listening. Ignoring the pain in his ribs and his foot, he took off after her.
Del cursed when she disappeared into the back door of the building. This was a disaster in the making. If she jumped one of his teammates the way she’d jumped him, she just might find herself closely acquainted with a few .38 caliber slugs.
He reached the door and pried it open. Going inside would be just about as dangerous for him. The others wouldn’t be expecting him in there. If they mistook him for one of the black-clad bad guys…
Pushing that thought out of his mind, he slipped through the door. The cool interior made his skin, flushed with sweat from the hand-to-hand skirmish, turn clammy. His heart tattooed a rapid pace. He couldn’t see the woman, but he picked up the faint pad of her steps on the floor behind a row of crates ahead.
He crept toward the sound, his gaze flicking side to side, watching for his teammates, and for the shooters. He didn’t dare call out, in case any of them were still around.
The woman’s light footsteps halted, somewhere around the end of the row of crates, Del guessed. Holding his breath, he moved toward her. He’d almost caught up to her when a shadow crawled along the floor to his left—a pair of outstretched arms and a gun. Solomon’s body followed the shadow, swinging around to where the woman stood.
Swallowing his curse, Del stepped between the two women. His forearm shot up, knocking Solomon’s aim toward the ceiling. An explosion roared from the muzzle of the gun. He felt the blast of heat on his cheek, saw the flash of light. The pistol’s report deafened him for a second, then set bells ringing in his head. That had been too close.
Amazon 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
