Tex's Revenge: Military Discipline, Book Two (2 page)

She didn't get a good impression of his face until he reached the bar and she could see him in the reflective shelving behind Melissa's head. It was plain to see why the bar tender was melting. He was a handsome man in his mid-forties with a thick head of dark hair that was just long enough to be fashionable. His features were on the slim side but well defined and well balanced, set off by a carefully trimmed mustache.

“Hot day. It's savage out there,” he said, his voice rumbling pleasantly.

Zora's entire body tensed. The word 'savage'. It hadn't been an accident, had it? She sipped at her second whiskey of the day, keeping her ears pricked .

Whilst Zora drank, Melissa was agreeing that it was indeed uncommonly warm outside in a tremulous kitten voice that made Zora want to slap her. The man ordered a beer. Once he had his beverage Melissa leaned on the bar as she chattered inanely, her cleavage clearly visible in her low cut shirt. She was doing everything to seduce him barring actually throwing her vagina at the man.

Still, her flirtation did serve a useful purpose. Zora managed to learn that the man's name was Tex and that he was originally from Texas, hence his name. He claimed he was a journalist doing an expose on the bikers of California, but Zora wasn't buying that bit for a second. California had a lot of bikers, but Iron Horse didn't see many of them. Iron Horse didn't see any of them actually, it was the deadest of dead ends and not the sort of town where biker outlaws would have much chance of establishing themselves.

Not sharing Zora's skepticism, Melissa expressed her admiration for journalists at length. Eventually Zora finished her drink, wrote off Tex's use of the word 'savage' as a coincidence and scuffed her way out of the bar without having spoken a word to anyone.

She made her way to the general store with the mind of withdrawing her monthly cash. She liked having cash. The card was fine, but there was nothing like knowing you had hard currency if you needed it. It took her a couple of goes to punch the right PIN number into the ATM, but she got there eventually and felt a flutter of excitement when she saw that there was another five hundred waiting for her. Every time the money came it was like a covenant had been renewed, as if Savage himself were reaching out to her through the ATM. She withdrew the cash then wandered the shelves of the store for a few minutes, picking up some supplies in the form of microwave meals and potato chips.

There was no chit chat at the cash register, Brittany Daniels, the teenage daughter of the proprietor was on duty and she was very firmly in the stage of life where she had no patience for any human older than herself. Zora therefore got away from the general store with little more in the way of conversation than dramatic sighs and eye rolls when she asked for a larger box of tobacco.

All stocked up for a few more days at least, Zora carried her goods over to the car and piled them into an untidy heap on the passenger seat. That was when she heard it, the unmistakeable sound of a camera shutter flickering closed somewhere close by. She turned and saw nothing at first, but then Tex stepped out from the bar, a camera slung around his neck and she knew. She just knew.  Her heart began pounding in her chest as old fear came rushing back. She'd become dulled to the feeling of being on the run, the days had become one long procession of alcohol and tobacco. But the feeling was back now, it was as fresh and real as ever. If Tex was a journalist, she'd eat her socks.

He was walking towards her, a disingenuous smile on his face. In the split second between fight or flight, Zora's mind made the decision for her. “No pictures!” She screamed hysterically as she ran around to the driver's side door, jumped into the car and turned the ignition. Nothing happened. She swore and tried again. Tex was getting closer. He was still walking at normal speed, but he was less than six feet away. She pumped the accelerator then tried the ignition again. She got a small sputter of noise, but no motion. “Fuck oh fuck!” She swore to herself then tried again. The engine sputtered once more, then choked and died. Tex was around behind her car now and before she could take another crack at starting the bucket of bolts, he was bending down at her window.

“You'll be flooding the engine,” he said, smiling in a way that might have been described as friendly.

 “Go fuck off!” Zora swore, only marginally coherent. She was drunk. She wished she wasn't, but she was.

Tex sniffed and his nose wrinkled. “I don't think you're in any condition to drive, if I dare say so,” he said, reaching for her keys.

“Don't!” She slapped at his hand.

“Calm down Zora.”

Hearing her name spoken by the stranger cum government spy, Zora started screaming hysterically and twisting the key for all she was worth whilst stamping on the gas. The car chose that moment to come to life and she was off in a roar of smoke and screams, careening down the center of Iron Horse, burning rubber with the handbrake on. Tex leaped back just in time to avoid being hit by the car as it fishtailed in the dust and headed for the wild blue yonder.

Even with the handbrake still very much on, Zora was driving too fast. The roads surrounding Iron Horse were windy and worn and the tires of the car weren't much better. It seemed as if it was only a matter of time before disaster found her as she gunned the motor and headed for home.

By a miracle she managed to bring the car to a skidding halt outside the house without anyone being harmed. She dashed inside, heading for the stash of items she'd been keeping for a rainy day. The backpack she'd grabbed out of the hotel room all those months ago had gone largely untouched since she'd been dumped in Iron Horse. It was still stuffed with clothes, cash and information and sitting in the corner of her wardrobe, just where she left it. She yanked it up, tossed it over her shoulder and ran back out to the car, but the low squat shape of a black government issue sedan hurtling down the road towards the house told her that she'd been followed. Panicking, she ran back into the house and hid under the bed. It was a childish thing to do, but it was difficult to think clearly with very little blood in her alcohol stream. The beer and double whiskeys she'd consumed on an empty stomach were hitting her hard.

As she panted, trying to control her breathing, the front door opened and heavy footsteps entered. “Zora? It's okay, I'm a friend.” Tex's gravelly voice tried and failed to reassure her.

She held her breath as he moved through the house, searching for her. “I know you're here,” he said. “I saw you run inside.”

“Maybe I went out the back?” Zora made the suggestion out loud, then clamped her hands over her mouth. She'd made a terrible mistake. Possibly the last mistake she'd ever make.

A dark chuckle proceeded Tex as he entered her bedroom and went down on one knee, peering under the bed. “Come on out from under there. I'm not going to hurt you.”

“That's what someone who was going to hurt me would say,” Zora argued, buying herself a little time.

“You can come out from under there yourself, or I can drag you out. Your choice.”

Zora was barely listening to him, she was rustling through her backpack, looking for something she was sure she'd stashed inside it. There was so much loose cash cluttering up the thing it was difficult to find anything else, but her fingers eventually closed around the smooth butt of a loaded pistol. She clicked the safety off and pointed it at him. “Leave me alone.”

“I can't do that.” His expression had not changed, and even though she was viewing him through beer goggles and at a very weird angle, she found that odd. Most people got at least a little perturbed when you pointed a loaded weapon at them.

“Go away,” she said, waggling the nose of the pistol at him. “Get in your nice car and go.”

His expression remained impassive, his voice calm and low and patient. “Come out from there Zora.”

“I'll shoot you! I'll shoot you right between the eyes.”

“No you won't.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

“Because you're trying to bargain with me. You don't want to shoot me. If you wanted to shoot me you would have done it al...

BANG!

Zora discharged the weapon at Tex, disproving his statement. The bullet missed him by a fraction of an inch, slamming into the floorboard just in front of his knee. “I almost made you a cripple,” she declared triumphantly. “You still want to argue with me?”

“You didn't shoot me.” It was his turn to move quickly, he reached for the hand holding the gun and managed to catch Zora's wrist. It was enough of a grip to allow him to yank her out from under the bed in one strong movement. She fired the gun again, but the bullet didn't go anywhere near Tex, it hit the wall and kept going.

“Cut that out,” he growled, wresting the gun away from her. “Cut it out and calm down already.”

Zora didn't have much choice but to calm down, he had her pinned on the dusty floor, her cheek pressed against the rough floorboards, one hand held behind her back to stop her struggling.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Two questions that would have been far more useful asked up front if only she'd had the presence of mind to ask them before diving under the bed like a frightened cat.

His voice rumbled above her, sounding like he had a bunch of gravel stuck in his throat. “My name's Tex, and I just want to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?”

“About Savage.”

“I don't know anyone called that,” she lied instinctively.

His grip on her tightened. “Don't lie to me.”

“You're lying to me,” she argued.

“Well maybe I am and maybe I'm not, but I'm the one on top and the one with the gun and that should probably count for something,” he tried reasoning with her.

“I don't care,” Zora growled defiantly. “I'm not telling you anything.”

Tex hauled her up onto her feet, lifting her into the air as if she barely weighed a thing. He was a lot stronger than he looked. “Here's what's going to happen,” he said, laying down the law. “We're going to go to the kitchen, sit down and have some coffee and a talk Nobody is going to shoot anyone. We're going to play this out nice and friendly.”

Zora shook her head emphatically. “I'm not having coffee with you and I'm not telling you anything.”

“Listen,” Tex said, turning her so that she was forced to face him and his mustache. “Savage is my friend too, okay? He's gone missing. I need your help to find him. Now can you do that for me?”

Zora nodded slowly. “Maybe.”

“Good. Now let's get you sobered up a bit.”

Zora was still scowling, but she followed Tex out to the kitchen and sat in a chair, watching as he put the kettle on the stove. She didn't trust a word he was saying, but he definitely knew about Savage and he knew about her and if he knew that meant that other people might know, other people who might shoot first and ask questions later.

“How do you know Savage?” She tested his knowledge a little bit.

“We first met on Desert Storm,” Tex said, leaning back against the counter with his arms folded over his chest. “He was special ops. I was intelligence.”

“Why do you want him now?”

“Like I said, he's gone missing.”

She shrugged. “Maybe he's just been sent somewhere. They'll do that to you.”

“Maybe,” Tex said. “But I have pretty high clearance and there's no record of any missions. And I got this in the mail.” He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a small white envelope and tossed it on the table in front of Zora.

She picked it up, opened it and squinted at the contents. There was a slip of paper with her name, her address, and a symbol she didn't recognize.

“What's this?” She pointed to a circle with two horizontal arrows through it.

Tex chuckled as if something was funny. “It's a hobo symbol. Means hit the road quick.”

“So he sent you after me,” she mumbled.

“He did. You must be special to him.”

Zora felt his keen eyes boring into her head. Tex was making a good job of playing the concerned friend, but she could sense danger so thick she could almost smell it. The man standing before her was no friend of Savage's – and he was no friend of hers either.

Chapter Two

Ever the model captive, Zora sat in the passenger seat next to Tex snacking casually on cheesy chips they'd picked up at one of their stops for gas. She'd been surprised when the evil bastard had been nice enough to get them for her. She mentally called him an evil bastard because he'd handcuffed her to a railing in the car, which seemed to have been added for the express purpose of handcuffing people to it. It stood to reason that only evil people had their cars modified to facilitate casual prisoner transport.

“You're very calm now,” he noted in his low, growling voice that made everything he said sound dreadfully dramatic.

Zora looked out the window. The people in the cars whizzing by them on the other side of the road would have had no idea at all that they were passing an abduction in process. There was a certain elegance to the entire affair that she had to admire.

“I guess,” she replied at length. Truth be told, part of her was glad just to be out of Iron Horse. The fact that she was being abducted was almost incidental. It was hardly her first go around with incarceration, Savage had been the man to pop her kidnap victim cherry and everybody knows that there's no time quite like your first time. Besides, she'd already tried an alcohol-fueled hysterical tire squealing escape and it hadn't worked. She was sobering up quite quickly thanks to copious amounts of coffee and junk food and had come to the conclusion that it was probably best to go with the flow until there was an opportunity to make a better, less wildly obtrusive escape.

“You know where he is?” Tex tried a casually probing question, evidently hoping she was dimwitted enough to give Savage away in general conversation.

“I have no fucking clue.” She swore languidly, with no great passion or malice. She should have been terribly upset with Tex, but she found herself feeling rather numb instead. She theorized that it was because people are only capable of feeling so much emotion. The first time something terrible happens they tend to react quickly and with a sense of outrage, but the more often terrible things happen, the lesser the reaction. Maybe she was just at a point in her life where being kidnapped by a strange man just wasn't enough to evoke sustained panic. Or maybe the cheesy chips were just really good.