No Help From Austin: Red: Book 5 Read online

  RED

  Book 5:

  No Help From Austin

  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 2017 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to Debra Poston, my twin sister who was taken long before her time.

  She was a far better person than I could ever hope to be.

  The Story So Far…

  Debbie disliked her name. It made her sound like everyone else. Like just another girl.

  And she had a fire inside her that made her different. She knew it and embraced it.

  “Call me Red,” she announced when she was a child of six.

  The name stuck.

  Few people called her Debbie after that.

  From an early age Red was a determined child. Intelligent, headstrong, loyal.

  She made friends easily, and kept them for life. They came and went, but never because she deceived or betrayed them.

  She was something else besides determined. She was fiercely protective. Especially of those who were unwilling or unable to protect themselves.

  Red believed there were two distinct types of people in the world. Those who would pick on the weak and the oppressed, and those who would help them.

  John Savage was everything Red wasn’t. He was selfish and brutish and just plain mean. For years he’d held sway over the tiny town of Blanco, Texas as the town’s only banker.

  And as such, the holder of the notes for most of the town’s properties.

  That had served him well over the years, as he chose when and where to foreclose on Blanco’s residents who’d fallen on hard times for one reason or another.

  He adopted a zero-tolerance policy for arrear mortgages which he selectively enforced. Typically only those homes he coveted for his own purposes.

  His shady tactics enabled him to become one of the biggest land barons in central Texas and a formidable force within Blanco County.

  Like most greedy men, though, enough was a concept John Savage just couldn’t comprehend.

  He kept gathering more.

  When he learned there was oil deep beneath the town he shifted into high gear on two fronts.

  The first was to pay off whoever he had to to keep the information secret.

  The second was to acquire even more of the land.

  For being one of the richest men in the county wasn’t quite good enough for him.

  He wanted to own the State of Texas.

  That was where he made his biggest mistake.

  For instead of acquiring the county’s land a little at a time as he’d done for many years, he pushed a bit too hard.

  And he ran afoul of Red Poston.

  And that wasn’t a good thing. Not by a long shot.

  Savage hired a pair of thugs to blow up Red’s house. She’d been a thorn in his side for awhile by broadcasting his shady business practices to the world. And by offering to loan or give money to town residents before they fell behind in their mortgage payments.

  Savage’s instructions to Jesse Luna and Ed Sloan were explicit and chilling: to make sure Red and her entire family were in the house when it blew.

  Red just happened to step onto the back porch moments before the explosion.

  She was critically injured, but survived.

  Her husband and young son weren’t so lucky.

  Savage had planned to call the incident an “accident” and to blame it on a faulty gas line.

  Red knew better.

  So did her father Butch.

  Savage’s days were numbered.

  But Red wasn’t one who went off half-cocked. She’d make Savage pay. But she’d choose the time and the place.

  If Savage had been a smarter man he’d have gone on the run.

  But he was more cocky than smart. He not only stayed in Blanco, he decided to do away with Red’s closest ally.

  Butch Poston dropped dead of an apparent heart attack. The town’s only doctor determined as such on the official death certificate.

  Red knew better.

  John Savage’s attempt to weaken his foe failed miserably. For while Butch was gone, Red was anything but cowed. She was more adamant than ever to see justice was served.

  Weeks before Butch’s murder a massive solar storm on the face of the sun wreaked havoc upon the earth.

  The electromagnetic pulses shorted out virtually everything electronic, effectively sending the human race back two hundred years.

  All over the world people were giving up by the millions, unable to cope.

  Basic survival skills were mostly forgotten, especially for city dwellers.

  Few people knew how to hunt, trap and fish anymore. A slightly greater number had experience in maintaining a garden. But not in growing the massive amount of subsistence crops needed to keep them alive.

  For most, food was something one found on grocery store shelves. Once the shelves were empty they had no clue how to survive.

  The blackout played to Savage’s advantage on the one hand. He had himself named Blanco’s Chief of Police to prevent a murder investigation. Lack of communications between the county sheriff’s department and the Texas Rangers prevented Red from asking for help from the outside.

  And the truth was, Red wasn’t one who typically asked for or needed help.

  For Red, the county sheriff or Texas Rangers would just have protected Savage from her fury.

  She had plans to take care of him on her own, without the aid of a justice system.

  Jesse Luna saw the writing on the wall and rode a fast horse to Lubbock, at the base of the Texas panhandle.

  He didn’t expect Red to follow him that far, but she did.

  He didn’t expect her to be a fearsome opponent, but she was.

  Before Luna died he shared with her the details of her family’s death as well as her father’s “heart attack.”

  “He wanted your land,” Luna told her. “He knew that someday soon the oil leases on that land would be worth millions.”

  Red returned to Blanco, but she wasn’t alone. She’d taken a young partner named Jacob and adopted an old woman named Beth.

  Together they comprised a rather odd lot as they made their way across the plains of Texas in an ancient hay wagon.

  Back in Blanco, though, they made a formidable team. They had one another’s backs.

  When a Texas Ranger showed up in Blanco not long behind them, he told them he’d heard rumors there might be trouble in the air and offered to intervene.

  He was rebuffed.

  The Ranger honestly wanted to help, and could have taken Savage into custody to stand trial.

  But Red saw him as an interloper. An outsider whose help was neither wanted nor needed.

  Red wanted to deal with Savage her own way.

  In Red’s mind, she earned that right.

  For everyone she’d ever loved had been taken away from her.

  She deserved the chance to deal with Savage on her own terms; in her own way.

  When we last left Blanco, John Savage had just murdered two henchmen he’d hired to kill Red. They’d failed to do so, but that wasn’t why he killed them.

  He killed them because they’d discovered buried treasure… quite literally. And he wanted it.

  It seemed there was no end to his greed.

  And now, the final chapter:

  NO HELP FROM AUSTIN

  -1-

  Most of the town came running at the sound of the gunshots.

  In bigger cities people were giving up en masse in the aftermath of the blackout.

  People in
small country towns like Blanco, though, tended to be of sturdier stock. Most of them were hunters. Nearly all of them had grown up fishing. And while they might not be experts at it, they could still catch a meal if they needed to.

  A few folks even knew how to trap small game, and were sharing their expertise with their neighbors.

  In addition, most of the homes in Blanco had yards of half an acre or more. Plenty of grow space large enough and fertile enough to yield a year’s worth of crops.

  They had far fewer concerns about their ability to survive than city dwellers who only knew how to hunt supermarket aisles. Who couldn’t string a fishing line to save their lives.

  Who’d never trapped anything other than mice.

  Suicide shots were all too common in city environments these days as more and more people grew hopelessly depressed.

  But they were few and far between in Blanco.

  John Savage had tricked the two hit men he’d hired to ambush Red just outside of town.

  It wasn’t hard to do.

  For Gomez and Duncan had only a handful of working brain cells between them.

  Savage owed them money and walked out of his bank office to get it.

  He returned not with the money but with a fully loaded Ruger.

  He wasn’t a man who’d ever fired a bullet into a living human being before. He’d always killed by proxy; paying cash to others to perform the actual deed.

  Considering his inexperience so much could have gotten wrong. After all, he was a single man, half drunk and not practiced in the art of armed combat. He was going up against two hardened killers.

  But somehow he came out ahead.

  It took him only three shots to kill them both. The look of surprise was still frozen on both their faces, even after they’d drawn their last breaths.

  For neither thought Savage had the courage to challenge them.

  In a classic display of overkill, Savage didn’t stop firing until his gun was empty.

  It was the act of a coward. A man desperate to make sure neither man could somehow turn the tables on him.

  Once the deed was done he locked his office door. Removed their weapons and placed them beside the bodies to make it appear they’d drawn on him.

  Only a fool would believe it.

  That he’d won a gun battle against two hardened men like Gomez and Duncan after they’d already pulled out their weapons.

  But then, knowing he was full of it wasn’t the same as proving he was full of it.

  It was Savage’s word against theirs, and they were no longer talking.

  Before he unlocked his bank’s doors he was careful to retrieve a tiny spiral note pad Gomez was carrying.

  It was the notebook which seemingly contained nothing but a mishmash of random numbers.

  Gomez had taken it off two highway nomads he’d shot dead.

  Nomads who had two backpacks heavy with gold and silver bullion and jewelry.

  The nomads had been gathering the precious metals from trucks abandoned on the highway. And since such items are exceedingly heavy, they’d been periodically burying their loot with the intention of returning for it later.

  That wasn’t going to happen now.

  Gomez had cracked their code and determined where the loot was buried.

  He’d planned to leave Blanco to recover it himself.

  That wasn’t going to happen now either.

  Within four days the coded note pad had changed hands three times.

  Now Savage had it.

  And no one else would take it away from him.

  Because no one else knew about it.

  Dead men tell no tales.

  Once the pad was securely in his pocket Savage reopened his bank’s doors and sat upon the steps in front of the bank.

  The evening breeze felt good upon his sweaty face as he waited for the townsfolk to come running.

  -2-

  Many of the residents responding to gunshots at Savage’s bank shared a common sentiment.

  They were disappointed that Savage wasn’t the one shot dead.

  Still, they’d seen Gomez and Duncan lurking around town in recent days. Both of them were frightening, and the fact they’d been associating with John Savage meant they were up to no good.

  They’d be missed by absolutely no one either.

  By the time the Ranger had been rousted from his sleep and rode hard toward the shots a crowd was already gathering.

  He’d just drifted off, the Ranger had, and his mind was slow to register. The shots came from somewhere to the east, within half a mile or so. That wasn’t much to go on, but he’d get to the bottom of it.

  Trigger, his horse, was already at his side and ready to be saddled. They’d been a team for a very long time, and the big horse knew his role.

  He was mounted and on his way within four minutes. Not bad when awakened from a deep sleep.

  He left his bed roll and saddle bags there, beneath the oak tree in Blanco’s only city park. He fully expected to return to it after he checked out the gunshots and offered his assistance in whatever crisis had just occurred.

  It wasn’t hard to find the scene, being that there was still a steady stream of townsfolk walking in the direction of the shots.

  A full moon and cloudless sky helped.

  By the time the Ranger dismounted and tied his horse up outside the bank, Savage was going over his story for the tenth time.

  Each time he said it the wild tale became a bit more polished. He was becoming much more comfortable.

  Everyone in the crowd doubted his word to some degree. Most knew it was a bold-faced lie.

  But knowing it and proving it were two different things.

  “They… they knocked on the bank’s doors,” he said with feigned distress. “They yelled that there was an emergency. That the judge had collapsed. That the doctor was looking for someone to match his blood type. That the doctor was calling for everyone to come to his office.

  “I, of course, wanted to do my part. I didn’t know if my blood matched the judge’s own, but I was more than willing to share it.

  “I opened the door to ask for details and to tell them I’d report to the doctor forthwith. But they forced their way in and took me hostage.”

  He paused for dramatic affect and was even able to force a few phony tears from his eyes; then professed great sorrow at having to take the men’s lives.

  “They demanded I open the vault and give them all the money inside. I told them the vault was on a time lock and couldn’t be opened until tomorrow morning.

  “They didn’t believe me. But they said they’d hold me hostage until I could open the vault.

  “I excused myself… went into another room where I had a gun hidden. Then I returned to them and shot them. But I swear it was self defense. They both had their guns pointed at me and were getting ready to fire. I have God as my witness and swear upon everything holy. I had to do it.”

  It was Judge Dan Moore, probably the town’s most respected citizen, who stepped out of the crowd and summed up what everyone else was feeling.

  In a single word.

  “Bullshit!”

  “Oh it’s true, I swear,” Savage pleaded. “Every word. I feared for my life, I really did.

  “Judge, you know I wouldn’t go up against two armed men unless I was in fear of my life.”

  The Ranger walked up the bank steps at that same moment and caught the word “Judge.”

  He paused long enough to introduce himself.

  “Judge Moore, I’m Randy Maloney from the Texas Rangers.”

  The old judge shook his hand and said, “I heard there was a Ranger in town. Welcome. And you can call me Dan if you want. I retired from the bench many years ago. The title is something I haven’t been able to shake.”

  “Have you been inside?”

  “No. Savage has refused to let anyone in.”

  The Ranger opened the door to the bank and stepped inside, to the loud protestations of
Savage.

  “Wait! You can’t go in there! It’s an active crime scene and I’m still the Chief of Police in this town.”

  The Ranger paused long enough to turn and say, “And you’re also involved in the shooting. If this turns out to be a murder you’re the primary suspect. I suggest you sit down and be quiet until we figure this thing out.”

  “But… I’m the Chief of Police for crying out loud!”

  “And I’m a Texas Ranger. I have the authority to relieve you of your duties and to take over this case. I suggest you sit down and be quiet or I’ll place you in cuffs and march you over to your own jail.”

  Someone in the back of the crowd started a chant.

  “Lock him up! Lock him up!”

  Within seconds almost everyone in the crowd took up the chant.

  Including several people walking down the street toward the bank who still had no clue why they were chanting or who they were referring to.

  The Ranger walked into the bank with the judge and Doctor Munoz close behind.

  The Ranger asked Munoz, “Who are you, sir?”

  “Raul Munoz. I’m the town’s only doctor.”

  “Very well. Stay back until I examine the victims. If either of them is still alive I’ll step out of the way and let you treat them. If they’re dead you are not to touch them.”

  The doctor seemed surprised.

  “But why? I am required by law to declare them dead.”

  “Not when you are a suspect as well.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve spoken to enough people in this town to know you are tied closely to John Savage. And he may well be a suspect in a double murder. That makes you, sir, a possible suspect as well. I have the authority to declare these men dead if need be.”

  Munoz said nothing else, but couldn’t look any more shocked if someone had slapped him across the face.

  -3-

  It was obvious, even before the Ranger knelt beside each victim and felt for a pulse, that both men were dead. Their eyes were open, their bodies still. A look of surprise was permanently frozen upon both faces.