . . . you reckon he could still be . . . alive?”

  “No.” Stark moved closer, forcing himself to be detached as he played his flashlight beam over the thing that had been Tommy. “He bled out five, maybe ten minutes ago. And he would have passed out from loss of blood before that.”

  “Poor boy,” Newt muttered.

  Everett Hatcher came up beside Stark. He was wiping the back of a hand across his mouth. “Who’d do a thing like this?” he asked in an anguished voice.

  “The Vulture,” Devery Small put in from the other side of Stark. “Tommy crossed that lawyer fella who works for Ramirez. He has to have done this.”

  Stark said, “Not Ramirez his own self. He wouldn’t dirty his hands. But he had it done, that’s for damn sure. Tommy didn’t have another enemy in the world.”

  “What do we do now?” Everett asked.

  They were too late to help Tommy, Stark thought, but there were still Julie and the children. Ramirez’s men probably didn’t know where they were. Would they try to track them down? Would the trail lead to the Diamond S?

  He swung toward his uncle and said, “Newt, take a couple of the boys and head back to the ranch as fast as you can. Don’t tell Julie what happened, but make sure she and the kids are all right. Then keep ’em that way.”

  Newt nodded. “Don’t worry, John Howard. Ain’t nobody gonna get up to any shenanigans on the Diamond S.”

  Shenanigans, Stark thought as he glanced at Tommy’s mutilated corpse. But he knew what his uncle meant.

  “Get Elaine off by herself if you can,” he went on. “Tell her, and let her tell Julie.”

  “That’s a mighty hard burden to lay on the gal.”

  “I know,” Stark said heavily. “And I pure-dee regret having to do it. But Elaine’s the strongest woman I know. She can handle it.”

  Newt said, “If you say so, John Howard. Come on, Hubie, W.R. You’re with me.”

  As the three men filed out of the barn, Stark patted his shirt pockets and then said, “Anybody got a cell phone? I left mine back at the house.”

  Devery handed over a phone he took from his breast pocket. Stark held it for a moment, then sighed and punched in 911.

  Like it or not, it was time to bring the law into this.

  Norval Lee Hammond had been an all-state defensive tackle for the Del Rio High Rams in 1970, was considered a blue-chip recruit, and his signature had been sought on a letter-of-intent by colleges and universities across the land. He had signed with Texas A&M and was all-conference his sophomore year, but then unexpectedly transferred to a smaller, less prestigious school for his junior and senior years. It was whispered that academic problems were behind the transfer, but there was nothing academic about the two coeds he had gotten pregnant or the other three he had beaten up. His time at the smaller school was unmarred by such incidents, and while his football career was much lower profile there than it would have been at A&M, the pro scouts had already seen enough to interest them. He was drafted in the third round by the New Orleans Saints, a fact that was appropriate in one way, since he never got above third team on the depth chart, and inappropriate in another, because he was far from being a saint in his behavior. He lasted two years before being released in training camp the third year. In those days NFL teams had what were called “taxi squads,” the equivalent of what later became known as practice squads. Warm bodies, basically, who showed some promise. When he was released Norval Lee was confident that he would catch on with some other team as a free agent; if that didn’t happen, surely the Saints would put him on their taxi squad.

  Neither of those things came about.

  With his pro football career at an end, Norval Lee had returned home to Del Rio. Most of the money from the two years he had spent with the Saints had already been spent. Contracts, while still lucrative by normal standards, were smaller back then, small enough that an athlete couldn’t earn more money in a year or two than he could possibly spend over the course of the rest of his life.

  Convinced that someday the phone would ring and it would be the Cowboys or the Bears or the Raiders on the other end, begging him to sign with them, to come back and help put them over the play-off hump so they could win the Super Bowl, Norval Lee lived with his parents and worked construction to make ends meet. He believed it was damned unfair that such a fate had befallen him. He had been young and stupid those first two years at A&M. He had cleaned up his act since then, hadn’t knocked up any more girls, and hardly ever swatted one around and then only when she got so damned annoying that nobody could blame him for losing his temper. He didn’t use dope, never drank more than a couple of beers when he went out. He was hardworking and clean-living, and it just wasn’t fair that none of the NFL teams wanted him anymore.

  Then Willa Sue McLaney, whom he had been going out with for a few months, called him one day and said she was going to have a baby and what did he intend to do about it? She had started bawling, but she didn’t really need to do that to get what she wanted. Norval Lee liked her, he really did, and he was twenty-five years old by this point and felt he ought to start thinking about settling down. His dreams of continuing his pro football career weren’t completely dead, but they were sure as hell on life support. Willa Sue getting pregnant was just what he needed to make him go ahead and pull the plug.

  “Marry me,” he had said to a stunned Willa Sue, and after sniffling a few times, she had agreed.

  A man with a wife and a child on the way needed more than just a job, he needed a career. Norval Lee scraped up some money, borrowed a little from his folks, who weren’t well-to-do by any stretch of the imagination, and rented a small house for himself and his new bride. Then he started taking law enforcement classes at the local junior college while still working part-time on construction jobs. Within a year he was a member of the Del Rio Police Department.

  He’d been a good cop. He never had any doubts about that. He got along with the Anglos because he ha
d once been a professional football player and so was considered a local celebrity. He got along with the Hispanics, too, because he spoke the language well and treated them fairly. There were a lot more brown faces than white ones in Del Rio, so Norval Lee considered it simply a prudent thing to keep them from hating him.

  By the time he was thirty-five he was chief of police and had three kids. Willa Sue drank a little more than she used to, but by and large they got along all right, and if she knew about the two or three Mexican gals he had on the side, she never said anything about it. He was a big man, with big appetites. And by his standards, he was an honest man. He never took a bribe.

  Until one of the local whorehouse owners offered him one that was just too blasted big to turn down.

  He’d been cheated out of a fortune by bad luck, he told himself. He should have been a rich, famous pro football player. If he had been able to stay at A&M, he would have been taken in the first round, sure as hell. A first-round draft choice got a lot more money, and the Saints wouldn’t have kicked him off the team after only two years, that was certain. He’d just never gotten a chance to really show what he could do.

  So it was only right that his finances should take an upturn. He deserved it. Willa Sue and the kids deserved it.

  The only problem was that a fella could never take just one bribe. The first bribe was never the last one.

  He ran for sheriff before his reputation got too bad. He won, too, which didn’t surprise anybody. By the time his first term was up, a lot of rumors had been whispered about him. He ignored them and went on about his business, enforcing the law to the best of his ability.

  Well, 99 percent of the time, anyway, and that was a pretty damned good ratio, even if he did say so himself.

  He had won reelection, and life was going along pretty smooth, pretty good. He didn’t need any disruption. He sure as hell didn’t need a gruesome, high-profile murder case.