He went to the kitchen and put coffee in the basket and added water. As he did the work, I leaned on the door jam and asked, “How was Syria?”
“The fires of hell have leaked through the crust there. Never trust a man who wipes his ass with his bare hand. We thought we knew where that British dude was who likes to lop off heads with a knife, but he was gone when we hit the place. The Brits were royally pissed. Words cannot express how badly they want that murderous prick. They would sell a prince and maybe a princess or two to lay hands on him for just an hour.”
“That’s what they get for letting every raghead who can get there into the country.”
“Don’t say that aloud to them. They don’t have warm fuzzies about the politicians. And Soetoro is doing it too. Welcome to diversity.”
“So where’s your significant other?”
“Rachel? She hit the road. I don’t know the straight of it, but I think she got tired of waiting for me to come home and started picking up men in bars. Anyway, she left a note. Want to read it?”
“No.”
“That’s good, because I tore it up.”
The coffee was dripping through, and he poured me a cup. He had to wait a minute for the pot to deliver enough for another cup.
When we were sitting in his little living room, I said, “I suppose you heard about Jake Grafton getting arrested.”
“Yeah. And parochial school murders and martial law and Texas declaring independence and all of that. The whole damned country is going to hell in a wheelbarrow. I’m thinking about pulling the plug and going to Montana. You know I grew up there?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah. My folks are outfitters, fishing trips during the spring and summer and hunters in the fall. My dad told me last night I’ve got a job there if I want it. I’m sorta thinking I do. I don’t want to go back to Syria. They’re all pedophiles and wife-beaters. Sunnis and Shiites will be fighting each other for a century or two, and the truth is, I don’t think it matters a single teeny tiny little goddamn who wins.”
“Probably not,” I murmured.
“The only thing I am absolutely convinced of, I don’t want to die in that shithole.”
“Montana would be good.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Before you run off, I need some help.” I told him about Jake Grafton and my project to rescue him.
Travis Clay took it like a man and didn’t cry. What he said was, “Fuck you, Carmellini.”
“You aren’t cute enough.”
We batted it back and forth awhile, and I told him Willis Coffee was on board.
“Oh, hell,” he finally said. “Why not?”
Half an hour later, after we had gone through my plan from end to end, he said, “If you have to shoot an FBI agent, can you do it?”
I answered honestly. “I don’t know.”
“Better get that figured out before we saddle up. I guarantee you they will shoot you and me and Willis Coffee in a heartbeat if we stop that car. That’s what they train them to do at Quantico. They won’t even think about it — they’ll just throw lead.”
“I suppose.”
“What you need, Tommy, is a serious diversion. Think about that for a while. The feds will pull out all the stops if we snatch Jake Grafton, whether we shoot an agent or two or not. Barry Soetoro will turn purple. We must give Soetoro and the rest of them something else to think about, something with a higher priority.”
I was in a McDonald’s munching a Big Mac when the phone rang. It was Callie Grafton.
“I saw him,” she said. “He looks good.”
“Great. Maybe I’ll stop by this evening for a beer.”
“Sure,” she said.
We hung up.
So it was a go.
JR Hays rolled into Austin late that Sunday afternoon. He was fighting to stay awake, but he parked by the state capitol and walked across the lawn. Upstairs, he told the governor’s receptionist who he was and took a seat in the waiting room. Legislators came and went, striding purposefully, almost trotting. He gathered that the legislature was in session on the other side of the building, arguing about and passing the legislation needed to convert Texas from a state in the United States to an independent republic.
An hour passed. JR dozed in the chair. The governor shook him awake. “Come into my office, JR. I apologize for the wait. We’re making history and trying to give every Texan a decent place to live.”
He went into the office, and Jack Hays closed the door behind them. “Talk to me,” the governor said, and sat down behind the desk.
JR dropped into a chair and told it. “There are ten dead men at the ranch. I ambushed them last night. They were carrying about two hundred pounds of some kind of drug, and I have about a hundred fifty pounds of it in the truck. Two of the backpacks the mules carried were too full of holes to hold the stuff. One of the guards was that deputy sheriff we met before the funeral, Morales I think his name was. There couldn’t be two men in west Texas tattooed like that. After the ambush, I hot-footed it out to the highway, and who should be driving up and down but Sheriff Manuel Tejada.”
“Was he in on it, you think?”
“I called him this morning, told him there had been a shootout between two drug gangs, and the stuff was lying all over. Told him I wanted to call the state police and DEA. He begged me to wait until he had come out to look the scene over. He would have probably tried to shoot me, so I boogied.”
Jack Hays was a quick study. “How do you want to handle this?” he asked his cousin.
“We have to fix it so the drug syndicate guys don’t come to the ranch with enough firepower to conquer Israel and whack little old me. Plugging Tejada would have felt mighty good, but it wouldn’t have solved that problem. I want to take these backpacks over to DPS headquarters, and the colonel needs to have a press conference. Show the drugs to the press. He needs to thank Sheriff Manuel Tejada for his cooperation, which was an essential element in the investigation that allowed the Texas DPS to break up this gang of smugglers.”
Jack Hays smiled. “The phones here are down. I’ll take you over there. Let’s go.”
The cousins drove to the state police headquarters in JR’s truck. They went in to see Colonel Frank Tenney. Fifteen minutes later two state troopers armed with the key to JR’s toolbox in the bed of his truck carried the backpacks full of dope up to Tenney’s office.
Tenney looked the governor in the eye. “There was a warrant issued for JR over in Upshur County today. He’s wanted for murder and drug trafficking. It’s signed by a justice of the peace. They radioed the news in.”
“Squash it,” Jack Hays said, waving the warrant away as if shooing a fly. “He was working as an undercover agent for the Department of Public Safety. I want you to hold a press conference, for the evening news if possible, and have the department take full credit for recovering a hundred and fifty pounds — or whatever it is — of narcotics and smashing a smuggling gang. And I want you to tell the world that it wouldn’t have happened without the active help of the sheriff of Upshur County, Manuel Tejada, who gave you the intelligence necessary to break up this gang. It is unfortunate that the smugglers chose to fight rather than submit to arrest and trial by jury, but that was their choice. I want you to make the point that the Republic of Texas will seek out and actively hunt down narco-criminals. Tell the world that Governor Jack Hays has personally assured you the Department of Public Safety will get the funding and manpower needed to finally do the job right.”
The lab did a quick check and established the drug was pure, uncut cocaine, and the cops weighed the stuff. The street value they came up with was $1,360,000 at twenty grand a kilo.
Driving back to the capitol, Jack Hays told JR, “Come on over to my place for dinner tonight. We need to talk. Washington is gearing up for a war against Texas.”