Three Cowboys

Chapter Seven

When this was all over, Wyatt thought, and Brittany and Elena were both safe, he was going to have a long talk with Elena about going off on her own without backup.

Not that she’d listen. And, if he was being honest with himself, he probably would have done the same thing. He couldn’t have let the opportunity to hitch a ride to Calderón’s secret compound go by, either.

At least she’d texted him her GPS coordinates. Wyatt had mapped the location and found that she’d been somewhere just south of the Rio Grande, where the Texas scrub grass gave way to the matorrales of northern Coahuila.

“How sure are you this isn’t a trap?” Morgan, always the suspicious type, sounded skeptical as Wyatt outlined the situation over the phone. “You’ve been wondering if there are Los Jaguares spies inside ICE. What if Elena’s the spy?”

“She’s not,” Wyatt said without hesitation. Elena Vargas might be frustrating, prickly as hell and hard to get close to, but no way was she a spy for Calderón. “She’s in danger. She’s trying to find our sister and bring her home safely.”

“She should have waited for us.”

“Someone has to stay there at the ranch and protect the others.”

“Bull can do it.” Over the phone, Morgan was already on the move. Wyatt could hear his feet crunching on the river-stone walkway to the ranch-house garage. “Give me the coordinates again.”

Wyatt repeated them. “I’m not waiting for you. Just get here and wait to hear from me.”

“Don’t go there alo—”

Wyatt hung up, made sure his phone was set to vibrate and stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans.

He’d never met with Calderón, despite Elena’s request. As much as he might want the drug runner dead or captured, he wanted his sister and Elena alive and safe even more. The battle with Calderón had been going on for years and it could go on a little longer, as long as he knew Brittany and Elena were okay.

He had no trouble following the path of the truck in which Elena had stowed away. It was apparently a heavy vehicle, with newer tires that left easy-to-track prints in the sandy dirt road. Wyatt came to a bridge, fashioned with concrete blocks and a few steel girders. It looked steady enough to allow for the weight of a large military-style truck like the one Elena had described in her text.

But it would never hold up to the strain of an 18-wheeler, he thought. Which explained why Calderón wanted to use J-Bar-J land for his shipping routes. He could easily bribe some border guards to look past any irregularities in his shipping manifest, but the more time he spent on U.S. roads with his contraband, the more danger he was in of discovery. Taking the private road that wound through the J-Bar-J, he could take his trucks almost all the way to I-10 without scrutiny.

Wyatt parked his father’s Mercedes on the Texas side of the bridge, put on the emergency blinkers and got out to go the rest of the way on foot. He could make a more stealthy approach that way.

Wyatt hadn’t gotten far past the bridge when he saw a small compound of buildings in the distance, seemingly slumbering in the pale moonlight. But after a couple of seconds, he spotted lights inside one of the buildings, dots of gold in the ghostly bluish-white color of the structures.

A truck sat parked about a hundred yards from the building. Wyatt headed for the vehicle as silently as possible and laid his hand on the hood.

Still warm.

He moved toward the building with lights on and peeked inside. It looked like some sort of commercial stable no longer in use, though the stalls seemed to be in decent shape.

Then he saw the dark shape lying in the open doorway.

Kel Tec in hand, he edged toward the figure. It was a man, lying in a pool of his own blood. A large hole in his chest told the tale. He was dead.

Wyatt turned away, flattening his back against the outside wall of the stable. He listened carefully for any sound that might give away the presence of another person. But all he heard were animals moving in the underbrush and, somewhere not too far away, coyotes baying at the moon.

Nearing the end of the building, he stopped just short, spotting another crumpled form lying in the shadow of the stable eaves. A second man’s body, this one gut shot. A couple of feet in front of Wyatt, something had gouged a hole in the concrete siding of the stable building.

A bullet gone awry?

As he started around the corner, a faint crunching sound was his only warning. Something swung through the air and hit him square in the chest, knocking him to the ground. His weapon hand hit the hard dirt first with a jarring crack, shooting numbness through his fingers and wrist. His Kel Tec fell away from his nerveless grip.

“¿El policía?” The voice was male. Close. Tight with pain. Wyatt looked up and found himself staring into the prongs of a pitchfork. And clutching the pitchfork handle in one hand, his face contorted with pain, was Tomás Sanchez. El Pavón. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped on the ground next to Wyatt.

“No,” Wyatt answered. “Ranchero.” He knew Los Jaguares loved taking police scalps. Sometimes literally. And while he knew who Sanchez was, he didn’t think Sanchez knew who he was.

“Why are you here?” Sanchez asked in English.

“Looking for a lost calf,” Wyatt answered. “Have you seen her?”

Sanchez just laughed. “You’re funny, vaquero.”

The sound of a vehicle approaching drew Sanchez’s attention away from Wyatt for just a moment, but when Wyatt tried to make a move to roll away, Sanchez drove the pitchfork downward, barely missing Wyatt’s wrist, and pinned his sleeve against the dirt. “You stay put,” he said.

Wyatt considered making another attempt to escape, but he’d never get his arm unpinned before Sanchez used the weapon hanging from his belt holster and finished him off.

He still had a chance to help Brittany and Elena. But not if he was dead. So he stayed put, as El Pavón demanded, and waited with dread for the vehicle still moving toward them to come to a stop.

The tires popped and hissed on the stony driveway before the vehicle pulled to a halt. Footsteps crunched on the ground toward him and his captor, and Wyatt turned his head to see who had arrived.

The vulpine features of Javier Calderón were unmistakable, even in the pale moonlight. He walked forward, ahead of the two men accompanying him, and looked down at Wyatt.

“Sheriff McCabe,” he said in his lightly accented English. “What a mess you’ve made of my property tonight.” He crouched by Wyatt, his dark eyes shining with malice. “You’ll pay dearly for the trouble you’ve caused.”

* * *

THE GIRL WAS FASTER THAN Elena expected, though her path over the scrubby ground cover was erratic and panicked. Elena could hear her crying, terrified sobs that were beginning to take on a tone of despair. She was lost, and she knew it.

“Brittany!” Elena called, praying this time the cold wind blowing across the matorrales wouldn’t carry her voice away before the girl heard her.

Brittany stutter-stepped, her head turning toward Elena’s voice, but she didn’t stop running.

“Brittany Means, stop running! My name is Elena Vargas. I’m a friend of your brother Wyatt.”

Brittany’s head whipped around that time, and she stumbled, falling hard to the ground.

Elena raced to her side, reaching her as the girl was struggling to her feet. “It’s okay, Brittany. I’m here to help you.”

“I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted to get away. I climbed out of the stall and I—I didn’t want him dead. I just wanted him out.”

“I know.” Carefully, Elena reached out and touched the girl’s dark hair, brushing it out of her eyes. “I was there. I know what happened.”

“The police here are on their side,” she wailed. “They’ll put me in jail and throw away the key.”

“We’re not staying here,” Elena told her. “We’re going back to Texas.”

Brittany sniffed back tears, but they kept coming. “I don’t know how to get back to Texas.”

“But I do,” Elena assured her. She helped the crying teen to her feet. “Do you think you can walk a little farther?”

Brittany nodded. “Do you know—do you know Julio Rivas? Is he—?”

“He’s fine. He’s safe. Now let’s get you to safety, too.” Putting her arm around the girl, Elena checked the coordinates on her cell phone to get her bearings. They were less than a mile from the border. Once she and Brittany were back in Texas, she’d feel safer.

As they neared the border bridge, she pulled out her cell phone again and tried Wyatt’s number. No answer.

Brittany grabbed her arm, stopping. “There’s someone there,” she said, pointing toward the bridge ahead.

Elena followed the girl’s gaze and spotted a Mercedes coupe parked at the side of the bridge, emergency lights flashing. Relief washed over her. Wyatt. “It’s your brother’s car. Come on.” She started running, pulling Brittany along by the hand.

But as they got close to the car, Elena’s earlier relief began to seep away. Why wasn’t Wyatt getting out to greet them? Why were the flashers on? She peered at the interior of the coupe, trying to see beyond the moonlight glare on the windshield.

There was nobody inside.

“Where’s Wyatt?” Brittany asked, sounding bleak.

“I don’t know,” Elena admitted, although her chest was beginning to hurt as the obvious answer occurred to her.

He was looking for her. And since he hadn’t stayed to meet Calderón, the leader of Los Jaguares might be on his way back here right now.

Without a key, she couldn’t move Wyatt’s car out of the way. So there was no way to keep Calderón from knowing someone had invaded his territory.

Wyatt was in serious trouble.

“Brittany, listen to me. You have to find somewhere to hide while I go find Wyatt. And you need to stay quiet and still, no matter what happens. Promise me.”

The girl sniffled. “Okay. I promise.”

Elena looked around, wondering where the girl could hide. Her gaze ended up on the river below the bridge. This part of the Rio Grande wasn’t particularly wide, though it had cut a furrow through the land deep enough to create a sloping bank on either side. Beneath the bridge, there was a narrow ledge of land that would accommodate a girl Brittany’s size.

“Under the bridge,” she said. “Do you think you can get down there?”

Brittany nodded, already heading down the bank on the Texas side of the river. Elena waited until she heard the girl settle into place before she started walking across the bridge into Mexico.

She checked the magazine of her Smith & Wesson M&P40. She’d fired the round she’d had chambered, but there were still fifteen rounds in the magazine. She chambered another round and started hiking south.

* * *

“ELENA VARGAS WAS HERE?”

From the stall where he was tied up, Wyatt could make out only snippets of what Calderón and Sanchez were talking about in rapid Spanish. But Calderón’s mention of Elena came through loud and clear, along with the seething hatred that infused his voice when he spoke her name.

Elena had been right. Calderón’s reasons for wanting her dead seemed to be deeply personal.

“And you’re sure she and the sheriff are involved?” Calderón asked, this time in English.

“Positive,” came a new voice, also speaking English with a mild Texas accent. “At least, she spent the last few nights with him, either at his place or at his family ranch. And they spent the afternoon together at a motel at Los Soldados.”

Wyatt shook his head, recognizing the voice. Unbelievable.

Elena had suspected a mole in the San Antonio ICE office. And she’d been right.

The voice belonged to the ICE agent who’d been her supervisor for the last two years, Clive Howard. The man who’d put her on enforced vacation leave. No wonder Memo Fuentes had known to set the bomb in the middle of the day. Howard had known she’d be home.

“They’re probably heading for the border bridge,” Howard added. “We should go look for them. We don’t need them to get back to Texas and start talking. When it was just the girl, that was one thing—nobody’s going to believe the little liar. But Elena—”

“She is a knife in my heart,” Calderón growled in Spanish. “Every day she lives is a twist of the knife.”

Wyatt kept working on the thick cord they’d used to lash him to the stall support, but Calderón and his men had stripped him of anything he could have used to free himself.

He should have fought back. What good did it do for him to be alive if he couldn’t even get his damned hands down from over his head?

Calderón and his men left the stable, their voices fading as they moved farther away. A few minutes later, there was only silence in the cavernous abandoned stable.

Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it—

“Cowboy!”

The word was a whisper, so soft he thought he’d imagined it.

“Wyatt, where are you?”

It was Elena’s voice, still barely a whisper. She sounded close.

“Stall ten,” he answered with equal quiet.

He couldn’t hear footsteps, but he sensed her coming closer. Felt her, like lifeblood coursing through him, warming him from the inside out.

“Why didn’t you stay in Los Soldados?” Suddenly, she was there, in the door of the stall, gazing at him with soft brown eyes. Her hair was a mess, her wrinkled clothes were dusty, and a streak of dirt ran down her face from forehead to chin. But he’d never seen a more beautiful woman in his life.

“Why aren’t you halfway to San Antonio?”

With a knife from her purse, she cut through his bindings in a few seconds. “Leave you behind? I could never do that.”

He caught her hand. “Is this a bad time to tell you I think I love you?”

She stared at him for a moment, surprise and pleasure shining in her dark eyes. “It’s a terrible time. We have to go. I left Brittany out there alone.” She pulled a pistol out from behind her back. “I got this off the guy who shot at me outside.” Her voice darkened. “He’s dead. He won’t need it.”

She led him quietly out of the stall, heading for the side door of the stable. “They left Tomás Sanchez standing guard out front,” she whispered. “Brittany pitchforked him, but I guess he lived, huh?”

“He’s wounded, but it’s not a mortal injury, apparently,” Wyatt answered, checking the pistol’s magazine. It was a GLOCK G17. At least one round missing. Two, if he’d had a full magazine and one in the chamber. It looked clean enough, at least. Maybe it wouldn’t jam on him at a bad time. “How do we get past Sanchez without his seeing us?”

“He was already nodding off when I sneaked in here,” she answered. “He’s playing it tough for Calderón’s benefit, but I think he’s hurt more than he realizes. I think we can get out of here without being spotted.”

Wyatt wasn’t as confident that Sanchez would be oblivious to their escape, but she turned out to be correct. They reached the cargo truck without raising an alarm and headed north toward the border.

This had to be the third time Elena had walked the mile and a half between the stables and the border, Wyatt realized as they neared the river, but she showed no signs of flagging. He wondered if she was that strong and fit, or if she was running on pure adrenaline.

His father’s car was still where he’d left it, he saw with some surprise. He’d figured Calderón and his crew might have taken it. Of course, they also might have tampered with it, he realized, remembering the powerful bomb that had blown Elena’s car into the house next door.

“I’d better check it out, make sure it hasn’t been booby-trapped,” he said as he crouched by the left front tire and peered under the chassis.

“Wyatt?” Elena’s voice sounded strange.

He pushed to his feet, looking at her across the hood of the Mercedes.

But she was not alone.

“Did you really think I would leave an injured man to guard you, sheriff?” Calderón’s smug voice froze Wyatt’s blood. He had a gun to Elena’s head. “I have been tracking you since you left the ranch.”

“How?” Elena asked. Her dark eyes darted around, looking for a way to escape. Determination squared her jaw, and Wyatt knew that she’d rather die trying to get away than to play passive to Calderón’s whims.

He admired her for it, even as he feared the outcome of her intentions.

“Check your pocket, sheriff.”

Elena’s eyebrows twitched, and he knew without her saying a word what she wanted him to do. It was a big risk, but if he was going to make any kind of life with a strong, independent-minded woman like Elena Vargas, he was going to have to trust her instincts.

He reached down to his pocket, as Calderón suggested. At that moment, Elena began to struggle, earning a clout to the face with the butt of Calderón’s weapon. But it was distraction enough. When Calderón got her back under control, he was staring down the barrel of the borrowed GLOCK.

Elena smiled at Wyatt.

“You should have brought your thugs to watch your back, Calderón,” Wyatt said. “Why didn’t you?”

“Put the gun down or I’ll kill her.”

Wyatt knew Calderón wasn’t bluffing, but he had to give Elena a chance to make another move. “I think you don’t trust your men at all. They’re in it for money, not out of loyalty. And surely some of them must realize that if you were to die, they might be able to take over your empire.”

“My men are loyal to the death.”

A new thought occurred to Wyatt. “Is that why you sent your brother Tonio after Agent Vargas and her partner? You had to know one or the other of them would kill Tonio. Two against one.”

“I did not think she would shoot. She was my brother’s whore.”

Elena’s expression darkened, her nostrils flaring with rage.

“She was an ICE agent, and you knew it. You sent your brother to get what he could out of her. And then you sent him to die. Because he was a threat to your control, wasn’t he? Your men liked Tonio better. They trusted him more. Admired him more. After all, he was charming and handsome, and you...” Wyatt let the words hang in the cold night air.

Calderón’s gun hand twitched toward Wyatt, all the opening Elena needed. She rammed her elbow into his gut and tore free of his grasp, rolling out of the way.

Calderón’s gun moved with her, tracking her. “¡Puta!”

“Put the pistol down,” Wyatt ordered.

Calderón fired a shot toward the side of the Mercedes. At the same time, Wyatt fired at Calderón. The round struck Calderón in the side of the neck, tearing through his throat. Calderón’s gun went off one more time as he started to fall. The pistol slid from his grasp as he put his hands to his ruined throat and crumpled to the ground.

Wyatt circled the Mercedes carefully, looking first for Calderón to make sure he was no longer moving. “Elena?”

“I’m okay.” Her voice came from behind the Mercedes. “But you have a hole in your back tire.”

With his foot, Wyatt nudged Calderón’s pistol out of reach. Calderón was dead. The blood pouring from his neck had already slowed to a trickle, no longer pumped by his heart.

He reached in his pocket again and pulled out something Calderón or one of his men must have put there while he wasn’t looking. It was about the size of a quarter, with a small antenna built in. He dropped it to the ground and crushed it to pieces beneath his heel.

“Brittany?” Elena called. “It’s Elena and Wyatt. You can come out.”

There was a scrabbling noise from under the bridge. A few seconds later, Wyatt’s half sister crawled up to level ground and ran to Elena’s outstretched arms, burying her face in her shoulder.

Wyatt crossed to them, blocking Brittany’s view of Calderón’s body. “Hey, kiddo. I’m your brother Wyatt.”

Brittany looked up at him with tear-stained eyes, her lips trembling. “He said you wouldn’t come. He said none of you cared if I lived or died ’cause I was just a bastard from one of Dad’s whores.” Her jaw squared. “He made me so mad I wanted to shoot him!”

“We’ve all been looking for you, short stuff.” Wyatt pulled her into his arms, an unexpected rush of love spreading through him. “All of us, even Virgil and Morgan. They’re here and they really want to meet you.”

“Just in time for Christmas,” she said with a weary smile.

“Just in time for Christmas.” He looked away, his gaze drawn by lights moving through the darkness about a mile away.

Elena had already drawn her pistol, taking cover behind the truck. Wyatt joined her there, coaxing Brittany down to the ground. But before long, he made out the shape of his brother Morgan’s rented SUV. The vehicle stopped several feet away and Morgan called out from an open window. “Wyatt?”

“It’s Morgan,” he said. “Weapons down.”

Elena put her Smith & Wesson back in her purse. “I never thought I’d be so glad to see one of your brothers.”

He looked at her across the hood of the car, his heart rattling like a snare drum. “We have to talk. Alone. Promise you’ll stick around until we sort everything out.”

She smiled at him, her expression as warm as a spring day in Serpentine. “I’m not goin’ anywhere, cowboy.”