The driver from the nearby work crew had been kind enough to leave the key in the starter of the Deere, which handled like a big, angry SUV.
“Hey!” Cort Wesley thought he heard someone yell, as he turned the Deere wheel all the way to the left and swung out into traffic. “Hey!”
He thumped across the eastbound traffic lane and moved into the westbound lane, accompanied by screeching brakes slammed by drivers doing a collective double take at the sight of the massive vehicle ranging across their path like some iron dinosaur.
Cort Wesley hopped the curb into Bobby Roy’s used car lot, managing to steer clear of the twin rows of vehicles, which were covered more by dust than by paint. He headed straight for what passed for a showroom.
55
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Cort Wesley barely felt the impact as the big Deere’s raised shovel crashed through the showroom glass and plowed T-Bird and Caprice classic convertibles from its path like they were Matchbox cars. A guy he thought he recognized as Bobby Roy flew out of a desk chair, in front of which sat a couple with whom he’d been in the process of closing a deal.
Terry and K-Bar Boyd stumbled out of the back office, struggling to free nine-millimeter pistols from fancy holsters tucked under their sport jackets. But Cort Wesley was out of the cab by then, boots crunching over shattered glass, kicking aside a back bumper that had separated from one of the convertibles on impact. He reached the Boyds just as they finally found purchase on pistols, and he tore the weapons from their grasps in a motion so fluid that both brothers were left absurdly aiming their empty hands at him.
“What the fuck?” one of them managed, before Cort Wesley slammed him in the nose with a ridged palm.
He watched the potential buyers flee through a side door, closely followed by Bobby Roy himself, as Cort Wesley stuck a leg out to trip the second Boyd brother. Then he hoisted both of them up onto a big rectangular planter, which looked decorative compared to the rest of the showroom. He smelled spilled coffee somewhere as he smacked the Boyd brothers’ heads together to further make his point. The impact sounded like a golf club thwacking a ball off the tee.
“You K-Bar?” he said to one, producing a dazed headshake. “Then nice to meet you, Terry,” he greeted him. “You too, K-Bar,” he said to the other. “I’m the guy whose son you pulled out of that McDonald’s the other day, in Houston. Sound familiar? You were trying to scare me off. Thought I’d give you boys the opportunity to do it in person.”
“Fuck you!” Terry managed in nasally fashion. He was pinching his nose closed in a futile attempt to stanch the blood that Cort Wesley’s blow had unleashed.
Cort Wesley let them see him grin, ignoring Terry Boyd’s failed show of bravado. “You boys crossed a line here, and the only reason you’re not under the big wheels of that John Deere now is I need to know who put you up to it.”
The Boyd brothers heard the screech of police sirens picking up cadence in the distance, their expressions flashing hope that their assailant would surely flee. Clearly, they were uneducated on the damage a man like Cort Wesley could do to them in his remaining minute or so.
“You give me a name and you get a pass. Call it your Get Out of Hell for Free card.” Cort Wesley glanced at the blood running from Terry’s nose, between his fingers, and the lump the size of a baseball that had already formed on K-Bar’s skull. “Well, not quite for free, but close enough as things go.”
“We ain’t gonna give you nothing!” K-Bar ranted, his words stringing into each other. “You wanna kill us, go right ahead.”
His bravado, inspired by the increasingly loud police sirens, was ignored by Cort Wesley, who snatched up a pristine fan belt, once displayed on a partition wall that now had fallen to the Deere. The sign had said something about the belt coming from the Mustang the great Steve McQueen had driven in Bullitt, but Cort Wesley had his doubts.
“Okay,” he said, wrapping the fan belt around K-Bar’s neck and tightening it until K-Bar’s breath choked off and his face began to purple.
“What the fuck, man?” Terry Boyd ranted, his voice whiny. “What the fuck?”
Terry’s brother was starting to gurgle now, his cheeks so pumped with air they looked as if they were ready to explode.
“A name, Terry. Give me a name.”
56
HOUSTON, TEXAS
“What’s that pounding sound?” Sam Bob Jackson asked Cray Rawls. “I can hardly hear you.”
“That pounding is me smacking a heavy bag, because if I stop now, I might drive back there and pound you instead, you fucking moron.”
“Cray, I didn’t catch what you just—”
Rawls stopped his punching long enough to adjust the Bluetooth device riding his ear. “Never mind. Nice talk I just had with that cunt of a Texas Ranger you sent my way.”
“She wasn’t taking no for an answer.”
“Your job, while you still have one, is to run interference. That means keep the attention off me.”