The Grey Man: Payback, page 1
The Grey Man
-Payback-
JL Curtis
© JL Curtis 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below:
Oldnfo@gmail.com
Author’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Available from Amazon.com in Kindle format or soft cover book, BN.com in Nook format. Printed by CreateSpace.
The Grey Man-Payback/ JL Curtis. -- 1st ed.
ISBN-13: 978-1500225698
ISBN-10: 150022569X
DEDICATION
Dedicated to the families those who serve in the military, Law Enforcement, Fire and EMS professions. They keep the home fires burning.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil. Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth. Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
1st Corinthians 13 verses 4-7 KJV
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the usual suspects.
Special thanks to my editor Cara Lockwood.
Cover art by Tina Garceau.
Books by JL Curtis
The Grey Man- Vignettes
Table of Contents
Prolog
Another Day at the Office
Laredo
On the Podium
Mixed Feelings
Bangkok (Again)
Aftermath
What now
Rallying the troops
Coming back to Texas
At the Ranch
Toby’s Funeral
Plans and More Plans
Juanita’s Funeral
The Chase
Prep and Departure
Trailing South
Aaron’s Return
The Shot
On the Run
Moving North
Jesse
Fight’s On
Rio Grande
The Ranch
Jesse
More Funerals
Fallout
Rehab
Wedding Prep
The Ceremony
Family and Friends
On the Range
A Gift
Any Units
One More Dinner
Epilog
Blurb
Layout of the Cronin Ranch main buildings.
Prolog
The old man drove slowly down Highway 67 toward Deputy Hart’s location, wondering what he’d face at the scene. Regardless, he was out of the house and away from the coven as he now thought of the wedding planners. He didn’t remember this much hate and discontent with Jack’s wedding, but they’d been on the male side so it’d been fairly simple. Get a nice suit and show up: the total of their responsibility.
Looking out the windshield, he saw a ring of buzzards circling, so he knew he was close. Slowing down, he pulled off on the shoulder well short of Hart’s cruiser. He steeled himself for whatever was to come. Knowing it was a signal seven call, he reached in the glove compartment and pulled out one of the cigars he kept there for just this reason.
He got out of the car and the odor of death assailed him; he lit the cigar immediately and was once again glad he got away with wearing the grey Dickies work shirt and pants rather than the standard uniform. Looking down to make sure his badge was secured on his belt, he hitched his gun belt, pulled out a pair of latex gloves and walked over to Deputy Hart. “What ya got Johnny?”
“Got a body, Captain Cronin, but… well there’s no head and no hands.”
“Ah crap. Did you call the sheriff or the Rangers?”
“Neither, I wasn’t about to put that over the radio and figured he ain’t going anywhere in the time it would take for you to get here.”
The old man shrugged. “Okay, you call the sheriff right now on his cell, tell him to get rolling this way. Tell him to call Bucky enroute, and I’ll call the Rangers.”
Deputy Hart nodded. “Yes, sir. How much detail?”
The old man had his phone out and was looking at the body. “Limit the detail. Tell him I want him here.”
Walking around the body, he dialed Ranger Clay Boone. “Clay, John Cronin. Got one you need to roll on. Signal seven at the first dirt road south of the sixty-seven and Old Alpine Road crossing.”
Listening for a minute, he replied, “Yeah, Jose and Bucky are both going to be rolled in on this. So I’d let the major know if I were you. On and bring your full kit, we’re going to need it.”
He listened again, then said, “K, see you in thirty.”
Turning back to Johnny Hart he asked, “You get hold of the sheriff?”
“Yes, sir. He said he’d be here in twenty.”
The old man took out his wheel book and a pen. “Okay, now what caused you to come down this way?”
Hart said, “Buzzards. Don’t normally see them around here, and it twern’t one or two but probably ten or twelve. Saw them from sixty-seven as I came south. Decided to investigate, damn near wish I hadn’t.”
The old man nodded, looked at his watch and asked, “You just came on duty right? You relieved Merrill?”
“Yeah, we did a turnover and I came straight on out. He didn’t say he’d seen anything unusual. I’m afraid I might have screwed the scene up. Hell, I thought it was probably a damn cow, and I drove right up.”
The old man nodded and pulled out the phone again, dialing dispatch he waited. “Lisa, Captain Cronin. If you haven’t already, turn Merrill around and get him headed back to the office. I need the patrol pattern and times he came by this location as best he can remember.”
Nodding to himself he said, “Good girl! We’re going to be here a while. Just have him complete it and go on home. If we have any questions, we’ll call him.”
Hanging up, he shoved the phone back in his shirt pocket and kneeled down. “Did you move the body at all?”
“No, sir. When I saw the head missing, I figured there wasn’t going to be much I could do, so I called it in and waited. I set up a perimeter that extends back to the turn and left my car right where I stopped. The tape is where I’ve walked, best I can remember.”
“Good job, Johnny, good job! Lemme see the soles of your boots.”
Hart picked up each foot in turn as the old man took quick snapshots, then started backtracking toward the road along the tape. Getting back to the road, he looked for tracks and saw tire tracks extending in front of the cruiser; dropping evidence tags, he took photos of each of them. Walking further down, he could see where the tire tracks made a three point turn before heading back to Highway 67; more tags and photos followed.
As he walked back, he saw what looked like multiple tennis shoe tracks about three feet to the left of the tape. Carefully he dropped evidence tags on what looked like three or four pairs of tracks and broken vegetation.
With Hart’s help he started compiling the evidence sheets and correlating them to the photos he was taking, while they waited for the rest of the folks to show up.
Hart finally said, “Captain, how do you handle this so calmly? It’s all I can do to keep from throwing up, and you’re acting like… Well, it’s another day in the office.”
The old man stopped and flipped ashes into a hole he’d dug in the dirt. “Johnny, I’ve been doing this for thirty years. Just because I don’t appear to react doesn’t mean I’m not tore up on the inside. I guess part of it is I had to learn how to deal with bodies in Vietnam, some of them friends of mine. It’s a whole different level when you’re stuffing pieces and parts in a damn body bag that was once the guy sitting next to you in the chow hall. And the smell here is nothing compared to a real battle. After a while your sense of smell just gets numb to it, I guess. Trust me, it don’t make it any easier.”
“But doesn’t seeing a body without a head…”
“Yeah, it’ll be another nightmare that will save itself for a night when I really need sleep,” the old man continued. “The saving grace of this is we’ve got a chance, a slim one mind you, but a chance at actually catching the murderers and putting their asses away for a long time.”
Hart nodded. “Makes sense. But with this one, well, it’s obvious he wasn’t killed here. No blood pooling and the lividity looks wrong. All you’ve got is a body and tire tracks.”
The old man replied, “True, but those are clues in themselves. This is probably a cartel killing, and if we can find out why that will point us to who. That will narrow down the list of suspects, and there’s usually at least one that will roll over, either through fear or self-preservation.” Cocking his head, he heard cars coming hard on Highway 67. “And here comes the cavalry, so it’s time to get to work. If you want to continue this conversation later we can, Okay?”
“Yes sir, I want to l earn, but I wouldn’t want your job,” Hart replied.
Another Day at the Office
The old man, Sheriff Rodriguez, Texas Ranger Clay Boone, and Bucky Hendrix from the Laredo office of the DEA[1] were taking a break and brainstorming who might be lying in the bar ditch when the old man suddenly cussed and trotted over to his cruiser. Reaching in, he pulled out a file from his gear bag and flipped through it rapidly. He pulled one piece of paper out and hurried back to the group, “I knew something about this was bugging me. It was that damn BOLO[2] from Brewster County that came out Tuesday morning. Jose you need to make a call, I think we’ve found Eddie Guilfoile Junior.”
Clay started cussing viciously, startling all the others. “Gahdammit, this ain’t good at all, his old man is in Huntsville doing three to five for smuggling marijuana and this has all the signs of a cartel hit. I need to make some calls.”
The sheriff looked at the BOLO and walked back to the body. “Yeah, red and white striped shirt, blue jeans, six-one. Let’s measure what we’ve got and see.”
The sheriff held the tape against the bottom of the left foot, which had set pretty straight, and the old man measured to the top of the body and said, “Yep, five-three, maybe five-four. There’s a formula for that, but I can’t remember it right now, so I’m just adding ten inches so that makes it six-one or two, which fits. Let’s go ahead and release the body to the coroner, we can’t do anymore now. I’d suggest you have Sheriff Garcia send a car out to the house and see if the head or hands are in the mailbox or on the front porch, or hell, maybe sitting in the car seat.”
Bucky came over. “None of the pocket litter tests positive for anything, shoes are clean; I think this is a payback killing.”
Jose hung up and said, “Hector is going to send a unit and he’s going personally to see if he can get a better description of the shirt and pants. Turns out the kid was an athlete, starting tight end on the football team and point guard on the basketball team. He was pretty much the opposite of his old man.”
The sheriff motioned to the ambulance crew that had been standing by. “Go ahead and bag the body, you’ll be taking it to the Coroner in Brewster County since it’s closer and Doc Truesdale is out of town. If it is the Guilfoile kid, then so much the better.”
The crew worked quickly, loaded the stretcher, and headed for the coroner's office in Alpine.
Clay and Bucky came back to the old man’s car, with Clay saying, “Looks like the Guilfoile boy’s old man got in a beef with a cartel type in the Goree Unit a couple of weeks ago. That whole situation is screwed up; Goree is used for non-violent offenders to train horses, but they run all the illegals through there on the way to deportation. Apparently the cartel types sent an enforcer to take care of him, but he cut the enforcer up with his own shiv. The enforcer was known as Smiley, so Guilfoile gave him an ear-to-ear smile, then dared any of the rest of them to come get him. As soon as the guards came on the yard, he dropped the knife and just stood there. They rolled him over to the Walls unit and his parole hearing was supposed to be today. I think they’re gonna let him out in the next day or two, probably Monday.”
Bucky nodded. “Yeah. I’ve heard of Fast Eddie. He’s a Cedar chopper down by Big Bend and he’s always been on the fringes of whatever illegal stuff needs to be moved. Low-level type, just wants to put food on the table. But he’s one of those cat-quick little shits and apparently has quite the temper.”
The old man asked, “If he’s a little shit, how do you explain a six-one kid? And they’re gonna let him out?”
Clay kicked at a rock. “Well, he’s married to an Irish girl named Iris that came over from the old country and apparently she tops him by at least four or five inches. I’m thinking her side of the genes won. As far as letting him out, he’d had a perfect record for the last three years, and was a trustee. Hell, he’s the one that trained Dusty, my buckskin!”
The old man shook his head. “Well, Bucky, I think this one is going to fall into your and Clay’s bailiwick as a cartel job, and it appears we’ve got a hit team working this side of the border. Normally, that crap stays over in Arizona, but if it’s coming here, there must be some indicators we’re missing.”
Clay said, “That’s the problem, we’ve had no indications of anything out of the ordinary. I’m going to Huntsville on Monday to see if I can tease out who and what cartel group this guy that Guilfoile had the beef with is associated with. Bucky, can you check with EPIC[3] and see if they’ve got anything?”
Bucky nodded and made a note on his pad.
The old man looked at his watch and decided to head back to town for lunch rather than go home, since he figured the women were all still there, planning. He hit the truck stop on I-10 and grabbed a burger, then went to the office and worked on the report from the crime scene. He downloaded the pictures and formatted them into the document and thanked his stars they’d gone digital. Ten years ago, he’d have had to go to the lab, print the pictures, wait for them to dry, cut and paste them into the report; and if somebody wanted another copy, he’d have to do it all over again. By the time he had all the forms filled out, the evidence logged and the reports emailed to the various agencies, it was almost 6 PM.
He got up and groaned, rolled his shoulders and tried to get the kinks out. John Cronin you’re getting too old for this shit between the Army and now thirty years as a deputy sheriff, he thought. Halfway succeeding, he stopped by dispatch on the way out and told them he was going home, and that he would be out of town Monday and Tuesday. Lisa noted the information in the log and wished him a good evening.
As he drove home he debated how much to tell Jesse; then decided what the hell, she needed to know and he was tired of her bitching about not being in the loop. He also made a mental note to get Francisco to make sure all the rear accesses to the property were locked all the time. He figured he’d better let the neighbors know too, since Highway 18 was a major cut-through from I-10 to I-20.
The old man pulled into the drive and was relieved to see the driveway was empty. His thoughts bounced wildly from subject to subject as he drove in. Jack, I wish you and Pat could see your little girl now, and I’m sorry she got hooked up with a Marine, but he’s a good kid and he loves her. This whole wedding is getting out of hand, and thankfully there isn’t a coven of damn women here again. How are they going to explain that kid’s death to his parents, much less with the father in prison?
As the old man walked in the house, Rex slunk out of the office to come see him. “Yeah, Rex, it’s me and you against all of them, ain’t it.” Rex wagged his tail and whuffed in agreement. The old man took off his hat, gun and handcuffs and hung the belt on the hat rack next to the desk. He looked at the desk and realized Jesse hadn’t even been in the office all afternoon. Shaking his head, he headed for the kitchen with Rex following close behind.
Juanita, the wife of the ranch foreman, and Jesse were sitting at the table, looking at one of what seemed like a six-inch stack of books, and laughing. He thought to himself Juanita has become Jesse’s de facto mother figure. Hard to believe she and Francisco have been here almost twenty years now. God, Jesse is a grown woman, fixin’ to get married. Where have all the years gone? As he stepped into the kitchen he took the laughter as a good sign saying, “I take it y’all made some progress today?”
Jesse looked up, “Papa, there is no such thing. At this point I think we’re in a holding action, and I’m about to tell every one of the bridesmaids to wear what the hell they want! I swear, I thought we all got along, but now I’m beginning to wonder if eloping might make more sense!”
He laughed and took the cup of coffee Juanita handed him. “Well, that would certainly be a lot cheaper! Damn church is going to cost me a mint, and both the padre and the preacher are trying to hit me up to donate a little extra to the churches.”
Juanita slapped him lightly on the arm. “John, do not profane the church, you know the padre is just doing what he does.”
