Stand Your Ground (2 page)

Despite losing their quarterback to an injury, Fuego hung on to eke out a 21–17 victory over the previously undefeated McElhaney Panthers. It took a great effort by Brent Sanger, who played defensive back as well as running back, to slap away a Hail Mary pass in the Fuego end zone as time ran out on the clock.

Jubilation filled the town as people in the stands used their phones to post the final score on social networks. Car horns began to honk, not only at the stadium but all along Main Street to the Dairy Queen and McDonald's at the other end of town. Soon there was such a cacophony it seemed more like the team had just won a state championship, instead of improving its record to one game under .500.

So yeah, maybe folks were overreacting to the win, Lucas Kincaid thought as he made his way through the parking lot toward his Jeep, but he was happy for them anyway. With the world the way it was, people needed a little something to celebrate every now and then.

A long line of red taillights stretched from the parking lot along the road in front of the high school to the state highway that ran past the school and the football stadium. Kincaid figured he would sit in his Jeep for a while and let the traffic thin out before he left. He hated inching along in traffic.

Loud voices from his left drew his attention as he walked across the asphalt with his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket. He looked in that direction and saw three men confronting a man and woman who had a couple of small children with them.

The three men were angry, and their comments were pretty profane. One of them said, “You people don't even realize what you've done. We were undefeated! You've ruined the whole season!”

The other two shouted obscene agreement.

So, disappointed McElhaney boosters, thought Kincaid. And from the sound of them, drunken ones at that.

The man and woman tried to lead their kids around the angry visitors. The trio cut them off.

“Whassamatter? You too good to talk to us? You think one lucky win makes you better than us?”

“Mister, my wife and I just want to take our kids home,” the man said. He was in his thirties, a little heavyset, wore glasses. Kincaid thought he looked like a teacher.

As if three-against-one odds weren't bad enough already, the three men from McElhaney were all bigger and rougher-looking, the sort of men who worked outdoors in construction or oil and gas. Kincaid's eyes narrowed as he studied them. He had never liked drunks, especially mean drunks . . . like his old man.

One of the men shoved the guy in glasses and sent him stumbling back a step. The guy's wife made a sound that was angry and frightened at the same time. She maneuvered the kids, a boy and a girl, behind her.

Kincaid had slowed, but he hadn't stopped walking. He could just go on to his Jeep and forget about what was happening in this corner of the parking lot. He knew that was exactly what he should do.

No, he thought. He couldn't. Who was he trying to fool by pretending that he could?

“Stop that!” the guy in glasses said. “Leave us alone!”

“You gonna make us?

“No,” Kincaid said as he came up behind the three men. “I am.”

They turned toward him, startled, and he hit the one in the middle in the belly hard enough to double him over. Then in a continuation of the same movement he slashed right and left and caught the two flankers on the sides of their necks with the hard edges of his hands.

The one on the left went down like a puppet with his strings cut, but the one on the right stayed on his feet. He was a little tougher than the other two, Kincaid supposed, and probably not as drunk, either, because he reacted fairly quickly. He bulled forward and caught Kincaid around the waist, slammed him back into the passenger door of a parked pickup.

If he could have just gone ahead and killed them, it would have been easier, but Kincaid knew he couldn't do that. Even getting in a fight was more notoriety than he ought to risk. Since he had to hold back, it threw him off a little, slowed him down, allowed the guy to ram him into the pickup. Kincaid's head bounced off the glass in the window.

Yeah, and maybe he was a little rusty, to boot, he thought. He had been lying low for a while. Skills deteriorated with disuse.

But muscle memory never went away completely. Kincaid jerked his head out of the way as the man tried to punch him in the face. Another second and he would have the man on the ground, puking his guts out like the one Kincaid had hit in the belly.

Kincaid didn't get the chance. The guy in the glasses tackled the third man from the side. Both of them spilled onto the pavement. Glasses swung a punch into the man's face. The blow was slow and awkward and probably didn't have a lot of power behind it, but it landed squarely on the man's nose and broke it.

That ended the fight. The third man rolled onto his side, cupped his hands over his nose, and squealed in pain. Glasses climbed to his feet, where his wife grabbed his arm and asked, “Honey, are you all right?”

He pushed the glasses up on his nose and said, “Yeah, I think so. Thanks to—”

He stopped as he looked around for Kincaid.

It was too late. Kincaid was gone. He'd faded into the shadows because a crowd was gathering and somebody was bound to call the cops and Kincaid didn't need that.

As it was, nobody involved in the incident knew his name. Nobody would be able to describe him except in vague terms: medium height, medium build, dark hair, blue jeans and denim jacket. That description would fit dozens of guys who'd been at the game tonight.

“Stupid,” Kincaid muttered to himself as he circled through the parking lot. Getting mixed up in a brawl in a high school parking lot wasn't keeping a low profile. Not low enough.

Not when a lot of dangerous people would have liked nothing better than to kill him.

 

 

Andy Frazier floated on a cloud of painkillers. He didn't even feel his broken leg anymore. He was just coherent enough to realize he had a silly grin on his face as he looked up at Jill, who stood beside the hospital bed holding his hand.

“Did we win the game?” he asked her.

“We did,” she told him. “Twenty-one to seventeen. Ashleigh texted me and let me know.”

From the other side of the bed, Lois Frazier, Andy's mother, said, “He's asked you that four times already, Jill. I think there's something wrong with his brain. Did they check him for a concussion?”

“For God's sake, Lois, he's just doped up,” Bert Frazier said. Andy's dad stood at the foot of the bed. “He doesn't know what he's saying.”

He was tall and had the same shade of brown hair as Andy, but his was straight and thinning, instead of thick and rumpled. His face was broad and beefy, and his shoulders were heavy. He was a supervisor out at the prison, in charge of the correctional officers when he was on duty, which he wasn't tonight because he always arranged to have Friday nights off during football season.

Andy was glad his dad and mom were here. That made him feel better. So did having Jill hold his hand. But as he looked up at her, he felt a pang of disappointment.

“My leg's broke,” he said.

She smiled and nodded and said, “Yes, I know.”

“That means we can't—”

Her hand tightened on his and made him stop.

“I know,” she said. “That means we can't hang out at the Dairy Queen with everybody else and celebrate the victory. But it wouldn't have been possible without you, Andy, and everybody knows that. We'll just have to celebrate later, when you're feeling better.”

“Okay,” he said. That wasn't what he'd meant at all—he had been thinking about what they would have done out at the dry lake bed, just the two of them, alone—but if she wanted to act like that's what he was talking about, that was fine, because . . .

Oh, yeah, his folks were right here. So it was probably better not to say anything about the lake bed. Jill was smart that way, really smart. Probably gonna be valedictorian. Vale . . . dic . . . torian.

Andy started to giggle.

“Ah, he's stoned out of his mind,” Bert said. “Come on, Lois. Let's go home and let him sleep it off.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” Andy's mom said. “I'm going to stay right here at the hospital. I can sleep in one of those chairs out in the waiting room.”

Bert rolled his eyes. That just made Andy giggle more.

Then he stopped and asked Jill, “Did we win the game?”

 

 

There was only one motel in Fuego, down on the same end of town as the fast-food joints. It had been built in the fifties, with a one-story office building that also held the owner's living quarters in front of a two-story L-shaped cinderblock building with thirty rooms, fifteen on each floor. A swimming pool sat inside the L. Guest parking was on the outside of it. It was a fairly nice place, well kept up despite its age.

Stark had checked in earlier that day and told the clerk, who was also the owner, that he would probably be staying for a few days but didn't know exactly how long. That wasn't a problem, the man assured him. The motel did a steady business, since it was on an east–west U.S. highway, but it was seldom full.

When Stark got out of his pickup after the football game and started through the open breezeway leading to the stairs, he saw the motel's owner doing something to the ice machine that sat in the breezeway next to a soft drink machine. The man looked up and nodded to him.

“Hello, Mr. Stark.”

“Mr. Patel,” Stark said.

“Did you enjoy the game?” Patel grinned. “I could tell from the racket that we won.”

“Yes, it was very exciting.” Stark gestured at the ice machine. Patel had taken a panel off the side of it, exposing some of its works. “Problem with the machine?”

Patel shook his head and said, “Not really. Just doing a little fine-tuning on it.” He chuckled. “You know, when things get older, they don't work as well. You always have to be messing with them.”

“That's the truth,” Stark said with a smile of his own. “Well, good night, Mr. Patel.”

“Good night, Mr. Stark.”

Stark didn't think any more about the encounter as he climbed the stairs to the second floor and went to his room.

What he had told his old friend George Baldwin about being in remission was true. The last time he'd seen his doctor, he had gotten an excellent report, which came as a surprise to both of them. A couple of years earlier, the doctor had told Stark he had maybe a year left.

So every extra day was a blessing, Stark told himself, but at the same time the days carried with them a curse. The longer he hung around this world, the longer it would be before he was reunited with his late wife, taken from him by violence several years earlier.

But Elaine would have wanted him to live as long as he could and enjoy every day of it, Stark knew. His friend Hallie Duncan, waiting for him back home, was the same way. She had encouraged him to go see his old friends, so that was what Stark was doing.

Despite what he'd told George, in a very real way this
was
a farewell tour, because Stark didn't know from one day to the next what was going to happen. It was all too possible that he would never see any of them again.

But then, every day on this earth was a farewell tour of sorts, because the past was gone and nothing else was promised to anybody but the present.

Tomorrow might not ever come . . . and the day after that was even more iffy.

As Patel was tightening the screws on the service panel after putting it back in place, a figure drifted out of the shadows to the side of the breezeway.

“That was him,” the newcomer said in the foreign tongue that he and Patel shared. “The big American who has caused so much trouble for our friends in the cartel.”

Patel nodded. His mouth was dry with fear—this man caused that reaction in him—so he had to swallow a couple of times before he could speak.

“Yes, that was John Howard Stark. I . . . I have no idea what he is doing here. He said he came to Fuego to visit an old friend, and it must be true. He could not have any idea what we plan to do.”

“Well, it doesn't really matter,” the other man said with a shrug. “If he chooses to stay here, in a few more days he will be dead, too, along with thousands of these other decadent Americans.”

Patel looked down at the ice machine and tried not to shudder.

He had been born in Alaska, of all places.

Unlike the American president a decade earlier who finally had been proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to have been born overseas, Phillip Hamil really was a native-born American. To add to his credibility, his parents were both naturalized Americans who had immigrated from Pakistan and gotten their citizenship before Phillip was even born.

His father worked for an oil company—that was what the family was doing in Alaska—and his mother was a housewife. Nothing in that background to make anybody suspicious.

But from the time he was old enough to understand the teachings of the Prophet, Phillip Hamil had been raised to hate America.

To destroy America.

As good looks did in every aspect of life, it helped that he was movie-star handsome. With his dark hair and skin, he could pass for Hispanic if he needed to. He spoke Spanish as if he had been born and raised in Guadalajara. But he was also as fluent in Russian as if he had grown up in Minsk. He spoke every dialect of every Middle Eastern language. And his English was perfect.

Why wouldn't it be? He was an American, after all.

His facility for languages was just one area in which he shone. He was a brilliant mathematician and scientist, and his grasp of world history was enough to have earned him several doctorates. He was one of those rare individuals who mastered everything he turned his hand to. Degrees from Harvard
and
Yale, president of a smaller but still major university, best-selling author of several volumes about political relations between the U.S. and the Arab world, advisor to presidents . . .

And at the moment, lover to a United States senator.

She gasped and clutched at him and then her head fell back on the pillow as she tried to catch her breath. Hamil rolled off her, left her splayed on the hotel bed, and padded over to the window to part the curtains slightly and look out at the night. They were in suburban Virginia, and he could see the lights of Washington, D.C., glowing in the distance.

For a moment he allowed himself the fantasy of seeing a mushroom cloud rising over that cesspool of American evil. Such a sight would be so satisfying.

But even better was the knowledge that ninety-nine percent of what came out of Washington these days harmed and weakened the Americans without an electoral majority even knowing it. The place was a necessary evil that in the long run did the work of Islam.

The Americans, in their damnable arrogance, should have listened to that old man when he said, “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.”

If only they had known then that it would be all downhill from there for them, to use one of their own sayings.

“Phillip, that . . . that was incredible,” the woman said in a throaty voice, still slightly breathless from their exertions.

Hamil let the curtain fall closed and put a smile on his face before he turned back to her. She was a powerful woman, rumored to be a strong contender for a vice-presidential slot on the next Democratic ticket, that is, if she didn't make a run for the top spot herself.

It was a shame she was ugly as a camel. With rare exceptions, the hated Republicans had much better-looking women, from the politicians and the pundits down to the ones who attended rallies and waved signs demanding that no more rights be taken away from them.

Those rallies were futile, of course. The Democrats and their lapdog media just called anyone who opposed their stranglehold on power racists . . . or misogynists . . . or homophobic . . . or anti-immigrant . . . or religious bigots . . . or gun nuts . . . or if all else failed, Nazis . . . and their followers swallowed the lies whole.

For a short time, after an American president had gone too far, ordering the use of nerve gas on American citizens who opposed his policies, then been impeached and removed from office for his crimes—literally removed, since he had barricaded himself in the White House and refused to leave—the pendulum had swung back in the other direction. Hamil, already a power in academia but not yet in politics, had feared that the Americans had finally woken up and come to their senses.

But then a movie star had died of a drug overdose, and a young pop star had lost most of her clothing during a scandalous performance on live television, and a rap singer and his longtime girlfriend had gotten married, and another rap singer had beaten up his longtime girlfriend, and a new cheating scandal had broken out in professional football, and by that time enough people had forgotten what had happened that it was safe for the media to go back to telling everyone on a daily basis how wonderful the Democrats were and how terrible the Republicans were, and the Republican leaders, who really just wanted to be liked and patted on the head by their Democratic masters, quashed any real dissent in their ranks, and everything went back to the way it was before, with the United States on a long, slow slide into oblivion and irrelevance.

But then the politicians, thinking they were doing a good thing, had made the mistake of moving those prisoners—those holy men and martyrs—to a place called Hell's Gate. It was an insult to Allah that could not be borne.

Anyway, letting the Americans destroy themselves was taking too long. It was time to act.

And so the order had gone out. Phillip Hamil's order. He had picked up a phone, called a certain number, and said one word in Arabic: “Judgment.”

The man on the other end of the line had called two more men, each of whom had called two more men, and by the time the Americans finished with their unholy prisoner transfer, the word had gone out across the country to thousands.

Some were members of small cells; others were individuals. Many had been born in this country, like Phillip Hamil. They had jobs, small businesses, families. They lived like Americans because they
were
Americans.

But they answered to a higher calling, and now they had been summoned. By ones and twos and small groups, they would travel to Texas to liberate their brothers and strike a blow to the heart of the Great Satan. They would travel to a place called Fuego . . . Spanish for “fire.”

The Americans would know fire, Phillip Hamil thought. Fire and death.

“Phillip . . . you look so . . . intense.”

The woman's words shook him out of his reverie. He smiled and slid into bed with her.

“Intensely in love with you, my dear,” he said as his hands began to move on her body.

She responded, of course. Her fool of a husband—an academic like Hamil—had no idea how to satisfy her, but she had been faithful to him anyway, unwilling to risk the damage an adulterous affair might do to her political career, even in this liberal day and age.

Until she had met Phillip Hamil at a Washington cocktail party. She had been an easy target, and a worthwhile one since she served on a Senate committee that made her privy to a great deal of inside foreign policy knowledge.

It had taken only a few weeks for her to agree to a series of clandestine meetings in anonymous hotels like this one. No one knew she was here tonight.

No one.

She looked up at him and stroked a hand across his cheek.

“I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't met you,” she whispered. “You made me realize that my life was just an empty shell. I've never been more truly alive than when I'm with you, Phillip.”

“I'm glad I've been able to give you that, Mercedes,” he murmured. “I'm glad you've been able to know true pleasure at least a few times in your life.”

A slight frown creased her forehead. She said, “That sounds sort of . . . I don't know . . . final. You're not . . . ending this, are you?”

“I have to leave Washington for a time. My presence is required elsewhere.”

“Oh.” She sounded relieved. “I understand about having to travel. I mean, I have to travel quite a bit because of my Senate duties, too.” She smiled. “A politician's work is never done, you know.”

“I know,” Hamil said as he stroked her face and slid his hands down to her neck. She seemed not to think anything of it as they began to tighten. “But yours is, my dear.”

He would hang the Do Not Disturb sign on the door when he left. He had paid for the room for four days. It might not be that long before her body was found, but he would still have plenty of time to get to Texas.

Under normal circumstances the murder of a United States senator would be big news. With what was coming, it would just be a footnote.

But her usefulness to him was at an end, and her continued existence was an affront to him.

When she finally realized something was wrong, her eyes barely had time to widen in terror before he broke her neck with a quick, clean snap.