Winning Texas

by Nancy Stancill

  Winning Texas

  Nancy Stancill

  Copyright Nancy Stancill 2016

  Published by Black Rose Writing, Publishing at Smashwords

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  © 2016 by Nancy Stancill

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  First digital version

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61296-683-0

  PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  Print edition produced in the United States of America

  For Len Norman

  My husband, my best friend and partner in all things.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  The female body slipped into the oily waters of the Houston Ship Channel one night and surfaced early the next morning, floating by the Valero petroleum refinery where it spooked a middle-aged cleaning woman savoring a cigarette.

  Annie Price heard about it on news-talk radio as she drank coffee and scanned two newspapers at her kitchen counter. She jumped off the bar stool, scaring Marbles, her cat, who was lurking underneath. She hurried to her bedroom, pulled on a pair of black jeans and a red blouse and twisted her hair into a low bun. Five minutes later, she backed out of her narrow driveway in the Heights neighborhood in her old white Camry, heading east to the ship channel.

  She’d half-hoped for a light day filling in for Travis Dunbar, a reporter for the Houston Times, who normally covered daytime police. Travis had gone to the Rio Grande Valley to a court hearing for Phil Cantoro, a drug kingpin. As his editor, she made sure police was covered – day and night. Today, she was the only person available in the thinly staffed newsroom to work the early shift.

  As she maneuvered through the early-morning traffic east of downtown, she tried to remember when she’d last worked police at the Times. Probably in her early thirties, not long after the paper hired her. She’d become an assistant metro editor three years ago, when her prized job of investigative reporter was eliminated. At forty, she might be the oldest reporter at the scene. Would any of her old sources be there to help her out? She wished she’d had time to wash and blow-dry her thick black hair, which she considered her best feature. Not that it would look good for long in this humidity.

  A familiar mixture of excitement and anxiety welled up in her chest. She’d never outgrown a reporter’s stage fright, even now as a fairly experienced editor. She was spending too much time at her desk editing other people’s stories. Would she still be able to coax enough details out of the police? Could she frame her story fast enough to be competitive? Would she get all the details right? Timing was everything on the police beat, especially now that Houston’s radio, TV and newspapers all had fiercely competitive websites. She was definitely rusty and she’d always performed better on longer stories with more expansive deadlines. But she knew that once she got to the scene, she’d stop worrying and her skills would take over.

  She opened the car window to gauge the heat of the morning and was assailed by the very particular odor of Houston’s eastside. It was acrid and earthy at the same time, the corky burnt smell of the refineries in nearby Pasadena and the funk of heat and humidity with the faint aroma of overripe bananas. She wrinkled her nose, but didn’t mind it as much as outsiders did. The August weather drove hordes of Texans to Colorado or other, cooler mountain retreats, but Annie prided herself on having developed the stoicism of a native. If you outlasted the blast-furnace heat of Houston’s August, you’d be rewarded with balmy temperatures in February.

  She pitied whoever had been unlucky enough to meet her fate in the opaque waters of the ship channel. Annie had gone on a Port of Houston tour one time, expecting eye-popping waterway views and insights into the city’s massive shipping industry. But the big tour boat had lumbered along for what seemed like hours, passing rusty hulls of workhorse vessels slung along the sides of the channel like old beached whales. At the tour’s end, she still felt mystified by the workings and the appeal of what resembled an oversized ditch.

  Up ahead she spotted a swarm of activity at an industrial marina with a shabby wooden building. She saw the knot of police cars and a few media trucks, so she eased the Toyota into a spot and got out quickly, carrying her old-fashioned leather notebook and straw purse. She scanned the group of uniformed police and rescue workers loading a body bag onto an ambulance. She was happy to see a familiar face, Detective Matt Sharpe. He’d been one of her best sources ten years earlier and apparently was the lead detective at today’s scene.

  He stood at the water’s edge, talking and gesturing to the clump of workers. She’d always marveled at the easy manner and unforced leadership with which he commanded everyone’s attention. A few uniformed men took notes and others listened intently, drinking coffee from paper cups they’d gotten at the marina. She walked up and nodded to Sharpe, but stayed about eight feet from the group, knowing he wouldn’t want to be interrupted.

  He grinned at her and walked over immediately when he finished, g
iving her a hug.

  “Annie Price! Girl, what are you doing here? Aren’t you the big dog editor who stays in the office?” Sharpe drawled in his small-town Texas accent. He was a middle-aged, barrel-chested cop who always looked rumpled, especially after being summoned to a scene at 5 a.m. He moved more slowly than usual, his brown eyes swollen and red around the edges, but he seemed to be in a decent mood.

  “Sometimes they let me out on good behavior,” Annie said. “So glad to see you, Matt. I’m subbing for Travis Dunbar. He’s working on a story in the valley.”

  “Coffee? There’s a joint a few blocks from here,” Sharpe said.

  “You always know the best joints,” she said. “That Greek place? Meet you there in ten.”

  She gathered a few details from the public information officer handling reporters, called the Times’ website editor to bolster the bare-bones story he’d already posted and said she’d be back with him in a while.

  Minutes later, she joined Sharpe in a battered orange booth at the ancient café and both ordered the $5.99 breakfast special – eggs, sausage, grits, biscuits and coffee. Soon they were sipping from steaming brown mugs. Annie stretched her long legs under the table, feeling human again. She badly needed coffee to make up for the half-full cup she’d left on her kitchen counter.

  How she’d missed this, she thought, taking in the sight of Sharpe in his navy chinos, short-sleeved shirt and bifocals. He’d been one of her favorite police officials during her reporting years and they’d occasionally enjoyed coffee, diner lunches and dissecting the roiling mysteries that cropped up daily in the big city.

  Annie thought about the times she’d sat in similar cafes with news sources. She’d always considered cultivating sources her greatest reporting strength. She’d been born shy, but she enjoyed people and relished getting them to talk and share secrets that she’d parlay into stories – while protecting her sources’ confidentiality. She loved flushing out things that the top brass wanted to keep hidden. And while most of her sources were male – men mostly still held the power on the major urban beats – she was friendly without being flirtatious. She thought that her tallness – nearly six feet in her favorite ballet flats – and her looks, more girl-next-door than vamp, helped her in some ways. Her height, a bugaboo as she was growing up, now worked to her advantage. Questioning stubborn men at eye level, standing tall and refusing to go away without answers, was surprisingly effective.

  “So what’s your best guess on the body?” she said, pushing a few strands of hair back into her twisty up-do. She leaned forward, eager to hear whatever the detective had to say. From past experience, she knew that Sharpe could deduce more from a scene than most of his bosses.

  “Female in her twenties, and she’s not from around here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The body markings and the tattoos make me think she’s from Eastern Europe,” Sharpe said, stirring his grits into the runny yellow of his fried eggs. “One of her tattoos apparently is in a Slavic language. That’s not for publication until the medical examiner weighs in.”

  “Accident, homicide or suicide?”

  “Best guess, homicide. Maybe someone smuggled her into the port on a cargo ship. Something went wrong and she ended up being disposed of.”

  “Seen anything like that before?”

  “About three years ago. A biker gang was paying the Russian Mafia to bring girls in, but three suffocated in the hold before the ship landed.”

  “Nasty. I remember seeing those stories. Can’t recall the name, but wasn’t it some big homegrown Texas gang?”

  “The Brazos Boys. They were bringing girls from Eastern Europe and sending them to biker bars in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio.” Sharpe held up his hand and the waitress came over and refilled their cups.

  She sipped the café’s inky brew, enjoying his companionship and gauging how much time she could spend catching up before heading to the office and filing a new top to the story. He seemed to be in a reflective mood, so she decided to go with it. It was intoxicating to be out of the office, talking to a human being about something besides deadlines and personnel problems.

  “The Boys still around?”

  “Not to speak of. The judge charged the head honchos with racketeering and murder and sent them away for life. The gang as we know it is kaput.”

  “So who do you reckon is responsible here?”

  “Don’t know. Could be another prostitution ring, or something entirely different. Could be just a stowaway. I imagine we’ll get more clues from the autopsy.”

  They sat for a few more minutes while she picked his brain about human trafficking in Texas. One of the dubious distinctions of Houston, he said, was its notoriety as a hub of trafficking in men and women for the sex trade, and for agricultural work in near-slavery conditions.

  “You got the port, the interstates that connect through Houston and the direct access to the border,” he said. “Dream territory for smugglers.”

  Annie listened and took more notes until her cell phone rang. She saw that it was Hugh Heller, the website’s editor. She excused herself and walked outside to talk. The parking lot of the popular diner was filled with pickups and beat-up compacts, but work loomed and more were leaving than arriving. She saw Sharpe’s fading blue Crown Vic parked not far from her Camry.

  “Hey, Hugh. Got more details about the body. I’m coming in to file.”

  “You better feed me what you’ve got and I’ll top what we already have.” Hugh was a legendary rewrite man, a pint-sized, wizened reporter in his sixties who always wore a starched white shirt and skinny dark tie. He could put a story together faster than anyone in the newsroom. He prided himself on usually being first with breaking news on the region’s websites.

  “Sure, let me tell my source goodbye. Call you back in a minute.”

  As she hung up, Sharpe shambled out the diner’s front door, looking wide-awake at last.

  “Think you inhaled enough battery acid?” She joked. His ability to drink mug after mug of bad coffee had always amazed her.

  “Nope, just getting started,” Sharpe said. “Annie, don’t be a stranger. Call if you need anything.”

  “Thanks, Matt. You know I will.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Travis Dunbar woke to the sound of less-than-ladylike snoring next to him on the blow-up mattress. He’d never bothered to get a real bed because he kept moving from one small, barely-respectable apartment on the north side of Houston to the next. During the three years he’d been at the Houston Times, his financial circumstances hadn’t improved.

  The stentorian sounds emanated from Lila Jo Lemmons, his occasional lover and fellow card-playing enthusiast, who’d stayed over after a long night of Texas Hold’em in an upscale neighborhood about five miles from his apartment. High-stakes poker was illegal in Texas, but underground games flourished in Houston, mostly in private homes away from police scrutiny. It hadn’t taken Travis long to find games and Lila Jo was much more connected than he was.

  Neither had found any luck last night. He’d blown a few hundred dollars, a serious dent in his meager bank account, while she was out nearly a thousand. Lila Jo, who worked sporadically in real estate and occasionally burnished her finances by selling a multi-million dollar mini-mansion in the Houston suburbs, could absorb her losses a lot easier than he could. He reminded himself that he hadn’t gotten a decent raise in the years he’d worked as a police reporter for the newspaper – and they’d hired him cheap to begin with.

  He looked at Lila Jo, whose snoring was amplified by too many glasses of cut-rate bourbon at last night’s games. Her tousled curly hair was dyed a red not seen in nature and she carried an extra twenty pounds aroun
d her waist and hips. But he liked her easy laughter and fun-loving approach to life. She was what his parents would probably call a good old Texas gal, though they’d be horrified if they knew he was sharing a mattress on the floor with a woman at least fifteen years his senior. But what could they expect? He wasn’t much of a prize for sophisticated Houston women his own age, he reflected, looking at the love handles slopping over his plaid boxer shorts and white T-shirt. He was short, round and his sandy blond hairline was receding faster than his bank account.

  His passions were just two – journalism and Texas Hold’em, but they warred against each other for control of his life. He’d started playing the popular poker game while he was a student at UT Arlington and had gotten hooked. But he’d settled down and managed to get his journalism degree, and even gave up the game for his first few years as a reporter in the boondocks. Then he’d gotten a big-city job in Houston and stumbled into the city’s incredible feast of underground poker. He’d always heard that Houston was the poker-playing capital of Texas, but he hadn’t counted on the number of opportunities that existed for playing every night, if he wanted. Once you earned the trust of regulars, the illegal network flung its doors wide open.

  He’d resisted regular play until he met Lila Jo at a game three months ago. She helped organize games for a deep-pockets investor and had introduced him to a flamboyant new crowd, where the quality of the play was more comparable to Vegas and the stakes were higher. Now he played with her a couple of nights a week, which he couldn’t afford, but it was hard to stay away.

  “Hi, Trav,” she said suddenly, yawning and stretching. She wore a large pair of pink panties and nothing else, and gave him a beguiling smile. Travis returned it, but ignored the implied invitation to take up where they’d left off a few hours ago.

  “I’ll put some coffee on,” he said. “Got to grab a quick shower and get out of here. But stick around and have a cup or two if you want.”