Read Absolution for Free Online Page B

belong?
    Wayne sat back down on the bed.  There was nothing he and Gary could do at the moment.  They had no idea where Logan had gone, and were both hurting and unarmed.  And worse than that, he would have to phone Zack and tell him what had gone down.
    Zack took the call at home.  “Yeah Wayne?” he said.  “Tell me that you took care of the problem.”
    “Sorry, boss, it went south.  He was waitin’ for us.  Someone must have warned him.”
    “Come out to the ranch, now,” Zack said before disconnecting.
    Wayne swallowed hard.  A part of his brain told him to go back to the car and put as many miles as he could between himself and Ajo.  Zack didn’t tolerate failure.  The Apache was a psychopath with an evil temper, and was totally unpredictable.
    “What’d he say, Wayne?” Gary said.
    “He wants us to go out to the ranch,” Wayne said as he racked the motel phone.
    “You think we should?”
    “Yeah.  It wasn’t our fault.  Logan knew that we were comin’ for him.”
    “He’ll be pissed at us.”
    “Shit happens.  He’ll probably blow his stack and then calm down and figure out who gave Logan the nod.”
    Gary frowned.  “The deputy followed him into town and phoned Zack.  Who else could it be?”
    “How the fuck should I know?” Wayne said.  “Lance wouldn’t let us know where he was and then warn him.  The guy’s a hobo.”

    The Ba’cho ( Eagle ) Ranch was situated on the eastern boundary of the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, facing east toward the Gunsight Hills. It was not a working ranch, just a beautiful white two-story house with stately pillars at either side of the main entrance door.  It was an almost exact copy of the Southfork Ranch in Dallas, which Zack had always aspired to owning, since watching the TV series as a boy growing up with his widowed mother and her parents in a rundown four room ship-lap house on a reservation, before Bob Parker had married his mother and set up home in Phoenix.
    Zack tolerated whites, but had a deep-seated loathing of them in general for how his nation had been treated down the years.  His stepfather had been a hard-working guy, but Zack’s ingrained mistrust of whites had been instilled in him by his mother’s father.  They were takers, and he had studied their greed for power and money and was now in a position to never have to be subservient to any man, whatever his color or creed.  He had learned very early in life that knowledge was the key to real power over others; that and the capability to intimidate and use extreme violence, if necessary, to ensure that people did his bidding.
    “Miller and Foley have arrived, boss,” Martin Keno said from the open door to the study, in which Zack was on the Internet checking the balance of one of several encrypted offshore accounts that he used to hide laundered money that he had not paid tax on.
    “Show them through to the kitchen,” Zack said. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
    Martin nodded curtly and made his way along the wide hall, dipping his head so as not to catch it on the top of the archway halfway along it. Martin Keno was six foot eight; a full-blooded Apache with a face that could have been carved from the red rocks that his ancestors had lived among for millennia, before the whites had all but driven them from their lands at the back end of the nineteenth century. Martin had the physique of a rangy basketball player.  He wore his black hair short, and the gray at the temples made him look older than his forty years.  He had known Zack since childhood, and they had become almost inseparable, linked by a similar upbringing, and the fact that neither had any intention of becoming the stereotypical deprived Indians that scraped through life by the skin of their teeth.  They had soon acknowledged that crime would be their salvation, and it had been Zack that had been the natural leader, with the acumen to build a small empire by muscling in on the illegal