Capitol Offense (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 2)

by George Wier

  “Okay,” I said. “Who do you think Frogger is?”

  “Sounds like he’s some kind of opportunist,” Trooper Herrera said. “Maybe he’s a double-agent or some stupid shit.”

  I thought about it. I’d headed back to Austin as soon as I walked out of my last interview with Norman Howell, the last time that anyone from outside the prison had seen him alive. So Sawyer and Frogger had to have known the minute I left. Probably, Warden Benjamin Spence had been eavesdropping and had heard the actual play by play.

  A chill went through my body.

  I was lucky to have made it out of the prison in the first place.

  So who was Frogger? He’d been dogging me since Huntsville. Maybe he’d called my house that morning, right after he blew Milo Unger, his houseboat and his new unfinished novel sky high.

  “What’s next?” I asked.

  “Oh. All I know is to get you to Fort Stockton and stick to you like glue, and see that you don’t get killed.”

  I looked over at him just as he looked at me. He had dark Spanish eyes and a bit of a smirk. I’d say he was not quite thirty. He was big, though. A good two-thirty if he was a pound. The gun on his right hip was a .357 Magnum. I supposed that maybe I was safe.

  “We’ve got a small DPS barracks there, but I know the Sheriff. I think you’ll be safer out at his ranch. Meantime, somebody back in Austin is preparing some questions for you. You and me are gonna make a little movie.”

  The miles passed.

  He picked up his radio, toggled over a few bands, then said: “Fort Stockton S.O.?”

  “S.O. Go ahead.”

  “This is DPS 347. Tell Sheriff Sample I’m Code 6 to his residence. I’ve got Flyboy.”

  “10-4.”

  He hung up the radio.

  “So what do you get out of this?” I asked.

  We were moving along at a pretty good clip, passing a sign that declared Fort Stockton to be a mere 36 miles.

  “I get to be buddies with the next Governor of Texas.”

  He paused.

  “Hell,” he said. “Don’t you think I’d make a good Texas Ranger?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  By the time we got there I was so turned around as to be considered lost, except that the sun had dropped low in the sky and had picked up a rusty hue. At least I knew my cardinal directions.

  After half a dozen turns we crossed a cattle guard onto a caliche gravel road. I assumed that we were on the Sheriff’s ranch.

  So far I didn’t like how things were going. It was quite possible that several someones were acting based upon the assumption that I knew more and had more proof than was the case.

  But that was all right. When you’re living from one minute to the next, you can often survive well on the ineptness of others.

  Questions. I had a lot of them as we trundled over the desert hardpan, twice crossing paths with a pair of dust devils. I was thinking about the picture that was in my Sawyer-box on the back seat behind us — Herrera had, after all, found the Sawyer-box in Hap’s plane — the picture that Julie had held in her delicate little hand.

  In that picture, Sawyer Senior was there standing next to his son, our current Governor; Emil Howell kneeling in front, a Cheshire Cat grin on his face and his balding pate winking. Probably Milo Unger could have told me who the others were, but there’d be no asking him, unless I happened across a bona fide medium who could channel him. Not that I ever believed in that kind of thing.

  Topping a hill, I caught a glint of the sun on a windshield not more than a half mile away behind us, and just the fraction of a hint of green. Someone was back there, following. Maybe it was the Sheriff.

  “Welcome to the Kingdom,” Herrera said.

  “Kingdom?”

  “Yep. All that you see here. Some of us boys call it that, others call it ‘The Republic’.”

  What? I thought.

  Then it hit me.

  Around fifteen years back there had been a group of folks who had held off a siege by the Texas Rangers out in West Texas. They’d called themselves ‘The Republic of Texas,’ a group that had wanted Texas to be independent of the United States and had not recognized U.S. sovereignty over Texas. And especially over themselves. They drove around without driver’s licenses and without tags on their vehicles. They threatened and sued and managed to tick off a few of the wrong people. Their little revolt had very narrowly escaped becoming a blood bath, and had ended on a West Texas ranch in surrender. The cooler heads had prevailed that day.

  I was no longer simply chilled. I was cold, as if I had been too long in a February north wind.

  All along there had been larger issues that I had been unable to see. A suspicion began to grow in my mind. An improbable, not-plausible kernel of an idea.

  If it were remotely true, then I was in much more deeply than I had dreamed.

  *****

  The ranch house was a solid wood construction halfway up a mountain. West Texas mountains do not have the grandeur and stature of their Rocky Mountain Range cousins to the north nor their distant relations, the Andes in South America, and amount to little more in most places than very tall hills. They do, however, tower over West Texas and provide fairly easily scalable overlook points. Sheriff Sample’s ranch stood out on the crown of a lesser hill that jutted out over a deep and desolate valley. And if it was the main house for a cattle ranching operation, I was yet to see any livestock.

  When we pulled up within spitting distance of the porch a trapped feeling assailed me.

  Trooper Herrera climbed out and I followed suit, with no small amount of trepidation.

  It was all wrong.

  The porch, a solid-built, Wolmanized wood structure all of forty feet long and twelve feet wide, ran the length of the house.

  My Doc Martens didn’t raise so much as a squeak from the heavy planks beneath them.

  Herrera opened the sproingy new screen door and I followed him into the foyer, where he put his hat up on a rack. I noticed there were three others there. All Stetsons.

  I followed him into the spacious living room.

  There was a man sitting in a cowhide-covered easy chair, reading a magazine. He looked up and smiled. Behind him, on the wall, there was a larger than life painting of General Sam Houston, a reproduction of the one that hangs at the State Capitol in Austin.

  “Hello Milo,” I said. “Or should I call you ‘Frogger?’”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “How you doin’, Bill?” Milo asked.

  “Not so good.”

  “Well, pull up a chair.”

  There on the floor next to him was his laptop computer.

  I sat down on the love seat opposite him. There was a marble-top coffee table between us. I was wondering how it would look smashed through his face.

  “How’s the novel coming?” I asked.

  “Can’t seem to write just now. Too many distractions. You know how it is.” His voice trailed off. He dropped his magazine on a rack of others and it slipped off onto the floor.

  “Who do those other Stetsons out in the foyer belong to?” I asked. Then, before he could answer I raised a hand. “Wait. Let me see if I can guess.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. I’d say one of them belongs to Warden Spence from Ellis Unit.”

  “Pretty good,” he said. “That’s one. Keep going.”

  “You’re not the Stetson-wearing kind. You’re more the tie-dye type, so I’ll say you don’t have a hat hanging anywhere close by. Nope. I’ll take a guess that hat number two belongs to Noah McPherson, who was supposed to be fishing. I never figured him for the cowboy type.”

  He looked at me, deadpan. I didn’t flinch at all. I kept myself pretty well in check, even though I was mad enough to pull his arm out of his socket and beat him with it.

  Trooper Herrera stood behind me and to my right. Waiting for something. I hadn’t heard any faint snapping sounds, so chances were his gun was still holstered.

  “
Damn,” Milo said. “You’re batting a thousand. Keep going.”

  “The other one’s easy. I haven’t met him yet but I’ve got the feeling that I’m about to. Sheriff Sample.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That one was a gimme. I knew you were a bright fellow. That’s what we need. It’s what Texas needs. The best. The brightest.”

  “The New Texas?” I asked.

  “Hey, I like that. The New Texas. Except that it’s really the Old Old Texas. But like the song says: ‘When everything old is new again.’”

  He smirked. His lips twisted up at the corners, bringing out a pair of dimples, one in each cheek.

  “You do know, Bill, there are only two states that can secede from the union, according to the documents bringing them into the United States...”

  “Yeah. Every school kid knows that. Texas and California. But that’s a rumor. You need to take a second look at that. There was never any right to secede.”

  “So what. Bill, we’ve got everything we need right here in the Lone Star.”

  “I know,” I said. “We’ve got oil and gas, all the refineries. We’ve got commercial fishing on the Gulf. We’ve got the largest military post on the planet at Fort Hood and we’ve got Aerospace and computers and lumber and cotton and all the raw essentials for a country. So tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like whose body it was, that was a fairly close approximation of yours, who came floating to the top of Lake Travis?”

  “Oh,” he said. “That.” He smiled again.

  “Yeah. That.”

  Behind me Trooper D. Herrera moved further back.

  “Hey Frogger,” he said. “I’m gonna head back to the kitchen. See what’s cookin’.”

  I heard a jingle of metal and then saw Trooper Herrera’s keys fly past me. Milo snatched them deftly out of the air.

  “You do that, Darrell,” Milo said. At least I’d found out what the “D.” stood for.

  I heard a door close. Milo and I were alone.

  “I knew that about you,” he said.

  “Knew what?”

  “You absolutely can’t abide a mystery. Even before all of this stuff started coming together, I heard about this accountant who liked to wedge himself into tight places, with shit blowing up all around him and the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding roughshod for him. So when Ben Spence called me — that’s Warden Spence — and told me he had signed off on allowing Norman a visit, he asked me if there was any reason why we shouldn’t listen in. I almost said no. But for one thing.”

  “He mentioned my name,” I said.

  Milo grinned. “You just jump across those chasms, don’t you? Don’t even wait and judge the distance.”

  “Sleeping dogs are for kicking,” I said.

  “Exactly. You thirsty?”

  I was. I didn’t want to tell him that, though.

  “Investment counselor,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’m not an accountant.”

  “So what? You’re a glorified bean counter, either one you pick.”

  Milo got up.

  “Come on,” he said. “The Sheriff has got the best bar in the Republic.”

  I stood and followed him. He opened a door on the far end of the living room, waited for me to go ahead of him. There was a long, wide hallway with stuffed and mounted heads and a number of gold and silver trophies perched on little ledges. Hunting trophies. We passed down the hallway, and as we did the hair on the back of my neck stood up. It was a bit of a sneaking, sinking feeling. Probably about how the protagonist must have started feeling in The Most Dangerous Game when he began to wonder whether his benefactors were so benevolent after all.

  Through another door and we were in the billiard room. Along the walls were gun racks in glass cases. Riot guns, carbines, M-1s, sniper rifles, AK-47s.

  Milo saw my eyes moving about.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We keep the pea-shooters in here. We’ll never need them, as this is a peaceful coup. But... You never know who’s gonna come knocking.”

  His mid-western accent had fallen off. Maybe he hadn’t become conscious of it yet. East Texas was there in his voice.

  Along the back wall was the bar. I had been inside my own share of watering holes before. This one had them all beat. There must have been a few hundred bottles and I didn’t even attempt to count them. Top brand names too.

  “What’re you havin’?” he asked as he stepped behind the bar.

  “Stoli,” I said. “Wave some Canada Dry in its general direction.”

  “Good choice. A vodka man. I wouldn’t have figured.”

  “I thought you knew everything about me.”

  He turned around. I heard a ‘clink’. He came back with a half-empty bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. Or half-full, depending.

  “Not everything. But then again, it’s your curiosity I want to fully satisfy.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before you decide of your own free will to throw in with us.”

  He set a glass in front of me. I looked down at it for all of a minute. I could see little balls of light on the surface of it, rippling, moving. My hand had picked up just the hint of a tremor. I was wishing that the balls of light could talk to me, offer me some advice; but they were just reflections of the track lighting over the bar.

  “What do you call yourselves?” I asked, finally.

  “Texas First. Some of us refer to themselves as Firsters. Me? I’m just me. Cheers.”

  I didn’t toast him but I drained my glass anyway. And as I did, something happened.

  *****

  Pieces of the puzzle moved in and out, orbited each other. They moved through a black vacuum of disconnectedness.

  Viva la revolucion, Noah’s voice had said over the phone that morning before we’d had lunch. It had struck me as mildly odd at the time. No doubt Noah was somewhere in the house or on the grounds of the ranch not far away. I’d be talking to him soon.

  You and me, we’re a couple of bad-corner people, Hank had said. He’d told me to go west and find his friend, Walter Cannon, who could chew up steel rails and spit .45 caliber bullets and who kept a rusting Tyrannosaur in his front yard. I didn’t think I’d be running into him any time soon, what with my new set of company.

  A couple of state troopers, looking for you, Julie had told me. I could almost see Julie and Nat and Penny sitting at Nat’s kitchen table nibbling corned beef sandwiches while a couple of troopers with warrants looked around. So there were some state troopers that knew right where I was at any given moment, and a whole other set that didn’t. The guys that didn’t, those were probably the good guys.

  Should have stayed home with my dad and made good money blowing up gook fishing boats for Dick Sawyer... It always seemed to come back around to Dick Sawyer: businessman and Governor, the symbol of our great State embodied in one man.

  We keep the pea-shooters in here, Milo Unger — a fellow I once thought I could like — had just told me. We’ll never need them, as this is a peaceful coup.

  Coup.

  For the most infinitesimal of instants — the tiniest, most perfect of instants — the pieces came together, fit and then shattered with a force great enough to physically shake me. I had a complete picture, but it was gone.

  “Whoa there, Champ,” Milo’s voice said. But it was a voice outside the void that I had entered. “Don’t drink that stuff so fast,” the voice said.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it. Faint little lights tracked across my vision, which slowly swam in and out of focus. I had one hand wrapped around a glass, which was empty, but I couldn’t feel my fingers. My other hand had a death grip on the bar.

  “Milo,” I said, my voice just a thin rasp.

  “Yeah. I’m listening.”

  “You’ve lost your perspective,” I said calmly. “I don’t know what it is that is driving you, but your actions — although they seem deliberate and calculated — are those
of a crazy person. We can put an end to all this — ” I gestured toward the room. “You need to walk away from this before anyone else gets killed.”

  “And I suppose you’ll go to bat for me with the state police, right?”

  The reality of it was too stark. There would be no real defense for such a conspiracy. It was life in prison or Death Row, depending upon who had been murdered thus far to protect their secrets.

  “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t, even if I could.”

  “You’re turning into a real bona fide hero, Travis,” Milo said, and tried to force a little humor with a smile and a half-hearted chuckle. “So your terms are that we all surrender to you and go quietly and you’ll turn the other way when they start beating the ever-living crap out of all of us. Man, you’ve got some real heart there.”

  “No. What I’ve got is a sense of the real world. Mr. Unger, I’d say your goose is going to get thoroughly cooked. Your only option is how well-done. And you can take that one to the bank and cash it.”

  The door to the parlor opened and a several men came into the room.

  “Hello, Noah,” I said.

  “Bill,” he gave me a little nod. He had a sober, somber look on his face. Outside the window behind him night was falling.

  “I’m Sheriff Sample,” the big man beside Noah McPherson said. He didn’t wear a badge or anything, but his gut lopped over his belt a good six inches.

  “I know,” I said, at the same instant that Milo said “He knows.”

  “Good,” Sheriff Sample said. “The Lieutenant Governor says that you’re our man to nail Sawyer to the wall. He said that you’ll help. Ain’t that right?”