Chapter 14
Sue Bryant’s brown paper grocery sack was starting to rip by the time she reached her front door.
Probably the fresh zucchini sweating through.
She was a Parker County farm girl, born and raised.
It felt like a sin to buy produce from Safeway, but this hellfire summer had dried her garden to ashes.
She set down the groceries on the porch and discovered the culprit causing the bag’s imminent failure—the braided chew toy she’d picked up in the pet aisle.
Any toy had to be tough to stand up to her pup’s teeth.
This one was the size of a Frisbee, like an oversize rawhide doughnut.
Her boy deserved something special after what he’d been through.
She unlocked the door, then bumped it open with her hip.
Groceries in one hand, rawhide doughnut in the other, she turned her back to the door and gazed toward the main road before going inside.
She and her Ray Gene had only been married three years.
The sight of his old truck coming up the lane still made her giddy—but who she wanted to see cross the cattle guard today was their German shepherd, Bear.
The dog had been at the veterinarian’s clinic for three days, recovering from a nasty run-in with a rattlesnake that cost him his right eye.
She was thinking about how they’d almost lost him when she stepped inside her house. The hairs on the back of her arms stood up; the front room was oddly cool for this time of day—like Ray Gene had forgotten to pull the bedroom door closed when he went to work.
The two men were on top of her before she saw them. The smaller one had her black nightgown on his head! Her nightgown.
He slapped the groceries out of her hand and lunged. She jumped backward. Surprise curdled to terror.
She cursed, screamed, not out of fear but from anger.
She lashed out with the only weapon at hand, the braided rawhide chew toy.
The first blow took the smaller man across the nose.
He screamed, clawing at her with both hands.
She hit him again, two wild jabs, but both connected directly to his face.
She felt the rawhide impact flesh beneath the nylon gown.
He staggered backward, tumbling out the door behind her.
The big guy lumbered in from her left, reaching with one hand while he held a halter top … no, one of her bras over his face with the other. His makeshift mask must have come off in the attack.
Sue swung wildly, raging like she had when she’d chopped the rattlesnake that had bitten Bear to pieces with her hoe.
She missed completely.
The big guy hiding behind her bra grabbed her by the shirt, growling something. She couldn’t understand it but knew it was a threat. Of course it was a threat. These assholes were in her house, wearing her underwear over their faces.
The big guy yanked her closer, ripping the sleeve off her shirt. A horn honked outside. Tires spun on gravel.
Sue screamed, clawing with one hand while striking out over and over with the chew toy—now a broken shard of rawhide. “My husband is going to kick your ass!” she barked, but it came out as a garbled mess on the back of her scream.
The big guy cursed again, punching her hard in the shoulder before grabbing a handful of her collar.
She gagged, choking, trying to pull away. The big guy must have dropped the bra. It didn’t matter. He was using two hands now, one to choke the life out of her, the other to punch her repeatedly in the arm and ribs.
Then the collar tore away from her shirt, and she fell away, gasping for air, scrambling backward out the door like a crawfish. There was a hoe out on the porch somewhere, the same hoe she’d used to kill the snake. If these bastards wanted to kill her, they were going to have to work for it.
The world closed in around her, like she was looking through a cardboard tube.
Sounds were muffled and syrup slow. Had she heard a car door?
Or was it just her runaway heartbeat? Intending to scramble off the porch, she rolled onto all fours and turned just in time to see her beautiful one-eyed German shepherd clear the steps with one jump and fly past.
Behind her, one of the intruders gave a garbled cry. “Holy shit!”
Bear hit the door hard, bouncing backward as the outlaws tried to slam it shut.
Sue reached out for the dog’s collar, but it pulled away. “Bear, no!”
Claws clacked against the porch as Bear scrambled for the door again, ninety pounds of heat-seeking missile, hell-bent on destroying whoever had been manhandling his mama.
Ray Gene Bryant baled out of the pickup and sprinted to the porch. He grabbed his wife under both arms and dragged her to the safety of his vehicle.
“Bear!” she cried. “They’ll kill him! He’s half blind.”
Ray Gene situated his wife behind the rear tire, where she was relatively protected in case the men had guns, all the while keeping the front door in view. He took her left hand and pulled it across to her right arm.
She looked up at him like he was crazy. “What are you doing?”
“You’re bleeding.” He nodded at a half-dozen gashes up and down her arm, one of which was at least six inches long. “Most of these are superficial, but this one looks bad. Keep pressure on it while I find out what’s going on.”
Ray Gene drew the revolver from his duty belt and peeked around the truck. Still on the porch, the shepherd pawed relentlessly at the front door. Frenzied barks tuned into fearsome snarls.
Ray Gene expected gunfire to rip through the door at any moment.
Sue moved up from the back of the truck, crouching beside him. “Bear! Get back here!”
“Stay down.”
She held up her wounded arm. “I’m fine. If they were trying to cut me, they did a poor job of it. Couple of stitches and I’ll be good as new.”
Ray Gene frowned. “If you’ve decided not to bleed to death, go to the neighbors and wait there until I call you.”
He kept his handgun aimed in while he slipped the Motorola radio off his belt.
“Four Thirty-One.”
He got no answer. A dead spot. He tried again.
“Four thirty-one in the blind,” he said without waiting for Dispatch to respond. “I’m out at my residence with two armed intruders. I say again, two armed intruders inside my house—”
The passenger door of his pickup creaked open and Sue reached in to grab the Ruger Mini-14 rifle from the gun rack in the back window. She worked the action, putting a round in the chamber, then took aim at the front of their home from behind the wheel well. Blood dripped steadily from her elbow.
“Go to the neighbors my ass!” she scoffed. “And leave you and Bear here? Not a chance.”
Pink threw the bra on the floor and stepped away from the door, trying to work out what to do next. “What do you think?” he said. “Should we split up? I can come around one side while you go to the other and we’ll catch them in the middle.”
“We’d still have to deal with the dog,” Duvall said. “The damned thing wants to eat us. I don’t fancy getting chewed to pieces.” He snatched up the discarded bra and tried to staunch the blood oozing from the burst skin over his cheekbone.
“I’ll just shoot it,” Pink said.
“We could rush ’em if that bitch had a pistol, but …” Duvall peeked out the gap between the mini blinds and the wall, careful to stay well back and out of sight. “That’s a Mini-14 in her hands. Have you ever seen what a .223 rifle round does to a man’s pumpkin?”
“Can’t be worse than a shotgun,” Pink scoffed.
“Fair point.”
Pink chanced another look out the window. “I connected with my box cutter,” he said. They were close enough he could see the line of blood running down the woman’s arm.
Duvall stepped to the center of the room, glancing from the front door to the kitchen and the rear of the house.
“That cop’s for sure calling in backup,” he said.
“You ever hear the expression, You can outrun the cop, but you can’t outrun the radio?
Well, I gotta tell you, I don’t like the idea of barricading.
Every lawman who shows up is gonna feel like it was his own house we’ve violated and make his personal mission to blow our heads clean off.
No way! Let’s get out of here before that dog chews a hole in the walls. ”
The men eased quietly out the back door and ran straight for the fence, keeping the house between them and the crazy woman with her Mini-14 rifle.
Pink caught sight of the first sheriff’s patrol unit as Duvall pulled his black pickup out of the trees and headed west on the dirt road, Sue Bryant’s underwear still pressed to his bloody face.
The receptionist at TexSafe Armored said Gerald Moffit was out for the day, so Cutter decided to head back to the Sheriff’s Office.
He and Johnson had just passed the car dealerships at the junction of the Fort Worth Highway and Interstate 20 when Ray Gene Bryant put the call out over the radio about intruders at his place.
“My academy instructors said burglars like to hit rural houses in the middle of the day,” Johnson mused.
“At least they got that right.” Cutter checked his mirrors and made a quick U-turn.
Johnson braced himself against the dash. “Where are we going now?”
“Ray Gene Bryant’s,” he said. “It’s faster if I jump back on the Interstate.”
“We’re going to respond to a burglary call in the middle of a homicide investigation?”
Cutter turned to the younger deputy. “Who was the first person to arrive at the armored truck robbery?”
“Bryant,” Johnson said. “You think it’s the same guys—”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“I thought you said they were long gone with the diamonds.”
“Looks like I was wrong,” Cutter said matter-of-factly.
Johnson gave a low whistle. “I don’t hear senior guys admit that very often.”
“Hell, kid, I’m wrong all the time,” Cutter said. “Better to adjust my heading in the moment than dwell on it. Now, grab that Kojak light out of the glove box. Plug it into the cigarette lighter and put it on the roof.”
Johnson did as instructed.