Winning Texas

by Nancy Stancill

  “That’s Carmen Silva,” she said. “We’re trying her out on the mid-afternoon shift. Remember, you said we could bring in a few fill-ins.”

  “Well, get rid of this one,” Krause ordered. “She’s not good enough for this club. You can see that nobody’s paying any attention to her.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell her at the end of her shift.”

  She left quickly and Krause watched the woman on stage perform what would be her last number, writhing a little too athletically to an oldie, Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” She had long wavy hair and a pouty red mouth, but those attributes were offset by chunky legs and lead-footed dancing. He thought that her breasts, partially concealed by blue pasties, were no better than average. All in all, she didn’t live up to the standards he liked to enforce at his clubs.

  Carmen exited the stage without a single tip from the audience, though there were now three tables near the stage populated by small groups of men. The after-work crowd – or more accurately, the leaving-work-early slackers – was thickening as 5 p.m. approached. The skinny deejay speeded up the music tempo and spoke in a more energetic voice.

  “Give a big Texas Girls welcome to Huuunnnter,” he said, drawing out the name in two long syllables as a tall blonde dressed in leopard shorts and a bra top danced down the catwalk. Now that was more like it. Krause smiled as she climbed the pole and shimmied down headfirst, with her twined legs supporting her lithe body. He occasionally worried that some woman would slide all the way down, fall on her fool head and break her neck, though he took comfort in the fact that as independent contractors, the dancers were responsible for their own medical costs.

  Hunter was a big hit, capturing all eyes as she bent forward and gyrated her butt toward the audience. He supposed it was her version of twerking, but unlike some skinny pop singers who’d tried the move, she had a well-formed butt to shake. A few men stuck dollars into her waistband as the song ended. She was the type Krause liked best – young, blonde and very tall. He’d often thought of developing a specialty club called Tall Texas Timbers and hiring only dancers who were at least six feet tall and looked as good as Jerry Hall in her prime. That was the big thing these days, developing clubs that catered to different slices of the lubricious population. Rick’s Cabaret was cashing in big time with its Onyx Clubs, which, as the company’s prospectus said, catered to African American gentlemen. He’d thought about how he could do the same.

  He toyed with the idea of introducing himself to Hunter and perhaps starting a secret fling with her. He’d done that a few times at his clubs in past years, but on the whole, he knew it was a bad idea. It gave a dancer too much power and created problems when other dancers and staffers found out, which they always did. And then there would be hell to pay with Juliana.

  “Hello, darling. Enjoying yourself?” He heard a husky drawl behind him and whirled around to face Juliana, his fiancée. Speak of the devil, he thought.

  Her mahogany-brown hair was parted in the middle and fell in thick waves past her shoulders. Her peachy complexion was enhanced by expert makeup and she wore a classic brown linen suit with a short skirt, long jacket and high-heeled sandals. He liked the fact that she cared about clothes and staying fit as much as he did. She was beautiful, though it came with a coldblooded approach to life that marred the overall impression. Sometimes she egged him on to more aggressive decisions than he would’ve made on his own. Her take on business was more tough-minded than his, but he’d had to admit more than once that her approach made more financial sense.

  Krause had met Juliana as a teenager visiting his grandparents during summers in Copacabana, Brazil. Juliana was the daughter of their wealthy neighbors, a few years younger and a student at the best international school. She’d taught him how to surf and pressed him endlessly for details about life in the States. They’d kept up with each other and five years ago, she’d fulfilled her lifelong ambition by coming to Texas to live and work with him in his businesses. Her English was impeccable, if a little stilted. She spent much of her time in the Hill Country working with a risky venture he didn’t like. He guessed, but wasn’t really sure, that he loved her. For sure, he needed her.

  He got up, kissed her and motioned to the seat beside him.

  “Some wine, honey?” He said. “It’s your favorite Riesling.”

  They clinked glasses, but he could see from her face that she wasn’t feeling festive.

  “How’re things at the ranch?” he said. He left the operations there in her hands, just overseeing some of the finances.

  “Everything’s under control. We’ve got more clients than we can handle and the women are doing their part. I’m more worried about what’s going on here in Houston.”

  “Aw, come on, Jules,” he said. “Let’s not get into this.”

  “We’re not going to do business with Behar Zogu again,” she said. “He’s an idiot and now we’re stuck with a huge problem.”

  “Hold your horses,” he said. “We can wait a week or two to make that decision. The business at the ranch is more of a danger than Zogu.”

  “I don’t think so. Somebody’s going to get arrested,” she warned. “And it better not be me.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Dan Riggins woke up every morning in Mexico sorry that he was forced to live in a tawdry border town, longing to be home and knowing he could do nothing about it. So he mourned silently, knowing that his beloved Alicia wouldn’t understand. But today was different – he’d cross that border and damn the consequences.

  He tried not to worry as the moment approached. His faked passport and identification papers, including a driver’s license in the name of a deceased shopkeeper from Laredo, were impeccable. He’d paid a premium through his underground sources and changed identities often during his four years on the run.

  His stomach lurched as he reached the checkpoint between Ojinaga, Mexico and Presidio, Texas, but when he stopped at the roadside cubicle, the Customs officer waved him through. Once again, it was a smooth passage into the interchangeable arid lands on the United States side of the border. He could feel his body slacken as he swallowed the last of a lukewarm can of Coke.

  He stopped at a gas station, got out of the car, took out a new cell phone and called a number about sixty miles away. Tom Marr answered.

  “Howdy, cowpoke,” Marr said, using the clichéd-by-design code words they’d agreed upon earlier. “Coming to the ranch today?”

  “On my way. Should be there in a couple of hours.”

  “We’ll have lunch by the pool. Staying the night?”

  “Probably not. See you later.”

  He clicked off, noticing a malnourished, gray-striped cat rubbing against his pants leg. He guessed the animal had emerged from the tall weeds that surrounded the station. By God, he hated cats, always begging for food or attention, especially mongrels like this one with a torn ear and patchy fur. He wondered if the creature had mange.

  “Get away from me,” he said in a low but audible voice, stepping aside quickly so the ugly creature wouldn’t deposit any fleas in his pants cuff.

  “Sorry, mister.”

  A stubbly young guy in a short-sleeved plaid shirt that failed to hide a hideous full-arm tattoo picked up the cat and chucked it under the chin. The tattoo, complete with dragons and shamrocks, apparently was a paean to Ireland.

  “She kind of lives here. Hasn’t got a home.”

  “You should keep it away from paying customers,” Riggins said, climbing into his car before he’d be forced into more inane conversation. He drove through the godforsaken town of Presidio, still shuddering from his encounter with the cat. Part of his dislike of cats came from his certainty that they brought bad luck, a superstition he’d pi
cked up from his father, a hard man who’d trusted neither man nor beast.

  At least a few times a year Presidio made the news as the hottest place in the country. Temperatures of 104 degrees or higher weren’t uncommon. Today, the thermometer in Dan Riggins’s car registered a mere 99. Riggins lived on the outskirts of Ojinaga, a sluggish Mexican city of 22,000 across the border, his most stable address in the last four years. He’d fled Texas to avoid the federal indictment accusing him and three others of drug trafficking and plotting two murders. He’d gone first to Peru, where Alicia Perez joined him after he’d engineered her escape. They’d spent two years in Peru, but the lure of West Texas and the remnants of their secessionist cause had proved irresistible. They’d moved to Ojinaga, where they could slip across the border.

  Karen Riggins, his estranged wife in San Antonio, had divorced him and he’d lost contact with his grown twin sons, but he was philosophical. When the time was right, he’d reconnect with them. Alicia and the Texas secessionist movement still ruled his life and he was deeply worried about both.

  He drove past Presidio, thinking how much it depressed him. Most of West Texas was magnificent, but much of its beauty and charm depended upon its mystical emptiness. The craggy mountains of Big Bend National Park and the cloud-dappled skies of the scrublands revealed their splendor in their raw, natural state. What man touched in West Texas, he usually despoiled.

  Presidio was the classic example. Its dusty streets were lined with clunky auto-repair businesses, battered retail stores and dilapidated government buildings. The residential areas weren’t much better. Houses of ancient stucco or weathered wood stood close together, yards laden with broken-down bicycles and discarded toys. He wondered how many of the town’s 5,000 residents, mostly working-class Hispanics, had pickup trucks. Old, rusting but dependably sturdy, they cluttered the streets.

  He drove as fast as he dared and it didn’t take long before he hit the wide-open spaces. His spirits rose again with the sight of the brilliant sky and the shifting shapes of cottony clouds. Peru had majestic mountains and stunning scenery, but he never felt deeply connected to the land like he did here.

  Riggins felt a rare burst of happiness. It had been four years since he’d seen his best friend. He was still ashamed of destroying Marr’s campaign for governor and ending his political life. The only thing he’d done right was to keep his friend insulated from the worst of the fallout. Marr hadn’t been indicted, but he’d been fined for campaign violations. He’d retreated into the quiet life of a rancher raising his daughter and sworn off the secessionist movement. He hadn’t been in contact, but Riggins had called him yesterday. The upshot was today’s clandestine reunion at Marr’s ranch.

  Riggins knocked on the door and Marr appeared. They leaned together, almost embracing. Riggins walked inside Marr’s stucco two-story home, past the living room with its upright piano and formal portraits, and the dining room with its faded Persian rug and sturdy wooden sideboard. He followed Marr into the pine-paneled den with its leather sofa and chairs and windows that stretched across the back of the house. Hell, he thought, the house looks and even smells the same. It was an ineffable old-house aroma that blended fireplace ashes, boot polish and solid walls baked by decades of dry heat.

  Being in Marr’s house flooded him with memories. At odds with his own family in San Antonio, he’d come to the ranch with Marr on holidays from the University of Texas. The ranch was where they’d first hatched plans for Texas to secede. Knox Marr, Tom’s iconoclastic rancher father, would spend hours brainstorming with them. Riggins had loved the nights of political plotting and whiskey drinking, stoked by fires in the cozy den’s stone fireplace. Days were even better. He rode horses, branded cattle and helped with other ranch chores that were routine for Tom, but exotic for him.

  Around the time of their senior year, Riggins’s visits tailed off because Marr’s campus romance with Elizabeth Barnard, a willowy philosophy major, had blossomed. He’d take her to the ranch often and they’d married on its patio one evening soon after they graduated. When Knox Marr died the following year, Riggins had helped the couple pack up their grad school apartment in Austin to return. Riggins came back for the christening of their first child, Betsy. Just four years later, Marr called him to come for Elizabeth’s funeral after breast cancer ended his young wife’s life.

  Riggins joined Marr on the stone patio with its outdoor fireplace, pool and seclusion. He sat down across from Marr at a teak table shaded by a green-striped umbrella.

  “Tell me more about Alicia,” Marr said. “What happened?”

  As Riggins thought, he noticed how much thinner and older Marr looked than when he’d last seen him four years ago. The tall rancher always was deeply tanned, which contrasted with his light hair and pale blue eyes. But Riggins detected more weariness in Marr’s face.

  “Gone off the rails again,” Riggins said. “Disappeared early this week and isn’t answering her cell phone.”

  “Did you have a fight?”

  “No, but I think she got agitated after overhearing me talk about some problems and decided to take things into her own hands. Think she’s headed either to the Hill Country or to Houston.”

  “That’s a lot of territory to cover,” Marr said. “Shouldn’t we wait a few days, see what happens?”

  “Nothing else I can do. Long as I stay in West Texas, I’m pretty safe. Kind of dangerous for me to travel anywhere else.”

  “You look a lot different than four years ago, Dan. So does Alicia. You might not be recognized.”

  Riggins could feel his friend staring at his shaved head, graying moustache and gaunt figure. He knew his aged appearance was probably as shocking to Marr as Marr’s was to him.

  “Her hair has turned completely white, good for disguise,” he told Marr. “But people have a way of remembering her.”

  Riggins smiled, thinking of Alicia. At 54, with her mane of thick hair, shapely body and ferocious energy, she was still youthful and sexy. But he’d suspected for a while that something terrible had gone wrong with her brain. In the last year, she’d become increasingly erratic and unpredictable.

  “She gets irrationally angry sometimes,” he said. “She always had a temper, but now it’s over things that shouldn’t matter. She was driving near our place in Ojinaga last month and shot holes in the tires of a driver who was going too slow.”

  “I guess we’ve all wanted to do that,” Marr smiled.

  “It wasn’t funny,” Riggins said. “I had to pay the man off to keep him from going to the cops. Not the kind of thing you want when you’re in hiding.”

  “Third time she’s disappeared, you said? Have you taken her to a doctor in Mexico?”

  “She refuses to go, says she’s perfectly fine. And she is, most of the time.”

  “What do you suppose is going on?”

  “Best guess, a brain injury. Violence was a way of life in Peru. You know she was captured by the Shining Path when she was just 16. I think those damn thugs knocked her around.”

  Riggins changed the subject. “Tell me what’s going on with you. You said you’d explain when I got here.”

  “I’m worried to death about Betsy.”

  “The world’s sweetest kid?”

  “Not so much lately. Since she turned sixteen, seems like I can’t do anything right. Now she’s gone.”

  “Gone? When?”

  “We found her room empty three days ago,” Marr said. “She left a note saying she wanted to be on her own for a while and not to follow her.”

  “Does your housekeeper know anything?”

  “She says she doesn’t, and I believe her.”

  “How about her friends?”

  “I t
alked to two of her best friends. They said they didn’t know anything at first, then one confessed that Betsy had fallen for a rock guitarist she met in El Paso after a show.”

  “El Paso – that’s awfully far afield for girls their age.”

  “The three girls spent a weekend there with the cousin of one. Betsy was all excited about it.”

  “Is there any trouble between you?”

  “She hated the whole secessionist thing and all the publicity when it blew up,” Marr said. “Even after the media left us alone, kids teased her. That’s one reason I got out for good. I thought things would get back to normal, but Betsy has never seemed the same. She’s become rebellious, especially where boys are concerned.”

  “My boys sowed a few wild oats when they were teenagers,” Riggins said. “I was gone so much. Karen usually ran interference.”

  “Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have tried to raise Betsy on my own. She was so young when Elizabeth died.”

  “I’m kind of surprised you haven’t remarried. Aren’t there any attractive women in this neck of the woods?”

  “Lord, yes,” Marr said. “Even with my tarnished reputation, people try to fix me up all the time. But I haven’t met anyone I really liked since Annie.”

  “Annie Price? Didn’t she do enough damage to last a lifetime?”

  “Dan, we need to stay away from this subject,” Marr said with a firmness that surprised Riggins. “I don’t blame Annie for anything that happened. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Okay, sorry.”

  “Betsy might have gone to Houston,” Marr said. “Her friend Carly admitted that the band was from Houston.”

  Riggins thought of a horrible possibility and struggled to keep his face impassive. But Marr could read his changing expression. He grabbed Riggins by the shoulder.

  “You know something you’re not telling me?”

  “I read something in the Houston Times online today about a body found floating in the Ship Channel,” Riggins said. “It was an unidentified young woman, but likely it’s not Betsy.”