Not Forgotten

by George Lee Miller

  Not

  Forgotten

  George Lee Miller

  Frio Press LLC

  © 2019 George Lee Miller. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-7341564-2-3

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7341564-0-9

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-7341564-1-6

  Cover design by Lance Buckley

  Interior design by Lisa Gilliam

  Published by Frio Press LLC 2019

  For my dad and my brother and all those who stood the watch.

  Contents

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Prologue

  He wore a fringed buckskin jacket that was a size too large and a coonskin cap that fell loosely over his right eye, and insisted his parents call him Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. In one pint-sized hand, he carried a replica flintlock pistol with an orange plastic muzzle-cap. In his other, he held a genuine, rubber Jim Bowie knife. It was fifteen minutes to eight on the fifth of July, and the temperature was already eighty-five degrees and climbing rapidly. By noon it would be ninety with matching humidity. He had been up since the crack of dawn, keeping watch out the hotel windows and waiting impatiently for his mother and father to wake up. Now, finally on patrol along the San Antonio River Walk, he breathed the stagnant air that smelled like stale beer and damp tree bark and covered the man-made canal between the buildings like Grandma’s quilt on a warm day.

  He imagined himself at the battle of 1836 just the way it was depicted in the diorama at the Alamo gift shop where his father had purchased his replica gear. The tiny men thrust bayonets and fired at point-blank range, reminding him of an ant bed he’d once uncovered with his plastic shovel. When school started next fall, he knew he would be the envy of all his classmates in his hometown of Stuttgart.

  Davy was on the alert for any enemies of Texas when he saw a man with a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard sitting with his back against one of the ancient cypress trees. He pointed his Jim Bowie knife and cocked his flintlock pistol, posing like the figurines in the diorama.

  The man exhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke and gave him a toothless smile. “Easy, Davy,” the man drawled. “I’s friendly. You huntin’ Santa Annie?” The man wore an Army cap and camo jacket despite the heat and carried a cardboard sign with a hand-scrawled message that read Iraq Veteran, please help.

  Davy stopped in his tracks. At just under three feet tall, he came face-to-face with the seated man and stared with unblinking curiosity. He struggled to understand his accent. The missing teeth gave his speech a slight lisp. Like all of the kids his age growing up in Germany, he was fluent in English, but this was his first trip to Texas and some of the locals were difficult to understand.

  “I’s pretty sure I seen him under that bridge,” the man lisped, and cocked his whiskers toward the nearby stone footbridge.

  “Danke,” Davy said. He slipped into his native tongue when he got excited. He gazed at the bridge beyond the patio of a Mexican restaurant. The meaning behind the accent slowly sank in. The man had called him Davy. He stood rail-straight and brushed the tail of his coonskin cap over his shoulder.

  Someone had recognized him. He was Davy Crockett. He watched his mother give the man an American dollar.

  The man nodded. “God bless you,” he said.

  Davy peered in the direction the man had indicated. The majestic cypress trees and tall buildings created deep shadows in the early morning, making it hard for him to see under the bridge. He took an intrepid step forward. His mother held firm.

  “This place is open.” She motioned with her head toward the restaurant. “We’re stopping for breakfast.”

  “Nein, Mutter, es ist Santa Anna,” Davy said, trying to pull free.

  “Santa Anna is just a story,” his mother reassured him. “Tell him, Gunther,” she addressed her husband. “Why did you buy him that gun?” She appealed to her husband, irritated at being up so early in the sizzling July heat.

  “It’s part of history—” Davy’s father began to explain.

  His wife cut him off for the hundredth time. “You’re glorifying it for him. He thinks the gun’s real,” she said, searching for a table near one of the large outdoor fans.

  Davy followed his mother to a metal chair beneath a faded green canvas umbrella and near a fan that was taller than he was. The waitress put down her broom and came with a smile, wearing a white Mexican peasant dress with a red-lace apron that flapped in the breeze created by the big fan. She gave the three of them each a tall glass of ice water and a basket of tortilla chips and waited patiently while his father read the laminated menu out loud over staccato mariachi music coming from the restaurant speakers.

  Davy announced that he wanted cornflakes, then turned his attention back to the shadows under the bridge. When he adjusted his chair, he could see between the red, white, and blue banners on the handrailing. He placed his flintlock near his fork. He could feel danger in the air. To him it was as real as the crispy tortilla chips and spicy red salsa resting on the table. His skin tingled with excitement. If Santa Anna was under the bridge, as the man said, he would be ready. Two pigeons suddenly landed beneath his mother’s chair.

  “Scheiße!” she exclaimed, startled.

  Davy ignored her. His father shooed the birds away. Then Davy saw something moving slowly out of the shadows, floating in the murky water, and drifting into a pool of sunlight. The bend in the narrow water channel forced the large object directly toward him.

  He grabbed his flintlock and tore through the Fourth of July banner.

  “Schau, Mutter! Look!” he shouted. “Santa Anna!” He raced to the water’s edge.

  “Not now.” She sighed, pressing the cold glass to her hot forehead.

  “Bam, bam!” Davy shouted, aiming at the object in the water, the toy pistol making rapid metal clicking sounds. He saw what looked like a han
d and forearm extended above the surface of the water as if buoyed by an unseen rope.

  The object bumped against the limestone steps. Now Davy saw what it was. A woman. Facedown. Dark shoulder-length hair tangled about her head. Small American flags decorated her blue tank top. A black skirt floated above her waist exposing yellow-lace panties, and her submerged legs appeared waxy green.

  Davy dropped his replica flintlock.

  “Mutter!” he cried, and his mother was beside him, wrapping him in her arms and forcing his terrified face into her breast.

  “Es tut mir Leid, Mutter,” Davy trembled. I’m sorry, he thought, believing he had killed the woman with his replica flintlock.

  “Es ist nicht deine Schuld,” his mother said, transfixed by the woman in the water.

  “It’s not your fault, Philip,” his father repeated, using his real name. “It’s only a toy gun.”

  A crowd quickly gathered. A young woman wearing an orange sports bra and lime-green jogging shorts took charge. “You call 911,” she commanded the waitress. She grabbed the woman’s foot and pulled her closer to shore.

  “Gunther, hilf irh!” Davy’s mother shouted.

  Before her husband could reach the water’s edge, the toothless veteran pulled the woman’s head up by her tangled hair. The restaurant speakers were playing “Guantanamera.” The woman’s face was frozen into a puffy smile. The crowd gasped and took a step back when they saw the skin around her eyes was swollen and a shade darker than her olive skin, as if she wore a masquerade mask.

  “She’s dead,” the veteran pronounced, as if he were the authority. His words transformed the mood of the crowd from horror to morbid curiosity. The woman with the orange sports bra began to video the scene with her cell phone.

  “We’re going,” Davy’s mother announced. She grabbed her son’s toy pistol and tossed it in the garbage bin. She shot a pointed look at her husband as if the toy flintlock he bought for their son were to blame for ruining their vacation.

  “Wer war sie, Mutter?” Davy asked, staring over his mother’s shoulder at the body in the water. He was still shaking but beginning to breathe normally.

  His mother hugged him tightly and took the stone steps up to the street level. “We don’t know who she was.”

  “Why did she die?” he asked. He calmed down when the dead woman was out of sight.

  She studied the street signs trying to formulate an answer to satisfy her son. She couldn’t think of anything. “How about some ice cream?”

  Chapter One

  Ipressed the down button on the limo’s automatic window to let my client’s dense cloud of leather-and-spice cologne escape. The fresh San Antonio air, though sticky-humid and tinged with exhaust fumes, cleared my head. It was five minutes to nine on a Friday night and the temperature hovered near eighty-five degrees, typical first of September weather in South Texas. I was getting a fat paycheck to provide security for Javier Sosa, a businessman from Mexico City in town to attend a last-ditch fundraising effort for Marcus Antonio Lopez’s gubernatorial campaign, and grateful to be working. I hadn’t had a paying assignment since the end of July, putting a serious strain on my pursuit of the American Dream. My credit cards were maxed out, and my mortgage payment was past due. Everything I owned was invested in my new Fischer Private Investigations and Security business. Since payment came after the work was done, everything I had was riding on me keeping Sosa safe and sound.

  The job was to get Sosa from the airport to the convention center, and after the reception, back to his hotel. He said his personal security team would be in place by then and would take it from there for the rest of his trip. So far, the only problem had been the traffic jam on Highway 281 caused by two local colleges battling it out in the Alamodome for their football season opener. I wished I could say I had a dozen jobs like this lined up, but my new business calendar was empty for the next several weeks.

  I did have one other prospect, but I didn’t think it would amount to much. A woman, who wouldn’t give her name, had called my cell phone before seven that morning. She said she was on her way to work but asked if she could come to my office the next morning to meet me in person. My usual answer was no when a prospective client wouldn’t share their basic information over the phone, but I couldn’t afford to turn her down. I was running out of money, and my girlfriend was urging me to go back to law school. If business didn’t pick up soon, I might have to consider her suggestion or a new line of work.

  The woman caller sounded like she was in her late forties or early fifties with a strong Spanish accent, which could be attributed to sixty percent of the local population. That she had a job and it got her out of the house before seven a.m. was a good sign. It meant she could pay for my services. I was quickly learning that one downside of working as a private investigator was that people would come to you in dire straits, asking for miracles involving weeks or months of hard work while forgetting to put up any money. Which didn’t pay the mortgage.

  “Thank you, Mr. Fischer, for accepting employment with minimum notification,” Sosa said. He compensated for his thick Spanish accent by overenunciating his words. “Forgive me for noticing your, uh… your scars.”

  “No problem,” I said. “And call me Nick.” When I had picked him up at the airport, he stared for an extra moment at the star-shaped scars that formed a constellation across my brow, curtesy of an IED that shattered the windshield of my Humvee on my final deployment. They were an advantage in a fight. My opponent knew I wasn’t worried about ruining my good looks, but I tried to smile at strangers; otherwise, they would get nervous and start looking for an exit.

  As we inched south on the freeway, I caught Sosa glancing at the 750-foot Tower of the Americas built for the 1968 World’s Fair. It dominated the flat but colorful Alamo City skyline and towered directly above our destination like an air traffic control tower on stilts. The closer we got, the more nervous and chattier Mr. Sosa became.

  “Do you know anything about the oil business?” Sosa asked. He didn’t fit the Texas-oilman stereotype. He had narrow shoulders made square by a padded tux coat and wore zip-up, high-heeled, patent-leather boots to compensate for his five-foot-nothing stature. “It’s a volatile industry,” he said, and waited for me to ask why. I didn’t bite. I hated idle chitchat mainly because I wasn’t good at it.

  “My job’s to protect you,” I told him. “I don’t care about your business or your politics.”

  “I like your philosophy. It fits your reputation.” He tapped a Marlboro cigarette against the armrest and thoughtfully lit it up with a silver-plated lighter. “What’s your opinion of Mr. Lopez?”

  I rolled the window down a little more and let the smoke escape. Marcus Lopez’s face was plastered on billboards all over town. We’d passed four on the way in from the airport. He was an ambitious local attorney whose campaign slogan was “Taking care of Texans.” The polls put him in the lead, but rumor had it he was running out of money and desperately searching for a new source of revenue. I had met Lopez before because my girlfriend, Sylvia Flores, was trying to make partner in his law firm. I couldn’t imagine him taking care of anything other than his ego. Sylvia thought he was the greatest thing since wireless earbuds, so I kept my opinion to myself.

  “He’s a lawyer and a politician,” I said. “That’s two strikes against him.”

  Sosa chuckled. “You and I are in agreement, my friend, but both are necessary to do business.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  He checked the proximity of the Tower again to gauge our time of arrival. I didn’t mind the accent or even the zipper boots, but something about Javier Sosa reminded me of the kind of used-car salesman who would sell his grandmother a car with no engine. My research showed his main business was with PEMEX—the state-owned Mexican petroleum company. Whatever deal he had with Marcus Lopez was probably not strictly legal.

  “Do you think he is a man of his word?” Sosa leaned forward
, anticipating an answer as if my notion of Marcus Lopez would make or break his trip. The question was more complicated than it should be. I didn’t care for politics or lawyers, although I had spent two years in law school. It was Sylvia that kept me from completely thrashing Marcus’s character. Since she chose me and we had been together three years, I couldn’t really question her judgment of character.

  “Like I said, he’s a lawyer and a politician, but since society needs both, Marcus Lopez is probably as good as any.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fischer.” Sosa leaned back in his seat and lit another Marlboro. He let the smoke trickle through his nose, then offered me the red-and-white package.

  “No, thanks.” I’d never picked up the habit. I smoked a cigar on special occasions, but lately those were few and far between, and Sylvia couldn’t stand the smell. I preferred smokeless tobacco when I was younger but gave it up when I went to work for myself. The only professionals I knew that still dipped snuff at work were baseball players and rodeo cowboys.

  Sosa tossed the package on the seat. “I’ll leave those here,” he said, referring to the cigarettes. “Americans don’t respect the Marlboro Man anymore.”

  I thought about telling him the tobacco company had highjacked the iconic cowboy image and that several of the models for the Marlboro Man had died of lung cancer, but I knew Sosa wouldn’t understand the irony or care.

  “Not much respect for anything,” I said. He nodded like we’d shared an inside joke.

  When the driver finally made it to the East Commerce Street exit near the convention center, I made a show of checking my weapon. Sosa watched me work the butter-smooth action on my Para-Ordnance P14-45 pistol. It was an awesome weapon with the two qualities necessary to win a gunfight—a large caliber and a high-capacity magazine. He seemed curious but not upset, which was a good sign. If I needed to draw a weapon, I liked to know that my client wasn’t going to turn into a three-year-old with a bee sting.

  I rated every job on a risk level of one to ten. A risk-level-one job was taking Sylvia on a date and fending off the riffraff making catcalls. A ten was the equivalent of storming a safe house in Fallujah, something I’d done in my previous life and counted myself lucky to have survived. This job rated a five. I took all my normal precautions, plus I carried a .38 Smith & Wesson hammerless revolver on my ankle—my weapon of last resort. I had checked it when I left the house and didn’t take it out in the limo. I wanted Sosa to be impressed, but not overconfident. I carried the .38 for personal protection. I was pretty sure he hadn’t told me all the reasons he wanted my services.