Power and Empire

Bonnie Porcaro had just taken a bite of her medium-rare ribeye when she heard what sounded like a very angry man in the aisle behind her booth. A petite blond woman in her mid-sixties, she had grown up in Harlingen, which was just about as close as one could get to Mexico and still be in Texas. She hadn’t been back to her hometown in more than twenty years, but she still understood enough Spanish to know what a man behind her had whispered.

“Time to kill the whore.”

That just wasn’t something good men said, even if they were joking. The slurred tone of his gravel voice told Bonnie this man was deadly serious.

Her husband, Mike, sat across from her. He started to say something, but she raised her hand, shushing him. They’d been married more than four decades and he knew all too well when she was serious. At the same time, Bonnie Porcaro reached beneath the table with her right hand and drew a stainless-steel Kimber K6s .357 revolver from a simple pancake holster under her vest. The vest was stylish lightweight cotton and suited a woman of her age. It also did a nice job of hiding her sidearm — which she was seldom without.

Bonnie had done her research, quizzing her nephew, who was a detective with the Dallas PD, and watching dozens of videos of different models on the Hickok45 YouTube channel. This was the first gun and holster she’d ever owned.

Bonnie wasn’t a gun nut any more than a person who needed a pickup and bought one for a certain purpose was a truck fanatic. She did not concern herself with all the fancy gadgets and gizmos in the firearms culture. Still, she was practical and went to the range with her girlfriends once a month, religiously presenting the weapon the same way each time she took it out of the holster at night as her instructor had taught her. The little Kimber was plenty for her needs — and she was a heck of a shot. Her nephew told her so.

Her husband’s eyes grew wide as she brought the weapon up. He didn’t say anything or try to be a hero.

Bonnie had this.

She shifted her body sideways in the booth, head toward the wall, feet toward the aisle and the threat. She was aware of the booth across from her, which was thankfully empty, making her shoot/don’t-shoot decision a little simpler.

Bonnie’s finger tightened on the trigger as the front sight of her Kimber covered a tall and slovenly Hispanic man who was clutching a pistol that was tucked down into his waistband. He staggered, dragging his feet as if he were intoxicated. Definitely a bad guy.

A male voice to the left suddenly yelled, “FBI!” causing her to pause her shot.

Bonnie hardly had time to blink before the redheaded woman in the next booth swung around the corner with a long pepper grinder in both hands like a baseball bat. She bashed the tall man in the face, dropping him at the same moment that a second man, this one with a flat nose, staggered by. His attention split between the FBI agent behind him and the woman who’d just bashed his friend in the face, and the flat-nosed man roared, spewing curses in Spanish as he drew a black pistol from under his shirt.

Bonnie Porcaro let the man’s silhouette blur, focusing on the Kimber’s front sight as she pressed the double-action-only trigger. Her instructor had told her over and over that slow was smooth and smooth was fast. The pistol barked twice. It was so loud on the range, but, oddly to Bonnie, it seemed to make no noise as it fired. She wasn’t even sure it had fired, and then thought maybe she’d missed if it had. The man with the flat nose just turned his head to look at her, as though he was put out by her behavior. He started to bring his gun around, but she’d already adjusted her aim and pressed the trigger again. The Kimber’s third bullet punched an almost perfect hole in the bridge of his flat nose.

He lingered there for a moment, then pitched sideways on top of his dazed friend, who’d just been smacked with the pepper grinder.

“FBI,” a man’s voice said again to her left. “Ma’am. Please put down your weapon.”

Bonnie slowly lowered the Kimber to the table before raising both empty hands above her head. She’d trained for this as well. Across the table, Mike stared at her slack-jawed, as if he wasn’t quite certain who he’d been sleeping with for the last forty-four years.

• • •

Dominic Caruso secured the blond woman’s revolver while he aimed his own weapon at the guy Callahan had clobbered with the pepper grinder. Callahan had her handcuffs out and was already moving in. She looked up at the blonde.

“You okay?”

“He was going to shoot you,” the woman said. Her hands were still up, but she was remarkably composed for someone who’d just blown off the back of a man’s skull.