Free Run to Ground by Don Pendleton Page B

enough to realize the gunner would not go home empty-handed. Hector and his sidekicks would be hanging in until they found their man, or until they satisfied themselves that he had slipped away.
    Camacho had been right, of course. If he was wounded and on foot, their quarry could not have gone far. His hopes of flagging down a ride this time of day were slim and none, but even if he tried he would be forced to show himself along the highway, and the vultures would be waiting there to pick him off. If he had gone to ground somewhere in Santa Rosa, on the other hand, he would be hungry, thirsty, maybe dying from his wounds. The guy would have to try to get in touch with someone who could patch him up, at least enough for him to travel.
    And his thoughts came back to Becky. As the only doctor in a radius of about thirty miles, she stood a decent chance of meeting Mr. X before he tried to hit the road. If he was armed and desperate, she might be in a dangerous predicament. Held hostage, maybe, in her own damned office by a raving lunatic.
    It might be the solution to his problems, Vickers thought, if things worked out that way. He'd have a chance to rescue Becky, earning her eternal gratitude, while taking out Camacho's man without a lot of fireworks from the border rats. He would be forced to shoot the guy, of course; he couldn't have Rivera's people coming for him at the jail, and if Rivera didn't like it... well, he'd have to live with it.
    Grant Vickers reined in his wild imagination before it had a chance to carry him away. He had no proof as yet that the stranger was in town, forget about the Dirty Harry number out at Becky's. Still, it wouldn't hurt to warn her, just in case. It was his duty as the law in Santa Rosa, and no one could ever say that he had left his duty unfulfilled.
    * * *
    Bud Stancell was surprised to hear the bell that signaled customers in need of gas this early in the morning. He continued to open at seven every morning, even though he seldom turned a dollar prior to noon, and lately there were days when only one or two loyal patrons — locals — stopped at all. Sometimes he thought he should have sold the business after Ellen died, and tried his luck in Phoenix or Las Vegas, but he could not bring himself to leave.
    He had grown up in Santa Rosa, as his parents had before him, but the town was different in those days. There was more border traffic in the years before the interstate had placed a quarantine on smaller towns, conducting tourists in their air-conditioned Cadillacs to Tucson and points east without a necessary stop in Santa Rosa. Time had been when stores were flourishing on Main Street, dealing souvenirs and cactus candy, buckskin duds and beadwork from the Papagos, but that was old news now. A few more years, he thought, and Santa Rosa might dry up and blow away, another ghost town swallowed by the creeping desert, lost to living memory.
    Bud Stancell would remain because it was his home, but he had other dreams for Rick, his son. Already taller than his father, Rick had been starting quarterback for Ajo's high school football team last fall, and if he kept his grades up, he was looking at a scholarship, no sweat. It made a father proud to realize his son was strong
and
smart, a combination noticeably lacking in a number of his teammates. Once he went away to college, Rick would have a new perspective on his life, a view of something outside Pima County, even outside Arizona. He would see there was a big, wide world out there, and no mistake.
    Bud Stancell's time away from home had been accumulated in Korea, at the Chosin killing grounds, and he was grateful to return and find Santa Rosa more or less unaltered in his absence. All the changes had come later, after he had married, sunk his final dollars into the construction of a service station and garage. In those days, "service" meant precisely that; a patron didn't have to kiss your ass to get the windshield cleaned, and gasoline was