They’d load their wagon, and if they managed to fill it up, they’d turn around and head back.
If not, they’d travel a bit farther on the highway, in search of the next abandoned truck which fit their needs.
-9-
The previous day the Martinez brothers decided to do some fishing at a lake north of town, and camped for the night instead of returning directly to Blanco.
By doing so, they’d missed the ruckus at the bank. Didn’t know that John Savage had been arrested and was cooling his heels in Mrs. Montgomery’s boarding house.
As was their usual practice, they left the highway before getting to Blanco so they could enter the tiny town from the back side, down a seldom-used dirt road.
A few people saw them, but not many. And those who did witness their comings and goings would have assumed they were gathering supplies for themselves. They couldn’t see what was beneath the canvas tarp which covered the load.
And they weren’t likely to ask, either.
For the Martinez brothers didn’t have a lot of friends in Blanco.
Oh, they weren’t despised and hated, as Savage was.
They could be friendly at times, when the mood struck them.
More often than not, though, they just kept to themselves and did their own thing.
They never went out of their way to form bonds with anybody.
It came from a lifetime of being more or less alone. And relying only on one another for support.
On this particular morning, they arrived totally unseen at the large warehouse behind Spencer’s Market.
Spencer’s Market had been the only one in town. The only place for townsfolk to buy a gallon of milk or a dozen eggs, unless they wanted to drive the ninety miles to a large chain supermarket in Austin.
When word had gotten around the blackout was permanent, old man Spencer struck out for San Antonio to be with his son and daughter.
He struck out in the evening, thinking it safer to travel at night, and didn’t tell anyone of his plans beforehand.
No one knew whether he made it to the Alamo City. But all hoped he did.
For he was a kindly old man.
So kind, in fact, he left his store and warehouse both unlocked.
With a sign on the door of each:
PLEASE, FRIENDS
TAKE WHAT YOU NEED,
BUT SHARE WITH YOUR NEIGHBORS.
ONLY BY SHARING
CAN WE ALL SURVIVE THIS.
GOD HELP US ALL
-JACOB SPENCER-
The warehouse was only partially filled, for old Jacob had been suffering of late.
Business hadn’t been what it once was, since many of the town’s residents had gotten into the habit of driving to the chain store for weekly shopping trips and going to Jacob only when they ran out of something.
The grocery shelves were cleaned out within a week, the warehouse within a couple of months.
John Savage held the note on both properties, as he did with most other buildings in Blanco.
Once they were both empty and deemed worthless he cited arrears mortgage accounts to justify seizing both. He had huge padlocks placed on both doors and went to the Martinez brothers with his plans.
Savage explained his plan to the brothers in simple terms.
“Someday, when the warehouse is stocked, I’ll reopen the market. By then the canned food will be all gone. People will be hungry again. They’ll be clamoring to me to buy their dried beans, their pasta, their rice. And I’ll tighten my control of them even more so.”
Jesse Martinez had asked a simple question:
“But how will they pay you? You already have nearly all the gold and silver in town.”
Savage smiled but never answered the question outright.
“Oh, don’t you worry about that,” he said coyly. “I have a plan that has nothing to do with gold or silver.”
And he did indeed have a plan.
He’d gotten the idea from seeing an advertisement in an old magazine he was reading.
An ad for a reverse mortgage company.
A reverse mortgage company which offered to pay retirees a monthly payment for each and every month of their lives. The amount varied for each client, based on the value of the retiree’s house.
In exchange for lifetime monthly payments, the couple agreed to hand over their homes and properties to the company upon their deaths.
For certain people, specifically those with no living relatives or whose children had no need of the homes, it was a fair deal.
And of course it was a very fat cash cow for the reverse mortgage companies.
Since Savage had the paper on most of the properties in Blanco, and since nearly all those residents were behind in their mortgage payments, he had them over a barrel. He could legally throw them out of their homes any time he wanted to.
A compassionate man would never dream of doing so.
But Savage thought compassion was a human flaw. And he did not suffer it.
The fact was Savage hadn’t foreclosed on the town’s residents simply because he didn’t need their property yet.
Someday, he believed, the world would return to normal. Somebody would figure out how to get vehicles running again and the refineries would reopen.
At that point, the oil rights on property in Blanco would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe more.
Savage thought he was the only man in Blanco who knew the federal government had discovered a new oil field beneath their town. A field which promised to be the largest in Texas.
By the time it became public knowledge, Savage planned to be the outright owner of as much acreage in Blanco as possible. With ownership would come undisputed oil and mineral rights.
That in itself might be enough to make Savage a billionaire.
But men like Savage are never satisfied.
Men like Savage want it all.
The thought that there were some properties in Blanco which were paid off didn’t sit well with the portly banker. Neither did the knowledge those homeowners would never sell their properties to him at any cost.
So he came up with another idea to get their land.
-10-
Savage explained his scheme to the Martinez brothers, not because he had to. But because he thought he was brilliant for coming up with it.
He felt the need to brag to someone… anyone, to show how shrewd he was.
“There are twenty two residents in this town who own their property outright,” he explained. “I have made offers to buy all twenty two of them. Generous offers, I might add.
“They’ve all banded together and decided en mass not to sell.
“Purely out of spite.
“But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
“Because they still have to eat.”
Luis merely looked at his brother and nodded his head.
He pretended to listen to Savage’s words. But his mind was pondering the funds Savage must have available to him to make “generous” offers on twenty two houses.
He was starting to wonder whether it would be better to rob Savage instead of work for him.
As Savage rambled on, Luis made a mental note to discuss the idea with his brother later.
“My plan,” Savage continued, “Is to gather all dry food in the area and to place it on sale at the old market. I’ll sell it for gold and silver to anyone who has it.
“Most people won’t.
“But I’ll offer another payment option, for special customers.
“I’ll define special customers as those who own their own homes. For those people I’ll offer a special line of credit. I’ll draw up contracts so it’s all legal. I’ll offer them the opportunity to put their properties up for collateral.
The contract will say that they can have whatever I have for sale at the store. For a slightly higher charge. I’ll tack on interest charges so their balances quickly get out of their control, and I’ll make the balance due pa
yable in full in ten years.
“If it isn’t paid in full in ten years, their properties will be forfeited.
“I’m guessing that most of them will be unconcerned about what might happen ten years down the road. Especially when food is in very short supply and they’re on the verge of starving.
“I’m also guessing that damn few of them will be able to pay their bill in full.
“And I’ll take great pleasure in throwing them out onto the street, one at a time.”
He’d conveniently forgotten to mention the oil, or why he was so intent on getting his hands on as much property as possible.
The greedier of society are often hampered with blinders which prevent them from seeing the flaws in their evil plans.
For this latest scheme to work, he’d have to outlive all twenty two of the homeowners.
And at the rate he was going, that wasn’t likely. As the most hated man in Blanco, he was much more likely to suffer an early death from a bullet to the back than he was to survive ten more years.
He was also wrong in thinking he was the only man in Blanco who knew the town sat atop a rich oil field.
John Savage was wrong about many things.
And any one of them could result in his undoing.
As he was sitting on a bed in Mrs. Montgomery’s boarding house, trying to get comfortable with one hand cuffed to the bedpost, the Martinez brothers were taking the last few bags of beans and rice from their wagon and stacking them in his warehouse.
They walked over to the bank and were puzzled to find a note on the door.
BANK CLOSED
UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
BY ORDER
OF THE TEXAS RANGERS
They weren’t pleased. The deal they made with Savage was for a one ounce silver ingot for each wagon load they brought back, payable on demand.
The brothers didn’t trust Savage any farther than they could throw him, and always collected their money day to day.
But they wouldn’t be paid on this particular day.
They had to settle for the bottle of scotch they’d pilfered from Savage’s private stock in the back corner of the warehouse.
It would do for the time being.
After all, you can’t drink silver.
-11-
The Martinez brothers had planned to drop their cargo at the warehouse, retrieve their silver ingot from Savage’s bank, then set back out for another load, since the day was still young and they’d gotten a good night’s sleep.
The shuttered bank made them think twice.
Deep down inside themselves they knew Savage wouldn’t rip them off.
From the beginning they’d pegged him as the kind of man who was afraid of his own shadow. He seemed intelligent enough to know that if he ripped them off he’d pay a very heavy price.
But the locked bank door and the sign on its window made them wonder.
They were a long way from home the evening before when the shots rang out inside the bank. Cozy in their sleeping bags on the banks of a lake. They’d eaten their fill of lake perch, which wasn’t the finest of fish. But it was the best they could do, it was fresh, and there was plenty of it.
Men with full bellies and a comfortable sleeping bag can sleep through anything.
They’d also missed all the ballyhoo that followed the shots. By the time they snuck into town the back way the following morning, all the dust was settled and the townsfolk were back home in their beds.
They, unlike the Martinez brothers, had had a restless night. First there was the shooting itself and its aftermath. Then hours of speculation about what happened.
Finally, giddy hope they might be done with Savage for good. If the Ranger was able to find the evidence he needed, he’d keep his promise and haul Savage’s rather generous butt to Austin to stand trial.
The whole affair was the talk of the town until well into the night.
A group of boarders at Mrs. Montgomery’s boarding house sat on her veranda discussing the possibility of circulating a petition and presenting it to the district court in Austin.
A petition asking the judge to grant them their request to have Savage returned to Blanco for hanging.
It seemed there was a very old oak tree in the courthouse square which was once used to hang robbers, murderers and horse thieves.
Most of the townsfolk considered Savage all three, and wanted to revive the old tradition.
Unfortunately, the conversation took place directly below Mrs. Montgomery’s bedroom window, which was open so the air could circulate a bit.
She finally had enough of the foolishness and walked downstairs about four a.m. and asked the guests to go to bed.
Now, not long after sunrise, nearly the whole town was sound asleep and would be for several more hours.
Luis and Jesse didn’t know that, of course, and walked over to the boarding house for a cup of coffee and to see if they could find out why the bank was closed.
They were met upon the way by Luke, who’d heard the gunshots the night before but hadn’t been curious enough to drag himself out to see what they were all about.
He had walked up to the back fence of the boarding house, though, as one of Mrs. Montgomery’s employees was headed to the barn to milk the cow.
Luke had a very peculiar habit of walking around naked as a jaybird. He never bothered anyone, and the townsfolk considered him a harmless eccentric. But Mrs. Montgomery rarely allowed him to enter her property, unless it was to have a picnic with her beneath one of the huge elm trees on her grounds.
She was sweet on him and he on her. But she had a business to run.
And a naked man running around, even a harmless one, could be bad for that business.
It was an arrangement they’d had for several years. He, on his morning walk, would stroll by her place and sit in the soft grass just outside her fence.
If she was up and wasn’t too busy for a break, she’d walk out and join him. She’d bring a thermos of coffee and they’d share the same cup. They’d talk of the night they’d just completed and the day ahead.
On this particular day, though, Mrs. Montgomery would sleep until noon, having become exhausted by the night’s activities.
It was up to Rachel, the breakfast cook, to fill Luke in.
“Good morning naked guy,” Luis called out in greeting as the brothers met the nutty nudist. “Where’s everybody at this morning?”
“Good morning. Mostly in their beds. Apparently there was quite a ruckus last night, and most folks were up ‘til the early hours.”
“What kind of ruckus?”
“Savage shot two men in the bank. They’re still in there. A Texas Ranger happened to be in town and arrested him. He’s holding him upstairs at the boarding house while he’s doing his investigation.”
Luis and Jesse looked at one another. They were thinking the same thing: that the gravy train had finally run out.
That there would be no more silver ingots.
But Luke continued and gave them a thin ray of hope.
“He might not be able to hold him, though. The Ranger, that is. He told Mrs. Montgomery last night the case against him is very thin, and pretty much relies on fingerprint evidence. He’s gonna take Savage’s prints today to see if they match others at the crime scene. If they don’t, he said he’d probably have to let him go.
“And that would be an awful shame.”
The brothers didn’t comment.
Luke had no way of knowing he’d crossed the path of possibly the only two people in Blanco who wanted Savage to be a free man.
“Hey, Luke,” Jesse said.
“Yes sir?”
“I’ve always been kind of curious. How come you’re always walking around town naked, and let the whole world see your wiener? Does it give you some kind of thrill to do that?”
“Not at all. This is the way God intended us to be. Do you believe in God?”
“Yeah. Well, I guess so. But I don’t know. God ain
’t never been very kind to us.”
“He might be kinder if you followed His word more closely.”
“That still don’t explain why you let the whole world check out your wiener.”
“Read Genesis, my friend. Chapters two and three. You’ll see that when God created man and woman, he created them in this state.
“God wasn’t ashamed of the human body. He didn’t intend for Adam and Eve to be. They are the ones who put clothing on their bodies out of shame after they ate the forbidden fruit.
“I have led a virtuous life. I intend to continue to do so. I have eaten no forbidden fruit, and I am confident I have been a good Christian man. Therefore I have no reason to be ashamed. Should I become a sinner someday, I might be ashamed enough to cover myself. Until then I am free and proud.”
“Well, I guess you have that part right, Luke. My brother and I have been no saints. We’re sinners through and through, and maybe that’s why God hasn’t been so kind to us. Maybe we’re just not worth it.”
“It’s never too late to better yourself, Jesse. There’s hope for all of us.”
He smiled.
“Well, except maybe for John Savage. I believe he had his ticket for hell punched an awfully long time ago.”
-12-
There wasn’t much for the brothers to do but wait.
And to ponder their future.
“Let’s go back for the wagon and make another run,” Luis suggested.
“Why? You heard what Luke said. If Savage goes away, he’s going away hard. You don’t get your wrist slapped on a double murder charge. Even these days.”
“Well, what else do we have to do? There wasn’t much to do in this little town even before the lights went out. Now there’s absolutely nothing.”
He did have a point.
“So what do we do with the cargo we bring back?”
“Same thing we’ve always done. We’ll keep track of the loads we bring in until Savage gets released or hauled away to stand trial.
“If he gets released, we’ll tell him how many loads we brought back and demand an ingot for each one of them.”
No Help From Austin: Red: Book 5 Page 4