Road to Justice Read online

  Martin settled the rifle back on his shoulder. “You think I need your fucking permission,” He shouted across the water. “I don’t! You’re a dead man!” Eyes squinting through the scope, his finger touched the trigger.

  3.

  Creosote

  She walked down the center of the gravel road that passed through town. The gravel was firm there, packed down by the trucks and cars passing over it and made for easier walking.

  The red glitter polish on her toenails flashed in the sunlight with each step. The polish was the reason she wore sandals with thin leather soles. On most days, she would have been barefoot.

  The soles of her feet were tough enough to walk along the road without protection. She’d grown up here, had walked these roads and surrounding scrub country since she was old enough to stand on two feet. But the polish was new, just applied after her shower this morning, and she wanted to protect it, at least for a day or two.

  Isabella Palmeras had lived in the tiny backwater place called Creosote, Texas all of her life. Calling it a town would have been too grandiose. The collection of dusty block buildings and frame houses that made up the community did not even appear as a dot on maps.

  Creosote was a gathering place more than anything else, a stopping place where people looked around and took stock before continuing on. Some worked their way farther west to the Rio Grande and Mexico beyond. Others saw nothing here but scrub and dust and moved on to Laredo to the north or Brownsville to the south.

  A few stayed. When they did, it was because Creosote was what they were looking for. There was no newspaper, no law enforcement, at least not within twenty miles, no town council, or mayor. No website or Wikipedia entry would show up for anyone searching the place online. For all practical purposes, Creosote was nowhere.

  Over the last century and a half, the ones who did stay arrived without fanfare. Mostly, they just showed up one day, stumbling across the place as they made their way across the vast South Texas plains. If ever there were an accidental assemblage of persons congregated in one place for no apparent reason, it was the community of Creosote.

  As in most out of the way places, order was arrived at through mutual agreement. That doesn’t mean that everyone got along. They didn’t.

  There were disagreements, and when no satisfactory solution to disputes could be arrived at, the issue was frequently settled by force. In the old days, Creosote had seen its share of gun battles in the street. These were not the fast draw duels pictured in Hollywood movies. They were dirty, messy affairs, with blood being shed at close quarters in an unspeakably brutal fashion.

  That is not to say that Creosote was lawless. There was law of a sort. There had always been some local Texas lord who ruled over things, serving as judge, jury, and executioner when necessary. These days Tom Krieg and his partner Raul Zabala sat enthroned as the lords of the prairie, enforcing their own form of justice.

  Dressed in denim shorts and a flowered cotton halter top, Isabella swung her long brown legs through the morning air, relishing the sun on her bare shoulders. A breeze blew in off the plains carrying with it the scent of sage and the acrid taste of the dry dust that was everywhere. She sucked it in savoring the smells and tastes like a person sampling a favorite wine.

  The quarter-mile walk from her small frame home at one end of town to the place where she worked took only a few minutes. The business had no name. There was no need for one. Everyone knew what it was and who owned it.

  Isabella’s grandfather started it after he came back from the war in 1945. If someone had to say where they were going, they would just say, “To the café.”

  Like her grandfather, Isabella served two meals a day for those interested. These consisted of a breakfast of eggs, bacon, black beans, and tortillas and an afternoon meal of hamburgers. The evening was reserved strictly for drinking. It was seven AM, and she walked down the center of the road to prepare the morning meal for the hungry and those just looking for something to fill their guts and ease their hangovers.

  She stopped on the concrete block in front that served as a step, turned the knob, and pushed the door open. There were no locks. They wouldn’t have done any good anyway. If someone wanted to get in, they could, but no one ever had. By mutual agreement among Creosote’s residents, the café was Isabella’s and not to be touched or disturbed in any fashion on pain of having your ass beaten by the rest of the inhabitants.

  A noise on the morning breeze caught her attention. She turned her eyes out toward the open plains.

  Vehicles approached. No doubt Krieg or Zabala or some of their men. Plumes of dust billowed high behind three fast-moving trucks, hanging in the air for a minute before dissipating in the breeze.

  A frown crossed her face. “Wonder what they’re in such a hurry for?” she muttered.

  She glanced across the road to another low-walled block building. Oh, that.

  Mazey’s whore house was already open, the door flung wide in welcome to the approaching customers. The girls could be seen moving about inside cleaning things up from the previous night’s festivities. Mazey herself sat in a rocker on the ground outside the front door. She lifted a hand and waved.

  “Mornin’ Isabella.”

  “Mornin’ Mazey. Looks like you got business coming.”

  “Yep.” Mazey nodded. “For both of us, I expect.”

  Like Isabella, Mazey Higgins had lived in Creosote all of her life. Older than Isabella by twenty years, she had seen the boom days when drill crews had come through looking for oil. They had stayed for a while then moved on. Many of the shacks and buildings in town had been left by the drill crews, taken over by various residents and newcomers as needed.

  “Guess I better, get some food going inside. Talk to you later, Mazey.”

  “Yeah, me too. Gotta make sure the girls got things in order.” Mazey lifted her sturdy bulk from the rocker, pulled her bathrobe tighter around her, and shuffled inside in her slippers. She called over her shoulder, “Have a nice day, Isabella.”

  The sound of a compressor and air wrench vibrated through the air. Isabella walked around to the shed at the side of the café and peered through the open door.

  “Sandy, come help with breakfast. Looks like a crowd coming.”

  A blond boy of eighteen poked his head above the engine cowling of a four-wheeler. “Be there in a minute, Mom. Just got to put this back together for Mr. Westerfield. He said he’d pay me thirty bucks to get her running.”

  Sherman ‘Sherm’ Westerfield lived in the backcountry about five miles out of Creosote. He had become a sort of grandfather figure to Sandy, always finding some small job for him so that he could pay him for it. For some reason, he had developed a soft spot for the boy. People thought it was because old Sherm’s own boy had died in Afghanistan some years back. Whatever the reason, Isabella suspected that he would just dole out money to the boy if she weren’t around to make sure he earned it.

  “Did you get it running?”

  “What do you think?” Sandy grinned.

  Isabella smiled. Her son had a gift for tinkering with engines, continually pulling things apart to see how they ran, and reassembling them, so they ran even better.

  “Alright, then. Put it back together. I expect Sherm will be in this morning for breakfast.” She looked across the plain at the approaching dust cloud kicked up by the trucks. “They sure as hell are hauling ass. I better get moving.”

  She turned toward the café door, calling over her shoulder. “I could use a hand cleaning up after breakfast.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. I have to take this old buggy out for a spin first and make sure it runs.”

  “Take it for a spin, but don’t get lost for the day.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Sandy disappeared behind the engine cowling. Isabella went into the café and began breaking eggs into a bowl. Across the road, Mazey had the girls cleaning themselves up for the approaching clientele.

  Other residents slept off t
heir hangovers or sipped their morning coffee on the cinder block stoops of their dusty shacks. Life continued in its typically slow fashion on the little patch of Texas dirt known as Creosote.

  4.

  Encounter on the Rio Grande

  The sun had risen. John Sole settled himself farther back in the pickup’s seat, arms folded across his chest, his eyes closed. He wanted to sleep. This spot was good. He had pulled off U.S. 83 a little after four in the morning and had been sleeping since.

  In the last day, he had covered a thousand miles or more, uncertain of his destination, but determined to get closer to his goal.

  His eyes blinked open at the first crack of the rifle, echoing through the air like a distant, muffled thunderclap.

  He sat up. Gunfire was an excellent alarm clock.

  Immediately alert, his senses reached out, gathering every bit of data they could about his environment, searching for threats. There didn’t appear to be any.

  The fatigue of his sixteen-hour drive the day before was forgotten. He was focused. Gunfire tended to do that to a brain, even one that had been asleep seconds before.

  He turned to scan a full three hundred and sixty degrees, pushed the door open, and stepped out. The Texas scrub brush country afforded him a view to the horizon in all directions. Another shot sounded, followed by another. It was definitely a rifle, not a handgun.

  Not a .22. The shots were not from kids plunking at cans and bottles. This was bigger, but not quite .30-06 heavy game caliber. Something in between. .30-30 possibly, something traditional and not an AR-15. People out fun-gunning with ARs tended to spray ammo just for the hell of it. These were deliberate shots, fired at something, or someone.

  The slight pause between rounds indicated a manually operated rifle, bolt or lever action, not a semi-auto. Hunters? He wondered what they were hunting. Apparently not him, since none of the rounds seemed aimed in his direction.

  He reached into the cab to retrieve the Colt 1911, .45 ACP, he kept under the driver’s seat. He had other weapons, but this one was handy, and the .45 had a way of making a statement if it came to that.

  A rapid series of shots rang out across the plains, pulling his eyes to the west. Instinctively, training and experience took over, and he began moving.

  A couple hundred yards distant, a belt of green stretched along the banks of the Rio Grande River. He couldn’t make out the shooter, but the shots had definitely come from that direction. He started off at a trot, clipping the Colt’s holster to his belt as he moved.

  What are you doing, John?

  It was a question he asked himself a lot these days. Not sure, he answered the voice in his head. Someone’s shooting. Could mean trouble.

  Someone else’s trouble, buddy. Not yours.

  I’ll just check things out.

  And do what? You are not a cop. Remember?

  I remember.

  The voice in his head was right. He wasn’t a cop anymore. Hadn’t been one for over a year. What the hell was he going to do?

  Another shot, this one a deep-throated roar. He was closer now, and the sound of the gunfire had lost its distant cracking quality. It was a phenomenon he had experienced in the Gulf War and in confrontations since. The closer you got to gunfire, the more alive it became, not just because the volume was louder. The sound took on a personal, threatening quality as if every bullet was searching for a home in your brain.

  He saw movement ahead in the brush. If it’s nothing, he reminded himself, I turn around and get back to the truck and hit the road.

  He slowed and advanced in a crouch staying as close to the sparse cover as possible. He could see the river now, below the small rise where two men stood looking out across the water. A white Chevy pickup sat nearby in the brush.

  One spoke to the other who had a Winchester raised, sighting across the river. The one with the rifle ignored him focused on his target. It was a man, lying on the opposite bank, apparently injured.

  Sole slowed to assess the situation and noted the jumble of bodies, arms and legs jutting out, squirming for cover behind a nearby mesquite. Their size indicated they were children. The man with the Winchester shouted.

  “You think I need your fucking permission? I don’t! You’re a dead man!”

  It was a long shot, too long for the Colt. Sole took it anyway. He wasn’t trying to hit anything, just get the man’s attention. The .45 slug flew in an arc and kicked up gravel ten feet from the men on the U.S. side of the river.

  It was enough to startle Winchester-man as he pulled the trigger. His shot went wild and sent up a small geyser of water from the river. The man on the opposite bank started scrambling toward the mesquite.

  Winchester-man spun with the rifle held out at waist level, levering a round into the chamber as he searched for a target. It was not a very accurate method of firing a rifle, at least if you planned to hit anything. A couple of wild shots rang out, whizzing far wide.

  Sole knew he had to close the distance before Winchester-man decided to slow down and put one between his eyes. He moved forward at a run, and let another round off, still not intending to hit anything, but just to keep the shooter off-balance and to remind him that he was armed as well. He was almost there, a few more feet and he would have the advantage over the rifle.

  He made it as the man started to lift the rifle back to his shoulder to take an aimed shot.

  “Lower it or die!” Sole shouted. “Do it now!”

  He took a point-and-shoot stance, ten feet from his target, both hands holding the Colt out in front, the sight centered on the man’s chest. At that range, the .45 caliber muzzle looked like a cavern.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Winchester-man said, trying to retain some bravado as he complied with the order to lower his weapon.

  “Put the rifle on the ground.” Sole kept the forty-five pointed at the man’s center body mass.

  “On the ground! Hell no, I ain’t putting my rifle in the dirt.”

  Sole took one step forward, closing the distance to about eight feet. To the two men he faced, the Colt’s muzzle bore grew about two feet in diameter.

  “Won’t say it again. Lay it on the ground. Do it gentle so you don’t get the mechanism jammed with dirt, but you are going to put it down, one way or another.” He motioned down with the Colt. “After that, we can talk about what happens next and what you’re doing here.”

  “Lay it down, Lucky,” Stu Pearce said. He had remained silent since the confrontation began, but someone had to reason with Lucky before he got them both killed. “He means business.”

  “Listen to your friend, Lucky.” Sole smiled. “And you’ll stay lucky.”

  “Shut up, Stu,” Lucky snarled, keeping his eyes on Sole. “How do I know you won’t shoot us if I do like you say?”

  “If I wanted to shoot you, I would have already done it and gone off to find some breakfast.” Sole shrugged. “I don’t want to … yet. So, do like I say and place your rifle on the ground before I change my mind.”

  With the Winchester’s muzzle pointed at the ground in the direction of the feet of the man with the big ass Colt, Lucky considered his options.

  It was a standoff. He might be able to raise the rifle enough to get a shot off to hit the man before he drilled him with the forty-five. Then again, he might not. It was a chancy thing, and despite his name, Lucky was not much of one to take chances with his own skin.

  His eyes darted from the forty-five’s muzzle to the hard eyes of the man holding it. The man took another step, closing the distance to six feet. The Colt’s muzzle yawned open at him. Lucky bent and gently placed the rifle on the ground.

  “Good.” Sole nodded. “Now, step away from it.”

  Lucky shuffled back a few feet, watching the forty-five all the while. Sole knelt to one knee and picked up the Winchester, keeping the Colt pointed at the two men. Resting the rifle over one arm, he holstered the Colt.

  “Okay,” He said with a smile. “Now, we can talk. What’
s going on here? Why’d you shoot that man over there?”

  “Didn’t shoot no one,” Lucky muttered.

  “How’d that man get injured?” Sole motioned to the mesquite where the mass of bodies remained huddled. The man had crawled there now and tried to push the others behind him, so they weren’t exposed to the rifle fire.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Bullshit. I saw him drag himself to the tree. I know a gunshot wound when I see one.”

  “Look, mister,” The one called Stu said, trying to reason. “It was accidental. He was just firin’ roundabouts in the area to scare them back away from the river, that’s all. A round flew wild, and that fella over there got hit. It wasn’t intentional.”

  “Shut up, Stu.” Lucky glared at his companion.

  “So, if I understand,” Sole said nodding. “You were trying to keep them over on the other side of the border and accidentally hit one. Then you decided that it was best to cover up the incident by removing the witnesses … killing them so no one could say who shot them.”

  “Well, no …” Stu’s brow wrinkled trying to think of a way to explain things so that it didn’t look so bad. He couldn’t, and his mouth closed shut.

  “Why?” Sole asked.

  “Why what?” Lucky glared at him.

  “Why shoot at them to keep them there? Why not just watch them come over and call in the Border Patrol to pick them up?” He nodded at the mesquite across the water. “You can see it’s a family, a man with a woman and children. They aren’t going to be running very far. You could have called in the Border Patrol while they were swimming across.”

  “Well …” Stu began, thinking things through. “You see, it’s like this. Our boss don’t want them over here. Says they got to come over the right way. So, he sends us out to kind of patrol around the river and send any we find back across. You know, so they come over right.”

  “Who’s your boss?”

  “K and Z Trucking,” Stu said. “Tom Krieg and Raul Zabala.