Chapter 6
Six
Phillip James was still fuming. Not only had Tony Garza helped one of his best senatorial contacts to avoid blackmail. Now
Tanner Everett was also back in Texas and not dead from the operation overseas that was meant to take him out before he could
spill his guts about what James had done in the Middle East. What a headache the man was, and James was thirsty for revenge.
He couldn’t think past getting even with Tanner Everett for what he’d done. James had actually been subpoenaed to a congressional
hearing in the near future for claims of negligence and aggressive tactics in pursuance of his job. He was raging for payback.
He couldn’t get to Tanner himself, but there were soft targets that he could reach.
“I want results!” he raged at Glover, his right-hand agent, who’d been with him from the Middle East operation onward.
“Everett has thwarted me for the last time. Even if I can’t get to him, he has family that I can get to!
You find me a way,” he added in a soft, threatening tone.
“Or your own head may be the next to roll. I want payback! Nobody threatens me like this and gets away with it. Everett may have nine lives, but he’s used up two.
I want him to wish he was on the third. I want him hurt! You find me a target. Soon!”
“Okay, boss,” Glover said calmly, used to his boss’s volcanic rages. “On it.” He left the room, closing the door behind him.
He hated this business. He hated James. But there was no way out for him. James had too much on him. He’d have to help with
payback, and it was going to be brutal. God only knew what the price would be when it was all over. He couldn’t even be sure
that James wouldn’t make him the fall guy. It was a hell of a life. Just a hell of a way to live.
He turned and went down the hall, deep in thought.
James was pacing, talking to himself. “I should have put every resource I had into killing Tanner Everett. He’s the reason
for all this trouble I’m in! But he’ll pay! Oh, yes, he’ll pay!”
Glover was making his way out of the building. His boss was losing his prestige and his place in the pecking order that was
politics. In just a little time, he was going to be fair game. When that happened, Glover told himself, he’d be close by,
waiting. He had plenty of patience. And an ally of which James was unaware. One way or another, he was going to prevent going
down the drain for what James had done. He still had nightmares about it, and about the poor agents who had been sacrificed
when James had Glover set up his jungle trap to take out Everett. Everett had lived, in spite of everything. Glover
had delivered his bloody backpack to the family, having told James that it would hurt the family to see it. James had been
happy to let him make the visit.
But Glover had other plans. He’d advised the Everetts secretly to look for Tanner, and where to start.
In a way, he’d helped save the man. That might go in his favor later, if he faced charges.
He had no illusions about James, who would throw anybody under the bus to save himself.
Everyone except his son, the only person on earth that James truly cared about.
Well, everybody had an Achilles’ heel, he reckoned, and went out into the misting rain.
Josie was waiting for her cohorts to come back from a conference with some confederates. She wasn’t allowed to go; probably
because they didn’t trust her enough.
She had intel that her confederates were up to their necks with one of the Mexican syndicates, presumably the one Velasquez
headed. There was a rival, a Hispanic named Jorge Vega, who was rumored to be as violent and perverse as any savage in the
jungle. It wasn’t possible to choose between two evils, but she was certain that Velasquez was a better prospect than Vega.
Over the long days, she’d wondered if Vega hadn’t been behind the deaths of the mother and little kids who had died for the
husband’s avarice in linking up with drug runners.
Sadly, she had no mandate concerning the syndicates themselves. Their organization was far too big, and too experienced, to
be brought down easily. But if she could shut down this one pipeline, it might save a few lives at least. That made it worthwhile.
She was fairly certain why her colleagues were so interested in the Big Spur ranch. They’d wanted her to scout out security
precautions, and they were very interested in a grain transport station far on the eastern side of the property. It contained
a silo and a building where trucks were parked. They’d paid particular attention to it, noting that the cowboys seemed not
to use it at the present time. They wanted to know when it was used, for what and how often.
They also wanted to know when cattle sales were promoted on the ranch. She’d mentioned this to a contact and been told that
perhaps they had a client who wanted to purchase purebred cattle along with drugs.
It sounded very odd to Josie. In fact, the colleague from the DC office sounded very odd. He was supposedly involved in shutting down these operations, but he was far less helpful than an old, retired Texas Ranger whose acquaintance Josie had met at a local strip mall café a few weeks ago.
Not revealing anything about herself, she’d asked about cattle rustling in the area. The elderly man had been delighted to
drink coffee with her and impart knowledge. In fact, he’d been a special deputy whose chore it was to find and arrest cattle
thieves. His knowledge was less current, but he was a wealth of information about how rustlers worked, where they carried
their stolen goods and how they could be tracked in some less than obvious ways.
“Please tell me you aren’t going into the rustling business, Miss Josie,” he teased. “I’d hate to see you locked up.”
She pursed her lips and laughed. “Orange is not my color,” was all she said.
She wasn’t wearing the handgun she carried when she traveled. He was. He had what looked like a .45 handgun in a hand-tooled
holster on his hip.
He got the allusion, and grinned.
“I like that gun,” she said.
He chuckled. “Me, too. It’s old. It’s a Ruger Vaquero single-action revolver. And I’m wearing it because I belong to the Single
Action Shooting Society at our gun club. We have a meeting in about an hour to plan an event.”
“An event . . . ?”
He smiled. “We dress up like old-timey cowboys or lawmen, and we have places set up where we practice on set targets in different
venues.”
“That sounds like fun,” she said, her eyes bright.
“It really is. If you stick around long enough, you ought to come to a meeting. It’s for all ages. You don’t have to be old,
in other words,” he teased.
She grinned. “I’m not much for guns,” she said with a straight face. “But I appreciate the invitation.”
“Anytime,” he said.
They drank coffee in a companionable silence. She’d met him in this very café and started up a conversation several weeks
ago when she first arrived in Percell. The nice old man had been similarly dressed, but without the gun belt and six-shooter.
They’d become fast friends. Without revealing anything about her presence in the town, she’d asked questions about locals.
He’d been vocal about the sudden increase in drug trade in the area. Nobody knew where it was coming from, although they had
suspicions. He mentioned that some ranches far away on the border had become overrun with gun-wielding drug mules, even some
high-level executives of the drug world, looking for access points or hubs.
“Surely, they wouldn’t come to a small place like this,” she’d ventured. “And we’re nowhere near the border.”
“You’d be surprised,” he replied. “Dallas isn’t far away and it’s a major drug hub for distribution. There’s a good highway
between Dallas and El Paso, and it’s a major drug smuggling route as well. Small areas like this don’t have big government
law enforcement offices. We don’t even have a police force here. Just the sheriff. And if there’s a murder or some big crime—don’t
hold your breath that they’ll ever be one here—the Texas Rangers will come in and investigate.”
“Is the sheriff a good guy?” she asked.
“One of the best. Dunn Marlowe. He has a sort of shadowy past, but he’s honest as the day is long, and he never backs away
from a fight.” He chuckled. “Had a big-time bully here when he first came to the county. He thought the new sheriff would
be a pushover, so he walked into our one bar, where Marlowe was having a beer after work and picked a fight.”
Her eyebrows arched. “What happened?”
He laughed. “I was there when it happened. Never will forget it. The bully weighed maybe three hundred pounds, and he was tall with it. He threw one punch at Marlowe. Marlowe sidestepped the punch, whirled around like lightning and kicked him in the head. He went down so fast . . . !”
Now she was really interested. “Martial arts?”
“Oh, yeah,” he replied. He leaned forward. “He doesn’t advertise it, but he was special forces overseas. Damned gutsy guy.
Anyway,” he continued, setting back in his chair, “the bully picked himself up off the floor and came at him again. Marlowe
just sighed, did a roundhouse right into his gut, brought him down, flipped him over and cuffed him. The bully did several
months for assault on a law enforcement officer. When he got out, he actually went to the sheriff’s office and apologized
and shook the sheriff’s hand. ‘No hard feelings,’ he said, and they’ve been friends ever since!”
She laughed. “I’d like to meet that sheriff.”
“You should come to one of our meetings, then,” he told her. “He’s president of our gun club.”
She lifted her coffee. “Well, I’ll be,” she said, and finished her drink. She was remembering what the ranger had told her
about small towns and their lack of serious law enforcement, and the uptick in drug trafficking. Her two colleagues had assured
her that they had suppliers who traded cattle for drugs, and that was why they wanted so much information on Big Spur. Rustling