by George Wier
“All I’m saying is, you take the less-traveled path and you might get somewhere. But finding Harrison Lynch and not going any further is the broad highway straight to hell and nowhere. You find out who Harrison Lynch really is. That’s your ticket, old son. Because if I’m right in what I think, Jack Pense isn’t going to be the last killing.”
“What do you mean by that?” Micah asked intently.
Homer shrugged. “There was a lot of speculation that went on back in those days, and a lot of it was whispered. Vague rumors and half-told tales. You dig them up and I believe you’ll be getting somewhere. And now that’s all I’m going to say. I’ve said too damn much as it is.”
“Okay. One last question,” Micah said. “What does Bonaparte Foley have to do with this whole mess?”
“He was the ranger sent down here to put a stop to the killings. By hook or crook.”
“What do you mean, by hook or—”
“That’s how things sometimes worked back then. Foley was supposed to find the guy and make the case on him. But if he couldn’t make a solid case, he was supposed punch his ticket for him.”
“Did he find him?”
The old man laughed a grim little laugh. “Well, the killings stopped and there never was any prosecution, so you figure it out. Now that’s all you’re getting from me.”
“All right,” Micah said, and meant it. “I won’t press you any further.” He opened his wallet and handed the old man the hundred-dollar bill. Homer took it without hesitation. Maybe he’d already forgotten that he’d turned it down.
• • •
When Micah got back to his truck, he found a ticket for illegal parking under one of the wiper blades, flapping in the gulf breeze. On the signature line printed in perfectly legible block letters was the name of the officer who had issued it: Leland Morgan. The son-of-a-bitch even put an exclamation point after his name.
[ 9 ]
Lieutenant Leland Morgan watched Micah Lanscomb as he walked along the beach below the seawall. It was low tide at the moment, and the strip of beach had widened by perhaps a hundred yards. Lanscomb had his boots over his shoulder and seemed to be in no hurry. His patrol uniform was rumpled, his overly-long hair flopped around in the breeze. There was no telling what Boland saw in the guy. How could he trust him so implicitly with his business?
The beach was otherwise deserted at this hour. It was just Lanscomb and the surf. Morgan had to climb back inside his cruiser at one point when Lanscomb disappeared from view past a hotel boardwalk. He drove a quarter of a mile down. He passed the boardwalk and parked opposite the hotel that stood over the water on top of a forest of black pilings. He got out and approached the seawall, walked a few yards on the wide boardwalk, and watched Lanscomb.
Lanscomb had stopped and was looking toward a set of stairs ahead of him that ascended from the beach to the top of the seawall. Morgan waited and fingered his binoculars.
A man came into view from the stairs and sauntered across the sand toward Lanscomb. It was the beachcomber—Underwood.
Underwood approached Lanscomb and the two began talking. Morgan raised his binoculars.
“What are you two dipshits saying?” Morgan whispered under his breath. “Goddammit, I better let her know right away.”
Morgan watched as Lanscomb pulled out his wallet and offered money to Underwood, who appeared to refuse it. Lanscomb then gestured back the way he had come—in the direction of Nell’s.
A shiver went up Morgan’s spine. If they turned, they would certainly see him. At this angle, if he moved, the motion might attract their attention.
Leland Morgan stepped back slowly across the boardwalk until his tailbone encountered the opposite railing. He crouched until only the top of his head could be seen from the vantagepoint of the two men.
At that moment the two turned toward him and began walking.
Morgan waited until they were beneath him, thirty feet down, then stood and walked back to his cruiser. He drove to Nell’s, where Lanscomb’s little security truck was parked illegally by the seawall. He stopped next to the truck and a smile slowly spread across his face.
It took no more than a moment to write the parking citation. He had to fish through his glove box for the pad, though. It had been more than a year since he’d written a ticket. It was something a lieutenant didn’t normally do but technically could. He paused only a moment when he had filled out the form down to the officer’s signature line. Normally, his signature was no more than an illegible scrawl. It was the badge number next to it that the municipal court went by in the event the violator pled not guilty and he’d have to appear before the bench or a jury. Instead, Morgan wrote his name in plain block letters. He wanted Lanscomb to know his place in the scheme of things, and who was putting him there.
The breeze from the Gulf drove the odor of salt spray into his sinuses. He fought the urge to sneeze.
Why the hell was he here in Galveston, so far from Lubbock and home?
Leland Morgan shook his head. For some questions there weren’t any answers.
He placed the ticket under the wiper blade of Lanscomb’s pickup, climbed back into his cruiser and drove away, his spirits beginning to lift for a change.
[ 10 ]
The DPS lab completed the autopsy and sent Jack Pense’s body back to Galveston shortly after noon. C.C. Boland had Jennifer Day clutching his arm when he walked into the Welch and Sons Funeral Home to make the arrangements.
Billy Welch, the owner of half a dozen funeral chapels strung along the Texas Gulf Coast, was there to greet them. Billy’s sleeves were rolled up and he was ready to help. Billy and C.C. had known each other since the two of them were kids in grade school.
Jenny picked out a five-thousand dollar casket, the flowers and the headstone. Billy tried to shave the price downward, knowing it was one of Cueball’s employees, but Cueball glanced at the figures and shook his head.
“What the hell you think you’re trying to do, Billy?”
“What do you mean?” Welch asked.
C.C. sighed and fished out his checkbook. “You’re undercharging me, and you’re doing it on purpose.” Then he wrote a check for a little over seven thousand dollars and never batted an eye. He placed the check in Billy’s hand and Welch sighed deeply.
“Thank you, C.C.,” he said. And meant it.
After the arrangements were made, Billy requested a two-hour window to prep the body for a brief viewing. It would be a closed casket ceremony—this Cueball had known, having already seen the grisly remains at the warehouse—but Jack’s common-law wife hadn’t seen him yet.
During the wait, Cueball took Jenny to a cafeteria a block down from the funeral home and made it a point to get her a cup of coffee and spike it with Irish rum. Business was slow. The two were seated alone in a section away from the listless cafeteria workers. Every time Jenny got her spiked cup of java drank halfway down, C.C. reached across and poured in another dollop of rum from his flask. At her first protestation, Cueball said, “This will stiffen your spine a little. And you’ll need it when you go in and see Jacky.” And so she drank and drank some more. Just about the time Cueball estimated she was feeling no pain, his pager beeped.
Cueball read the number, got up and used the pay phone in the lobby. Micah answered on the first ring.
“Did you know a Texas Ranger by the name of Foley?” Micah sounded perpetually tired.
“Of course I knew him. In fact, I was at his funeral, along with the most of the rangers in the state.”
“Okay. Good.”
“What’s Foley got to do with this?” Cueball asked.
“Uh. Let’s just say I have my sources. Maybe we should be looking for a little more than just Harrison Lynch.”
“Yeah? Who’s your source?”
“It’s—”
“Huh! I already know. It’s Homer Underwood, isn’t it? Why do you listen to that old grifter?”
“He’s no grifter, Cueball. At least not anym
ore. He’s just an old man who knows things.”
“Alright. Fine. And Homer knew Lynch was involved?”
“He mentioned the name before I did,” Micah replied.
“What else did he say? And how did Foley figure into his thinking?”
“Homer said he suspected that Jack’s death tied into a bunch of killings that happened here back during the war. Foley worked the case. In fact, according to Homer, Foley was sent down here to put a stop to the murders by whatever means necessary.”
“Which war?” Cueball asked.
“The war. World War II.”
Micah Lanscomb heard a very long roar of nothing over the line and waited. Finally Cueball spoke. “Alright. Have you slept yet?”
“No. I’m not tired.”
“That’s because you burned that fuse out a long time ago. All right, these are orders: Go home and get some sleep. Drop by the house tonight, though, and I’ll tell you about Harrison Lynch.”
“Okay, but what about Foley? And the other fellow Homer named? Denny Muldoon?”
“Muldoon? Don’t know him. What about them?” Cueball asked.
Micah laughed. “I suppose we’ll talk about it tonight.”
“Get some sleep. You sound like the walking dead.”
Cueball heard the phone click dead and snorted. “Well, hell,” he said to himself.
When Cueball returned to the table he found Jennifer snoring softly. He woke her and they went back to the funeral home and completed the arrangements. The funeral was to be two days hence.
[ 11 ]
“You promised to tell me the story of Harrison Lynch,” Micah said. They sat on the front porch of Cueball’s house, just as they had so many times before, enjoying the balmy darkness of the Gulf night.
“You know, in a couple of weeks we’ll have to move these sessions inside,” Cueball said. “It’s about to get too cool for late evening reveries.”
“Lynch, Cueball! Quit evading the subject.”
Boland laughed. “Where to start? Okay. I’d been on the force a year up in Dallas, but I was still a rookie by the old timers’ standards. It was my first week in a radio car all on my own when the call came in...”
• • •
Cueball talked and Micah listened.
According to Cueball, Harrison Lynch was a slim character with a shock of wavy blond hair, a hatchet-shaped face, and a pair of teal blue eyes that were devoid of any trace of humanity. In a word, Harrison looked hungry.
His first recorded professional foray into his career as a thief was a motel burglary off the feeder road to Interstate 20 on the outskirts of Pecos, Texas. The year was 1966, and Harrison was a mere twenty-two years old. The official incident report stated that the thief came in through a hole in the roof of the attached tool shed. He got through a steel door by using a hand-drill through the lock mechanism and into the room containing the motel safe.
The motel manager was known to begin drinking early in the afternoon and to lock up the place as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon. Then he would polish off whatever bottle with which he happened to be engaged, and pass out somewhere in the vicinity of his cot—any actual bed to be had having been employed for the sole use of the guests, should there be any.
The safe contained a week’s worth of receipts in the form of cash and traveler’s checks totaling $762—a remarkable sum for a run-down motel slap dab in the middle of hell-and-gone. This total, however, would be significant for Harrison Lynch. It was twelve dollars over the minimum limit for a felony conviction. The local prosecutor, a former washout from the Mercury Astronaut Program, was more than ready to nail Lynch to the wall.
Lynch was bonded out of jail by his family—the Penses—and removed from Pecos for good long before the trial was to begin.
He put in an appearance in Houston three weeks later when he burgled a downtown jewelry store in the middle of a hot summer night. The take was seventy thousand in diamonds, gold, watches, necklaces, and a small stack of St. Gaudens twenty-dollar gold pieces. Harrison was moving up in the world.
During his second heist in Houston, Harrison Lynch killed his first human being. This was three weeks after the gold and jewels had been siphoned through the network of black beer and whiskey joints that kept Houston’s Fifth Ward juiced and throbbing, converted to hard cash and spent on prostitutes of every ilk. His victim was an elderly night watchman, a black man, who came upon Harrison after he fell from the roof of a warehouse that stood along the Houston Ship Channel.
It was a hot, humid night in high summer during the dark of the moon. The night man, a sixty-six-year-old grandfather named Curtis Gray, heard the racket and the moaning and went to investigate. When he tried to help Harrison to his feet, Harrison pulled a knife and stabbed the man five times in the belly and once in the throat, then whined like a baby for twenty minutes over his scraped knee. When he finally pulled himself together, he took Gray’s keys and helped himself into the warehouse where he set off an alarm that caused permanent damage to both his ears. Harrison gained a set of keys, lost a knife and a good part of his hearing. It took Curtis Gray five days to die.
After the fingerprints were lifted from the knife, photographed and run through the FBI’s Houston crime lab, both the Houston Police and the Texas Rangers became interested in the whereabouts of Harrison Lynch.
Within days the mug shot from his booking at the Pecos County Jail appeared on WANTED posters in every post office and police station throughout the Southwest.
Harrison was arrested two months later.
It was the middle of the night. Cueball Boland responded to an alarm call at a storage facility near the newly-constructed North Central Expressway. He cut his red and blue lights three blocks away from the call, killed his headlights and coasted up to the place by feel in the close dark.
The manager, a twenty-one-year-old beauty school student named Veronica Hilliard, lived at the back of the storage facility in a trailer. The new silent alarm system had been going off randomly of late for no discernible reason, and she was tired of it. She came into the office and had the fatal misfortune of catching Harrison Lynch with a stethoscope held against the side of the company safe. Harrison had also apparently stolen himself a new knife somewhere along the way.
Cueball heard the screams and was out and running before he could begin to think about it. He climbed the chain link fence in nothing flat. He had his Smith & Wesson .357 in his hand before he crashed through the glass door of the storage office and got the drop on Harrison Lynch. The screamer was there with him, but she had stopped screaming—and everything else. Harrison was covered with blood. Cueball had about two pounds of pressure on his trigger with Harrison Lynch’s forehead resting comfortable in his night-glow sights. Instead, he eased off the trigger and reached for his cuffs.
The famous Henry Wade personally prosecuted the case. With Cueball’s testimony and photographs of the deceased, it took a Dallas County jury exactly seven minutes to decide that Harrison Lynch desperately needed to die in the state’s electric chair for the murder of Veronica Hilliard. For good measure they tacked on forty years for breaking and entering. A month later, a Harris County jury took approximately eleven minutes longer to give him a second death sentence for the Curtis Gray murder. Three hours after the judge’s gavel fell in Houston, Harrison Lynch found himself wrapped in chains and bound for Huntsville.
Six years later, through efforts of a clique of bleeding-heart lawyers who were appealing his case on a number of frivolous grounds, Harrison still roosted on death row, eating all that good jailhouse food and waiting for his turn to ride the lightening. Then the Supreme Court abolished capital punishment. Harrison was transferred up to one of the regular maximum security units, this one on the Brazos River Bottom, where he was shocked to learn that a good portion of the inmates were stone cold psychopaths like himself. Thus he began his long sojourn with the Texas Department of Corrections. He spent his days chopping cotton and his nights trying to
survive the various assaults that came his way from the muscle-bound homosexuals and Dixie Mafia types. Both groups viewed the killing of a harmless grandfather and the brutal murder of a pretty young woman as the moral equivalent to child molestation. But such are the wages of sin in the great State of Texas.
• • •
“So you had a chance to punch his ticket?” Micah said.
Cueball nodded in the darkness. “Yeah. That Smith & Wesson’s trigger was honed to four pounds let-off. I’ve wondered since then if he ever knew how close he was to Gloryland.”
“Do you regret the way it shook down?”
“Not one bit. I’ve never killed anybody, and I’m glad of it. As far as Jack goes, I didn’t kill him by letting Harrison Lynch live that evening. Lynch is the one who did it, and he did it by exercising his own free will. I had nothing to do with his choice.”
“I know you believe that intellectually, but is that how you really feel?”
Cueball sipped his drink and then stared off into the dark nowhere for a few seconds before he spoke. Then he laughed a little and shook his head. “Ain’t life a bitch sometimes?”
[ 12 ]
“Homer Underwood is dead,” Cueball broke the news to Micah Lanscomb in person. Another dark morning, another rude awakening with Micah in his skivvies and Cueball on his front steps.
“Goddammit,” Micah said. Cueball waited for Micah to invite him in, to say something past his initial curse, to break down and cry—anything except simply stand there looking at him.
“I know you liked the old son-of-a-bitch,” Cueball said.
Lanscomb hung his head forward and shut his eyes tightly. Perhaps he was praying.
“Get dressed,” Cueball said. “You were seen with him yesterday, and you’re a sitting duck in this trailer. You’re moving in with me until all this blows over.”
• • •
Cueball drove his burnished maroon Lincoln while Micah rode shotgun.
“I thought we were going to your house?” Micah said.