Don Pendleton - Run to Ground

Old Enoch had immediately fallen silent, but he held his ground, unmoving. Other citizens up and down the sidewalk were edging towards doorways or looking for cover. If the gunmen opened fire, Rebecca thought, none of them had a chance. She was about to watch a massacre, and there was nothing she could do to head it off, prevent the slaughter that was coming. If Snyder said another word, the stranger might unleash his wrath upon her neighbors. And after he was finished there, then what?

The old man took his time, examining the guns, the hard-eyed man who held them leveled toward the citizens of Santa Rosa. Slowly, with a fine contempt, he spit another murky stream into the street and took a long stride back to lounge against the grocery's brick facade. Rebecca Kent felt the tension gradually unwind her, sensing that catastrophe had been averted for the moment. But she knew that it was only a postponement, rather than a true reprieve. Her mind made up, she turned to Bolan in defeat.

"Your guns are in the first examination room," she said. "A cabinet underneath the sink."

Grant Vickers watched the sideshow through binoculars from his position at the southern end of Main Street. The approaching sirens had alerted him, but Vickers knew Rivera's reputation and had not been overanxious to respond before he checked out the situation. A glimpse of the Grundys' ambulance, the Chevrolet Camacho had been driving, told him everything he had to know about the noisy caravan. The presence of a squad car was distinctly ominous, but Vickers was concerned with number one right now. The border boys could damned well take care of themselves.

Old Snyder was a spitfire, but he backed down quick enough when guns were drawn. Rivera was the first one who had ever shut the old bird up, and Vickers gave him points for that, but he was worried now about the confrontation shaping up in Santa Rosa. If Rivera lost his cool, or if some local boy got itchy, made a careless move, they could be ankle-deep in blood before the sun went down. Grant Vickers didn't want that on his conscience, but he didn't want his own blood on the pavement, either. Somewhere, in between the two extremes of martyrdom and crass desertion, he would have to find a not-so-happy medium and try to make it work. Somehow he had to try to save the town.

There was no question of a face-off. Vickers had lost count of the armed men down there, and there might be others hiding in the ambulance. It was an army, and he was just one reasonably frightened lawman with a job to do. It didn't help that he had never faced a hostile gun before, and his involvement with Rivera through the past few years was icing on the cake. When a person accepted money from a man like that, his soul was pawned without a ticket. Vickers hoped there was a way to pull it out before the whole thing blew up in his face. With any luck at all...

He listened as Rivera stated his demand: delivery of the stranger in an hour's time or there would be unspecified reprisals. Vickers had no doubt that blood would spill. Rivera wasn't on the list of gracious losers, and he would not leave until he had his quarry, or until his anger had been spent upon the town. If no one gave the stranger up...

But what if no one had him? What if no one in the tiny, godforsaken town had seen him. If Rivera was mistaken, or if the elusive hit man had already found himself a place to hide, unknown to any resident of Santa Rosa, they were up the creek. There were abandoned mobile homes and houses on the outskirts of the town, a scattering of shops downtown that had been closed for eighteen months or more. A couple of the houses had been broken into by tramps or bikers, and there would be nothing to prevent a fugitive from holing up in one of them to lick his wounds and watch the hunt go by. If Vickers could persuade Rivera to begin a search of the outlying empties, he was betting they could bag the guy in question and avert a massacre, but touching base with his employer would not be as easy as it seemed. He lived in Santa Rosa, after all, and there were still proprieties to be observed.

Downrange, Rivera wrapped up his ultimatum with the announcement of a lesson for the populace of Santa Rosa. At a gesture, one of his gorillas revved the ambulance and put it through a backward U-turn, parking in the middle of the street with rear doors angled toward the small crowd on the opposite sidewalk. Rivera snapped his fingers, and a couple of his henchmen opened the doors, began unloading something heavy on the pavement.

Vickers took another look through his binoculars, then closed his eyes and groaned. There would be no more time to waste, he realized. It might already be too late to head off the bloodbath; there might already be too many witnesses.

Rivera and his men were pulling out the stops, going for broke, and they had left no doubts concerning their intentions. If he still had any hope at all of heading off disaster, Vickers had to act before somebody in the town panicked and took it on themselves to even up the score. If there was time. If there was any hope at all.

Rick Stancell had been drawn from the garage by ululating sirens, startled at the sight of the Grundys' ambulance bringing up the rear of a motley parade. There had not been sufficient time for them to get to Tucson, let alone return, and that meant someone must have stopped them on the highway. Rick observed the squad car at the head of the procession, realized its driver and his passengers were not in proper uniform, and knew that something had gone desperately wrong in Santa Rosa. He thought of Dr. Kent's phone, and his own back at the service station. Dead. And suddenly his father's beating seemed a part of something larger and more sinister, a threat not only to the Stancell family, but to the town at large.

Rick listened from the sidelines as the tall Hispanic stranger made his statement, sparred with Enoch Snyder, finally calling up the guns. It was apparent that the town was under siege, perhaps cut off from any contact with the outside world, but Rick's predominant concern was for his father. Dr. Kent had made it clear that he was desperately in need of treatment that the local clinic could not offer, and prolonged delays while strangers played their macho games in Santa Rosa might prove fatal. Rick was tempted to approach the leader of the raiding party, make a personal appeal, but something told him that he might as well be talking to the wall.

The dark man finished threatening his audience and smiled. In stilted, formal tones, he offered them "a lesson," something to consider if they were tempted to defy him. At a gesture, one of his companions backed the ambulance around until it stood directly in the middle of the street, its double rear doors pointed toward the combination grocery store and post office. At a finger snap, two gunners trotted to the van, swung back the doors and reached inside. Rick froze in shock as work boots wriggled into view, pursued by khaki legs, the swollen paunch of Amos Grundy. The gunmen dumped his body on the pavement as though it were a sack of grain, reaching back inside to haul his brother out and place them side by side. The flaccid postures, ragged wounds and crusty, drying blood left no doubt that both men were dead.

Rick held his breath, already sick with horror as a third limp body was wrestled from the inside of the ambulance. He did not have to see the battered face, now vented with a bullet wound above one eye, to recognize his father. The remains of breakfast came up and Rick was doubled over, retching, by the time Bud Stancell's body hit the pavement in the middle of the street.

He could hear a woman sobbing somewhere behind him, two men cursing softly beneath their breath. The world was spinning, tilting crazily beneath his feet, and for a moment Rick was frightened that he might collapse, lose consciousness, before he had a chance to break away. The blinding rush of panic-rage was fading, and while he longed to lock his hands around the stranger's neck, move on when he was finished there to throttle each of his companions in their turn, Rick knew that he could never hope to reach his target in his present state. A rush from where he stood, barehanded, would be tantamount to suicide, and he was suddenly committed to survival. Long enough, at least, to pay back something of the debt he owed to nameless men whom he had never seen before this afternoon.