No cell phone records. No bills from the cable company to go with the big-screen TV in the living room.
I found several spiral-bound notebooks filled with a tightly written script in a weird English hybrid language. Some words, mostly verbs, were recognizable.
More creaking floorboards from upstairs. I would have to deal with Petey pretty soon.
I returned my attention to the notebooks. On the last page of the last book I read the words “flowers” and “weather f.” along with gibberish. I tossed them aside and stood up.
A phone with a long cord was mounted on the far wall, next to a small dry-erase board. I walked over and picked up the handset. No dial tone. A few lines of writing were on the board.
“Marty.” I said the name out loud. “In Weather… fd.” A phone number with an area code I couldn’t identify followed.
Weather. Again.
Marty was in some weather. Which made no sense…unless it did.
“Marty in Weather,” I said. “Weather. Ford. Texas.”
Weatherford was a town about an hour west of Fort Worth. I entered the phone number into my cell but didn’t call. I headed to the stairs.
“Hey, Petey. I’m leaving now.”
Nothing. Not even a creak.
“I found the address.”
The compressor on the refrigerator kicked on but still no sound from upstairs.
“I’m headed to Weatherford.”
Footsteps shuffled then stopped.
I clomped to the front door and slammed it shut but stayed inside.
Hurried steps down the stairs.
I pressed against the wall that was out of view from the rest of the house, willing myself to become at one with the lemon-yellow flocked wall covering.
Petey dashed into the foyer, a revolver in his fist. He noticed me at the same instant that I grabbed the hand holding the weapon and twisted it up behind his back.
“You weren’t going to shoot me, were you?” I whispered in his ear.
He didn’t respond. His breathing was ragged. He smelled of sweat and beer.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” I eased the pressure on his arm a little.
“Everybody wants to hurt us.” His voice was tight.
“More of your people are going to die unless this guy is stopped.”
“You can’t go to Weatherford.” His voice was choked with emotion.
“Yes, Petey. I most certainly can go to Weatherford.” I wrenched the gun from his hand and shoved him against the wall.
“They’ll kill you.”
“No, they won’t.” I shook my head. “Your people run scams; they don’t do the violence thing very well. Neither do you. Your heart’s not in it.”
“If I take you, then they’ll kill me.”
“I can live with that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Texas of myth and legend lay spread before us, a vast sheet of undulating earth reaching westward to a horizon so all-encompassing it threatened to overwhelm the senses and the ability to describe.
The surface of the terrain was the color of aged straw except for the occasional patch of green and the black-gray of the fence lines running like scars across the land. Farmhouses, stock tanks, and the occasional oil well seesawing crude from the depths dotted the sunbaked ground.
We were on Interstate 20, a dozen miles east of Weatherford, riding together in silence in the Volkswagen, a tiny ship lost amid a sea of eighteen-wheelers, pickups, and Suburbans.
About the time we’d passed the western limits of Tarrant County, I had given up trying to make Petey talk. He sat in the passenger seat, nursing his swollen mouth and sullen attitude.
Born under a bad sign, those Irish Travelers were.
I remembered what I could of the mysterious group. Most of my information was apocryphal, beer-fueled anecdotes from bunko cops. The Travelers ran half-assed shakedown scams. Slip-and-fall claims on insurance. Money accepted for contracting work never done. Several years ago a Traveler woman had tried to extort money from Disney World with a fabricated rape story.
They spoke their own language, too, as I recalled, a hybrid tongue derived from the ancient Celtic dialect.
Above anything else, they possessed an overwhelming desire to be left alone, a quality I could identify with all too well.
As a truck loaded with cattle rocketed past us, I said, “You never told me what a yonk is.”
“It’s our term for a crook.” Petey blew a jet of air out of the corner of his mouth.
“Wasn’t there a Toogoode that got caught on tape beating her child?” I said. “Somewhere in the Midwest, a couple of years ago.”
Petey paused for a long time before replying. “Yeah.”
“She any relation to Collin?”
“Something wrong with that girl.” Petey shook his head. “Hitting a child like that.”
“You got any kids?” I maneuvered around a slow-moving truck and flatbed trailer loaded with hay.
He didn’t reply.
“You married?”
“She told who her people were. She ain’t welcome back.”
“What’s gonna happen when you show up with me?”
He pulled a cell phone from his pocket. As he flipped it open, I put one hand on his arm.
“If you call and set something up where I’m the fall guy, the first person to get it is you.” I glanced down for a half second to where the revolver he’d been carrying was resting on the floorboard underneath my seat.
“You don’t have much trust in your heart, do you?” he said.
“The Travelers aren’t the only ones that like a low profile.”
He pulled his arm free from my grasp and dialed a number. He held the phone to his ear for a long time before hitting the end button. “We may be too late.”
________
The Travelers had come to America in the middle of the nineteenth century, among the first wave of Irish immigrants escaping the potato famine, Petey told me.
After the Civil War, they’d wandered about the land, settling in different areas, the largest group in a compound north of the Savannah River called Murphy Village, after a priest of the same name who convinced a large group of Travelers to buy property there.
The Irish Travelers of Texas were known as the Greenhorn Carrolls and had made White Settlement their primary headquarters until an automobile accident one New Year’s Eve involving several Traveler children forced part of the clan to move west to avoid scrutiny by the authorities.
I asked why he’d told me all this, but he wouldn’t say, shaking his head slowly and staring out the window at the strip malls, barbecue joints, and used car lots that formed the outskirts of Weatherford, Texas.
Petey again gave directions, and pretty soon we were at our destination.
The Greenhorn Carrolls lived in a true compound; the chain-link fence had barbed wire on top running around several acres of land.
I stopped by the gate and watched smoke billow toward the sky.
“Oh no.” Petey leaned across the dashboard and peered through the window. “He’s already here.”
Two gunshots rattled in the distance.
He looked at me.
“How many people live in there?” I pulled off the road to one side of the gate.
“Not many now. Maybe ten or so. Maybe less. Mostly women.” Petey jumped out of the car. “Everybody’s on the road this time of year, earning.”
I grabbed the weapon off the floorboard. It was a Smith & Wesson revolver, a four-inch-barrel .38-caliber. Fully loaded with six bullets, 158-grain roundnose lead. I’d have given Petey’s Rolex for a little more firepower, but that wasn’t going to happen.
“Let’s go.” I slipped through the gate. The Weatherford compound was heavily wooded, live oaks and cottonwoods thick with vines. A dirt road led to the right.
I jogged down the path, gun in my hand, Petey running behind me.
The road veered to the left. About twenty feet ah
ead, a man in a gray track suit stepped out of the woods. He was about seven feet tall, bald like a cue ball, carrying a shotgun in one hand. The firearm looked like a child’s toy in his grasp.
He raised the weapon and pointed it at me.
I stopped but kept the gun in my hand. Petey almost rammed into my back.
“Oswald, right?” the man said.
“Yeah.” I frowned, trying to remember where and in what context I knew this elephantine human being. There had been so many lowlifes over so many years. Hard to recollect exactly. Plus, I had made a conscious decision to try to forget.
“What are you doing here?” He lowered the shotgun slightly, the muzzle pointing at my knees now.
“Working.” I smiled and shrugged as the man’s name came to me.
Bobby Ray. A low-rent enforcer for a thug in Fort Worth who ran the gambling and hookers on the south side of town. Bobby Ray had once tossed a prostitute through a plate glass window on Christmas Day. That was the good story I remembered about him.
“Heard you got out of the life.” He put the shotgun back to his shoulder. “Now you’re here.”
“A man’s gotta make a living, you know?” I cocked my head to one side. “Guy called, said he needed help with a bunch of Gypsies.”
“We’re right in the middle of it.” He laughed and lowered the gun again. “Greasy little fuckers scream a lot when you torch their trailers.”
Petey let out a groan and stepped out from behind me.
The gigantic man frowned. “Who’s that?”
“Nobody.”
“You’re not working for my team, are you?” He raised the shotgun, finger tightening around the trigger.
“The hell I’m not. You think I’d come all the way out here and—” I shot Bobby Ray in the chest.
He looked at the wound in his sternum and then at me. He tightened his grip on the shotgun and squinted down the barrel.
“Holy shit.” Petey crossed himself.
I fired again. The bullet hit a few centimeters from the first.
Bobby Ray dropped the gun and sat down on the dirt path, cross-legged. He stared at me and then at Petey and clutched his chest. A few drops of blood flecked his lips.
I grabbed the shotgun from the ground and a nickel-plated revolver from the front of his waistband. We now had three firearms between us.
“Here.” I tossed Petey the handgun.
He caught the weapon by the barrel, held on to it for a nanosecond, and then dropped it as if it were on fire.
“I don’t like guns,” he said.
“Me neither.” I picked up the gun and pointed toward the direction of the smoke. “Let’s go.”
The Professor smiled inside the face mask strapped across his nose and chin, the flow of oxygen gentle as it wafted across the tender membranes of his nasal cavity. Between the pure O2 and the antioxidants he’d taken, he had mitigated some but not all of the damage done by the Traveler woman and her pesticide spray.
He stood behind a large elm tree in the woods a few dozen yards or so from where the strange man from the house in Plano had just dispatched the lummox named Bobby Ray.
Lee Henry Oswald.
A warrior, much like himself, a veteran of the elder Bush’s Middle Eastern campaign, according to an old contact at the U.S. Army Human Resources Center in St. Louis.
And, if the child was to be believed, an employee of his target, Anita Nazari.
A Ranger. A worthy opponent if only his health had been better. Now he would have to use stealth and artifice.
Later, if time and circumstances permitted, he would enjoy a visit with the man, a chance to learn how he had made it to the Gypsy encampment. A comparing of notes after the game, so to speak. He hoped he wouldn’t have to kill him.
A voice sounded in his earpiece, the one hired freelancer with an IQ above that of farm animal. The quarry, the second contractor, had been spotted.
The Professor stepped away from the tree and slipped deeper into the woods.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Petey led the way this time, holding the shotgun awkwardly against his chest. I followed a few steps behind, carrying the Smith against my thigh.
“I’ve never seen anybody get killed before,” Petey said.
“Hope you don’t ever again.” I could see flames through the trees now. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”
We reached the edge of the wooded area. Four large travel trailers were visible, double wheeled, triple axled. Expensive looking.
Three were on fire. The fourth was closest, maybe seventy-five or eighty yards away. The air smelled like somebody had dropped a Styrofoam cup full of urine into a fire pit of burning rubber. Oily and nasty, choke-inducing from the plastics and other synthetic materials that were aflame.
Three men stood by the last trailer, talking to each other. Each held a long gun of some kind, either a rifle or a shotgun.
I pulled Petey behind a thick old pecan tree, bracketed on either side by oak saplings. “You recognize any of those guys?”
He shook his head.
“You wouldn’t by any chance have any military experience?”
“Don’t even have a Social Security number.” He turned and looked at me. “You think I’d join your nation’s army?”
One of the men by the RV bent over with laughter. Another slapped him on the back and pointed to the surviving RV. The third fired his weapon in the air. It was a rifle. The sharp crack of the report hit my ears a split second after a finger of smoke jetted out of the barrel.
“There’s only women and children here.” Petey hopped from one foot to the other.
I studied the terrain and vegetation. The woods curved to our left, toward the burning trailers. If you followed the trees, you might get as close as thirty or forty yards to the group of men, at the extreme range of the shotgun. They’d get peppered by pellets. And mightily pissed off.
A .38-caliber bullet could be deadly that far away, but wildly inaccurate out of a four-inch barrel. I grabbed the second revolver, the one I’d taken off of Bobby Ray, from Petey’s grasp.
“Hey.” He resisted for a moment before letting go.
The gun was an old Colt Trooper Mark III, again in the wimpy .38 caliber, though this time loaded with six hollowpoints.
I turned my attention to the shotgun, a Remington 11-87 with a magazine extension tube bolted onto the forearm, making the weapon look almost like a double barrel. I jacked the bolt back and ejected a shell, repeating the movement until the gun was empty.
Four red shells lay on the carpet of leaves at my feet. I picked them up. Double-ought buckshot. A dozen or so ball-bearing-sized hunks of lead in each.
I reloaded and handed it back to Petey. The shotgun was a much superior weapon for close-in combat, but four shells didn’t leave much margin for error. I would take the two .38s with ten bullets between them and hope my meager pistol-shooting skills would be up to the challenge if it came to that.
More laughing from the men by the RV. Waving guns at the trailer. I recognized the action for what it was, an adrenaline bleed-off, the let-down after a firefight.
One of the men fired again, and even from the distance I heard a woman scream.
Petey said something in his language and lunged toward the clearing. I grabbed his shirt and pulled him to the ground before he got away from the cover.
“Suicide is not the answer.” I dragged him back behind the tree. “This sounds stupid, but let’s synchronize our watches.”
He frowned.
“What time do you have?” I grabbed his wrist, looked at the gaudy gold Rolex. Four sixteen. I adjusted my Timex to the same minute.
“You’re gonna take the shotgun and walk along the tree line that way.” I nodded to the left. “When you get to the point closest to the bad guys, stop.”
Petey gave me a blank stare.
“Got that?”
He blinked once and nodded.
“Good. That should take you about three
minutes, give or take.” I tapped my watch. “So let’s say that at exactly four twenty, you fire at those guys. Shoot twice and then run as fast as possible in the opposite direction.”
“Four twenty.” He nodded. “Shoot twice.”
“That’s correct,” I said. “That will leave two more bullets for when they follow. You know the compound pretty well, right? You can find a place to hide?”
“Yeah, I can lose them, don’t worry.” He shrugged his shoulders and rolled his head like a runner loosening up for a track meet. “But what about you?”
“Don’t worry.” I smiled tightly. “I’ve got a plan.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I had no plan.
Petey took off, moving quietly through the underbrush.
I stood behind the tree for a full minute, trying to figure out what to do. The smartest course of action would be to get back to the VW and leave. I owed nothing to these bizarre Traveler people, nor to Anita Nazari.
But a strange thing had happened during the confrontation with Bobby Ray and the surreptitious hike through the wooded compound.
I got the juice back. I was loose and wired and cold inside, all at the same time.
Everything was more distinct now, the unevenness of the ground against my feet, the tiny details of the lichen on the oak trees, the crackle and roar of the burning trailers. I could feel the individual lines checkering the grip of the Smith in my palm.
I wanted to kick some ass and write home to Mom about it. Nolan was right; the juice was good. I hated her for pointing it out.
The group of men laughed and whooped, a bottle passing among them now. Three soldiers without a captain.
I stepped out of the clearing, looked at my watch. Two and a half minutes to go.
I stuck the revolvers in the waistband of my jeans, one behind each hip. I pulled out my cell phone and placed it against my head, mouthing into it, gesticulating with my free hand while staring at the three men as I walked.
They were drinking and laughing and watching the trailer, so I made it to within twenty yards before one turned around and saw me.
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