But until that happened, he was working every angle for security. Taking nothing for granted beyond his next step, his next breath.
* * *
“WHERE IS SHE?” Jesse Folsom muttered.
“Runnin’ late,” Bryar Haskin said. “How the hell should I know?”
“We just sit and wait for her?” asked Jimmy Don Bodine.
“Naw,” Haskin answered back. “We gonna go ’n’ get a lap dance, then tell Kent we didn’t wanna stick around. How’s that sound to ya? Think he’ll like it?”
“I just meant—”
“Check this out,” Cletus Jackson said, from the backseat.
A car was turning north from Crockett onto Alamo Plaza. It slowed for the parking lot’s entrance, then swung in it. Creeping along, the vehicle slid into a space about two hundred feet from the old Mexican mission.
“That her?” Folsom prodded.
“Can’t tell,” Jackson said. “Wait and see, with the dome light.”
The car was a black Dodge Avenger, four door, not an obvious cop car. Haskin puzzled over that, since they were waiting for a cop—a lady cop, at that—but he supposed that she could be off duty, driving her own vehicle. It didn’t matter what she came in, after all, as long as she went home with them.
The cop...and whoever she was meeting at the Alamo.
“I still can’t see the driver,” Jackson said, to no one in particular.
“It’s one of ’em,” said Haskin. “Has to be. Who else would be here when the place is closed?”
“Damn tourists,” Bodine suggested. “Wanna snap a picture standin’ in the lights.”
“Parkin’ as far as they can get from anything?” Haskin snorted dismissively. “We got one. Now just keep your eyes peeled for the other.”
“You figure they’ll be packin’?” Jackson asked him.
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Hell, I am.”
That was a fact. Between them, they were carrying two pump-action shotguns, one Heckler & Koch HK416 carbine chambered in 5.56 NATO, one AK-101 feeding the same NATO rounds and at least four handguns. Bodine sometimes wore a second pistol in an ankle holster for backup, normally a Colt .380 Mustang Pocketlite, but Haskin hadn’t looked to see if he was packing it tonight.
They had firepower, anyhow, and horsepower under the hood of their GMC Yukon, with its 5.7-liter turbocharged Chevrolet small-block V8 engine. Haskin wished they’d had a bit more brainpower, but these were good boys, dedicated, all straight shooters. He would work with what he had.
And how hard could it be?
Pick up two people from the ever-loving Shrine of Texas Liberty and take them back to headquarters for questioning. It wasn’t like they had to fight John Wayne and Richard Widmark, or even Billy Bob Thornton. Sure, one of them was a Texas Ranger, but she was a woman, for God’s sake.
One woman then and she’d be packing, but he didn’t know about the other one. Haskin had no idea who else they were looking for—a man or woman; white, black or whatever—but it stood to reason that there’d be at least one other gun against their eight or nine.
Safe odds, if only they had been allowed to kill their quarry, but that wasn’t in the cards. His orders were to bring at least one of them back alive and preferably both. Headquarters couldn’t question corpses, and if Haskin dropped the ball on this one, it would be his own ass on the charcoal grill. And that was not one of them whatchamacallits. Simile or metaphor, maybe an oxymoron.
Screw it.
“Here goes,” said Jackson, as the Dodge Avenger’s driver opened up her door and stepped out. She’d turned the dome light off—smart thinking—but the parking lot was lit for security’s sake, and Haskin recognized her from a photo he’d been shown that afternoon.
“It’s her,” he said. The lady Ranger.
“One down, one to go,” said Bodine, like he had just invented math.
“Suppose the other one don’t show?” asked Folsom.
“Then we bag this one,” Haskin replied. “Call it a night.”
“We have to take her straight back?” Jackson queried. “She’s a looker.”
“Remember what we’re here for, damn it. And remember what you stand to lose, if you screw it up.”
* * *
WATCHING FROM THE SHADOWS, Bolan saw his contact step out of a vehicle he took to be her personal ride. Nothing the Texas Rangers would select for chasing outlaws on the open road, and Bolan wasn’t sure if they did any undercover work. He knew the force was small—about 150 officers to police America’s second-largest state and its twenty-six million inhabitants. Not to mention the countless tourists, drifters and undocumented aliens. Only a handful of Rangers were women, and Bolan was looking at one of them now.
He knew her face from photos he’d received in preparation for the meeting. She, on the other hand, wouldn’t know him from Adam until Bolan introduced himself. Photos of Bolan—with the new face he had worn since “dying” some time back in New York City’s Central Park—were scarce as the proverbial hen’s teeth. He hadn’t bothered changing fingerprints at the same time, since he was dead to the world, and Uncle Sam’s elves had purged every file they could find that contained Bolan’s prints—from the Pentagon and FBI headquarters, to LAPD, NYPD and so on down the food chain.
In that sense, at least, it was good to be dead.
The Ranger he had come to meet, by contrast, was very much alive. And Bolan hoped to help her stay that way.
Adlene Granger was thirty-one years old, five-seven without standard Ranger cowboy boots and Stetson hat, her frame packed with 137 fairly trim, athletic pounds. Green eyes and auburn hair, no known tattoos, although she had a scar inside her left forearm from taking down a crackhead who had pulled a razor in the scuffle. All of that was in her file, together with the fact that she had shot two would-be bank robbers in Brownsville, on a stakeout, killing one of them.
But now she needed help and couldn’t ask her fellow Rangers. Couldn’t put her faith in local law enforcement, Texas-style. She wasn’t all that keen on trusting Feds—from what Bolan understood—but everybody had to lean on someone, sometime.
Nature’s law.
Enter the Executioner.
His contact—Ranger Granger?—had a tale to tell, and Bolan had agreed to listen. He already knew the basics from his briefing, but he needed more details. Needed to know if it was serious enough to rate his kind of handling and yield a positive result.
Bolan had known too many dedicated and courageous women of the law to swallow any crap about their runaway emotions, inability to cope with crises or the rest of it. Short of a power-lifting contest in the heavyweight division, Bolan couldn’t think of any field where women did not rival or surpass their male competitors—and he had seen some Russian ladies who could hoist the big iron, too.
He wasn’t looking for a partner, though. Had no intention of enlisting anybody for his mission, if it turned out that there was a mission here, deep in the heart of Texas. He wanted information he could act on—if it seemed his kind of action was appropriate—while Ranger Granger went back to her normal daily life and put their meeting out of mind as best she could.
Simple—unless it wasn’t.
Bolan knew she had a personal connection to the problem, but he didn’t know how far she planned to chase it. He would have to make it crystal clear that he was not recruiting, not inviting