Ted Bell - Spy

“Good one, J.T.!” someone said.

“Who wants to be on the jury? Say ‘aye.’ ”

A chorus of “ayes” rang out. The men pressed forward making a tight circle around Rawls and the sheriff and the downed deputy.

“Put the gun down now,” Franklin said, taking a step forward.

Rawls backed off and raised the gun to his shoulder and aimed it square at Franklin’s heart. Franklin thought he was going to pull the trigger right then. Then he stepped forward until the muzzle of the gun was pressed against the sheriff’s breastbone.

“Guilty,” Rawls said, trying to shove Franklin backwards with the Mossburg. But suddenly, Rawls was going down hard like he didn’t have legs anymore. Homer, still on the ground, had somehow managed to kick J.T.’s feet out from under him.

Franklin knocked the shotgun barrel aside and knelt beside Homer. The boy’s eyelids were fluttering and he looked up and smiled.

“I appreciate that, son,” the sheriff said to his deputy. “You got a little kick left in you.”

“Howdy, Sheriff. Glad you made it.”

“Yeah. Come on. We’re going to take you over to the emergency at Southwest Medical.”

“You ain’t going nowhere but Hell,” Rawls said from the floor. He fired the weapon about six inches above the sheriff’s head and blew a jagged hole in the veneer of the bar about a pie plate wide.

Franklin grabbed the muzzle and swung it away before the man could fire again. He tried to pull it downward so that if J.T. fired again he wouldn’t hit anybody and then there was a muzzle flash and he felt a searing pain in his forearm. He ripped the gun from the man’s hands and swung on him. Rawls caught it on the side of his head and fell back, blood pouring from the wound. He tried to stay sitting upright but he went down. Out cold by the look of him.

The sheriff threw the gun behind the bar and turned toward the mob pressing in on him now, all around him, sensing blood.

Dixon stood his ground.

“It’s all over, boys. Time for everybody to go home.”

“Hell if it’s all over,” one of the big Harley fellas said, coming right up in Franklin’s face. “I’ll be damned if it’s all over, you sonofabitch. Why, I’m going to kick your—”

“Sheriff, come quick!” a man said above the murmurs and angry cries. He was standing in the doorway, just a silhouette with the blazing sun falling to the ridge behind him. Something about the way he called out made them all stop, freeze in fact, and look at him. It was Joe Beers. He stepped inside a bit, looking at the mess and Homer on the floor and all, taking the whole of it in and immediately understanding what was going on.

He stepped forward, pushing men aside, and took Sheriff Dixon’s hand, pumping it up and down. The man was laughing and crying at the same time.

“I seen your car out there on my way into town, Sheriff. Lord, I’m glad to find you here. I was going to the courthouse. Everbody’s there, the whole town. They all want to thank you for getting all our little girls back home safe.”

“You mean to say they’re all back?” one of the semidrunk fellas nearest the door said.

The bar went dead quiet.

“He’s lying,” Rawls said. “Don’t believe a word of it.”

“All of them. Ever last one. Heck, my wife just called my cell and told me. An old moving van pulled up at the courthouse here not ten minutes ago and dropped them off. All five of ’em is what I hear. It’s a miracle is what it is. My wife Sherry’s there with Charlotte already. I got to go hug my daughter.”

“Are they all right?” Franklin said. “Unharmed?”

“Yes, sir. I asked. Sherry says they’re all physically unharmed as far as she can tell. She already called the Southwestern EMS and it’s on the way. Check everybody out, make sure they’re all right.”

“They just brought ’em back?” Davis Pike said, crossing over to where Joe Beers was standing. “Just like that? I find that hard to believe, Joe.”

“Well, they sure did. Way I understand the thing, what I hear is the sheriff here went on down there to Nuevo Laredo and had a little talk with them Mexicans. He and Homer there, just the two of them. Took a lot of guts, you ask me. You can thank your sheriff and his deputy now, any you people got any damn manners.”

Davis Pike knelt and cradled Homer in his arms, wiping off some of the blood running from his nose and mouth.

“Homer?” Franklin said, kneeling also. “Can you walk?”

“I believe I can, yessir.”

Franklin and Davis managed to get Homer on his feet. They each got an arm around him, supporting him, and they started for the door. Men were falling all over each other getting out of their way, looking stunned and averting their eyes.

“You killed my boy, you son of a bitch!” Rawls cried out. “I’m going to get you, you hear me?”

“Sometimes I wonder whose side you’re on, J.T.,” Dixon said, pausing at the door to look at him. “Texas? Or Mexico?”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“You know what I mean.”

After that, nobody said a damn word.

20

QUARTERDECK

T he course of history, as Sir Winston Churchill so presciently remarked, is always being altered by something or other—if not by a horseshoe nail, then by an intercepted telegram. Churchill was referring, of course, to the Zimmermann Telegram intercepted and decoded by our Room 40 chaps back in the year 1917.”

“Ah, yes,” C said to Ambrose Congreve, “Room 40. Every schoolboy in England knows that stirring spy saga. Isn’t that right, Alex?”

“I seem to remember hearing something about it, yes,” Hawke said, prying his eyes away from the wintry scene beyond the window to regard his two companions with a faint smile. He was tired all the time since his escape and return to England. He slept a good deal, more than required, but felt unrestored by it. There were demons lurking and they’d have to be dealt with soon.

Ambrose, who had the floor, paused, took a sip of his whiskey and smiled at Alex. Hawke, who had seemed distracted if not downright somber since their arrival at Sir David Trulove’s home, was perched on a window seat overlooking a dense thicket of woodland. Something was troubling him and Ambrose had no idea what it might be.

C, his sharp eyes bright and alert as always, was in his favorite high-backed chair near the crackling fire. Sir David was suffering some form of bronchial infection and now sat with a black cashmere scarf swaddled round his neck and had his feet encased in woolen slippers. Despite his occasional coughing fits, he was now in the process of lighting one of his poisonous black cheroots.

A sleeting rain was chattering against the high windows in C’s library where the three men had earlier sought refuge from the gathering storm.

Half an hour or so earlier, under sunny skies, Hawke had swung the long bonnet of his Bentley off the A30. From there it had been a leisurely ten minutes or so on some twisting back roads through the pine woods. Then the Bentley slipped across the Windsor-Bagshot Road and shortly thereafter they arrived at the unimposing stone gateway that led to the house known as Quarterdeck.

A lone sentry, most likely a plainclothes detective sergeant from the Met working a rotation shift, waved them inside the gate. There was, of course, a good deal more security on these grounds, but this unobtrusively armed man was the only face the public was ever allowed to see. The neighbors, who were distant in every sense of the word, had no inkling about who lived at the end of the lane.

It was not by any stretch a large house, but it was very handsome. Sir David Trulove’s Regency manor house was quietly situated on the edge of Windsor Park, and the flinty bachelor had lived there in comfort and privacy for many years. As they left the beautifully maintained gravel drive and pulled into the car park, Hawke realized why he’d always admired the house. Simplicity. Quarterdeck was a plain rectangle of Bath stone that had weathered over the years to a lovely shade of greenish gray. An ancient wisteria climbed above the shallow portico and encircled a small first-floor balcony, on to which the windows of C’s bedroom opened.