Invasion USA (11 page)

Tom stepped closer, brought the bat up, swept it down hard. The thud of wood against bone silenced the intruder's screams. Max continued savaging the man until Tom grabbed the thick fur at the dog's neck and pulled him off.

“Back!” Tom ordered. “Stay back, Max!”

Reluctantly, the big mutt retreated. Tom saw a bloody lump on Max's head and knew that the men must have knocked him out when he was barking at them. They might have even thought that they had killed him.

This one had paid for that mistake. He was covered with blood. Tom checked for a pulse and found one. The bastard was lucky to still be alive. Max could have easily torn out his throat.

Tom dropped the bat and picked up the shotgun. “Stay,” he told Max as he pumped another round into the chamber. “Guard.”

“Tom,” Bonnie said, “where are you going?”

“To see if there are any more of these sons of bitches hanging around.”

“Not without me, you're not.” She jerked the robe's belt tight around her waist. “You're not leaving me in here with these two.”

“Come on,” he said.

Together, with Tom out in front by a step, carrying the shotgun, they went down the hall.

It took about ten minutes to check the house, inside and outside. No one else was around. The three men must not have had any companions, or the others had taken off when the shooting started.

Tom handed the shotgun to Bonnie and got some nylon rope from a drawer under the workbench. He cut a couple of lengths of it with a utility knife from the same drawer and used the rope to tie the hands and feet of the first man he had knocked out. The guy was still unconscious, but Tom wasn't going to take any chances on him coming to and being loose to cause more trouble.

“Let's get the others tied up,” he said. “I don't think they're going to regain consciousness any time soon, but you never know.”

Taking the rope and the knife, he headed for the bedroom. Bonnie followed with the shotgun, her eyes flicking around, still alert for any sign of danger.

As they reached the door of the bedroom, she said, “Shouldn't we go ahead and call nine-one-one? Or Buddy?”

Tom had been thinking about that very thing. He shook his head and said, “Not yet.”

“But you need help. Those cuts on your arms—”

Tom glanced down at the injuries. “They'll be all right,” he said. “We'll clean them up and bandage them later.”

“You might need stitches.”

“We'll see.” He cut more lengths of rope and bent to his task, trussing up the intruders securely. Both of them were still alive, although he didn't like the way the one Bonnie had hit with the bat was breathing. When he was finished, he tossed the rest of the rope and the knife on the bed and said, “That's it.”

“
Now
we call for help?”

Again, Tom shook his head. “I've got another idea.”

“What are you talking about? We need an ambulance out here, and the sheriff—”

“I think the world of Buddy Gorman, you know that,” Tom said. “But I'm not sure I want him involved with this.”

“For God's sake, why not?”

Tom rubbed a hand over his head. “Think about it. M-15 sent these guys up here to scare us off or kill us, whatever they thought would work. But their bosses across the border don't know what happened here. If these three turn up with the hell beaten out of them, the rest of the gang won't know where or how it happened. They can't blame it on us. But if the law gets involved, they'll
know
.”

“It seems to me like you'd want them to know,” Bonnie said. “You'd be sending a message to them that way.”

“Yeah, I thought of that. But I don't know if challenging them is something I want to do right now.”

“You think they won't just send somebody else after us?”

Tom shrugged. “Maybe. But I think they'll lay off for a while, anyway, and try to figure out what happened.”

Bonnie looked skeptical, but she said, “I'll do whatever you think is best, Tom. You know that.”

“You mean you'll go stay with Lisa and her family in Houston until everything calms down around here?”

“Nice try. I'll do whatever you want—except for running out on you.”

Tom wasn't surprised by her answer. He said, “Keep an eye on these two while I get dressed. I don't think they're going anywhere, but be ready to use that shotgun if you have to.”

She nodded. “Of course.”

Once he had pulled on a shirt and boots to go with his jeans, he dragged the unconscious men one by one out to the garage. Bonnie and Max followed him. Tom lowered the tailgate on his F-150.

“What are you going to do?”

“These men need medical attention. I'd let them die if it was up to me, but I'm not in the habit of playing God.”

Bonnie rubbed her hand in the thick fur at the dog's neck. “Max will need to go to the vet tomorrow. You can be stubborn about your injuries, but he saved our lives.”

“I know he did. He's a good dog.” Tom opened the passenger side door of the pickup. “Get in, both of you. I'm not leaving you here alone.”

Bonnie looked down at the robe. “I'm not dressed.”

“Don't worry.”

She thought it over and nodded. At her command, Max jumped up into the truck and sat down in the middle of the bench seat. Bonnie climbed in after him while Tom locked the door into the house.

“I'm a little surprised some deputies didn't show up anyway,” Bonnie commented as they pulled away and headed for the highway. “Some of the neighbors must have heard those shotgun blasts.”

“Yeah, but a shotgun going off a couple of times isn't that unusual out here. Could have been somebody shooting at a snake or a coyote. That's what people will think.”

Tom rolled both windows down part of the way as he drove toward Little Tucson with the three men in the back of the pickup. As usual in this dry climate, the night air had cooled off quickly once the sun went down. Bonnie pulled the robe a little tighter around her against the chill.

“I feel positively indecent, driving around at night with only a thin robe on.”

“Well, if there are any truckers out on the highway, you can flash them.”

She laughed. “You wish!”

Tom smiled wearily. The fact that Bonnie was able to banter with him was a good sign. A lot of women would still be crying and shaking with terror after everything that had gone on tonight. He knew she was scared and upset—hell,
he
was scared and upset—but she had the reaction under control.

He drove straight to the Sierrita County Hospital and turned in at the entrance to the emergency room parking lot. He stopped before he got to the door, although his headlights had already flashed across the entrance and probably alerted whoever was on duty inside. With the pickup's engine still running, Tom got out and went to the back to lower the tailgate. Quickly, he grabbed hold of the three men and pulled them out, letting them drop none too gently to the asphalt of the parking lot. Then he slammed the tailgate and hurried back to the cab. A backing turn, and then he gunned the truck toward the street. In the rearview mirror, he saw the door of the emergency room open and a couple of people came running out to see what was going on. They would find the injured men and take care of them.

“I hope we're doing the right thing,” Bonnie said as they left the hospital behind them.

“So do I,” Tom said.

But even though he didn't want to admit it, he had an uneasy suspicion that in a situation like this, there wasn't any right thing to do. No matter what path they took, the worst was yet to come.

11

Neither of them slept much that night. When they got home, they spent quite a while cleaning up and taking stock of the damage. The first thing they did was to make sure none of the blood from the three men had gotten onto them. There was always the threat of AIDS when dealing with men such as the ones who had invaded their home. Satisfied that they didn't have to worry on that score, Bonnie cleaned and bandaged the cuts on Tom's arms. She conceded that they didn't really need stitches, although they were certainly painful for him. Then they both donned rubber gloves, broke out the bleach, and began scrubbing up the blood in the garage.

When they were done there, they moved to the bedroom. “This carpet's going to have to be replaced,” Bonnie commented with a sorrowful shake of her head.

“We'll pull it out of here tomorrow, cut it up, and burn it.”

“Let's do it now,” she said. “I don't want it in my house.”

Tom shrugged and went to work. It took a couple of hours and quite a bit of furniture moving, but at the end of that time the bloodstained carpet was rolled up and they carried it out of the house, Tom at one end of the roll, Bonnie at the other.

They found the torn screen and the broken window latch in the utility room where the two men who had gotten inside had gained entrance to the house. “I need to get better locks for all the windows and doors,” Tom said.

“No bars, though,” Bonnie said. “I won't live behind bars. No honest American should have to do that.”

Tom nodded in agreement, although he knew that in some cases reality intruded on that ideal. An ugly fact, but true.

There was nothing they could do tonight about the holes in the garage door and the wall of the hallway that were caused by the shotgun blasts. Repairing them would have to wait until the next day.

“While we're at it, I think I want to repaint the bedroom,” Bonnie said. Tom didn't argue with her. This was one case where whatever she wanted was all right with him.

Long after midnight, they finally settled down on the big sofa in the den. Bonnie didn't want to stay in the bedroom until they had finished the work in there, and she didn't want to spend what was left of the night in either of the guest rooms that had once belonged to their children. So she spread a blanket over the sofa, and Tom was more than happy to stretch out on it with her. They lay in each other's arms, savoring the closeness and the knowledge that they still had each other, despite the close call. They were comforted as well by the fact that there was a loaded shotgun on the floor next to the sofa for each of them, within easy reach.

Finally they dozed off and got a few hours of sleep, not waking until well after the sun was up the next morning. It would have been nice if all their troubles had gone away with the night . . .

Of course, that wasn't the case.

 

 

Buddy Gorman rubbed a hand wearily over his face and tried to concentrate on the road ahead of him. His mind's eye, though, was back in the emergency room of the Sierrita County Hospital, some six or seven hours earlier, when he had looked down at the bruised and battered faces of the three unconscious men who were being treated there.

The men didn't have any identification on them, of course. They were all in bad shape, although only the one with the fractured skull had a life-threatening injury. The doctors gave him a fifty-fifty chance of surviving—just like Fred Kelso, who was still hanging in there despite not having awakened from his coma. One of the other men had an ugly gash on his face, but that wound had been cleaned and stitched up by the time Buddy got there. The one who appeared to have been mauled by an animal was in worse shape and was still being worked on when Buddy arrived in response to the urgent call. The nurses and the doctor on duty in the ER had called the sheriff's department as soon as they found the unconscious men sprawled in the hospital parking lot.

That left Buddy with the problem of figuring out who they were and what had happened to them. He had a pretty good idea why they were in Little Tucson. Lauren Henderson had the most fingerprint experience in his department, so he had called her in to take the prints of the three men and e-mail them off to be compared with the state and national databases. Buddy hoped to have a response fairly early the next morning. At the same time, Lauren had sent the prints to the authorities in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Buddy didn't expect to get lucky again and receive quick responses from those countries, but it didn't hurt to try.

From the hospital he drove to Carla May Willard's home, which he was disturbed to find empty. At least he assumed it was empty, since the place was locked up and dark and no one answered his knocks. Buddy had thought seriously about busting down the door, but that would compromise any evidence he might find inside. He would be able to get a search warrant first thing in the morning, and by now that was a matter of just a few hours anyway. Feeling uneasy about it and hoping that he wasn't making the wrong decision, he drove home and got a little restless sleep before getting up and at it again.

County Judge Consuelo Ramos hadn't been happy about being interrupted while she was eating breakfast with her family, but once Buddy explained the circumstances to her, she signed the search warrant right away. Taking Lauren with him, since she had been inside the Willard house the day before, he headed back there and used a pry bar to open the front door when there was still no response to his knocks.

The house was empty, which was both a relief and a mystery to Buddy. He had been afraid that they would find the bodies of Carla, her children, and her mother. Instead, although the furniture was still there, the people were gone.

Lauren checked the closets and reported that most of the clothes were gone. “It looks like they packed everything they could take with them and just left,” she had told Buddy after the search.

He had looked the place over for any signs of violence or trouble and hadn't found any. As he and Lauren stood in the living room, though, she had noticed a couple of spots on the carpet.

“This might be blood. I can go back to the office and get a forensics kit to check it out.”

“You do that,” Buddy had told her. “Call me when you know for sure one way or the other.”

“Sure. What are you going to do?”

“Go see Tom Brannon,” he had replied. “I've seen places where people ran out before, and this looks like one of them to me. The only reason I can think of for Ms. Willard to take off like this would be if somebody from M-15 paid her a visit.”

“Maybe they took her and the kids with them,” Lauren had suggested.

“If M-15 kidnapped them, they wouldn't have had a chance to pack up all their stuff like that.”

Lauren had nodded in acknowledgement of that point, then asked, “You think they went after the Brannons, too?”

“That's what I'm going to find out. I know one thing, though—Tom Brannon wouldn't cut and run just because somebody tried to throw a scare into him.”

No, Buddy thought now as he neared the Brannon house, Tom wouldn't run. He would fight.

And those damn gang members wouldn't hesitate to kill him and Bonnie both.

Buddy saw smoke rising into the air behind the house as he drove up. He parked the cruiser in front of the garage, got out, and slammed the door. The sound brought Bonnie from inside the house. She was moving rather quickly, but she stopped short when she saw who the visitor was. “Oh, hello, Buddy,” she said with a smile. He thought she looked nervous, despite the friendly greeting.

“Mornin', Bonnie,” he said pleasantly. “Where's Tom? Around back burning trash?”

“That's right. Do you have any news, Buddy?”

“What? Oh, no, no news. Just visiting.”

She didn't believe that, and he didn't blame her. He started around the house as she fell in step beside him.

Tom must have seen them coming, but he continued using a hoe to stuff something into the big trash barrel where the fire was burning. Then he turned and lifted a hand in greeting. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, which was a little unusual. “Good to see you, Buddy,” he called. “What's up?”

Buddy stopped and looked at the thick black smoke coming from the barrel. An odd smell hung in the air, as if whatever was burning in there wasn't the usual household trash. “Sendin' smoke signals to the Navajos over in New Mexico, Tom?”

“You mean this? No, we've just been cleaning up. We're a little late on our spring cleaning this year, I reckon you could say.”

“I see.” Buddy thumbed his Cubs cap farther back on his head. “There wasn't any . . . trouble out here last night, was there?”

“Trouble?” Bonnie repeated quickly before Tom could reply. “Why should there be any trouble?”

“Just curious,” Buddy said. “I've got a mystery on my hands this morning. Two of them, in fact.”

“What sort of mysteries would those be?” Tom asked in apparently innocent curiosity.

“One of them is what happened to Carla Willard and her kids and her mother.”

“Carla May?” Bonnie said, a worried frown appearing on her face. “Something happened to her and her family?”

“I don't know. They're gone. Just up and vanished. No signs of a struggle or any other trouble at their house, but they're sure enough gone.”

“Maybe they just went on a trip,” Tom suggested.

Buddy nodded slowly. “It did look like they had packed quite a few clothes to take with them. If they're on a trip, they're planning for it to be a mighty long one. That's not good.”

“Why not?” Bonnie asked. “After what happened to Carla May, I don't blame her for wanting to get away from Little Tucson for a while.”

Buddy scratched his chin. “Yeah, but we're gonna need her to testify for the grand jury when Porfirio Mendez's case comes up. I have to see if I can find her before then.”

“I don't see why you have to bother with that,” Tom said. “I can testify against Mendez.”

“You didn't actually witness anything except the end of that rape, and Mendez wasn't even the one attacking Ms. Willard.”

“But he robbed the bank,” Bonnie said. “He and his friends shot poor Al Trejo and Deputy Kelso.”

“I went over all the statements from the folks in the bank yesterday. It all happened so fast, and they were so scared, a good defense attorney wouldn't have any trouble shaking their identifications. Besides, some of those people are going to be too scared to testify against a member of M-15—especially after everything that's happened lately.”

“What about the video cameras in the bank?”

Buddy shook his head. “Not working. Just bad luck.”

“You've got Carla May's statement,” Tom pointed out. “Won't that be enough for the grand jury?”

“Enough for an indictment, maybe, but without her testimony I don't know if we can get a conviction at trial.”

Tom glared at Buddy. “You can't mean there's even the remotest possibility that that animal could go free!”

“Anything's possible where the law's concerned.”

Tom shook his head. “This just doesn't seem right. Anyway, by God, he was an accessory to that rape. He was standing right there watching!”

“You seem to be the only one who can testify to that,” Buddy pointed out. “So I'll ask you again, Tom . . . any trouble out here last night?”

Tom didn't answer the question. He looked narrow-eyed at Buddy and said, “You mentioned having two mysteries to clear up this morning. What's the second one?”

“Who dumped the bodies of three badly beaten men on the hospital parking lot in front of the emergency room entrance last night?”

Tom shook his head and said, “I wouldn't have the slightest idea.”

“I talked to the staff at the ER,” Buddy said. “They all told me they didn't get a good enough look at the vehicle that dumped those men to identify it, but they were all sure it was a big pickup.” He turned his head and looked pointedly at the garage where Tom's F-150 was parked.

“There are a lot of big pickups in Arizona.”

“Yeah, but I'm wondering what would happen if I got a real forensics team down here from Tucson and had them go over the bed of
your
pickup, Tom. I'm wondering what they'd find inside your house.”

Tom and Bonnie both stiffened. Buddy didn't miss the reaction. Tom's eyes narrowed even more as he said, “I don't think I like what you're implyin', Buddy.”

“Why don't you let me go in there and take a look around?”

Tom shook his head. “I don't think so.”

“I can get a search warrant, you know.”

“You'd do that, after all the years we've been friends?”

Buddy's temper finally got away from him. He snatched his cap off his head and said, “Goddamn it, Tom, I'm the sheriff of this county, and you're puttin' me in a hell of a bad position! One of those men is in such bad shape he's liable to die, and if he does that means there's likely to be a manslaughter charge against whoever walloped him!”

“That's crazy!” Tom blazed back at him. “Men like that—”

He stopped short, but Buddy hadn't missed it. “Men like what?” he asked. “I haven't said anything about who they were.”

Tom didn't say anything for a moment, just stood there with his face taut and angry. Then he said, “Do you even know who they are?”

“Not yet,” Buddy admitted, “but I hope I will soon. I've got my office working on it. Now, how about letting me look around inside?”