by George Wier
“It wasn’t your fault, James. Don’t worry about it. Take care, James,” I told him before hanging up. He said he would.
*****
Julie and I, with Hank Sterling riding in back, stopped in at Bubba’s Crap Cars on the outskirts of Huntsville on the way to West Texas.
Bubba wasn’t there. There was a fellow named Earl, however, and Earl wasn’t ready to honor any agreements between Bubba and anybody else. Also, he wasn’t all-fired in a hurry to release any information about Bubba’s status with the company, which I thought was rather interesting.
When I mildly threatened to call in a friend from the seat of government, Earl caved.
Then he told me the story.
Within an hour of my heading out that evening after buying the Jeep, a team of law-enforcement officers descended on the place. Bubba had been in the crapper at the time and his very serious business was abruptly interrupted when the business end of several high-caliber weapons were trained on his pock-marked nose.
Fortunately, Bubba had his pants down at the time.
A lady had come in — and from Earl’s second-hand description, she closely matched that of Sherry Unger — stepped around all the waiting local cops and had gone through my Mercedes with a fine-toothed comb.
Thinking on it, it made sense.
She had been dogging me whenever Milo hadn’t.
In the end I got Earl to give me access to the car. I let Julie drive the rental, with Hank to keep her company, across the entirety of Texas.
My only wish was that I could have been there to see the look on Bubba’s face.
*****
It wasn’t easy finding Hap’s place. I had inadvertently found it at night between the towns of Junction and Sonora when tiredness had overcome me. It took driving on into Sonora, stopping off at a local café, looking him up in a local phone directory and calling him.
With directions in hand we turned back east and arrived about fifteen minutes later.
Hap’s house was different with Julie and Hank there. It had before seemed a lonely place. What it had needed was voices and laughter bouncing off its walls. The four of us supplied plenty of that.
Hank and Hap shook hands like long-lost friends, and we all settled into our chairs for a helping of freshly-made peach cobbler.
I had to fill Hap in on everything that had occurred when we parted company. It was kind of fun to watch his expressions as the story came out.
At the end of it, he asked me a few questions, some of which I had the answers for.
“Bill,” he said. “You told me about a fellow being blown up in his house boat. Now you’re telling me that he was the fellow that was setting you up all along? So did somebody get blown up?”
“Yeah,” I told him. “There was a body missing from the San Antonio coroner’s morgue. A friend of mine at the Travis County Sheriff’s office was the one who pieced that one together. I had thought that somebody may have been murdered just to make it look as though Milo had been killed by the Governor or one or more of his men. I’m thinking now that Milo was not an indiscriminate killer. It’d have been far easier to find a ringer from the local homeless population than to steal a fresh corpse. That’s why I now believe he wasn’t completely rotten.”
“Still,” Hank chimed in. “He was going to assassinate the Governor.”
“Yeah,” Julie said. I looked at her and she returned my gaze. “Bill. No more big adventures for you, okay?”
Her hand dropped down to her belly.
“Okay,” I said. Truth be told, I was ready for some peace and quiet for awhile.
“Hap,” I said. “We’re going out west to visit a friend. You want to come along? We’ve got plenty of room.”
Hap shook his head slowly.
“Well,” he said. “I thank you kindly for that offer... But I’ve...”
“What?” I asked. “What have you got going on that’s so all-fired important?”
“I’ve got a date tonight,” he said.
It took a moment for it to settle in. By the time I looked around, everyone else was grinning.
Hank started laughing.
“You old hound dog,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
We ate barbecue under the shadow of the dinosaur — Julie, Julie’s Uncle Nat, Hank Sterling with his oxygen bottle close at hand, just in case, Walter Cannon and me. There was barbecue brisket, potato salad, ranch-style beans, iced tea and Shiner Bock beer.
I looked up at the beast that towered over us. Walt’s T-Rex was not all that scary. He had done a good job of duplicating a textbook Tyrannosaur with rusted I-beams and welded parts. It was far better than anything I could have done. But his attempt to make a ferocious, open-mouthed roaring beast had resulted in a thirty-foot tall monstrosity with a cartoon-like grin. About the way Elmer Fudd would look after happily crunching down on something that shattered all his teeth. Strangely, it was the rust that gave it texture, that made it seem more alive than it otherwise would have appeared. I wouldn’t dare touch it if the sky was cloudy.
I thought about home and a soft bed and Julie’s sighs in the night. And I was glad T-Rexes were gone from the Earth.
“When do you start, Nat?” Hank Sterling was asking my business partner.
“Next Monday they’ll swear me in on the steps of the State Capitol,” Julie’s Uncle Nathaniel said. He would soon be an in-law of mine. Why was that both so odd and so perfect at the same time?
I looked at Julie. She was beautiful. She had her hair tied into a pony-tail with a pink ribbon. I looked down at her belly. Was it my imagination, or was she starting to show?
Julie caught my look and smiled. My heart did a little flip.
“Reckon you’ll be better than the last one,” Walt said. “He was a nut. He was busy blowing town about the time the news footage of Bill hanging from a rope attached to a blimp was all over the television.”
Hank chimed in: “I’ll bet he felt about the way you felt, Bill, when I told you that your picture was on the news.”
“I’m counting on it,” I said. “By the way, Walt, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Shoot,” he said.
“Why is it when you’re disguising your voice, you sound like you’re from my home town in East Texas?”
“Because,” he said, “I am from your home town in East Texas. You and I may be a generation apart, but somebody has to come from there.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Did you know that all along?”
“I pulled up what I could about you on the computer when I first heard your name. I got your whole history, including your home town. I thought maybe I’d sound ‘real’ to you.”
“You sure got my attention,” I said.
“Thank you,” he replied, and looked off to the horizon.
“William?” Nat began. “I’ve been intending to ask you if you recall how much was Norman Howell’s trust account?”
“Um. Two hundred thousand,” I said. “Give or take. I think.”
“You should count your zeros,” he said. “It was twenty million. Of course I was counting on you not looking.”
“Good God,” I said. “Where did it come from?”
“Originally?” Nat asked.
“That’s a good question.” Then it hit me like a lightning strike. When I looked up, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
“That day — ” I began. “That day in Howell’s cell. I was shuffling papers for him to sign. Remember, Nat, these people were all your clients, not mine. But that day I was shuffling papers and the title of the bank jumped out at me, or at least I thought it was a bank. I thought it said ‘Europe Bank Trust’, but it wasn’t. It was EUBANTRUST, all run together. She was Milo Unger’s wife, but she was also Richard Sawyer’s daughter.”
“William,” Nat said. “I’ve been trying to get you to think all along. You know I cannot abide messy transactions, even those close to home,” he pointed at Julie’s ba
ck, and that put me in mind of another time he’d sprung a surprise on me. “Sherry Euban was my client. She was wealthy, but I had no idea of her revolutionary proclivities. Her wealth came from her grandfather — Richard Sawyer’s father, Trent. I wonder whether her father ever even knew she existed. I do know that the elder Sawyer raised her as if she was his own. She stayed with him until the day he died. But I think she hated her father.”
“Good God,” I said. “She hated his guts. She tried to kill him.”
“The lengths some people will go to get attention,” Hank said.
“‘Family and friends come... Whenever you call’,” I said to myself just above a whisper.
“What?” Hank said.
“Nothing. Just a poem I read once. Nat, how was the Sawyer fortune divided up?”
“Let me tell him,” Walt said.
“Fine, Mr. Cannon,” Nat replied. “Go ahead.”
“Bill, the Governor got squat, zero, nothing. Sara Sawyer, Trent Sawyer’s legitimate wife with the six kids got the bulk of the estate, about eighty percent. Sherry Euban got a fraction.”
“The Trent Sawyer fortune is well over a billion dollars, all told,” Nat said.
I whistled. “Where is it going now?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk with you and Nat about, Bill,” Walt said. “I figure there are some good charities out there that need some help.”
“That’s why we’re really here,” I said. I looked at Julie. We winked at each other in the same instant.
Her face changed suddenly. Possibly she hadn’t been listening, or had been and what had been said thus far sunk in at that moment.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Emil Howell’s son Milo married Dick Sawyer’s daughter? That sounds like a match made in hell.”
“Yeah, it does,” Walt said.
“And the Governor didn’t even know about her?” Julie asked.
No, I decided at that moment. It felt right. He couldn’t have known about her. He’d left at age seventeen. He left Teresa Euban there with the old man, and she died in child birth, just as Milo’s mother had. He never knew his daughter had ever existed. The last time I saw the Governor, he had been looking out the window of the mansion into the night. Now I knew what he had been looking at. Not his father. Not him. He had been looking at her face. The face of his daughter’s fifteen year-old mother.
“He didn’t have the first clue about Sherry,” Walt said. “From what I’ve managed to glean from records and Milo’s computer files — which, by the way, thanks, Bill — Sherry’s mother was pregnant about the time Richard — uh, Governor Sawyer — fell out with his father and departed.”
“Who was she?” I asked.
“Teresa Euban?” Walt said. “She was the daughter of one of Trent Sawyer’s many whores. She died in childbirth. Fifteen is sometimes a tough age to have a child.”
“Yeah,” Julie said. “Any time is.”
I thought about it. My own family had its share of skeletons in the closet. Thank God none of us were in the limelight. Then I remembered. I was about to marry the new Lieutenant Governor’s niece. I shivered.
“Why did she hate her father so much, do you think?” Julie asked.
“It seems to me that Trent Sawyer, Emil Howell and the rest of The Posse were in the hating business. It got passed on to Sherry somehow. We’ve all heard about couples who separate. The one who gets custody of the kid gets to form the child’s opinion about the missing partner. And because there is a separation in the first place, the prevailing opinion usually isn’t of a positive nature.”
“He who wins the war gets to write the history books,” Walt said.
“Right,” I agreed.
“It was awful convenient,” Hank said, deftly switching the subject. “That fellow on Death Row killing himself like that.”
“That was Milo’s half-brother,” I said. “And he didn’t kill himself. The whole thing was engineered. The moment I walked in there and had Norman sign those papers, that was his death warrant. He was going to be put to death anyway. I believe that Sherry paid to have Norman killed. I believe she paid handsomely.
It would take a great deal of scratch. Some guards can’t be bought, or at least not cheaply.”
The pieces had all come into focus. Finally.
“Why?” Julie asked.
“It was all to help Milo. He wanted me. He wanted me on his side, and she would have done anything for him. Sherry arranged everything, but Milo wasn’t responsible for Norman’s death. I’m sure it was Sherry. It might not have been what Milo would have wanted, but I’m sure she saw it as the best thing for him.”
“You’re sounding like you knew her, Bill,” Julie said.
I thought about Sherry. About her eyes, her face twisted in anger and pain looking up into mine. “No,” I said. “I just know people. I know what they’re like when they’re on the way down and out. They’ll strike out at anyone, anything in an attempt to achieve something. But still, the last thing to die in a person is their willingness to help, no matter how twisted it may have become.”
There was a silence then that lasted a beat too long.
“I don’t know about you folks,” Hank said, “but I’m ready to change the subject.”
“Amen,” I said. “Amen.”
“Baby,” Julie said, leaning close toward me and talking just above a whisper. “Could you get me some more potato salad?”
“Better do it,” Hank said, and chuckled. For an old fellow who liked to blow things up, his hearing was pretty damned good.
“Be right back,” I said. I left them at Walt’s picnic table, went inside the house to the kitchen.
I dug the potato salad out of the fridge, found a spoon in the sink, cleaned it and spooned a good chunk of it onto a paper plate.
Out the back window of Walt’s kitchen far West Texas stretched on with its canyons and rock and broad vistas. I tried looking as far as I could. Maybe I’d be able to make out some detail in the distance. Something man-made, perhaps.
There was a wink of light at the top of a far range. Just a flash. The sun was not down yet, so it could have been a reflection off the windshield of a car or truck, high up on the range, or possibly off the wind screen of a low-flying aircraft. It was terribly bright, and just as terribly brief. But I had seen it.
The light.
Maybe it was telling me goodbye.
I hoped that was it.
Finis
Read the opening chapter of the next thrilling Bill Travis Mystery:
LONGNECKS & TWISTED HEARTS
Coming soon
PROLOGUE
The French ship ran toward the lowering sun. Behind her, southeastward, perhaps forty nautical miles distant, the wall of slate gray pursued: Hurricane.
The marauder’s master emerged from his cabin, tromped up the companionway steps to the pilot deck and raised his glass.
They had been running before the storm for a week; as if it were a bloody hunt and themselves the prey.
“Capitan,” his commander called to him. “There is land.”
The Captain turned, raised his glass and peered through it. There was land: it was the familiar long and narrow strip of sand bar that an earlier Spanish explorer had named Corpus Christi, which meant “Body of Christ,” perhaps for the fact of his deliverance from just such a storm as followed. Spaniards were superstitious. Louis considered that it was almost a form of blasphemy itself to go around naming things after Deity. Still... He turned back toward the distant wall of gray. If there was, truly, a personage — Deity himself — then he might be angry at Louis and his ship for the theft, if not the murders.
For the last six days the storm had tracked the ship and men across the Gulf of Mexico, as if consciously following every turn of the pilot. It was enough to make a man superstitious.
The day before the storm appeared, Louis du Orly and his crew had sacked a galleon on the Spanish Main, just off the coast of the island named for the orde
r of friars that now inhabited it: Dominica. They had taken five huge crates from the hold of the Spanish ship, each crate containing a treasure trove of gold and gems, then they had burned the ship to the waterline. Now, belowdecks, Louis had a dozen papists — the survivors of his conquest — in chains. He would return them to France for use in an exchange of prisoners. Perhaps his old captain himself could be returned to him.
But the storm — some of his men thought it was the Wrath of God — pursued. And France was so far away.
“Bear north,” he called. “Head for Matagorda. We will take shelter on the Brazos de Dios.” In the Latin tongue it meant “The Arms of God,” but in truth it was little more than a wide, muddy river that emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, named such by that idiot LaSalle. The story was that LaSalle, pursued by Indians, had stumbled upon the river, at first believing he had found the Mississippi. He swam it, and upon the other side he sank to his knees and offered a prayer to Divinity for delivering him, thus consecrating the river in God’s name. The Indians, more worldy-wise, had not attempted the crossing. Perhaps they were not mere savages. Perhaps they were wise. The Brazos was treacherous. If stories were true, half as many as had attempted the crossing had not made it. There were tales of great eddies in the current that would swallow any craft less than a large sailing ship. Also, there were great beasts; reptiles up to thirty feet in length that could eat a man whole. A year before, Louis had taken Le Royale up river perhaps ten miles and there had observed a great geyser of water and sand. As he brought his ship nearer, he observed a thing that was part fish and part reptile slink into the water and disappear. Through the course of his life Louis had found that legends, by and large, were not true. However, such stories were usually based upon some fact — some thing, however idiotic, and usually mis-observed. He would not himself have believed the animal existed had he not seen it. Yes, the Brazos was treacherous. There was greater danger, however, from sandbars, from the Indians, from disease and ignorance than there was from legendary dragons.