Too Tough To Tame: Red: Book 2 Read online

  RED: Book 2

  TOO TOUGH TO TAME

  By Darrell Maloney

  This is a work of fiction. All persons depicted in this book are fictional characters. Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Copyright 2015 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to:

  Greg Valker

  John Brown

  Prashan Hirange

  Chris Bugert

  Hope Arnold

  Harold Lowry

  Toni Jones Kight

  Nancy Tipton

  I hope you learn to love the “Red” character as I have. The inspiration for Red was my sister Debbie, and she was a heck of a woman. Thank you all for your continued support.

  For more information about this or the author’s other books please visit darrellmaloney.com

  Chapter 1

  John Savage was working late. The First Bank of Blanco stood on Main Street, sandwiched in by a boutique and a realty office.

  The bank was the only one of the three still operating. When it became obvious that the power was never coming back on again, the little old lady who ran the boutique had nothing to do. She was a spinster, never married and never even really dated. She had her cat Alfred, who she used to call the one and only love of her life.

  When Alfred died of old age, she no longer had a reason to go on. She just shriveled up and died one day, sitting at her desk in the back of the boutique, knitting needles in hand and a half-finished sweater in her lap.

  The realty office closed for good on the day its manager shot himself in his office. Word had gotten around that the world had changed. The new order of the day was for people with the biggest guns to just take what they wanted. Others would step out of their way or pay a heavy price.

  There was no longer a need for real estate agents.

  The manager, Tom Chance, had no family. He had little to nothing in the bank. He didn’t know how to hunt or fish or trap game. And he didn’t want to starve when the food in his cupboards ran out.

  So he took the easy way out.

  Just like many others.

  Tom’s body lay rotting in his office for days before volunteers from the Baptist Church took on the grisly task of removing it and placing it in an unmarked grave. Truth be known, they probably would have left him there were it not for John Savage complaining about the stench wafting over to his bank next door.

  Savage still opened for business, fully intending to foreclose on each and every property as its owners either committed suicide or fell so far behind on their payments that any chance of catching up was exhausted.

  By his estimation, within a year or two he’d own half the property in the county.

  And that was fine by him. For he knew something that virtually no one else in the county knew.

  There was oil beneath the hard ground of Blanco, Texas.

  A lot of oil.

  The oil rights would be worth hundreds of millions once the oil companies came in and started to drill.

  At least that’s what John Savage thought.

  Overwhelmed by greed, he hadn’t thought things through.

  With no working automobiles, there was no longer a need for massive amounts of oil. No way to refine it. No way to move it. No longer a demand for it.

  The black gold had turned into black water.

  The greedy man’s hope that the world would soon get back to normal was just a pipe dream. Smarter men knew that.

  John Savage wasn’t that smart.

  He looked up from his desk as a tall man entered through the bank’s doors and asked a question.

  “We alone?”

  “Yes, Mr. Luna. Welcome back to Blanco.”

  “I wish I could say I’m happy to be back.”

  “You don’t like our sleepy little town?”

  “Your sleepy little town is boring as hell, but it’s peaceful. I like peaceful.

  “The trouble is, I don’t want to be stuck here. There wasn’t much to do here, even before the blackout. Now there’s even less.”

  “I suspect there isn’t much to do in bigger cities either, with no power to run anything.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  Luna sat at a table in the center of the bank’s lobby, and Savage got up from his desk to join him.

  As Savage sat down and got comfortable, Luna took what appeared to be a wadded handkerchief from his jacket pocket.

  He unwrapped something from the center of the handkerchief and let it roll onto the table top.

  Then he leaned back in his chair and studied the portly banker.

  “What is this?”

  Savage took the vial of clear liquid from the table between them and rolled it around in his hand.

  The vial had a lot of tiny words Savage couldn’t read without his reading glasses. But he could make out the name: Zarzapine. He could also make out the words Caution; Deadly Poison, over a small skull and crossed bones.

  Luna explained, “They once used it to put down large animals, like horses. Rural veterinarians all over the world swore by it, and it was very effective. Turned their lights out quickly and made their hearts stop pumping.

  “Nobody ever paid much attention, until a lot of city vets started using it too, mostly for large canines.

  “Then the bleeding heart types starting complaining, saying their dogs were crying and twitching just before they died. Most people thought they were just nuts, until they started using it on humans.”

  “They used it on humans?”

  “Yeah. At the time there was a lot of controversy about the drugs they were using to kill condemned prisoners all over the United States. The manufacturers of the drugs they were using were all overseas. All the American pharmaceutical companies got out of the business of producing death penalty drugs for fear of getting sued or picketed.

  “Anyway, the overseas companies, when they found out their drugs were being used to kill prisoners in the United States, either stopped producing them or stopped selling them to us.

  “The governor of one of the states, I can’t remember which one, told her prison people to find something else instead.

  “So they found Zarzapine.

  “It worked well. It induced heart attacks, and the prisoners were dead within minutes. They cried and moaned and groaned and said their veins were burning, but nobody really cared.

  “So other states started using it too.

  “Everything went fine until Oklahoma put a man to death about a year ago. It was a controversial execution anyway, because the mother of the man the condemned guy murdered went public and said she thought he was innocent. She said she thought he was railroaded by cops who just wanted to close their case. And that he found Jesus in prison and should therefore be spared.

  “Well, despite all of that, Oklahoma took a hard line and executed him anyway.

  “The mother of the man he murdered was one of the witnesses at the execution. And apparently it was pretty grisly. She went public, and told the press how the condemned man screamed and said his veins were on fire, and how he foamed at the mouth and coughed up blood. She said that it took over thirty minutes for him to die, and she got other witnesses to say the same thing.

  “Well, according to the doctor’s official report, he died peacefully after three minutes and never made a sound.

  “The mother of the murdered man went on all the talk shows and testified before congress, and in the end they finally banned Zarzapine. It’s now illegal to use in the United States. But I just happened to get my hands on a few vials of it.”

  Savage was puzzled. He put the vial back down on the table. Luna took his left hand out of his coat pocket and gently picked the
vial up. Savage noticed that Luna was wearing a latex glove on his left hand, which struck Savage as peculiar.

  “That’s all well and good, and it’s a very interesting story. But how does all of that relate to the problem we’re dealing with?”

  Luna smiled and continued.

  “Zarzapine is what I plan to use to kill Butch Poston. And now that your fingerprints are all over the murder weapon, it gives me a little more leverage than I had five minutes ago.”

  Savage suddenly felt nauseous and swallowed hard.

  “What do you mean, leverage? Leverage for what?”

  “Leverage to get half of your earnings for the oil rights on Red’s land.”

  Savage now felt faint. He reached out to grab the chair in front of him, and fought hard to keep from passing out.

  Luna laughed the wicked laugh of the devil.

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. You didn’t know I knew about the oil, did you?”

  Chapter 2

  Red was a lot of things. Men called her beautiful. She had a face that turned their heads and made them want to take her home. But she had a fiery disposition that made many of them regret it.

  She was tough, and the equal of any man.

  But she had a tender side too.

  That’s why few people completely understood her. They tried to encapsulate her essence into a certain category.

  And she was far too complicated to be put in a box and labeled.

  Red lost her mother to cancer when she was but a girl, and was raised by her father to be protective of her friends. To stand up for the oppressed. And to be giving to those who deserved it and suspicious of those who didn’t.

  She seemed to inherit her father’s ability to meet someone and instantly know what category they fell into.

  So Red was guilty of placing others in boxes and applying labels to them, even knowing how hard it was for them to do likewise. But she was almost always right.

  Red despised John Savage from the moment she met him. He seemed… shady to her, in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on. But she resisted his efforts to charm her, preferring instead to consider him a degenerate until he proved otherwise through his actions and not his words.

  When word got around that the new banker in town was up to no good, foreclosing on properties that his predecessor had made handshake deals on, her suspicions were confirmed.

  Julia Bennett was a good friend and a confidant, who’d helped Butch Poston raise Red after her mom died.

  Red considered Julia her second mother, and told her so often.

  Julia’s husband died the same year Red was born, so Julia was a widow as long as Red knew her. Red always believed that was one of the reasons they grew so close. She was the only one the reclusive widow had to talk to. And many of Red’s classmates considered her abrasive and rough around the edges. Many of them avoided her at all costs, and there were many times in her youth when Red had no one either.

  Except her father, who was always there for her… and the widow Bennett.

  When she was thirteen, she brought wildflowers and blackberries from the forest to Julia and found the old woman on her front porch, weeping.

  Red wrapped her arms around her friend and held her close.

  “What’s the matter? What happened?”

  “It’s nothing, dear. I’ll be okay.”

  Try as she might, Red was unable to pry anything out of her, so she asked her father that evening if he knew what might have upset her so.

  Butch ran the only hardware store in Blanco, a tiny town of two hundred or so. The hardware store was one of three places in town one went to when they wanted to shoot the breeze or share gossip with other townsfolk.

  “I heard that the new banker is foreclosing on her land.”

  Red wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but it didn’t sound good.

  “It means they’re going to take her land from her. Repossess it because she was behind on her payments.”

  “But where will she go? What will she do?”

  “I don’t know, honey. Some of the others and I are trying to persuade Mr. Savage to honor the deal she made with Tony Sisco before he died.”

  The look young Red gave her father told him she didn’t understand.

  “Mr. Sisco was the banker at First Bank of Blanco before he died a few months ago. He was a good man and a fair banker. He knew the widow Bennett was having trouble making her payments, but he told her he would restructure her mortgage for her. Lower the payments, so she could handle them. When he died she continued to struggle, paying only a portion of what was due each month. She assumed that the new banker would honor Mr. Sisco’s commitment to her.

  “But apparently Mr. Savage has no intention of doing so.”

  Chapter 3

  Despite the efforts of Butch and several other townsfolk, Savage did indeed throw Widow Bennett out of her home. She went back to Iowa to live out her remaining years, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

  She’d promised to write Red every week, as she was too old to learn such newfangled things as the internet and email.

  But the first and only letter Red ever received from Iowa wasn’t from Julia Bennett. It was from her sister Charlotte.

  Charlotte told Red that Julia died just days after her arrival. The doctors said it was her aged body and bad heart. But Charlotte said she seemed depressed and out of place. And very much stressed at the whole idea of having to move in her eightieth year.

  Charlotte believed her sister died of a broken heart.

  And Red blamed John Savage. She hated him from that day on.

  Flash forward to the present, when the world was much different. It had been a year since massive solar storms on the face of the sun bombarded the earth with electromagnetic pulses. The “EMPs” shorted out nearly everything electronic, sending mankind back into an age where people had to hunt for their meat and grow their own food.

  A few saw it coming. They were called “preppers,” and they’d stockpiled food and supplies. As for the rest of the world, they fell into two distinct categories: Those who struggled and suffered, and those who gave up and checked out.

  Over half of the earth’s population either committed suicide or fell victim to thieves who murdered as they plundered because they found stealing easier that way.

  Many of the rest starved to death or fell victim to plagues which sprang up from the millions and millions of rotting corpses.

  The world was in turmoil, and it came home to roost in the tiny town of Blanco for Red and her family.

  Red had finally found a man who wasn’t threatened by her stubbornness and toughness. She and Russell seemed a perfect match to all who knew them, and they soon married and had a son. Only one name seemed appropriate for the tiny red-headed boy. So he was christened “Rusty.”

  Red and her family struggled during the blackout, like the other survivors. Then one day Red’s house exploded. She survived, but her husband and young son never had a chance.

  “I don’t know how I know, Dad, but John Savage had something to do with this. I can’t prove it yet, but with God as my witness I will. And I’ll make sure he pays.”

  “I know, honey. I suspected the moment he brought you flowers in the hospital that he was somehow involved. Such a gesture was just too far out of character for him. He wasn’t there to be civil, or to wish you a speedy recovery. He was there to find out what we knew, and whether we suspected him.”

  “We can’t let him get away with it, Dad. We just can’t.”

  “He won’t, honey. I’m with you on this. We’ll work together and we won’t rest until he’s held accountable.”

  Chapter 4

  As the weeks went by, though, evidence against the shady banker just wasn’t forthcoming. Red’s father Butch was starting to have second thoughts.

  And Red needed a break.

  “Dad, I have to get out of here for a while. The world has just gotten too nuts for me.”

  “Meaning what
, exactly?”

  “Meaning people like John Savage shouldn’t get away with throwing helpless old women out of their homes. And they shouldn’t be able to kill people at will, simply because they don’t like them.”

  “And therein lies the problem, sweetheart. We are assuming that Savage had something to do with the explosion. But the evidence isn’t there. There simply is no proof. And no motive that I can see. And there was never any indication that Savage disliked Russell any more than he disliked anyone else.”

  “Are you saying you no longer think he killed my husband and son?”

  “No, honey. I’m sure he did, or was involved in some way. I’m just saying that justice is going to have to wait a little bit longer, until we can prove it. That’s all.”

  “Dad, it’s not just Savage. It’s this whole frickin’ world. It’s gone to hell in a handbasket since the power went out. Half the world’s population has given up and is trying to find ways to kill itself. The other half is robbing, raping and murdering.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I visited Eddie Simms yesterday. He’s got a ham radio hooked up and he’s been listening to it.”

  “How in the world did he get a ham radio to work?”

  “Heck, I don’t know. He’s a prepper. He said he saw the blackout coming and was able to protect some of his electronic equipment by storing it in a big metal cage, or… something. I don’t remember exactly how he said he did it, but…

  “Oh, hell. What does it matter? The point is that people are killing themselves in great numbers. I guess you didn’t hear that part. They’ve given up. FEMA says the power won’t be restored for years. They say there will be disease and famine. Disease from the millions of bodies piled up in the streets because they can’t bury them fast enough. And famine because without modern equipment, farmers won’t be able to grow enough food for the survivors. And even if they could, they wouldn’t be able to get it to them.