Capitol Offense (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 2)

by George Wier

  In 2002, at the ripe age of 73, Emil Howell took his own life. I knew from a letter from Norman Howell — my partner’s favorite Death Row client — that it had been a boating accident. The last I heard, though, boats don’t load and wield shotguns. Nor do they pull the trigger.

  I had been wrong. The Howells of the world do take their lives. Perhaps it is the saving grace of the species that they do.

  I looked up from the computer screen. Looked over at Walt. He nodded.

  I looked at the clock. It was getting late in the morning. Around 5:00 a.m.

  “You wanna stop and get some breakfast?” Walt asked me. “Next town is ten miles.”

  “No,” I told him, even though my stomach was gnawing at me. “Let’s keep going.”

  “Fine by me,” he said. “Anything interesting in that computer?”

  I thought about Emil Howell sitting in court all those years ago, actually proud of his murderous son.

  “Not really,” I said.

  What a way to go. I was, however, of the opinion that Emil Howell was about sixty or so years too late.

  *****

  During the long drive I dived further into Milo’s family history. He’d been around hate all his life. He’d been taught how to kill at an early age, and do it well. He’d seemed to me to be a deviously brilliant fellow. And he wanted revenge.

  As for his plan to kill Richard Sawyer, something greater than a simple knife in the dark was in order. Milo had wanted the whole world against Richard Sawyer. But if the whole world wouldn’t enlist, then he’d at least enlist Texas.

  And there Milo’s story of his family ended. What followed was his own manifesto for why Texas should secede from the United States and his own abbreviated history of the Lone Star State.

  Milo’s version of history was, to say the least, not exactly the way it was being taught at your average Texas middle school. Many of the details — such as dates and sketches of historical personalities — were in line with the accepted history, but there were a few points that were skewed.

  The Texas Declaration of Independence was written by George C. Childress. With the U.S. Declaration as his guide, Childress listed out all the horrors that Generalissimo Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and the Mexican Army had visited upon the colonists of Northern Mexico, what would later become Texas. Childress knew he was declaring war. He also knew that there would be bloodshed.

  To be fair to the Mexicans, though, each of the colonists that had been granted land in the then northernmost Mexican State by Stephen Fuller Austin — the appointed agent, or ‘empresario’ for the area’s settlement — declared that they were Catholic and owed their allegiance to the Pope in Rome, and further declared, in writing, their allegiance to Mexico. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Almost to a man they were Freemasons — as was Austin himself — a society that had endured a great deal of suppression from Rome. In spite of the settlers’ declarations, when the Catholic missionaries came by to collect their tithes they were sent packing, often at the business end of a gun. When the missionaries’ complaints filtered back to Mexico City, the army was dispatched to enforce tithing. From there, admiration and respect dropped out the bottom on both sides. There were first harsh words between the colonists and the Mexican Army, then finally, bullets.

  Mexico had been tricked. Revolution and war became inevitable.

  In a little cabin on a bluff overlooking the convergence of the Brazos and Navasota Rivers, and near a growing settlement of about ten thousand souls, the several delegates to the Texas Constitutional Convention signed the Declaration.

  War had come. The Alamo fell and its defenders were butchered. Nineteen days later at Goliad there was wholesale slaughter. Families fled east during the Runaway Scrape before the unopposable numbers of the Mexican Army, and finally on a field near the Gulf Coast, General Sam Houston surprised and routed the Mexicans as they slept their mid-afternoon siesta. Victory. Texas was a Republic. A sovereign nation among sovereigns.

  The Republic of Texas lasted ten years. Due to the efforts of Texas President Sam Houston, a friend of Andrew Jackson, Texas was brought into the Union on April 5, 1845. Texas became a State; one of many. One of the articles of Texas’ acceptance of U.S. sovereignty over its citizens was the right to secede. Texas was forever done with foreign oppression.

  Sixteen years later Texas exercised that right and left the Union along with the remainder of the southern states. A new war was brewing: the war of brother against brother. Four years later, with the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, Tennessee, Texas was back in the Union where she belonged. Old Glory was again raised to the top of the flag pole across the state.

  Texas, theoretically, still reserved the right to secede, an unexercised right that was written into her Declaration of Independence and her Constitution.

  It looked as though Milo and his misguided people were banking on the legality of secession.

  There were some definite problems, though, with Milo’s history lesson. First of all, to my knowledge the Texas revolution had not been a Masonic plot. There was a revolution already underway in the State of Coahuila in northern Mexico, and Santa Anna sent his cousin, General Cos, to crush it. When tempers flared in Texas, General Cos just kept marching on.

  As far as any right to secede was concerned, there was no such right. But that was the myth that had been passed around until it became folk legend. Texas was taken into the Union by treaty. There was no “right to secede” in any of those documents, nor with any of the articles in force under Reconstruction.

  Even if there had at one time been a right to secede, there was one small detail that Milo and his confederates had not taken into consideration: the law is whatever some judge says it is, until a bigger judge says otherwise.

  *****

  Milo’s final entry was what I had been looking for all along. It detailed the trouble he had gone to in setting me up and bringing me into the group, as well as the details he had worked out in the plan to assassinate the Governor.

  I’d been told while at Sheriff Sample’s ranch when the opening shot of Milo’s misguided revolution would begin. Now, at last, I knew from where.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  We made it into Fredericksburg as the sun rose directly in our eyes.

  “Turn left,” I told Walt.

  “Austin’s straight ahead, Bill.”

  “I know,” I said. “I need to stop by a ranch outside of Marble Falls. Check on my woman and my partner. We’ve got some time, now.

  “Okay,” he said. “Makes no difference to me. We gonna see Hank Sterling before all this is over? I’d like to see the old sonuvabitch. He didn’t sound too good when I talked to him on the phone last.”

  “That’s my fault, Walt.”

  He looked at me.

  “Why is it your fault?”

  “I took him into a bad situation where he had no business going. He almost died on me. I didn’t think he’d pull through.”

  He was quiet for a moment, mulling over what he was going to say.

  “Bill,” he said. “Let me tell you something you may not know.”

  I waited.

  He turned left and shifted up through the gears. I liked riding with him when we didn’t have to fly along.

  “I may not know Mr. Sterling they way you do, but he doesn’t sound like the sort of fellow who would go walking into anything unless he had his eyes open. I’d say there’s no chance you were responsible for what happened to him.”

  I had a bit of a lump in my throat. I’d been holding onto a good deal of self-blame for some time on the subject. I wanted to speak, but found that I couldn’t.

  “Hell,” he said. “I’m surprised both of your collar bones haven’t turned to powder.”

  “What?”

  “You carry too much weight on those shoulders. Who the hell elected you responsible for the whole universe? Pressure will crush a brick. Take on enough of it, it’ll crush
you.”

  I looked away, my eyes tracking the sun glistening on morning dew in a broad hayfield. I started to breathe a little easier. Maybe Walt was right.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll shut up now.”

  We were both quiet.

  The miles rolled on past.

  *****

  We pulled up out front of Nat Bierstone’s ranch house. The moment I climbed out, the front door of the house burst open and Julie dashed across the porch, flew down the steps without her feet appearing to touch the ground, and almost tackled me. Her arms were around my neck and she was saying my name and kissing me and squeezing my waist between her legs.

  “I love you too, Honey,” I said.

  When I put her down she said: “I promised myself I wasn’t going to do that if — when you came. But I couldn’t help myself.”

  “I know,” I said. “I feel the same way.”

  “Bill, my God! What have you been doing?” Julie asked, startled.

  “I look bad?”

  “Baby, you look horrible.”

  “Yeah. But I don’t have time to gussy up. I found out Sawyer isn’t so bad after all. But somebody’s gonna kill him. Today. Unless I stop them.”

  I looked up. Nat Bierstone and Penny were on the front porch. Nat waved at me, smiling.I realized Walt was standing there.

  “Oh,” I said. “Julie, this is Walter Cannon.”

  “Nice to meet you Mr. Cannon.”

  “Call me Walt,” he said. I could tell he was entranced by my girl. The two of them shook hands.

  “Walt saved my life.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes wide, then she launched herself at him, throwing her arms around him. She reached up and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for bringing him back to me alive.”

  Walt was turning red. I got ready for the “Aw shucks” routine. “I had to,” was all Walt said.

  “Why don’t ya’ll come on in?” Nat called from the porch.

  With Julie and I arm-in-arm, we walked up to the house.

  After introducing Walt to Nat and Penny, Nat and I were the last through the door.

  Nat put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Bill,” he said, stopping me for a moment in the doorway. “No more running off like that.”

  “Fine by me,” I told him.

  “I need to know something,” he said. I looked at his face. It was all stony seriousness. But then again, I’ve rarely seen Nat Bierstone any other way.

  “What’s that?”

  “Who’s going to pay for all this wedding business?”

  “Why, you are,” I said without missing a beat.

  He looked down at the floor for a second.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said.

  *****

  We sat at Nat’s kitchen table. Penny served up eggs, bacon, biscuits and coffee. It had been awhile since I’d eaten. I was never big on breakfast, but still, I wolfed down everything that was put in front of me, trying hard not to resemble an actual wolf. I realized that of late I’d mostly been having breakfast, and little else.

  “Nat,” I said between mouthfuls. “I’m going to need some help. My name must be mud in Austin just now, so I don’t feel like we can call the police. They’d arrest me and there would be the devil to pay.”

  “What kind of help?” Penny asked.

  I turned to her. Normally, Penny tries to stay in the background. She does her job without question, collects her pay and lives her life. For the life of me, I couldn’t even remember where she lived.

  But I’d pulled her into this, had taken several days out of her normal life. I was glad she was interested.

  “I need to fly. Again.”

  “Airplane?” Nat asked.

  “Something a lot slower.”

  “A helicopter,” Julie said. She looked at Nat, then at me. She didn’t look so happy all of a sudden.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  There was one of those quiet moments where nobody knows what to say and nobody wants to be the first to chime in.

  “Cecil Link,” Nat finally said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Former State Representative. Cecil has a horse ranch five miles down the road. He likes to play around with helicopters. I’ll call him.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I looked at Julie. Her hand wandered from her cheek down to her belly and rubbed it absently.

  “Okay,” she said.

  *****

  I had promised myself that I was done with flying when Hap McCorkindale’s plane narrowly missed getting cut in half by a larger-than-life windmill. What’s the old saying? Never say never!

  Helicopters are a completely different animal from fixed-wing aircraft. I’d read some of the basic theory on them back in college physics class. The textbook and the occasional sighting of one had always been enough for me. Despite my subjective knowledge that “helicopters fly,” I was still missing the singular factor that would move that subjective supposition over into something resembling more of an objective truth. That factor was experience.

  Walt drove me over to the Lazy B, Cecil Link’s horse ranch. He’d saved my life outside of Fort Stockton, stuck with me through a moment of truth in the desert east of Marfa, and was fast becoming a good friend. He didn’t like it when he found out that Cecil Link’s chopper was a two-seater. He volunteered to fly me himself, but the former state representative wouldn’t hear of it.

  When I asked Walt to return to Nat’s ranch and look after my people, the look on my face must have convinced him.

  Still, it wasn’t easy watching him climb back in his truck to leave.

  Cecil Link was in his late sixties, retired and not getting near enough out of life. Meeting him made me wonder just a little what I’d be doing around that age, if I made it. Given the number of close calls I’d had in the last year there was an even chance that I’d be turned down the next time I met with my insurance agent to renew my life insurance policy.

  Mr. Link had a strong handshake. I had to go into a long song and dance about what was going on, how the Texas Governor was going to be shot and from where, and why I couldn’t call in the police.

  “Bill,” he told me before I was three-quarters of the way through. “You talk too much. Let’s go.”

  Like I said, my kind of people.

  The time was 10:15. A Saturday morning. The kickoff was slated for 11:00 o’clock. The coin toss would be a minute before that.

  “That’s one hell of a way to take a shot at someone. Who would ever suspect?”

  “I agree.”

  “I’ve got an idea.” Cecil strode off at a fast walk towards one of his ranch outbuildings and I followed.

  Within a minute I had a heft coil of rope in my arms and a large meat hook in my hand.

  I got some last minute instructions and then we were airborne.

  The roar of the rotors overhead was loud.

  “We’ve got about twenty minutes,” I yelled.

  “No need to yell,” Cecil Link calmly stated via my headphones. “I can hear you fine. I’ll have you there in fifteen.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t know they were on.”

  *****

  We were going to be cutting it a little close. Milo’s journal didn’t give me the name of the sniper. I didn’t need it.

  I had Walt’s .38 in the waistband of my pants. That was all I’d need.

  From ten miles outside of Austin and about five hundred feet in the air I could make out the features of downtown: the Frost Bank Building, the State Capitol Building, the UT Bell Tower. Just to the north of the Bell Tower was Memorial Stadium, dead ahead.

  Sitting in the gentle breeze several hundred feet above the stadium was our target.

  A blimp.

  *****

  The problem with the blimp, from my point of view above it, was that the cabin was underneath. Dirigibles and helicopters? Not a good combination.

/>   “Bill,” Cecil voice said into my ears. “Are you ready?”

  I tied one end of the rope around my waist and the other end where Cecil pointed by my door. I hefted the meat hook in my hand, gripping the handle. It felt heavy in my hand. I liked the feel of it.

  “Put me a little forward, center,” I said.

  “You’ve got a death wish, my friend.”

  “I’ve got a live wish.” I draped the coil of rope over my head and down under my arm. Cecil dipped the chopper a tad and moved forward.

  “Can you get a little closer?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But I’ve never done this before. Otherwise I’d try landing on the damned thing. I think if we get too close our downwash will push it down. I don’t want to crash. Either of us. And there are a lot of innocent folks down there.” He gestured downward at the stadium. There had to be fifty thousand people down there.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I figured that already. That’s why I’m gonna jump.”

  I opened the door and felt the intense downdraft sucking at me, trying to pull me out the door.

  “You see where the seams are on that thing?” Cecil asked.

  I was looking down at it. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Try to jump between them. You hit one of those ribs, it might knock the wind out of you, maybe even kill you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m taking these headphones off now. Anything you want to say, you better say it.”

  “Go get ‘em.”

  “Right.”

  I removed the headphones with the little microphone down in front, dropped them on the floorboard, and pivoted in my seat.

  I looked out over the wide Texas landscape, then down on the blimp and the stadium below. We were only a few hundred feet in the air, but the people down there looked about the size of your average ant.

  If I botched this then I was sure to give the crowd a sight to remember.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I’ve never been afraid of heights. They’ve always given me a bit of a thrill. When I was twelve my father and I went up in the Tower of the Americas in San Antonio. The top floor is the observation deck. One floor down from it is a restaurant where tourists can eat gourmet food while the restaurant turns slowly about. Before we went up that day the air was hot and still. But up at the top of the spire it was cool and windy and if you stood still enough, you could detect the subtle movement of the tower with the air current. For me, at that time of my life, being up high was being alive. I could look out over San Antonio and the surrounding area, which oddly enough, seemed to be little more than trees and highways with a few downtown buildings thrown in to make it interesting. And of course, being twelve, I imagined what it would be like to fall from such a height. Not to actually hit, mind you, just to make the journey down with only gravity and wind and a blur of speed to keep you company.