Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [73]
“God, I hope there’s not any more of them!” Ford said fervently.
“Get back in the hole, Earl,” Parker snapped.
“Hey, in case you guys didn’t notice, I think I just saved your lives,” Earl said.
“Yeah, thanks,” Ford said. “Get back in the hole until we check things out.”
Parker backed off to the far side of the creek and scanned the bank as far as he could see. Ford made sure the three men were dead and gathered up their weapons.
“Anything? “ he called to Parker.
“Nothing that I can see or hear. I think that was the last of them.”
“All right. Earl, come here and help me with this gear.”
Earl pushed his way through the brush and walked toward Ford. He made a point of not looking directly at the bloody corpses. His face was a little green now. “You, uh, killed them,” he said.
“Yep. Seemed like the thing to do at the time,” Ford drawled.
“Doesn’t it, I don’t know, bother you? Now that it’s all over, I mean, and you’re not caught up in the heat of battle.”
“We weren’t caught up in the heat of battle. That’ll get you killed. The man who keeps his nerves cool is the one who usually survives.” Ford handed him web belts full of ammunition that he had stripped off the dead men. “You can carry these.”
Earl grunted under the weight of the belts. “Aren’t you going to give me one of their guns?”
“Have you ever shot a gun?”
“Well… no. Only in video games.”
“Then I think it’s safe to assume that you don’t know how to use one of these babies that fires more than a thousand rounds in a minute.”
“Uh, no, I guess not. “ Earl hefted the belts. “What are we gonna do now?”
“Take their SUV and get the hell out of here,” Parker said as he rejoined them. “We have to find some place to hole up and figure out our next move.”
“Before they find us again and try to kill us again, you mean.”
“I’d say that’s pretty inevitable,” Ford told him.
They found a place where they could climb out of the creek bed and started toward the black SUV, which was about a hundred and fifty yards away. Black smoke still rose from the burned wreckage of the pickup they had been using.
“You think they left the keys in it?” Earl asked.
“Doesn’t matter, “ Parker said. “We can get it running.”
“Once we’ve made sure it’s not booby-trapped,” Ford added.
“They’d do that? Booby-trap their own vehicle to make sure no one else used it?”
“Oh, yeah. That’d be the smart move, wouldn’t it? Those boys weren’t quite as lucky as we were, but they were smart enough.”
“FPS wouldn’t hire dummies,” Parker put in.
“You think that’s who they worked for?”
Parker nodded. “I’d bet on it. In fact, I’d bet the whole thing is nothing but a cover for a black ops shop.”
“Is there anybody left in the government you can trust?”
As they came up to the SUV, Ford said, “That, my little friend, is the jackpot question.”
But before they could attempt to answer it, a man stepped out from behind the black vehicle, pointed a rifle at them, and said, “Y’all just hold it right there where you are, fellas, or by God, I’ll have to shoot you.”
CHAPTER 31
Ford knew instantly that the man wasn’t one of the government assassins who’d been sent after Earl Trussell and the two rogue CIA agents traveling with him. This man wore boots, jeans, a faded work shirt, and a cowboy hat with a tightly curled brim. His hawklike face was permanently tanned by long exposure to the sun until his skin looked like old saddle leather.
Even though the man looked like something from the Nineteenth Century, the rifle he pointed at them certainly didn’t. It was modern and high-powered, and he handled the weapon like he knew how to use it.
“Well,” he said after a tense minute, “y’all don’t look like a bunch o’ damn drug smugglers. You’re sure loaded down with guns, though, like they usually are.”
“You’ve had trouble with smugglers before?” Ford asked.
“Everybody in this part of