by George Wier
SLOW FALLING
A Bill Travis Mystery
by
George Wier
Copyright © 2012 by George Wier
Published by
Flagstone Books
Slow Falling—A Bill Travis Mystery
1st Kindle Edition
March 10, 2012
Cover photograph copyright 2010 by donnykim
courtesy of Big Stock Photography (bigstockphoto.com)
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes written in connection with reviews written specifically for a magazine or newspaper.
The Bill Travis Mysteries
(in chronological and publication order):
The Last Call
Capitol Offense
Longnecks & Twisted Hearts
The Devil To Pay
Death On The Pedernales
Slow Falling
and coming soon:
Caddo Cold
(First chapter at the end of this book)
IN MEMORIAM
Milton T. Burton
1945-2011
Educator, Author, Friend
I miss you.
DEDICATION
For Sallie.
PROLOGUE
The song goes: “She wants what she wants when she wants it...” sung in a slow drawl. The steel guitar comes in right on time between this line and the next, which is essentially the same line repeated many times, and then fades into the background where it belongs.
You can hear the music outside the old country tavern next to the row of Harley-Davidson motorcycles which are all outfitted in chrome and leather and wearing a thin veil of dust. An orange-pink glow hop-scotches along silvery, polished mufflers like distant slow lightning, the reflection of a rapidly dwindling sun. Engines tick away road heat like old clocks winding inevitably downward, and for a moment the bikes become the mechanical counterparts of flesh and blood riding-beasts of old, though these hot-blooded animals drink in high octane and spit fire and their masters are the riders of dragons, if in no other place than their own minds. For now the masters are inside tanking up and telling tall tales while their mounts outside bide the time.
Inside, they are, to a man, doctors, lawyers, and sundry account executives, the starched white-collar usually worn on week days now hanging in dark closets, having been placed there by paid maid services or dutiful wives who dream of the men they could or should have married instead. The wide boards beneath their boot-shod feet are oak planks with even cracks between that could swallow a silver dollar, but which usually swallow grime and spilt beer.
“I’m telling you, they went over that cliff,” a high-pitched, sand-papery voice intones. The speaker is white-haired, close-cropped, and he hasn’t shaved since Friday morning. He thumps the table. “Boom.”
“More like tumble-tumble-tumble-tumble–OOF!” another voice states, and laughs out loud.
“It’s not funny,” White-hair says. “Those are some hair-pin turns up there, and the bottom is five... hundred feet down.”
“You almost said ‘five-thousand.’”
There is no reply to this quip. Instead White-hair tastes his beer with a thin, quick tongue. Winces.
“Besides,” the other voice says, “I think it’s someone’s practical joke.” His voice is deep, commanding, yet bored. Also he is younger than White-hair by ten or fifteen years. “You go out and put up a cross at a particularly bad hair-pin turn way up in the hills, you tack a board to it and paint ‘Lee and Grace—Rest In Peace’ on it, and what do you get? I’ll tell you. Every guy on a bike heading into that turn slows way the hell down just to read it. It conjures an image, you know. I can almost see them myself. Grace has got her arms around Lee. She reaches down and gives his junk a good squeeze, he turns his head to smile back at her, then all of a sudden she’s screaming in his ear. He looks up but it’s too late. Through the guard-rail and down in slow motion like Thelma and Louise while Grace is screaming and flailing her arms about and Lee’s yelling ‘Mommmmaaaa’. It’s bullshit. That’s what I say.”
“I think there’s a story there,” White-hair says. “It could make a good book, maybe.”
“The sad story of Lee and Grace,” the other man says. “I thought you were a bankruptcy lawyer.”
“I am,” White-hair says.
There are a dozen peacockish men and a few rough-looking women in the long, undulating room, and toward the back brood a pair of coin-operated pool tables with tell-tale wear spots crying out for new felt. Blurry, color-faded balls click into one another while clouds of blue cigarette and cigar smoke slowly tumble about eight feet overhead like indoor weather. In essence, the place is it’s own time zone wrapped up in a time warp and shielded from the remainder of Earth by an IQ-dampening field of blaring, introverting, badly-written and badly-sung country music—not that there is anything particularly wrong with that. You could call the place Honky-tonk Heaven or Nowheresville or Shit-kick Inn, take your pick, except for the fact that a long, hand-painted sign on the tin roof outside proclaims it as Sonny’s Place, whoever the hell Sonny is or was. The bartender’s name is Pud.
“Hey Pud! Another pitcher here!”
Pud slaps his meaty arm across the counter and flexes his fingers. “Ten bucks,” he says.
“Come on, man. You know I’m good for it,” the voice says.
“Ten bucks,” Pud repeats.
Pud sweats. He sweats constantly. He sweats as much behind the bar as he does at home in the middle of the night while wondering if there exists a woman that is thin-waisted, thin-wristed, and as pretty enough for his tastes as she is—and of necessity must be—unmindful of his smell, the last of which he is too well aware. His doctor has labeled his malady as adrenal-fatigue, which sounds too much to him like an old-woman’s disease. He knows it will kill him one day, suddenly and without warning.
Alexander Hamilton crosses Pud’s palm and cool, salving medicine is administered from a rusted spigot.
The front door opens with nary a rustle. In walks a thin man. Not just thin, though. Gaunt. The word that comes to mind is ‘emaciated.’ His clothes are nearly falling off of his bony frame and are apparently held up by their heavy dirt content alone. The man is covered in dirt from head to foot. He could be a grave-robber, but upon closer inspection—if one can look for more than a fleeting glance at such a specimen without wincing away—the bets shift over toward the grave-robbee column. And, as is traditional when confronted by the supernatural, the weird, the fantastic, or the downright ugly, conversation in the room comes to a grinding, gear-stripping halt.
“Falling,” the man croaks into the room.
The music blares on.
The incident of the appearance of the gaunt man is palpable, and the passage of time has no power over it.
Pud takes three steps to his right and unplugs the juke box, whereupon a species of silence ensues. The silence is made even more thick by the distant, oscillating rattle of the deep freeze somewhere to the rear of the kitchen and by big trucks moving along the Interstate a mile away over the fields.
Every head turns. Not a few faces register disgust.
“Falling.”
“Say, old-timer,” White-hair speaks up, his voice little more than a thin whistle. “You look like you could use a drink.”
“Or a sandwich,” Pud says.
“Or two,” the man who thinks road-side crosses are the first relative to a bad joke intones, then adds: “Or a bath.”
White-hair titters and very nearly speaks, but the bu
lging eyes of the dirty man track toward him, fall upon him, devour the words before he can form them in his mind.
“The Falling,” the man says, and then, heeding his own words, tumbles forward onto the oak floor.
“Shit,” Pud says, and comes around the bar as chair legs scrape backwards around the room.
They gather around him in a circle, the formerly mildly-inebriated now stone-sober. Pud begins to reach downward but his thick slab-of-lard hand pauses in mid-air.
The figure stirs, coughs, and flecks of blood spray the floor.
“Shit,” Pud intones again. It is his anchor-word. It is a word that ends all words.
“Faw-ling,” the man says. A trickle of blood runs from his mouth, followed by a syrupy flood of it. It pools there on the board and runs into the wide crack.
“That man,” a busty woman wearing a skin-tight tank top says, “is dead.”
“What the hell do we do?” White-hair asks.
“Good God,” Pud says. “I think maybe I better call Sonny.”
CHAPTER ONE
Things come in threes and it's while reeling from the second that the third hits, as if the universe is saying: “I told you so, even though you didn’t want to believe me.” At least that’s the way it always seems to happen to me.
For instance my secretary, Penelope, had a fight with her live-in boyfriend, and I was at the police station with her and in the process of helping her get a temporary protective order placed on his skinny, ne’er-do-well ass, when I got a call from my wife telling me that she was having labor pains—and although that by no means is a bad thing, it’s a wonderful thing, it's yet within the classification of a thing to be handled immediately in one fashion or another. So, I was on my way to meet Julie at the hospital, and worried sick (not solely about Julie, no—I was concerned about the whole troop: Julie with the baby trying to come into the world, our youngest little girl no doubt strapped into the back seat of Julie’s Ford Expedition, while Jessica, our adopted daughter, the ink not yet fully dry on her Learner’s Driving Permit, likely hunched over an unfamiliar steering wheel and grinning from ear to ear like the little demoness she is, dodging through traffic) when I got a call from Dexter “Sonny” Raleigh, who proceeded to fill me in—despite my avid protest—on the event of a dirty old man suddenly dropping dead at his roadside tavern way out south of town, in another county entirely.
“You won’t be held liable, Sonny,” I said. “Bye, Sonny.”
“You’re sure?” he said before I could hang up. I whipped around too-slow interstate feeder-road traffic and punched the gas. I could almost hear my twenty-five year old Mercedes say “Huh?” right before it kicked into a high whine and the squirrels underneath my hood started doing triple-time on their little habitrail wheels.
“Certain, Sonny,” I said. “Look, I’ll call you later. I’m in the middle of something.”
A horn blared as I dodged two lanes over and around an eighteen-wheeler, the driver having let loose with his air-horn.
“Sounds like you’re in a demolition derby,” Sonny said.
“Uh. Almost,” I admitted. “I gotta go, Sonny.”
“Come by my place tonight, Bill,” he said.
“May not be able to,” I said. “Julie’s in labor.”
Sonny guffawed loudly.
“Bill,” he said, when the laughter quieted and just as I squeaked through an intersection on a yellow light, “you should find out what causes that.”
“Very funny, Sonny. Here, talk to Penny. I’m driving.”
I tossed my cell phone in Penny’s general direction and her hands did a little juggling act with it for a moment.
“Mr. Raleigh,” Penny said, all business-like, which is upsettingly disarming and cute at the same time, “is it alright if Mr. Travis returns your call at some later time?”
“You go, Penny,” I whispered. She punched my arm.
“Ow,” I whispered, and made my right tire dance around a low curb. We were two blocks from the hospital.
I could hear Sonny’s laughter and his deep voice. “Fine. Fine. Tell that sonuvabitch to call me tonight,”
“Thank you, Mr. Raleigh,” Penny said and hung up. “Really, sir, where do you get these people?
“The same place...” I began, then let it go. It wouldn’t have been very nice. I had been about to tell her: ‘the same place you came from.’
“You were saying?” she asked, clearly understanding.
“Never mind! We’re here.”
*****
There is something about being in the delivery room. No father should ever do it, despite what all of the nature-nurture holistic-approach people have to say about it. What those folks won’t tell you about is what it’s like to be in the same room with the woman you love as her insides are turned out for her, which is what it’s really like. They won’t mention the curtain of pain she radiates, nor the timbre of the ill-formed words she is likely to sling your way during the afore-mentioned inside-out process. Take a loving bundle of pure love and intimacy and transform it into a writhing, spitting wildcat in a burlap sack, and you’ve pretty well got the whole thing pegged. That is, before and during. Fortunately afterwards, the concerned husband having survived the unholy encounter with his wits intact and enough blood in his head to assure he stays on his feet, it’s different all over again. Needless to say, I turned my head when they cut the cord.
“Oh Bill,” Julie cooed. “She’s so precious.”
“Yeah,” I swallowed, throat-lump approaching grapefruit proportions the moment after I turned to gaze upon the new Travis. Julie held her, swaddling clothes, the whole bit.
“Her name?” an attentive nurse asked me, and placed a firm, balancing hand on my shoulder.
I looked at Julie and she looked up at me and began crying.
“Uh,” I said. “If it’s what we agreed on, then her full name is Michelle LeAnn Travis.”
Julie nodded, both smiling and boohoo-ing at the same time.
I leaned over and peered at the tiny, pinched face. Something happened then, something entirely unexpected. Possibly I dreamed it. Michelle’s eyes popped open, she took a look at me, frowned, and then sprayed my face with throw-up.
“Aww,” the nurses proclaimed in unison. The doctor laughed.
“Michelle loves her daddy,” Julie said.
The doctor patted my back and handed me a towel.
“It’s a good, healthy sign,” he said, which actually rang true with me. Sometimes you have to walk through hell to get a little slice of heaven.
*****
Sonny Raleigh was chatting with Jessica in the waiting room when I came out to make the announcement. I acted as if he wasn’t there. Served him right.
Sonny was a short, barrel-chested fellow with permanent dark circles under his eyes and a knowing, mischievous grin painted on his face. He was about my age but looked ten years older, the result of hard and fast the-devil-may-care-but-I-sure-as-hell-don’t living. Sonny used to race stock cars back in the eighties. A maverick from the Land of Mavericks, which is to say South Central Texas. I liked the old sonuvabitch—that is, when I could stand his company. At least he paid he had a healthy account with me and usually kept his mouth shut. Usually.
Jessica had Jennifer on her lap. Jenny was wriggling and trying to free herself. She was in the toddling stage and the whole wide world was her playpen.
“Yay Mom,” Jessica said. “Mrs. Fertility strikes again.”
“Hush,” I said.
“Day Hom,” Jenny articulated, and wiggled her butt. Jessica let her slide to the floor and I reached down and snatched her up before she could toddle away. She could be pretty fast.
“Daddy,” Jessica said, “you smell like throw-up.”
“I said ‘hush’. Mom’s gonna be okay. You have a new baby sister.”
“Michelle?”
“Yeah.”
“Way to go, Bill,” Sonny said and offered his hand. I shook. He handed me a cigar. “
That’s a Kinky Friedman cigar,” he said. “Slow burning, just like the Kinkster.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said. “Why are you here, Sonny?”
“It’s that—”
“Dirty old man?” I finished for him. “You’ve got nothing to worry about there, Sonny. He came in your front door and dropped dead. Ask any lawyer. You’ve got zero liability.”
“I already called a lawyer. He said the same thing.”
“Then why are you here?” I asked.
He gripped my arm, led me a few paces away from Jessica and whispered to me: “Because, this sort of thing is right up your alley.”
“I don’t have an alley, Sonny. I’ve got a green belt out back of my place, but no alley.”
“Har-dee har har. Look, the old man said something about ‘The Falling’.”
“Right before he fell?”
“Yeah.”
“Sonny, he was probably describing how he felt.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Take the case, dad,” Jessica said. I looked to my right and she was right there. So much for secrecy. She handed Jennifer off to me.
“Yeah,” Sonny said, “take it, Bill. I want to know who this guy was, how he wound up twenty miles from anywhere at my bar, and why he died.”
“And what he meant by ‘The Falling’, right?”
“Exactly!”
“I don’t have the time just now, Sonny. I’ve got a recovering mother to watch over, kids to raise up with moral fiber, and bills to pay.”
“Yeah, yeah. Heard all that. Great. Come on, you’d be doing me a big favor.”
“I’m sure I would. I’m no private investigator, just in case you’re forgetting.”
“I can help you, dad,” Jessica said.
Sixteen years old with an attitude, as if she could boss anybody around, including her teachers and her parents. And then I recalled an exploding house and Jessica and me being tossed across fifty feet of space by the shock wave.