Stand Your Ground

ISBN-13: 9780786050390

Media Type: Paperback(Mass Market Paperback)

Publisher: Kensington

Publication Date: 03-28-2023

Pages: 416

Product Dimensions: 4.14(w) x 6.74(h) x 1.03(d)

William W. Johnstone is the #1 bestselling Western writer in America and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of hundreds of books, with over 50 million copies sold. Born in southern Missouri, he was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. He left school at fifteen to work in a carnival and then as a deputy sheriff before serving in the army. He went on to become known as "the Greatest Western writer of the 21st Century." Visit him online at WilliamJohnstone.net. J.A. Johnstone learned to write from the master himself, Uncle William W. Johnstone, who began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or researching his massive American Western History library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts. J.A. worked hard and learned, later going on to become the co-author of William W. Johnstone’s many bestselling westerns and thrillers. J.A. Johnstone lives on a ranch in Tennessee and more information is at WilliamJohnstone.net

Read an Excerpt

Stand Your Ground

KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

Fuego, Texas

The bright lights on the tall metal standards around the stadium lit up the night for hundreds of yards around. The cheers of the people in the stands filled the air. An autumn Friday night in Texas meant only one thing.

Fuego had gone to war.

And the enemy was the McElhaney Panthers.

The undefeated Panthers were ranked number six in the state in the 3-A classification and had come in here tonight expecting to crush the lowly Fuego Mules, who currently owned an unimpressive record of two wins and four losses.

Yet here it was, middle of the third quarter, and Fuego held a slender 14–10 lead on the visiting Panthers.

The people in the home grandstands were going nuts. They were on their feet with almost every play as they cheered for the local high school team. The band played the fight song at high volume.

Across the field in the smaller stands where visitors sat, Panther fans who had made the ninety-mile drive from McElhaney were fit to be tied. Their shouts were edged with disbelief as they implored their boys to hold the line. Their dreams of an undefeated season were fading. The Mules had the ball and were driving for a score that would pad their lead.

At the big concession stand on the home side, operated by the Fuego Booster Club, Lucas Kincaid leaned forward and said over the racket, "I'll have two chili dogs and a Coke, please."

The booster club mom who was tired and harried from the press of hungry and thirsty customers blew a strand of blond hair out of her eyes and said, "Sure, hon. You want onions and jalapenos on those dogs?"

Kincaid shook his head and said, "No thanks. Just chili and cheese."

"You got it. "

He saw her casting glances at him as she fixed the chili dogs. Probably wondering if he had a kid playing in the game or maybe in the band. He was fairly youthful in appearance but had touches of gray in his close-cropped dark hair, which made him old enough to have a child in high school. She didn't know him, though, and even in this day and age, everybody knew 'most everybody else in a small town like Fuego.

But not Kincaid. He didn't have any relatives around here, didn't have a kid who was a football player or a cheerleader or a trombonist or anything else.

That didn't stop him from attending the games. He wanted to fit in, because the more he fit in, the lower a profile he could keep. Everybody in Fuego went to the games, so he did, too. He didn't want to get a reputation as a reclusive loner. People remembered reclusive loners.

Kincaid didn't want to be remembered. He didn't want to be noticed.

That way if his enemies came looking for him, they'd be less likely to find him.

Make that when his enemies came looking for him, not if, he thought. It was only a matter of time.

The blond woman set the chili dogs in their paper boats and the canned Coke dripping from the ice chest on the counter in front of him and said, "That'll be five dollars."

"Thanks," Kincaid said as he laid a bill on the counter beside the food.

"Can you handle that okay?" she asked as he started to pick up the food.

Kincaid smiled and said, "Yeah, I think so." His hands were pretty big. He had no trouble holding the two hot dogs in one hand and the Coke in the other. He opened the can before he picked it up and took a long swallow of the cold, sweet liquid.

"Thanks," the woman said. Kincaid could tell that she wouldn't mind if he stayed and talked to her some more, even though more customers waited in line behind him. He had seen the appreciation in her eyes when she cast those hooded glances at him. He was a good-looking stranger, and she probably didn't have much excitement in her life.

Lucky woman, he thought as he turned away.

In his experience, he'd found that excitement was way overrated.

Andy Frazier's nerves were jumping around all over the place. He struggled to bring them under control as he leaned forward to address the other players in the huddle. He had to make them think he was calm so they would stay calm. He was their quarterback, after all. Their leader.

"Red fire right on two," he said, relaying the play that one of the offensive tackles had brought in from the sideline. "Break!"

The team broke and went up to the line. As they took their stances, Andy looked over at the sidelines. He saw Jill Hamilton leading cheers, her long, dark brown ponytail bouncing as she jumped around and waved blue-and-white pompoms.

She must have felt his eyes on her, because she paused and turned, and the connection between them over the green turf was electric. They'd been dating for six weeks and Andy knew she'd be riding him in the front seat of his pickup before the night was over, but it would be even better if they could beat those asshats from McElhaney first.

Andy bent over center and barked, "Hut, hut!" and Charlie Lollar snapped the ball to him. Andy turned, faked to Brent Sanger charging past him from the running back spot, and slid along the line with the ball on his right hip as he waited for Spence Parker to make his cut and come open on his pass route.

But then one of the linemen—Ernie Gibbs, big but slow and stupid—lost his block and suddenly a McElhaney linebacker was right in Andy's face. Gibby, you son of a bitch! Andy screamed mentally as he twisted away from the rush.

There was no pocket—the play was designed to look like a rush, so the linemen had fired out rather than dropping back—and as Andy curled back across the field he saw a sea of McElhaney red and silver coming at him. He dodged this way and that and looked downfield to see if anybody was open, or at least close enough to open that he could heave the ball ten yards over his head and get away with it. They were almost in field goal range for Pete Garcia, but an intentional grounding penalty, with its loss of both yardage and down, would push them back too far.

Then Andy caught a glimpse of a seam in all that red and silver and cut into it without stopping to think. Hands grabbed at him, but he shook loose. Bodies banged into him, but he bounced off and kept his feet. He pulled the ball close to his body to keep it from getting swatted loose in all the traffic.

He was just trying to reach the first-down marker, but suddenly he came free and saw nothing but open field in front of him. The line of scrimmage had been the McElhaney 35, and he was past that now so there was no point anymore in looking for a receiver. Andy put his head down and ran as frenzied shouts went up from the stands on both sides of the field.

He passed the 30, the 25, and cut to his right as he sensed more than saw one of the McElhaney safeties coming in from his left. The diving tackle fell short, but the safety had forced Andy back toward the pursuit. He angled left at the 20 and saw the flag at the front corner of the end zone.

Now it was a race, and a hope that nobody behind him held him or threw an illegal block.

By the time Andy reached the 10, he didn't hear anything except his own pulse pounding in his ears. No, that wasn't his pulse, he realized, it was a couple of McElhaney players closing in on him from behind. He crossed the 5, left his feet at the 3-yard line just as they hit him. Momentum carried all three of them forward, and when Andy came crashing to the ground with nearly 400 pounds of McElhaney on top of him, the ball tucked under his arm was a good eight inches beyond the goal line.

Andy saw that, realized he had scored, and felt a moment of pure elation before he started screaming from the pain of his newly broken leg.

Up in the stands, George Baldwin turned to his friend John Howard Stark and said, "That's a sign of true greatness, being able to make something out of nothing. You know good and well that was a busted play, John Howard, and it wound up being a touchdown."

"Yeah, but it looks like the kid paid a price for it," Stark drawled. "He's still down."

Baldwin, a burly, bear-like, middle-aged man with close-cropped grizzled hair, frowned worriedly toward the group of players, coaches, and trainers clustered around the fallen player.

"Damn it, I hope he's all right. That's Andy Frazier. His dad Bert works for me out at the prison."

"I hope he's all right, too," Stark said. He was taller than his old friend but weighed about the same. Stark had lost a little weight over the past couple of years, but to all appearances he was still a vital, healthy man despite being on the upward slope of sixty.

An apprehensive quiet settled over the stands during this break in the action. The crowd became even more hushed when a gurney was brought out from the ambulance that had pulled up on the cinder track surrounding the field. Everybody on both sides stood up and applauded when Andy Frazier was loaded onto the gurney and taken to the ambulance. His right leg was immobilized and probably broken, but he was awake and talking and holding the hand of a pretty brunette cheerleader.

The kid would be all right, Stark thought. Even with the way things were today, he had everything in the world to live for.

As the teams lined up to kick the extra point, Baldwin said, "You never have told me why you showed up out of the blue to pay me a visit, John Howard."

"Can't a guy stop by to see an old army buddy?" Stark asked with a smile.

"Sure, but you've never been what I'd call the sentimental type. Anything you ever did, you had a good reason for it." Baldwin frowned again. "I heard about your health problems. Hell, everybody heard about them. There was the trial, and all that crap with that drug gang—"

Stark winced and said, "I could do without all the notoriety. I'm just glad things have settled down and I can go places again without being recognized. I've been traveling around, seeing some of the old outfit I haven't seen in years."

"You're not going around and, well, saying good-bye, are you, John Howard?"

Stark laughed and shook his head.

"No, this isn't a farewell tour, George. Fact is, I'm in remission and feel better than I have in a year or more. But none of us are getting any younger."

"Boy, that's the truth," Baldwin said. He clapped as the Fuego kicker drilled the extra point and made the score 21–10. "I've got a hunch I'm about to get a lot older, too."

"The terrorists," Stark said.

"Yeah." Baldwin sighed. "All the places they could have put them, and instead of spreading them out they've sent all hundred and fifty of the bastards to Hell's Gate."

Stark knew exactly what his friend was talking about. The official name of the place was the Baldwin Correctional Facility—a privately run penitentiary with a contract with the United States government to house federal prisoners—but nearly everyone knew it as Hell's Gate because of a geographical feature just west of the prison.

A long line of cliffs ran north and south there, and the red sandstone of which they were formed made them as crimson as blood when the morning sun hit them. Then, in the afternoon, the setting sun lined up perfectly with a gap in the cliff, and anyone looking through that opening at the blazing orb would think that Hell itself lay just on the other side ... hence the name "Hell's Gate."

The prison had been an economic boon to this isolated county in West Texas, which was larger than many northeastern states but had more jackrabbits and rattlesnakes than people, making it a good location for a maximum security facility. Hell's Gate was actually the largest employer in the county these days.

Because of the seemingly permanent economic downturn that had gripped the country for the past ten years, ever since the Democrats had learned how to buy national election victories by passing out benefits to low-information voters and how to steal the elections they couldn't buy, for a time it had seemed that Fuego was going to dry up and blow away.

Hell's Gate had changed all that, providing jobs for many of the town's citizens. Guards, administrators, service personnel, all benefited from the prison's being there. If the trade-off was having hundreds of violent offenders housed just a few miles west of town ... well, so be it. Prices had to be paid.

But now, with the recent closure of Guantanamo and other off-the-books military prisons, finally fulfilling the promise of the president who had started the nation's precipitous slide into mediocrity, the population of Hell's Gate had swelled dramatically, and nobody wanted the newest prisoners: hard-core Islamic fundamentalists who had nothing in their hearts but hate for America and a burning desire to harm the country. Stark had run up against their kind before and knew how dangerous they were.

The Supreme Court had ruled that they had to be held in a civilian prison, though, and tried in civilian courts. It was a farce, an invitation to catastrophe, but age had picked off enough of the Justices so that the gate was wide open for anything the so-called progressives wanted to do, without any way to rein them in.

And that, John Howard Stark thought as he watched a football game on a Friday night in Texas, was the true gate to Hell for a once-great nation.

"Well ... maybe it'll work out all right," he said to Baldwin, although he didn't believe that for a second.

"Maybe," Baldwin said, not sounding convinced, either. "Hey, you want to come out to the prison, have a look around?" He grinned. "I'll buy you lunch in the cafeteria. The food is actually pretty good."

Stark nodded and said, "I'll just take you up on that, George."

Despite losing their quarterback to an injury, Fuego hung on to eke out a 21–17 victory over the previously undefeated McElhaney Panthers. It took a great effort by Brent Sanger, who played defensive back as well as running back, to slap away a Hail Mary pass in the Fuego end zone as time ran out on the clock.

Jubilation filled the town as people in the stands used their phones to post the final score on social networks. Car horns began to honk, not only at the stadium but all along Main Street to the Dairy Queen and McDonald's at the other end of town. Soon there was such a cacophony it seemed more like the team had just won a state championship, instead of improving its record to one game under .500.

So yeah, maybe folks were overreacting to the win, Lucas Kincaid thought as he made his way through the parking lot toward his Jeep, but he was happy for them anyway. With the world the way it was, people needed a little something to celebrate every now and then.

A long line of red taillights stretched from the parking lot along the road in front of the high school to the state highway that ran past the school and the football stadium. Kincaid figured he would sit in his Jeep for a while and let the traffic thin out before he left. He hated inching along in traffic.

Loud voices from his left drew his attention as he walked across the asphalt with his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket. He looked in that direction and saw three men confronting a man and woman who had a couple of small children with them.

The three men were angry, and their comments were pretty profane. One of them said, "You people don't even realize what you've done. We were undefeated! You've ruined the whole season!"

The other two shouted obscene agreement.

So, disappointed McElhaney boosters, thought Kincaid. And from the sound of them, drunken ones at that.

The man and woman tried to lead their kids around the angry visitors. The trio cut them off.

"Whassamatter? You too good to talk to us? You think one lucky win makes you better than us?"

"Mister, my wife and I just want to take our kids home," the man said. He was in his thirties, a little heavyset, wore glasses. Kincaid thought he looked like a teacher.

As if three-against-one odds weren't bad enough already, the three men from McElhaney were all bigger and rougher-looking, the sort of men who worked outdoors in construction or oil and gas. Kincaid's eyes narrowed as he studied them. He had never liked drunks, especially mean drunks ... like his old man.

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Excerpted from Stand Your Ground by William W. Johnstone, J. A. Johnstone. Copyright © 2014 J. A. Johnstone. Excerpted by permission of KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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