by George Wier
“What do you usually do when things like this happen, Bill?” Perry asked.
“‘Do’ is the right word,” I said. “The worst thing is to think.”
“Oh,” he said.
“But, then again, this has never happened to me before.”
“Oh.”
“Hey fellas,” Bob said from forty feet away in the tall grass. “Found something. Don’t bring the girl.”
Jessica’s eyes turned to me and I watched as her imagination took over. Her mouth rounded in an “o” and her eyes grew wide.
“That’s enough of that,” I whispered to her. “Perry, stay right here with her.” I walked past him toward Bob and whispered: “Make a pass at her and I’ll feed you to some big dogs I know.”
“Bill, I don’t go in for kids.”
“That’s a relief,” I said. “Be right back.”
“I’m not a kid,” Jessica said.
“Yes you are,” Perry and I said in unison.
*****
“This gets weirder and weirder,” I said.
We stood looking down at it.
The flies were thick.
I will have to admit I expected the worst when Bob first called out to me, and I fully understood Jessica’s runaway imagination. I certainly had not expected what Bob had found.
“Tell me what I’m looking at, Bob,” I said. “Just so I know I’m not going nuts.”
“Well,” he said, and squatted down, “I’d say you’re looking at five or six hearts, a few kidneys and livers, and assorted other...can’t think of the word.”
“Viscera,” I said.
“Yeah. That.”
“I’m going with animal,” I said.
“I’d say that’s right. I hope that’s right.”
“Let’s head back to your guard shack and call this in,” I said. “Can you take the credit for finding all this, Bob?”
“Finding it? I suppose,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. “Let’s head back.”
*****
During the slow, meandering drive back to the surface streets and civilization, I waited for the question. When it wasn’t forthcoming from either my daughter or Perry, I went ahead and told them what we had found.
No comment.
Back at the gate I shook hands with Bob and headed out.
The sun overhead was beginning to wester and streams of light cirrus clouds much like ethereal claws raked the sky high overhead.
And there was a thrumming in my ears that I had felt before, like an old and unwelcome friend that comes calling out of the blue.
That eerie feeling was no longer in my gut and on the back of my neck. It was off and crawling around inside the car, and ducking into shadows at the roadside as we barreled along toward home.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
We dropped Perry off at his office and I took Jessica home. We both needed to change out of our mud-encrusted clothes.
“Where are you going, Bill?” Julie asked when I came downstairs from having showered and changed. It had already been a very long day. It was getting toward late evening and the shadows in our backyard had lengthened considerably.
Julie had Jennifer perched on one hip. Looking at them together, I knew that Jenny was going to turn out as beautiful as her mother.
“Waco,” I said.
“Why Waco?” she asked.
“Bly Take-o?” Jennifer murmured.
“There’s a museum there. I have to check something out.”
“The dead body deal. I’ve got dinner on the stove.”
“Good.”
Jessica walked in, her clothes changed and her face painted up.
“Is that makeup?” I asked her.
“Uh–yeah. Mom says it’s okay.”
I looked at Julie.
“She’s growing up, Bill,” she said.
“I know. I know.”
“I’m going with you, dad,” Jessica said.
“No way,” I shook my head.
“Will there be shooting?” Julie asked.
“I think something’s burning in the kitchen,” I said.
“Will there be shooting, Bill?” Julie pressed.
“Not a chance. Not in a museum. The Texas Rangers museum. And Walt Cannon’s got cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” Julie said. I could tell she meant it.
“Mom, can I go with him?” Jessica pleaded.
“Fine by me,” Julie said.
“Bine tye-ee,” Jennifer mumbled.
“You’re cute,” Jessica told Jenny, and started tickling her side.
“Alright,” Julie said. “You two go. I knew you weren’t staying for supper, so I made a little something for me and Jenny. Neither one of you like my meatloaf anyway.”
“I love you, babe,” I said and kissed her.
*****
I thought of a perhaps a million things to talk about with Jessica during the drive to Waco. We could have talked about this glorious week of her Spring Break, or the upcoming Pearl Jam concert, or about the truly weird posters on her wall, but she had the radio on and turned up and we listened to a weird, punkish beat while I waited for any tell-tale odd vibration from my speakers. They were factory originals from almost thirty years ago, and were likely nearing their output limit. Jessica’s arms moved and whirled and her head bobbed on her slender Amer-Asian neck.
The Interstate traffic was heavy, working people going home and big trucks settling into the stream for the long-haul. The sky was a purplish cast eastward and behind us, south and west, the sun sunk low and disappeared while no one was looking.
Jessica abruptly turned the music down and turned to face me. I waited for her to say something extremely profound and potent. Possibly she might say something I would have said at her age.
“Dad,” she said. “My friend Erica Rogers is a lesbian.”
“How would you know that?”
“She tried to put the moves on me,” she said.
I couldn’t think of a damned thing to say, so I simply nodded.
Jessica smiled. She turned the radio back up, completely satisfied. And that was our big conversation.
*****
As I suspected, the Ranger Museum was closed for the night. I should have called in ahead or arranged something.
We got a hotel room a few blocks away.
Jessica came up beside me as I looked out from the second story balcony and out over the parking lot and the Interstate with its whizzing traffic further on.
“Can I go out on my own for awhile?” she asked me.
I looked at her. “Not a chance in hell,” I said.
“I’m fifteen,” she murmured.
Something was not right there. I paused and thought about it for a minute.
“Hold on a sec,” I said. “You keep saying that. But you’re not fifteen. Your fifteenth birthday isn’t for ten more months. You’re fourteen.”
“Don’t you know anything?” she asked.
“What does that mean?”
“Duh! When we say ‘Fifteenth Century’, it’s really the fourteen hundreds. That’s because it was in the fifteenth set of a hundred years. From zero to one counts as in that year. So, I’m fifteen. See?”
I laughed. “Go watch TV.”
*****
The insistent knock on the door startled me out of a deep sleep. The alarm clock by my bed read 3:10 a.m.
I got up and peered through the peephole. Nothing but an empty landing and the parking lot. Peepholes are probably the way fish see the world.
I opened the door and peeked out, looking both ways.
Nothing.
It happened then. An electric chill went up and down my spine, the whisper of bad things on the wind.
I closed the door carefully, quietly, double-checked to make sure it was locked, and engaged the deadbolt.
“Dad?” Jessica croaked out from the other bed in the inky blackness. There was fear in her voice.
“Wrong room,” I said. �
�Go back to sleep.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. Instead I lay there and listened to Jessica breathe. Car doors occasionally slammed in the distance and eighteen-wheelers made a muted roar from the highway.
I waited for the insistent knock to come again so I could spring for the door and catch a glimpse of something, even a bit of fleeting shadow through the eyes of a fish. But no knock ever came.
Images moved in and out of the darkness: the murky darkness amid the icy and silt-laden bottom of Barton Creek, ancient scraps of newspaper and rat droppings in an abandoned marina, the horizon-glow from a towering blaze, the seamed lines on an old friend’s face and then the same face contorted in anger. And then another shape emerged from the darkness—an unexpected and unwelcome shape. The figure wore black robes. His cowled visage held an empty face as devoid and black as the space between the island galaxies. The light grew at my bidding and the shape resolved into a half-man, half-goat, nightmarish figure, as distinct as any client who ever sat opposite me in my office on San Antonio Street.
“I’m not afraid,” I whispered. And I found it was true. At that moment there was no thing that I could recall I had ever feared. Not life and not death and surely not the phantoms conjured by the primordial and superstitious mind of man—demoniac paintings created out of the deep mists by the cowering and pain-ridden, to rival the most prized works of the greatest Renaissance masters.
The image slunk away, whispering nothingness as it went. And during its slow retreat the light grew in the room with the nearing of the dawn.
*****
Jessica was quiet. We shared few words between us during a leisurely breakfast at the local I-HOP.
We were first in line when the museum opened, not that there was an actual line.
“Dad,” Jessica said, “this is going to be BOR-ing.”
“Hush,” I said.
The new curator was a Special Ranger, retired, named Howard Block. He was a round-faced man with a bulbous red nose and two close-set twinkling blue eyes. I liked him right off and he fawned over Jessica.
“Follow me,” he said, after I made clear to him what I was looking for.
We walked past historic displays and glass cases with aged and polished revolvers and rifles, each, no doubt, missing its firing pin.
Toward the rear of the huge, meandering concourse, we went through an open doorway off of the museum gift shop that bore a sign reading: Museum Personnel Only.
“What you’re looking for won’t be on any display,” Howard said. “When a case is closed out and enough time has gone by, then the Department of Public Safety clears out its old Ranger files and forwards them to us. If you say the file was here then it still has to be here.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.”
He gave me a strange look.
“Never mind,” I said. “I’m sure it’s here.”
The “archive room,” as Howard called it, was a long rear hallway filled with stacks of old paste-board boxes on sturdy wooden shelves.
“Silverfish is our greatest enemy here,” he said. “We remove the contents of each box and spray them as they come in, then stack them here in some kind of order. I’m still trying to figure it all out.”
He lead us down the long aisle and paused near the rear exit which bore an alarm warning for anyone attempting to exit that way.
There, at the end of the room was an old wooden work table, it’s surface polished and clean in counter-point to the rest of the room. This was Phil Burnet’s, I almost said aloud, and knew it was true, having seen the furnishings in his home. Phil Burnet, of the no-tipping, devil-worshiping, bottom-feeding, hole-in-the-head Burnets. I felt like I knew the man from the cold, high satin sheen of the table-top.
The file was close by. I could feel it.
“Well,” Howard said. “Feel free to look. I’ll be back in a bit to check on you. Would you like anything Miss Travis?” he asked Jessica.
“No thanks,” she said. I had expected her to ask for a coke.
“Okay,” Howard said, and strode back the way we came.
“Jessica,” I said. “You’re pretty good at finding things.”
“Uh huh.”
“Help me find the right box. It may have Walt Cannon’s name on it and it should have stuff in it about indictments of crooked South Texas public officials. And drugs.”
“Cool,” she said, and started off toward the closest set of boxes at hand.
*****
“Think I found it,” she said after no more than two minutes.
“Bring it over.”
She came to the table straining under the weight of a stuffed file box. I helped her get it up onto the table. She hopped up and sat beside it as I removed the lid.
Jessica and I began going through the box, her taking one end me the other.
“You’re in this box, dad!” she exclaimed.
“Really?”
“Yep.”
And sure enough, I was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sometimes, you get to live life all over again. That’s what it felt like gazing at the newspaper clipping from the front page of the Austin-American Statesman from a couple of years back.
The headline read: WOMAN FALLS TO DEATH DURING UT/TECH GAME. The picture was full color and showed a blimp frozen in the sky over a crowded stadium and a certain idiot hanging from a rope several hundred feet up, said idiot being Yours Truly. And there, caught in mid-fall beneath said idiot, was the figure of a woman.
“You really did that, dad?” Jessica asked.
I returned the article to its place in the file.
“No,” I said. “Stunt double.”
Jessica smiled.
I leafed further back.
And found it.
The file was marked “Ramirez” on the tab in block letters. I opened it and there was a copy of the indictment from Hidalgo County of the local Mayor, Pablo “Paul” Ramirez, on narcotic trafficking charges. Clipped to it was a small three-by-five photograph of Walt Cannon leading the handcuffed Mayor up the steps of the Hidalgo County Courthouse, likely for his arraignment
“That’s Mr. Cannon,” Jessica said. “He looked young then.”
“This was fifteen years ago, darlin’”
“When I was born,” she said.
I looked at the court stamp on the document. Sure enough, it was stamped three days after Jessica’s birth.
“Well,” I said. “Make that fourteen years. Still, it’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“Yeah huh.”
Behind Ramirez’ file was another, similarly marked. “Blaine Fenton,” it read.
I looked Fenton’s file over. Not only the indictment, but a clipping of the local headlines and numerous photographs were there, including one that got my full attention. I held it up closely.
“What is it, dad?” Jessica asked.
“I’m not sure.”
In this one Walt Cannon lead yet another handcuffed official down a tree-lined sidewalk while a line of people behind a bright pink ribbon at the edge of the grass made gestures, shouted taunts, and lobbed what looked to be pieces of fruit. In the narrow space between and behind both my friend Walt Cannon and whom I was certain was Blaine Fenton, was a woman’s face, slightly hazy due to the focus depth of the camera.
“It’s Sarah Banks,” I mumbled to myself, “also known as Candace Bingham, or ‘Candace’, for short.”
“Mr. Reilly’s girlfriend? The one that was supposed to be blown up?”
“Yeah.”
Jessica’s hand reached into the file and she brought up a small deck of business cards with a dry-rotted rubber band around them. She pulled the band off, dropped it on the table, and shuffled through the cards.
“Hey,” she said. “Here’s one. Stadtler Antiques. The address is here in Waco.”
“Let me see.”
“Phil Burnet,” Jessica said. “Mr. Antique himself. We hav
e to go check it out.”
She was right. The card gave a downtown address. Beneath the logo was the business slogan: ‘Impeccability—Discretion.’
“It’s the better part of valor,” Jessica said.
“You’re getting too smart,” I said.
*****
I jotted the address down, slipped it into my shirt pocket and placed everything back in the file.
We placed the box in a completely different location, at the back and behind a short stack of cases completely across the aisle and far down the row. If someone came looking for it, they would at least have to make a diligent search.
In the front lobby we met up again with Howard Block, thanked him for his kindness and told him we’d likely return.
He showed us out the door. At the last instant Jessica surprised both of us by hugging his neck and kissing him on the cheek.
“What was that all about?” I asked her as we got back in the car.
“He likes me,” she said.
“Oh.”
*****
“You know,” I said, “chances are that antique place is going to be closed. No telling how old that card was.”
“No, dad,” Jessica said. “Places impeccable and discrete don’t ever close.”
I laughed. “I hope you’re right.”
*****
She was.
I got that feeling again, looking at the place from the street. That knock-on-the-door-in-the-middle-of-the-night feeling.
“Weird,” Jessica said.
I nodded.
“You stay here,” I told her.
“Da-ad!” she whined.
I sighed. “Okay. Dammit. Come on.”
She smiled.
We crossed the stream of traffic like the jaywalkers we were. I would have tried peering in the place but the view inside was blocked to both sides of the door by a set of very old-looking Japanese wooden panel screens.
I opened the door and a chime went off somewhere in the rear of the place.