Last Tango in Texas

I put my hand on his arm. "Maybe so, but you got a gun and came here to help. That shows a kind of courage you don't come across every day. Being that scared and still taking action, that takes big balls. Don't feel bad about being scared. I was scared, too. Difference is, I'm used to being scared. I've learned to deal with it. You're the kind of guy I want on my team in a firefight. Scared, but ready to fight."

"Well, thanks for saying that. Do you really think we won't have more trouble? "

"I'm not sure, but Tank should call later today and give us a sitrep. In the meantime, let me slap some paint on this and we'll do some shopping."

At the office supply store, we bought a half dozen waterproof, battery-powered wireless motion detectors, the kind store keepers use to alert them when someone comes in or wanders into an area that's not open to the public. Back at Art's house, I showed him that the recesses in his door frames weren't cut deeply enough to permit the deadbolts to extend fully. We drilled and chiseled them out to the right depth and replaced the cheap, short screws holding the striker plates with 3" stainless screws. We also altered his sliding glass doors to prevent anyone from prying them out of the tracks. In a couple of hours, Art was equipped to know when someone was approaching his place and his doors were far more kick-proof and pry-proof.

We were relaxing on Art's patio after lunch with a couple of beers when my cell phone buzzed. It was Tank and he didn't waste any time.

"Bad news. Brian. Turns out the guy whose face you blew off was Constantine Lungu's son. He was grooming the kid to take over and had assigned him to work with Vasile to learn the business from the ground up. He's pissed at Vasile, but he's really pissed at you. Word is, he wants you, Radka and her husband dead. The really bad news is, he has a nephew in a local biker gang, right there in Beaumont. Nicolae says Lungu made a deal with them to take you out. It's not a big gang, but they're into meth and heroin distribution. Bad guys, for sure."

"Well, isn't that just fucking lovely. Okay, thanks for the sitrep. I'll get hold of some of my VFW buddies and work up a plan. You get any more details, let me know ASAP."

I hung up. Art and Radka were looking at me with eyes as big as dinner plates. "We probably don't have a lot of prep time," I said. "Odds are, they'll hit tonight or tomorrow night. You two get out of town. Drive north and find a cheap motel in Arkansas. Pay cash. Sit tight. I'll get right on this."

I made some calls and met my guys at the Waffle House. We took a table in the back of the room and ordered coffee. I had Jeff, Mike, Hank, Lamar and Phil, all standup guys with good amounts of combat time.

I spread a map of my neighborhood on the table and ran through a quick briefing. "So," I concluded, "that's the deal. I'm on a cul-de-sac, with a lake behind the house. Art's next door to the west. There's two areas of 'green space' east and west of us." I pointed out the green splotches on the map. "The trees stretch from the main cross street to the lake. Not much traffic on that road, so that's the best place leave their transportation and move to where they can get behind our houses. I doubt they're stupid enough to try hitting us from the street. Only one way in and out if you're driving or riding a bike. They'll probably come through the trees and we can channel them to one or two kill boxes. What do you think? Will they send one team or two? Hit both houses at the same time?"

We discussed it for a while and concluded that they'd probably send two teams. If there was only one, we'd be ready for that, too.

"Communication is going to be a problem," Jeff said. "We'll be separated. The two guys watching where the bad guys are likely to park won't be able to warn us, unless we use our cells. I'd rather not do that. Too easy for the cops to get a record of the calls, if we become suspects."

Lamar snorted. "Not a problem at all. I sorta 'liberated' a dozen encrypted headset radios when I left my last duty station." He shrugged at our laughter. "Hey, all I did was secure unsecured material! Not my fault if bonehead Special Forces pukes don't guard their equipment."

Phil chuckled. "Good, that takes care of that little issue." He turned to me. "Now, how do you want to set this up? They'll want to be as quiet as possible, so they'll probably use knives or clubs or suppressed handguns. Where do we hit 'em,? And what do we do with 'em after it's done?"

Mike piped up. "You know, I'm running my dad's construction company. Brian, we've been talking about 'dozing out a better shooting range on that piece of scrub you own. I've got an mongo-size excavator sitting on a lowboy flatbed in the yard at work. I can drive that out to your place when we're through here, dig a nice big trench and we can dump everything in there. I'll tow a trailer with a Bobcat behind the lowboy. After I've got the trench dug, I'll leave the 'cat there and use it to backfill the trench, clear some shooting lanes and throw up a berm to use as a bullet stop. I'll just tow the 'cat and trailer out behind my pickup." He paused, looking pleased with himself. "The excavator's going to a job site in Oklahoma tomorrow, so it'll be gone with any evidence it might pick up. And I'll park one of our oversized Transit vans in your garage. We can load all the bodies in that, and bikes if they're riding."

"Brilliant!" We did a quick fist-bump. "That's perfect."

An hour later, we had our plans made. Two men would watch from the trees on either side and be ready to take out any sentries the bad guys left. Two of us would watch each house and hit the hitters when they tried to get in. We split up to prepare for the night.

At 2:45AM, I was in full camouflage, concealed in a clump of crotons in line with the steps up to my back porch. There was a rail around the porch, so getting to my back door required going up the steps. Phil was in the bushes to my left. Mike's voice whispered in my headset. "Four bikes approaching. Two men per bike."

Lamar: "Okay, four tangos per side." A few moments later: "They left one guy to watch each pair of bikes." Short pause: "Six targets moving through the trees; three each side. No long guns visible."

Mike: "Roger, no long guns. Tangos out of sight. Moving on the sentry.'

After an unreasonable amount of time, a man crept out of the trees across the yard near the lake. Two men trailed after him. They cautiously slid up to the steps and one man moved silently up to the door.

Lamar's voice in my ear: "West sentry down."

Mike: "East sentry down."

The man at my door seemed to be trying to pick the lock. Good luck with that; I'd chosen my locks carefully. The second man crouched on the top step while the third man faced the lake, keeping watch.

I'm a hunter. I hunt deer every year with rifle and bow and always harvest a deer with each. I was armed with my bow; an arrow nocked and ready. The men near my door were lined up nicely. I pulled the string to full draw, silhouetted the aiming pin on the bow against the soft glow in the sky from downtown Beaumont, swung it over to step-man's back and released. The three-blade broadhead struck and penetrated his right kidney and his liver. It continued on a rising trajectory, hitting the lock-picker in the right side, slicing through his diaphragm, descending aorta and the lower lobe of his left lung, stopping just under the skin on his left side. Both wounds caused massive, catastrophic blood loss. The lookout turned at the agonized sounds coming from his mates and Phil sprang on him, driving his knife through the man's throat from one side to the other. As he eased the man down, step-man and lock-picker slumped, their blood pressure having gone to near zero in seconds. There were sounds of a brief scuffle from next door.

"East tangos down," I whispered. Hank's voice answered: "West tangos down."

By dawn, all our work was done. There was no trace of any violence and no way to find any without ground-penetrating radar and a top-notch forensic crew.

Two days after our little nighttime adventure, I got a call from Tank. Seems that Constantine got himself killed in a raid to shut down a human trafficking ring and the price on our heads died with him. Vasile just sorta disappeared. So sad.

Through my contact with Detective Roland, I learned that a certain motorcycle club lost eight of its members. They went for a ride one night and never came back. Their bikes were never recovered. So sad.

And my life went back to normal. Other than a panicked call from Colleen when one of her friends called to tell her I'd made the news for shooting two armed foreign nationals, nothing disturbed my peaceful existence. Good guys shooting bad guys in Texas is relatively unremarkable. I got some high-fives at the VFW and that's about it.

Colleen will be home tomorrow and there's going to be an interesting discussion about her sexual activities in Minnesota. We're planning a driving trip through Europe this August and I'm sure we'll have things ironed out by then. All in all, I love my retirement.