The Last Honorable Man. Vickie Taylor
woman recovered before he did, but then, she hadn’t just nearly had her head blown off. She whirled, her eyes huge, then ran.
Del chased her again, this time with Solomon two steps behind. To hell with giving away their position. He shouted, “Hold your fire, we have a civilian in the building!”
As he neared the end of a row of crates and pulled up to round the corner, an anguished wail stopped him in his tracks. Solomon, who’d been running on his heels, crashed into his back, then they both started to run again, pulled forward by the keening.
Del and his teammates converged on the scene at once, weapons ready. Hayes, his revolver trained on the downed form of one of the gunmen in black, yelled, “Clear.”
But Del wasn’t looking at the dead gunman. Or at the open boxes of weapons—a cache like he’d never seen before: automatic rifles, handguns, shotguns, even hand-held air-to-ground missile launchers that could bring down a small plane—surrounding them. He couldn’t take his eyes off the sight a few feet beyond, in the center of a cleared section of the warehouse floor. The mystery woman sat on the cement, her long legs curled beneath her skirt, holding a second lifeless body in her arms, moaning softly and rocking the dead man as if he were a child just nodding off to sleep.
Pressure built in Del’s chest like water behind a dam as he took in the details. This second man wasn’t dressed in dark coveralls like the other gunmen who’d escaped. He wore pressed navy-blue slacks and a white dress shirt, now stained red with blood from a wide wound—the kind of wound only a shotgun blast could cause. A patch on his sleeve identified him as a security guard, working for one of the agencies that protected the warehouse district. This wouldn’t be the first time one of the minimum-wage guards had been dealing dirty from his place of employment.
But Del didn’t see a gun. Where was the man’s gun? There had to be a gun. God, there’d better be one. Had the woman picked it up?
She shifted, rocking herself and the dead man forward again, and the dam in Del’s chest burst, sweeping away everything he believed about who he was, what he was. He was nothing. Nobody. Because the man on the floor couldn’t have had a gun.
His hands were tied behind his back.
My God, he hadn’t been part of the deal going down, but simply a security guard doing his job, taken hostage, maybe, when he walked in on the transaction.
Blood roared in Del’s ears, drowning out everything but the woman’s cries and his pounding heart. He fell to his knees, his legs no longer capable of supporting him. Pure instinct forced him to press two fingers alongside the column of the man’s throat. He tried to recall the prayers he’d learned in childhood, but his brain would only form one word, over and over.
Please, please, please…
He held his fingers over the man’s carotid a moment, with the others looking down on him in silence, then shook his head.
The woman raised her dark chocolate eyes, now glistening, to his, then to each of his companions in turn. To Del’s surprise, they showed no trace of the shock that usually accompanied a person’s first up close exposure to the vulgar reality of violence, but held instead the knowledge of one all too familiar with death. With loss.
“Federales?” she whispered, her voice thick with tears close to the surface, but not shed.
“No, ma’am.” Del let his hand fall away from the body she held. He met the woman’s gaze squarely, somehow holding his head high when everything inside him wanted to collapse. “Texas Rangers.”
They buried Eduardo Garcia in a pleasant enough spot. There weren’t any trees close enough to shade him from the sun in summer, but a flagstone wall screened him from the strip mall next to the cemetery, and it was quiet. At least it was today, with the jets taking off to the south, the opposite direction from the graveyard, out of nearby Dallas/Fort Worth airport. Still, Del couldn’t help but wonder if the man didn’t deserve better.
The answer came to him harshly. Of course he did; he deserved to still be alive.
Del dug his fists into eyes gritty from lack of sleep and the dust blowing in from West Texas on an arid wind. His chest ached as if something was missing inside him.
As if his soul was gone.
Waiting in the negligible shade of a scrub mesquite on a knoll some hundred yards from the gravesite, he scanned the assemblage of mourners again, still not finding what—who—he was looking for.
Vultures, mostly, had turned out for the service. Reporters. The investigation into exactly what happened at the warehouse was still ongoing. But no connection between Garcia and the gunmen or the confiscated weapons had been found. Word that an innocent man had been shot by one of the legendary Texas Rangers—especially word that an innocent Hispanic man had been shot by a Caucasian Texas Ranger—had the press on a witch-hunt.
Unfortunately, Del was the witch.
They were the reason he watched from up here, instead of bowing his head before the preacher. Lay low, Bull had told him. Let this blow over.
At the time he’d thought Captain Matheson meant a day or two, until the inspectors from the Department of Public Safety—the state agency that oversaw the Rangers—finished grilling him about the incident and declared Garcia’s death a tragic but unavoidable accident. But five days had passed since the shooting. The medical examiner had released the body after performing a full autopsy, and still the DPS inspectors hadn’t made any ruling. The furor showed no signs of dying down any time soon.
It didn’t matter. Let the system work its course, he told himself. He could pay his respects to Garcia later, after the press left. It wasn’t as if the man was going anywhere.
What mattered today was that she wasn’t down there, either. Amazon woman. The lady whose cries echoed in his mind a thousand times a night, robbed him of his sleep. The one he’d come to see.
There had been no question who had fired the shot that killed Garcia. Del was the only one carrying a shotgun. Within minutes of finding Garcia, Bull had ordered Del away from the crime scene, and rightly so. The death of a civilian—an innocent man—demanded an unbiased investigation. Del hadn’t had the chance to talk to the mystery woman with the dark chocolate eyes. He needed to know more about her. What Garcia had been to her. What Del had taken from her. He needed to know.
He scanned the crowd huddled around the grave once again, skipping over the media with their tripods and film-at-ten television cameras, looking for her.
Why hadn’t she come?
Disappointed, he supposed the reporters had kept her away, too. So far, the press hadn’t caught on to the fact that Garcia had been involved with a woman. Del hoped it stayed that way. She would be going through enough right now without the press hounding her.
On the plain below, those surrounding the grave, even most of the reporters, lowered their heads in prayer. This far away, Del couldn’t hear the words. He didn’t need to; he knew them all to well.
Yea, tho I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…
He’d been walking through a valley of his own since the shooting. Five days of reliving the same two-second slice of life over and over.
He crouches behind the car. Windows break in the warehouse across from him. Hayes is on the move, sprinting across the road. Inside the warehouse he sees the figure of a man through a window. The man raises a rifle, tracking Hayes.
Del stands. Fires two rounds from the shotgun.
And then hears the woman’s anguished cry, again and again.
Del can’t remember ever seeing the hostage. But the windows were dirty. The sun glared off streaked panes then disappeared into the darkness beyond the jagged edges of glass.
He’d had to fire. Done the only thing he could. If he hadn’t, Hayes would have been killed.
That didn’t make