Longnecks & Twisted Hearts (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 3)

by George Wier

  “That’s the same as eavesdropping,” Mike said. “But we’ll talk about that later.”

  “It is the same and we won’t be talking about it later. Bill, he married me because I was the first person he ever met who didn’t take his blustery exterior. He’s really just an overgrown kitten.”

  Somehow I doubted that, but I wasn’t going to say it.

  “You used your father to run Bill out of town and you won’t tell him what really happened with Bradley Fisher. You two are sitting here like a couple of game cocks about to spur it out. That’s bullshit! Mike, Bill is good people. You tell him what you know.”

  “And if I don’t.”

  She turned toward him. Her eyes flashed. My God but I had never seen this side of her. I’d had this big illusion in my head about her ever since I was a kid. That illusion was gone now, shattered. Thank God.

  “I think you don’t want to test me on it,” she said.

  He sighed, big.

  “No, I reckon I don’t,” he said. “Bill. I take it from your ring that you’re married as well. Does your wife ever talk to you like that?”

  “I never give her a reason to. But I’m sure she could if she felt she had to.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He turned away from Heidi. “Okay. I’ll tell you what you want to know. Who knows? Maybe when I’m done you’ll get in your car and head back to Austin anyway. I know I would if I were you.”

  He tossed down the last dregs of his bottle and wrapped his big, meaty right hand around the next bottle in line.

  While Heidi went to retrieve our supper, I listened to his story.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “You have to know how a company is put together, from the bottom all the way to the top, and you have to know a little bit about how people are put together as well, because that’s what makes up a company, large or small. Now at the bottom and all the way in between you’ve got the little guy, slogging it out day in and day out, trying to do his job and survive in a world that would just as soon be rid of him as see him survive. In the scheme of things, little fish are supposed to remain little fish. But then there’s the big fish. This guy swims in his own domain, and the little fish either get out of his way or get eaten up. That’s where Terry Throckmorton comes in. You’ve got a guy there who’s played the game ever since he was in college. When his frat senior said ‘Jump’, Terry didn’t ask ‘How high?’ he just jumped as high as he could. And in his senior year he didn’t bother to tell his juniors to jump, he was asking the Dean if he wanted somebody to jump for him. And so on after graduation and into the corporate world. In other words, we’re talking about a guy who has paid his dues, and never stopped paying them just so long as the gravy train continued to stop and unload, stop and unload. The thing about that gravy train is it just keeps on unloading. All you have to do is let it know where to dump its load.

  “And that’s Terry Throckmorton, in a nutshell.

  “Then you’ve got a guy like Bradley Fisher. Brad was small fish who always looked upon himself as a big fish that never quite made it into the big pond. Brad had ideas. Guys like Brad always have ideas. He had ideas about how to increase production, about how to make service easier and simpler. About how to cut back on the amount of labor and at the same time get things done. In other words, his ideas didn’t take into account the basic universal laws that exist in the big pond. They were good ideas; don’t get me wrong on that count. I’ve looked them over and I can tell you that not one of them was anything less than genius. But he was always bumping his head against management. Against the Big Pond. The place where he would never in a million years be allowed to swim. I tried to talk to him. I told him what I thought about his ideas. We knocked back many a Shiner Bock on that account. Him showing me a little drawing — done spur of the moment and showing me how the thing would be done in the real world — and me there just nodding and struck by the sheer brilliance and magnitude of it. But Brad was no Westinghouse. He didn’t have the magnetic personality; he didn’t have the credentials. I’ve read how George Westinghouse fronted a good deal of dough to a genius named Tesla over a few lines of telegraph type. You know, every one of those ideas is there for the world to read. They’re all there in the U.S. Patent Office, just waiting for some future generation to look and see what could be done, if a fellow was smart enough to get what he was talking about. I swear to God, Tesla was a man hundreds of years before his time. Got some good books on him, you know. But Brad, Brad was maybe ten or twenty years before his time. Also, he didn’t have the degree. Also, he wasn’t a bona fide member of the Big Fish Club. And so he swam in small waters and raised hell. One day he raised too much. And now he’s dead. All you have to do is talk to any one of his crew to verify what I’m telling you.”

  “Who was his crew?” I asked.

  “Mainly Sandy Jones. Sandy is the token... uh, black guy. He lives first house just past the power plant. He’s always the first one to work in the morning and the last one to leave each evening. Sandy, though — he’s not the kind of fellow you could get a peep out of. I don’t think he’ll be much help. He’s a parolee. Got a wife and four kids at home and works hard and never complains and keeps his family up.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Why would CTL&P and Terry Throckmorton want to get rid of Brad Fisher?” And as I asked it, Throckmorton’s name rang and reverberated in my head again. It was familiar, all right. I just couldn’t place him.

  Mike Fields looked down at the empty bottle of Shiner Bock in his hands. I could tell that he wanted more. I could also tell that he would rather not say what he was about to. But he said it, anyway. I found myself re-assessing the guy. Maybe Heidi knew him better. Maybe he was an overgrown kitten after all. And just maybe it took two Shiner Bocks tossed down quick and his wife riding herd on him to get him to admit anything.

  “Because,” he said, “Brad knew about the hole.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  When Mike Fields said: “Brad knew about the hole,” my cell phone rang.

  It was Julie.

  “Yeah, Babe?”

  “Bill. I think...”

  “What? What do you think? Is it —”

  “Time? Yeah. Think so. Uh... contractions.”

  “I’m coming,” I told her. “Call Penny and get her to take you to the hospital.” Penny was my secretary. She had become, over the last few years, about as close as anyone could get without being family.

  “I can drive, silly. I’m pregnant, not disabled. Besides,” she said. “Penny is on a date.”

  “Yeah, but you’re about to be a mom,” I said. “And Penny can cancel her date.”

  “I’ll drive,” she told me, and the way she said it didn’t allow room for argument.

  “Okay. I’ll be there inside two hours.”

  “Don’t rush. I’ll be fine.”

  We traded “I love you”s and hung up.

  I told Mike and Heidi that my wife was about to have a baby. I tried to beat a hasty retreat.

  Before heading out the door I turned back to the two of them.

  “Mike, I’m going to be lead-footing it back to Austin. Can you at least make sure I won’t get stopped on the way out of town?”

  “I can do better than that,” he said. “Hold on a minute.”

  Within five minutes it was all set. Not only was I not going to get stopped on the way out of town, but a state trooper was en-route to Mike’s house to escort me all the way back to Austin.

  The last thing Mike said to me — his cordless phone pressed hard into his ear as I started up my Mercedes — was: “Why didn’t you tell me that your wife’s uncle was the Lieutenant Governor?”

  “Oh. You mean Nat Bierstone? He’s just my partner. Besides, that’s got nothing to do with anything.”

  “Bill. You don’t need my help at all,” Mike said.

  “Au contraire. I need every bit of help I can get,” I said, and I was off.

  *****

  The drive took an hour and ten minute
s, but that was because we did ninety most of the way.

  *****

  “False alarm? What do you mean false alarm?”

  The state trooper was chuckling. Shortly, I expected he’d be guffawing.

  The nurse I was talking to kept a deadpan expression on her face.

  “She’s having contractions,” I said. “How can it be a false alarm?”

  “Mr. Travis. Voice down, please. Like I said, not false alarm. False labor.”

  “Same thing,” I said.

  “Okay. Still, we want to keep her here overnight for observation.”

  “Observation, huh?” I was beginning to settle down a little. I’d been hopped up pretty much into overdrive ever since our brief phone conversation back in the Fields’ tea garden.

  “Yes. Observation. She rests. We monitor. That’s about it.”

  “Is she in any danger? Will you have to, uh...”

  “Induce labor? I don’t think that’s needed just yet. The doctor won’t do that for at least another week.”

  I felt a gentle squeeze on my right elbow.

  I looked. It was Julie’s Uncle Nat.

  “William. Julie will be fine. Let’s go in and visit her.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  When I turned to look back, the state trooper was waving goodbye, headed toward the elevator.

  Nat and I turned the corner, and before my hand even touched the door to Julie’s room, there was explosive laughter from down the hall.

  The things some people think are funny. I tell you.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was late by the time I left St. David’s Hospital. I’d spent an hour at Julie’s side in her private room until I was thoroughly certain that she was getting enough of me being there and wanted me to leave. I told her I’d see her soon, kissed her and left.

  Before I was out to my car I was on my cell phone. I called Mary Jo. I told her about Julie’s false alarm. She informed me that she had company. Brad’s little brother, Fred, had arrived and was fit to be tied. He was raising hell and had already called and threatened the Sheriff’s Office, the County Coroner, and anybody else who would listen to him for more than a minute. He wanted his older brother’s body and he wanted it right then.

  All that was okay by me. Maybe it’d be him getting arrested instead of me. When Brad and I were kids we both thought that Freddie was a little demon, about like the kid on The Omen. Freddie could have been the Antichrist if he’d been a little quieter and had a dozen or so more points on his I.Q. score. I’d saved Brad’s life once from the little brat. Freddie, who was about eight at the time, had picked up a pitchfork and was running full tilt at Brad’s back with it, the needle-pointed silvery tines glinting in the sun. I took two steps, reached out and grasped the pitchfork. I wrenched it from Freddie’s hands hard enough to give him splinters.

  No. I didn’t mind if Freddie raised hell.

  As I was listening to Mary Jo and getting into my car in the hospital parking garage, I remembered something that Mike Fields had said.

  Something about Brad explaining his drawings to Mike over a few beers. I’d have to see those drawings. Also I wanted to talk to — what was his name? Jones? Yeah. Jones. Token black guy, as Mike had put it. Wife and four kids at home.

  I told Mary Jo I was on my way back to town but that I’d get a hotel room. She tried to get me to commit to staying at her home, but there was no way that was going to happen. I wouldn’t be sleeping under the same roof with Freddie during this lifetime, and knowing Freddie, he’d be sleeping on the living room couch, the only place to sleep in the whole house other than Mary Jo’s bedroom.

  By the time I was in my car and pulling back onto the highway headed back to Bryan and College Station, I was beginning to get a glimmer of just who the hell Terry Throckmorton was as the advancing little world encompassed by my headlights moved across the Texas miles.

  *****

  What in hell was “The Hole?” It was the big and dark question that filled my thoughts as I returned to the outskirts of Bryan, Texas. The question had been gnawing away at the far back corners of my mind during the entire return trip.

  I’d have to find out, and pretty quick.

  I checked in at an older hotel I remembered, built during the 60s and built to last. I had never been a Marriott or a Hilton type of guy. And while the twin cities had both famous hotels, I was looking for some-thing a little more homey and familiar. So I got an interior room up on the second floor with my window overlooking what used to be a Kettle Restaurant but that was now some Tex-Mex joint.

  Before getting to sleep I called Julie. Yeah, I’d woken her up. She was fine. No. No contractions. No more false labor, she corrected me, as opposed to false alarms.

  We exchanged an “I love you” again, and said goodnight.

  It took until nearly 1:00 a.m. for me to get to sleep. And, of course, I had a nightmare. But then, don’t I always?

  The coming darkness took me down, down into an abyss the like of which I had never before encountered. The abyss was where I could talk with Brad and finally get some answers.

  I was surprised to find it was no more than a hole. A very deep hole.

  “I don’t know, Bill,” Brad said. “You’re going off half-cocked again.”

  Brad had a shovel in his hand, and he was shoveling something black and raw and awfully smelly into a furnace.

  “Why?” I asked. “All I want to know is what happened? And who?”

  “Yeah. That’s just like you, Bill. You never could leave well enough alone.”

  “It’s smelly down here,” I said.

  “It’s all this dragon poop,” he said. “Makes good fuel, though.”

  “I’m sure. We used to shovel stuff just like this.”

  “That’s right. I remember now.”

  He stopped shoveling and stood with his arms across the handle for support.

  “Bill,” he said. “I’m dead.”

  “I know, Brad. I’m sorry. You should have talked to me.”

  “It wouldn’t have helped. Somebody had to fall.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Why. Always why. Some things just are,” he said. “Leave me alone for awhile, will you? I’m dead. We’re not supposed to be talking. Company policy.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Goodbye, Brad.”

  But Brad never said another word.

  *****

  I awoke at ten till nine with a slightly stuffy head, red eyes and the hunger of a she-wolf with a litter of pups.

  By ten twenty I found a good diner that served up a decent breakfast.

  At a little after eleven, I was back at Mary Jo’s.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mike and I were under the live oak tree a dozen yards from Mary Jo’s kitchen door. Each of us had a beer in hand. Mary Jo was in the kitchen cutting up chicken. I figured we’d smell it frying soon.

  There with us was Freddie Fisher. The beer was strictly off-limits for him. Mary Jo had alluded to his heart condition. There I was, about to turn forty-one, and here was this kid with something wrong with his heart. Go figure. Then again, I’ve known habitually angry people, and if chronic anger isn’t a risk factor for heart disease then there isn’t such a thing.

  Mike continued his story from the previous evening, and the two of us listened, me sipping a beer, and Freddie drinking tepid water. Life was sometimes kind.

  In 1990 my friend Bradley took a summer temporary job at the Navasota Lignite Plant #2 seventeen miles east of College Station, Texas, just across the Navasota River in Grimes County. His chief duty was to do what he was told, and during that hottest of summers he kept his hands wrapped around a long-nosed shovel and spent his days covering a fuel pipe that was being laid from the plant to the lignite strip-mine coal fields.

  After the pipe was laid the crew was paid off and dismissed, all but Brad, who complained little and was ever eager to get his hands dirty.

  Mike didn’t believe that Brad learn
ed about The Hole until sometime the next spring, and by that time he was full-time and busy completing endless rounds of safety-inspections. When anything got red-tagged — and there were a lot of red-tags flying around in those days before government de-regulation — Brad’s job was to fix it. By that time he was certified as an electrician by the State, having spent his off hours during the week nights in class over at the Texas A&M Riverside Campus.

  “When he found out about The Hole,” Mike said, “he did what every new boot did. He asked questions. I wasn’t his supervisor then, so I don’t know for sure what he was told, and we only had the one conversation about it.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Tell me about the hole, Mike.”

  “There’s no telling how many of them there are spread around the continental United States, in forests, deserts, near small communities. One of these days, say ten thousand years from now, whatever passes for human will stumble across the one we have at CTL&P. And bad things will start happening. That’s if the technology of the time is sufficiently low. If it’s high, no doubt the people of that later time will clean it all up. Maybe they’ll disintegrate everything, you know, like Star Wars or something. Or they’ll fire it all off into the sun. But until that day, The Hole and its contents will be there. You couldn’t get me near the damn thing.

  “Forget seeing it yourself. Last thing I heard it was sealed off. And good riddance.

  “Okay. Think of all the limestone caves there are underneath Texas. That’s where our groundwater comes from. The rain comes down, permeates through the soil, gets filtered through a thick layer of limestone formation, and runs off into underground rivers, what we call aquifers. The cleanest water on earth. But water does strange things. I’m no geologist, but from what little I’ve read about it, the water carves out weak places in the limestone, cuts channels through the chalk, and what’s left are endless miles of caverns down there in the dark. Some are solitary, cut off from others. Some run in chains, with narrow, snaking passages between them. A good spelunker could go down there and spend a lifetime looking, and never explore a thousandth of the entire labyrinth. Some are fairly close to the surface, and every once in a while somebody breaks through and discovers one. You’ve got the Natural Bridge Caverns over in New Braunfels, and the Wonder Cave in San Marcos. Out west there are the Caverns of Sonora. Just north of Austin, near Georgetown, highway workers discovered the Inner Space Caves while taking core samples during the construction of Interstate 35. So, it was only natural that a strip mining company would discover what we call The Hole during the early 1990s.