The concrete-walled room had not seen daylight in eighty years. Its only visitors were the occasional mouse or dung beetle which died of thirst or hunger shortly after happening along. There was a growing collection of the bones and husks of such spread around in little dried piles. The room’s furnishings-which consisted of little more than a small card table and a turn-of-the-century rocking chair-had been perfectly preserved in the dry, North Texas climate, and the room’s only permanent occupant, seated in the rocking chair, grinned vacantly in the dark, waiting to greet the first interloper to come along.
The occupant was a skeleton, little more than fine clothing over crumbling, desiccated flesh and protruding bone. Had the skeleton still retained its meat and had blood still coursed through its now empty spaces, it would have been surprised at the sudden present that shushed through the inky blackness overhead and landed on its lap, cracking its pelvis and sending decades of dust flying.
The present, a leather physician’s bag, itself an antique, was partially open. The bag landed upside down and its contents spilled out onto the dust-laden trousers and slapped down onto the concrete floor with a dull thud.
Perhaps if the occupant still had eyes with which to see and a light to see by, it would have seen the denominations of the bills in each deck of a hundred, and perhaps after a lifetime spent in earnest chasing after just such, it would have grinned even wider, if old corpses could.
Instead it accepted the gift from above silently and began again to mark time in the dark as it had done for decades.
Outside, above, lightning flashed and thunder boomed.
Inside, the dust that had for a brief moment stirred, slowly settled back down.
All the hell started on Monday morning while I was driving north to work along the Loop near the pulsing heart of Austin. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper-I could have made as much headway on foot.
I kept seeing this red roadster. Flashy. One of those kit jobs that make no pretense at posing as original. One minute it was behind me and I could see it in my side view mirror, then in a flash past me, several cars ahead, then I passed it again. I wouldn't have cared too much about the roadster, only there was this girl. Story of my life.
A man gets up into his late thirties and the chances are he stops looking and begins observing. I don't know when exactly this happened to me. Couldn't pin it to a day or even a year, really. Just sort of crept in and one day I found myself completely aloof in my watching; peripheral vision on automatic. Not shifty, no. But
The girl in the roadster that morning knew I was looking, but I got the feeling that she didn’t mind so much. I caught just the hint of a smile as she trundled up even with me one more time, just before I had to pass her again.
She had big hair, even though it was tied off into a ponytail. Women with ponytails do funny things to me. This one had both a ponytail and hair with actual mass to it, but at the same time her hair looked fine, like baby hair. It was reddish blond, the color of an East Texas sunset-that's where I'm from-and it rippled like the wind through the high grass. Also, she wore huge, snotty sunglasses. In a word she wore “bitch” like a totem, except of course for her mouth, her glorious soft mouth.
Behind me, ahead of me, behind.
I didn't turn my head. Not even once.
But then she came right alongside. My exit lane was coming up, but suddenly I wasn’t taking it. I had bigger fish to fry. My aging heart, God bless it, didn't even miss a chug-too seasoned to stop working over a goddess in traffic. There was a dead standstill ahead, likely some kind of accident. Happens every day in the big city. Unlucky for somebody else, but so far I was liking it.
My peripheral vision extended to encompass points west, like maybe Fiji Island. My window was cracked just two inches-enough to muss my hair a little-and the wind was coming from that way and upon my life I could smell her.
My finger jabbed at the window button, lowering it to half mast. I knew she was still looking. It felt like she wanted me to look at her.
I counted: one-Mis-sis-sip-pi-two-Mis-sis-sip-pi-three-Mis-sis-sip-pi, and turned slowly. No smile. Just deadpan. A guy in traffic on his way to work.
She removed her sunglasses and smiled a little and old faithful betrayed me: Clang!
I looked at her and tried not to smile, which was difficult, the way she smiled at me. Playful, as if to say: “There are possibilities here. The door is slightly ajar. Maybe you could come on in. Maybe not. We’ll see.” She was the cat and I the mouse and some kind of game was in progress.
I wasn’t paying any attention to what was going on ahead of me, and it just so happened that that was the game she’d been playing all along-distraction.
She looked forward, taking those lovely eyes off me.
When I finally looked forward, the line ahead of me had moved up perhaps fifty or so yards.
My right foot began the motion to switch from brake to gas and before that small space between foot and pedal was closed completely I heard rubber peeling on asphalt in a growing whine. There was a red and white blur just as I pushed on the gas and my reflex was to brake again, but before I could even do that the beautiful girl with the man-slaying smile and the bitch glasses and the red roadster that I wouldn’t have minded too much sitting in my own driveway darted into the narrow space between her and the car ahead of me and my heart lurched and my ears winced in anticipation of a metal-on-metal screech that didn’t come.
I suppose my ears turned red. It felt like that, anyway. Maybe someone behind me had seen it all and knew that I’d been played for a fool.
And maybe not. The problem was that
As the shock wore off I moved forward again, my window full up now and destined to remain so. I’d been thoroughly put in my place.
By the time I got caught up to the traffic in front of me the red roadster with the snotty little bitch had switched lanes again, merged into moving traffic and was gone.
So what does a man who’s a blink away from forty do? He does what he’s supposed to do. He goes to work as if nothing has happened at all.
“Good morning, Mr. Travis,” Penelope, my receptionist greeted me. No difference between this and any other given morning. Sometimes I wished Penny wasn’t so damned cute. That morning her cuteness was slightly accusatory.
I smiled and nodded and quickly disappeared around the corner and down the hall and into my office. Comfort and safety was to be found there.
I dropped my briefcase into a chair covered with papers and marveled that nothing spilled.
I made a quick jaunt down to the kitchen for a cup of hot coffee and managed to catch Nat Bierstone’s back disappearing into his own office where he’d probably be until about lunch time.
Back to my Corinthian leather executive chair. I propped my Dr. Martens up on my desk at the same time that I noticed a stack of bills that needed to be paid before the week was done. I’d get around to it.
I sipped my coffee, read the sports section and began to enliven.
I was in the middle of an article on Lance Armstrong, who could probably ride through hell and back on a bicycle-and I was enjoying the article-when my phone buzzer went off. That’s almost always the way it happens.
“Yeah, Penny?”
“Mr. Travis, your first appointment is here.”
Appointment? I didn’t have any appointments. I always kept my own calendar, so no one else actually knew my schedule.
“Penny, are you sure this not Mr. Bierstone’s appointment?”
“Uh, sir, Mr. Bierstone had me leave a message for you. He wanted you to talk to her.”
“I didn’t get any message,” I said, and just as the last word was out of my mouth my eyes came to rest on a small pink phone message tear-out sheet underneath the heel of my shoe on my desk top.
“Wait, think I found it.”
Sure enough.
“Okay, Penny. Give me a minute, then send her in.” I hung up.
I quickly started clearing my desk. Where does all the paper come from? I have a theory about paperwork: I’m certain it mates and reproduces during the night.
I swept the stack of bills and the large index card box on top of it (my client file system-I don’t trust computers, or at least not with that kind of information) under my arm, toted it over to the file cabinet, opened a drawer, dropped it in and slammed the drawer shut.
By the time I was back standing in front of my desk and surveying the room, the door opened.
And, of course, it was her.
The roadster girl, bitch-glasses and all.
The moment of recognition was priceless.
Her eyes widened, her mouth dropped slightly open. She tried to remove her sunglasses but only managed to drop them. I took three long steps toward her, bent quickly and picked them up just as she was beginning to stoop down.
I smiled, meeting her eyes.
“Hi,” I told her, pressing her sunglasses back into her delicate hand. She looked down at them as if I’d given her a little present of some sort, realized what they were and tucked them into her purse.
“Uh, hi.”
“Miss Simmons?” I asked.
“Um, yes. Listen, Mr. Travis, I have to say I’m sorry for cutting you off like that.”
“What are the odds, huh? Don’t mention it. It’s forgotten. Come on and have a seat. Would you like some coffee?”
I took her by the elbow, guided her, effortlessly.
She was beautiful. I caught the scent of something. An exotic fragrance. Couldn’t name it if I tried. I successfully resisted the urge to ask her what it was.
She took the proffered chair. I sat down at my desk, facing her.
She just sat looking at me. Not smiling. There was a tiny wrinkle in her otherwise perfect forehead, the beginning knit of a frown.
“How can I help you?”
“Mr. Travis. I’m not sure you can. I’m not sure anybody can.”
I’d heard this before. A few times it’s been true. It’s a marvel to me the whole spectrum of trouble that human beings can get themselves into. I suppose I’ve seen most everything.
“I know it must really appear that way,” I told her, trying not to smile. I suppose I was a little amused, and at her expense. “Just about anything can be untangled, if you know which string to pull.”
“Which string,” she said. Not a question. She was no longer looking at me but at the shelf behind me. Actually I’d say she was peering into some dark space in the universe of her mind.
“Right,” I said. “Why don’t you just start-”
”At the beginning?”
“Well… Okay. You can start there if you want to.”
Her face reddened. Cheeks puffed up just a bit. There was moisture stealing into the inside corners of her exotic, slightly feline eyes. My stomach did a little gymnastics, a little back flip that it was out of practice on. If she started crying, I thought I might fall in love.
Damn but she was gorgeous. Those green eyes the color of a field of clover. Shiny auburn blond hair down to her delicate shoulders. A smallish bone structure with a perfect thin neck and oh so perfect little wrists.
“Mr. Travis,” she began, and sniffed once, delicately.
“Call me Bill.”
“Bill. Have you ever been afraid?”
There are some people that you just don’t cross. Julie Simmons had made it a point to cross the exactly wrong person, a North Texas liquor baron named Archie Carpin, distant relative to the Carpins of Signal Hill and Stinnett up in the Texas Panhandle.
I’d read up on the Carpin Gang and some of the 1930s depression desperadoes before, back in the days when I actually did my assigned college research. I’d even gone once and kicked around up in Hutchinson County in North Texas, poked my nose into the abandoned, decaying buildings and rust-encrusted oil derricks of that ghost town. It was private property and I didn’t exactly have permission, but when you’re young you tend to think you’ve got license to look where you want, do what you want. Also, you tend to think and act like you’re immortal-at least I did, which at that time, was pretty close to the truth. What was amazing to me was that anybody else knew about Signal Hill and those old-time gangsters, but here was this pretty girl who had cut me off in traffic giving me chapter and verse.
Back during the early 1920s the Carpin brothers ran the small slapped-together oil boomtown a few miles east of Stinnett in what was little more than a den of bootleggers, gamblers and other criminals of low order. During those days of big bands and prohibition, men on the far side of the law either rose to the top of the heap or got stomped under. For a brief time the Carpins were on the top of that heap. When Signal Hill was cleaned out by the Texas Rangers in 1927, the former boomtown imploded and the Carpins, who had managed to avoid arrest and capture, had dispersed. When I went up there to look around back in the mid 1980s there was little left. So when the girl with the bitch sunglasses and the too-cute frown mentioned Carpin’s name, I naturally questioned her on it, and she not only admitted that the man who was after her was one of
There was one question though, once I put it to her, that she didn’t want to answer, and therefore, it was the one thing that I had to keep putting back in her court each time she attempted to bat it away. The question was, of course: “What did you do?”
When she finally told me, I had to contain myself from bursting into laughter.
She finished the story. I could tell that she’d left out quite a bit.
“I’m not sure I can help you,” I said. She frowned. There was bit of shocked expression on her face.
“Look,” I said. “Miss Simmons, my clients are…”
“What?”
“Well. I have to walk a very… I just can’t-No one could just walk in and ask someone to… Look, if we so much as took one step outside of the bounds of-”
She kept turning her head slowly, cocking it, waiting for me to finish. I found I didn’t have the words.
“Mr. Travis,” she said. “It’s two million dollars.”
I’m not normally impressed with money, of any denomination. But two million?
“So you’re not exactly here to turn yourself in,” I said.
“Getting arrested wouldn’t be half bad. I’d stand a better chance of surviving, I think,” she said. “But if I don’t get some help
She must have caught the quizzical look on my face.
“I don’t have the money
I looked closely at her, searched for some hint, some shred of evidence in her eyes that something of what she told me wasn’t true. I didn’t find it.
She unzipped her small, tan clutch purse and pulled forth three pathetic-looking, wadded-up hundred dollar bills. She was about to give them to me.
A tear slipped down her cheek.
Very suddenly the room felt warm, like someone had cranked up the heat. Possibly my ears were turning red again. I couldn’t let her give me the money, no matter what else was going to happen.
“Miss Simmons-”
”Julie,” she said, her voice just above a whimper. Her face was flushed and the muscles around her mouth were tight.
There, across from me over the dark gulf of my rosewood desk, was a girl who was used to helping herself. A girl who took her chances, to be sure, but who normally won out in the end. And here she was at the end of her rope. I at least knew enough to know that I had to know more, and that if it were possible, I would help. And it wasn’t as though I had any choice in the matter. No woman I had ever known had thus far been able to penetrate my armor with the simple expedient of tears. But it was not only this that drew me to her so inevitably and completely-it was also the simplest and yet most profound of feelings. And it was actually
“Julie.” I said. “Are you hungry?”
“Starved,” she said after a short pause. Her head tilted to the left. A little smile was on the verge of taking up residence.
“Would you like to have a little breakfast with me?” I asked.
“God, yes,” she said, smiling suddenly past her tears.
“Good,” I said. “I know just the place.”
There are places to get good coffee and a decent breakfast and be in your own crowd. The place I took Miss Simmons was nothing like that. Nestled in a predominantly lower class neighborhood on the East Side of Interstate 35 there is a hole-in-the-wall place where they start the barbecue about ten years ahead of time and the wood smoke hangs about in the late morning hours like London fog. We had places like that back where I grew up, and I made it a point to find one about the second day of my life in Austin, Texas.
My old Mercedes was parked underneath probably the only willow tree in East Austin, not ten feet away.
The two of us sat just outside the screen porch at a rickety, paint-peeled picnic table as the April sun rose toward zenith between draping willow branches. I found myself wondering whether or not I'd died and gone someplace I couldn't begin to deserve. Her sunglasses lay not an inch from my right hand, which held the scalding cup of coffee from which I sipped.
I heard the familiar crunch of heavy footsteps drawing close from around the wisteria bush close by.
“Julie,” I said, “I’d like for you to meet a friend of mine.”
She stood up halfway, and I suppose because of my upbringing, I found myself standing as well.
“This is Lawrence White,” I told her. “Lawrence, meet Julie Simmons.”
Lawrence White was a gentle giant. He was a mountainous, dark-skinned, Haystack Calhoun-of-a-man with a blood-red apron already stained with his homemade barbecue sauce. The smile Lawrence wore on his face that morning was slightly nervous, as if he were in the presence of royalty. I’d never seen the man act that way before, but then again I’d never seen him in the presence of a beautiful woman before. I’ve seen men who have gone through some of the worst hells that men have ever experienced under fire who, when they came face to face with a beautiful woman became slightly less articulate than your average garden squash, which is descriptive of how Lawrence White was acting.
“Lawrence,” I said. “Shake her hand.”
He did.
“It’s nice to meet you, Lawrence.”
“Uh. You too,” he said.
Julie’s arm got a good workout as he shook it up and down.
“Lawrence,” I said. “How about two plates of your world-famous breakfast?”
“You got it, Chief,” he said, finally looking at me, his face breaking into a huge, boyish grin.
For a moment he just stood there, his attention back on Julie, who sat back down and looked up, smiling at him.
Within ten minutes we had two small paper plates in front of each of us complete with plastic fork, two fried eggs sunny side up, a slice of Jimmy Dean sausage and a healthy pile of banana pudding.
For a while there under the shade of that willow tree on that first morning, I would have sworn that the woman was happy. What a difference. Twenty minutes before she had looked like the most pathetic creature in existence.
I watched Julie as she attacked her eggs, not chipping away at the flanks but going for the heart.
I suppose I was smiling at her, enthralled.
“So what's your story?” she asked me between mouthfuls of egg.
“Story?”
“Everybody's got one.”
“So they say,” I told her.
“Yeah. So let's hear it.”
“Well, lessee,” I began, not knowing quite how to do so, so I just started at the beginning. “I was born and bred about a hundred and forty miles east of here, been to more Texas A amp;M bonfires than I can count, survived junior high and high school somehow and the idiots graduated me. I took some pre-law classes at Sam Houston State, then decided that it wasn’t my thing. I went to grad school at the University of Houston and again somebody goofed and I got a sheepskin. One marriage, ten years. Bad divorce. No kids. Still love her, though. Suppose I always will. I know. Stupid of me. Three year fiancee-ship with another one, but we broke up and got back together so many times that any marriage would have been doomed. For a while though, her kid was my kid. Good kid. Not the best mother, though. So… I'm here in Austin and it's all work and no play makes Bill a dull boy. That's about it.”
“Gonna stick to that story, huh?” she asked, forkful of banana pudding suspended in time and space between us for emphasis.
“Wouldn't you?”
“Yeah, except in my case it’d be a lot different.”
“So your turn now,” I said. Bold of me.
“Aw man!” she said in sudden disappointment and dropped her fork.
“What?”
“Pudding is too sweet!” It could have been a report like Micronesia sinking beneath the sea or killer tornadoes in the Midwest.
The shifting pattern of willow frond shade and sunlight in her hair with shimmers of pure spun gold, delicate sharp pink tongue removing pudding from her front teeth, soft yet piercing green eyes with too much knowledge about the world and not enough of the mundane; and dark secrets hidden like treasures, the way squirrels will hide their nuts. I suppose from that moment I was in love. A dead man. No mourners, please, just shovel in the dirt and shut up.
“Besides,” she said. “You wouldn't be interested.”
“Oh, believe me. I am.” I took a strong draw of coffee and the movement of the earth slowed a bit.
The most amazing thing happened! She clucked, three times. Her tongue against the roof of her mouth pulled down quick. My idiot heart stopped, then resumed a full three beats later.
“Okay. You really wanna know? I'm gonna tell you. I survived a bad cocaine addiction when I was in the tenth grade. Was pregnant in the eleventh and carried it for six months, then miscarried. My mother and father were murdered while I was away in rehab for the second time. They were watching
I checked to see if my mouth was wide open. It wasn't.
“I understand.” It's all I could say.
Her jaw dropped. I swigged at my coffee.
“No. You don't understand, Bill. My middle name is Trouble. You should run. Now. Very fast.”
I had no excuse after that. I’d been officially warned. A lot of good it would do me.
“But you won't,” she said. “Will you?” I couldn’t tell whether she was begging me to get up and leave or begging me to stay. Probably more than a little of both.
“Not on your life. How old are you Julie? I'm thirty-nine.”
“Thirty-two.” There was a long pause. You could almost say the pause was pregnant. “So, Mr. Travis, Bill, what do you want to do now?”
I didn’t even have to think about my response. “If you really want to know, what I’d like to do more than anything is spend the rest of the day in bed.”
“With me?” She didn’t miss a beat.
“Not by myself.”
Her face turned a shade of scarlet.
“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go.”
I’ve always had this strict policy: Never get intimately involved with a client. It’s a violation of just about every ethical code imaginable.
The only problem is, there has to be one exception to every rule. Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Julie and I spent most of the rest of that first day in the sack with only the occasional jaunt to the surface for air, food, water, and other necessities.
We finally came all the way up to the surface of our ocean of lust long enough to dress ourselves and step out for awhile.
I took her out on the town. After driving around for a good hour I remembered a very special spot I hadn’t visited in a few years: the Captain’s Cabin, down at Ski Shores on Town Lake. It was the most out-of-the-way venue I could think of going and still stay in the same city. The place is one of Austin’s little-known secrets.
Sure enough, the place was still standing.
Over a couple of beers at an outdoor picnic table right on the water of Town Lake we got to know each other a little more, even over the melodic din of a native-Austin folk singer with a good sense of lyrics, not a bad voice, and a propensity to turn the amp up too loud.
After the food arrived we ate, made eyes at each other and soaked up the atmosphere and the loud music. As we finished our hamburgers and onion rings, the singer took a break.
“Bill,” she said. “You know all that stuff I told you about all the husbands and miscarriage and everything. Some of that’s not completely true.”
“Why’d you tell me that stuff, then?” I asked.
“Because,” she said and then looked down at the table, unable to look me in the eye. “I wanted to shock you. I wanted you to not be interested in me. It didn’t work. Did you believe me?”
“I believed everything you said. And I believe you now.”
“Why?”
“Because. Because you look like you could use a little faith right now. And because I damn well like you. I don’t think there’s anything you could tell me that would make me
And then the tears came again, slow but certain, and then, afterwards, came a smile like warm sunshine.
“Bill,” she said. “You never did answer my question this morning.”
“Which question was that?”
“Have you ever been afraid?”
“Can’t say as I have,” I told her.
“That’s what I thought,” she said and upended her Budweiser long neck.
I found myself looking out over the water behind her. Across the lake there were mansions on the cliff, new homes built by new money scant yards from the edge and a hundred- yard tumbling fall. Out on the lake the Jet Skis and pleasure craft had lessened with the rapidly descending twilight. But all the while I was really looking at Julie, my new lover, and hoping it would last, thinking that it just could, and also hoping I’d be able to harden my heart a little just in case it didn’t.
And it hit me.
Fear. It’s what I felt right then and there.
*****
Traveling back home that evening as a brilliant, fading sun traced the last arc of purplish sky, Julie and I took the winding, twisting City Park Road through the rocky countryside west of Austin. A sense of calm and surrealism came over me. I turned to look at her as I felt her fingers interlace with mine. She flicked her eyes my way and smiled, then turned back to take in the vista as we topped another hill. Something in my chest thudded fatalistically. I was either sinking or swimming. I had no way of knowing which as yet. If I drowned soon, then I’d know; or conversely, if I didn’t, I’d also know.
By the time we made it back to my split-level home in Westlake Hills night had fallen and it had grown cold out.
Once inside I opened a bottle of port and got the fireplace going. There was one rough moment when I realized I’d forgotten to open the flue and managed to singe some of the hair off my arm getting it open. The house got a little too smoky so I opened up a few windows. Julie laughed at my antics. That sort of stuff seems to happen to me all the time. By the time the flames were roaring and the small pine knots were cracking and we were sipping our port, all the questions that I had been holding back from asking her seemed to be wrong for the mood I had set. So, instead of talking we found other things to occupy us.
One time during the night we found ourselves both awake and whispering to each other.
“Bill?” Julie asked.
“Yeah?”
“What is it that you do?”
“I help people, darlin’,” I said. I didn’t have to pause on that one.
“If that’s not a practiced answer, I’ve never heard one.”
“Yeah. Okay. I’ve said it a few times too many.”
“Yeah. So answer.”
“People who have problems with money come to me. I solve their problems.”
“You launder money?”
“Hey,” I said. Not a whisper. “I do
“What do you do then?”
“I spread it around. And it comes back. But the people who come to me are good people-meaning not criminals.”
“I’m no criminal,” she said. Did I detect a little poutiness in her voice?
“No. You’re not a criminal. You’re just a thief.”
Julie talked in her sleep, or rather she talked in her nightmares. Those squirreled-away secrets normally kept hidden behind her soft green eyes and even softer lips came out and showed shadows and corners of themselves.
Across her delicate face there was a soft splash of blue light from my fish tank. In there I keep
“Doan,” she murmured, which I translated as “don't.”
“Doan.” Again.
“No, Ray.”
“Please. Not there. Doan shoot me there…”
Shoot? Either a gun or a needle.
“Raa-aaa-AAAY!”
She cried out and a shiver knifed through my stomach.
I reached for her but my hand didn’t even make half the distance. She awoke, eyes stark and wide in the blue light and she was in motion and hitting me and screaming.
“NO! I SAID
A rake of nails across my ribs like the tracks a red hot poker might make. A cuff to the chin and for just an instant there were little splashes of light, and my adrenalin kicked in and I was strong and grabbed her and held her.
“Julie! It's me! It's Bill!”
Eyes frozen, locked on mine in the submarine glow. First horror. Dawning recognition. Wonder.
“It's okay,” I cooed to her. “I've got you.” I put my arms fully around her and held her to me, tight. “It was a dream.”
“Oh… uh… Bill. God. Bill. I'm… so… so sorry!” Her voice broke.
She sobbed like that for five minutes until her sobs became whimpers and even the whimpers soon drew away into silence as I held her. We found ourselves looking into each other's eyes and she kissed me and I kissed her back and we were making love yet again, and I wasn’t thirty-nine but eighteen, or maybe sixteen, and our bodies and our thoughts and what we could see and touch and feel became one thing.
And it wasn’t even Tuesday yet.
It was Tuesday. I usually don’t know what day it is. I met Julie on Monday and either that was ten years ago or yesterday.
I was up by six a.m. and there she sat on my barstool in the breakfast nook, wearing my Notre Dame t-shirt and stirring coffee. An angel if there ever was one. I don’t ever recall using the breakfast nook for breakfast. What guy without a woman would?
“Hey,” I said, and she looked up. A smile spread across her face and I noticed the little dimple in her chin for the first time when she smiled big. Too angelic for even Notre Dame.
“Mornin’,” Julie said. It was a good sound for that room.
“Coffee, huh?”
“Yeah. Bill. I have to tell you something.”
“Here it comes, “ I said.
“Told ya to run.”
“And how fast. So what is it?”
“Bill. I like you a lot. I can't stay though. There's Jake and Freddie, two of Archie’s men. They wield guns the way lawyers wield briefs. If they find me I might not live through it, and if you're with me you definitely won't. And you're entirely too cute to fit for cement shoes.”
I took down my David Letterman cup and poured the last of the coffee. She was probably already on her second or third cup.
“Jake and Freddie, huh?”
“Yeah.”
She sighed, sipped at her coffee and looked off into space. I wished that I knew what she was looking at.
“I don't want to go, even though I know I have to,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. Sometimes it’s best if a fellow just lets a woman say what it is she wants to say. All you have to do is let her know you’ve heard her.
“Good. Just so you
Julie looked into my eyes. It was almost as if they'd changed color. They’d become more smoky, and all leprechaun green.
“Hey,” I said. “What you may not know is that I've got friends in low places.”
“That’s sort of hard to believe,” she said.
“Ha! Believe me.”
“Yeah?” she said. Her face was getting puffy, like maybe she’d start crying any second.
“Look,” I said. “I’m gonna help you. Wherever you have to go or whatever you feel you gotta do, I’m gonna help you.”
A tear paused, preparatory to rolling down her cheek.
“Sometimes I think you're not real,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve heard that before.”
“But you are. You really are. Okay, Bill. You can help. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to repay you.”
She wiped the tear away.
Fish shadows swam in my thoughts.
“We’ll think of something,” I said.
You can’t learn to get around in your own line of work without learning a little something about the history of your own particular area of specialization. One of my specialties was moving money around-legitimately. My clientele are special and they have special needs.
I’d started off as an investment counselor back in 1988 and quickly found that it’s not so easy to get ahead unless you have clients. I looked around at all the other fellows who graduated with me and found that few of them were earning more than enough than it would take to just begin to whet my appetite, and so I made a conscious decision to strike out in my own direction.
I originally started my firm out of an efficiency apartment three blocks off the drag in Austin. Why Austin? For one thing, I’d quickly grown tired of Houston during my five years there while attending the University of Houston. For another, it appeared that the market was pretty well cornered on the investment racket there by the late 1980s, about the time I graduated and was looking around for a way to make some money in my chosen profession.
And what’s my profession?
I help people.
Some of my clients have run into legal trouble-or maybe they want to avoid running into legal trouble, whatever the case may be-and I help them.
I’ve found that people fall into two categories. Cash rich, in which case they need to dump some of it-or cash poor, in which case they need some. That’s where I come in.
But we were talking about history.
Aside from all the required college classes with desiccated old instructors doling out daily chapter assignments, a certain amount of required outside reading and the re-interpretation of tax law changes that each student must digest and regurgitate, some of it going back to the nineteenth century, college for me had one saving grace: in my junior year I took a course in Criminal Syndicates of the Southwest, taught by an overweight and edgy former trial lawyer who had been in a car collision years before that had left him a paraplegic. However good or not so good he may have been in court in days gone by-and let me tell you, after the first day of class that year, I was certain that he’d been a god-he did one thing well: he made the men and the times of his favorite era-the Great Depression-live and breathe. Since that class I’d held a grim fascination for historic Texas criminals, some of the notorious gangsters of the 1920s and 30s, and not just Bonnie and Clyde, who had little more going for them than a species of dumb luck and a tad more than their fair share of press. All by way of saying that there were other folks running around back then along the unpaved Texas back roads and through open range country. For instance, Raymond Hamilton and Joe Palmer were an unlucky pair who were once confederates of Clyde Barrow up in West Dallas. At one time Ray was public enemy #1. Both Ray and Joe were put to death in the electric chair about eight minutes apart back in 1935 for the killing of a prison guard during their escape from Eastham prison farm. At one time they’d had the entire nation looking for them. Ray and Joe were also confederates of Whitey Walker and Blackie Thompson, two of the worst desperadoes ever to hit the Southwest. In 1926, Whitey, Blackie and a fellow named Matthew Carpin put together one of the most successful though short-lived crime syndicates in U.S. history by taking over a mining camp called Signal Hill up in the Texas Panhandle. For one brief year they ran the illegal moonshine trade, set up gambling houses, whorehouses, master-minded and staged robberies, and took a cut from every job that went down within a hundred miles of the place. Things got so bad that Governor Moody had to declare martial law, and sent a detachment of Texas Rangers to bring some semblance of social order.
I recall noting the description by one of the Rangers as he topped the last North Texas hill just after sunset and looked down upon the mining camp. From the hills and valleys surrounding the sprawling, thrown-together patchwork town there rose a black pall of soot from the carbon black plants that had sprung up after the oil strike. And within a hundred yards of each well head there was a continuous plume of fire rising into the night, the burn-off of the escaping natural gas. The ranger scratched his head, turned to his companion and said: “My friend, all my life I have kept in my mind an image of what hell must look like, and now I have found it.”
That was Signal Hill. And in those days “Signal Hill” and the name “Carpin” were rarely spoken very far apart from each other. That name wasn’t exactly one of the nicest family names to carry around. I wondered how his offspring had turned out.
The original Carpin had made a fortune at Signal Hill. And some of that money must have stayed around. And that was another thing I’d have to check into on my suddenly growing list.
Signal Hill had existed for a brief while some eighty years ago. There were ghosts up there in those hills, the bad and restless spirits of equally bad men who when alive had valued human life slightly less than they valued a middling poker hand.
I found myself asking myself why I should be worrying over men dead these many years gone by.
I could have answered myself, right then and there that Tuesday morning as I held my car door open for Julie and tossed a travel bag into the backseat. I could have reminded myself that while times change and mankind appears to progress, there are some who still abide in the dark and heed no law except the grim laws of survival and revenge.
We rolled up I-35 toward Georgetown, Texas. Our destination: a new strip mall that was under construction and a visit with a very old friend. Julie still wore Notre Dame, her hair once again in a ponytail and the bitch-glasses perched forward on her delicate nose. She: beautiful. Me: practically a dead man.
She was trouble. Green eyes and reddish hair. And she
So I had to start thinking about Hank Sterling.
Back around 1988 when I was first struggling to make it-or die in the attempt-one of my clients was Hank Sterling.
Hank was a different breed, an aging Vietnam veteran who liked to drink beer, build things, and blow them up. Like many of my clients, he had the Midas touch. He ran a one-man construction and demolition company out of his house in Killeen, Texas, did perhaps one job every year or two, and in the meantime welded spare parts together in such a way as to call the result art. For instance, there’s a megalithic piece of his work entitled “Dreams of Flight” out in front of the courthouse in my home town. The thing looks more like a melted pterodactyl that it does an airplane-not exactly the kind of thing I would have spent county money on, but that’s just me. The interesting thing was that
Hank called me up one day with a special problem. He had half a million in cash and he needed to get rid of it. A certain IRS agent had been nosing around in his business and Hank wanted to make sure certain revenuer didn’t catch the scent of undeclared greenbacks.
After that I put Hank in contact with an accountant who could manage his money, help him legally avoid paying more than he had to, and who could handle his sudden bouts of alcoholism and wildcatter fever. But, being Hank, from time to time he still had need of my services, and I was never the kind of fellow who could turn down a friend in need.
In 1989, there was a knock on my door in the middle of the night. Two men in black suits and sunglasses were there on the doorstep of my apartment and they had questions for me. Not about myself or what I did for a living, but about Hank Sterling-his whereabouts, his routine, his habits, and the possible location of the IRS agent who had taken an interest in him. Apparently the man was missing.
What did I know about it? Nada.
After that the two of us were never as close, but he still called me when the need was great.
At the moment I needed his advice more than anything; and it never hurt to have a friend in your corner, especially someone who knew how to fight.
*****
North Hills Shopping Center in Georgetown was mostly complete, even though the marquee twisted in the wind, suspended by cable from a mobile crane outfit sitting on a new parking lot. A Randalls grocery store and a Walgreens had already moved in, along with a few specialty stores.
I parked near the construction zone and Julie and I got out into the morning sunshine. There wasn’t so much as a wisp of cloud in the sky and the breeze felt fine.
We found Hank. He was nailing wooden studs in place with a pneumatic nail gun. His shirt was sweat-soaked and his jeans were torn at the knees, which was about his usual attire. Anyone who didn’t know him would have asked where the boss was. The fact of the matter was that Hank
When he saw the two of us he grinned really big giving us a toothsome smile. He put the nail gun down, walked over to me and shook my hand in an iron grip.
“Damn good to see you, Bill,” he said.
“You, too!” I said.
“Who’s this?”
“This is Julie.”
They shook hands.
“Girlfriend or client?” he asked.
“Both,” Julie said.
“Okay,” he said, and looked at me. Maybe it was the look on my face. I don’t know. “You want to talk, don’t you?”
“You have the time?”
“Sure.”
Hank preferred his own kitchen to a restaurant; one of the little quirks I’ve never understood about him. Go figure. It was getting up toward lunch and a quick poll from Hank showed three hungry people.
We ended up following Hank the thirty miles back to his home in Killeen. Every now and again Hank would attempt to sink his foot through the floorboard of his ’69 Ford Fairlane, and shoot ahead of us by a mile or more, then he’d slow down and let me catch up.
The land rolled by, the sun beat down relentlessly in the Texas spring, that spring like all others that I could ever remember. A spring, a week, a day of pure hell and beauty. I suppose that when I was a kid, I must have held a fervent wish that my life would go just the way it was going now, and to that kid, if he were watching, all this must seem about perfect.
I parked my Mercedes across the street and Julie and I walked across a front lawn that was a couple of weeks overdue for mowing. The weeds slapped at our ankles and shins. By and large the whole place was pretty much as I remembered it.
The front porch was rickety, the paint peeling back in places, and there was a front porch swing that had the various parts of an old carburetor laid out on a large piece of torn cardboard, waiting for re-assembly at some future date. The screen door was off and leaning up against the side of the house. The remnants of abandoned mud dauber nests seemed to be everywhere. The doorbell appeared to be out of commission, hanging out several inches from the door-facing with wires going this way and that. Yep, some things never change.
Hank held the front door open for us.
“Come on in. Come on in. Don’t mind the mess.”
We followed him through an undulating pathway to the kitchen. Hank had become a collector over the years. The house looked like it had survived an endless series of failed garage sales, but only just barely.
Julie walked ahead of me, turning around a couple of times with arched eyebrows and a twisted, sardonic expression on her face. I almost laughed out loud.
We all sat down at the kitchen table. There was far less clutter in the kitchen.
We looked around as we took our seats. Up on the windowsill above the sink was a line of glass telephone pole wire insulators from the early twentieth century. On the counter stood an ancient toaster oven from about 1950.
Hank opened his refrigerator, reached in and brought out three Pabst Blue Ribbon beers and set them in front of us. While he was doing this I found myself wondering if the refrigerator was actually an icebox, one of the kind that required an actual block of ice from a deliveryman with a set of ice hooks. But then the transformer kicked in with a deep, gravelly, electric hum.
Hank sat there at his kitchen table with us in his antique-store house with a shit-eating grin on his face and basked in the glow of my green-eyed client. He shifted his innocent, blue Paul Newman eyes my way and dropped a knowing flick of a wink. I wondered what the hell that was all about.
“So. What brings you here, Bill?”
“Her,” I said.
*****
Julie’s story was believable-so believable, in fact, that the sheer detail of it had me re-creating it visually in my mind as she walked me through it.
Archie Carpin lived on a three-thousand acre ranch in North Texas along the bank of the Red River. There he kept quarter-horses and ran an underground still operation that could have rivaled any of the smaller commercial distilleries in Dallas or Milwaukee in sheer quantity of output. But he kept himself respectable in the eyes of his neighbors, which were few in number. He liked it that way. “The less seen, the less said,” was one of the little one-liners that he was likely to drop at any given moment.
Julie had met the man at a strip-club in Vegas, just off the main drag. After her show he’d motioned her over, bought her a series of watered-down drinks, engaged her services for the evening and once she was ensconced in his hotel room proceeded to ply her with drugs. And she was all too willing. Whatever it was he was after, it apparently wasn’t sex, as he hadn’t so much as laid a hand on her.
No. What the man was into was domination: the subjugation of the spirit and the life of a person-and like the fly to the Venus Flytrap, Julie was drawn in. He dripped money and played a covert game of mental and emotional warfare that in a short space of time drained enough of her life force to make her little more than his personal slave. She’d stayed with him for six months, leaving behind her life in Vegas and following the playboy to Miami-where he kept his drug connections-and Houston, where he kept his offices in a downtown high-rise oil company building, and finally to the North Texas ranch. Then, two months before our first breakfast together, Julie did something that only Julie could have done. She pulled the rug out from under Archie Carpin, robbed him blind, and didn’t bother hanging around to take his temperature afterward.
That first morning in my office I had wanted to break into a fit of uncontrolled laughter when Julie had told me what she had done. What I hadn’t known at the time was how she’d done it. After she was finished this time I no longer felt so much like laughing. For the first time I began to see things from Carpin’s point of view. And let me tell you, if it had been me, after the stunt she’d pulled, I’d have found her and very quietly shut her up for good, money or no money.
Here’s what she did.
A fellow cannot amass a great deal of ill-gotten wealth without making some enemies along the way, and this was definitely a fact in Archie Carpin’s case. Also, I have met few men who do not have a weakness of one kind or another. Carpin’s weakness was horses, and his chief enemy was a fellow named Ernest Neil, his chief competitor. Neil ran a quarter-horse ranch just south of Navasota, Texas and like Carpin, he ran some of the best horseflesh on the hoof. Neil and Carpin had been at each other’s throats since the 1970s when the only pari-mutuel horse-betting to be had was across the state line in Shreveport, Louisiana. On about the same day ten or more times a year during the spring both men loaded their horses onto their sleek trailers and trucked them two hundred miles across Texas and over the Louisiana border to compete against each other.
All this Julie had gleaned from Lefty and Carl.
And, of course, before I could ask it, Hank was asking her himself: “Who are Lefty and Carl?”
Julie loved horses. While she was at Carpin’s North Texas horse ranch she spent a good deal of time down at the stables, within spitting distance of the ruddy waters of the Red River. She loved to ride and it was the one bit of freedom that Carpin allowed her to enjoy, probably because he cared for the animals more than he cared for Julie, and she was kind to Carpin’s horses. She very soon learned all of the horses by name, and they, in turn, became used to her. She made it a point to get friendly with Carpin’s jockeys who were a pair of short yet irascible men named Lefty Jorgenson and Carl Sanderberry. Lefty and Carl soon had her giving them a hand mucking out the stables, keeping the horses’ hooves clean, feeding and watering them, grooming them, and the sundry other chores that are an everyday affair at any well-run horse operation. They had no way of knowing she was up to no good.
And, of course, she nosed around the still. When Carpin caught her at it he beat her within an inch of her life and confined her to his walk-in bedroom closet for a week and put her on rations of little more than water and cocaine.
After a week of pleading with him for freedom, she clammed up. The next morning Carpin let her out.
Thereafter, Julie spent even more time with the horses and, consequently, in the company of Carl and Lefty.
Carl liked to chew tobacco and spit. Also he liked to talk his head off. He would just as soon talk to himself if no one else was around, but if someone, or anyone, for that matter, happened to be handy, they were sure to get an earful. Carl-an aging Aggie from College Station-liked to try to tell stories of the old days with himself and a young Archie Carpin and the boys, but he usually managed to tell them wrong and Lefty had to correct him “just to keep the record straight,” as he would say.
One story that Julie heard again and again was how, in 1979, one of Archie Carpin’s best quarter horses foundered while at the stables in Shreveport on Friday evening before the Saturday race. Carpin blamed Ernest Neil for it, even though he had no proof of foul play. The horse, a two-year old stallion by the name of
I gave the woman some credit. She could be resourceful. Also, she understood men all too well. I found it more than a little intimidating.
As she coldly described how she set Carpin up I found myself wondering if I was possibly as gullible myself, or perhaps I was being gullible just by taking her story at face value when I should have ditched her from the get-go. The blood drained slowly from my head and pooled in my gut as I listened.
“So I said, duh! What’s this guy got? He’s got a half-million dollars worth of horses and he’s got a ten million dollar moonshine operation and there are greased palms from Texas all the way to Washington, D.C. He made money from supplying name brand whiskey knock-off for bars from Houston all the way to Chicago. Carl and Lefty talked a little too much. Archie’s payoffs came in installments. Also, because of his appetites-you know, horses and drugs-he was always one step ahead of bankruptcy. With his pay-offs coming in installments, they were vitally important, but vulnerable.”
“So you intercepted one of those installments.” I said.
“Yeah. I did,” she said, waving her hands for emphasis. “Only I didn’t know it was one of the big ones.”
I could tell that she was getting a bit tipsy. It was our third beer each. Regardless, I was enjoying seeing her animated like that.
“It was easy,” she said. “I got hold of Archie’s little black book, the one with all the guys in it from the old days; guys that Carl and Lefty would talk and laugh about. And I found it: Ernest Neil. It had a number next to it. A few days later when I got access to a phone I called the number and got this old guy.”
“Neil?”
“Nah. A jockey. Jolly Mortensson. Worked for Ernie Neil.”
“Yeah?” Hank said, prompting her to continue.
“So Ernie helped me set it up. He handled some of the footwork from his end. But it was up to me to make the switch.”
“Where’s the money?” I asked. It was the first time I’d asked it.
“That’s just a… a little tiny detail… a small part of the problem,” she said.
“Where is it?” Hank and I asked in the same instant.
Afterwards, I wished she hadn’t told us.
“Well. I will just be damned,” Hank said.
“Yeah,” I nodded in agreement.
Julie was all done and just sitting there, sipping on her beer.
I could tell by Hank's serious demeanor that he'd arrived at some important thought or decision. A crossroads, as it were.
“You tell her all about me, Bill?”
“Just that you’re handy in a tight spot, that you’re a client of mine, and that you’re alright. That’s about it.”
The toaster oven timer dinged. My stomach was doing little whirly-gigs, and the smell of toast, butter and cheese had become maddening.
We took time out for Hank to fix us up a plate each and a tall glass of iced tea. The tea tasted like it was a couple of days old, but at least it was sweet.
“Okay,” he said when he was back at the table with us. “So who are Jake and Freddie?”
Julie sat back in her chair. She didn’t seem very interested in Hank’s toaster oven cheese sandwiches. Mine, however, didn’t stand a chance.
“They’re Lefty’s and Carl’s sons. They’re about as stupid as a couple of snipe, but they’re like hound dogs. They never give up.”
“When was the last time you saw them?” Hank asked.
Julie turned to look at me. There was a strange look in her eye. Something she didn’t want to say.
“Better tell him,” I said.
She reached out, wrapped her fingers around her bottle of beer on the table and drained the last quarter of it in one long gulp.
“About an hour ago,” she said.
“What?” Hank and I chimed in at the same instant.
“Following us from Hank’s mall.”
Hank and I were on our feet.
My life is not very exciting. I don’t like excitement. I don’t even watch exciting movies. I like things nice and calm. You put in your day of work, you watch the sun fade from the sky and you draw your dollar. But sometimes you just have to move quickly.
Hank and I were moving before we could think.
He jumped up and locked the back door with a flick of his wrist.
I was into the front room and dodging stacks of old, dust-coated thirty-three rpm records and nineteenth-century legal volumes to get to the front door.
“Lock it, Bill,” Hank called out from the kitchen.
“Yeah,” I said.
The living room had two large windows, one of which had the shade pulled four-fifths of the way down. The shade for the other one was missing completely.
I made it to the front door, peeked out of one of the rectangles of glass that was at eye level.
The front yard was empty. Well, not exactly
“Bill, what are we doing?” It was Julie. I turned back toward her voice. She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room in the center of the house.
“Julie. Get back in the kitchen,” I urged. From the kitchen I heard the sound of a slamming drawer. Hopefully Hank was fishing for a gun somewhere.
I looked back quickly toward the truck. I couldn’t see anyone in the cab for a moment, but then again there was a bit of a blur there.
Something had moved.
Then I saw the barrel of the rifle and recognized it for what it was about an instant before it barked a spark of flame.
Things happened pretty fast.
The glass from the window pane on my right crumpled in on itself in three large shards. I hadn’t fully registered what was occurring yet. My first thought on it was a bit odd:
She just stood there, bringing her hands to her face.
A large divot of splintered wood had appeared on the facing of the kitchen entryway about shoulder-high not a foot from her. I could see the splinters on her neck and ear.
In the next instant Hank hit her from behind and took her down to the floor. I heard a loud grunt.
“Bill,” Hank called out. “Head’s up.”
Something sailed through the air toward me from their direction behind the tallest stack of books. I snatched it out of the air and was pulling the slide on the object before I could think much about it. It was a thirty-eight.
I looked again out of the small doorway glass in time to see the passenger door on the other side of the truck fly open.
An engine roared into life.
I don’t know what came over me after that. The moment became somewhat surrealistic, with dark, pulsing, purplish and red tendrils creeping into the corners of my vision. It’s happened to me a few times before, and each time it has, by the time I saw the colors and recognized them for what they meant, it was too late.
The front door was suddenly open and I was across the porch and sailing off into the brilliant green too-tall grass and the too-bright sunlight, and the funny thing about it was I couldn’t even feel my feet touching the ground.
The pickup truck was moving, slamming the corner of the rear fender of my Mercedes in an effort to escape. There was the shatter of glass and the crunch of metal. I didn’t much care, though, at that moment. The red and purple pulses were forming interesting tributaries around the movie theater screen my vision had become. And there was a part of me that was watching the whole thing with a sort of rapt fascination, like a kid at the movies with a box of overly buttered popcorn on his lap and an awed look on his face. But, when you’re watching a movie, you’re safe. The bullets aren’t real bullets and the crunching metal is all staged and all is right with the world. That was how I felt.
It looked as though I was going to beat the truck.
I pointed my right hand at the truck cab and the blurry figures inside it as the whole thing loomed suddenly very large in front of me. My hand bucked once… Twice.
The driver was trying to put his foot through the floorboard of the thing. Tires squealed on the hot pavement and a carburetor whined with a steep over-abundance of horsepower.
The center of the pickup windshield blossomed with a huge, elaborate spider web. Another, duplicate, spider web appeared in front of the driver.
The truck came on.
It had been perhaps thirty feet away a second before, but suddenly it was about half that, or maybe more.
I did this funny thing with my legs-I did a sideways frog-movement. Sort of a cross between a hop and a dive.
I felt a numbness in my left foot, even as my shoulder slammed into the bottom of the ditch across the road from Hank’s house. Anyone who has ever been bitten by a shark while swimming would know how it felt. First there was a bit of a jolt traveling up my leg, a distant cousin to the electrocution variety, then sudden and intense numbness. Last came pain. But that was okay. What was even more noteworthy was the interesting sensation around the crown of my head, and the darkness that came on. Which in itself was interesting because I had been fairly certain that it was early afternoon.
I’ve had a few rude awakenings in my life. When I came to in the near dark, that first instant was unsettling. I wanted to swat at the wasps that were stinging my head, only there were no wasps.
“Settle down, Bill.” It was Hank’s voice.
“What happened?” I asked.
We were inside a garage. A bare forty-watt bulb cast the only light into the room. I heard a gentle snore nearby.
“That’s Julie,” Hank said. “She’s asleep. Napping. Don’t worry… She’s fine.”
“The last thing I remember was seeing Julie standing in your kitchen doorway. Somebody shot at her.”
“According to Green-Eyes over there, that would be Jake Jorgenson. He’s the one with the rifle. Also, she says he’s a pretty good shot. But he was looking in through glass at an angle, and I think refraction saved her life.”
“Yeah?”
“Also, you tried to tackle a speeding truck. How’s that foot?”
“What foot?”
I looked to where he pointed. My shoe was off and I had one leg partially elevated. My foot was wrapped up with an Ace bandage.
“What the hell?” I said.
“You must have kicked that truck. Or else somebody ran over your foot. I don’t think anything’s broken, though. It’s not as big as it was a few hours ago.”
“Geez. It hurts,” I said. “But not like my head.”
“Good,” Hank said. “Probably you’ll just limp for a few days. But you’ll need to walk on it soon. You know. To see if anything… gives.”
I looked down past my foot and saw an army cot boxed in by a couple of old steel filing cabinets. It was Julie. She was wrapped up in a sleeping bag.
“Carpin wants her dead,” I said.
“Yeah,” Hank replied. “I don’t know the guy, and he sounds like a real asshole. But,” he chuckled, “if somebody did to me what she did to him… Well.” He was sitting in a folding chair facing me, one of the kind you’d use on a fishing trip that is nothing more than a couple of pieces of bent pipe and two swatches of canvas. He had a three-fifty-seven Smith amp; Wesson Magnum on his lap and a large night watchman’s flashlight in his hand.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I put Dingo in the house,” Hank said, offhand. “Anyone tries to go in there, she’ll have them for dinner. Also, we’ll hear it out here.”
As I recalled, Dingo was a cross between a German Shepherd and an Australian Blue Heeler. One of the smartest dogs I’d ever seen. I’d forgotten all about her.
I moved to get up but felt a wedge of cold pain at my temples.
“Take it easy, Cowboy,” he said. “You’ve got a minor concussion.”
“Feels like… Goddamn wasps nest in my head. Why the garage?”
“No windows.”
“Oh,” I said. “Say… What time of day is it?”
Hank looked down at his watch. “About three in the afternoon. Anyway, I can’t let you go back to sleep. Not for awhile.”
“I thought it was night. It’s sure dark in here.”
“We won’t be leaving until it
“Okay,” I said. “Good enough. So what do you want to do?”
“Well, I was thinking about that.” Hank turned to the side in his chair and reached down toward the floor. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see what he brought back up.
“It’s time for the world-series,” he said. “Best two out of three. Or three out of five. Or whatever.”
He unfolded the cardboard square, put it down flat on a small pedestal beside him, and held out a transparent plastic bag.
“What’ll it be?” he asked. “Red… Or black?”
“Goddammit,” I said. “Not Checkers.”
It was dark-thirty out.
I wouldn’t have minded saying that I felt fine. That simply wasn’t the case. I was nursing a head that felt like the inside of a bell tower that was constantly striking the hour, I was wincing with every step I took, but thankfully, I didn’t think anything was broken, and I had lost all but two games out of the last forty at checkers. The two times I had won, Hank had cursed and blamed it on the ill-lighting. Probably he was right.
We left the garage and Julie and I followed Hank inside the back door of his house under cover of darkness.
I felt safe, though.
I don’t normally carry a gun. There are many reasons for this, the first being the most obvious: they’re illegal in Texas unless you carry a permit, which I don’t. Also I have a bit of a superstition about them. I’ve come to think that guns actually draw trouble. It’s like walking around with the Queen of Spades in your shirt pocket. It’s just asking for it.
Except for one thing: sometimes you really need one. Just in case.
In light of recent events, it felt good having one tucked into my belt. It was the thirty-eight that Hank had lobbed to me earlier in the day.
Dingo was happy to see Hank. The dog put her paws up on his chest and he gave her a good petting. When she was done with Hank, she got one good noseful of me, ignored my attempts to be friendly with her and put all of her attention on Julie. Julie smiled and made friends with the dog.
“So what now?” Julie asked. She looked rested and composed and beautiful there in the silvery moonlight coming in through Hank’s kitchen window. Other than a couple of tiny Band-Aids on her cheek and neck, there was little else to show that she’d lived through a close call.
“What do you think, Hank?” I asked. “Hotel?”
“Hell, no!” he said. “I’ve got better accommodations in mind for us.”
*****
Hank made a phone call there in the dark and ten minutes later there was a black Chevy Suburban idling in his driveway.
Hank and I checked out the lay of the land and then I stepped back inside Hank’s front door and prodded Julie out into the night, hurrying and hustling her into the back seat of our ride while Hank took the front. I would have made a fine Secret Service Agent.
When we got a little way down the road Hank introduced us to our driver.
“Bill, Julie,” he said. “Meet Dock Slocum. That’s ‘Dock’ with a ‘k’, like when you dock your boat.”
“Hello Bill, Julie,” the driver said, taking one hand off the wheel for a second and giving us a cursory wave.
“Hi,” Julie and I said together.
There wasn’t much to be said after that, so we all lapsed into silence. I guess Dock didn’t feel like talking.
He was an elderly fellow with perhaps a good fifteen or twenty years on Hank. So far he was little more than Hank’s mystery friend, someone I’d not heard Hank mention before.
Julie leaned into me and I slid my arm around her. My head still throbbed, but not as bad as before.
I could tell we were on the edge of town. The Suburban threw a wide swath of illumination into the night before us, revealing stunted trees and scrub brush along the side of the road and the sporadic lights of the dwindling city winked behind us as we topped a hill.
After a few minutes we turned off the main highway going out of town and began to ascend one of the many steep and lofty hills surrounding Killeen. Dock shifted down into low and I turned to watch behind us. Overhead the moon was full and bright and I could see no headlights behind us, nor could I see anything else but a broadening vista of city lights shimmering like a galaxy across the dark landscape below.
So much for the hound-dog persistence of Jake and Freddie.
Hank, Dock and I sat up late into the night drinking several bottles of Dock’s home brew, a very sweet Muscadine wine unlike anything I’ve ever bought at a liquor store. I’d say the alcohol percentage was a little higher. At the same time it was dry and smooth and it evened out the ache in my head. If I didn’t slow down soon, though, I’d end up hogging the bottle. Or hugging it. While we drank we played matchstick poker and talked.
“The game, gentlemen,” Dock said, “is Maverick.”
“Just deal, Dock,” Hank said. “Bill knows how to play.”
“Sure he does,” he said and smiled, looking at my dwindling pile of matches.
“How did you run across this girl, anyway?” Dock asked.
Julie was in an upstairs bedroom, fast asleep.
“My partner referred her to me,” I said. “I haven’t talked to him about it yet.”
“Okay,” Dock said. “Interesting girl. Right pretty.”
“You know it,” I said.
“What I’d like to know is to what degree you believe her, and if what she says is true, what you’re planning to do about it.”
“Tomorrow,” Hank began, “first thing we’ll do is go looking for Amos and Andy.”
“You mean Jake and Freddie,” I said.
“Yeah, them.”
We played out the poker hand. I tried to put together an extra queen with the one I had showing and the one down under, but drew a mate to the nine on top. Dock raised the stakes and Hank and I called. Dock beat us both with a flush.
“How do we find them?” I asked.
“Oh,” Hank said. “Julie told me while you were out.”
“Well,” Dock said as he pushed back from the table and squared up the cards. “It’s past my bedtime. What time do we start in the morning?”
“We?” Hank asked.
Dock looked from me to Hank and back again.
“You can’t expect to tell me all this shit and not bring me along. It’s not neighborly. I just assumed…”
“Hold on there, Tiger,” Hank said. “I wouldn’t want you to miss out. What do you say, Bill? Dock’s a fine hand in a tight corner.”
“Is that what we are?” I said, smiling. My head was spinning a little, and it felt just fine. “A couple of tight-corner people?”
Hank grinned.
“Fine, Dock,” I said. “You’re welcome. In fact, let’s take your Suburban. My tail light is out and Hank’s old Ford should have been sold for scrap about the time that Carter was finishing up his term.”
Dock slapped his hands together with a loud crack.
“Yippee,” he giggled.
The three of us stood. I got a slight twinge from my swollen foot, but I was able to put my weight on it without it killing me. I think the wine helped about as much as any of the pain-killers that I had taken in Hank’s garage.
“You two can sleep upstairs,” Dock said. “I’ll stay down here on the couch.”
“Come on, Dingo,” Hank called. Dingo got up from her post by the back door and walked across the linoleum in Dock’s kitchen. She followed us up the stairs.
About half way up, I blurted out the question that had been bothering me for a long time.
“Hank? Whatever happened to McMurray? That IRS agent. We never did talk about that.”
Hank stopped in mid-step ahead of me, turned slowly around on the stairs and looked down at me.
“Bill,” he said. “There are some people that make it a point to go around sticking their nose into the wrong crack.”
“That happened with McMurray?”
“Maybe I’m talking about you. You ever think of that? I didn’t think so. Let’s talk about Mr. Dipwad later, though, if that’s okay with you.”
“Sure,” I said. “Fine.” I shrugged.
“Okay,” he said.
Softness and warmth in the night. There are benefits to sleeping with someone on a regular basis. I’d almost forgotten what it was like until Julie came along.
We whispered in the darkness. A cool breeze blew in through our second-story window and I could see megalithic radio towers blinking rhythmically in the clear, moonlit night sky.
“Why didn’t you tell us we were being followed?” I asked.
The two of us were in Dock’s bedroom. Hank slept on a rollaway bed in the upstairs family room. It was a pretty big house. There was some kind of a story here about Dock. I’d have to learn what it was. He was an intriguing character. I’d probably be like him in another thirty years or so: living alone in a large house, sleeping downstairs and entertaining folks on the lam.
“I wasn’t sure it was them,” Julie whispered. “They were a long way back there.”
She sounded sincere. I believed her.
“Why a couple of jockey’s sons? I don’t get it. Carpin’s people are
“No,” she said. “I don’t think that’s it.” I could tell from her voice that she knew damned well that wasn’t it. But I wasn’t upset… yet. I did, however, want to know exactly what she was hiding, and why. I waited.
A particularly heavy mass of air lifted the gauzy curtains and we both watched as they fluttered slowly back down.
“You know I didn’t tell you everything, Bill.”
“I know,” I said. “You’ve been… afraid.”
“I hate that word, but yeah. Some things I maybe should have told you and haven’t. And there are definitely some things I’ve done that I shouldn’t.”
“Like?”
“Let’s go to sleep,” she whispered, turning toward me and putting her chin on my shoulder. “Make me warm, Bill Travis.”
“Fine,” I said.
It felt good to be back in Austin. Or as good as it can feel with a mild concussion and a bunged-up foot.
The weather was hot and the traffic was heavy. About usual for mid-afternoon.
There were four of us and a dog in Dock’s Suburban, tooling down Interstate 35 toward downtown.
“Exit here and take the next left,” Julie called forward to Dock.
Only a week before our chance meeting in traffic, Julie had caught Freddie and Jake tailing her down Riverside Drive in Austin, just south of Town Lake. And of course, being Julie, she proceeded to pull a fast one.
She’d parked along Congress Avenue not a block away from the Capitol where there is an ever-present State Trooper at the front gate and only a stone's throw from the Governor's mansion, then walked into an upper-crust dress shop. A quick change of clothes and a purchase later, she ducked out the back entrance into the alley and walked a block around and hailed a cab. She paid the cabbie to sit with her for nearly an hour as she watched Jake and Freddie while they watched the front door of the dress shop. Then when the store manager came out to feed her parking meter for her, the two North Texas yahoos must have realized that something was up. They started the pickup and darted away into traffic. But not fast enough. Julie and the over-tipped cabbie trailed the two back to East Austin, just across the Interstate from downtown, to a ramshackle duplex in a lower-class neighborhood.
She simply noted where they could be found, and drove away.
After that she altered her patterns and spent whole days at a time away from her new home in northwest Austin. She didn’t tell Hank and me where she’d gone during those times and neither one of us pushed it. Julie was that kind of girl. You could only prime the pump so far, fill your bucket about halfway, and satisfy yourself that you’d be making another trip.
I was sure there was plenty more that she felt she couldn’t-or just wouldn’t-tell us. We’d find out sooner or later. But hopefully before it was
Hank was up front with Dock. Under his feet there was a burlap feed sack with some guns in it.
In the backseat beside me, Julie laced her fingers with mine.
Following Julie’s “turn here-turn there” directions, we found ourselves off Chicon Street; not the best side of Austin. We were maybe ten blocks from Lawrence White’s barbecue stand.
The houses passed by. Chain-link fences sagged in places. There were not just a few overgrown lots going to seed. Dock had to slow down once so that a tamale peddler on a three-wheeled bicycle could cross the road-I’ve often wondered how those guys could make a living by selling tamales out of a small refrigerator box perched on the front of their bikes. Maybe they didn’t. Who knew?
Occasionally I caught sight of a portable basketball hoop set up in the street and looking like a howitzer.
We had our windows down and the wind felt comforting. I was sweating, though, and it was a cold sweat. Also, it felt like I had a ball of hot lead rolling around in my gut.
“It’s there, on the left,” Julie said. “Third duplex. Right side.”
Dock drove us past slow and easy and we craned our necks. There was no light-blue pickup in the driveway. The place looked like a dump. Also it looked nothing like I would have figured for the base-ops for a couple of sons of North Texas quarter-horse jockeys, but go figure.
Dock circled the block and we parked across the street from Butch and Sundance’s duplex.
Hank distributed firearms from the front seat. The thirty-eight for me and a little Walther for Julie.
“What about me?” Dock asked.
“What about you?” Hank replied.
“Where’s my gun?”
I thought Hank was going to laugh. He didn’t.
“You’re staying right here,” he said. “Now don’t raise a ruckus. Looks like nobody’s home, so I don’t think there’ll be any shooting anyhow. But if there is, for some reason, I’d advise you to duck.”
“Is that all I am? Your chauffeur?” Dock asked.
We ignored him and climbed out. Julie and I exchanged smiles.
It had been an hour-long ride and my legs felt like they needed a good stretch. I winced at my first step across the road, but the going got easier as I walked.
“You stay here, Dingo,” Hank said. The dog barked once as Hank slammed the door.
The thirty-eight felt cold in my sweaty hand.
“What're ya'll doin' over there?”
The three of us nearly leapt out of our skins.
We were hunched opposite each other, me and Julie to the left and Hank to the right of one of the duplex windows, trying to see inside and determine whether anybody was home. The voice took us by surprise.
“Good God! Glad I had on the safety,” Hank said.
It was a girl, a little kid about eight or nine, standing there at the back corner of the duplex where a section of rotted wood fencing had fallen down and an outdoor heat exchanger was converting over to rust and ruin. She had on a dirty pink paisley dress and an arm around an old cabbage-patch doll that was missing a limb. She was thin, terribly so, but there was strength in her stance and wonder and curiosity in her eyes. This was her space and we were the invaders and she looked to be not the least bit intimidated.
“You live here, darlin'?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“Of course she does,” Hank said.
“They’re gone,” the girl said.
“Who's gone?” Julie asked her.
“The bad men.”
“Oh,” Hank said.
There was a long story here, in the side yard of a dilapidated duplex in a dilapidated neighborhood, in the little girl's eyes and her wan frame. I could already see the additional trouble brewing, coming on with the inevitability of bad storm.
I looked at Julie and she was looking at the kid, seeing what I'd already figured out, maybe even more. And Julie being Julie, invited the additional trouble right on in to pull up a chair and sit a spell.
“Where's your mama, honey?”
“She gone.”
We put our guns away in silent agreement.
“Where’d she go?”
The kid turned her head and gestured back toward the thicket to the back of the property, or maybe just generally back towards Greater Austin.
“Mama wasn't doing nothin' except smokin’ cheese for a whole year.”
Hank was talking low, not moving his lips, and he was talking to Julie-as if it would have done any good. “There's agencies that handle this kind of thing,” he said.
Julie darted Hank a quick, angry look. Hank raised both hands a trifle, took a step back, and she turned her attention back to the kid again.
“Then she takes up with Melvin Hobbes one day and they go to the store, only they don’t come back.”
“How long ago, honey? And what's your name?” Julie asked.
“Keesha. Don’t know how long.” This said, Keesha hopped up and sat on the rusting AC unit and regarded us with just a little less interest. I was willing to bet that she'd heard promises and offers to help in the past.
“Those two bad men left this mornin'. I had to act like my mama was here so they wouldn't chase after me no more.”
“Very smart,” Julie said, and turned to look at me. There was a plea in her eyes. I found myself nodding, slowly.
Julie sat beside Keesha, and they chatted away. Hank and I moved around behind the duplex to have a look.
There are some places that simply don't have a good vibe to them. I expect you could probably cut the grass back, replace the bad wood, paint things and generally clean them up, but like as not that vibe would still be there, if only subdued. The ramshackle duplex where Keesha lived and where Jake and Freddie-the friendly neighborhood sniper-patrol-had set up their base camp was like that. The back yard had weeds up to three feet tall in places and had been trampled back and down where little brown feet had often stepped. There was scattered trash here and there which consisted mainly of candy wrappers and chip bags of the convenience story variety. I suspected that there was a sympathetic convenience store clerk somewhere close by that just couldn’t say “no” to sad little brown-eyed girls.
There were two brown-painted doors like twin peepers in the rear face of the building, and evidence that a hog-wire divider had existed between once separate yards. The further door stood slightly ajar on rickety hinges, somewhat crooked. No doubt it was the back door to Keesha's home. I stepped back around for a moment and gently interrupted Julie and Keesha to confirm it, then ducked back around to join Hank again.
Hank tried the back door to Jake and Freddie’s side, but it was locked. Of course. It couldn't be
Hank ducked into the gloom through the open door.
I waited two beats, then followed.
It was dark inside. I tried a grimy light switch, knowing full well it was no use. I was right.
The place was a cave.
An unpleasant odor emanated from a clothes washer and dryer just beside the back door. Wet clothes going to mildew and rot. Hank clicked on a little mag-lite flashlight and the stark reality of conditions sprang up in the wake of his roving beam. I followed him through the squalor, seeing things I'd seen before, and some things I'd not and rather hadn't.
I'm not much of a Bible-thumper, but being the product of the deep East Texas Bible belt, tent revivals as a kid and Wednesday night Bible study, some things come to mind unbidden. I was thinking about something I was taught in Sunday School at about nine or ten years of age. Christ had purportedly stood up on a hill and lectured the crowds and said something about “the poor you will always have with you”. It had always seemed to me to be a very simple yet profound statement, and the utter truth of it hadn't altered a bit from the hour that he was reported to have spoken it. Knowing that, though, didn’t make it any easier to confront the condition that Hank and I witnessed inside the duplex.
The living room was a complete wreck. There was no television or stereo or radio or anything. Probably whatever had once served to make the place a real home had long before disappeared, a casualty of habitual drug usage. There was plenty of soiled furniture, though, rescued, no doubt, from the clutches of the quarter-annual bulk trash collector some months or perhaps years past.
Worse yet was the odor; the ever-present, distinct and oppressive scent of burned chemicals mixed with rat and cockroach droppings.
“I've seen enough, Hank,” I said and headed out the way we came in, holding my nose.
I got back outside and could breathe again. Hank joined me a few minutes later. He had some clothes under one arm and carried a small stack of photographs in his other hand.
“Change of clothes,” he said. “For the kid.”
I nodded.
“Pictures, huh?” I asked.
“Kid’s family, probably. She’d know who they are, I hope.”
We went back around to the side of the duplex. Julie had Keesha in a big bear hug. Julie looked up at me and by God there were tears in her eyes. Hank gave me a grim look.
“All right,” I said.
Julie mouthed a silent “thank you” to me and patted Keesha’s back.
*****
When we all came back around front, there was Dock fiddling with the front window.
“As a quick-getaway-driver, you’re fired,” Hank said.
Dock started.
“You scared me,” he said.
Upon seeing the dog, Keesha drew in a quick gasp of surprise and almost bolted, but Julie caught her.
“It’s okay,” she said. “That’s Dingo. She doesn’t bite.”
“You promise?”
“She maybe don’t bite,” Hank said, “but I do. Dingo’s my dog.”
Hank called Dingo over to him and by way of petting and tousling the dog around maneuvered her slowly closer to the kid. After about a minute, the child was petting the dog. The way she did it, though, left little doubt that this was her first friendly dog encounter.
While this was going on Dock quizzed us about the kid.
“She’s been abandoned,” Julie said. Her arms were crossed under her breasts and she looked down at the little girl. “I don’t trust adoption agencies. I’ve got my reasons,” she said.
The three of us men exchanged looks.
“How you doin', Child? Are you hungry?” Dock asked, leaning toward her with his hands on his knees and a grandfatherly smile on his face.
“Yes, sir. I am.”
“’Course you are. So am I. What say we go get us some dinner?”
Keesha nodded in the affirmative. The rest of us didn’t even have to confer over the answer. We hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and that had been a hurried affair in Dock’s kitchen that morning before setting out.
“That settles it,” Hank said.
There was one thing we’d learned from the trip after poking our noses against enough dirty windows and peering into the gloom: Jake and Freddie-whom I was simply dying to meet-had cleared out. There wasn’t so much as a stick of furniture in the place. There was, however, trash aplenty, which consisted of the leavings of many a take-out meal. Apparently Jake and Freddie liked Chinese food.
Hill’s Cafe on South Congress in Austin has seen its share of strange clientele before, but I wasn’t sure it had ever seen such an awkward collection of thrown-together folks as the five of us as we took our seats at the ‘George Bush Table’. Back when the younger George was Governor, he used to eat at Hill’s-or so the story goes-and the management had designated our table for him. I wondered if while he sat in his big chair at the White House he ever missed his booth at Hill’s.
Dock Slocum and Julie sat with Keesha between them. They both doted on her. Keesha held open a large fold-out menu while Dock pointed to each menu item in turn.
“How 'bout onion rings? Ever had that?”
“Nope. Never did.”
“Chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes?”
“I like mash potatoes.”
“Mashed potatoes it is then!”
Most of their conversation was like that and they managed to run through the entire menu, the old fellow asking about this dish and that dish and the little girl nodding her head appropriately and looking up at Julie for approval and asking for clarification about the things she’d never heard of before.
Hank and I just looked at each other, smiled and nodded.
After ten minutes or so we all ordered. I knew I’d be picking up the check and a sinking feeling came over me; the knowledge that my credit cards would be getting a hell of a work out in the very near future.
I noticed that Dock and Hank were carrying on some kind of covert conversation.
“What’s going on, you two schemers?”
Dock looked up suddenly, as if he’d been caught red-handed.
“Nothing,” he said. “Private conversation. Something I’ve been trying to talk to Hank about for the last couple of years and I’m beginning to think he’s not really interested.”
“Now that’s not exactly true, dammit,” Hank said.
Julie reached over and slapped Hank’s hand.
“Ow! What?”
She had an angry look on her face and she nodded in Keesha’s direction.
“Language!” she said.
“Oh!” Hank said. “All I said was ’dammit’.”
Julie slapped his hand again.
“OW!” Hank jerked his hand back. “For Pete’s sake!”
Keesha giggled and I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Naw. He’s not interested,” Dock said and put a hand up on the table and started adjusting his silverware.
“Tell me, Dock,” I said. “I might be interested.”
“Here we go,” Hank said.
Dock gave him a withering look.
“What?” Hank shrugged.
“Okay,” Dock began. “So I’ve got this rental property in Harker Heights-that’s a little town that’s grown up into Killeen, sort of like a thorn in its side, you know-”
Hank cursed under his breath.
“Ow!” Hank sat upright. “Somebody kicked me! Bill, you’d better control your woman!”
“Shut up, Hank,” I said. “Go ahead, Dock.”
“Anyway, I’ve got this duplex over there-nothing but trouble. I don’t know what to do. About the time I get one set of renters in one half, the other half goes vacant and I have to make repairs. I’m all upside down on the mortgage too-bought it when interest rates were too high and I can’t refinance it because of my age, now. I haven’t seen enough on it to cover payments, repairs, and taxes too. And I wouldn't have bought it except for a slick-talking real estate agent-a friend of a friend, you know-called me up and told me about this foreclosure. So, I picked it up and have had nothing but misery with it ever since. I retired in 1972 and should have stayed retired, know what I mean? I got no business trying to invest in real estate. I’m a retired deputy sheriff from down in Hays County. I guess I never really hardened up, except in San Diego during boot camp. That was back in 1944. I guess I was born expecting the best out of people and have never been not-disappointed since. Maybe I ought to change my ways of looking at things, you know?”
“Don't change a thing, Dock,” Hank said. “It's the world that needs to catch up with you.”
“Reckon you're right. But it’s not just other people I expect more out of. It’s me, I reckon. I was down dropping off my taxes the other day, and I overheard this young whipper-snapper refer to me to this other accountant-fellow as a ‘slumlord’. Didn’t like the sound of that. I guess they were just following the stereotype, thinking that because I’m old I couldn’t hear worth a damn. I can still hear the Baptist preacher inside his church across the valley screaming at his congregation on Wednesday night. My hearing hasn’t changed since I was about two.”
“You just have the one duplex, right Dock?” Hank asked.
“That’s right,” he said, scratched his head and looked down at Keesha again. I noticed whenever he looked at her the corners of his mouth turned up into a little smile.
“Well,” Hank said. “I never heard an official definition, but I think you’d have to own a row of them, come by a couple of times a month not to repair anything but just to browbeat everybody for their rent to technically qualify as a slumlord.”
“Hank’s right,” I said. “That’s about the closest I’ve ever heard to a real definition of the word.”
“Well. That makes me feel some better. Still, after all this, I’ve got to get rid of the damned thing. Not sure how to do that, though. I was hoping Hank here would take them off my hands.” Dock looked over at Hank. Hank shook his head in the negative.
“I’ve got a friend who can help you with that, Dock,” I told him. I fished out my wallet, pulled forth a business card and handed it to him. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back in my office, Dock, but why don’t you call me and I’ll give you the numbers for a couple of honest realtors and investors I know who could take it off your hands. You might be able to get some or all of your money back out of it. If the market has corrected itself since last I looked, you might even be able to make some spare change.”
“Well, thank you kindly, Sonny.”
“You have to watch Bill, Dock,” Hank said. “He’s always at work, even when he’s not.”
“Just exactly what is it that you do, Bill? You never did say?” Dock asked.
The food arrived before I could start in. It was just fine by me. I never did like explaining myself. That’s sort of like going around asking people for a license to survive. Not only that, but once I start down that road, I’ve found that nine times out of ten I have to get into the ins and outs of how I do what I do, whether or not I make money at what I do, and if so, then I have to handle people’s ignorance on the subject of what is legal and what’s not. As if they knew.
I watched as Keesha’s eyes went as round as saucers at the large plate put down in front of her. She shook her head in disbelief.
“Can you bring her some more water?” Julie asked our waitress. Keesha had drained her tall glass within the first minute of sitting down.
“So what're we gonna do with this little precious one here?” Dock asked.
Keesha smiled up at Dock as he turned to her and she squished some mashed potatoes out through her teeth. Dock’s mouth opened in a big “O” of surprise.
Keesha turned to look up at Julie and the two started making faces at each other, sticking their tongues out and rolling their eyes around. I wished I had a camera.
We all dug into our dinner.
If we were hungry when we got there, we were in agony when it was time to leave. I was so full that I felt like it had been Thanksgiving.
As the waitress cleared away the plates, I decided since I was paying for it all that it was my turn to talk.
“Well,” I began. “Since Jake and Freddie are gone, maybe we should turn our attention to the little one here. Decide what we’re gonna do.”
I looked over at Julie. She was studying me carefully. I was thinking that suggesting anything short of adopting the kid would get vetoed flat out even before it got to committee. I looked at Keesha. She had grown on me a bit in the short space of time since she had surprised us.
“We need to go back to Killeen, get my car, get you home, Dock. In the meantime we’ll decide what we should do about Keesha. My friend Lawrence White might help us.”
There was a bit of a silence for a moment. I wasn’t sure if Dock had gotten what I was trying to say, so I plunged ahead again, trying a different tack.
“You’ve got grandchildren, don’t you Dock?” I asked.
“Sure I do. Two of ’em. They live in Gunnison, Colorado.”
“What I think Bill is trying to ask is, if there’s any reason you should back out of all this, now might be the time,” Hank said.
“Oh,” Dock said. He looked down at his hands. They were old man’s hands. Mine would look like that one day, if I lived long enough. “Well…” he began, “there’s nobody waiting for me at home, that‘s for sure, unless you count Geena’s ghost. My wife. I lost my wife back in ‘95 to cancer.”
“Oh,” Julie said. She reached over and put her hand on his and squeezed.
“It’s okay. I think she was tired of the world. In the end it was a blessing. I see my daughter about once a year. Sometimes she’s brings Harper and Kelly, but not always.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m just trying to give you an out, Dock. Regardless, what we need to do now is go and pick up Julie’s car. Meanwhile Hank and I will think of our next move. But I think the obvious thing is-“
”Shopping!” Julie said.
“Shopping!” Keesha echoed.
“Uh, like I was about to say-shopping. Then over to-“
”My apartment,” Julie interrupted again.
“Her apartment,” Hank said.
“Yeah,” Keesha said.
“Check, please,” I called out to our waitress across the room. The place was starting to get crowded. I looked down at my watch. Where had the time gone?
“And a couple of boxes for all this food,” Hank called out. “I’ve got a hungry dog out there.”
I’ve heard Austin described as the largest small town in the world. I think that description is the closest I’ve ever heard to the truth. The evening rush hour traffic was gone, having disappeared into residential driveways and restaurant parking lots, and the sun had dipped down low behind the trees to the west. Travel through the city had opened up and street lamps were coming on one by one.
Hank and Dingo and I were in Julie’s roadster, and Dock, Julie and Keesha followed us half a block back in Dock’s Suburban. We headed north in the direction of Town Lake up South First Street.
Austin is a series of hills coming down stair-step fashion right to the water. Out on the water we saw lovers in canoes and kayaks, wet paddles flashing in the last dying rays of the sun.
We passed the South First Street bridge and left Town Lake behind us. South First curved to the right and became Lavaca Street. Again, north of the river the hills resumed, stepping back up again into the high-rise jungle of downtown. The traffic became one-way, splitting into channels between the synthetic canyons of concrete, steel and glass. Pedestrian traffic became practically nil. If it had been a Friday or a Saturday evening, instead of a Tuesday-or at least, I was fairly sure it was Tuesday-we would have had to mind our speed. Austin’s Sixth Street is famous throughout the Southwest and is a heavy draw during the weekend: college kids from the University of Texas and Austin Community College flock downtown in droves and middle-aged professionals in search of their misspent youth (and a maybe a little company) can normally be spotted, trying desperately to look as though they belong.
The few people we saw were lost in their own worlds.
We passed downtown. The governor’s mansion loomed on our right, lit in a wash of sodium arc lamplight. Peeking between the Methodist Church and the Capitol Hotel we could see the State Capitol itself. Later, after full dark, its pinkish rose granite frame would become white in the glare of capitol complex lights. As Texans, we’re proud of that building.
We jagged left a block at Martin Luther King Boulevard, leaving Lavaca behind and trading it for Guadalupe, what natives call “The Drag.” I guess I’d been living in Austin long enough to call myself a native. At least I felt like one.
We continued north. The University of Texas was there on our right, rolling past. Tall, stately oak trees obscured academic buildings named after long-forgotten deans and contributors.
In north Austin we pulled into the parking lot of a Target store. Hank and I sat waiting while Julie, Dock and Keesha piled out and walked over to us. Julie came up to my window. I fished a credit card out of my wallet and handed it to her without a word. I could see gratitude in her eyes. She bent over and kissed me, the tops of her breasts showing with just a hint of cleavage. Hank and I waited while the trio disappeared inside the store.
Hank whistled.
“That’s some girl you’ve got there,” he said.
“Yeah. You don’t know the half of it,” I told him.
“Just what is it you do for a living, anyhow?” he asked. I suppose I was a little shocked he’d asked me, seeing as how I’d saved his bacon once.
“I’d be happy to tell you,” I said.
“Yeah? When?”
“Right after you tell me what happened to McMurray.”
He didn’t, so of course, I didn’t.
I always did know how to kill a conversation.
Hank and I waited nearly an hour. We didn’t do a whole lot of talking but instead allowed our food to digest while we watched shoppers go back and forth across the parking lot.
Julie and Keesha finally emerged from the sliding doors. They were holding hands and each of them had a shopping bag. Dock followed. They were a little too fast for him.
The two girls were smiling ear to ear as they walked over to us, but they both looked a little tired.
“Bill,” Keesha began, all excited. “There’s a lady in there that’s really a man!”
“I’m not surprised, darlin’,” I told her. “This is Austin.”
“Austin,” she said. “Ohhhh.” I almost laughed. Maybe she never knew what town she was living in before, but on the other hand, maybe she knew completely.
“What’d ya’ll get?” Hank asked.
Keesha looked up at Julie.
“Well,” Julie said. “We’ve got a few dresses and some jeans and shirts and stuff.”
“That’s mighty fine,” Hank said. I looked over at him. The old bastard was enjoying himself.
“Well,” I said. “Let’s go.”
The day might have been coming to a close, but I had that sinking feeling; an awareness that things were more than likely about to heat up.
What is it in our nature that makes us think just because we can't see danger immediately in front of us that we're going to be pretty much alright? I just don't know.
Julie lived in northwest Austin west of Loop 1 and south of Highway 183 in a duplex that resembled a medieval castle. The duplex stood near the crest of a high hill and looked like none of its neighbors.
We drove by slowly. Hank and I were still in the roadster and the rest of the crew was in the Suburban. More and more the situation was coming to remind me of a high school band trip.
Hank and I checked out all the parked cars along the road. No light blue Ford F-150 pickups. No North Texas Bubbas lying in wait.
Hank and I drove past the duplex and took a good look.
Nothing.
Two blocks down we turned around in a cul-de-sac, came back and parked across the street from Julie’s place. We waited.
It was full dark. To the east there was the purplish twilight above the glow of the city against the sky. From where we sat, between the trees I could see the UT Bell Tower bathed in bright orange light, about the same magnitude of brightness as the three-quarters moon just above it. The orange glow there meant that UT had won their baseball game.
Along came Dock’s Suburban and the twin spears of bright light from his headlights. He pulled up onto the long, narrow driveway. His lights went off. The interior lights came on as Julie opened the passenger door and closed it behind her. She sprinted across the street to us.
“Okay,” she panted a little, “This is it.”
“Lemme see your keys, Julie,” Hank told her.
She fished in her jeans pocket and I heard the rattle of keys.
“I haven’t been here in awhile, Hank,” she said. “I don’t know what the place is going to look like. Those idiots could be inside there laying for you, for all I know. It’s the door on the left side. That’s mine. I don’t think the other side’s been leased yet.”
“It’s okay. I’ll check it out first.” Hank reached into the burlap sack beneath his feet and pulled out his silvery.45. He opened the door and climbed out.
“You get in with Bill for a few minutes,” he told Julie. “I’ll be right back.”
Julie slid in beside me.
The night was quiet but for the
Julie and I watched as Hank climbed up the front walkway. She interlaced her fingers with mine and squeezed.
Hank peered in through the front windows. He moved around to the west side of the place and disappeared for a few minutes. We waited.
He reappeared, traversed the front and disappeared around the east side of the duplex. I noticed a small “For Lease” sign perched halfway up the yard beneath the drooping branches of a Wisteria. Hank reappeared again and was about halfway to Julie’s front door when we both noticed Dock climbing out of his Suburban.
I heard Julie’s whisper: “Don’t do that, Dock.”
By the time Hank got to the front door and was inserting the key, Dock had made it within twenty feet of the front of the house.
Explosions have a life of their own. They are like universes unto themselves with their own internal laws of time and space, cause and effect. To a person caught inside one I imagine it must be like knowing what is going on-time being stretched, and instances lasting eternities-and being able to do nothing to control it. As a spectator, just on the periphery, it’s instantaneous.
My first thought, lasting about a hundredth of a second, was the lights had come on inside the duplex, but then the glow swelled in brightness becoming too bright for my eyes. The windows, the whole front of the stone duplex became convex and the roof lifted up several feet in the air. For an instant it was daylight.
Beside me Julie’s ponytailed head, neck and shoulders looked black, silhouetted against a brilliant orange-white halo, then wisps of her hair blew back toward me horizontal as the blast wave rolled over us and pushed her hard against me. My left hip and shoulder slammed against my door.
The roar was of lightning striking close by, but with a horrible rending sound that continued after it. And then came the rain: pebbles, stones, boards, splinters of terra cotta and whole individual u-shaped tiles that burst into fragments on the sidewalk and street.
Against the dying orange glow I could see the outline of a door, still in its frame lying in the grass not far from the street. An arm poked out from under it, as if gesturing, pointing out something that I may have missed.
“Sweet Jesus!” Julie shouted, but my ears felt like they were full of liquid wax, or like I’d been swimming under water for far too long.
We moved in tandem, untangling ourselves from each other, got our doors open and moved across the street as the rain of debris began to slacken. By the time my feet hit the pavement the roof of the duplex was falling inward.
Julie ran towards the Suburban.
I was going for what must be Hank beneath the shattered door. No thought, really, just motion and the dim awareness of something shifting inside my head. Not pain, really, just a
I got to Hank before Julie reached the Suburban. I was thinking that maybe it was a good thing the explosion had taken out my hearing. I wouldn’t want to hear the screams that might be coming from that direction any second.
I guess the door and frame covering most of Hank weighed about a good seventy pounds, but somehow it felt about as heavy as a good sack of bread as I shoved it to the side, sending it further down the hill.
I reached for Hank.
In the flicker of flame from the house I could see that his eyes were open and moving around in confusion.
I ran my hands over his body, beginning with his legs.
He made funny gurgling sounds. Trying to form words. The sounds were muffled, though, as my ears were still all cotton candy.
His legs felt good and solid. I pressed lightly against his hips. No give. I didn’t see any blood, no protruding bones. There were a few buttons missing from his shirt. The arms seemed okay. He still had his gun in his right hand. I took it from him and laid it in the grass. The fingers of his left hand seemed a little odd. One of Julie’s keys from her key ring was imbedded in his palm. I turned his hand over and felt the indentation from the key poking up against the inside of his skin on the top of his hand.
No screams from the driveway. Yet.
Unless Hank was bad off either on the underside of his body or internally, he wasn’t going to die in the next few seconds. I hoped.
The last time I’d seen him he wasn’t far from the house. I looked up. No Dock.
Julie was inside the Suburban. The dome light was on and she was holding Keesha. Dingo was barking. Within seconds the dog was over beside us, licking Hank’s face.
Over in the Suburban I could see Keesha’s face, looking out at me above Julie’s shoulder. She was obviously okay, probably stunned though. The hood and top of Dock’s land barge was littered with large splinters of wood, stone masonry, terra cotta, a telephone handset, a table leg; other things unrecognized and unrecognizable in the near dark. There were several huge dents in it.
Between where Hank lay and the car there were a number of naked timbers.
I could only think of one thing. We had to find Dock and get the hell out of there.
“Stay here, Hank.” It was a stupid thing to say. Where was he going to go?
I moved across the wreckage, noting a stitch in my side. What could have happened to it? I ignored it.
There was no evidence of Dock amid the wreckage. I looked through the cracked windshield of the car. Keesha was still looking at me, Julie still holding her tight.
From where I stood I couldn’t tell, but I’d say she was probably crying.
Keesha pointed with her free hand back towards the road behind them.
I nodded.
I moved across the roadway. I could see Dock. He was in the neighbor’s yard a full sixty feet from where he’d last been. As I got to him I noticed that his right arm was gone just below the elbow. I looked around but couldn’t see it anywhere. Blood spurted spasmodically from the stump.
He was still alive! I reached over him, clenched my fingers around the stump just above his elbow and squeezed hard where I thought the biggest artery might be. I never had any formal medical training, but some things you just do.
I heard sounds. A voice. Maybe my hearing was improving.
I looked at his face.
I became aware that there were people coming out of the neighboring homes, moving slow, stunned. I just looked at Dock’s face, tried to see his lips move. A street lamp behind and above me was on full bright and Dock’s features were tinged with blue in the pale light. He was covered with splinters and gouge marks the entire length of his body. His neck seemed to be not right.
“Whoa there,” a voice said. It was Dock.
His eyes focused on me for a moment. There was sort of a quizzical look on his face.
“I… uh…” he said.
“Take it easy, Dock. Go slow. Anything you want to say, now might be the time.”
“It’s all… right. You… don’ need… ta worreee… about me.Uh. Kid… okaaay?”
“Yes, Dock. She’s fine. Hank too.”
“Gooooood.” He whispered something, but I didn’t quite catch it.
“What was that, Dock?”
He appeared to marshal himself for the effort to communicate it, whatever it was.
“Uh…Just- God… damned real estate agent,” Dock said, and died.
His eyes stared, but the power behind them was gone. The pungent odor of human waste wafted through the air.
“God bless you, Dock,” I said. “Goodbye.” What else was there to say?
I reached into his shirt pocket and took out the business card that I’d given him back at Hill’s Cafe.
The stunned people moved slowly across the street, coming on like zombies from some Grade B horror flick. I picked out bits and pieces from their abbreviated conversations with each other:
“What do you think happened?”
“I dunno. Sure was loud.”
“Gotta have been the gas jets. My cousin once-”
“Has somebody called the fire department?”
“I think that man’s dead.”
I ignored all of it, including the occasional attempt to hail me: “Hey, Mister.”
After disentangling Julie from the girl, the two of us went and got Hank slowly up to first his knees, then his feet. His eyes cast about. I could understand it, completely. If it had been me under that door, my luck being what it had proven out to be thus far, I would have been knocking on St. Peter’s Gate. But I guess that’s just my Southern Baptist side talking.
Between the two of us, each supporting him with a shoulder under an armpit, we moved across the wreckage to the Suburban. Dingo moved in front. She barked at the neighbors as they came into the edge of the yard.
About halfway to the driveway I stumbled a little over a piece of iron pipe that had once been part of a workout bike or something, and I almost brought both Hank and Julie down on top of me. I kept my footing and resolved to be more careful. I looked at Hank’s face and was relieved to see that he was coming around. His eyebrows were knitted into a disapproving frown.
“Sorry, Hank” I said.
Julie leaned her side of him up against the side of the Suburban and got the rear door open. I noticed it was Keesha that pulled up the lock-stem. God Bless her.
Suddenly there was a skinny fellow wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt and Bermuda shorts, talking up a storm.
“I think Jerry is calling the Fire Department on his cell phone. Hey, hold on, folks.”
Julie and I ignored him and got Hank into the back seat where he sprawled out across the long seat.
Julie snapped her head up at the fellow. “Look,” she yelled. “He’s got fractures and contusions. Possibly internal bleeding. We’re taking him to the hospital or he’ll die if we wait.”
At that, as if cued to do so, Hank let out a loud groan.
“See,” I said, showing exasperation.
“Oh. You guys better hurry. I’ll get Jerry to call the Hospital and tell the E.R. you’re on the way.”
I climbed into the driver’s seat. Dock had left the keys in the ignition.
“Thanks, Dock,” I said.
Julie got in and Keesha climbed over the seat between us and into the back. I looked back and saw her lift Hank’s head up and dip her hips in underneath him to support his head on her lap.
Julie and I closed our doors and the dome light faded to black.
I hit the door lock button.
There was a knock at my window. An old woman, kind of goggle-eyed. She reminded me of Gladys Kravitz on the old
I smiled at her, nodding. Maybe she wasn’t able to see my face in the night.
She cupped her hands to the glass and attempted to peer inside.
“Go, Bill,” Julie said.
I turned the key hard and pressed on the gas. Something sharp had worked its way up through the soles of my Doc Martens and wedged up between the toes of my right foot. Just another item to ignore.
The engine roared.
Gladys Kravitz was still there, hands cupped against the glass and unseeing eyes probing.
I grabbed the gear lever and pull it down hard one click. Reverse.
The whole vehicle shuddered once and we were in sudden motion. I flicked my eyes toward the rearview mirror and shadowy shapes tinged in blue from the street lamp and red from the backup lights leapt out of the way.
I jerked the wheel hard over to the left, dimly aware of having rolled over a good deal of wreckage. There was a crunch as we bottomed out on the street and I hoped the gas tank hadn’t ruptured. On the hood the table-leg, telephone cord, and shards of red and gray stone sloughed off into the street.
I stood on the brakes and threw it into drive.
And we were gone into the night.
In the back seat Keesha was talking.
“If you ask me, this is a bunch of bullshit,” she said.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
The houses rolled past us:
“We left the guns,” Julie said. “All but Hank’s forty-five.”
It came to me then just why my side hurt. The thirty-eight Hank had given me was digging hard into my leg.
“Still got this,” I said, and fished it out. I laid it back on my lap.
“How’s Hank?” I asked.
I hung a right, hoping to take us both further into the neighborhood and farther away from anyone who might want to stop us.
“He’s alright,” Keesha said. Julie and I took it as authority.
“Thank you, darlin’,” I said.
“Hank,” I heard her coo to him softly. “You gonna be just fine.”
The night had taken on the surreal quality of a good nightmare.
“We can’t go to Hank’s place,” Julie said. “It’s too long of a drive. Besides, there’s nothing we need there except your car. Shoot!”
“What?”
“We left my car!”
“Oh. Yeah,” I said.
“But wait. That’s okay.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s not my car.”
“Oh.” I let it go, for the moment. Maybe I’d remember to ask later. “Ordinarily,” I said, “this would be a good time to talk to a very nice policeman. You know, I do know one or two.”
She punched me in the arm.
“Ow!” I yelled.
“She does that a lot, doesn’t she?” Hank said from the back seat. He was still lying down. “I think that means she likes you. Must be why she was punching me earlier.”
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” I said to Julie, ignoring Hank’s comment.
I began to see what she was talking about: the explosion, Dock dead, a sack of guns on the floorboard of her car-or not her car, as the case may be-parked across the street from a duplex that looked like what was left of Saddam Hussein’s summer home. Also, it appeared that we weren’t checking into any hospitals, as we’d told Julie’s neighbor. Then, on top of all that, there would be questions, assuredly, about Keesha. Where she’d come from and why we had not taken her directly to the police upon finding her abandoned. Then there were the imponderables: such things as stalkers, sniper-fire, and more than likely a whole host of other interesting things that Julie hadn’t told us yet.
It wasn’t the first time, I realized as we sped through the night toward destinations and futures uncertain, that I had been wholly and completely guilty of taking a wrong turn in life.
I had a few things to latch onto, though. Important things. Beside me sat a cute reddish blond girl who was depending on me no matter how reliable she might or might not prove herself to be. And there was a kid in the back seat that we all seemed to care more than a damn about.
All in all, since none of us were capable of altering the immediate past as we ate up the night, things still weren’t too far from perfect.
*****
The highway moved along and the Suburban seemed to stand still. Four of us and a dog, slip-streaming into the night.
I visited ghosts of souls I had known. It could have been me instead of the old man, eyes fixed and lifeless staring into dark skies.
But it hadn’t been.
The old guy had had a way of smiling. The loose skin around his eyes and mouth had crinkled up when he was enthralled-as he had been with Keesha. I wished I had had the chance to get to know him better. That chance was gone.
I don’t have many regrets about my life. Maybe I had come to be just a little too careful with it, holding onto life like a firefly in a jar, shirking danger and responsibility.
There in the night I was having an epiphany. There would surely be blood and pain to come, but at least I’d be living it. I wouldn’t be dead from the age of forty until eighty or so, or whenever that appointed date and hour was scheduled to come to pass. I’d be living it.
As I turned Dock’s dented and baptized-by-fire Suburban out onto the expressway, I watched the traffic lessen with the approaching midnight hour. I watched as Julie appeared to calm down a bit. I listened to Hank moan and breathe, and to Keesha’s subdued, yet cooing words that didn’t seem to make any sense but were somehow both powerful and perfect as she stroked Hank’s cheek. And somehow, the moment, like all moments that had come and gone before, passed right on by.
In its wake an inexpressible agonized feeling departed from my chest to be replaced by a sense of place and peace that I had never felt before.
White’s Barbecue looked more alien and far less welcoming in the hours before midnight than it had during the bright early-morning hours a few days past. The willow fronds became drooping, other-worldly tendrils in the sultry, windless night. A bare, too-bright back porch light revealed this fundamental difference in its stark, cold electric glare.
Hank was under his own power. I stood next to him by the car and kept a close watch over him without appearing, hopefully, to do so. Hank never was the kind of guy who liked to be thought of as needing help, and just maybe that was why it was so hard for me to get close to him; that is, aside from the fact that I didn’t know what he had done with that IRS agent.
I knocked on the side door of the house.
After a minute the door opened a crack. I held my palm up against the glare of the light. Julie and Keesha stood at the bottom step behind me.
“What the… What you doin’ here, Mr. William?” the deep voice of a woman enquired.
“Ms. Coleeta, I was wondering if Lawrence is home.”
“Naw. He ain’t home. What’re you doin’ with all these people?”
“It’s a long story, Ms. Coleeta, and it’s a bit of an emergency, and-“
”Stop right there, Mr. William. Who is this here?” She asked, gesturing toward Julie and Keesha.
“That’s also what this is about,” I told her.
The door opened wider and a large yet gentle hand came to rest on the screen door spring.
“That’s enough,” she said. “You can tell me all about it in a little while. Lawrence will be back directly. He’s gone to Waco to pick up some chickens. You’re welcome in this house, Mr. William, so come on in here. That’s all of you. You too, Slim,” she said, raising her voice and hailing Hank, who leaned back against my car at the edge of the light.
I stepped up to the top step and in through the door into the waiting warmth inside.
“Come on in here, child,” I heard her say behind me. “Don’t be shy, now.”
Just inside the kitchen I turned and waited.
First came Keesha, with Julie’s hands resting gently on her shoulders, propelling her forward with just a touch. Julie looked worn out. Her eyes met mine.
There came an indefinable moment, no more than just an instant, in which something passed between Julie and me. We had been alone before, had been as physically close as two people could be, and yet this was, for some reason, a far more intimate moment. A sharing. Her somewhat pale, thin lips moved soundlessly. I was vaguely aware of little-girl eyes looking up at me, head tilted, and for an instant rapt. Keesha was watching.
I acknowledged Julie, smiling in spite of myself, and mouthed the same.
Hank came after Julie. I noticed the color was returning to his face. His hand had stopped bleeding through the makeshift bandage of one of Julie’s brown socks.
“Ya’ll go on in and sit at the dining room table,” she said, shooing us further on into the house. “I’ll get some coffee going.”
“Thank you, Ms. Coleeta,” I said.
“
“Yes ma’am,” I said. What else could I say?
“That child needs a bath,” she said, turning toward the dining room.
“I hadn’t noticed,” I said.
Ms. Coleeta was Lawrence’s mother. I had been on a nodding acquaintance with her for a good number of years, but this was my first opportunity to get to know her without Lawrence being there.
When Lawrence left the Army back in ’88, he’d been home only a week before he fired up the grill. His uncle, Benjamin Finley, came up from Houston and spent two weeks with Lawrence and his mother, showing Lawrence the ins and outs of the barbecue business. Ben ran one of Houston’s most successful barbecue stands off of Jensen Drive. I got to know the fellow when I was in college down there. That was the history of White’s Barbecue according to Lawrence.
Ms. Coleeta had a different version of the same story. According to her, about the second night Lawrence was home, he practically cleaned out her refrigerator. Somewhere along the line, Lawrence had learned how to eat. He ate and ate and ate. Whether it was in his genes-his grandfather, after all, was a big man-or just his inclination, the man put groceries away faster than they could be purchased.
That second night Ms. Coleeta got up to fix herself a late night snack and found there was nothing in the refrigerator. Even the six month-old pickled relish was gone.
She didn’t bother closing the door. She went to the telephone, picked it up and called her dead husband’s brother in Houston, and the next morning the man drove up Highway 290 to Austin. By sundown that night there was more food in the house than Lawrence could possibly eat. Ben even sprung for a new deep freeze. Within forty-eight hours Lawrence was cooking and dishing out platters of food for the neighbors, and he was making money while he was doing it. Word spread rapidly through the community and Lawrence and his mother were in business.
And that was White’s Barbecue, a history of.
Personally, I liked Ms. Coleeta’s version better.
About six months after Lawrence got his barbecue stand going-regardless of which version a fellow chose to believe-a certain Austin do-gooder and financial consultant got a late night call. Somebody was pulling in too much cash. In fact, according to Uncle Benjamin, Lawrence didn’t have a bank account. What he did have was about ninety thousand dollars in greenbacks.
So I went to work.
That was all of fifteen years before. In that time I had put on about fifteen extra pounds. Lawrence, however, had added an extra Lawrence-size-wise.
Fifteen years.
I sat at Coleeta’s dining room table. Next to me was Hank with a beer in his hand. Across from me was Ms. Coleeta. Julie was in the bathroom giving Keesha a good scrubbing. We heard the occasional loud splash and explosion of giggles from both of them.
Those two were rapidly becoming inseparable.
Having been raised in the neck of woods I hail from, namely the Brazos River Valley area of east Central Texas, I had met a good number of large-boned black women in my time. My father had been an insurance agent for many of my formative years and he used to take me along while collecting on his debit route. From about the age of eight to eleven I must have highly favored a young Jerry Mathers (either that or all of us little white boys look the same) and along my dad’s route in many a black home such as Coleeta White’s I became known as “Beaver”, or just plain “Beave”.
Coleeta White and her warm home called to mind those days.
“Now,” she began. “Let’s see how much of this we can sort out before my son gets back from Waco.”
“Well, ma’am…” Hank started in.
“Hold on, Slim. I want to hear from Mr. William here first.”
It took awhile, but I told her everything that had happened thus far. She took the news about the murder attempt on Julie pretty easily but when I told her about the explosion I noticed a shocked look had come over her face. Her mouth was open and her eyebrows were drawn down into a heavy v-shape of sheer anger. At that moment I swore I would never, ever do anything to make the woman mad at me.
“What’re you gonna do, Mr. William?” she asked.
At that moment Julie and Keesha came into the room. Each of them had on a new dress and were smiling from ear to ear.
I looked down at Keesha. Her eyes sparkled and she was moving from side to side in excitement.
“Ms. Julie says you bought this dress for me, Bill.”
“That’s right, darlin’,” I said. “And don’t you look pretty?”
“She does,” Ms. Coleeta agreed. “Come over here, child” she said.
Ms. Coleeta pushed her chair back. “Come on and hop up here with me,” she said.
“Yes’m” Keesha said.
With the kid in her lap, she turned back to me.
“Well?” she asked.
“She’s why we came here,” I said, nodding toward Keesha. I looked up at Julie.
“Hoo-boy,” Ms. Coleeta said. “I see now.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said. “I’m sure that right now you can see better than any of us.”
She looked back down at the child who was curled on her lap.
“Ma’am,” Hank said. “I’m only glad you didn’t see the conditions this child was living in. It would have broken your heart.”
“I heard it, though,” she said. A tear slipped down her cheek before she could catch it. “I heard it in what William wasn’t saying.”
I felt Julie behind me. She put her arms around my neck and whispered in my ear.
“You’re amazing,” she said. I patted her arm.
“We’ll talk about all this tomorrow,” Ms. Coleeta said. “It’s getting plenty late and it’s been a long day-for everybody. You folks can bed down now. Miss Julie, Keesha, you both can sleep with me. You two men can sleep out here in the livin’ room. I might wake you when Lawrence comes in, which I expect will be sometime between two and four.”
With that said, the meeting broke up.
Lying awake in the darkness, the loud tick of an old-fashioned cuckoo clock to track the passing half-seconds, I waited for the sound of tires crunching on gravel. It didn’t come.
There in the pier-and-beam solid wood-floored home, lavish with green and red
I successfully fought off sleep for an hour, maybe longer.
Big trucks whistled along in the night down I-35, half a mile away to the west, and there was the occasional whoop of an ambulance siren: approaching, dwindling, gone.
Finally, sleep came, embracing me and carrying me off.
There are some that give credence to dreams. I always subscribe more to the philosophy that they are the drippings of experiential soup; nothing less, nothing more. But my dream there on Coleeta White’s couch was potent, and inside it, I became caught up in a plot not of my own devising.
“
“
“Bill! Bill!” It was Hank and I was awake, the shallow wail from my throat cut off.
“Get a hold of yourself,” he said.
I stared into the darkness in the direction of his voice. The house was quiet.
I noticed lights through the blousy window curtains. Truck headlights. They were there just a moment before they winked out.
“Somebody’s here,” Hank said. “I hope to God it’s this big friend of yours.”
“That it’s Lawrence,” I said. “Back from his chicken run to Waco. Yeah. I hope so too.”
It was.
The inside back porch light came on and I heard a heavy tread on the hardwood floor.
I listened.
After a few moments I heard low murmurs from down the long hallway off the living room. It sounded like it was the back bedroom. It was Lawrence and his mother whispering to each other.
I didn’t feel so good, and it wasn’t just the leftover stirrings from the nightmare I had just experienced. It was a feeling of
The whispers and mumbles lasted a few minutes, Mrs. Coleeta explaining, no doubt, and Lawrence clarifying. No other voices.
The conversation ceased. The hardwood floors vibrated, and I knew Lawrence was again moving through the house.Hank and I waited, but Lawrence was either intent on getting some much-needed sleep for himself or on allowing-for the moment-sleeping dogs to lie. Or both at the same time.
We heard the creak of old bed springs behind a closed door.
“Let’s catch a few hours more,” Hank whispered in my direction.
Before long I was back on the edge of sleep. And thankfully, this time, there were no dreams.
Breakfast was a family affair. Keesha sat up at the table, smiling, a milk moustache prominent beneath her little nose. She wore a small light-blue PowerPuff Girls blouse-one of the purchases from Target, no doubt. She looked happy in it. No more lonely nights and grimy tenements for her. It made my heart glad.
Julie sat across from me and to Keesha’s left, making fast work with her knife and fork.
Lawrence put in an appearance, plopping himself down in a chair and looking as though he could do with a little additional sleep.
Breakfast done, Julie helped Ms. Coleeta with clearing the table and getting the kitchen squared away. It was refreshing to see Keesha both eager to help and encouraged to at the same time. The vacant look that had been there on her face had begun to fade. There is no greater thrill in life than to find that you are not only useful, but that you can help, and that your help matters. I was sure it was that, coupled with her natural childhood resilience, that made all the difference.
Hank remained at the table nursing yet another cup of coffee while Lawrence took me out back to the pit.
As the morning wore on, I helped him clean out the previous day’s dead coals and scrape the grill.
I had a beer in my left hand, and that made it feel like a Sunday.
“Hey, Bill?” I knew from the tone of his voice that what he had to talk about with me wouldn’t be exactly sweetness and light. I was right. “How’d you get roped into this?” he asked after handing me a scratcher pad.
“It’s a long story,” I told him.
“When did it start?”
“As far as I can tell about 1926.”
“You’re playin’ me, man,” he said.
“Well, maybe a little. But still, I think that’s where the money started. I’ve still got some checking into all that to do. But I came in on this whole thing Monday morning. By the way, what’s today?”
“Thursday.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Yeah. Time flies, and all that nonsense.”
“Yeah.”
“You got pulled in pretty fast, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But compared to what?”
“Don’t get me wrong, Bill,” he said. “She seems like a fine lady, even though she’s some kind of thief, but-you gonna do this thing? You going to help her?”
I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know what else to do,” I said.
“Bill,” he said, pausing. I looked up at him. “You in love with this girl or something? Don’t get me wrong. I’m smitten with her myself.”
I looked down at the grill I was scrubbing and at my hands. The grill was cleaner than it had been probably since it was new and I had flecks of black carbon up to my elbows. It was a hell of a question, and I suppose it took me a little off guard. I wasn’t sure how to answer.
“You really want an answer for that, Lawrence?”
“Not if you don’t want to give me one.”
He looked at me, his large brown eyes both expectant and patient.
“I like her, Lawrence. She reminds me I’m still alive.”
He laughed. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’ve seen men do worse.”
We put our attention back on the job at hand for another ten minutes. When I looked back up, Lawrence was just standing there, his hands on his hips. He was a big man, but he carried it well. I’d known a few large guys before that were like Lawrence; much bigger than they themselves perceived. I had a theory that because they were not so consciously aware of their own size they could be dexterous and quick. There’s nothing quite as liberating as not knowing one’s own limitations.
“The kid can stay with us,” he said.
“That one came out of left field,” I told him.
“That’s where I pitch from. Don’t take this the wrong way, but she needs her own kind of folks. What she don’t need is more danger.”
I agreed with him. I hoped that Julie would as well. Maybe it wouldn’t be a sticking point. A wedge between us.
I finished up on his grill. When I looked around, he was unloading whole chickens from a large Igloo cooler, setting them up next to his cutting board, getting them ready to quarter.
“Bill. I’d join you. I’d help out.”
“But?” I waited.
“I’ve got to mind this grill and take care of my momma. I wouldn’t mind seeing a little action, though, you know?”
“Action? That’s the last thing I want. Really, I’d prefer a vacation.
“Yeah, right!” He laughed. “Since when do people like us get to take vacations?”
I supposed he was right.
He turned towards me, one large brown hand with long fingers like plump sausages wrapped around a whole chicken. I imagined those hands could be of real use to us in the near future, but it looked as though it wasn’t meant to be.
“Yeah. I understand,” I told him.
“But I do have one piece of advice for you,” he said.
“I’m listening.”
“Good. I don’t like to give out advice. Most of the time people don’t like to take it. It was a white fellow, I think, who said that people just hear what they want to hear, and disregard the rest.”
“Right. That was Paul Simon.”
“All right then. Don’t you think you better talk with that woman of yours in there about all this stuff? About the kid? About what she really wants you to do? You’d better take control of this operation right now. But first, I’d find out where her heart is. What side she’s on, if she’s on anybody’s but her own. If she’s willing to put you in danger then something’s not right.
I just looked at him.
“Well,” he said. “That’s it.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t realize that I had been holding my breath and so I let it out. “Maybe I’ll do just that,” I said.
By the time I got back inside the house the look on Hank’s face probably meant that he was aware that I had something on my mind, but that he wasn’t hell-bent on questioning me about it.
In the kitchen I caught Julie wiping wet dish hands on her pretty backside. She turned to look at me.
“We need to talk,” I said.
We sat on a couple of rusted-out and upended barbecue barrels in the back yard. There were bees around us, gathering nectar from the wild flowers that grew there in profusion.
“I had a dream about you last night,” I said.
“Not good?”
“Yeah. Very not good. Do you know what today is?” I asked her.
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. It’s Thursday. I had to ask Lawrence what day it was. I don’t like all this on-the-run, dodging bullets business, Jules. So we have to switch tactics about right now.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Do you still have Carpin’s little black book?”
“Uh. Yeah. I’ve got it in my purse. Who are you gonna call?”
I thought about not telling her, or lying. There was probably too much of that going on in our relationship already. So, I told her.
“Your friend, Archie Carpin, for starters.”
“Bill, no.”
“Oh, I’m going to talk to him, alright. Also to that other fellow… What’s his name? The one who helped you.”
She gasped.
“No. You can’t!”
“Oh. I can, alright. You’d be surprised what I can do. The next time you want to go setting somebody up and cleaning them out, come talk to me first. I know people with money. Money is the one thing you’d never have to worry about with me.”
“Okay,” she said.
“I’m not through. Also, we’re going to need some equipment. For-”
“Getting the money,” she finished for me. Her eyes were downcast. I’ve been dressed down a few times in my life and know how it feels. Julie was looking like I had shot her favorite cat. I didn’t feel so good about being the jerk, but somebody had to do it. Things had gotten way too far out of hand and she’d been shot at and a nice old fellow had been killed in an explosion meant for her. Some people will resist any effort to help them, even while they’re practically screaming for help. Julie was a walking disaster. But, then again, she had warned me about her middle name.
“I’m only hoping Carpin will negotiate,” I said.
“Oh Bill,” she began. Her eyes were red. “He won’t. He’ll kill you. And me. He’s…”
I held up my hand, cutting her off.
“Nobody’s going to kill you,” I said. “Nor me. And certainly not Hank Sterling.”
“You don’t have to do any of this,” she said. “I could- I could disappear.”
My stomach did a little flip-flop. My throat tightened and suddenly felt twice its size.
Dark clouds were coming in over the trees away to the east of us. Rain clouds.
“I told you I’d help you,” I said. “That’s what I do. That’s what I’m doing now. Just stick by me. There may come a time when I’ll want you to cut and run. Go into hiding. But that time’s not now.”
I turned and looked at her face in profile, her beautiful tresses, the warm, natural glow of her skin.
“Okay,” she said.
“Julie.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll get you through this.”
“I know.”
Silence again. I could feel the electric current between the two of us, an effect of the affinity versus the distance. Like two huge celestial objects attracted together by gravity or magnetism but held apart by some greater force.
But there were more important matters at the moment.
“You and Hank and I are about to leave,” I told her. “But Keesha stays here with Lawrence and his mother.”
She frowned. “She’s a wonderful kid, Bill. But I know we can’t take her with us. She’s why you came here. To Lawrence and his mom. It’s okay.”
“Good,” I said. I slipped one arm around her narrow, perfect waist. “Go get it,” I told her.
“Get what?”
“That little black book.”
Our goodbye was short. Underneath the shade tree in the front yard where the grass had given up the ghost many years before beneath the incessant comings and goings of barbecue customers and family, Ms. Coleeta and Keesha managed to get hugs in on all three of us. Hank and I shook hands with Lawrence.
As I started up the Suburban, Keesha popped around the car to my window. I flicked the button and rolled it down.
“My man Bill,” she said. “You be careful.”
“I will, darlin’.”
“My girl Julie, my man Henry. Y’all
“We will, honey,” Julie said.
She stood back and waved as I backed us out into the street. I patted Julie on the leg. She was actually smiling.
It was the best goodbye I’d ever had.
Within five minutes after we left the sky overhead had become overcast with immense, dark clouds. Lightning played across the sky to the east. We all knew we were in for it.
We crossed Austin from east to west, then got back on the Loop going south. Our destination? My house.
It was sort of interesting being home without my own car. Mine was back at Dock’s house in Killeen.
Then it hit me. Anyone trying to figure out who Dock was or how he’d gotten where we left him would begin by checking into his home on the outskirts of Killeen. Which meant they’d find my car.
It was time to make a couple of phone calls and then get a move on. Well past time.
Before going inside we looked the place over as best we could. Nothing appeared to be tampered with. Hank got Dingo out of the Suburban and let her sniff around, first the front door, then the back. Nothing. I didn’t know whether or not Dingo was specially trained, but Hank seemed to act as if she had given the place her seal of approval.
Just in case, we went in through the back door.
About the time we got inside, the rain began, coming down in sheets. It had been awhile since I’d seen such a hard rain.
It didn’t appear that anything in the house had been tampered with. My fish were about half starved, so I gave them an extra dose of food.
While Julie, Hank and Dingo raided my refrigerator, I picked up the phone.
“Yallo?” The voice sounded like it was talking through a couple of jawfuls of gravel.
“Is this Mr. Neil, or Mr. Mortensson?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Bill.”
“Bill who?”
“Just Bill. This is with regard to Julie Simmons and Archie Carpin.”
Silence.
“Hello?” I said again.
“I’m here,” gravel-voice said.
“Just making sure.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s safe, for now. A couple of jokers named Jake and Freddie, whom I’ve been dying to meet, keep trying to kill her. Know anything about that?”
Silence.
“Is this Mr. Neil?” I asked.
“Neil’s dead.”
“Really? My condolences. When did he die?”
“Last week.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Really.”
“So I guess he can’t talk to me then.”
“Not unless you’ve got a crystal ball or something-connections on the other side. Son, you don’t want to get involved in this shit. It’s not exactly safe.”
“You know what’s not safe? Going around sniping at folks with deer rifles and setting dynamite charges inside of duplexes. That’s not safe at all.”
“Bill, huh? Maybe it’s your real name. Okay, listen up real close, you happy dip wad. You’ve got a woman there who is pure-dee poison. Don’t turn your back on her.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I said. “So how do we go about calling off these dogs?”
“You mean the dipshit twins? Bullets won’t stop ’em. They’re too stupid to know when to quit.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. I looked up from my couch to see Julie leaning up against the doorway from the kitchen. Her arms were crossed under her breasts and she had a serious look on her face. Behind her I could see a tail wagging. Hank was feeding Dingo something. I wondered what it could be.
“What you think is what she wants you to think.”
I covered up the phone with my hand so gravel-voice couldn’t hear.
“Does Jolly Mortensson sound like he gargles with sandpaper?” I asked Julie
“Yeah,” she said.
I took my hand off the phone.
“Okay,” I told him. “Somehow I get the feeling that you two aren’t the best of friends.”
“I don’t have any friends, Mr. Bill. All my friends are dead.”
“I understand your nickname now.”
“What?”
“Goodbye, Jolly,” I said, and hung up.
I made another call.
I had to wade through three different people at the Sheriff’s office until I got who I was looking for: an old friend of mine, Deputy Patrick Kinsey.
“Kinsey,” he said.
“Pat. This is your old friend, Bill Travis. I need a favor.”
“Bill? Bill Travis?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn. It’s been awhile. I thought I saw you one time across the room at one of those lawyer functions my wife’s always trying to get me to go to. By the time I got over to you, you were nowhere to be found. By the way, what happened to us? We used to really knock back the suds.”
“You got married, Pat.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Guess you’re right. I did. Okay, so that makes sense.”
“Yeah.”
“So what kind of favor?”
“First, I’ll give you something.”
“Shoot,” Pat said.
“That explosion in northwest Austin last night.”
“Okay, you got me. I’m all ears.”
“You recording this?” I asked.
“Not if you say not to.”
“Okay,” I told him. “Don’t.”
“Got it.”
“Write down a name. Got a pen?”
“Sure do. Poised for writing.”
“Good. The name is Carpin, with a ‘C’.”
“Carpin. Got it. Is that a first name or a last name?”
“Last. What I’ve got for a first name is Archie. I don’t know anything else, so I’ll guess it’s maybe an Archibald. Who knows?”
“Okay. This who I’m looking for?”
“Him or a couple of his flunkies. Two names. Flunky number one is Jake Jorgenson, I think. The other is Freddie Sanderberry. You might have to flip-flop those two last names, though. I never did write any of this down, so it might be all backwards.”
“Okay.”
“Jake and Freddie blew up the duplex. They drive a late model Ford F-150 pickup, light blue. Looks like it needs a coat of paint.”
“Coat of paint, got it.”
“Okay, so if you run all this through the National Crime Information Computer, I’ll bet you get diddley-squat. But, I’m willing to bet the FBI has a file on them, especially Carpin. He runs horses and moonshine stills up in North Texas, or rather, he did.”
“Geez Louise. Got it. You’re leaving out a whole lot,” he said.
“Protecting somebody.”
“One of your special clients?”
“As I recall, you were a special client of mine once,” I said.
“Bill, did you know the guy who died. Dock Slocum?”
“Yeah. He was… a friend of a friend. One of the good ones. He’s got people up in Gunnison, Colorado, if I recall correctly. You’ll find my car when you go over to his house.”
“I was just about to head over there and have a look around. Geez, Bill, I really think you ought to come in and talk with me about this one.”
I watched as Julie turned away from me and went up the stairs. Maybe she’d heard enough.
“Can’t do that, Patrick,” I said. “I’ve just told you everything you need to know right now.”
“Somehow, I have trouble believing that.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“All right,” he said. I could hear the resignation in his voice. “Where can I reach you, Bill?”
“If I need to, I’ll be reaching you.”
“You better write down my cell phone number,” he said. He gave it to me and I took it down. I could hear some shuffling over the phone line. Probably Patrick clearing his work space. Maybe I’d lit a fire under him.
“So what’s the favor?” he asked.
“When all this is said and done I may be seriously needing your help. For my client. Possibly for me too.” There was a long silence on the other end.
“Bill. I can do just about anything except break the law. But you know that.”
“I know. Wouldn’t want you to break anything. Might want you to bend a few things, though.”
“Bending. Now that I can do, if I have to. It depends on how far.”
“Good. I don’t know exactly what kind of help we may need, but it never hurts to have a friend in your corner, you know?”
“You got it. I’m plainclothes now anyway. It gives me a little latitude. Anything else?”
“I’ll let you know when, and if, the time comes.”
He was quiet for a bit.
“You sound sorta funny,” he said.
“Yeah, but nobody’s laughing.”
“Okay,” he said. “See ya.”
“See ya,” I said, and hung up.
I placed another call, this time to my office.
Penny answered.
“Penny. It’s Bill.”
“Mr. Travis! Mr. Bierstone has been looking for you. He’s had me leave several messages on your desk.”
“That’s fine, Penny. I may be out for a few days. It’s this Simmons case he wanted me to handle. Listen, Penny, I’ll be checking back in as I’m able. There’s a stack of bills that have to be paid in the second from the top drawer of my filing cabinet. There’s a small stack of blank checks in the safe. Pay those bills for me, would you?”
“Okay, got it,” she said. “Is that it?”
“Sorry, Penny. Just getting started. First thing is there’s this little kid. I’ll need some standard papers for her, assignment of legal guardianship, that sort of thing. You might ask Nat what all we’ll need. He loves doing that sort of thing. The kid’s name on the form will be Keesha White. A Kay, two ee’s, and a shuh. Guardian would be Coleeta White.” I spelled it for her. “She should be in the phone book as far as address and stuff. Tell Nat that it might be a good idea to go over and visit and get her to sign them when the papers are ready.”
“Okay… Got it. Is that it?”
I thought for a moment.
“Hold on a second, Penny,” I said.
“Julie!” I called.
I heard a distant voice say something that sounded like “bathroom.” Good. She was out of earshot.
Hank was standing there in the doorway where Julie had been before, Dingo right beside him. They both looked at me. Dingo barked once, gruffly.
“Okay, Penny,” I said. “One last thing. Have Nat call an old friend of mine. Deputy Sheriff Patrick Kinsey.” I told her the number. “Have Nat tell Kinsey everything he knows about Miss Simmons.”
“Okay. Is that it?”
“Is that it? Hmmm. Penny, does anything ever bother you?”
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“Good. You’re doing a fine job.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“One more thing. Just remind Nat to let Mrs. White know that he’s my partner. That way, nobody will be freaking out when he comes knocking.”
“Got it.”
“Penny, I might have to leave town for a few days. If you don’t hear from me by say-?”
“Monday?” I mouthed to Hank.
He nodded.
“Monday,” I said to Penny. “Can you come to my house and feed my fish? There’s a spare house key in my desk.”
“I’ll do that, sir. Have a good day, sir.”
Have a good day? Me? She didn’t know me very well.
I hung up.
Hank raised his eyebrows.
“What?” I asked.
I wasn’t sure why I’d asked for information on Julie, or why I’d asked Penny to pass it on to Nat Bierstone to do. That’s not like me. Usually I hit things pretty much head on, and the consequences be damned. But looking at it, I think maybe that it was some reflex action. A nod at self-preservation. I sometimes didn’t take too good of care of myself, I guess, the way I tended to fall into things like I’d just done.
I had a feeling right then. That feeling of something not right.
I’d learned a long time ago that the only way to head off trouble was to face it head on. Doing anything else only tends to stack it up deeper further down the road. So, I was hoping that my little call to Pat Kinsey would be worth something later on. Also, I was hoping beyond hope that Julie would get something out of what I was doing. She’d been running for some time, it appeared, probably mostly from herself. Maybe I was just kidding myself, but what I was wishing for most of all was that she’d begin to face up to whatever she had done.
Me, I’m no saint. I’m basically lazy, and I’ve found it far simpler to get along in life by looking, confronting, and stopping the stone before it gets too much inertia going down that long hill. Sometimes, waiting too long before trying to stop it gets you nothing but flattened by it.
Julie sat next to me on the couch while I dialed Archie Carpin’s number.
“Do you want to talk to him first?” I asked her.
She shook her head.
I got a ring.
“Start talking,” the voice said. It was a masculine voice.
“If this is Archie, Julie wants to talk to you,” I said.
There was a long silence. I could almost hear the gears turning.
“I don’t care much for talk,” he said.
“I can understand that,” I said. “But the fact remains that talking is better than shooting.”
“Who says?”
“Marshal Dillon, for one. The word we’re looking for here is negotiation, I think.”
“Well,” he said. “Really, I ought to kiss her. She killed my number one competitor. Nobody else was brave enough to do that.”
“Are you talking about Mr. Neil? Your horse-racing competitor?”
“The one and only.”
It was my turn for silence. I looked at Julie. She was petting Dingo. Also, she was biting her lower lip.
“How did he die?” I asked.
“Somebody put a very large caliber bullet through his neck. Like to have cut his head off.”
“Well damn,” I said.
“That’s ancient history. What I want to know is where she put it.”
“I thought he died last week,” I said.
“Last week and a million years ago are about the same. Dead is dead. I repeat: so where did she put it?”
“Put what?” For a moment my question was sincere. I had forgotten about the money. Then I got the picture in my head: the close lightning and the fat drops of rain and the grating metal-on-metal sound of the vent cover opening and two million sliding down into oblivion.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “I want that money.”
“Oh…
“I won’t negotiate,” Carpin said.
“That’s what Julie said. But people can change, Archie,” I said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about a deal,” I said.
I noticed Hank looking at me rather studiously. He nodded his head “no”.
“The money first, then we talk,” Carpin said.
“No way,” I said. I didn’t have to hesitate.
“I know she stashed it somewhere,” he said. “There’s a certain little girl who will attest she didn’t have it the last time she saw her.”
“What little girl?” I looked at Julie. Her eyes went wide as I watched.
“You don’t know?” Carpin asked. He laughed; a great hollow chuckle with about as much humor as a lynching party. “Hah! That figures. Tell Julie the kid is safe right here with me. Ain’t that right, little darlin’?” his voice had become distant. He was holding the mouthpiece away. I pressed the phone against my ear so hard that it hurt, but I couldn’t make out a response.
“Carpin,” I said quickly. “You’re related to the Signal Hill bunch, aren’t you?”
“Hell yeah I am. That was my granddaddy.”
“Not that I want to win friends and influence people or anything, but your granddaddy was low-life scum of the earth. I’m surprised you never changed your name in shame. A sorrier cutthroat never walked,” I said, and hung up.
“Who’s the kid?” I asked Julie, immediately upon hanging up.
“Oh God,” Julie said. “I put her on the bus. I watched the bus leave that night. He’s lying. He can’t have her.”
“Have who?” Hank asked.
“Jessica.”
Isn’t it interesting how when you think you’ve got things pretty well nailed down, they start jumping around again? For me that normally doesn’t happen. I don’t like it much.
The room was still, but things were jumping.
She was about to lose it. I could tell. Another minute, maybe ten seconds, and she’d lose it for sure.
I reached out to her, grabbed her arm just as she was pushing herself up from the couch. Her wrists were bony and delicate, so I made sure not to break them. I’ve got a pretty good grip.
“Julie,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “you can tell us all about Jessica, and that’s probably a lot more important than any amount of money right now, but I want to know one thing first.”
I could see the terror in her eyes, the indecision. She looked toward Hank, who sat stock still.
“What?” She said.
“I have to know. The guy you called… The guy who helped you… Ernest Neil? He’s dead. It happened a few days before you and I met. Carpin said that you killed him. Is there anything you need to tell me?”
“Bill… I-no! I didn’t kill him. I haven’t killed anybody, ever- except- my parents.”
“You were away,” I said, “in rehab. You weren’t home when they were murdered.”
She was either going to hit me or start crying. I wished she’d do one or the other and get it over. I watched the war of conflicting emotions play itself out in her features. “I know,” she said, finally. “But I should have been there.”
“Bill told me about that,” Hank said. “If you’d been there, you’d have been dead too.”
“Do you know how Ernest Neil died?” I asked her.
“Of course I know,” she said. Her face was flushed, as I’d seen it only a few nights before after I’d awakened her from the nightmare. “He died in my arms.”
“Are you ready, Hank?” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s saddle up,” I said.
The hammering rain had slackened down to a steady drizzle.
We all climbed back into Dock’s suburban.
“Which way are we headed?” Hank asked.
“North,” I said.
Julie took the front seat. Chevrolet makes Suburbans wide, and it seemed like a mile across to where she was sitting. That was okay. Just at the moment she wasn’t my number one pal.
Within ten minutes we were back on the Interstate, headed north and into the drab, gray curtain the world had become.
When we stopped at Hank’s place it was ostensibly for supplies, but when Hank caught on to my real why, he wasn’t having any of it.
“Goddammit, Bill. I’m going with you. I’m not staying here.”
“Thanks, Buddy,” I told him. “I appreciate everything, really, but you didn’t sign up for what we’re headed into. Hell, you’re about as bunged up as I am. You should take it easy for a few days. If I need you I’ll call.”
Hank stepped around me and dropped a case of water bottles into the back of the Suburban. There in the growing stack was also a couple of boxes of ammunition for the stack of rifles and shotguns in the rear cargo area.
Hank whistled to Dingo and made a motion with his arm. Dingo hopped up into the back, turned and regarded me and barked once.
“See,” Hank said. “Dingo agrees with me. We’re going.”
Up front Julie turned back my way and smiled.
I gave her my best withering frown. She laughed.
I was at first certain that Jessica was Julie’s daughter, only to find out differently. Julie had had a close friend named Lindsey, a high-dollar prostitute in Vegas. Lindsey had been murdered by one of her clients, a Silicon Valley millionaire turned playboy named Horace Farkner who spent nearly every weekend in Vegas when he should have been home with his wife and kids. Farkner had fallen into a fatal attraction for Julie’s friend back in the late 1990s and Julie was there for Jessica from the moment they both heard about Lindsey’s death. Apparently, when Lindsey demurred one time too many in the face of Farkner’s continuous pleas to run away with him, the man decided that if he couldn’t possess her then no one could. During a heated argument in which furniture was smashed and mirrors broken the man attempted to separate her head from her body with a six inch piece of shattered glass.
The five year-old half-Anglo, half-Samoan girl, had stayed with Julie from that night forward.
As we tore along the Interstate toward Dallas and Fort Worth, I did a little mental math. Jessica would be eleven years old now, or thereabouts. It was good information to plan with. Kids that age can think, and sometimes they can act.
On the outskirts of Fort Worth, I remembered something. I sent Julie and Hank into a Cracker Barrel restaurant just off the Interstate, found a pay phone for myself and started dialing.
I got Kathy on the first ring. When you live in a town as long as I had lived in Austin you get to know a lot of people. There might be a million people living in the city, but I’d found you couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone you knew. My friend Kathy was one of those people. I tended to bump into her around town and at the oddest of places, which in itself was passing strange, given Kathy’s profession. She was a librarian at the University of Texas Center for American History.
“Hello, Library.”
“Kathy, it’s Bill Travis.”
“Hi Bill Travis, what can I do for you today, since you’re not actively stalking me.”
“Hey,” I said. “Last time I looked up from my favorite bar stool you were coming in the door, so I wonder who has been stalking whom.”
“
“A little research. Signal Hill. It was an oil boomtown up near Borger. The Texas Rangers shut the town down around 1927. There was a fellow named Carpin running half the town up there.”
“Carpin. Got it.”
“Good. I’d like to know when he died. Also, I’d like to know what happened after the town was shut down. Where all the money went. That sort of thing. I seem to remember something about a U.S. Marshal who went in there and never made it back out. Anything you can dig up would be helpful.”
“Okay, Bill. You gonna do me a favor some time?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Dinner.”
“Um. Okay. I’ll buy you dinner, Kathy. Should I wait a few days for the information?”
I could hear her flipping pages of some kind. Maybe she was reading about Indian incursions against the settlers or something.
“Nah,” she said. “Call me tomorrow morning.”
“Thanks, Kathy. You’re a peach.”
“I don’t like peaches. Can I be something else?”
“Okay, when I see you next you can pick your fruit.”
“Bye, Bill Travis.”
“Bye, Kathy.”
We hung up. I heard a bark and looked back toward the suburban. Dingo had her head out the driver’s window and her front paws on the steering wheel.
“Dingo,” I said. “You’re a clown.”
Julie got up during dinner for a bathroom break. It was probably the only chance I’d get for a while to talk with Hank alone.
“Hank, either I’m the most gullible fellow you ever saw, or I’m missing something vitally important.”
“It’s both,” he said. “But what’s on your mind?”
“I feel like every move I make is the wrong one. Also I’ve got this itchy feeling on the back of my neck.”
“I know what you mean. My short hairs have been on end ever since those pot shots through my living room window.”
“So you understand me. I’m not going nuts.”
“I understand you, more than you know. And yeah, you’re pretty much a basket case, all right. She’s got a pretty short leash on you, Bill. Now don’t puff up like a toad. Any man-well, a lot of fellows would gladly trade places with you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s for sure.”
Outside the sky had turned a soft shade of purple with clouds thinning down to thin puffs. The sun was going down somewhere out of sight.
“You know, Hank, this might sound… different, but this is sort of what I dreamed my life would be like when I was a kid.”
“What? People shooting at you and houses blowing up in your face-correction, my face-and heading off into the dangerous unknown?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Yeah,” Hank said, and sipped his coffee.
“So what’s the important thing I’m missing?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know, since you’re feeling so fine at the moment.”
I thought about it.
“Try me,” I said.
“Okay, hotshot,” Hank said, and looked off into space. “It’s what I was missing right up until we left your house today.”
“And that is?”
“Who are the cops that are following us?”
“What? Not again.”
“Hold on, there, Texas. As far as I can tell, they’re not Austin locals. I got one good look when we split up to make your last call. They’re feds. I’m almost sure of it.”
I had that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“You don’t look so good,” Hank said.
“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t feel exactly wonderful.”
“Not what you wanted your life to be like?” he asked.
“Thank you, Mr. Sarcasm.”
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Let’s just move on, Bill. Let’s keep an eye on them and act like they’re not even there, for now. They may be following me, you know? That missing IRS agent?”
“I thought we weren’t talking about that,” I said.
“We’re not. Just bringing up possibilities.”
I noticed Hank’s eyes flick over my shoulder and then back to me.
“Julie?” I said.
He nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “Mum’s the word.”
“Fine.”
A moment later I felt a delicate hand on my shoulder. I looked up at her and gave her my best smile as she sat down beside me.
On the way out of the restaurant, Hank tapped me on the shoulder and nodded. I glanced quickly where his eyes indicated, trying to be nonchalant, and saw them.
Two guys. One white, one black. They both had business suits on. One of the two-the white guy-was beefy, about two hundred and fifty pounds.
Feds.
I knew then what Hank meant. They exuded it like an aura.
We moved through Fort Worth and out the other side and up onto the wind-swept North Texas plains as night fell.
It was a dark night with a spread of stars over us and clear road ahead. Julie nuzzled into my shoulder, finding the most comfortable position for herself, and the most painful one for me. Such is life. I endured it for about twenty miles before shifting her slightly.
After an hour or so she awoke.
We passed through myriad small towns in the night and little communities with no name.
I heard snoring from the back seat and craned my neck. I’d thought it was Hank, but it was Dingo. Hank and I traded knowing nods.
My eyes were beginning to glaze by the time we made it to Dumas, Texas. We found a motel on the main drag, an Indian-run outfit that carried a light scent of curry, even outside.
Hank took the room next to me and the blond.
That night Julie and I made frantic love in the dark. We didn’t speak.
Several times during the night I awoke to get up and scan the parking lot. There was only one other vehicle, and it looked like it hadn’t moved from its spot in quite some time.
Finally, I was able to sleep the sleep of the just and had dreams of Julie, Hank and me in plaster casts. Dingo drove the Suburban and sang with Hank Williams, Jr.’s voice.
“Kathy, it’s Bill Travis.”
“Hi Bill Travis. You’re up early.”
“And you’re at work early. Did you even go home last night?”
“Of course. Contrary to popular belief, librarians do have a life.”
“But a quiet one,” I said.
“‘Tis true. ‘Tis true. Bill, that research you wanted me to do?”
“Yeah?”
“Interesting stuff.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well, for starters, there was a whole gang of people running that town up there, but you were right, two chiefly. Bryan ‘Whitey’ J. Walker and Matthew Carpin.”
“I know what happened to Walker. What about Carpin?”
“He went into hiding, then about ten years later he was suddenly legitimate. Made a killing racing horses. He was always watched, though. The J. Edgar Hoover crowd had his number.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. I looked over at Julie, still asleep under tousled covers. The light from the new day streamed through cracks between the window curtains.
“And money? According to the Amarillo Globe, in 1927 the two most profitable legitimate businesses were the sheriff’s office and the undertaker.”
“I’ll bet.”
“There’s more. You said something about a U.S. Marshal. There was one. He went into that den of thieves and was never seen again. I think that’s why Carpin was watched after all those years. I got copies of reports and letters from the state archives. The FBI writing to the Governor’s office, demanding help with the continued investigation. Looks like they never found that poor man.”
“What was the marshal’s name, Kathy?”
“Jonathan Johannsen. They called him ‘Jack’, which was short for ‘Blackjack’.
“Thanks, Kathy. I owe you.”
“Sure do. Bye, Bill Travis.”
“Bye.”
I scanned the parking lot outside.
Nothing.
I got Julie up and by the time we were showered and cleaned up and ready to go, Hank and Dingo were sitting in the Suburban with the back flung open. Hank was tossing bacon strips into the air for Dingo to catch.
“Bacon?” I asked. “Where’d you get bacon?”
“Down the road. A little diner. Your kind of place, too.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Soul food,” he said and tossed another strip of fat bacon into the air. Dingo gobbled it down instantly.
“Oh,” I said. “You already had breakfast, then?”
“Nope. Waitin’ for you two. Had to feed the dog, though.”
“Okay,” Julie said. “I need coffee. Let’s go.”
We parked in front on a wall that was covered with a mass of ivy. The name of the restaurant was “Jerry’s Place”, an ancient brick and clapboard affair that looked as though it had started off life as a 1920s gas station and had gone through a long series of abandonments before finding its highest and best use as a soul food restaurant. The front door was little more than a couple of clapboards grafted onto steel mesh with baling wire, but the blue paint looked fairly fresh. It didn’t come off on my hands.
The hours were prominently displayed:
OPEN EARLY — CLOSE LATE
Walking into the place was like coming home. It had that day-old bread smell to it that is common among such establishments, but beyond that it had a shabbiness and a Spartan utility that combined in such a way as to command comfort. There were checkered tablecloths, though they were covered in thick clear plastic that had molded itself into a permanent shape, and smooth, straight-backed hardwood chairs. Also the lighting was slightly dim. We passed a table that had a box of yellowed dominoes on it that looked older than myself.
We took a table in the corner near an old jukebox. I took a look at the selections. It was a museum piece, with seventies disco music mixed in with Marvin Gaye and trucker music. It looked as though it was either out of service or that none of the clientele was willing to risk hard-earned money in it.
“Some place, ain’t it?” Hank said.
I could smell the kitchen already, and knew the food was going to be good.
“You haven’t lived, Hank,” I said, “until you’ve tried pork chops that melt off the bone and collard greens that have been steeping since New Year’s.”
“Stop it, Bill,” Julie said. “Damn but I’m hungry.”
The proprietor was a heavyset black woman with a cherubic smile and wide eyes. She seemed pleased to see us. The menus were pieces of tan-colored stiff-backed paper run through a copy machine.
“What’ll you folks have to drink?” she said.
“Coffee,” Hank said. “All around.”
“Fine. Be just a minute.”
We spent a few minutes looking over the menu and discussing it. We were all looking forward to breakfast. It was too bad when we realized we wouldn’t be getting any.
We heard the twang of the screen door opening and thought little of it at the moment. Julie was facing away from the door and I had my back almost directly to it, but Hank was sitting there looking over my shoulder, not saying a word.
“Howdy,” Hank said.
I became conscious of the gun pointed at my head and the other one, a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun leveled across the table at Hank.
“Ever’body just be cool,” the man with the shotgun said.
“Oh shit,” Julie said, then quickly: “Hi, Jake. Hi, Freddie.”
“Hi, yourself,” the one with the pistol aimed at me said.
“What can we do for you fellahs?” Hank asked, as calm as you please. He lifted his coffee cup and sipped.
“We’re taking you back, Miss Julie,” Jake with the shotgun said.
“Oh,” Julie said. “I’m going back, alright. But it’s to get Jessica out of there.”
“Ain’t gonna happen,” the other one-Freddie-said.
“What the hell?” Three plates shattered on the hardwood floor almost simultaneously. Our waitress had picked the wrong moment to come out of the kitchen.
The two guns swung to cover her and the shotgun discharged across the table. A hole about a foot wide appeared in the back of a chair one table over and the chair flew end over end.
“Shit,” Hank yelled.
Pistol-toting Freddie got my left elbow in his gut just as his gun swung back toward me. The pistol butt almost connected with my head, but I ducked just in time.
I was dimly aware of several things going on at once: first, that I couldn’t hear all that well, second, that Hank was already out of his chair and grappling with the shotgun, that our waitress was screaming her fool head off and that Julie was using Jake-shotgun boy-as a punching bag.
I had my legs under me and sudden adrenaline working in my favor. As Freddie bent double I launched myself at him with all my weight. The chair underneath me toppled as I left it and I came down on top of him, hard.
I had the wrist from his gun hand in my grip and I slammed it hard into the floor. The pistol, an old Luger, dislodged from his fingers and rattled across the floor.
“You sonuvabitch,” he said. I felt a stinging sensation upside my face. He’d cuffed me a good one.
I reached up, grabbed a handful of greasy hair and forced his head down into the floor, once, twice. After the second time around he stopped moving.
The table where we’d been sitting toppled over and came down on my foot, the one that had been hit by Jake and Freddie’s truck. For an instant I felt the most exquisite, keen-edged, electric-blue pain.
I bit down hard into my lip to keep from screaming, rolled over onto my back and yanked my pulsing foot from underneath the table. A ketchup bottle rolled past my ear.
The tableau going on was one for the scrapbook. Hank had his hands around the shotgun between Jake’s hands, each engaged in a tug-of-war to the death. Julie was on Jake’s back with her hands dug into his face and neck.
“Stupid ass,” she kept saying. “Stupid ass stupid ass stupid ass.”
Hank let go with his right hand, clenched it into a fist and drove it three times in rapid succession into Jake’s nose, cheek and mouth. Jake’s lip split and a tooth tumbled backwards into his mouth. Blood began to flow even as Jake let go of the shotgun and rocked backwards. I noted surprise on Julie’s face-her mouth framed an “Oh!” that I never heard as she fell back underneath Jake.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Ohhhh,” Julie moaned. “My head.”
Hank ran his fingers through her head, feeling.
“She’s got a pretty good knot back here,” he said, “but she should be fine. Wait a minute. I know an old Indian trick. Bill, check on the waitress. She disappeared. I’m hoping she hasn’t called the cops yet.”
“Will do,” I said. I left the two of them there and went back toward the kitchen.
Just as I was about to enter, a tall black man came out. He had a long-barreled twelve gauge shotgun in his hands.
“Whoa there,” I said. “We took their guns away from them.”
“What kinda devilment you brought into my ‘stablishment?” he shouted at me. He raised the shotgun, leveled it at me point blank.
“Nothing,” I said. The hole at the business end was suddenly a cavern hanging in front of my face. A cavern from which quick death in a whirlwind of fire and blood might emerge at any second.
“Put the gun down, stupid ass,” I said.
He looked at me uncertainly.
I yawned.
The cavern went away, slowly.
“You got some kinda nerve,” he said. “Like I never seen.”
“Thanks,” I told him.
“You can call the cops after we leave. Just keep your gun trained on Frick and Frack there until the cops arrive. Tell them they tried to hold up the place, or whatever. I really don’t care what you tell them, just give us time to get out of here.”
I reached into my wallet and brought out five one hundred dollar bills.
“Here. This should cover the damage.”
“Shit,” he said. “Okay. You got it.” The man snatched the money from my hand.
I went back to help Hank get Julie to her feet.
“You doin’ okay?” I asked.
“Better,” she said.
“Let’s get outta here,” Hank said.
Hank took one long minute outside to pop the hood of Jake and Freddie’s pickup and remove a couple of plug wires from the distributor cap.
“If the cops don’t slow them down, then that will,” he said. He tossed the wires over the barbed wire fence at the rear of the place and out into the high weeds.
By my reckoning we still had about a hundred and fifty or so miles to go; from Wichita Falls to northwest of Childress, Texas, some eighty or so miles southeast of Amarillo as the crow flies.
“I have a friend who lives outside of Vernon,” Hank told me when we were well on our way. Wichita Falls had faded into gently rolling plains behind us and I found my ears were popping from the change in altitude. Sometimes it’s simply amazing to me just how far a fellow can go and still be in Texas.
“Are you sure now’s a good time to stop by and say howdy?” Julie asked him. She had stopped holding her head in her hands about twenty miles back. Maybe Hank’s old Indian trick had eased her concussion.
“I don’t want a visit, I want some supplies.”
“Oh,” she said.
The hint of an idea was beginning to form in my mind, and I wanted to take a little time and try to plan things out.
“Okay,” I began. “We’ll stop in Childress and try and get some lunch. Then we’ll get a motel room and-”
”And?” Julie asked.
“And we’ll have a little council of war.”
“Fine by me,” Hank said. “Except let’s stop in Quanah for lunch. It’s closer. I know my way around this part of the country a bit, you know. Also, we turn off before we get to Childress for my buddy. That’s where I get the supplies.”
“What kind of supplies?” I asked. We were still set for drinks and other amenities, but I suspected Hank had a different idea of supplies than either Julie or I had.
“Oh… You know. A few sticks of TNT. Some nitrates. Prima cord. Some caps. That sort of thing.”
“Nitrates!” I was a bit stunned. “Geez louise, Hank. And prima cord? A little of that stuff goes a long way. Are you planning to start World War III?”
“Those fellows did that when they blew up Julie’s duplex and killed Dock,” Hank said. “If you haven’t noticed, we’re still driving his truck.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I thought about it and watched another mile tick by in the bright North Texas sun. The sun was coming directly in Julie’s window. She’d end up with her right arm slightly more tanned than her left.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll get your supplies.”
I felt something wet on the side of my face. Dingo was licking my ear.
“Darling,” I said to Julie, “you didn’t know we were traveling with Demolition Man and Scooby Doo-ette, did you?”
She laughed. “No. I didn’t. I figured they came along for our comic relief.”
Lunch, finally, in Quanah, a small Texas town much like the fictional Lake Woebegone: somewhere along the line, time simply forgot all about the place. If memory served, the town was named after Quanah Parker, a Texas half-breed Indian of some historical note. There were spots of my education that had been neglected, and that whole scenario was one of them. I’d have to do some reading up on the fellow when-and if-I made it back home. Texas was just too big and the years since its inception were becoming, for some of us, innumerable. Somewhere along the line, but within my own lifetime, Texas History had become an accepted specialization in academic circles.
Over hamburgers at a roadside diner well off the beaten path, we commiserated.
“We’re only about fifteen miles from the Red River,” Hank said. “Just to the north of us.”
“Really,” I said. “We should have brought a map.”
“Yeah,” he said.
I looked out the window of the diner. Dingo barked. We were making a little game of it. Whenever I looked her way, she barked at me. Hank and Julie looked at each other and shook their heads.
I took a big bite of my burger and turned back to look at Dingo with her big head poking out of my window.
A man was there, patting her on the head. He was a big man.
Suddenly I knew who he was: Mr. Fat-Business-Suit with the discernible gun bulge under his left arm that we’d seen in the cafeteria in Fort Worth. The Fed.
“Hank,” I said. “Look.”
I pointed.
“Well I’ll be damned,” he said.
“Who is it?” Julie asked.
“Excuse me,” a voice said before I could think of what to tell her.
We all turned together. The other federal agent, the black fellow, was standing there at our table.
“Would you folks mind if I talked with you for a few minutes?”
“You guys are like blood hounds,” Hank said. “We haven’t seen you since Fort Worth.”
“Oh,” the man said. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Go ahead, I told him. Hank slid over and he took a seat.
“Okay,” he said. “First, we put one of these on your car.” He held up a small button-battery.
“You put a calculator battery on our car?” Julie asked.
“Looks like one, doesn’t it. It’s a tiny GPS transmitter.”
“GPS?” Julie said.
“Global Positioning System,” Hank told her. “Satellite surveillance. It tells these guys where we are within about fifteen feet anywhere on the planet. Standard issue for all cops cars, although I’ve never seen one that small.”
“Yeah,” the federal agent said. “But you will in about ten years. That’s about how long it takes for our gizmos to reach the open market.”
“Oh,” Julie said. “Why didn’t you guys tell me we were being followed?” She looked at me seriously. Her lips were tight.
“Uh. Yeah,” Hank began. “You see, just like you we weren’t sure.”
“But we suspected,” I said. “We didn’t want to alarm you.”
She was looking at me with hurt eyes, but I turned to focus my attention on our company.
“Look,” I said. “Who are you and why is the federal government following our every move?”
“You don’t know, do you?” he said. He looked at us, pausing as he looked from face to face to face and then passing over us again.
“Okay,” he said. He raised a hand up and motioned to his partner outside.
“We’re going to need a bigger table,” I said.
When the bigger fellow came in we were already moved to another table in the center of the restaurant. He walked over, took a seat and introduced himself.
“Ben Cranford,” he said. “You’ve met my partner, Felix Bruce.”
“You’ve got two first names,” I said to his partner.
“Thanks,” Agent Bruce said. “Two coffees,” he said to the waitress at his elbow.
Agent Cranford took a seat.
“I told you guys,” Julie said, “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
I looked at her. She was avoiding my gaze.
“Wait a minute-” Hank started to say, but I cut him off, turning to Agent Cranford.
“How long have you been following her?” I asked him.
“Miss Simmons and the two rednecks who have been chasing her? About a month.”
“You were watching me when-” Julie began, obviously upset. Agent Cranford cut her off.
“When you dropped the kid off at the Greyhound station? Yes.”
“How did Archie get Jessica then, if you were watching?” she demanded.
“We were watching… But we were following
“Julie,” I said. “Shut up a minute. It’s me and Hank who ought to be upset. You never said a word about Batman and Robin here,” I turned to Cranford. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Agent Bruce said.
“What about the explosion?” Hank asked. “What were they using? Sounded-felt like TNT.”
“It was,” Cranford said.
“Why?” I asked. “Why would they want to kill her when-” I stopped short. I’d almost let it slip.
“When what?” Agent Bruce asked, and took a sip of his coffee.
“Well,” I said, face deadpan and covering quickly. “It’s that it’s not consistent with the action of someone who wants her back.”
Cranford put his elbows down on the table, laced his fingers together in space.
“Right now,” he said “Carpin is at his horse ranch. The last I checked, Mr. Jacob Jorgenson and Mr. Frederick Sanderberry were en-route to the ranch.”
“Replaced the plug wires and on their way again, huh?” Hank asked.
Cranford laughed. “Apparently. We were wondering what was wrong with their truck when we passed by them. Also, one of ‘em looked to be bleeding.”
“I wonder how they got around the cops,” I said.
“We heard about it over the radio. They were released when they said that two men and a woman fitting your description tried to rob them. They kicked your asses and ran you out of there. When asked, neither of the men wanted to press charges.”
Hank and I were chuckling.
“Also the ranch is pretty well deserted from what intelligence I’ve gathered.”
“Racing,” Julie said. “We’re in mid-Spring. Carl and Lefty and half the still crew are probably in Louisiana right now.”
“Right,” Cranford said.
“Where’s the ranch from here?” Hank asked. “I was about to start asking locals.”
“Fifteen miles this side of Childress,” Agent Bruce said. “It’s off the beaten path but you can’t miss the signs. You don’t have far to go.”
“What do you want with us?” I asked.
Agent Cranford coughed once into one of his meaty hands.
“I want to know where the still is,” he said. “Miss Simmons, you can tell us that much, can’t you?”
“It moves around,” she said. She was lying. I knew it. Hank knew it. Either she didn’t trust Cranford and Bruce or there was something she didn’t want them to know.
“Okay,” Cranford said. “So where was it the last time you saw it?”
“I didn’t ever see it,” she said. “Look. That’s all I’m going to say. Nothing more until I have Jessica. You could get him on that. On kidnapping.”
“Not technically,” Agent Bruce said. “You left her.”
“I put her on a bus!” She said, a little too loudly. The few other patrons in the diner turned their heads.
“I put her on a bus,” Julie said again through her teeth.
“Fine,” Agent Cranford said. “You put her on a bus. We can’t help you there.”
“Then we have nothing more to talk about,” she said. She looked at me, tilted her head and tried to smile. It was my cue.
“Okay,” I said. “You fellahs take it easy.”
Agent Bruce tossed off the last of his coffee and put his cup down quickly. Agent Cranford stood up.
At first I thought he was going to offer to shake hands with me, but instead he gave me a business card.
“Call me,” he said. “I won’t be too far away.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Hank said.
They left.
I had to cover their coffee tab.
It was after midnight and I had just put a couple of motel rooms on my American Express card in Childress.
In the balmy Texas night, bats darted to and fro gobbling down moths and mosquitoes in the parking lot lights, and Julie stood behind me in the doorway in just her bra and panties, waiting for me to come inside and be good to her.
Inside the room, lights off, the blackness near complete, Julie and I once more got into the act; doing what teenagers and old married folks and even animals do.
And sleep came.
I had dreams in which old truck drivers adopt little kids and barbecue tastes like new money. And then I had
“
“
“
It was Julie, squeezing my hip. I’d been nightmaring again.
She shook me.
“Awake,” I managed to mumble. “Ahm awake.”
She stopped.
I turned and curled into her, my stubbly cheek pressing against her soft breast.
She hummed me back to sleep.
I was awake instantly at the sound of the gunshot. Someone was shooting outside our door.
Julie’s eyes were open wide and staring into mine in the gloom. Through cracks in the window curtains I could tell it was almost dawn.
Another window-rattling shot rang out.
I didn’t even think to grab my gun. I thrust my legs into my slacks and didn’t even bother with a shirt. I left Julie twisting in her bed covers and thrusting two pillows against her ears.
Outside. The morning was cool and fine.
Hank was there leaning up against the Suburban. He had a deer-rifle that I’d not seen before and he bolted home another shell as I called out his name.
“Hank! Goddammit! What the hell are you doin’?”
He looked at me. There was a sad and somber look on his face.
His left hand moved and the rifle recoiled down against his leg.
He was already reaching for the bottle of Jack Daniels on the Suburban running-board. Where the hell had he gotten that?
“Got eighteen more to go,” he said, slurring his words almost beyond recognition.
“Eighteen what?” I asked.
He didn’t bother to reply. He reached for another shell. There was an open box of them beside the whiskey bottle.
I noticed Dingo slinking back into the partially opened door of Hank’s motel room, her tail between her legs. Apparently she was not beyond fear, if not downright embarrassment.
“That’s enough,” I said. “Come on, give me the gun.”
“No can do, keem-bo-sobby,” he said. “He deserfs a twenty-one gun salute.”
Clang! He shot the bolt home.
“Who?” I said.
“Dock.”
The shot echoed off the walls of the old tourist court motel. Hank nearly dropped the gun. He was likely to have a nasty bruise on his leg later, the way he was taking all the recoil just south of his hip.
“Hey! Hey!” another voice called out. I turned to look. It was the skinny Pakistani motel clerk. “What you idiots doing?” He wore a pair of flannel long johns and burgundy house slippers.
“Uh. Nothin’” I said. “I’ve got this situation under control.”
BLAM!
I jerked.
“Control, shit!” he yelled. “You get the hell off of my business! Take Mr. Rambo wit you!”
“Now hold on!” I held up my finger in his face. He stopped.
I turned toward Hank in time to see him tossing down another shot of whiskey.
“Hank,” I said.
“Here,” he said, holding the gun out to me. I took two steps toward him and took it.
He set the whiskey bottle back down and grabbed another shell.
“Hey,” I said.
He reached and grabbed the gun, inserted the shell into the breech as I tried to pull it out of his grip.
“Hold on,” he said.
“Oh no you don’t,” I said. I pulled back and away from him, but his right hand shot out and hit the trigger.
BLAM!
The rifle jerked in my hands. I almost lost it. My wrist would be sore for some time from the recoil and my ears had begun to ring.
“What’s that?” he asked. “Sixteen more, I think.”
The Pakistani was yelling behind me: “I already called the cops,” he said. “They come and take you crazy friend away.”
“That done it,” Hank said. He jumped up and grabbed the rifle out of my hands.
The Pakistani’s eyes went round and white. He turned and bolted.
Hank took two steps. I moved, fast. I grabbed him from behind and lifted him off the ground, which was no easy thing as he outweighed me by a good fifty pounds.
The rifle clattered to the pavement.
“What?” he yelled. “Let me down, Goddammit!”
I dropped him. He staggered and almost fell, but I caught him again.
The motel clerk was out in the highway. He stopped running suddenly, waved his arms and began pointing back our way. He became sort of red-tinged for a moment, then blue, and suddenly I knew what was coming.
Two police cars, the second following dangerously close on the heels of the first skewed into the parking lot in a cloud of dust and gravel, brilliant red and blue spears of light from the headache racks rotating and counter-rotating like some nightmares I have had.
There is one hard and fast rule about small Texas towns: the law is always not very far away.
“Shit,” I said.
“Alright, you two, what’s the big idea?”
It was a deputy sheriff. His uniform was a butternut color with dark brown epaulettes and pocket flaps and he wore a Stetson hat. Also, he had a gun in his hands in firing stance.
“Gun’s on the ground, Officer,” I said and put my hands in the air.
Hank looked at the deputy. He looked at me.
“What’d you do this time?” he asked me. “Why’re the cops here?”
I slowly put my hands down. The officer took in the rest of the scene: the rifle on the pavement at our feet, the box of shells twenty feet away on the running board of the Suburban, the almost-empty bottle of Jack Daniels next to it, and Hank’s condition.
“Okay,” he said to me. “Has he been shooting that thing?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Up into the air. A friend of his died recently and this was his version of a sendoff.”
“Twenty-one guns,” Hank said, then grabbed his stomach. “I don’t feel so good.”
The deputy from the second car walked over, picked up the deer rifle and put it inside his cruiser.
“Hey,” Hank said. “Tell ‘im to give dat back.”
“Let’s go,” the first deputy said. He was smiling. “And I thought it was going to be a quick shift-change.”
“Oh my God,” the voice said through the little speaker by the doorway. We were in the driveway tunnel under the courthouse. I’d forgotten what county we were in, but I didn’t want to ask just yet. Also, I was trying to think of which lawyer would be best to call.
I looked up to see a camera panning down toward us.
“Yeah,” Deputy L. Rice said. “Sheriff, this is our one man wake-up call.”
“Well, tell him to come right on in. And welcome.”
The door in front of us buzzed. Deputy Rice pulled the door open and motioned us inside.
I turned to look behind us. Julie and Dingo were in the Suburban parked behind the Sheriff’s patrol cars.
I shrugged at her. She shrugged back.
Maybe she wouldn’t have to wait too long. I hoped.
Hank was in a holding cell inside the jail. I gave the booking officer as much information as I could while I chatted with the County Sheriff. He’d identified himself as Randy Thornton, and had shaken my hand as if he was about to ask for my vote. Small town elected officials can’t usually afford to make people overly upset with them unless it’s unavoidable, and that extends even to prisoners under arrest. We were out-of-towners, however, so I was both surprised and pleased by the Sheriff’s demeanor.
“I’m glad you got that rifle out of his hands before my boys got there, Mr. Travis. No telling what could have happened otherwise.”
“He means what could have happened to Mr. Sterling,” Deputy Rice said. “But I’ve never had to shoot anybody yet. Knock on wood.”
The three of us there-the booking officer, Deputy Rice, Sheriff Thornton, and myself-all started at the sudden
“Let me OUTTA HERE! You HEAR ME!” Hank’s muffled voice reverberated off of concrete and steel.
“Your friend,” Sheriff Thornton began, “is a hell-raiser. A bit old for that, ain’t he?”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
My eyes detected movement from upwards and to my right. On one of the closed-circuit surveillance monitors there was someone walking up to the back door of the jail. Someone familiar.
“I’ll be dipped,” I said.
It was Agent Cranford. In the camera lens-distorted background behind him I could make out Agent Bruce standing by the Suburban talking with Julie.
“Better let him in,” I said, just as the buzzer went off.
“Who is he?” Sheriff Thornton asked.
“You don’t want to know,” I said.
“Sheriff, if you’ll let these fellows go, I’ll be responsible for them.”
“I don’t have a problem with that,” he said.
We were in a small conference room off the booking room. In the corner was an old fingerprint roller and a leaning stack of ancient parking meters. The quest for space is an ever-present problem for small town governments. The room was concrete cinder-block covered with lime-green paint. It gave our faces a sickly pallor. Then again, I wasn’t feeling so good myself. I could have used some breakfast to go with the cup of coffee I had in my hand.
“I just like to know what’s going on in my county,” Sheriff Thornton finished.
“Sheriff,” Cranford said. “First, I need to know something. Don’t take this the wrong way, alright?”
“Shoot.”
“Are you a close friend or relation to Archibald Carpin?”
Sheriff Thornton laughed. I looked at Cranford. He was a little too seasoned to take offense. He waited for the laughter to subside.
“What’s so funny?” he asked
“Heh! Nope,” Sheriff Thornton chuckled. I’m not remotely related to that coke-snortin’, rum runnin’ fool. No sir. You and Mr. Travis and that aging hell-raiser in my drunk tank in there come to my county to do something about that idiot?”
Agent Cranford looked at me. “As far as I can tell,” he said, “Mr. Travis, Ms. Simmons and Mr. Sterling are here because of a little girl named Jessica. And because of two million dollars.”
My heart skipped a beat. He hadn’t mentioned anything about the money before.
“Is he serious?” Thornton asked me and rubbed his rough-hewn, meaty hands together.
“Like a heart attack,” I said.
“Okay. That explains them,” he said. “What about you?” He pointed his finger at Cranford. “Why are you here?”
“My partner and I are here to shut down a certain moonshine operation that has been going on in this county since the late 1920s.”
“Oh. That.” He yawned. “Every few years a couple of fellows like you come through here. They go out there, look the place over. Then they leave.
“Yep,” Cranford said. “I know. I’ve read and re-read the files. But-” he pulled a piece of paper out of his jacket and handed it to Thornton. Thornton looked it over and handed it to me. I scanned over it quickly. There were three columns. The first column heading was ‘Date’, and underneath it was a long list of dates from 1930 to four years ago. The second column was a list of offenses, most of them the same thing: “ULUT alcohol transport”.
“What’s ULUT?” I asked.
“Unlicensed, untaxed.”
The third column was numbers. Dollar amounts.
“Those are just the ones we’ve interdicted-caught,” Cranford said.
I did some quick math. The total was millions of dollars.
“This case,” Cranford said. “It’s my last hurrah. I retire in two months.”
“So where does the wrecking crew here come into play?” Sheriff Thornton asked and gestured towards me.
“Our government cannot run without the assistance of its people.”
“What the hell kind of an answer is that?”
“The only one I have to give, right now.”
“All right. All right.” Sheriff Thornton stood up. He leaned across the table as Agent Cranford and I stood up. He shook both our hands.
“Please,” he said. “Get that crazy, gun-toting alcoholic out of my jail.”
Agent Cranford followed us back to the motel. Julie and I helped a snoring Hank out of the car and into his room. Dingo followed us in.
Hank needed a bath. I wasn’t his Momma, so I decided to wait and see if she showed up to bathe him. He was a friend, but I hadn’t signed up for that job yet.
“You two go get some breakfast,” Cranford said when I came out of Hank’s room. “I’ll stay here until you get back.”
“Uh. Thanks,” I said.
Julie waited until we were in the Suburban headed out of the parking lot before asking me: “Why do you trust those guys?”
“They sprung Hank out of jail.”
“Yeah, but what’s their angle?”
“I wish I knew.”
We had a late breakfast-that was more of a lunch than anything-at a Mexican Restaurant. The food was pretty good, but not as good as the Austin venues I was used to.
When we got back to the motel, Hank was still zonked.
Cranford and Bruce waved and drove away as soon as we unlocked our door.
“You’re right,” I said to Julie. “They’re pretty weird. Nice, but weird.”
Julie and I passed the rest of the day in each other’s company.
I kept expecting Hank to wake up. I kept expecting the phone to ring. I kept a watch out for light blue Ford F-150 pick-up trucks.
Night time.
We were back inside the hotel room, in the same bed. In the dark with her body pressed against mine, it was like we’d never left the room from the night before. The events of that day hadn’t even happened. We did things in the night that young people do in the back seats of their parents’ cars.
Afterwards, I went outside and smoked one of her cigarettes. At one time in my life I smoked only when I had a beer in my other hand, so this was new for me. Julie had been craving a cigarette for the last several days. She’d gotten some when we had stopped for lunch.Maybe I wouldn’t turn it into another bad habit. Like sleeping with my clients, for instance.
A white, late model Ford sedan pulled up next to the Suburban. A lone figure emerged under the bright orange-ish light.
Agent Cranford.
I waited for him.
I’d forgotten to give the Suburban a thorough going-over and remove the GPS bug that had been planted there.
The North Texas night was cooler than the previous one. The door behind me was open just a crack. Julie was in there in the dark, snoring softly.
I thought of a name: Ernest Neil. The name of the man who had died in Julie’s arms. That sounded rather poignant.
“Hiya,” Agent Cranford said.
“Hey.”
“Nice night. Got another one of those?” he asked, referring to my cigarette. “I think I left mine down in the car.”
“I don’t normally smoke,” I told him. “These are Julie’s. But it’s a smoking kind of night, you know?”
“Uh huh,” he agree.
I fished a cigarette out for him. I wondered if Julie counted them. Probably not.
He took it with a thin smile. I thumbed the lighter. Held it for him as he lit up.
“Thanks.” He drew deeply, paused, letting the nicotine bite, exhaled slowly. I’d say he was about forty-eight years or so. Conservative haircut. Clean shaven, even late at night. Forty-eight seemed sort of young to be looking at retirement. I hoped I was going until I was about ninety.
“How’s Hank?” he asked.
“Still sleeping it off,” I said.
“Good. Ya know,” a touch of New England came through in his accent, “people here are real nice.”
“Mostly,” I said.
“Mr. Travis-”
“Bill. Call me Bill.”
“Fine. Bill, I’ve been wondering something.”
“What?”
“Just what is it you do for a living?” he asked. “If you don’t mind telling me.”
“Financial consultant.”
“Ahh. Okay,” he said. There was a little sparkle in his eyes.
Suddenly I knew that he’d already read everything that his friendly, neighborhood FBI computer could spit out about me. Probably, he knew who my second grade teachers were when I’d forgotten the information a long time ago.
There was an odd and long moment of silence as we smoked.
“Got something for you,” he said finally.
I waited.
He fished something out of his jacket, handed it to me.
It was a photograph.
“What am I looking at?” I asked. The sodium arc light from the parking lot revealed an old black-and-white photograph of three men sitting at a small table. The men looked somber and serious. It was from a time when it was customary to put on your most dour face for a picture.
Then it hit me what I was looking at.
“This is Carpin, isn’t it? Matthew Carpin. The fellow on the right is Bryan “Whitey” Walker. Who’s that in the center?”
“You’ll figure it out, Mr. Travis. Oh, sorry. I’m supposed to call you Bill. Old habits die hard, you know. Kind of like old law men. It’s getting late. Good night, Mr. Travis.”
“Good night, Agent Cranford,” I said.
He turned and went back the way he came, got into his car and left.
I’d have to remember to get rid of that GPS bug on the Suburban.
I studied the photo.
Whitey was already going bald on top by the time he was in his late twenties, but this was earlier than that. The other fellow, Matthew Carpin, was a wiry little fellow. All three men at the table were nattily dressed.
It hit me.
The man in the center was Jack “Blackjack” Johannsen.
Stirrings in the night.
I listened to Julie breathe in the night as the dark thoughts came and went. Even though we weren’t touching, I felt the heat from her.
Around two in the morning the phone rang.
I grabbed for it before I was even fully awake.
“Bill. You are not a very nice fellow.”
“Huh?”
“I said, you’re not a very nice guy.”
I got up, the phone snugged against my ear. Stumbled around in the dark in my underwear. Outside? No good. Bathroom! I went inside in the dark and closed the door behind me, felt for the toilet, put the seat down and sat on it.
I was cold all over.
“You there?” Archie Carpin asked.
“I’m still here,” my voice reverberated off the bathroom walls, echoed back at me. My stomach felt like it had a ball of lead in it, engulfed in a sea of acid.
“That’s good,” he said.
“What do you want?”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said. About negotiations and attitudes and crap like that.”
“Well,” I said, attempting to put some of the nervousness out of my voice. “I guess that’s a good thing.”
“It’s a good thing, Mr. Travis.”
“So you know who I am. Good for you. Then you know that when somebody snaps at me, I snap back.”
“It depends on who draws the first blood, doesn’t it? Also it depends on who’s right and who’s wrong, right?”
“Listen,” I began. I was sitting in the dark, but there was a picture filling up my vision; a perfect picture in three dimensions and with sound and motion. Dock’s life blood squirting out of him and the labored breathing of a dying man. “You drew the first blood,” I told him.
“Not really,” he said. “But I will draw the last blood. That is unless we can come to a meeting of the minds.”
“What’s your bright idea?”
“You bring Julie back to the ranch, and I’ll promise that I won’t hurt her. Or the kid.”
I laughed at him. “Julie’s not mine to give,” I said, “and even if I could, I wouldn’t trust you.”
“But you’d trust her?”
He had a point there.
“I’ll make this easy for you, Mr. Travis,” he said.
I interrupted: “Don’t do me any favors. Only friends do favors.”
“Call it a good will gesture, then. I’ll let the little girl go, in exchange for Julie. Even she’ll go for that.”
“No way,” I said. “No trades.”
“Let me talk to Julie, then.”
“Nope. That ain’t gonna happen.”
The phone clicked off.
I went back to bed, but couldn’t sleep. If the call had been nothing more than Carpin’s attempt to keep me unbalanced, then it had worked.
Somewhere after 3:00 a.m., I went back outside and tapped lightly on Hank’s door. Absently, I wondered if maybe I was being watched from somewhere through a starlight scope. I hoped I wasn’t. I’d never considered myself to be photogenic, but I was willing to bet that I would make a good target.
Hank’s door opened a crack.
“Yeah?”
“You okay?”
“My head is killin’ me. I seem to remember something about red and blue lights. And a jail. Was I in a drunk tank?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn. I gotta lay down.”
“Okay,” I said. “Get some sleep. We’ll get up early and get some breakfast.”
“G’night.”
“‘Night.”
Back inside our almost pitch black room, I lay down and snuggled in with Julie.
And somewhere before sunrise I made my first real mistake. I went to sleep at the wrong time.
“Wake up, Bill.”
It was Hank, shaking me awake.
“What? What?”
“Bill. She’s gone.”
“Julie,” I said.
“Yeah.”
My eyes darted around the room. All my stuff was there, but what little she had of her own was gone with her.
I got up on wobbly feet. Probably I looked like hell. I wasn’t starting to hurt yet. I was still in shock. Would be for some time. It would come though. This I knew.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She didn’t bother to check out,” he said. “Ohhh, my head.”
“She must have heard me.”
“Heard you what?”
“I got a call last night. It was Carpin. He wanted to trade the little girl for Julie. I told him no way. She must have been listening on the other side of the door. Decided to take him up on it.”
Hank nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “That must be it. I already went downstairs and talked to the owner. I apologized for the gun-play. Gave him an extra hundred-dollar bill.”
“And, Julie?”
“Oh. She banged on his office door about five-thirty this morning. Used his phone. A half-hour later a light-blue Ford pickup picked her up.”
“Jake. Freddie.”
“Yeah,” Hank said. “Also, she left you a note. It’s both short and sweet.” He handed me the note, written on motel stationery.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Almost ten. Bill. It’s okay. I was asleep too. We can’t change it now.”
I wanted to curse. It wouldn’t have done any good. Red hot needles of betrayal were beginning to poke at my gut, my heart.
I could see that Hank wanted to ask me a lot of questions. He didn’t, though. Just the same, it was all right there on his face. I wasn’t anywhere near in the mood to talk, but then I guess he knew that.
“Hank. I’ll tell you all you wanna know. Not now. We’ve got to get going.”
I started putting my clothes on.
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Right.”
I was warned.
She had told me to run. Very fast.
It didn’t help, though.
My normal tendency is to go into a state of black despair when I lose someone whom I consider to be close. But I wasn’t depressed. I was angry, but who could I blame? I had known all along that something was going to happen, and that it would be something that I wouldn’t like.
It was simple anger. Deep inside of me, beneath the caldera of my exterior, there was a magma chamber burning hot. If I got just the wrong jolt at just the wrong time, whoever got in my way might have gotten hurt.
Once somebody did get hurt. It never made the papers or the seven o’clock news. I was never arrested, although technically, I could have been.
When I was seventeen I met my first enemy in life. I was a junior in high school and this other kid-if you want to call age twenty “kiddish”-thought I was scrawny and even-tempered enough to be his whipping boy. His name was Jose Rios. He’d been held back more times than Carter had little liver pills. I never forgot him. The teachers tended to turn a blind eye when he’d shove some kid in the hallway and spill his books. Jose had one of those chilling laughs, the kind one could imagine a kid with a sick sense of humor might have who liked to torture small animals just to hear them squeal in terror and pain. Jose was like that in the head department. Twisted.
Whenever he picked on anybody it was a lot like a cliche vaudeville act. First came the push. Second, books or furniture would spill, making a loud clatter. Third, heads would begin turning toward the source of the clamor. Fourth: silence. Last came Jose’s evil laugh. No drum roll. Just a perverted cacophonous titter turning into a belly-rolling laugh. Every time I saw it happen I got a little upset about it, sure, but the magma chamber hardly registered anything. There was more embarrassment than there was outright anger, and not enough heat and not nearly enough pressure to cause a blow-up.
Not enough, that is, until Elden Williams ran into Jose Rios on a particularly bad day in May near the end of that same year.
Every high school has an Elden Williams. Elden was a mildly retarded kid with an ever-present grin on his face. I had known him from the first grade forward, and while we had never actually been “friends”, I had learned to tolerate him a little better than most anybody else, including his teachers.
Elden loved school buses. After his Special Ed classes he’d usually show me a large foldout manila page with his latest creation on it. Sometimes it was an overly large greenish yellow bus with just about every race and nationality represented through over-sized too-squarish windows. Other times it might be a front view showing a fat bus driver, or even a top view. For Elden, school buses were
That Friday, when I looked up from the sidewalk where the fire ants were devouring the leavings of a thrown down sandwich in the bus yard and saw Jose ripping a large manila sheet in half and registered the tears streaming down harmless Elden’s face, the caldera of my whole self went pyroclastic.
Jose Rios spent three days in the hospital. Maybe he had been milking it for sympathy. That could have been it. But just maybe he hadn’t wanted to return to school and have to face me. All I do know was that I discovered what I was capable of. I never saw him, but I heard reports-he had a broken nose, a number of contusions on his head where I had reportedly rammed it into a school bus, and a cracked clavicle.
Volcanoes are blindly and unintelligently violent. If they were to have a viewpoint, I suspect it would be like that day in May when Jose set me off. All I could recall after hearing Jose Rios’ animal-torture laugh was whirling, blurring motion.
As we moved off into the heat and brightness of the new day, I allowed myself to feel what I was feeling. And as I did, I calmed. Thankfully, Hank kept quiet.
God bless ‘im.
“Your supplies,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s go get ‘em.”
We were out into the countryside. The highway had become little more than a series of bridges over North Texas creeks and lowlands. It reminded me a little of summer camp; those roads, and Hank and Dingo and Julie to keep me company, much the same as good friends of summers past. But Julie wasn’t with us.
It was turning into a hot day.
Hank guided us.
Outside of Childress by about ten miles, Hank had me take a left down a gravel county road. We were exactly nowhere, I’d say. Hell, we could have been in the middle of remotest Africa, but for the presence of a few road signs.
I thought of the dream I’d had about Africa and Julie, and shivered.
We made another three miles down a narrow, gravel road; our only encounters, the occasional deer regarding us docilely like the interlopers we were.
Hank directed me to turn left.
We stopped and Hank climbed out and unhooked a barbed-wire gate, one of those kind that is nothing more than three strands of wire and a couple of posts. He dragged it off to the left, held it and motioned me through. I waited as he put the gate back and climbed back in.
We followed narrow ruts through high weeds.
“You sure you know where you’re going?” I asked him.
“Sure as anything else about this trip,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
About a half-mile through nothing but weeds and cow pasture and there was a house ahead among a grove of oak trees. As we approached I could make out a large double-wide trailer house up on blocks and minus its skirting. There was a bass boat on a trailer parked up close to the front porch and a couple of pickup trucks parked in the yard.
“This is it,” Hank said. “Stay here for a minute, Bill. And mind the dogs.”
“Dogs?”
Then I saw what he meant. I’d never seen so many dogs in one place. There were all kinds, from little terriers up to big tick hounds and every gradation in between, and they all came running up to the car, tails wagging and thumping against the Suburban. A big chow planted his paws up on my window, black tongue lolling and dripping drool. So far though, not one had so much as barked. I could hear a few nervous growls, though.
Hank moved between the trucks amid an entourage of canines scurrying about his feet and hips. He petted the taller ones that he could reach without bending over and stepped up on a wide porch. The porch had bowed wooden railings that had seen too much rain and not enough sealant. Hank knocked on the side of the house.
“Carpin,” I said to myself. “If you hurt her I’ll kill you.”
The front door opened. It was dark inside but for the fluctuating blue light of a television screen hidden from view.
I waited all of five minutes. Hank finally emerged from the house, dogs in tow. I rolled down my window.
“Okay,” he said. “I need your help, now.”
“What are we loading? I’ve already forgotten.”
“You ain’t forgot. You’ve got that woman on your brain and you can’t see or think of anything else. Come on. A little work will be good for you.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Cooder is fresh out of C-4 and Prima.”
“Oh. Yeah,” I said. “Nitrates?”
“Yep. By the way. No smoking in the Suburban for awhile.”
“Fine by me,” I said.
Nitrates. That word called something to mind, but it slipped away. I looked up at Hank. Then I had it. The Oklahoma City bombing. A small truck filled with nitrates had taken out a whole multi-story building and all the people inside it. The first domestic terrorist bombing on American soil.
“Hank. Nitrates? You sure about this?”
He looked at me.
“What’s
I thought for a minute.
“Never had one,” I told him.
“Good. That’s what I’m here for anyway.”
I looked up through the trees into a patch of blue sky. Far off on the horizon there was a line of dark blue. A storm of some kind. More than likely, if my luck hadn’t undergone a change, it was bearing down on us.
I thought about nitrates.
I’d seen up close the results of two explosions in my life. One was the one I had just experienced first-hand, blow-by-blow, a little over two days past. An old man had died in that one. It hadn’t been very pretty. I knew I’d be carrying those last few moments with Dock around with me for the rest of my life.
My first explosion, however, had to do with a tractor-trailer rig that had wrecked and blown sky-high at the entrance to our country neighborhood when I was a kid of about fourteen years of age. A dynamite company had leased the pasture behind us and they stored gun powder in trailers all along the back forty. At first I had thought that one of the dynamite rigs out back had let go, but a glance out the window and a quick count ruled that out. I ran down the road that led into our dead-end neighborhood on a spring morning before the school bus was due and I saw the wreckage out on the highway. There were about ten thousand little steel rings in a circle about a hundred yards in radius, the “o-rings” that were supposed to keep the gunpowder hermetically sealed. Amazingly the driver had lived through it. I remembered wondering at the time if he would ever haul dynamite or gunpowder again. If it had been me, I knew I sure as hell wouldn’t.
Explosions. Storms. One or the other, or possibly both were coming, bearing down upon us with all the inevitability of fate.
“I’ve come this far,” I said, and climbed out into the herd of dogs.
We went back to downtown Childress.
Where were Agents Cranford and Bruce when we needed them?
We stopped for a bite at a Sonic Drive-In on the main drag through town.
Hank ordered for us while I made a phone call at the gas station pay phone next door.
“Bill! I’m glad you called! I didn’t know how to get hold of you.”
“What’s going on, Kathy?” I asked. She sounded pretty excited.
“I found something in the State Archives. A letter. It was in the restricted stuff, so you didn’t hear it from me.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“It was inside an envelope with the letterhead of the Dallas Sheriff’s Office and addressed to the Governor of Texas. I think it may be a hand-written note from that guy you told me to look up.”
“What guy?”
“The U.S. Marshal. Blackjack.”
“What’s the note say, Kathy?”
“Okay. Hold on.” She put the phone down. I listened to the surface of her library counter for a minute, then she was back. “Got it. Ready?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s dated the eighth of September, 1926. It reads: ‘Roger, Feels like this playing both ends against the middle is going to wind me up dead. There’s a lot of money in this town, but getting close to the shine is work. These people are scum of God’s Earth, but they are sly. If I don’t hit pay dirt in a week, I’m out of this God-forsaken hell-hole. If you don’t see me in ten days after receiving this, then I’m dead. Send cavalry anyway. Best, BJ.’ That’s it. What’s it mean, Bill?”
“It means that the cavalry got there too late, Kathy.”
“Why do you need to know all this stuff, Bill? And why was this restricted? This stuff happened over seventy years ago.”
“Because, darlin’,” I said. “Those were real people and they had real families, and some of those families, the sons and daughters-and most certainly the grandsons and granddaughters-are still around up here.”
“Oh,” she said. “They could be affected by this after seventy years?”
“Is the South still affected by the Civil War? Is Germany still affected by the Nazis?”
“Uh. Yeah. I see your point,” she said. “By the way, where are you calling from?”
“Childress, Texas. Kathy, this is about money, whiskey, horses and kidnapping. If I recall correctly, Roger Bailey was the Dallas Sheriff. He used to sell the bicycles that Clyde Barrow stole over in West Dallas. Sold them out of his pawn shop. This was when Clyde was still a kid, just getting his start in crime. Bailey knew what he was doing.”
“Wow. Nice guy. Was everybody on the take back then, or not?”
“Not everybody, Kathy, but sometimes the lines blurred.”
“Okay,” she said. “I still don’t understand all the secrecy.”
She had a point. I didn’t either. “Well,” I replied. “What if somebody started going around saying your grandfather made his fortune from illegal whiskey, robbery and murder-for-hire?”
“Hah! I think maybe he did, Bill.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. Still, you’re right. I wouldn’t like it.”
“Exactly. Also, I think there’s even more to it all than just hoodlumism.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Don’t know. I’ll tell you if I find out.”
“Uh,” she said. “On second thought don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
I looked up. Hank drew his hand across his throat and tapped on a non-existent watch.
“Gotta run, darlin’,” I told her. “I’ll see you later.”
“Um. Bill? Uh. I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Just spit it out.”
“Well, okay. I don’t want to go out with you.”
What? I thought. “I thought I was just buying you dinner. You know, friends?”
“Oh. Okay. Good. I’m glad you thought that. It makes it easier. I still can’t.”
“Alright,” I said. “Why?”
“‘Cause,” she said. “What you do is too dangerous. I don’t want any part of it.”
I paused two beats, let it sink in.
“Good,” I said. “I always knew you were a smart girl.”
We exchanged goodbyes and hung up.
“Well,” I said aloud to myself. “I’ll be damned.”
After Hank, Dingo and I bolted down our food we got back on the road.
“Turn left off the town square, Bill,” he said.
It was getting late in the day. All of three o’clock.
“Where’re we going?” I asked.
“Radio Shack,” he said.
“Sorry I asked.”
Surprisingly the town had one.
By four-thirty we were sitting under a shade tree down by a slow-moving creek on the outskirts of town.
I patted Dingo and watched Hank. He was ladling some very foul-smelling raw nitrates from a large-sized trash bag into a series of small metal cylinders. I started to ask where he had gotten the cylinders, then decided against it. I didn’t need to know.
A sheriff’s deputy car passed. I waved and the two patrolmen waved back.
“Think they know us?” Hank asked me.
“If they don’t then I’m willing to bet that they know
“Remember when she told us about Carl, the jockey?” I asked Hank.
“Yeah. And Lefty. Jake and Freddie’s fathers.”
“Right. Well, remember when Julie said that Lefty liked to tell stories, only he-”
“He did a bad job of it,” Hank said.
“Uh huh. So Carl had to finish most of them. The story she told me in my office the first morning I met her was about a manure pile.”
“What? You’re kidding.”
“Nope. A story about a manure pile and some horse stables. At first I thought it was… Uh… Horseshit.”
“The story,” Hank said, “not the manure. Got it.”
“Right,” I told him. “So there was this bit of concrete poking up at the edge of the manure pile. It had a rusted out lid on it and an old padlock on top of that. All Lefty could say was that the manure pile had a ghost, and that it was the ghost of an old lawman. Carl corrected him and pointed out the concrete tube, about a foot and a half in diameter, and said it was the chimney for an old tornado shelter.”
“Makes sense,” Hank said. “Most of these old homesteads up here on the plains have them. Go on with the story.”
“Okay. Carl told her that a house had once stood right beside the tornado shelter, which was concrete with a steel door. In the ground on top of that was a vegetable garden. They used to fertilize the garden with horse manure. Later, after the house had been torn down and rebuilt higher up on the hill they stopped raising vegetables there. Later they built some new horse stables there-about the time that Archie Carpin was a kid-and because it was tradition, kept on dumping their manure on top of the old tornado shelter.”
“Okay,” Hank said.
“So, that night when Julie was on the run and Archie was coming back home, she had to ditch the money. She had Jessica-the kid-with her and all she could think of doing was getting rid of the money and getting the hell out of there. If those men had caught her with the money, she-they-would both have been dead.”
“She got the lid open,” Hank said. “Didn’t she? The lid to the tornado shelter.”
“Uh huh. She did. It was mostly a blob of rust. She said she got crudded-up on all the wet manure from the downpour, but she got the damn thing open-“
”And dropped the doctor’s bag with the money down the hole.” Hank said, pleased with himself.
“Yeah,” I said. “Only she didn’t know about Blackjack. After all, it was just an old jockey’s tale.”
“Blackjack?”
“You’ll find out,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “We’re running low on time.”
Off to the east the line of dark clouds was much closer.
“I know,” he replied. “It’s time to get Julie and the little girl.”
“And the money,” I said.
Carpin’s ranch was fifteen miles outside of town and three miles from the state highway.
I got Dock’s Suburban up to eighty-five miles per hour and didn’t get any complaints from Hank.
About mid-way we passed a Dodge Ram pickup that had a headache rack on top. A county vehicle. Probably Sheriff’s Office.
I glanced in the rearview mirror, watched it slow down, turn off and whip around. It followed us for a mile or more, then slowed and pulled off to the side of the road.
I wondered, but then decided to forget about it.
The leaden gray leading edge of the storm front rolled and tumbled over us. Beneath it, in front of us and along the black eastern horizon, lightning forked down in brilliant trunks, searching, finding. Thunder pealed. From behind us the sun lit the land away north and east in an ethereal, orange-ish glow.
“Gonna be one helluva storm,” Hank said.
“Yeah. I think we should pull over and re-check our armaments,” I said.
We were loaded for bear. I had a.38 and Hank had his.25 caliber Walther and Dingo. Also he had a backpack stuffed with little metal cylinders with walkie-talkies taped to them.
“How’re you holding up?” Hank asked.
“Bout as well as can be expected,” I told him, but in truth, I was more than a little nervous.
When it comes to mortality, whether it’s your own or somebody else’s, that’s just the way it is. You feel it in your stomach, in the little nerve-endings in your hands and feet, over the sensitive skin along the spine. If I had to name the feeling, I’d call it fear.
I wondered if Hank felt the same.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
I started up the car and pulled out onto the road and headed straight into the coming blackness.
A few miles down the road from Carpin’s ranch the windshield started picking up little spatters of rain. As we advanced the drops become larger, the roadway underneath became slick. By the time we reached a large billboard that read “QUARTER HORSE RANCH” on the roadside, it was coming down in sheets, almost horizontal, right at us. I turned the windshield wipers on full. In our headlights the rain appeared to have a nexus, a central emanation point about eight feet in front of the car and about four feet above the level of the hood.
Night had descended, and it was a night right out of some story by Sterling Hayden, or perhaps Dean Koontz. The kind of night where the weather takes on a personality all its own.
I slowed us to a crawl. The last mile took all of five minutes, though it seemed a lot longer.
The rain came down so fast and thick and hard all at once as we pulled off the road near the main gate that visibility was down to twenty yards, even with the wipers flogging the windshield full tilt.
I looked at Hank.
“Are we doing this right?” I asked him.
“I’ve never done this before, Bill,” he said. “We’ll know soon enough. If we live through this, remind me to tell you that you did fine.”
I put the car in park.
“Leave the keys under the seat,” Hank said. “We may have to scoot pretty quick.”
“How are we going in?” I asked. Really, I was asking myself.
“Gun in hand. We go in together. You too, Dingo,” Hank said. Dingo stuck her head up front and licked Hank’s cheek.
It was my turn to say it: “Let’s do this.”
Hank and Dingo and I crouched in a downpour at the edge of the woods near the main gate to the Carpin Quarter Horse Ranch. Thunder crashed and lightning lit up the world for brief spaces.
I had never been so wet. The rain came down in sheets.
The earth beneath our feet churned in the torrent of the runoff and became so much mud.
Hank was bent low with an arm around Dingo’s neck, and even the dog tried to make herself as small as possible, pressing herself back against and underneath him in an attempt to stay out of the rain. The pack on Hank’s back was shedding water at an alarming rate. I only hoped the merchandise inside was still high and dry.
The heart of the storm would be passing over us soon. There was one particular sheet of brilliance, there and gone in a twinkling, so bright that my retinas hurt, and even as I thought of counting forward from the flash to the peal of thunder, it seemed that a giant decided at that moment to clap his hands together behind my head.
“Damn,” Hank shouted, “that was close.”
In the woods to our left I saw a flicker of light. The tree that had just been hit by lightning, not twenty yards away, guttered with flame for a moment, then the flames winked out.
“Yeah!” I yelled back.
A hundred yards ahead through the night and the storm I could make out the dark, solid silhouette of the main house. Still no light.
“Do you think anybody’s home?” Hank asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine. If there are any cars, they’ll be around back.”
Dingo barked, but it was half-hearted. A protest, probably. I was certain the dog thought we were all out of our minds, and I wasn’t so sure that she wouldn’t be right if she did. What the hell were we doing anyway? Then again, I’d been asking myself that question for most of my life.
“The stables must be down the lane,” Hank said. “Back beyond the house. Still wish I had that map Julie drew.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hank, I think we should split up. Like in
It didn’t take him long to agree, one quick scan of the lay of the land, which was darkness and quagmire, and he was nodding.
“Okay.”
“I’ll go left,” I told him and pointed. Toward the left there was a stand of brushy woods straining against an ancient barbed wire fence and a narrow path between the house and the woods, a black place in the night that appeared to swallow the lightning and the storm.
I caught Hank’s look in a flash of lightning. Even he thought I was crazy. That was a switch.
“You and Dingo go right,” I said, and pointed.
To the right of the house the bare land rose up into a series of low hills, then fell away toward the rear of the property. Back there, somewhere, was the swelling, clay-red waters of the Red River. Also, back there somewhere were the horse stables, and beyond that, a certain manure pile.
“You be…
“I’ll be…Yeah.”
With that Hank and Dingo were gone into the storm, vanishing completely in an instant.
With the rain filling my shoes-by God, I’d have to get new ones soon-I set off down the fence line, peering at the ground ahead and pausing between flashes of lightning in order to keep my bearings.
I entered the night.
When I was all of seven years old I went with my folks to visit a neighbor lady.
In the small town where I grew up the street lamps were thin-to-nonexistent the further you got away from downtown, and we lived within a block of the city limits. When the moon waned down to nothing, or hid itself completely, the dark spaces between and behind the homes held little more light than a limestone cave, particularly on cloudy nights.
That night was such a night.
After dinner and tall tales, each equally unremarkable, my mother and father said their goodbyes on the front porch while I fidgeted from foot to foot on the spaced concrete blocks that composed the front walk.
I looked around at the ocean of night around me, the only safe shores of which was the pool of rectangular light spilling around the silhouettes of my folks and Mrs. Beckham.
I heard a sound; an odd sound, like a whimper. It seemed to emanate from the side of the house down near the ground, and being age seven it was up to me to investigate.
Some of us are born curious and have the good fortune to have an inborn sense of fear and awe with which to temper it. I wasn’t so lucky. Curiosity I had, and that in spades, but until that moment in the hot high summer of 1970 in the East Texas night at Mrs. Beckham’s house at the corner of Collard Street and Maple, I had not yet learned of fear and pain from the unknown.
Perhaps ten feet-all of a world-into the darkness, I felt for the whimper in the inky blackness.
I moved forward. Two yards. Five.
I smelled earth, freshly turned-the same scent as from our vegetable garden when it was being tilled-and I smelled iron, and something else. A wet smell. A reek.
The whimper turned abruptly into a growl; a low, gravelly staccato rising in volume and intensity in the stillness of the dark. From a world away I could hear the adult voices around front, indistinguishable as words but with crystal clarity as far as tone-over there, in that other world where my parents and the old neighbor lady stood on the shores of the light, all was well. All was right with the world.
The fear began as a little feathery whisper down in the area of my gonads, grew rapidly into a shout and overcame me in a flash.
I turned and ran.
I took two strides and then I felt stabbing heat-teeth sank into my left buttock even as I distinctly heard a raised voice: “Don’t get too close to that dog, now, ya hear!”
It was not the first nor the last time I had been bitten by a dog, but for me it forever changed the character of the night.
As I stumbled forward into the storm at the Carpin ranch, I thought about dogs. Dogs I have loved and dogs I have loathed. I hoped that Carpin didn’t have any, or on the off-chance that he did, that I’d be able to see them before they saw me. I’ve seen my share of ranch operations, and I never knew one not to have a dog.
I didn’t relish meeting mindless teeth, blind in the dark and the storm.
Hank had Dingo. All I had was a.38.
I put one foot in front of the other as I penetrated the darkness between the house and the fence that held back the brush and the woods.
Intermittent lightning revealed just how narrow the space was, and for the length of that space I’d be catching the full brunt of the runoff from the roof.
There were strange, twisted shapes there in the dark. Revealed in snapshot-like images from the lightning, I saw that someone had taken to collecting old kiddie-train parts. Along the fence there was a string of cars, each about eight feet long and three feet high, some of them rusted through in places and starting to cave in upon themselves from decay. Just across from that oddity along the south side of the house and perfectly revealed for an instant of time in a flash of lightning there was the largest Jack-In-The-Box I’d ever seen, all of seven feet tall. Behind it was a huge plastic gorilla with bared teeth sitting cross-legged. Maybe it was King Kong practicing his Zen meditations.
In a moment I had it figured out. Either someone had been planning a miniature golf course and never got it off the ground, or the same someone had hauled off all the props after the miniature golf course was closed down.
I looked at King Kong’s teeth and Jack’s smile in the next thrum of lightning flashes and shuddered.
The way became even narrower toward the rear corner of the house and I could tell that the space opened up back there. Behind all the trash on my right I could see the interminable blackness underneath the house, which was raised up on pier and beam pilings to about my chest height.
And, all things being both equal and perfect, not ten feet from freedom I heard it above the fever pitch of the storm and the thunder: I heard the growl.
Maybe I’ve read a few too many Dean Koontz novels, but in the first instant I got the idea that the thing was part human-some kind of mad-scientist experiment gone horribly awry. Then the thing stepped out to fill the last three feet between the house and the fence.
It was a big animal. By its silhouette I guessed that it was a mastiff. Julie had never said anything about the dog. If ever I talked to her again, I definitely planned to mention that fact. But, then again, there were a good many things that she failed to mention.
Lightning flashed and the dog took a step toward me.
The chain from its neck grew taut. It was at the chain limit.
I took out the thirty-eight. Aimed it at the dog.
The growl grew louder.
I didn’t want to kill the animal, but I had decided that I was coming through.
I hoped no one was home, or that the shot would be taken for thunder if there was.
The rain runoff from the roof poured down on top of my head, trailed down my arm and spilled off the barrel of the gun I held at hip level.
I began to squeeze the trigger.
“Sasha!” A voice bellowed. “Come on!”
The chain around the dog’s neck jerked back and the growl was cut off. It reminded me of killing a lawn-mower engine.
The dog was gone.
I waited, shivering in the cold. I counted slowly from a hundred down to zero, then stepped around the corner of the house and into the back yard.
I paused, waiting for another lightning flash. One came within a few seconds.
I caught movement across the way. There was an immense horse walker in the center of the backyard space, and beyond it, a hundred yards away, were the stables. The movement was from the direction of the stables. I wasn’t certain, but what I’d seen in that hundredth of a second could have been a dog’s tail disappearing into the gloom of the stables.
It wasn’t completely black. There was a utility pole by the parking lot at the other end of the house and it shed pale, electric blue light downward in a cone. There, in main light, were three vehicles. Two of them were trucks. There was a new pickup over there, either silver or white-it seems it’s always impossible to distinguish between the colors in limited light. But one of the trucks I recognized. It was a light-blue Ford F-150 pickup. Someone had replaced the windshield. Other than that, I would have recognized it anywhere.
“Well well,” I said into the rain. “Old friends.”
And down at the stables someone turned on all the lights.
I would find out much later what Hank was up to during his and Dingo’s trek through the rain.
At the bottom of the last hill he traversed he found the south bank of the Red River. A hundred yards down, around the curve of the bank he found a floating dock and a motor boat, which was where he parted with the first of the presents he carried on his back.
Up the bank, perpendicular to the river, he came upon the darkened exterior of the northern end of the horse stables. After a quick search he found what he was looking for and left another present.
I wouldn’t know anything about his little Santa Claus-run for another fifteen minutes.
Time enough for Hank to start the countdown to World War III.
When the man and the dog were gone I stepped up onto the porch. There was little light inside, but I caught an amber glow from the central part of the house.
The porch was long and roofed over with tin and so I enjoyed a few moments without rain coming down on my head. There were windows onto the porch. I crept from window to window, trying to see inside.
At the third window there was a little girl. She sat up on a bed and played with what looked like two Barbie dolls. I had to restrain myself from tapping on the window and getting her attention. But no-I wasn’t ready to do anything to put her in direct danger until I knew more.
The silhouette of a man passed by the open doorway to her bedroom and I started. Jake, or Freddie. I didn’t know which. Fortunately he hadn’t seen me.
The house wasn’t clear yet. I needed to rendezvous with Hank before I attempted to get Julie and the kid out of the house.
I would have to make for the stables. There was someone down there with a dog. Probably it was Archie Carpin, but I had no way of knowing.
Facing the stables I looked back toward the dark fence line. It cut a hundred yards across the open landscape and again disappeared into blackness to the south of the stables.
I hopped off of the porch and into the darkness.
One end of the stables lay in inky blackness. I could smell horses but I couldn’t see any of them. I moved from one stall to the next and listened.
No neighs or whinnies. No stamping of hoofed feet. All of the horses were gone.
I remembered: Julie had said that all the men-even the ones who tended the still operation-were at the races. That meant the horses were there as well.
I wondered where Hank was.
Suddenly there was a long low growl, growing in intensity. It came from the other side of the stables.
There was an answering bark. Dingo!
An instant later there came the unmistakable sound of Hank’s voice: “Git ‘em!”
I ran down to the center of the stables into the light, cut through the central corridor and out the other side.
Splashing through water nearly a foot deep in places, I approached the dogs.
There were strange shapes in the night. The strangest shape of all was the hill.
It was a manure pile. Perhaps thirty feet long and in places nearly the height of a man.
A lot of horses had created it over a long period of time.
As I came around the southern end of the pile there was a flash of lightning, and as if newly created by the storm, a man, standing with his back to me.
Five feet away from him was what appeared to be an ancient concrete culvert stood on end, three quarter embedded down in the manure.
The dark silhouette was Hank, standing there in the darkness.
Fifteen feet in front of him was somebody else.
Archie Carpin stood there staring at me.
“Where’s my money,” Archie Carpin asked me. There was a gun in his hand, pointed down at the mud.
The two dogs were out there, growling and splashing and snapping at each other.
“Why don’t you ask Julie,” I said.
“She ain’t talkin’,” he said. “She must think I’m gonna kill her after I’ve got it.”
“I wonder why she would possibly think that?”
“Smart fellah, ain’t ya?”
“Not so smart,” I said. “Looks like you’re holding all the cards.”
“I’m holding most of the cards,” he said. “I’ve got the kid and I’ve got Julie. I’ve got Jacob over there covering your partner.”
I looked. It was true. In the light of the stables I could see Hank’s hands coming up into the air. His backpack was gone. Jake stood behind him, gun raised. Also, I didn’t see Dingo.
“I’m only missing one thing,” Carpin said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The money.”
“What money?” I asked.
“Where’s the goddamned money?” Archie Carpin screamed.
There was a sudden screech. One of the two animals fighting out there in the darkness and the mud just experienced the sensation of teeth sinking down into throat, cutting off its last howl. Either Dingo or the mastiff was dead.
I took two steps forward.
His gun swung up, pointed at me.
I laughed. I laughed out loud at him as the lightning played and danced across the sky.
“What’s so goddamned funny, asshole?” he yelled.
“You. You and your stupid horses and your screwed-up family history and your pathetic control games. Money is nothing!”
“If it’s nothing, then maybe you wouldn’t mind handing it over,” he said, and grinned.
“I can’t,” I said. “You idiot. You’ve already got it.”
He looked around, then back up at me.
“I don’t see it,” he said. His smile had taken on the aspects of lunacy. His eyebrows were arched and I could see his teeth.
“That’s because it’s out of sight,” I told him.
“Where?” Carpin said. “Tell me, or your buddy there gets it.”
I looked over at Hank, his hands in the air, a gun pointed at his head. Jake grinned at me, the dark gap where one of his incisors had been lent him the appearance of ignorant evil.
I looked toward Hank, caught a split-second of his face in that perfectly illuminated world inside a lightning flash. He was smiling as well.
I remembered.
“Where?” Carpin shouted.
“Right there, you stupid piece of shit,” I said, and pointed to the ground at Hank’s feet.
“The manure pile?” Carpin laughed. “You gotta be shittin’ me.”
“Not the manure pile,” I said. “Under it. Way under it. The old tornado shelter.”
Back in High School I did a brief stint on the Junior Varsity football team. In those days we had coaches who weren’t afraid to rub our noses in the dirt when we screwed up, and if you happened to get on their bad side… look out.
I got on a coach’s bad side once, right in his office. Back then my mouth was a lot faster, sort of like a pistol with a hair trigger. So when I told the coach that maybe he ought to worry a little less about my lack of team spirit and a little more about the rumors of him and Miss Puckett-the young substitute teacher who was being handed around-and about how his wife might react when she found out, the white-headed old pug came unglued.
He stood up from his chair so quickly and violently that a lynch-pin underneath it fell out and the whole swivel seat and backrest fell over and rattled on the waxed tile floor. He never even noticed. His face was fiery purplish-red, the color of a freshly pulled beet.
We almost came to blows that day.
That’s what Carpin’s face reminded me of in the light from the stables and the intermittent lightning. His face was red, just as Coach Looney’s had been.
“What?” he screamed. “All along? All this time? While those two idiots were chasing her all over?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Ain’t it a riot?”
Jake started laughing, the laugh of a dullard who has stumbled across some simple yet profound truth.
“I fucking believe you,” Carpin said. “It’s the only thing that makes any kind of sense. You know why, right? ‘Cause it makes no fucking sense, that’s why it makes sense.”
“Good,” I said. “Your money is on your property. We can go then.”
I took a step toward Hank and Jake.
Carpin’s gun belched flame. A clot of mud leapt up from the ground and swatted me. He’d fired into the ground to my side.
“Not so fast,” he said. “I can’t let you people live. You know too much. You know about the still. You know about the kid. Besides that…”
”What?” I asked.
“I’ve been waiting to do this since I first talked to you on the phone.” He raised his gun, straight-armed, and pointed it at my face.
“Good girl,” Hank yelled.
There was a blur and belching fire. I felt hot air: a bullet whizzing past my cheek just as Carpin’s arm came down under the dark mass of some beast.
Dingo!
They were on the ground for a moment, rolling in the mud. Dingo’s teeth tore through wet cloth down into flesh and bone.
Motion to my right! I snapped a glance.
Jake moved his gun off of Hank toward Dingo and Carpin.
“Get it off me! Kill it-KILL IT!” Carpin screamed as he flailed at Dingo with his other arm. In the night, in the mud and rain, in the orange glow from the stable lights and the blue lightning the two of them looked like one single alien thing suffering its final death throes. Like John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’.
“I cain’t, boss. Ah might hitch’ oo!”
Hank moved, but Jake brought the gun back to cover him.
Hank froze.
At that moment Freddie walked up between us, raised his gun and fired down at the earth.
And then the heavens opened.
Beauty can be many things. For me beauty was the mud and earth moving under my feet and an invisible hand forcing me forward headlong; it was a too-bright eruption of light around from behind me; it was objects moving around me like petals of an unfolding flower.
Beauty was an explosion. And for that briefest of instants I completely understood something-understood it with the perfectness of crystal clarity, so thoroughly got the essence of it that it unraveled before my flight was done. I understood the soul of my friend Hank Sterling. I knew what it looked like.
Then the back of my head encountered mud and the rest of my body flipped over. The air above my eyes was alive with particles. There were long splinters of wood from the inside of support beams and two-by-fours and they were all flying, migrating outward from the center of the blast. There were large nails and shards of glass and whole saddles, moving, drifting away into the night.
My ears weren’t working, by my eyes saw everything, captured it all.
And the lightning dared not strike.
I rolled over.
My hand came to rest on the gun in my waistband. I pulled it out. What good was a gun when the world was going
I pushed down against the mud. Got up on one knee, shakily.
Somebody else was trying to get up as well.
Freddie.
He turned towards me. Half of his face was gone.
“Freddie,” I said. “You ain’t gonna make it.”
His eyes stared into mine for an instant in the glow of the fire that had once been some horse stables. I thought he was going to say something-he certainly looked for a moment like a fellow who had something on his mind-then he fell over, face first into the mud and never moved again.
I stood up, reeling.
A hand closed around my ankle.
It was almost too much like the dream.
The fingers on my ankle thrummed out a rhythm for a moment and then went still.
Both Hank and Jake were trying to get to their feet.
Jake’s gun came up, pointed right at Hank.
I was cold inside. I’d never known such cold.
Gun up, I pulled the trigger without thinking. Just looked and then-
— a spray of blood and bone in another herky-jerky lightning flash.
Jake began to fall amid another flash
— and there was fire in the rain, leaping from the muzzle of Jake’s gun, then gone.
Hank jerked like he’d been hit by a charging bull, fell back into the water with a splash.
The hand around my ankle thrummed again, almost as if it was trying to tap out a message in Morse.
I lifted my leg and stomped it, once. Twice.
There were lights, suddenly, cutting across the nightmarish landscape.
A pickup truck. It roared to a stop, slewing mud everywhere.
The front door of the Dodge Ram came open. A cowboy hat with a plastic rain cover emerged. Sheriff Thornton.
I didn’t wait. I got in motion.
Around the manure pile and the concrete chimney, the next lightning flash revealed Jake’s body. I sailed over it, my feet splashing into water.
“Bill!” Sheriff Thornton called out. I ignored it.
Hank was face down in the mud and the runoff. His face was underwater.
I grabbed him by the shirt, took one shoulder and rolled him over.
At least his eyes weren’t staring at me like
—
like he was maybe dead already.
There was a hole in his side right through his ribcage. I turned him again. No exit wound.
His eyes came open. He smiled. His mouth opened. Water and blood spilled out.
“Nice”-
“Goddammit. Shut up, Hank. If you talk you’re likely to die.”
He half-nodded, slowly.
“Bill!” The voice, again. Not as loud. Insistent, though. Trying to reach me. It was Agent Cranford.
I ignored it, pulled Hank over to the Sheriff’s truck. Opened the passenger door.
There was a shape beside me. I didn’t know who. Didn’t care. “See to Julie and the kid,” I said, and gestured in the direction of the house.
By the time I got Hank loaded into the back seat, I noticed that the rain was beginning to slack off.
“You’re not gonna die, you sonuvabitch,” I told him. I guess I was a little loud.
His eyes were following me. I didn’t want to look at them. How things like that almost always seemed to go: if I looked into his eyes, he’d die. Superstitious of me, I knew, but I didn’t care.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
I shivered. It was cold and I was shaking.
“What?” I almost screamed it at him.
“I ain’t gonna die,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. Hurts…like…hell. But I ain’t gonna give up yet.”
Emergency rooms are possibly my least favorite places to be. Aside from funeral parlors, that is.
It was 12:20 a.m. in Wichita Falls, Texas.
I suppose I’ve been lucky most of my life. I don’t know why. I’d like to think it has something to do with the fact that I haven’t hurt so many people in life, but then again, you never know. My mother used to say I should count my blessings. I suppose if I ever do get back to saying my prayers again like I did as a child, then I’ll include a special thanks for watching over me during that week of hell. And for that night of the storm.
Hank was still in the operating room. I kept my hands clenched the whole time. The young lady doctor with the drab-green scrubs and elongated neck had said that it depended upon whether or not the second lung collapsed, and how much he bled. If he pulled through this one, his life was going to be a little slower for awhile.
I had an eleven-year old on my lap, trying to go to sleep. Her name was Jessica, and I was already smitten with her.
Julie sat up on her E.R. bed. Fortunately she only had a few contusions. Her hair looked like a chopped up sort of butch all the way around where it had to be cut away from the electrical tape. It would grow back. I found myself hoping that if everything with her and me and the law resolved the right way that maybe the two of us would also have a chance to grow back together. Foolish of me, I know.
So there I sat, holding her hand and looking into those enchanting eyes. She had an alcohol-soaked rag in her other hand, doing her best to remove the remaining patches of tape glue that were still there around her cheeks and mouth. The alcohol vapors must have been getting in her eyes because they were tearing up. Or maybe it was something else.
There were the tips of black cowboy boots pacing slowly back and forth just the other side of the privacy curtain. Sheriff Thornton, probably.
Another set of boots walked up and there was a brief, whispered exchange. I caught one bit of a sentence, though, and I liked the sound of it: “…thinks he’s gonna pull through.”
“Julie,” I said. “Sounds like Hank’s gonna make it.”
She started crying.
“Don’t cry,” Jessica said. She got up from my lap and put her arms around Julie. I stood up from my chair and sat down next to her.
I waited until the sobbing subsided. She leaned into me and I held her.
“Anything you want to tell me before you have to tell everything to the Feds?” I asked her.
“Be with me,” was all she said. “Both of you.” I guess she said it loud enough to be overheard outside the curtain. The two pairs of boots turned and walked away.
“We’re here,” Jessica said.
You don’t just pull a magic trick and switch bags with a fellow who is carrying home two million dollars. That kind of stunt requires careful planning, follow-through, quick-thinking, and terrific dumb luck. Fortunately Julie had each of these elements going for her the night Archie Carpin was paid off in a small town of seven hundred souls five miles north of the Red River, just across the state line in the furthest southwest corner of Oklahoma and only fifteen miles from the Carpin ranch.
El Dorado was a farming town dependent for survival upon two things: the muddy waters of the Red River for irrigation, and upon keeping the kids who were graduating high school from moving off.
The heart of the town centered around Jill’s Diner, where a farmer and his family could stop by on Sunday for the buffet and expect to eat about as well as they could expect to eat at home. Jill’s was a greasy spoon, in the noblest tradition of that label. The air was laden with the scent of deep-frying oil-possibly in need of a change-and cigarette smoke.
One the Sunday afternoon that Archie Carpin stopped in to have dinner and meet with his Oklahoma City friends, the crowd inside Jill’s was thick and the pretty yet slightly pudgy waitress-whose heart was firmly set on running off to college in Kansas City and becoming a Forensic Scientist-was serving as fast as the plates came through the kitchen window.
Carpin didn’t bother to sit. He ordered the buffet and iced tea, but was told that the buffet-a steam table affair in the family room just around the corner inside the dimly lit place-had run dry.
No problem. They’d fix him up a fresh plate, special.
Carpin sat. He glanced at his watch.
At ten minutes till one, the Oklahoma City boys came in and took a seat at the table with him. They demurred when the waitress asked them if they wanted anything. Instead they exchanged a few words with Carpin, shook hands and left.
There on the seat across from him was the bag. An old country doctor’s medical bag, from the age when doctors carried such and made real house calls on their patients. It was a bit of an inside joke and Carpin sat there for a moment, chuckling to himself. Among his distribution buddies he was known as “The Doctor” because of his skillful method of taking moonshine and flavoring it so that it could pass for most any label of brand-name whiskey.
He regarded the bag across from him, and continued to regard it even as his food arrived and he began to eat.
By the time he finished his cherry cobbler he knew that something wasn’t right. It started first with his hearing, which had taken on a muted and tinny quality. After a minute of sitting and studying on it, it came to him as a shock that his hearing was beginning to fade out completely. His vision, likewise, began to grow dim along the periphery. As he watched, the periphery began to shrink, to close in on the center of his vision.
He slammed his fist on the table in an effort to get some of his awareness back, but only succeeded in knocking his iced tea glass off onto the floor where it shattered.
In another ten seconds he was out.
In small towns an ambulance is a rarity. Response time in such places is usually from half an hour to half a day. That Sunday it took the ambulance mere moments to respond. None of the patrons there at Jill’s gave it a second thought. Their attention was on the excitement: Archie Carpin, a bit of legend in those parts, had had a heart attack in their very own diner.
The two EMTs, unaccountably short fellows, had a time getting Carpin onto the gurney and had to have help from among Jill’s patrons.
Finally, they got him loaded and out the door, not for a moment forgetting to take the physician’s bag.
Of the long ride to the hospital in Wichita Falls, Texas, Carpin would later remember very little.
He did however, from a sea of lurid, tortured dreams, feel the ambulance jerk to a stop in Quanah, Texas, eight miles south of the Red River. He felt the cool breeze on his skin when the rear door to the ambulance swung open, and although there were words exchanged and the distinct lilt of a female voice which he would never be able to piece together, one thing was unmistakable, and would immediately surface in his mind when he woke up an hour later with the worst headache he’d ever had in his life: the scent of Giorgio perfume.
It had been a stormy evening, much like the one we had just experienced. Carpin was on his way home from the hospital with a bag full of confetti. He was going to kill somebody.
Jake Jorgenson had, in his own fashion, been in love with Julie since the moment she put in an appearance at the ranch. Nobody seemed to realize it but Julie, who would have nothing to do with him. That night Jake got a call from his boss that he was on his way home. He had instructions to round up Julie and lock her in the closet until he got there. Apparently Jake hadn’t liked the sound in the older man’s voice. He’d told Julie that it was a sound like blood and powder.
When Jake told her that he would protect her from Carpin, if she’d only get in the closet as he’d said, Julie demurred. Instead she wracked Jake up pretty good with a well-placed kick that took him down to the floor. She left him there, holding himself and leaking spittle. Then she grabbed the physician’s bag with the latest Oklahoma City payoff, and started looking for Jessica. Something had gone wrong. Archie was not supposed to have awakened until late that night. She had been counting on that and the hospital’s propensity to keep him for observation and monitoring of his vital signs while she got everything ready and made her break.
She went to Jessica’s room to fetch the girl, but she was gone. With one look out the window from the main house Julie found her. She was down past the horse stables, as always, and playing in the rain.
Julie took the bag and her purse and high-tailed it down the lane toward the stables.
By the time she had Jessica by the hand she saw the glow of headlights coming over the hill past the house. Archie Carpin was home.
The stables were deserted, except for the men down in the still. But there was nowhere to run.
Her eyes settled on the manure pile and on the concrete cylinder rising just inches above the refuse.
She ran to the manure pile, stepped shin-deep into the manure and gave the rusting lid a shove. It didn’t move. She looked around. There was a manure shovel close by, leaning up against a mesquite tree. She grabbed it, took careful aim on the ancient lock and brought the shovel down on top of it with all she had.
The lock and the hasp shattered.
She gave the lid a second push. This time it opened with a screech of metal on concrete.
She dropped the bag into the blackness of the shaft, pulled the lid closed, took Jessica by the hand and made for the barbed wire fence and the woods beyond.
And they made it.
They spent the night in a hunter’s blind deep in the woods, shivering and shaking and starting at every sound.
The next day they cut across country, hiking until they found a road. From there they thumbed a ride into town.
Later that next evening, Julie put the kid on a bus to her real grandmother’s house in New York City, paying for the fare in cash. She’d had the presence of mind to take one stack of bills and stuff them into her purse the night before. And by the time she met me, all she’d had left were three pathetic-looking hundred dollar bills.
She ran from Childress, Texas, and into the arms of Carpin’s chief enemy, Ernest Neil, a hundred miles east of Austin.
Jake and Freddie tracked her there and Jake killed Ernest Neil with a bullet to the head at three-hundred yards. It was impossible to know whether or not he’d been aiming at Julie or at Ernest. I had it figured that in the moment he had her lovely head and face in the cross-hairs of his sniper-rifle, Jake couldn’t bring himself to do it. Whether from misplaced affection, unrequited, or from anger, I believe he moved the cross-hairs a few hundredths of a degree, took careful aim at Ernest Neil, and fired.
When she was finished with her story, she sat there for a time, drying her eyes.
I picked up Jessica and set her down on the bed next to Julie. She was a darling kid and her eyes seemed to watch my every move.
“You watch out for her, will ya, kiddo?” I said. “I’ve got to check on Hank.”
“Okay,” she said, and smiled.
“Mom,” I heard her say as I walked around the curtain and across the floor. “Everything is gonna be great.”
“I know, honey,” Julie said.
I had been warned.
The doctor had said he might not wake up for some time. That he wasn’t out of the woods yet.
I was just sitting there in his room watching little green blips of light surf peaks and valleys, each peak accompanied by that damned sound that means the same thing in any language. I watched my friend’s heart beat. Watched him breathe.
I haven’t had many close friends in my life. I think exactly three. If that was true, then Hank was definitely one of them.
Two hours and just a little over, before he awoke.
I watched nurses pass by out in the Critical Care Ward. Then I heard a “hmm.”
It was Hank. He was looking at me. There was no telling how long he’d been watching me. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d looked up at his face. Really, I had had one hell of a night myself.
I stood up, walked over to him.
He tried to raise his hand toward me.
I took his hand in mine, two old buddies meeting after a long absence and just shaking hands.
“Don’t try to talk,” I told him. “You took one in the lungs.”
“Julie? The little girl?”
“They’re fine,” I said. “None the worse for wear.”
He shook his head.
“Dingo?” he asked.
“Hey. You don’t listen, do you? You’re supposed to shut up.” I suppose the relief on my face was not enough to discourage him.
“Tell me,” he rasped.
“Dingo’s gonna be fine. She’s at a veterinary clinic down the block. Feds took her there. She took a bullet through the neck, but she’ll live. Her bark will never be the same, though.”
“Yeah?” he said. “Either one of us.” His voice was a breathy wheeze, like a teakettle that was trying to come to a boil. He coughed once, softly. It was a weak cough, but it was a sound that I didn’t like.
“Easy, Cowboy,” I said. “Don’t you ever shut up?”
His eyes were on mine. “I’m gonna be fine,” he said. “But… I do have to tell you-”
“What?”
“McMurray.”
“Oh,” I said.
Hank nodded.
“The IRS guy. Hank, you don’t have to tell me,” I said. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t anyway. To tell the truth, I don’t think I can stand the thought of you going from a hospital to a jail.”
“I’m… too old, I think,” he said, his voice hardly better than a rasp.
“There’s no such thing as too old for prison.”
He waved a weakened hand. My turn to shut up.
“You don’t understand,” he said softly. “It was… self-defense.”
“Why would an IRS agent try to harm you?” I realized the stupidity of the question the moment it tumbled out of my mouth. “I mean physically,” I said.
“You might, too, if I had the goods on you the way I did… on him.”
Things clicked into place in my head.
“Um,” I began.
“Yeah,” he said. “Remember? I was about three million up in unpaid taxes. Even after everything settled down I had to pay in a third of that.”
“I remember,” I said.
“McMurray was the only agent who knew about it. He wanted his share… And a plane ticket to South America.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I got his demand on tape. He came after me.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
“‘S truth,” he said. “Remember, I disappeared for about four months. That was after. He cornered me…in the parking lot of a truck-stop in Killeen. Pulled a gun. I grabbed for it. Got a bullet through my shoulder, but not too bad. The next bullet… Murray ate.”
“Jesus, Hank,” I said. “What-I’m not sure I want to know this… But what did you do with the body?”
“Bottom of… Lake Belton. Wrapped a tow-chain around him. I let the bottom-feeders have him.”
“You still got that tape?”
“Yep,” he said. “Made copies. The original was in the glove-box of my Ford. I reckon the government has it now.”
I thought about it. We’d left Hank’s Ford Fairlane parked across the street from Julie’s demolished duplex, along with Dock’s dead body.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure they have it.”
“Yeah. It’s what Agents Bruce and Cranford didn’t mention. They’ll be asking about it soon.”
He coughed again, this time it didn’t sound good at all.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s enough. Time to shut up. I mean it.”
He tried to speak again.
I leaned forward, putting my ear close to his mouth.
“Bill,” he wheezed. “I was… supposed to remind you…”
I turned and looked at his eyes, up close.
Why did I feel like crying?
“What?”
“Bill, you did just fine.”
And that’s how I felt as I walked out into the early morning sunshine for what seemed like the first time, as if I had just been born with the rising of the sun.
Not perfect. Not apt.
Just fine.
Sheriff Thornton must have been having a hell of a time keeping the reporters back and away from the scene of all the devastation we had caused. When I arrived back there about one o’clock that day in the front passenger seat of Agents Bruce and Cranford’s car, I almost didn’t recognize the place. The narrow blacktop highway leading to the ranch was lined with news trucks, jeeps and ordinary gawkers, each attempting to gain entry or get a glimpse of what was going on.
It made sense. The explosion last night had lifted us all up off the ground. It was a wonder that any one of us had lived through it, except for one thing: Hank really had known exactly what he was doing.
As we rolled over the cattle-guard-the same cattle-guard where Hank and Dingo and I had stood in the pouring rain last night-I saw two Sheriff’s deputies escorting a dejected cameraman and a young reporter with a torn dress back off the property. She held a microphone that wouldn’t be seeing any action and a broken high-heel shoe. Also she wore a priceless expression.
“Interesting effects you cause,” Agent Cranford said from the back seat.
The comment didn’t merit a reply. We trundled on up the driveway and wound through the low hills and around back. I looked to the left. All the windows on that side of the house were shattered. Also, the house appeared to have shifted some on its foundation. I wondered if it would ever be habitable again. Not that it mattered. There was no one left to live there.
There was nothing left of the stables but scattered sticks of wood and strips of tin roofing. The whole place looked as though it had been hit by a tornado. Which it had. A tornado named Hank Sterling.
Men with black ATF jackets sifted through the wreckage. As we passed slowly by I saw that one fellow was helping another up out of the exposed hole in the ground where the south part of the stables had once stood. Carpin’s still operation-or what was left of it- had been exposed for the whole world to see.
I chuckled out loud.
Agent Bruce shot me a look, appeared to smile and frown at the same time.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Just that-I didn’t know Hank was going to do that. He must have been listening better than I was to Julie. He couldn’t have planted those nitrates better if he’d had a set of blueprints.”
“Uh huh,” Agent Bruce said. Why couldn’t I remember his first name? “By the way, I got a call from a friend of yours. A fellow named Kinsey.”
“Patrick,” I said. “Well. What did he want?”
“He wanted to know if you were okay. Also, he wanted to make sure that I knew that he knew all along where you were going and what you were doing. That’s true, right?”
“Pretty much,” I replied. I was pondering the significance of the question as I turned and looked back at Agent Cranford.
“It’s my idea, Bill,” he said.
The car pulled to a stop.
“What idea?”
“You and Hank were acting as citizens deputized in the field.”
It sunk in. There was going to be no backlash from all the hell we’d caused. No charges preferred or filed. No grand juries, no true bills, and no defense lawyers.
“Who do I have to kill?” I asked.
“Nobody,” Agent Cranford said. “Actually, I’ve been hoping that you might help bring somebody back to life. Or if you can’t, then let us know what happened to him.”
“McMurray,” I said.
“Right.”
I thought about it. About Hank lying there in the hospital. I thought about his new chance at life. About everything he’d told me-that night at the truck stop, a life and death struggle in the dark ending in gunshots. I thought about greed and about bottom-feeders moving around in the murky dark of a lake bed.
“You have the tape, don’t you?” I asked. “You know what McMurray was trying to do to him?”
“Yeah,” Agent Cranford said. “Right here,” he said. He held it up for me to see. The cassette tape had a dingy-brown label on it and Hank’s scribble across it: Creedence Vol. 2.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it. Everything I know.”
I turned to see Sheriff Thornton looking at me from ten feet away. He was leaning back against a Caterpillar backhoe with his arms crossed and his hat tipped up in front.
“But first,” I said. “Let’s go solve another mystery. A much older one.”
It took the backhoe ten minutes to clear out the entrance to the tornado shelter. When the job was done there was an eight foot pile of mud, clay, rock and manure a few yards away.
The door was composed of rust and concrete, and while there was a large padlock hanging from one fused-together mass of rusted iron, I knew it wouldn’t take much to break through.
“Let me see that sledge,” I said.
A sheriff’s deputy gave me the handle. I dropped down into the pit. The men above me crowded around.
I swung once, twice. On my second pass, the steel head connected with the padlock and the hasp, and both tore free and landed in the mud at my feet.
“Crowbar,” I called up.
One was handed to me after a moment.
I slid the business end between the concrete wall and the doorway and shoved.
Nothing.
“Some help down here,” I said.
One of the sheriff’s deputies, a young fellow in his twenties, dropped down into the hole next to me.
“Together,” I said.
We both shoved on three and then there was a loud creak and an eerie, hollow echo. The door came open an inch, two.
Up above someone wedged a two-by-four into the top of the doorway and shoved.
The door came open, pushing mud out of the way in a smooth arc at our feet.
I stepped into the cellar.
“Who’s the corpse?” the Deputy Sheriff next to me asked.
I stepped over and picked up the stacks of bills and stuffed them back into the satchel. Zipped it up.
“I didn’t know until yesterday,” I said.
Behind us, other men crowded around.
There was a note under a layer of dust on the card table, next to a skeletal hand.
The sheriff was right there beside me. Agent Cranford shoved his way up next to me.
“Go ahead,” I told Sheriff Thornton. “Read it. But before you do, take a look under that jacket. See if you don’t find a tin star.”
The sheriff lifted the jacket. There, pinned to the vest underneath, was a badge.
“What the hell?”
“The United States Government has been wondering what happened to this man for the last eighty years,” I said.
“That’s a fact,” Agent Cranford said.
“What’s his name?” the Sheriff asked.
“Jack Johannsen,” I said. “About eighty years ago this man was a United States Marshal for North Texas, and Oklahoma.”
The sheriff lifted the note from the table, blew dust from it.
“How the hell did he get here?” the sheriff asked.
“Carpin locked him in here. Archie’s grandfather.”
“The note says: ‘Tell my people, I died for someone that I thought was a friend.’ What does that mean?” Sheriff Thornton was looking at me.
“It refers to a betrayal. How familiar are you with your North Texas crime history, Sheriff?” I asked him.
“I know a fair amount,” he said. “But I’m always willing to learn more.” He crossed his arms.
“Okay,” I said. “Back in 1927 the Texas Rangers were sent into the Borger area to establish martial law and clean up the town.”
“I’ve heard about that, all my life,” Sheriff Thornton said.
“Tell him the rest of it, Bill,” Agent Cranford said.
“They shut down the mining camp at Signal Hill and arrested about fifty men. During those days the two most prosperous businesses in those parts was the Sheriff’s Office and the undertaker. It was rough; it was quite literally hell, and even the Sheriff’s Office was on the take, so Governor Moody sent in the Texas Rangers. When they did, a lot of men scattered. As you know, Sheriff, Archie Carpin owned this ranch. His grandfather was partners with a man named Whitey Walker. Walker and Carpin ran Signal Hill and Borger and practically the whole Panhandle of Texas. Walker fled the Rangers and enjoyed a crime spree down in Central Texas until he was killed during an attempted prison escape. But Carpin and his brother, they simply went home. It looks like they brought somebody home with them.”
We all turned to regard the corpse.
“Jack Johannsen was the U.S. Marshal sent into Signal Hill to investigate rumored prohibition violations. He never made it back to civilization.”
I reached into my shirt pocket and brought out the photo that Agent Cranford had given to me at the rest stop two nights ago.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a photo of three men, all sitting at a table enjoying a drink. The one in the middle is Whitey Walker. The one on the right is Matthew Carpin. The fellow on the left,” I said. “I dunno, but it looks a lot like Jack Johannsen. Him,” I pointed. The man in the photo and the crumbling corpse in the chair were wearing the very same clothing.
If I had a camera that could look backwards through time, what might I see? In my imagination the iris on my camera lens opens to reveal a row of Model-T Fords parked in front of a line of hitching rails near the entrance to a clapboard saloon. There is a red patina from clay dust covering everything and an ever-present fiery glow on the horizon, north and south. That glow is there whether it’s night or day. Right this minute it’s nighttime. The air here is a fume. I can hear shouts, catcalls, and the incidental loud pop of a firearm discharging somewhere the next block over. In essence it is Perdition. It is Mordor. It is 1926 in the North Texas oil patch.
Inside the saloon three men sit at a table that is hardly big enough for the elbows of one man. On the table is a bottle of whiskey and three shot glasses.
One of the men is used to carrying a badge, but he isn’t wearing one now. It’s the wrong thing to possess in this place. In the waistband of his slacks, however, is an old Navy pistol. When he stands the whole world can see it, but right this moment he is sitting, sipping his whiskey. The gun alone is enough to deter trouble in this place, unless of course someone knows his secret. If that turns out to be the case, then he will die the way Wild Bill Hickok died: a bullet to the brain from behind. He knows this. But right now his back is to a wall and he is among men who consider him to be a friend.
The whiskey bottle is nearly drained.
One of the regulars in the saloon wanders by, says: “Blackie, can I take youse guys’ picture wid my new camera?”
“Sure, Slick,” one of the men says. “Go right ahead.”
Smiles fade from three faces.
“Say ‘rotgut’.”
“Rotgut,” the three men say in unison. There is a flash of light.
“Thanks, fellahs.”
Slick waves and moves on.
The man in the middle-the one minus the badge-watches a couple of whores pass by through the window across the way from him, follows them and the sound of their laughter as they pass the front of the saloon.
When he turns back again, one of the two men beside him has a gun drawn and pointed at him. The other man across from him pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket and lays it on the table.
“You ever drink with a dead man before, Blackie?” the man with the gun asks to his friend sitting across from him.
“Nope. Have you, Matt?” The man with the note says. He begins to unfold the note.
“This is my first time, too,” Matt says.
“What you got to say about this, Jack?” Blackie asks.
Jack recognizes the note. Not the latest one, but an earlier note. Maybe the latest one got through.
Jack wipes his forehead with his sleeve. “How did you fellows know?” He asks.
“Your friend in Dallas,” Matt says. “He was our friend long before you ever came down the pike.”
“Goddamn you, Roger,” Jack says to the absent traitor. “May you rot in hell.”
“Oh,” Blackie says. “This is hell. Right here. And I have the feeling that our buddy Roger would get along here just fine.”
“You guys gonna kill me? Best get to it.”
“Not yet,” Matt says. “We’re going to ransom you first.”
And outside the window on the hard-packed and heavily rutted Main Street a dust-devil moves desultorily along, kicking up trash and sending it a hundred feet into a smoky, carbon-black sky.
“I think, Sheriff,” I said, “that at the last minute Dallas Sheriff Roger Bailey had a change of heart. Maybe he tried to get Johannsen out. Maybe all he did was send word to the governor. There’s a record of that, at least. Whatever he did, though, it was too little.”
“And too late. That’s what that means, then: ‘for someone that I thought was a friend.’”
I didn’t need to reply. We were in agreement.
“There’s more,” Agent Cranford said. He held out another piece of paper to me. I took it.
It was a telegram.
“Read it,” he said.
“GOVERNOR MOODY STOP THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT DOES NOT PAY RANSOM STOP GOOD LUCK GETTING THAT BOY OUT OF THERE STOP SIGNED HH.”
Cranford must have noticed the quizzical look on my face, even in the dim light.
“H.H. stands for Herbert Hoover. At least I’m pretty sure it does.”
The room began to feel even more close than it had when I first entered. I shuddered. Goose bumps stood up on my arm.
“What is it?” Sheriff Thornton asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Like hell. Tell me.”
“It’s just that… You ever been to one of those exhibits where they keep the three thousand year old mummies?”
“Naw. Can’t say as I have.”
“If you did, you’d know the feeling,” I said.
“Okay. Now I don’t want to know,” he laughed. It was a nervous laugh. “But you better go ahead and tell me.”
“It’s being trapped. Not for seventy years, or even a thousand. But for eternity.”
We were quiet for a bit. The men behind us shifted around. I heard quick whispers in the gloom.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s get out of this place. But Sheriff Thornton, I’ve got a suggestion for you. You don’t have to do it, but I think we’ll all sleep better.”
“What’s that?”
“After all the dust settles on this thing and all the reporters go home, I’d have your backhoe operator dig out this whole thing and expose it to the open sky.”
Sheriff Thornton laughed. It sounded better than before.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I’ll do just that.”
I handed him the satchel of money.
“Sheriff, you should count this, then bag it and tag it. If the proper owner doesn’t claim this in thirty days, then it belongs to Miss Julie Simmons.”
The sheriff took the physician’s bag.
“How much is in here?” he asked me.
“Two million dollars, or thereabouts.”
“And Miss Simmons? Is she your-?”
“Client. Yes.”
“Just what is it you do for a living, Mr. Travis?” Sheriff Thornton asked. I’d been waiting for the question for some time.
“I’m an investment counselor,” I said. “For instance, say you have too much cash, or not enough and you want to-”
I had one more phone call to make. The last call.
“Good morning, Bierstone and Travis.”
“Penny. Bill.”
“Oh. Good morning, Mr. Travis.”
“Penny, is Mr. Bierstone in?”
“Yes, sir. He is. I’m sure he will want to know how close you are in resolving his niece’s case.”
Silence.
“Mr. Travis?”
More silence.
“Mr. Travis?”
“Penny,” I said. “Remind me to take you to lunch sometime. Soon.”
“I’ll do that, sir.”
“‘Cause you and I really need to talk.”
“I look forward to it, sir. Shall I put Mr. Bierstone on now?”
“Yes, thank you. Goodbye, Penny.”
“Goodbye, sir. And have a nice day.”
After a moment my partner’s very formal voice was there.
“Ah, William.”
“Hello, Nat.”
“Have you been taking good care of my niece? You know, she was my sister’s daughter, God rest her soul.”
“She’s fine. Everything’s fine. Why’d you want me to handle her case?”
“William. You’re a very bright lad, but sometimes you ask the most empty-headed questions.”
“I’m working on it, partner. I’m working on it. It’s just that sometimes I add two and two and get twenty-two. Or twenty-two thousand.”
“Speaking of round figures, William, what happened to the two million dollars? Have you retrieved it yet?”
“The money will be in claims for thirty days. After that, it’s Julie’s.”
“Good. Good job, William. When will the two of you be returning?”
I paused. Images of the Swiss Alps from the frosted window of a little chateau popped into my head. A chateau I had never seen but knew had to exist.
“I’m bringing Julie and Jessica home with me in a few days, as soon as the Texas Rangers and the feds are done with her. After that, we’re thinking about taking a little vacation together.”
“That is a wonderful idea. I suspect the two of you have grown rather close, then.”
“You might say that.”
“There is someone here who wants to talk with you,” Nat said.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“See for yourself.”
There was a moment as the phone passed from one hand to another. I scratched hard trying to figure out who it was.
“Mr. Bill,” a little voice said.
“Keesha!”
“Thank you, Mr. Bill. Thank you for my new family.”
“That’s all right, darlin’,” I said.
“Mr. Bill. I think you and Miss Julie ought to get married.”
“What makes you say that?”
“‘Cause she loves you, and you love her.”
“That’s right. That’s right. I’m thinking of asking her.”
“Ms. Coleeta says don’t think. Thinkin’ is a waste of time. Just do it.”
“Okay, darlin’. Okay.”
“Bye, Mr. Bill. Here’s the papers man.”
I waited.
“William,” Nat said. “I will expect a full report when you return.”
“See you soon, Nat” I said.
“Goodbye,” he said, and hung up.