by George Wier
“It’s about Highway 119, that’s what it’s about. A Highway that is going nowhere.”
“Penny said something about a restraining order. Where? What Court? Who signed it? Why?”
“I don’t know all that, and I most especially don’t know why?” Lief wasn’t the kind of guy to calm down simply because someone tells him to do so, but I was using soothing and calm tones with him and I was beginning to get that tone across.
“Well,” I said. “Let’s start with the Court Order. You got it there with you?”
“Um. Yeah.” I heard papers being shuffled around. “Here’s the goddamned thing.”
“How thick is it? How many pages?”
I heard a sigh. “About five or six.”
“What does it say, essentially?”
“Well shoot! I got no idea what it says. It’s written in legalese language. Something about injunctive relief and temporarily restraining. Crapola like that.”
“Okay. Flip through it and see if there is a section with a Roman numeral two on it.”
I heard rattling paper and low curses. There was a train going by somewhere within half a mile of Lief Prescott and his restraining order.
“Found it. It’s on page two,” he said.
“Read it to me, Lief.”
“Okay. It says: ‘On or about April second of this year, the State of Texas annexed the property known as the Pender Addition of Southwestern Robertson County, Texas, for the purposes of constructing a multi-lane throughway as a part of the state highway system. This was done through the Eminent Domain doctrine. However, the current owners of the property were not advised of the annexation nor were they given sufficient notification to remove any personal property in existence on said property.”
“That’s enough for now, Lief. What’s on that property that’s so hot?” I asked.
“What do you mean? There’s nothing on that property.”
“Have you been on it?” I pressed him, cautiously.
“I’ve walked every square foot of that property. There ain’t nothing there but scrub brush and gullies and an old hay barn.”
“An old hay barn.”
“That’s what I said. An old hay barn that’s about to fall down under its own weight.”
“And nothing else?”
“Nada. Zip. Goose egg,” he said. He was starting to calm down a little. That was a plus.
“Okay,” I said. “But there is something there. Who’s Jockovitch?”
“He’s some big time lawyer from Boston. Flying down here. He said he doesn’t want anybody near that property for the next fourteen days. Bill, I’ve got a survey crew that needs in there right now. Also, there’s a big hill on the place that we’re going to have to doodle-bug our way through.”
Doodle bugging meant blasting with dynamite. I’d heard enough.
“Lief. Don’t do anything. When’s this lawyer coming in?”
“Tonight. Flying in to Easterwood Airport in College Station. They’ve got the biggest runways between Dallas and Houston, and it’s pretty close. Thirty miles from here.”
“Okay. Give me a couple of hours and meet me at that little café you’re so fond of.”
“You’re coming?” he asked. I could hear the relief in his voice.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Hot damn,” he said, and hung up.
CHAPTER TWO
A phone call to Julie to let her know I wouldn’t be home for supper and a quick stop for a full tank of gas, and I was on my way.
I took to the back roads East of Austin, the traffic thinning down to about one pickup truck or car every five minutes, and with the sun squarely behind me I got to the gently rolling hills, my now aging Mercedes eating up the miles as I looked over the countryside.
Driving for any good distance is somewhat therapeutic, and I found myself humming along to an old Jazz tune.
And so I started thinking about Lief Prescott, whom, I was certain, wouldn’t be able to pick out jazz from a choice between Count Basie and an elephant stampede. George Strait and Randy Travis were more his type of music. I don’t know that they still make them like Lief Prescott, but then again, somebody is sure buying that country music these days.
I get along in life by making it a point to know a lot of people and being sure they know I’m the guy that can help them. That was how I met Lief.
My good friend, Hank Sterling, had given Lief my name and I got a call from him one morning after coming back from a misadventure back home. All I could really remember about that time was a black female Sheriff, a great deal of water coming down on my head, and Julie having our first baby together, Jennifer. When I first spoke with Lief over the phone he didn’t bother with any back-story but simply began by telling me what he needed from me, as if he were placing an order with Sears and Roebuck.
And that pretty much sums up Lief Prescott. If the government were to give him a hundred million and tell him to get mankind to the stars, Lief would figure it out and still come in under budget. All by way of saying that he was the kind of fellow who got what he wanted. Who was I to try and stop him? No. With Lief, all I saw was opportunity.
Since then, with a little backing from a few of my friends, Lief had built a toll road in Houston, had added a runway to the George Bush Airport, and was now working on the biggest thing to hit Central Texas: a five-lane highway neatly bisecting the triangle between Houston, San Antonio and Dallas.
With the kind of client base that included people like Lief Prescott, within a few years I’d be able to retire if I played my cards right. My only problem was that I had never been what you’d call a good card player. Yet.
Small towns with quaint names passed on by. I made good time.
I hung a right, headed east on Highway 79 and passed through the one-horse bergs of Milano and Gause. A few miles on down and I found Lief’s highway where it bisected 79. I noted that the road was still blocked off there. I went on into Hearne, Texas, an old Southern Pacific railroad terminus and once the home of a large Italian prisoner of war encampment. When World War II ended most of the Italian POWs who were released decided to settle down there, and so the local phone book reads more like the directory for, say, Brooklyn, New York, than it normally would for a small Texas town of less than five thousand souls.
I loved the place.
I turned right, from memory, onto Highway 6, went north one block and there was the café. Lief’s maroon Ford King-cab pickup was parked out front.
*****
In small towns they don’t usually pass ordinances against smoking in restaurants. I’d forgotten that. The cigarette smoke was thick inside the Family Diner, and as far as I could see, there weren’t any families in evidence. It was a good name, though. If I had been driving sedately along Highway 6 with my wife and kids, I would’ve stopped.
Lief was hunkered over the jukebox in the corner. A quarter disappeared into the machine from his meaty fingers and he tapped a couple of buttons.
A waitress was suddenly in front of me, a short woman with broad thighs and an equally broad smile and twinkling, pretty brown eyes. I bet she made good tips with that smile and those eyes.
Before she could say anything we heard a voice.
“He’s with me.” It was Lief.
“Fine,” she said and stood back, waiting.
Lief came over and shook my hand. He had a grip like iron.
“Made good time,” he said. “I wish you were here this morning when that Constable served those papers, though.”
“Yep,” I said. “I’ll bet you do.”
“Come on and sit down.” Lief turned and led me to his table. There were plates there that needed cleaning away, and the waitress, whose name tag ready “Dollie” began gathering them up.
“Coffee?” she asked me.
“Iced tea will be fine,” I told her.
She gave me that smile again. I pegged it: a smile that seemed to say ‘You and I have got a secret.’
She flitted off.
“Interesting folks around here,” I said.
“That’s for sure. Here’s the papers, Bill.” He handed me a re-used manila file folder and I took it and laid it on the booth cushion beside me.
“You ain’t gonna look?” Lief asked.
“No reason to. What we are going to do is take a little ride, see what’s on that land.”
“What?” His voice came up a decibel level.
“Quiet, Lief,” I said. “We don’t know anything until we know something, and we won’t know that until we know everything.”
The restaurant was half full ― or half empty, depending upon one’s point of view ― and I didn’t want to share our conversation with everyone in town.
The waitress set a glass of iced tea in front of me, and with her other hand refilled Lief’s coffee cup, then she was gone.
“Lief, you wouldn’t happen to have the original plat map for that property, would you?”
He smiled.
“I’ve got it and about two hundred others out in my truck.”
“Get the one we want, would you?” I asked.
“Alright. Be right back.”
It was after he got up and left that I realized the jukebox was playing something by Aerosmith. Just when you think you’ve got somebody pegged ―
To my right, outside the window, Lief was rifling through the back seat of his pickup.
I looked up to see the waitress giving somebody else the same smile she had given me. I suppose I was both vaguely relieved and disappointed at the same time.
Lief was back inside of a minute.
I moved my iced tea aside, wiped up the condensation on the table and unrolled the map.
“You’re looking at it upside down,” he said.
So I was. I righted it.
“Here,” he said. A thick forefinger pointed out the tract. It was 269.23 acres. The map showed two structures instead of one.
“This smaller one has to be the barn,” I said.
“Sure is. The house is not there anymore.”
“What happened to it?”
He took a sip of coffee. “I don’t rightly know. There’s a glade where that house used to be, but little evidence that there ever was a house there.”
“Burned down, maybe?” I asked.
“Nothing charred around there. No slab. No old piers or beams. Nothing.”
“Okay.”
I looked back down at the map.
Something very strange happened. Lief’s coffee cup broke. One minute it was sitting there, the next he was jumping up from his seat. I snatched the plat map away, but a corner of it had gotten wet. Coffee was everywhere.
“They don’t ordinarily do that, do they?” I asked.
“Dammit!” Lief said.
I looked to my right. I don’t know why, just reflex I suppose.
There was a neat, round hole in the window just above the baseboard.
I slipped out of the booth, taking the court order and the plat map with me, grabbed Lief’s arm and pulled him after me.
“What the hell?” he asked.
We had the attention of the entire restaurant. The waitress was standing near the door, not smiling. There was less glass and therefore less exposure to the outside in that direction.
“Back door?” I asked.
She pointed. I stuffed the paper under my arm, reached for my wallet and drew out the first bill I encountered ― a fifty. I handed it to her and led Lief off the way she had pointed, through a kitchen where a skinny, acne-faced kid and a big black man labored over a smoking grill.
The kid looked at me, yawned, and turned back to some frying eggs.
“Hold on just a goddamned minute, Bill. What the hell?”
“We’re being shot at, Lief. It’s either that or holes magically appear in windows simultaneously when coffee cups explode.”
“Shit,” he said.
Through a back room with a large cooler and big sinks and there was the rear door, standing open. There lay dimming sunlight, lengthening shadows and green grass out there.
CHAPTER THREE
Outside there was a smelly dumpster and an even smellier grease bin. A line of scrub brush divided the diner property from an open field beyond, but there was no fence.
“Let’s circle around,” I said.
“What about the police?”
“That’ll just upset everybody. Right now we don’t want any attention. Come on.”
We went through the brush, turned right when we were through and jogged down a block to the next street and doubled back across the highway when the traffic was clear.
Up a grassy embankment we came upon a set of railroad tracks. We flew over them, rushed down the other side and turned right.
A hundred yards ahead of us was a pickup truck, just getting into motion. Whoever was driving it was in a hurry. Gravel and dust flew and the truck lurched forward, did a little fishtail for a moment and then turned left and disappeared into an old residential neighborhood.
“That was the sniper,” Lief said.
We arrived where the rear truck tires had left a set of divots in the dirt road beside the track.
I looked in the direction of the café. I couldn’t see it.
Lief motioned to me, already moving that way.
Up the embankment again, we both saw where the grass had been pressed down in several places.
“Here,” Lief said. “He had his knees planted here.” He pointed. Something caught my eye off to our right. The glint of shiny metal.
“Cartridge,” I said, pointing.
Lief started to pick it up, but I touched his arm.
“Wait.” I loosened my shirtsleeve at the wrist, pulled my hand inside the cuffs and reached down and picked up the cylinder with my shirtsleeve.
“Damn,” Lief said. “Fingerprints, huh? Just like a TV private eye. What are you, Bill?”
“I don’t know about any of that,” I told him, “but this is the only thing we’ve got at the moment. We may need it.”
“I ain’t never been shot at before,” he said.
“I have.”
He exhaled slowly and I looked at his face. I could see relief there.
“Sort of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?” I said. “Close call like that.”
“Yeah.”
“You alright?” I asked.
The tension drained away from his face. He smiled. “You know, for the last five minutes I haven’t felt the pain in my leg where it got broken in High School. Also, I haven’t been thinking about hiring and firing and checking accounts.”
“Yep,” I said. “Me neither.”
I put the cartridge in my shirt pocket. I didn’t say anything to Lief, but I certainly thought it. It was the ejected shell of a .22-250. A deer rifle. If the bullet had hit either one of us, it would have gone through and out the other side, funeral arrangements pending.
*****
We were in Lief’s pickup and headed south on Highway 6 when the local police blew past us, lights rotating and siren wailing.
We drove on.
*****
I was thinking about my Mercedes, which I had moved to the empty parking lot of a funeral parlor next door to the café. I was hoping that no one had noted it and connected it up with the rifle fire and pointed it out to the police. The old tub of bolts had seen me through a number of miles and I had a soft place in my heart for it.
About five miles south of town Lief turned us off down a narrow county dirt road. The sun was getting low on the horizon through the bare tree b
ranches and neither one of us was talking. I’d never known Lief not to talk before, but I could understand it.
After ten minutes of winding countryside and a stunning sunset, Lief slowed us down and pointed to his left. I looked but could see nothing but gathering darkness and woods.
We drove a quarter of a mile further and pulled off the road at a turnout that led down a deserted lane.
“We’ll park here and walk back,” he said.
“You got a flashlight?”
“Does a hen lay eggs?”
We climbed out and walked back to about the area Lief had pointed. We stopped.
Dense brush marked the property in question. I turned and looked behind us. Even in the dark I could see the silhouettes of abandoned earth movers across the road; the highway that, as Lief said, was going nowhere.
“Just so you know,” Lief said, “I don’t look on this as trespassing. Jockovitch is some kind of lawyer, and the fellow who owned this was named Pfeffer, and is probably dead. The name has been on the plat map at least since 1936. So the owner hasn’t told me I can’t go on this place and the court papers didn’t say anything about it either. And court order or no court order, this place was condemned.”
“You don’t have to rationalize it to me, Lief,” I said.
“Oh. Alright. Let’s go, then. Let’s wait until we get into the woods a bit before turning on the flashlight.”
“Yeah. We’ve had enough attention already.”
At that moment, far down the road that led back to the highway, I could see spreading illumination. Headlights.
We moved quickly, stepping across the ditch through high weeds and up to the barbed-wire. Lief put his foot on the middle strand and pushed down while pulling up on the top strand.
I stepped through without a snag. It’s a skill gained from country living. I haven’t lived in the country since I was a kid, but some things you never forget. Once through I held the wire for Lief and he came on through. No mishaps.