by George Wier
A light came on and Ms. Delphina opened the door. Before I could explain myself, Ms. Delphina, who seemed to be in a complete dither, said, “He’s gone. I’m afraid for him, Mr. Travis. Willard took a gun with him. He gone go kill a man.”
“Horner?” I asked.
She nodded vigorously. “You’ve got to stop him.”
“How long ago?”
“Ten minutes. No more.”
Without further word, I turned and ran back to the car.
I lobbed the umbrella into the back seat, still open, started up the thing and put it in gear.
*****
I called Gresham, even as I speeded through neighborhood streets. I decided it was also time to use the onboard GPS computer.
“Gresham,” he answered on the first ring.
“Willard Dalton is going over to Dale Horner’s house to kill him.”
“Hot damn. At four-thirty in the morning?”
“According to my dashboard, it’s a quarter of five.”
“I’ll send a couple of cruisers to intercept him,” Gresham said.
“Do that. He has a ten minute head start on me, but your people can be there first, I’m hoping. Tell you what. Have them block off all the streets at all the choke points to Horner’s house. They need to find Cottonmouth and detain him. Once I get there, though, I’m going on in. I want to talk to Horner myself.”
“Horner’s the killer, isn’t he?”
“I believe he is, but I need to talk to him about it before we drag him down.”
“Okay. Let me get on the horn and let everybody know you’re coming.”
“Give me Horner’s address. I’ll plug it into my onboard GPS system.”
He gave me the address and I tapped it in.
“Good night,” I said.
“Happy hunting.”
I slewed the wagon around curves and blew through red lights like the devil was after me.
After jumping on to Interstate 69 South, I got into the far right lane and took the exit to I-10 West, known locally as the Katy Freeway. At one point I looked down to see that I was driving in the rain pushing a hundred miles per hour, and decided to ease off back down to eighty-five or so.
At the appropriate turn-off, I went south on Durham, and through the Rice Military neighborhood. I remembered the area from my college days, what seemed like a lifetime ago. Hell, it had been a lifetime, as far as some people I had known were concerned.
I’d been lucky, I reflected. There had been far too many close calls, going all the way back to my high school days and one particularly bad scrape during a wolf hunt. At the time I was a wet-behind-the ears kid, without a clue as to what I was doing, and I’d nearly lost my life.
As I drew closer to the destination, the GPS map focused in on the neighborhood and the Horner house. It was at the end of a bend in Buffalo Bayou and was surrounded on three sides by water. Also, according the map, there were only two ways of getting to the house, and they were from the same street, bent like a bow ready for stringing. I suspected the police would be blocking both choke points.
I turned off into the River Oaks neighborhood coming from the north, a hard right hand turn that I nearly overshot. I braked hard and slewed into the turn.
Two minutes later I turned again and saw red and blue lights.
There was a pickup in front of them. It was Cottonmouth.
I pulled to a stop, grabbed the umbrella, got out and made my way over to the cop car. The window came down an inch.
“You Travis?” the police woman asked.
“I am.”
“Got your friend in the back seat. Had to take his gun away from him.”
“Bill!” Cottonmouth yelled at me from the rear seat.
“Let me talk to him for a second, please,” I told her.
She nodded and the rear window came down a bit.
“What are you doing in there?” I asked him.
“You set me up, is what I’m doing in here.”
“I had to,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I made a promise to Hank that I would do what I could for you, and that includes saving you from your stupid self.”
“You figured it out too, didn’t you.”
“I finally did,” I said. “And with a hell of a lot more clues than you had.”
“I wish you would let me go with you.”
“I can handle Horner,” I said.
“He’s a snake,” Cottonmouth said. “You watch yourself.”
“I will.”
I ducked back to the front of the car. “Officer, when I come back out of there, will you let him go?”
“If you’ll vouch for him.”
“I will. But don’t let him go until I come back.”
“You’re going to need some backup in there. Let one of us go with you.” She started to reach for her police radio.
“Wait,” I said. “No, there’s been enough killing for one day. I don’t want anyone else hurt. This is my parade, and I don’t want anyone raining on it.”
She nodded, reluctantly.
“If I’m not out of there in fifteen minutes, then you can send someone in.”
“That I can do,” she said.
I went back to the car, lobbed the umbrella in the back again, and moved forward.
The policewoman moved enough to let me pass. As I drove past her, I noted that she moved back into position.
While driving the last few blocks to Dale Horner’s house, I noted the dim glow coming from the east. The new day coming.
No telling what it was to bring.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
W e move and live and have our being as if there is justice in the world. This is the first premise—and possibly, it is the illusion—of any citizen, including this one.
As I sped toward my rendezvous with Dale Horner, I had every hope that he would freely confess to his crimes. That he wouldn’t need me to either convince him to do so, nor resist my efforts to take him in, one way or the other.
I’m not a lawman by trade, and the occasions have been rare when I’ve had to lay down my cards—the badge and a sidearm, the pair of aces in my deck which none other may trump—but when I’ve done so, it was only because someone else was not doing the right thing. Which brings me to my point. Justice, in the hands of human beings, is usually misplaced.
If there was any justice, anywhere, then at a minimum, Dale Horner would be home, and I would catch him. That’s all I wanted. It was all anyone could hope for.
I turned down the last driveway as the light in the sky increased. The rain continued to come on with a renewed ferocity with which I had become accustomed.
The house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, the last house in a bow-loop bend in the river. There was the one narrow road in and out, and no other. I pulled even with one of Horner’s neighbor’s houses, took my umbrella and got out. It was only as I did so that I realized the umbrella had a logo of some sort emblazoned across it in large blue letters. I took a second to read it. It said, I’M AN IDIOT. Either someone had played an effective joke on Jessica, or she was playing one on me. If I got the chance later on, I’d sort it out.
I walked the distance of three houses around the cul-de-sac and approached the three-story mansion at the end. I went up the petrified stone sidewalk and under the expansive front porch. There was a lit doorbell button there, but I decided to knock, instead.
I expected nothing from this, and was mildly shocked to see a distant stairway light come on through the frosted glass of the front door. I remarked to myself that the door must have set Horner back a few thousand bucks.
A hazy silhouette grew behind the frosted glass, and the door was unlocked and opened.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” Horner asked. He was wearing a tee shirt and baggy Bermuda shorts, the kind with multiple pockets. He was also barefoot.
“I’m fully aware. We need to talk.”
“Shit. Come on in.”
He opened the door for me and
turned on the front hall light. I was looking down for a mat upon which to wipe my feet, and something glistened from behind the bureau immediately to the left. It was broken glass.
I followed Horner into his kitchen.
“May as well start the coffee maker,” he said.
“Coffee sounds fine.”
“What brings you here on the morning of my wife’s death?” he asked.
“I would wonder what brings you here?” I asked.
“No where else for me to go. My boat’s gone. My wife’s gone with it. It’s only logical that I would come home.”
I nodded. “Only logical.”
“So, were you able to verify that she was on the boat?”
“Oh, she was on the boat, all right,” I said. “There’s no question of that.”
He poured coffee grounds into a sieve and placed it in the top of the coffee maker, then took the urn and ran some water into it from the sink.
“Only she was dead long before the explosion,” I said.
As if I’d never said a word, or perhaps he had tuned me out, Horner said, “Hold on just a second. I think this needs some cinnamon.
He reached for the spice rack standing on the counter and alarm bells started going off in my head.
I unhooked the loop from the hammer of my pistol and began to unholster it as Horner suddenly pivoted, bringing the spice rack at me in a roundhouse. The spice rack connected with the back of my hand and my pistol went flying.
The pain was both immediate and excruciating, but I managed to get in a punch with my other hand to his stomach and he went sprawling backwards.
I got down on my knees and scrambled for the gun, but Horner kicked it, and it went under the dishwasher, disappearing into the black gulf there as if it had never existed.
Horner regained his feet before I could do the same, and darted around the island counter.
“Give up,” I said. “The whole neighborhood is surrounded.”
He didn’t respond. Instead he darted for the back door, twenty feet away.
I started after him, but stepped on a small glass jar of spice and skated on it for a second before falling backwards onto my keister.
I got myself up and gave chase. Across the patio and into the rain, around an upended patio table and chairs that were still rattling and rolling around in the wake of his flight from me, I plunged into a back yard, splashing through inches deep puddles like a kid on the way home after school was out.
A nearly bowled over a barbecue stand, but dodged it, and continued.
Horner’s back yard was laden with tall trees and foliage, but it all whipped past me. His figure blurred ahead of me as I blinked back the rain in my eyes, but he came to an abrupt stop.
He was at the river, and I had him.
*****
Horner was looking at the boat tied up at his private pier on Buffalo Bayou, almost philosophically so. As I ran up and brought myself to a stop ten feet away from him, even with the water, I quickly saw his difficulty. This was where any of the scant planning that may have gone through his head back in the kitchen had apparently broken down. The boat was half full of rain and straining against its rope from the swift pull of the current, utterly useless to him or anybody else.
“Give it up, and just come along with me,” I said. “We’ll have a little talk with Detective Gresham, downtown, and you can even have a lawyer present.”
Horner looked at the coursing river, then back to the boat, and seeing no clear hope of escape, appeared to sigh. I was sure that he was going to give up at this point, but instead he reached into his baggy Bermuda shorts and removed a snub-nosed revolver, and pointed it at me.
*****
“Whoa, Hoss,” I said. “You’re responsible for the deaths of five people, according to my accounting skills. Don’t keep adding onto the body count or you’ll never come up for air. At this point you’ll be lucky not to get the death penalty.”
“You don’t know anything,” he said.
“Oh, but I do,” I said. “It all came to me in a dream last night.”
“Bullshit.”
I laughed. I was acutely aware that the rain had stopped and that to my right Buffalo Bayou was out of its bank and lapping over the edge of Horner’s pier.
“I never bullshit,” I said.
“Okay. Then what came to you in your stupid-assed dream, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“The whole thing.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you have anything figured out. I don’t think you’re that damned smart.”
“Oh. You’d be surprised. I know that when it comes to crowds of people, I don’t seem like this intellectual ball of fire. It’s probably the same thing people think of you, come to think about it. You and me, we’re a lot alike, except for one thing.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’m smarter than you.”
“Well, if you’re so smart, how come I’m the one holding the gun, and you’re the one about to become crab bait?”
“You would have to mention that. Okay, here’s where you made your first mistake. You remember when we were standing in the doorway of your stepson’s trailer?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I noticed that his gun had started to droop a little. I’d tried holding one up like that one time, straight out in front of me. After a minute, they tend to get awfully heavy. “There was you, me, Detective Gresham, and Clark. Also, there was another cop, but he’s not important.”
“Right. So?”
“Clark tried to call his mother, but couldn’t reach her. This was right after you tried it.”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, I told him he’d better call somebody—his conspirator, whoever he was, because I knew he had to have one—and he did call him. Before he hung up, he called the man by name. He called him ‘Jakey’, and that’s what came to me in the dream. I guess it took that long for it to sink in, because, well, you know, I was tired. But the name slid right past you. There’s probably only one Jakey—or rather, Jake—who would be anywhere near the Atwell Company, and that’s Jake Weller, your top security man. Hearing his name didn’t faze you then, but it should have.”
“So?”
“It didn’t faze you because you set the whole thing up all along. You told Weller—and who knows, maybe both of them; maybe both Weller and Price—to ingratiate yourself with the kid. Probably it all started innocently enough. Someone to spy on the kid. Maybe keep him out of trouble. But later, you had Weller supply the kid with a nice, shiny new van. Then a few guns. Later it was plastique—enough explosives to take out a yacht.”
He stared at me, wordlessly.
I plowed on ahead. “So you got Jake Weller to talk the kid into putting a little scare into the old man by shooting out his windows. Only you weren’t trying to have him killed. Oh no. You wanted to give Atwell a reason to think you’d done it, and you even sweetened the old honey pot by hiring a few of his musicians out from under him on a Saturday, the biggest night of the week for a blues bar. You wanted Atwell to come after you because you wanted to make it look as though Atwell had killed his daughter while trying to get to you.”
The rain continued to come down. The whole world was raining, a great Biblical deluge that would scrub the world clean once more. In the meantime, Horner waited. His hand had started to shake.
“You weren’t trying to get back with her,” I said. “You set it up so that she would come to the dock. Or hell, who knows, maybe you drugged her yourself and had Weller and Price take her there. I’m sure she no longer trusted you. I have my doubts she would have gotten within a mile of the place on her own, so your whole story about getting back together with her likely won’t stand up to any real scrutiny. No, she was here alone when you came calling, sometime yesterday afternoon, probably about the time your stepson was shooting up the Nite Wing and inadvertently killing his own grandfather. You came in here and she resisted you. There was a scuffle, in which thi
ngs were broken. Oh, you did your best to clean it up, but there’s broken glass under the edge of the bureau by your front door. She struggled with you as you chloroformed her.”
“That’s a hell of an accusation.”
“Oh, there’s more. A lot more. I just got the results of a preliminary toxicology report on Virginia—sorry, on Gingie—before coming over here. There was enough chloroform in her system to kill a very large horse. The deal is that she was already dead. In fact, she was several hours dead when your yacht was blown sky high. The explosion was supposed to cover that and be the ‘reason’ for her death. But it wasn’t. You kill Gingie and make it look like Atwell did it, then you don’t have to pay any alimony. And a woman like that, a sophisticated woman with a high-powered Houston divorce lawyer is going to get some major bucks out of you, on a monthly basis, and for a very long time. But killing her, that’s sort of has the same result as a no-fault divorce. So, you can’t get insurance money out of a murder, no matter who commits it, because insurance companies don’t pay policies when there’s been a crime. But you never had her insured in the first place. No. But you did have the yacht insured, and for a hell of a lot more than it’s actually worth, I’m willing to bet. Oh, don’t worry. There will be a paper trail. By the way, Price and Weller are both dead. But you knew that, since you sent Johnny to kill them. First rule in a conspiracy is get rid of the conspirators.”
“That’s a hell of an accusation. Have you asked Johnny about this?”
I caught the movement in the distance behind Horner. Something was coming. Something big. “Johnny and I had a little talk. Right before he died.”
“I don’t believe you. Johnny’s not dead.”
“What’s the phrase I heard tonight? Oh. I remember now. Deader than yesterday’s news.”
“And you’ve told everybody about your little conspiracy theory, I’m sure,” he said. “That dumbass detective, maybe?”