Starr County Line Read online

  He went inside the station house and sat on the corner of his desk and gnawed on a drumstick. The chicken was greasy. He thought about calling Ange. He knew she was at home waiting for him. He dropped the chicken bone in the box and wiped his hands on a napkin before looking at the clock on the wall. Almost nine. He got up and walked back to the jail cell and gave Miguel his fried chicken.

  Roe navigated the cruiser along 12 towards the trailer park. He had some work to do and not much time to do it. He had to shower, shave, and straighten up the trailer. His heart beat fast and strong in his chest.

  He looked up the road ahead at a pair of headlights. The driver had the high beams on. He pulled the visor down. There was also pair of headlights, high beams on, coming up quickly in his rear view mirror.

  “Sumbitch,” he said, flipping the mirror to the night position. He pushed a button on the FM radio in the cruiser, switching from the gospel show to the Grand Ole Opry show further down the dial. Ernest Tubb, Skeeter Davis and Barbara Mandrell were on. He nodded his head to the music. He looked out the passenger side at the countryside racing by in the dark.

  He looked back at the road in time to see the headlights on high beam in front of him were now bearing down on the cruiser. He wrenched the steering wheel to the right and the cruiser went down into the roadside culvert and started to skid out. He yanked the wheel in the direction of the skid and tried to get the clumsy vehicle back under control.

  He realized the vehicle that had been racing up to his rear was now following him down into the ditch. He could hear the blower on the large vehicle roar as the driver stomped the gas pedal. He could see up ahead of him was a drain pipe stuck up under somebody’s driveway. He cranked the wheel harder to his left and the cruiser popped back up on the shoulder and he ripped through some mailboxes. One of them broke the windshield and a piece of the pole lay in the front seat.

  He angled the cruiser back towards the road, but the heavy back end slipped back down into the ditch and threatened to bottom out. He tapped the accelerator and the wheels threw gravel. He looked over his left shoulder and could see the big vehicle angling straight for him. He let go the wheel and raised his hands to his face to try and shield himself from broken glass.

  The pursuit vehicle hit the cruiser at fifty miles an hour, the big Suburban’s brushguard plowing into the driver side door. Roe’s left arm broke in two places. The police car then began to flip over and over in the culvert. The rooftop lights were crushed and the bar flew off into the woods as the car skipped up and over the drain pipe. The trunk came open and the spare tire fell out. The hood crumpled and was ripped off. It finally came to rest on its flat tires some forty yards ahead of the Suburban, which had stopped on the roadside.

  Roe tried to unbuckle the safety belt with his right hand. Blood poured down into his eyes from a large gash on his head. He reached for his gun. He could hear voices. Spanish. One of them said ándale, ándale! He left the seat belt alone. He held the Smith & Wesson 13 in his bloody right hand. A flashlight beam crept across his face. He waited. The footsteps were close now, or at least he thought they were. He waited. He heard one of them laughing.

  He leveled the gun out the window and opened fire. He squeezed off four rounds in succession and heard one of the men cry out. He heard the retort of a suppressed automatic rifle and heard the rounds tear into the door. He looked down in horror to see his own blood pouring out into the seat. He’d not even felt the bullets. He slumped in the shoulder harness.

  He knew the Mexicans were looking him over. He held his breath. There was blood everywhere. The cruiser was destroyed. He waited for the bullet to the brainpan. It didn’t come. He heard faint footsteps as they retreated to their vehicles. He remained dead still. He wanted to throw up and pass out. His side felt like someone had stabbed him with a hot wire coat hanger. He coughed some blood. He heard the Suburbans get out on the road and head towards Pinto.

  He clumsily reached for the mike.

  “Officer down,” he called out, “Officer down.”

  JD got up from the chair and walked back up front to his desk. He thought he’d heard the radio crackle. It squawked again, static pouring over the channel. He thought he heard someone’s voice. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. The garbled voice kept saying “off.”

  He shook his head and looked out the large plate glass window down Main Street. Something wasn’t right. It took him a moment to figure it out, and he decided that must have been because he knew a person could look at something a thousand times and that something could remain exactly the same until a day when it suddenly changed and then that person can’t quickly ascertain what the change is.

  The lights on Main Street were out. From 1 right down to the station house, every street light was out. Not shot out, just out. He reached for the mike on the radio when the lights in the station house went dark. He seemed to disappear in the blackness of the office. He held the mike for a moment until his gut told him to hit the deck. He dove to the floor and crawled to a darkened corner. He could hear Miguel calling out from the jail cell.

  He pulled the Magnum and crawled towards the gun rack. The two Henry rifles were chocked. He could see two boxes of shells. The shotgun was in the Blazer. Roe’s shotgun was in his cruiser. He had some rounds on his belt for the Magnum. Not enough. And he wasn’t good enough with a Henry to have it do him any favors. They’d all have to be standing arrow straight, fifty yards in front of him. That wasn’t likely to happen.

  He crawled back to the door to the jail cell and pushed it open. He slid forward on his belly, the Magnum in his right hand.

  “Sheriff?” Miguel called out.

  “It’s me,” JD said.

  “They’re coming to get me, Sheriff,” Miguel told him.

  He sounded oddly calm.

  “Good that you’re a facin it, Miguel,” JD told him. “But we ain’t done yet.”

  “They will send an army,” Miguel said.

  “Maybe not,” JD said.

  “Just let me go, Sheriff,” Miguel said. “Let me out and I will take care of this.”

  “That ain’t happenin,” JD told him. “You set here and be quiet. I’m goin out the back way down to the Big Chief. I gotta get some more ammo.”

  “Just let me go, Sheriff,” Miguel pleaded with him. “Just let me go!”

  JD carefully opened the back door, peered out into the darkness, and slipped out into the alley.

  He crept along the side of the building. All around him were rooftops where shooters could be. Maybe they had not taken up positions yet. He felt like a man who’d just bet his fortune on a nag of a horse. He tried to raise Roe on the walkie talkie but got no answer. He crossed San Jacinto in a low run and kept to a crouch as he pushed along the bricks towards Main. He would have to cross the two lanes and the median and make his way right down the sights of their guns, in all likelihood he told himself, to get to the Big Chief.

  He knew Bob had installed a heavy steel door in the rear, but the plate glass windows were still on the storefront. That was his only way in. He could hear engines in the distance. There were vehicles coming. He stopped a moment and tried to pinpoint their location. He gave up on it and kept moving. He stopped for a moment behind a Chevy Caprice Classic parked at the corner of Main and San Jacinto. He sucked in a deep breath and ran across the first lane.

  Something skipped up behind him. It was a piece of pavement. He could see flashes down the road. On the courthouse roof. More divots in the road as he ran. He stuck behind the hedges in the median, his back to the streetlamp base. He was glad the lights were out. He wanted to shoot back, but he didn’t dare give up his position. He had to keep moving. He took off for the other side of Main. A bullet dug into the toe of his boot. He couldn’t believe they’d shot his boot. He almost fell forward to the pavement as another bullet grazed his shoulder and ripped his shirt open. He stumbled into the shadows and tried to catch his breath.

  He swung out and began worki
ng his way down Main towards the Big Chief, keeping his eye on what looked to be the shooters’ nest on top of the courthouse. The Big Chief was just a few doors past the Burger Spot. A big Ford roared to his left and started to speed down Main towards the station house. Dumbass. He’d left Miguel sitting in the jail cell and if a body wanted to they could just walk right through the plate glass windows and go get him. He stood and took a shot at the big truck as it passed. Gunshots rang out from the rooftops and bullets danced all around him. He pushed back into the doorway of the old doctor’s office and shot again.

  The bullet hit the driver of the Ford in the cheek. He slung blood and spit all over his passenger and the truck veered wildly towards the median. The big tire hit a streetlight base and the truck jumped up on two wheels for a moment before falling over on the passenger door. It skidded on the concrete and came to a stop. JD looked at it for a long moment, wondering if the passenger would emerge. He did not.

  He forced himself to keep going. He hoped they hadn’t really cased the town. Of course they had. They had to know right where he’d be headed. He crept past the Burger Spot in the pitch black. He could still smell the grill. Hunger gnawed at his belly. He rubbed his shoulder. The bullet had cut a divot and the blood had partially dried on the cut with his shirt stuck to it. He looked at his boot. A section of the toe was gone. Like someone had snipped it off with some cutters.

  He was just ten yards from the Big Chief when he saw it. First one, then two beams of light from flashlights dancing around inside. The Mexicans had found the gun store.

  The ambulance raced towards Rio Grande City on 83. The paramedics in the rear tended to the young man’s wounds. They held an oxygen mask to his face. He kept trying to push it away with his one good arm.

  “Blood pressure’s dropping,” one of them said.

  “Restrain him,” the other one said.

  “JD,” the man sleepily called out. “Some…body…gotta tell JD.”

  “Relax, son,” the paramedic told him. “You’re on your way to Rio Grande City. We’re takin you to the hospital. You’ve been shot.”

  JD sprinted across Main Street again, towards Salazar’s Barber Shop. He held up for a moment on the street side of Robbie Skinner’s El Camino. He swung out in a crouch, gun out in front of him. As he moved across the sidewalk, he saw a shape emerge from the shadows of the barber shop. It came right through the door and turned right towards him.

  He watched in disbelief as the shadow’s arm raised high with something attached to it. A blade of some kind. He tried to move back, but was clumsy in his half crouching position. The shadow was right on top of him. No shadow, but a man in all black. He was wearing something bulky covering his torso. The arm with the blade was coming down.

  JD stuffed the gun barrel forward as he fell back, trying to find something soft. The muzzle glanced off a hard, thick piece of material. He put his forearm up as the blade came down. He jammed the gun barrel forward again and it stuck deep into fatty flesh. He pulled the trigger. The blade fell to the sidewalk beside him and the man coughed blood in his face. He could see smoke coming from his back. The man’s hands hit the pavement on either side of JD and JD crawled backwards.

  He watched as the man turned himself over painfully and looked at his belly. JD had shot him between the flak jacket and his waistline. The only place he could have shot him. The man touched the wound and the blood. He sat for a moment and then lay on his back and began to crawl towards the street.

  JD left him there and rushed into Salazar’s.

  He wiped the blood from his face with his shirt sleeve and studied the darkened interior of the barber shop. Red, worn barber chairs with dirty cracks in the vinyl. White Wahl clippers hanging on the front of the sink countertops. Blue Barbicide in the comb dispensers. Old linoleum warping over ancient hardwoods.

  He crouched behind the counter, where Shelly the cashier had stuffed her issue of Time magazine with Cher on the cover between the boxes of spare bibs and aprons. Back to the wall. Knees to his chest. He could see a piece of peanut butter candy with ants all over it in the corner. His toes curled and uncurled in his boots. Every few seconds a shout or two in Spanish from the street a few blocks down. He wanted to spit, but his mouth was too dry.

  He peered cautiously around the front counter. The boots of the man he’d just killed stuck out from underneath Robbie Skinner’s brand new El Camino parked out front on Main. He’d slid himself up under, like it was something he’d planned on doing. Wide-eyed pain and fear all over his face as he did it, blood pooling on his cheap western shirt. He’d hardly made a sound as the bullet went through him. He died right there staring at the undercarriage. He might have been just another cowboy working on his truck, except his boot toes splayed in opposite directions. Like a dead man’s would.

  The wood on the sagging doorframe spit splinters as a bullet cut a divot in it, the ptttth sound of the impact echoing in the small space. The round embedded itself in the wall next to Salazar’s framed picture of President Gerald R. Ford. He white-knuckled the Magnum with both hands and blinked the sweat from his eyes. If they were going to rush him, he figured it wouldn’t be long now. He wondered how Roe was doing. He almost smiled at the thought of him out on the estacado with Jeannie Pruitt. He peeled his lips slowly apart. It felt like someone had tried to glue them together. He froze as a small cloud of dust particles drifted down like snowfall from the ceiling above.

  There was someone upstairs in Salazar’s old apartment. He twisted the knob on the walkie talkie on his belt until it turned off. He aimed the Magnum at the moldy spackle, trying to pinpoint the location. Whoever was up there was crawling. He’d have heard the walking weight against the old crossbeams if that weren’t the case. He’d spent a few nights up in that apartment himself, so he knew.

  Shooting from down here wasn’t the smart play, either. Could be the Mexicans down the street didn’t know where he was. They might not know he was in the barber shop at all. Otherwise, they’d have come on by now. That’s what he kept telling himself. Of course, they could be counting on their man upstairs to get the job done and maybe they’d just sit tight til then. He remembered a Walter Cronkite report from Vietnam on CBS and soldiers throwing grenades in suspected VC hideouts, waiting to see who came running out. He wondered why the Mexicans didn’t just try that. Maybe they didn’t have any grenades.

  Another sprinkling of dust from the popcorn ceiling, now closer to the stairs than before. He dropped his chin to his chest and closed his eyes briefly, then swung out in a crouch from behind the counter, gun pointed at the stairwell. He didn’t like having his back to the street, but he couldn’t very well walk backwards up the stairs, either. He eyed the floorboards under his boots carefully. Some of them were warped and noisy. He couldn’t give away his position being careless. He unfastened the walkie talkie on his belt and turned it on and pushed the button.

  “Roe! Sadie!” he whispered.

  He placed it on the floor where he’d been hiding behind the counter. He turned the volume up all the way and backed carefully behind the first barber chair. If someone came in from the street, at least he’d have a bit of a shield and maybe the element of surprise. He thumbed the hammer back on the wheel cutter until it locked.

  Come on, somebody, he thought. Come on. Push the button and give me a where you at, Sheriff.

  No more falling dust. He’d settled up there, maybe just a foot or so from the landing, gathering his courage. He wondered what he was packing. A shotgun or a MAC-10, or maybe another machete. That had taken him by surprise. The last thing he expected to see come running out of Salazar’s was a wild-eyed Mexican with a machete. But these Gulf Cartel boys, they liked quick and quiet.

  He wondered if he should try to get to the spandrel and just hide. He’d end up trapped in there. Still, he might be able to make some kind of a bomb or something with the cleaning stuffs and the old Playboys Salazar kept hidden in there. There was a crackle on the radio and the instant
it happened there was another dust fall from above. No more waiting. The man up there was on his feet, getting ready to come down. Come on, someone, goddammit, do it. Another short burst of static followed by Sadie’s raspy voice.

  “Sheriff, where you at?”

  The man upstairs came on full bore. He came off the landing taking the steps two at a time. His boots hit the hardwoods after he cleared the last two and he froze for a moment, staring at the open front door of the barber shop. He carried a sawed-off .12 gauge and wore a hand-stitched black pearl snap and a bent up tan palm leaf hat. Black Wranglers. Wallet on a chain. JD raised his right arm from behind the barber chair and put the red splash of paint on the sight square in the middle of the man’s body.

  “Hey,” he whispered.

  The Mexican spun, much faster than JD thought he could. It was his fancy cowboy boots, the slick leather soles on the hardwoods. Still, even if he’d beat JD to it, the shotgun was aimed way too high. JD pulled the trigger and blew a hole in him. The man staggered backwards, knocking the cash register over, firing the shotgun as he did. The ceiling exploded and asbestos rained down on him as he hit the floor, blood pouring from his mouth. JD grabbed the shotgun from his shaking hands and sprinted up the stairs.

  The decision to flee seemed to be an easy one to make, even though he might have had a chance right there in Salazar’s against however many of them were left as they came. But, he had nine bullets for the Magnum and whatever was in the sawed off, and that was it. He wished he’d made it to the Big Chief. He’d at least have a couple boxes of rounds for the Magnum and some shells for his newfound shotgun.

  He checked the apartment quickly. They’d just sent one man. That didn’t mean there weren’t more of them waiting on the roof, though. He grabbed the glass jug of water from the icebox and took a long swig. He kicked the old wooden door to the rooftop open and waited for a moment. The hot night wind blew on him and he could hear a dog bark in the distance. Other than that, no sound. He sucked in a deep breath and took off across the roof. His boots dug into the gravel stuck to the tar and it felt good to run. Adrenaline was coursing through him. He hopped the trellis Salazar had laid across the gap between the barber shop and the 5-and-10 so he could sneak in at night and steal candy and kept on.