by George Wier
Who knows? I don’t. There was never any evidence she killed anyone. She had tried to kill Ranger Walter Cannon and had failed in that, although Walt himself might argue differently, if you substituted his heart for himself in that equation.
Every old movie, every piece of fiction I’ve ever read, has either of two motives: love, or greed. But there is a third motivation, stronger than the other two put together: survival. In a world that would just as soon do away with you as see you live and prosper, that one drive reigns supreme over all others.
Esperanza had fought to survive, and very nearly won. She had survived Mexico, she had survived the loss of family, of lover, and even identity. And she had finally succumbed when her luck ran out, as anyone living perpetually on the edge will tell you. One day or another, the fated number is drawn, and then there is the Devil to pay.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The ceremony was short. The Governor, a man I had once met under not the best of circumstances, gave a brief speech opining the high standards of the Texas Rangers service, ticking off one by one the virtues and the weight of responsibility each Ranger bore, then concluded with an example of each point from Walter M. Cannon’s life.
He folded the papers before him, made them disappear into his coat pocket, then leaned forward to the microphone, paused, and looked across the crowd in a slow sweep. There were fifty of us there, the majority being Ranger Captains with a few senators and other dignitaries thrown in for good measure. The Governor tried to meet and hold each gaze. It was likely that ability that had gotten him elected in the first place.
“Therefore, it is my duty and my honor to present Texas Ranger Walter M. Cannon with this State’s Medal of Honor.”
The Governor stepped to his right as Walt stood.
From the second row back, with Julie and Jessica to either side of me and Jennifer perched in my arms and running her tiny fingers through my windblown hair, I noted the single tear as it slipped down Walt Cannon’s cheek. My own throat, for some reason, had developed a bit of a lump.
Walt removed his hat and the Governor draped a broad red ribbon with a gold medal depended from it around Walt’s weatherbeaten neck and crisp, starched collar. The medal caught a glint of sunlight through the whispering oak trees in the secluded garden of the Governor’s Mansion.
“Well, Walt,” I whispered to myself. “You got what you wanted.”
“Shiny man,” my youngest said and pointed at Walt.
Julie’s eyes met mine.
“Was that her first sentence?” I asked.
“Sentence fragment. But, I think so,” she said, smiling proudly.
Jessica leaned over and whispered in my ear: “Dad, I think mom’s pregnant again.”
It took a moment for that to settle in.
I jerked my head toward Julie, looked deeply into her eyes when she turned to regard me. She smiled at me.
I turned back to Jessica, who nodded knowingly and smiled wickedly. There was just enough malice there to make me suspect she was telling the truth.
My head felt a little spinny and my throat was suddenly dry.
Little Jennifer laughed at me. Maybe I had made some kind of face she’d found amusing.
Walt stepped to the microphone at the Governor’s bidding and seated his hat back on his head. He smiled, ear to ear.
And I suppose what he said then is recorded somewhere for posterity’s sake, because for the life of me I can’t recall a single word.
*****
After the ceremony I had a brief chat with Walt, Howard Block, the Governor and Walt’s Captain. Walt was being promoted. And I had thought he’d be retiring.
“Fellas,” I said. “I’d like to lodge a bit of a protest.”
“About?” the Governor asked.
“Seems like I’m being railroaded.”
Howard and Walt laughed.
“Is this about your status as a Ranger?” Walt’s Captain asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You got something against the Texas Rangers?” he asked. He was trying to put on a stern face, but I could tell he was mildly amused.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Walt and Howard looked at me with raised eyebrows.
The Governor chuckled. “You’d better tell them, son,” he said.
“What I’ve got against the Rangers is her,” I said, and pointed toward Julie, who stood against a backdrop of lush foliage and garden wall. She patted Jennifer’s bottom and swayed side to side. Wish I had a picture.
“Keep talkin’, Bill,” Walt said.
“First of all, that woman is expecting me to help her raise that baby. And Jessica, my daughter, tells me she thinks Julie is pregnant again. I just found that out. And—”
Howard Block burst into a fit of laughter.
“And you’re scared...out of your ever-lovin’ mind.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Ranger Captain smiled and patted me on the shoulder.
The Governor very nearly doubled over with laughter. Julie looked my way quizzically.
“Well,” the Ranger Captain said, “I suppose we have enough witnesses here for this.” He stepped directly in front of me and said: “Bill Travis, I hereby formally discharge you from the Texas Rangers. Since you don’t have a badge or a gun, all I need you to do is nod your head.”
I nodded, vigorously.
And that was that. The closest scrape of my entire life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I stopped by Perry Reilly’s office not long after the events of that spring. Perry was wearing painter’s clothes and had a dripping brush in hand and a broad smear of antique white paint on his forehead of which he probably wasn’t aware.
“Want to grab a brush?” he asked me.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll pass.”
“What brings you around?” he asked.
“Oh. Just checking up on you. You had a rough go awhile back.”
“Yah. Next time I ask you to let me tag along with you, Bill, I want you to do me a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Turn me down. Can you do that? No matter how much I beg and plead and chew the rug.”
“Sure. I can do that.”
“Good,” he said.
“So...How goes it?”
“Fine. Business is fine.”
I waited. I could tell there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“Anything you’d like to say” I asked.
“Um. I’m being sued.”
“Your associate? Angela?”
“Yeah,” he sighed.
“What are you gonna do?” I asked.
“I’ve got lawyers working on it. Probably we’ll settle it. Don’t like going to the courthouse. I always end up looking bad.”
“Okay,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Well. Maybe so.”
I waited. Perry dropped his paint brush into a bucket.
“Yeah,” he said. “That girl. Candace. Who was she?”
Then I recalled we hadn’t had this conversation yet. Perry was the one guy who knew next to nothing, other than that she had beguiled him and used him and discarded him.
“She was bad news, Perry. And that’s about it.”
I thought he would press the issue, but apparently that was enough.
“Sometimes, Bill,” he said, “I wish I could be like you.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to tell me,” I said. “Why would you say something like that?”
“Because...you’re lucky, Bill.”
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“It’s not just that you’ve got Julie and Jessica and the new baby.”
“Jennifer. Yeah. I’ve got a home and a wife full of children.”
“Yeah. It’s not just that. It’s how you get to live. Always falling in the manure and come up smelling like a rose. And bullets won’t stop you.”
“Aw. Come on. That’s a load of bull, Perry.”
&nbs
p; “Is it? I’m not so sure.”
I heard a rustle from an adjoining room. Then my secretary came through a door with a paint brush in her hand. She was wearing a very revealing halter-top and a mini-skirt. Also, she had flecks of paint on her bare skin. She saw me and blushed crimson.
“Hi, Penny,” I said.
Penny had a couple of days off, long overdue. She was the last person I expected to see in Perry Reilly’s office, particularly dressed like that and with a paintbrush in hand.
“I...I.”
“You don’t have to explain yourself,” I told her.
Penny visibly relaxed, but I was certain the embarrassment would be good for a few weeks worth. Not that I’m the kind of fellow to rub such things in. Well...mostly.
I looked at Perry. He had a kind of wistful look on his face. Was it satisfaction?
“After we finish painting, we’re going swimming,” Perry said.
EPILOGUE
Promises kept, goals reached, dreams fulfilled.
The water was cool and fine. Distant wavelets reflected intense sunlight. We cast sharp shadows on the water.
“Is this right?” she asked.
“Let me see. Turn around.”
She turned and the boat rocked. She waited. Everything looked to be in order. We’d find out for sure soon enough.
“Looks fine,” I said. “You ready?”
“Hell yes,” she said.
I leaned over hard to port and she almost belly-flopped starboard, chin tucked in as I’d taught her, to absorb the impact. The splash was spectacular.
Her wet, visored head surfaced, jet black hair streaming lake water. Her thumb came up, the universal “okay” symbol.
I nodded and motioned her back. I stood, unsteadily, and leapt.
I came up and we peered at each other, father and daughter. Best friends.
I motioned down. Jessica nodded, her eyes mischievous and daring. A new adventure in the offing.
Our lights clicked on and we swam in a new world.
Her hand reached out to me and I took it and we swam together, down into the darkness.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A good friend of mine, Mr. Tom Burks, retired after many years of service as curator of the Texas Rangers Museum in Waco. The curator in this tale bears no resemblance to Tom other than in that of occupation. Thanks, Tom, for all your help, the old stories, and the advice. The errors here are mine, not yours.
One of the chief problems any author has is with his characters: what they say and what they do. A very good friend of mine and early reader, Megan Creel—a fantastic author in her own right—once informed me as to the degree Bill Travis miffed her by what he said and did. And while she didn’t put it in those exact words (Megan is far more plain-spoken than that) I thought I clearly understood what she was saying until I realized she was looking to me for some explanation—as if I had something to do with what Bill Travis said and did! I told her in essence: “Yes, Megan, I feel exactly the same way.” All by way of saying that Bill Travis, his family, his friends, and even his antagonists, are prone to say and do just about anything, and what they say and do is—and I suppose, always will be—beyond the scope of my control. And that is as it should be.
When I began this series of books in about the Fall of 2004, I had every intention of writing no more and no less than what these characters told me to write. I didn’t want any pattern, any script, any formula. What I wanted was something approximating the quality and texture of fine-grained sandpaper—I wanted “reality,” with all its grit, its stains and splotches, its prevailing winds and currents, and its propensity to exceed the expected. A casual look at any great work will clearly show a disdain for formula. In a word I wanted “organic.” But even that concept falls far short of what I wanted. What I really wanted was Bill as we find him here. I wanted him as alive as I was. I wanted him to feel the same air as I felt and as my eventual readers would feel. I wanted him to taste the same weak tea, to feel the same Monday evening tiredness and the self-same Friday night expectancy we all feel. And I wanted something else—that other element that keeps us all hanging on, even in the darkest hour: I wanted him to win in the end. I wasn’t sure if he was going to (and I’m still not) but I sure as hell was pulling for him when I typed out those first words: “All the hell started on a Monday...” That was the first line of the first page of the first draft of book one, which was, in the beginning entitled Hell Week as opposed to The Last Call. Hell Week was written at white-hot speed, and except for the initial Prologue, the bulk of it was written in the first-person present tense: (“I walk over to the door and grasp the knob” as opposed to “I walked up and laid my hand on the knob”). Years later I picked up a book at a local bookstore and found this same format and found that it had worked well for that established author. At the time Hell Week was written a good buddy of mine, Milton T. Burton (author of The Rogues Game and The Sweet & The Dead), one of the greatest crime novelists of this new century, thought the present-tense version a bit pretentious for a first-time novel, and so I re-drafted it into the more palatable and acceptable (I hoped) past-tense.
Another good friend, Gary Carlin, told me recently he still pined for the old days when what was going on with Bill was going on right now! (Sorry, Gary. And thanks for throwing away your copy of that first draft. I wouldn’t want any of them surfacing.) And so I redrafted that first book and found, amazingly so to me, the final product—which, let me tell you, ultimately underwent six, count ‘em, SIX more drafts—still retained that same gritty feel. Yep. Fine-grained sand-paper. You can do a lot with a little of that stuff.
And so, here we are, Book Four, with Books Five and Eight written and book Six and Seven partially written. And Bill has changed and I have changed and our country has changed and the world has changed, and, as Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger would tell you: “the times, they are a-changin’”.
I hope so. I hope they continue to change, and I hope the rate of change changes as well.
This author has seen his own changes since that first Monday. The gain of a new wife and family. The loss of a father and an older sister. The revitalization of ability and spirit. And new purpose and the fulfillment of the twinkle in this author’s once very young old eyes. So, change.
What happens next? With me, I don’t know. With Bill and company? Still don’t know. Sorry. Wish I could say. I could pull out the drafts for the next few books and show them to you, but I think that wouldn’t answer any questions, only pose more. So, no clue. I’m sure I could make up something, but then that’d be lying, wouldn’t it? I can tell you this: the last three in this series are going to be prequels. And there will be twenty-one, all told. And that’s about it.
You see, I’m just the guy that reports for Bill. And while I’ve got this job—as long as he (and you) continue to pay me—I’ll do just that. I won’t go on strike, I promise. And I won’t talk back to Bill, or Julie, or Jessica, or any of the others you find here. Not only is that not how this relationship works, it’s simply not in the contract. Now maybe you understand what I meant by my actual reply to my friend Megan: Yes, Megan, Bill pisses me off too.
So, thanks for riding along with me this far. There’s a long road ahead. But the countryside promises to be interesting, the people promise to be who they are, and the changes, well... they promise to do just that.
Best,
George Wier
Austin, Texas
Read the opening chapter of George Wier’s next thrilling
Bill Travis Mystery:
DEATH ON THE PEDERNALES
Coming soon!
CHAPTER ONE
The body was brought out of the hangar on a stretcher by a deputy sheriff and uniformed paramedic doing double-duty as a deputy coroner. That’s sometimes the way it’s done in the hinterlands, where demand crosses swords with budget and the tax base is more of a tax ditch. A gray blanket covered the large mass. One stray finger was there beneath the edge, the hand threa
tening to fall from the jostling it was taking as the stretcher trundled past us.
“You’re the closest thing to family here,” Deputy Ladd Ross told Denise Lipscomb, who stood beside me in a state of shock. “You can ride with me. We’ll follow Burt’s ambulance.” The deputy and the paramedic exchanged nods of agreement.
“Nice to meet you, Burt,” I told the paramedic, who gave me no more than a curt nod.
“What about Bill here?” Denise asked.
“I’ll ride with Burt,” I volunteered.
“Fine,” Burt and the deputy said simultaneously, and I would have laughed aloud but for the intensity of the moment.
“How did he die?” Denise asked the deputy as Burt began to make a great ruckus with loading the stretcher, so much so that I decided to help him.
“Crowbar to the face,” the deputy said. “Repeatedly.”
*****
For me it always begins when I least expect it. One time it started out while I was driving to work one gorgeous morning and on another occasion it was in the middle of a meeting with a client. Regardless of when, they all have one common element: I’ll get the call from an old friend who has fallen hip deep in the proverbial, doesn’t know which way to turn and desperately needs a certain old friend with certain known special skills—or, one of my clients has rubbed the wrong person the wrong way and needs me to smooth everything out come hell or high water. Whatever the situation, I wind up interposing myself between destruction and the seemingly innocent and after that it’s all like one long train-wreck that lasts for hours, or days, or even longer.
But that’s me.
I’m Bill Travis. The name alone should tell you something.
And it always begins with a feeling in the gut, with a nervous prickle among the small hairs on the nape of the neck, with a parched throat and a black gulf somewhere in the area near to the feet as if the ground underfoot is astride a crevasse of amazing dimension. And it means little sleep and guesses in the dark to come.