He had been flying for his Military Aviator Test.

Born in Fairfax, Virginia, Love was appointed to the U.S. Army in 1910. In April 1913, he was ordered to Texas City, Texas, and there detailed for aviation duty with the Signal Corps and the 1st Aero Squadron. He was with the Signal Corps Aviation School at the time of his death.

Love Field opened for civilian use in 1927, and remained the major aviation hub for Dallas and its citizens until being joined by the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional (now International) Airport in 1974.

Delgado shook his head disgustedly.

Who gives a shit?

Just another dead gringo.

Damn land-grabbers.

Delgado looked at the other cast bronze plaque. It had a replica of a Texas lawman. He wore a big Stetson hat, a gun belt with a Colt revolver, a Western-style shirt bearing a badge that was a five-pointed star within a circle, Western-style pants, and pointed-toe boots.

The sign read:

TEXAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY “The Lone Star State Presents…” ONE RANGER, ONE RIOT While developing settlements in what then was the Mexican province of Tejas, Stephen F. Austin called for men to “range” the frontier to protect its people. These “Rangers” in 1835 officially became the legendary policing force known as the Texas Rangers.

In 1896, Texas Ranger Captain William McDonald was sent here to Dallas to shut down a planned illegal heavyweight prize fight.

Dallas Mayor F. P. Holland met Captain McDonald as he disembarked his train at Union Station downtown.

Mayor Holland looked at Captain McDonald and in great shock said, “Where are the other Rangers?”

“There’s only one fight,” McDonald said. “Hell, ain’t I enough?”

McDonald’s legendary reply became known as “One Ranger, One Riot.”

The phrase embodies the toughness and determination of all those who have sworn the oath to uphold the laws as a Texas Ranger.

One creed of the Texas Rangers is also from Captain McDonald: “No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.” (Sculpture created by Waldine Tauch, and gifted by Mr. and Mrs. Earle Wyatt on the occasion of the dedication of Love Field’s new terminal, 1961.) More gringo bullshit.

And this should still be the “Mexican province of Tejas.”

Delgado’s phone vibrated, announcing a received text message.

He pulled out the phone and read its screen:

214-555-7636

About damn time.

He looked at the clock on the phone’s display. It showed seven forty-five. The cellular service in Dallas had automatically set back the time on the phone; Texas Standard Time was an hour behind Eastern Standard Time.

That makes it eight forty-five in Philly.

While he had the phone out, he typed and sent a text to Omar Quintanilla:

A moment later, his phone vibrated.

Quintanilla had replied:

Delgado snorted. Poor little El Gigante.

Another text then came from Quintanilla:

Delgado nodded.

He had told Quintanilla to settle Jim?nez’s bill with two of the TEC-9 pistols that they had stolen from the Fort Worth gun store last month. The store was on the south side of town, and they had carefully cased it over time.

He grinned at the memory of that morning.

El Gato, El Cheque, and Paco Gomez had taken the Chevy Suburban to a salvage yard on the western edge of Dallas, where they’d swapped the plates with ones they’d taken off a just-totaled pickup. They’d also helped themselves to a twenty-foot length of rusty heavy-duty chain from one of the tow trucks there.

At two the next morning, El Gato, El Cheque, and Gomez had driven the SUV to the gun store in South Fort Worth.

The store was in a deteriorating shopping strip two blocks east of Interstate 35, and its storefront was covered with large signs advertising the guns and accessories inside. It had surveillance cameras, and wrought-iron bars bolted over the windows and the aluminum-framed glass door.

El Gato and Crew had a can of black spray paint, a length of chain, and a half-ton Suburban.

Delgado had let Gomez out at the corner. Gomez, who stood six-one, wore a black hoodie, its top up. He carried the can of spray paint along the side of his leg, attached to the end of a four-foot-long extension arm they’d bought at Home Depot for ten bucks. He trotted down the sidewalk of the strip center, keeping his face concealed from the cameras. When he got to the gun store, he simply extended the aerosol can to the camera lenses and squeezed the extension arm’s grip. The lenses were quickly covered in a coating of black paint.

Moments later, El Gato was backing up the Suburban to the front door. Then El Cheque, the chain coiled over his shoulder, jumped out the right rear passenger door.

He dropped the chain at the foot of the gun store’s front door, grabbed one end with his leather-gloved hands, and began threading it through the wrought-iron bars. Then he wrapped the chain around the heavy metal support bar bolted across the center.

Gomez, also wearing leather gloves, took the chain’s other end and doubled it around the trailer ball of the receiver hitch that was affixed to the Suburban’s rear frame. Then, with an open palm, he pounded twice on the big SUV’s rear window… and ran.

El Cheque got out of the way just as the accelerating truck took up all the slack in the chain-and popped the bars and the door off the face of the storefront. It made an enormous noise. There was mangled metal and broken glass everywhere and, inside, an alarm blared angrily.

El Cheque ran inside the store and spray-painted the cameras there, while Gomez went to the Suburban, unwrapped the chain from the hitch, and pulled the door frame and twisted wrought iron to the side. El Gato then backed up the Suburban to the doorway, and Gomez threw open the SUV’s rear hatch, removed a pair of bolt cutters, and went into the store to cut the steel cable the store owner had strung through the trigger guards of all the shotguns and rifles on the racks. El Cheque was already coming out with an armful of the TEC-9s.

They’d had the back of the Suburban, its rear seats all folded flat, covered with guns and ammo in five minutes.

And two minutes after that, they were on the interstate and getting far away from the scene and its blaring alarm.

Juan Paulo Delgado was not surprised that Angel Hernandez had agreed to the barter. The TEC-9, a more or less cheap knockoff of a fine Swiss submachine pistol, was a coveted weapon. Early semiautomatic TEC-9s had an open bolt design and could be converted to fully automatic. They even had a fifty-round box magazine, which made for one lethal weapon.

The newer models that El Gato and Crew had stolen were of a slightly different design and could not be converted, and their mags held only twenty bullets. But they still resembled the older fully auto TEC-9s that Hollywood had glorified by having all the badass movie drug-runners shooting them. And that was enough to give the gun “street cred”-credibility in the ghetto. So much so that homeys even shot one another just to get their hands on any variant of the TEC-9. They even mimicked that moronic pose they saw in the shoot-’em-up flicks: holding the guns sideways while they fired.