Capitol Offense (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 2)

by George Wier

  “This Walter Cannon...”

  “He says his friends call him Walt.”

  “Fine,” I said. “This Walt Cannon, he’s not in the state government? Doesn’t work for the Governor or anything?”

  “How the hell should I know? But I don’t think so. Doesn’t sound like the type. He’s a vet, like me. We were in some of the same places in Southeast Asia about the same time, including some places neither of us was supposed to be... well, officially. I’m surprised I didn’t know him sooner.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So hit back, huh? Question is, with what?”

  “I don’t know about that. Lemme give you Walter Cannon’s phone number.”

  Hank read it to me and I jotted it down.

  “You know,” Hank said. “When I asked Cannon who was after you, he told me the same thing you said.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He said ‘the bad people’ too.”

  We both laughed.

  “Fort Stockton, huh? Walter Cannon.”

  “Yeah. From talking to him, I get the impression that he’s the kind of fellow who could chew up steel rails and spit .45 caliber bullets.”

  “He does sound like somebody you’d know,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where exactly can I find him?”

  “He says he lives just on the other side of Fort Stockton, way out south down a county road about twenty miles or so. I don’t recall the exact address just now, but I can fetch it for you. He’s got a little spread there. Runs goats on it. Doesn’t have a phone. He was using a phone at some ranch nearby. He said you’d recognize his place because he’s got one of those monsters in his front yard like in that movie. You know, the one with the dinosaurs that eat up all those people?”

  “Jurassic Park? You gotta be kiddin’ me.”

  “He says he’s got one of those big mothers in his front yard. That you can see it from the highway.”

  “A T-Rex. He’s got a T-Rex in his front yard?”

  “That’s the one. Don’t worry. It don’t bite. He says it just rusts.”

  I chuckled. Talking to Hank always did lift my spirits.

  “Bill. When all this is over and done, I want you to promise me one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you and that bare-foot and pregnant woman of yours will come and see me. Maybe for a day or two.”

  “You got it,” I told him.

  “Don’t get your ass shot off, Bill.”

  Thus far my self-preservation was taking on the tone of some kind of conspiracy. But I had to agree with him.

  “Okay. I’ll make sure. See ya, Hank.”

  “Ciao.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  I made the one phone call I knew I’d have to make sooner or later but dreaded the most. But that was okay. I’d become more than a little upset.

  The first hurdle was getting past the Ellis Unit operator.

  “Hello,” I said. “This is Arnold Simms with the Governor’s Office. Can you connect me with Warden Spence, please?”

  “Hold please.”

  There was hold music on the line. No Hank Williams, Jr., sure, but then again it was a prison. The operator was back inside of a minute.

  “I’m putting you through to the Warden, sir.”

  “Thank you,” I told her.

  There was a mild little click on the line.

  “Hello, Ben,” I said. It was the name that I’d seen on the forms that have been faxed back to me by the prison — the warden giving permission for me to have a sit-down-talk with my client inside the prison. I’d never met the guy, but at least I knew his name: Benjamin Spence.

  “Hello, what can I do for the Governor today?”

  “Geez. I don’t know, Warden. I think you’ve done enough for the Governor already.”

  Silence. It lasted about five seconds.

  “Who is this?”

  “How’d Howell die, Warden?”

  “Is this Travis?”

  “You were about six months early on that execution. At least it looks that way by my calendar. I think he had an even chance of getting his sentence commuted to life. Tell me, Warden, do you always eavesdrop on confidential interviews, or do you just tape ‘em and go through ‘em at home after supper? You know, except when there’s a good game on the tube.

  “Travis,” he said, not a little venom in his voice. “That’s spelled D-E-A-D.”

  “Goodbye, you son of a bitch.”

  I hung up. Hard.

  I took a minute. My fingers were still wrapped around the phone handset and my knuckles were white as a ghost.

  Breathe. Just learn to breathe again, old son, I told myself.

  There I was, still in Huntsville. I should have been down on the coast: Houston, Galveston, Port Arthur and probably points between where it all really started way back in the dark, dead days of the 1980s, but instead I was drifting off course like a rudderless craft caught in a hurricane. And as I drifted, people were dying.

  I wished I had Dan Rather’s phone number.

  *****

  I made one last phone call and had to use directory assistance, which cost me an extra fifty cents. That was okay, though. There was something I had to know for sure.

  A kid answered the phone. I’d say he was about five or six.

  “‘Lo?”

  “Hello. Is your daddy home?”

  “Not ‘sposed to say.”

  “Can I talk to him?” I used my Mr. Nice-nice voice.

  “Okay.” He put the phone down a little hard. Kids. I guess I’d be getting used to them before long.

  Off in the background I heard a “Who is it?” Then an “I dunno”.

  “Hello?” A female voice came over the phone.

  “Tamara. This is Bill Travis. Is James around?”

  “Bill? Oh my God, it is you. I saw you on the TV a little bit ago.”

  “I know. It’s a big mix-up.”

  “How are you? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Tamara. I don’t have much time. I really need to talk to James. It’s about his Uncle Noah.”

  “Oh. Let me get him.”

  She put the phone down, not delicately. I could see where the kid got it from.

  I guess I’d been on and off the phone for about thirty minutes or so. I looked away from the brick building and the phones that I’d been staring at the whole time to see a girl in a loud orange smock standing not ten feet away from me, smoking a cigarette. The clerk from inside the store. Maybe she didn’t have a television going inside the place, hadn’t seen my picture and therefore didn’t recognize me. She breathed smoke out of her nose, the Huntsville version of a dragon.

  “Mr. Travis?” A masculine voice on the phone.

  It was James. Noah McPherson’s nephew.

  “Yeah. It’s me, James. Don’t have time to say a lot right now, so let’s keep it short, okay?” I lowered my voice a little. Maybe smock-girl wanted to eavesdrop, and maybe not. Regardless, I wasn’t about to let her.

  “Okay,” he said. “Tammy said something about you wanted to talk about Uncle Noah.”

  “Yeah. Have you heard from him? I couldn’t reach him at work. They said he doesn’t work there anymore. Strange things are going on and I’m a little worried about him.”

  There was a slight pause.

  “Mr. Travis, I’m not supposed to tell anybody anything. But I guess I can tell you that he’s all right. I don’t know where he went off to, but he was scared when he did. He told me that people would start asking about him, which they have, and that the phone might be, you know, bugged, which I think it probably is ‘cause there’s a slight echo over the line. Also that you might call, which you’re talking to me right now.”

  “Okay. I can understand all that,” I said.

  “But you can’t tell me why. Can you?”

  “Not over the phone, no. What I’d do, James, is invite a number of friends over and have ‘em stay. You and your family will
be safer that way.”

  “I got a full house right this minute. It’s sort of like a party.”

  “Good. Keep the party going. You’re sure your uncle Noah is fine.”

  “Yeah. I hope he catches some fish. That’s what he said, anyway. To tell anybody who asked that he’s gone fishing.”

  “Good enough. I gotta go, James. Your family sounds great.”

  “I know. They’re a hoot. Especially Junior.

  “Okay,” I said. “Gotta run.”

  “Take care, Mr. Travis. Thank you for... well, everything.”

  “Bye.”

  I hung up. The girl was done with her cigarette and flicked it out into the parking lot. She looked at me and smiled. Probably she was about twenty, her whole life ahead of her.

  I gave her my best smile back.

  *****

  It was getting on in the day.

  The clouds came in from the south and scampered off north and west. The last time I’d checked the weather there had been a hurricane brewing somewhere off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. Maybe somewhere it was threatening landfall, but I had a hurricane of my own to contend with.

  I was done with phone calls for the moment. I climbed into my car and backed out of the convenience store parking lot.

  I drove around town for a good hour, aimless, drifting, checking out old places I remembered from years gone by when I was a kid fresh out of high school. I was hell-on-wheels back in those days. If there was a party around, I crashed it. If there was mischief, I was somehow involved. Don’t know how I made it on through without racking up a criminal record, not that I’d ever done much to hurt other people. Just lucky, I guess.

  I drove up the hill past my old dormitory next to the girl’s dorm on the corner. I had loved Sam Houston State. They’d had rules then about having someone of the opposite sex inside the dorm after certain hours. That was my favorite one. Back in those days if I was told something was against the rules, I took it as a personal challenge.

  I turned past the girl’s dorm and looked up to the top of the hill to my left, up past the gates and the steep steps. There was Tripod’s grave, a Sam Houston three-legged mascot from the ancient days. I never knew what breed of mutt he’d been, though. I’d only heard stories.

  Up on top at the crown of the hill was the low wall of the Old Main Park. There had been a building there once, an impressive and beautiful thing that I carried a perfect picture of in my mind. The inspiring Gothic structure had burned to the ground in the middle of the night back in 1982. Maybe Sawyer had something to do with that too. Who knew? Since that time the University had built a small park on the site. Back in the day I used to sit up on that hill looking out over the town below, smoking Borkum Riff in my briarwood pipe and attempting to look Byronic. I lost the pipe somewhere along the way. Probably for the best. From up there I was able to look a few blocks north to see the Walls prison where they kept the death chamber. They still execute them there, but the prisoners live at Ellis Unit until the fateful day. If you want to call what they’re doing ‘living.’

  I passed on by the hill.

  I was delaying taking action. Debating which way to turn.

  Go east, winding my way down to Galveston where the fishing boats put to sea with the rising of the sun and the cries of the gulls? Or west, where the desert began and the scorpions and sidewinders crawled, and where the lights danced where there were no roads to speak of?

  I waited for my car to guide me, but for the time-being it seemed to desire nothing more than to be permitted to drift through the streets of Huntsville, Texas. Maybe my old Mercedes knew what was coming.

  I was going to have to ditch the car.

  I’d had the Mercedes for about ten years. Originally I’d bought it from a kid whose parents had given it to him for graduating college. The kid liked Camaros instead and I wanted the Mercedes. A money guy has to have a money car. Or at least that was my justification back then.

  My eyes roamed over the streets of Huntsville. I meandered through town in the general direction of the Interstate. Maybe there’d be a used car dealership out there that would deal in cash.

  No luck on the east side of town. All the dealerships there were for new cars.

  A half-hour later, on the outskirts to the west of town I found a run-down used car lot. My old friend Hank would have loved the place. The ancient sign said “Bubba’s Classic Automotive,” but the place could very well have been called “Bubba’s Crap Cars.” I suppose, though, I’ve been known to be a little bit of a critic at times. Gift horses? Shouldn’t insult ‘em.

  I parked in the gravel parking lot between a couple of old clunkers, climbed out, and went looking for Bubba. I found him, and when I did he was almost exactly as I’d expected.

  The building was a converted Stuckey’s diner from about the 1950s, and the conversion job looked about half finished from a decade or more back.

  I opened the hand-painted glass and steel front door and a cow-bell clanked above my head. Perfect.

  “Yeah?” I heard a voice come through yet another dark doorway, where the door was held open with baling wire through a hole in the sheet rock.

  “Wanna buy a car,” I yelled.

  I heard a groan. A creak. A shuffle. Perhaps he’d been sleeping.

  A large, grizzled and deeply pock-marked face emerged from the dark space through the doorway. In the corner of his mouth was the stub of a cigar, chewed within an inch of its life.

  “What car?” he asked.

  “Don’t know yet,” I said. “Got anything that runs?”

  He sniffed, wiped the sleep out of his eyes with one meaty and dirty paw.

  “Yeah. This is a car lot, ain’t it? You sayin’ I sell cars what don’t run or somethin’?”

  “Nope,” I said. “I’ll only say that if I buy one and it craps out on me.”

  He looked at me close with large, brown eyes. I’d say if the fellow could be any animal he chose, his choice would have been a bear of some kind.

  “Are you Bubba?” I asked.

  “I better be,” he said. “Say, you look familiar to me. You been in here before?”

  “I’ve got one of those faces.”

  “Yeah. Well, come on. Let’s get this over with,” he said.

  Those were my sentiments exactly.

  *****

  After half an hour of haggling with Bubba I paid five hundred dollars cash for a little open-air jeep that had been phased out of production back in the early eighties. Also I talked Bubba into letting me park my Mercedes inside one of his empty garages. No problem. How did a hundred dollars a month suit me? It suited me right down to the ground. If I didn’t come back and pay up, he’d keep it, file a mechanic’s lien on it and re-sell it. No problem there either. I knew I’d be coming back for it, if in fact I survived.

  Bubba could tell I was itching to high-tail it. I apologized for interrupting his sleep, and he grunted something unintelligible, spat out the cigar stub onto the gravel and fished another cigar out of his shirt pocket.

  I thought of offering my hand in a shake to seal the deal, but one look at his fingernails disabused me of the idea.

  After I parked my Mercedes inside the garage and got Milo Unger’s Sawyer-box out of the trunk, I locked it up tight and put the new Jeep key on my key-ring.

  “What if I need to move it?” he asked when he saw me dropping the keys in my pocket.

  “I’m paying you a hundred dollars a month not to,” I said.

  He said something under his breath. I thought I caught the word “prick,” but I wasn’t sure.

  I smiled at him.

  “Well, see ya,” I said.

  I started up the jeep for the second time. It coughed once, hard, and sent out a plume of blue smoke.

  Just great, I thought.

  As I pulled out onto the highway and clutched my way up to the speed limit, I found myself hoping I’d make it to the land where the dinosaurs rust.

  CHAPTER TEN<
br />
  I made it a hundred miles west before having to stop for gas. I checked the oil. It was a couple of quarts low, so I filled it with some cheap stuff.

  I crossed over into Texas Hill Country after another hundred miles, passing Austin by fifty miles to the south.

  I got a cheap motel room in Fredericksburg. One of the kind where they prefer cash over credit and don’t make too much fuss about guest registers. I would’ve used an assumed name anyway.

  *****

  The next day I spent easing further west, with the occasional jaunt down a side road to check out areas I’d heard of but had never seen before.

  The desert was all stillness and quiet but for the occasional dust devil, funneling grit and sand up dozens or hundreds of feet, and I thought of the Tasmanian Devil from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons.

  The drive from Huntsville to Fort Stockton is not a short one, and I had time to think; to ruminate over love and longing, over sex, sperm, eggs and fallopian tubes; over the knitted brows and painful eyes of mothers giving birth in delivery rooms; over fatherhood and over life. And death.

  I passed small towns that were no more than little islands of civilization, small universes unto themselves in the rolling landscape. In the distance ahead of me I saw the beginnings of mountains with the sun dipping down toward them, bringing down the day with a glorious finale of purplish red and searing bright gold.

  Alone at sunset. Miles to go. Yawning. Tiredness worked its way between my shoulder blades, into my arms.The radio didn’t work. It figured. I’d forgotten all about that back there while I was haggling. Maybe I was better off.

  *****

  Driving through the night, tired, the highway long and lonely, much like every other trip I’ve ever taken across the vastness of Texas.

  There was no traffic to speak of, except for a set of headlights in the far distance behind me, disappearing and re-appearing again as I topped a hill.

  I wondered, absently, if it was someone following me, then laughed to myself. Of course they were following. We were on the same stretch of highway in the dead of night, they were behind while I was ahead, therefore they had to follow.