The Highways of the Dead (A Creed Crime Story Book 1) Read online

  I had the windows rolled up and the air conditioning on. There was a Godsmack CD in the player and “Under Your Scars” was playing and I had the volume cranked up high as I drove through the square. Even so, I could still hear the frenetic thumping rhythm of the post-grunge music spilling out of The Rockbottom’s open doors.

  The Last Stand was getting busy by the time I arrived, 8:24 PM. Located in an old railroad warehouse that dated back to the Fifties, it wasn’t much to look at on the outside. Nelly hadn’t bothered with the exterior apart from hanging out some signs. The parking lot was too small to handle a Saturday night crowd so I had to park in the lot of Breen’s Hardware next door, which was itself nearly full.

  When I got out of the truck I could hear the bass thumping as ZZ Top’s “La Grange” provided a background for a din of laughter and loud talking coming from within the honky tonk. A few people were hanging out among the cars and trucks and motorcycles packed in front.

  I didn’t have to tell Makker to stay. He understood that when he was in the back and I walked away and didn’t tell him to follow then his job was to guard my property.

  I wasn’t worried about someone trying to steal my dog. Working with Dutch Shepherds and Malinois during my tours in Afghanistan, I knew how they were wired and what they were capable of. Police, intelligence and security services around the globe use them in search and rescue, drug and explosive detection, and to track down fugitives. They are fiercely loyal to their owner. Since I didn’t live in town, I needed a dog that wouldn’t run off with another canine or join a pack and roam all over God’s creation, as many country canines do.

  Two young women were coming towards me. One was tall, slender and blonde. The other was short, curvy and brunette. I assumed they had parked in the hardware store’s lot. Locking the truck, I was turning around as one of them spoke.

  “Oh wow! What kind of dog is that?”

  I told them. The brunette said she had never heard of the breed.

  “Not many have in this neck of the woods.”

  “Can I pet him?” asked the blonde.

  “Sorry. When he’s in the truck he’s in guard mode.”

  “My name is Jessie, by the way,” said the brunette, with a coquettish tilt of her head and an inviting smile. “Do you live around here?”

  I smiled and said, “Yeah. You two have a nice night.”

  I turned away and started for the bar. After a few strides I glanced back once to make sure the girls weren’t so drunk that they were going to try to pet the dog despite my warning. Having slighted the brunette, and by extension the blonde, I wasn’t surprised to see they had moved on. Petting Makker hadn’t really been what they were after anyway.

  4

  Walking into The Last Stand, I moved to the side so I wasn’t blocking the door and paused a moment to scan the room. The place was packed and not a single table was to be had. Nelly’s waitresses were busy, and popular. They were pretty, had the figures to wear tight clothes, and all of them made good money in tips.

  Customers were lined up cheek by jowl at the bar. Nelly and Sundown, her bartender, were busy behind it. Even so, she spotted me as soon as I walked in. She gave me a big smile, waved and shouted, “Creed!” in a sharp clear voice that could be heard over the deafening den of about sixty people talking, laughing and shouting, topped off by the loud music.

  Smiling, I waved back and weaved through tables packed in tight to the edge of an open space in front of the bar where people were dancing to another ZZ Top tune, “Tush.” Nelly didn’t have big screen televisions in her place and didn’t pipe in radio stations. What she did have was a hellacious sound system on which she played CDs, blues and country mixed with some southern rock, from B. B. King to Kenny Chesney to Lynyrd Skynyrd.

  I wedged myself into the crowd at the bar. A warm smile and a Bloody Bull like only Nelly could make was waiting for me. Plucking the lemon wedge off the rim of the highball glass, I bit into it, laid it on the napkin, then took a sip while she reached out and grabbed my free hand with both of hers.

  “How the hell are you, handsome?” she shouted, over the din.

  Penelope Rouse was closing in on thirty-five but she looked ten years younger. There were a few women in the place who were as pretty, but none had her sex appeal. It was entirely natural. Nelly didn’t need to wear makeup. Raven-black hair was cut tomboy short, framing an oval face featuring prominent cheekbones. A man could get lost in in her limpid brown eyes. She favored old jeans and untucked shuts. She didn’t have to try to be sexy. She just was.

  I couldn’t help grinning like an idiot. She did that to me. “Good. Even better now. What about you?”

  She gave my hand a squeeze. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Well, I could come in every night but folks might start talking.”

  “Like I care. You could work here, you know.”

  I looked down the bar at Sundown, deftly dealing drinks to several barflies.

  “You already have bar help.”

  “Bouncer, then.”

  I looked around. “You don’t need one, though. You’ve got that sawed off 12-gauge back there. In a place full of cowboys, farmers and the good ol’ boys from town, a bouncer would just be a magnet for trouble.”

  She scoffed at that. Nelly could make a derisive snort sound sexy. “You just don’t want it to be known how much you love me.”

  I nodded and said, “Just don’t spread that around, okay? I’ve got a reputation to protect.”

  She laughed.

  I glanced at the patrons bellied up to the bar, most of them male. A few were giving me the evil eye. They were clearly envious and wondered why I warranted such a warm welcome. I recognized some of them and gave the whole bunch an affable nod.

  “You sure can pack ‘em in,” I told Nelly, since I wanted to change the subject.

  She scanned her establishment with a proprietary pride that was completely justified. Then those big brown eyes locked on me again.

  “Business is good. Thanks to you.” Three words dipped in heartfelt gratitude.

  I just smiled. “Nah. It’s because you’re a good host, a good businesswoman, and a hell of a good woman.”

  A few years ago Nelly had shacked up with a man. A pretty bad man as it turned out. She confided in me because we were friends going all the way back to high school. I don’t know if I was her only confidante, but I know one thing. It didn’t take long for me to get sick and tired of seeing her miserable.

  The guy broke her heart. That was bad enough. But then he started hitting her. She filed charges and he went to jail for aggravated assault, a first-degree felony. He served two of his five years, got out, found her and beat her up, breaking her arm. She was understandably afraid to call the cops again so she called me, since I was back home by then. Let’s just say I persuaded him to go away.

  “So you’re her man, huh?” asked the guy who stood to my right.

  He was in his twenties, brawny in a way that made me think he had gotten that way in a gym. I’m six feet tall and he was taller than me. His light brown hair was cut in a comb over fade. There was a sneer on his square-jawed face that I didn’t care for.

  “I’m a friend.”

  “Uh-huh. A friend with benefits, I think.” Leaning with his right elbow on the bar, he bent closer and spoke loudly, louder than he had to at this range to be heard over the din of music and voices. He either thought I was deaf or he wanted Nelly to hear him, and maybe other guys at the bar, too. “She looks like she could fuck the living daylights out of guy. Am I right? I bet she’s a real cock whore, isn’t she?”

  I subscribe to the theory that people are naturally aggressive. Many such people are drawn into the service. My first impulse was to break his face because Nelly had heard every word. But anger in a combat zone can be a big liability if it isn’t channeled. So you learn how to calculate what actions will pay off in any given situation.

  Her hand was still on mine, and mine had curled up into a f
ist. She squeezed it again, an anxious squeeze this time. She was embarrassed and offended and if looks could kill, the guy would have dropped dead. Then she glanced my way and her eyes were begging me not to make trouble. It wasn’t just that she was worried about me, or that a fight would be bad for business. The slightest chance of violence made her uneasy.

  The guy had been drinking, a lot. I could smell it. I looked past him at his buddy. They had been whispering and laughing from the moment Nelly had walked up to me. The buddy wasn’t as big as the gym rat, shorter with a wiry build, an Hispanic. He wasn’t smiling. He didn’t look belligerent. He was just watching me, in an intent and unblinking way. The same way I looked at him and his buddy. I didn’t know either one of them.

  This time I was the one who leaned in, pitching my voice just loud enough for the guy to hear over the barroom noise.

  “Tell you what. Come outside and I’ll answer your question.” I straightened and took a step towards the door, then stopped and half-turned, as though waiting to see if the two were coming. This gave me a better view of the Hispanic, in particular his right hand. It was shoved into the pocket of his jeans. He had a teardrop tattoo on his right cheekbone. It wasn’t filled in. When he began to move he pulled the hand out of his pocket and I saw the word TORO was inked on the flesh between the metacarpophalangeal and proximal interphalangeal joints of the fingers on his right hand.

  “Yeah, sure,” sneered the brawny one. “I wanna hear all the juicy details.” He chuckled, glancing at his buddy. The Hispanic didn’t look amused anymore.

  5

  There had been no shouting, pushing or shoving, so my exit from The Last Stand, with the two guys in tow, drew little interest. Once outside I turned right and walked along the front of the old train station to its corner. Because a row of cars and trucks were parked up against the building, they had to follow me single file.

  I went around the corner and then put my back to the wall. Hooking thumbs into my pants pockets, I watched the eyes of the buffed one as he came to a stop directly in front of me.

  “So what do you want to know?” I asked.

  He looked incredulous. “You serious, dude? You gonna talk to us about how your woman is in bed? That’s pretty fucked up.” He snorted and glanced at his friend. “You believe this guy, bro?”

  The Hispanic was watching me solemnly. “Debemos irnos.”

  “Nah. I think we oughta teach this dude a lesson, since he likes to go around talking about fucking his girlfriend. Maybe when we’re done, we’ll take her to my place and show her how real men do it.”

  “I don’t think she’d go with you,” I said.

  “Who said she’d have a choice? I bet she likes it rough. I think most women do even though they might pretend they don’t.”

  “Shut up, ese,” said the Hispanic.

  “Don’t tell me to shut up!” shouted the brawny one. Then he looked at me and I saw the rage that was rippling through him. “I’m going to fuck you up, man,” he snarled. “Then my friend and I are gonna fuck your girl.”

  He threw a punch with his right. I stepped into him, throwing my left arm up to deflect the punch and drove my right hand, fingers apart, into his face, two fingers into one eye, two in the other, and the heel of my palm impacting the bridge of his nose. His head snapped back, his eyes flooded and he was off balance. Twisting my upper torso to the right, I raised my right arm high, until my fist was behind my right shoulder, the arm bent at the elbow, and then torqued my body sharply to the left, bringing the wedge-shaped lower extremity of the humerus down into his face, the power coming straight through that big bone from the shoulder, impacting the bridge of his nose and his left eye and breaking the nasal bone. He went down, out cold.

  I caught a glimmer of light, cast by the streetlamp on this end of the parking lot, reflecting off the Hispanic’s steel blade as he lunged. Turning my body to the right, ninety degrees to his, I closed the gap, slamming my left side into his right as my left arm curled between his upper right arm and his torso, my right hand grabbing his wrist and forcing his arm straight and pinned across my body. I saw his left hand balling up into a fist and I bent at the waist and the way I held his arm forced him to bend, too. Doubled over, he couldn’t throw a punch with his left, not one that meant anything.

  With my right hand I bent his left, the knife hand, at the wrist, forcing his fingers to unclench. I stripped the knife out of his weakened grasp. Using his arm as leverage, I swung him head-first into the wall. That stunned him enough so that I could wrench his right arm up behind his back hard enough to cause a partial anterior dislocation of his shoulder. Bouncing his skull off the wall knocked him out and I let him go. He slithered down the wall into a heap.

  Sundown came hustling around the back corner of the building with an aluminum baseball bat in hand as I was putting the Hispanic’s blade, a trigger knife, in my pocket.

  “Nelly sent me out to help,” he said, looking down with rheumy eyes at the two unconscious men.

  The barkeep was at least sixty years old, with gray shoulder-length hair and a scraggly gray beard covering the lower half of his long, creased face. He reminded me a little of George Carlin. Sundown was a diehard hippie who said he had been at Woodstock and protested the war in Vietnam.

  “Appreciate it.”

  “Looks like you didn’t need it, though.” He sounded relieved as he bent at the waist to get a closer look at the brawny one. “Hell’s bells. You know who this is?’

  “No idea.”

  “Sheriff Guthrie’s boy, Andrew.”

  I sighed. “That figures.”

  “What you gonna do?”

  “If I had to guess? Go to jail.”

  Sundown found a chin under his beard and rubbed it, nodding. “Reckon that’s so. You can say I saw the whole thing. I saw ‘em attack you. That you were just defendin’ yourself.”

  I put a hand on his bony shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I appreciate that, Sundown. Won’t be necessary. But there is something you can do for me. Call the police.” I looked down at the son of the county’s top law enforcement officer and added, “Throw in an ambulance.”

  He nodded and went around the front corner. I sat on my heels next to the Hispanic and searched him. He had a wad of cash – a few singles, four twenties, two Franklins – and a Texas driver’s license. His name was Antonio Perez. The DL had an El Paso address. I put everything back in his pockets and lifted his shirt, sitting on my heels as I studied the elaborate tattoos that covered just about every inch of his upper torso. Mexican gang tattoos spoke a language of their own. It was a language I wasn’t familiar with.

  Walking over to my truck, I ordered Makker down out of the bed and led him back around the side of the honkytonk to where the two men still lay unconscious. I pointed to them and told the Dutch shepherd to houden and then headed back inside the bar.

  An apology to Nelly was called for. I was sorry that the law would be coming to The Last Stand because of me. That wasn’t good for business. Sorry, too, because I knew she had been looking forward to spending the night with me. I had been looking forward to it, too. And I thought she deserved a chance to tell me what a fool I had been to take Guthrie and Perez outside to beat them up.

  If she did, she would be right.

  6

  The Wayland Police Department has thirty-two full-time officers. I’d met a few of them but only knew one really well. Jenna Rekar had been with the WPD for nine months. She was the rookie in the department. She was also single. For those reasons she got night duty. Fortunately for me, she was the one who answered the call.

  I was sitting with my back against the wall about fifteen feet from Andrew Guthrie and Antonio Perez when Jenna rolled up in her cruiser with the ambulance right behind her. They left their high beams on to illuminate the scene.

  Twelve minutes had passed since I’d gone back inside to apologize to Nelly. She had been righteous in her wrath and minced no words. I hadn’t bothered trying to defend
myself. There wasn’t a good defense for what I’d done, anyway.

  Perez was showing signs of coming to. While the EMTs checked out Guthrie, Jenna lifted Perez’s shirt and checked his tats and then put cuffs on him. Turning his pockets out, she kept the driver’s license and put the cash back where she found it. Then she pulled off his down-at-heels boots to make sure he didn’t have anything stashed in them.

  After that she came over to me. I got to my feet. She shook her head, wearing a crooked smile.

  “Looks like the scene of a major testosterone overload to me. At least you didn’t kill them, Roy.”

  “Didn’t need to.”

  “Are you armed?”

  “Pocket knife.”

  “You use it?”

  “Nope.”

  She looked at Makker with the respect that he was due.

  “Did he play a part in this?”

  I shook my head.

  She stood there, arms folded, and looked me over. She was in her twenties, stood about five-seven and weighed maybe one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. But she was tough enough. She was also pretty, with blonde, shoulder-length hair pulled back in a ponytail and warm blue eyes, a button nose, and slightly parted lips that gave her a desirably breathless look. Slender and fit, she filled out her dark blue uniform nicely. Best of all, she liked me.

  “When it comes to people to beat up you sure can pick ‘em,” she observed. “The big guy is Andrew Guthrie, the sheriff’s son...”

  “I heard.”

  “...and the other one is a gangbanger. Toro gang, based in San Antonio, affiliated with MS13. We think he moves dope up from the border and through this and surrounding counties. So they were here together, huh?”

  I nodded and handed her the trigger knife. “Has my prints on it, too.”

  She asked me to tell her how it had gone down. I did, without embellishments. By then the EMTs had Andrew on a stretcher and were carting him over to the ambulance. Perez came to and rolled over on his side, testing the cuffs and glowering silently at Jenna and me.