Invasion USA (5 page)

Carla May pushed herself unsteadily to her feet. Brannon made a point of not looking at her naked lower body. She turned and started trying to climb up the bank. He stepped to her side, grasped her arm, and helped her.

When she reached the top, she ran toward the car. Brannon let her go. She had to see for herself that her baby was all right. He picked up the second gun and the tire iron and quickly carried them back to the pickup. He left the guns there but kept the tire iron with him as he got a brand-new roll of duct tape out of the back and returned to the wash. The one he had knocked out hadn't regained consciousness yet, but he was starting to stir a little.

Brannon worked quickly. He used almost the entire roll of tape to bind the man's wrists and ankles. For good measure, he slapped a strip of it over the guy's mouth. If the bastard regained consciousness, Brannon didn't want to have to listen to anything he had to say. Then, grunting from the effort, he picked the man up, carried him over to the bank, and wrestled him to the top. Then he dumped him on the ground, took hold of his feet, and dragged him over to the F-150, not being gentle about it. The muffled sounds the man made told Brannon that he had come to and didn't appreciate being dragged over the rough, rocky ground.

Tough shit.

Carla May had gotten Emily out of the carseat and stood next to the Nissan holding and kissing her and crying. Brannon lowered the pickup's tailgate, lifted his prisoner, and rolled him into the bed. There was a fifty-pound bag of dog food in the back of the truck. Brannon picked it up and set it across the man's midsection. That would keep him from getting too feisty. With his mouth taped up like that and a fifty-pound weight on his stomach, he would have to work hard enough just to breathe. He'd be too busy with that to think much about trying to escape.

Brannon hopped down from the pickup and got a folded blanket from behind the seat. He went over to Carla May and wrapped it around her waist. “Come on back to the truck,” he said. “I'll take you and the baby to town.”

“M-my car . . .”

“It'll be okay out here until somebody can come out and get it.”

Brannon put a hand on her shoulder and was glad to see that she didn't flinch. She had been through a hellish ordeal, but she was a strong girl, even if she didn't always make the wisest decisions. He thought she would be all right. He hoped that was so.

Before they got to the pickup, Brannon heard sirens. He looked toward the highway and saw a whole convoy of flashing lights speeding eastward from the direction of Little Tucson. A sheriff's car was in the lead, and someone inside it must have spotted the F-150 and the Nissan because the cruiser swung into the dirt road in a sharp turn that sent the back end drifting a little. The rest of the flashing lights followed.

“Something happen in town this morning?” Brannon asked.

Carla May shook her head. “I don't know.”

Brannon looked at the approaching cars and said, “I reckon we're about to find out.”

5

Buddy Gorman had this dream sometimes where he was outside, usually in the front yard of his house, and he heard an odd honking sound coming from the sky that made him tilt his head back and look up. He spotted something in the distance, like a dark smudge floating in the air, and as the noise grew louder, the smudge came closer, and then Buddy saw that it was a flock of ducks or geese or some sort of big birds, coming up from the south and headed north. Winter was over. There were so many the sky became black with them, and the honking was so loud that Buddy had to raise his voice so that his wife and kids, who were with him in the front yard, could hear him as he said, “They're going home. Look at that, they're going home.”

This dream had really happened, years earlier when Buddy's children were young. There hadn't been so many birds that they blotted out the sun, of course, and their honking hadn't been quite so deafening in real life, but that was just how things got exaggerated when you dreamed about them later on. Buddy always felt good when he woke up after having that dream. It was like for a little while he had been transported out of himself, back to a happier time in his life. Not that he was unhappy now, but there had been something about those days, something that smacked of infinite possibilities . . .

He didn't feel good at the moment, dream or no dream, because the ringing of the phone had jerked him awake, and he always hated that. His hand shot out and grabbed the cordless off its base on the bedside table. He had it halfway to his ear before he came awake enough to realize that Jean was probably getting it elsewhere in the house. The phone rang again, though, so Buddy thumbed the button, brought it to his ear, and said thickly, “Hello?”

A moment later he was sitting up straight in bed, all the sleepiness jolted out of him by what he had just heard. A thin bar of sunlight came around the edge of the closed blinds over the bedroom window and slanted across the foot of the bed. Buddy squinted against the brightness and took a deep breath as he listened to Cecil Rhodes babble. Finally he said, “Take it easy, Dusty. I'm on my way.”

He broke the connection before the agitated dispatcher could say anything else. As he stood up he reached for his pants.

By the time he walked into the kitchen three minutes later, fully dressed except for the top couple of buttons on his shirt being undone and the gunbelt he carried in his left hand, Jean had a cup of coffee ready for him. As she handed it to him, she said, “You got, what, an hour's sleep?”

“Maybe,” Buddy said. “I'll be all right, though.”

“I saw it was the office on the caller ID, that's why I didn't pick up. What's wrong?”

Buddy took a sip of the coffee and then set the cup on the kitchen table. As he buckled on the belt and its holstered service revolver, he said, “Bank robbery. Shots fired.”

Jean's blue eyes widened. “You're kidding!”

“Wouldn't kid about a thing like that, honey.”

He picked up the coffee to take with him. As he turned toward the door she caught hold of his arm for a second and looked worriedly at him. “Be careful.”

He nodded and said, “Always am.” Then he leaned over and brushed a quick kiss across his wife's lips.

He snagged the ball cap from the hook beside the back door as he went out. A lot of lawmen in the Southwest wore Stetsons, if they wore any sort of hat at all. Buddy Gorman wore a Cubs cap because he had been born in Chicago and lived there until he was in the eighth grade, when his family had moved to Arizona. He was still a Cubs fan, just like he still had a bit of a Chicago accent despite living down here for a lot of years.

A tall, lanky man with graying dark hair, he pulled the cap on his head and walked quickly to the sheriff's car parked in the driveway next to the house. He put the coffee cup in the holder on the console, started the car, and backed out. As soon as he hit the street, he had the lights and siren going, and his foot was heavy on the gas.

He'd tried to keep his tone light with Jean, but from the sound of what Dusty had told him, this was bad, really bad. The silent alarm had gone off at the Little Tucson Savings Bank, and Fred Kelso had been on his way to respond. Dusty didn't know what had happened after that, but citizen reports began to come in of shots being fired and a big wreck on Main Street and—Lord have mercy!—an officer down. That could only be Fred, and despite the fact that the temperature was in the nineties already and not even ten o'clock yet, Buddy Gorman felt the cold touch of fear in his gut.

The Sierrita County Sheriff's Department was small—Buddy himself, two full-time deputies, Fred Kelso and Wayne Rushing, four reserve deputies, and a couple of volunteer dispatchers. Their responsibilities covered the entire county, including the town of Little Tucson, which had a constable but no police department. The town contracted with the county for law enforcement and emergency services.

Because of that smallness, the members of the department felt a special bond with each other, like they were family as much as coworkers. Buddy would have been worried about Fred even without that, of course, but Fred was almost like a little brother to him. Still a little raw at the job, maybe a bit too gung ho at times, but with all the makings of a good cop.

And according to the reports, he was down, maybe wounded. Maybe dead. Buddy didn't know.

But he would soon, because he was getting close to the bank. He swung the car around a corner into Main Street.

His foot hit the brake, bringing the cruiser to a screeching halt as he saw the back end of a Ford Explorer sticking out from the ruined front of Hank Becerra's accounting office. That would be the bad wreck Dusty had told him about. A county ambulance was already on the scene, red lights flashing brightly even in the brilliant sunshine. A couple of EMTs knelt on the sidewalk next to a young boy who sat there crying. Buddy didn't recognize the kid right away.

He left the engine running and jumped out of the car. As he hurried over to the boy and the two paramedics, he called, “What happened?”

Before either of the EMTs could answer, the boy looked up at Buddy and yelled, “They took her! They made her drive off with them!”

The boy had quite a bit of blood on his face from a gash on his forehead. As he tried to scramble to his feet, one of the paramedics took hold of his arm and forced him to remain seated on the concrete sidewalk. “Take it easy, son. That's a pretty bad knock you got on the head.”

Buddy leaned over, resting his hands on his knees, and asked, “Who are you talking about, son?”

“My mom! The guys who wrecked that truck! They took her and my baby sister!”

Hostages, Buddy thought, and the coldness inside him grew even chillier. Even without knowing the details, he could make a good guess as to what had happened. The guys in the Explorer must have robbed the bank. They were fleeing when they wrecked, so they grabbed the first car to come along and forced the driver to help them escape. This boy's mother had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“What's your name, son?”

“A-Andy.”

“What's your last name?”

He sniffled. “Willard.”

“And your mother?”

“C-Carla Willard. Carla May, some people call her.”

Buddy kept his voice calm and level. “And you say your sister is in the car, too?”

Andy Willard nodded. “Y-yeah. Her name's Emily. She's in a carseat.”

“How many men were there?”

“T-two, I think. That's all I saw. One of 'em grabbed me and threw me out of the car.”

“What kind of car is it?”

“It's red.” He had to stop to think. “A Nissan. A little one. That's all I know.”

Buddy squeezed his shoulder. “Thanks, Andy. You've been a big help. You let these nice paramedics take care of you now, all right?”

Andy nodded shakily.

“One more thing,” Buddy said. “Those two guys . . . did they have guns?”

Andy's head bobbed up and down. “Uh-huh. Big guns. Like pistols, but funny-looking.”

Buddy could only guess the kid was talking about automatic weapons. That didn't surprise him. These days, the bad guys had more firepower than the cops.

As Buddy straightened, Andy sobbed loudly and said, “I'm late for Bible School.”

Aren't we all?
Buddy thought.

One of the paramedics stood up and said quietly to him, “There's one in the Explorer. The driver.”

Buddy nodded. “Anybody hurt in the building?”

“Nope. They were all lucky. The Explorer took out one of the secretary's desks when it came through the wall, but she was in the back of the office making some copies when it happened.”

There was that to be thankful for, Buddy told himself as he moved closer to the Explorer, stepping over some rubble so that he could glance through the driver's side window. The glass was shattered. He saw the figure slumped over the steering wheel. The guy's head was a bloody mess. Buddy couldn't tell if the injury had been caused by the wreck or by something else. That would be determined later. For now, the most important thing was that the guy was dead.

So there had been three of them. A wheelman and two who went into the bank. Those two had survived the crash and carjacked Carla May Willard.

Buddy hurried back to his car. As he drove toward the bank a couple of blocks away, he got on the radio and told Dusty to find out the license plate number of a red Nissan belonging to Carla May Willard and then get out an APB on it.

There was an ambulance in front of the bank, too, as well as a fire truck. Two paramedics were about to load a gurney into the back of the ambulance. Buddy jumped out of his car and hurried over to see who they had.

His jaw tightened at the sight of Fred Kelso's pale, drawn face above the sheet that was pulled up to his neck. At least the sheet wasn't over his face. He was still alive.

“Whattaya got?” Buddy asked the paramedics.

“His legs are shot to hell, Sheriff,” one of them replied. “He nearly bled out before we got here and got him stabilized. Doesn't look like he was hit in the body, though, so he's got a chance.”

Buddy nodded curtly. “Take good care of him. I don't suppose he said anything?”

The EMT shook his head. “He was out cold when we got here. He may not ever wake up, Sheriff.”

Buddy didn't want to think about that. He turned toward the door of the bank.

When he stepped inside, he saw that Wayne Rushing, his other full-time deputy, was already there. Buddy hadn't seen Wayne's car outside, but Wayne lived only a few blocks away. He could have run over here on foot when he heard the shooting. He was supposed to be off duty right now, and in fact he wore a pair of blue jeans instead of his uniform trousers. He had his uniform shirt on, though, and a Stetson cuffed to the back of his head. He was talking to some of the bank employees, who huddled together, still in shock.

Buddy stopped at the sight of a body lying on the tile floor. Someone had thrown a suit jacket over the man's head and shoulders. Buddy's teeth grated together as he recognized the security guard uniform—Al Trejo. From the blood on the front of his shirt and the way he wasn't moving, Buddy knew he was dead.

Buddy had to close his eyes for a second. Al had worked for him as a deputy. They had been close, still got together for a beer fairly often, and they'd been planning to go hunting together in the fall.

Now Al would never drink another beer. Buddy would never hear his boisterous laugh again. Rage filled the sheriff. What sort of bastards could have done this?

He thought he knew the answer.

“Get me up to speed, Wayne,” he snapped as he went over to the deputy, carefully walking around Al Trejo's body on the way.

Quickly, Wayne laid out the information he had already gathered from the witnesses. It had played out pretty much like Buddy suspected. Two men—young, Hispanic, strangers to Little Tucson—had walked into the bank while a third man had stayed outside in the vehicle. Al must have suspected something, because he had jumped to his feet and reached for his gun. One of the bastards shot him. Then the two of them cleaned out the bank. The people who worked in the bank weren't sure what had happened outside. They hadn't seen it, but they had heard a lot of shots.

That would have been Fred trying to apprehend the robbers, Buddy knew. He wondered if the autopsy on the dead man in the Explorer would find a bullet somewhere in him. Buddy found himself hoping that was the case. He hoped that Fred had gotten off at least one good shot before he was gunned down.

The radio clipped on Buddy's belt crackled. Dusty Rhodes said, “Got a report of a red Nissan matchin' the description of Miz Willard's goin' east out of town about fifteen minutes ago, Sheriff.”

Buddy acknowledged. He looked around and saw that one of the reserve officers had come into the bank. “Make sure this scene stays secure, Luis,” he said to the man. “Come on, Wayne.”

They hurried out of the bank. The other three reserve officers had just pulled up in their cars, civilian vehicles that had portable flashers set on top of them. Buddy pointed to one of the reserves. “Inside with Luis, Harry. Francisco, Lauren, follow Wayne and me. We're looking for a red Nissan that headed east out of town a little while ago.”

“You want one of the ambulances to come along, too, Sheriff?” Lauren Henderson asked. She had been a police officer in Phoenix before moving down here and was one of the more experienced members of his force. Buddy would have liked to have her as a full-time deputy, but she didn't want to be more than a reserve.

“What about the one down at Becerra's?” he asked.