Текст книги "The Last Call"

Автор книги: George Wier

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Within five minutes after we left the sky overhead had become overcast with immense, dark clouds. Lightning played across the sky to the east. We all knew we were in for it.

We crossed Austin from east to west, then got back on the Loop going south. Our destination? My house.

It was sort of interesting being home without my own car. Mine was back at Dock’s house in Killeen.

Then it hit me. Anyone trying to figure out who Dock was or how he’d gotten where we left him would begin by checking into his home on the outskirts of Killeen. Which meant they’d find my car.

It was time to make a couple of phone calls and then get a move on. Well past time.

Before going inside we looked the place over as best we could. Nothing appeared to be tampered with. Hank got Dingo out of the Suburban and let her sniff around, first the front door, then the back. Nothing. I didn’t know whether or not Dingo was specially trained, but Hank seemed to act as if she had given the place her seal of approval.

Just in case, we went in through the back door.

About the time we got inside, the rain began, coming down in sheets. It had been awhile since I’d seen such a hard rain.

It didn’t appear that anything in the house had been tampered with. My fish were about half starved, so I gave them an extra dose of food.

While Julie, Hank and Dingo raided my refrigerator, I picked up the phone.

“Yallo?” The voice sounded like it was talking through a couple of jawfuls of gravel.

“Is this Mr. Neil, or Mr. Mortensson?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Bill.”

“Bill who?”

“Just Bill. This is with regard to Julie Simmons and Archie Carpin.”

Silence.

“Hello?” I said again.

“I’m here,” gravel-voice said.

“Just making sure.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s safe, for now. A couple of jokers named Jake and Freddie, whom I’ve been dying to meet, keep trying to kill her. Know anything about that?”

Silence.

“Is this Mr. Neil?” I asked.

“Neil’s dead.”

“Really? My condolences. When did he die?”

“Last week.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Really.”

“So I guess he can’t talk to me then.”

“Not unless you’ve got a crystal ball or something-connections on the other side. Son, you don’t want to get involved in this shit. It’s not exactly safe.”

“You know what’s not safe? Going around sniping at folks with deer rifles and setting dynamite charges inside of duplexes. That’s not safe at all.”

“Bill, huh? Maybe it’s your real name. Okay, listen up real close, you happy dip wad. You’ve got a woman there who is pure-dee poison. Don’t turn your back on her.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said. “So how do we go about calling off these dogs?”

“You mean the dipshit twins? Bullets won’t stop ’em. They’re too stupid to know when to quit.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. I looked up from my couch to see Julie leaning up against the doorway from the kitchen. Her arms were crossed under her breasts and she had a serious look on her face. Behind her I could see a tail wagging. Hank was feeding Dingo something. I wondered what it could be.

“What you think is what she wants you to think.”

I covered up the phone with my hand so gravel-voice couldn’t hear.

“Does Jolly Mortensson sound like he gargles with sandpaper?” I asked Julie

“Yeah,” she said.

I took my hand off the phone.

“Okay,” I told him. “Somehow I get the feeling that you two aren’t the best of friends.”

“I don’t have any friends, Mr. Bill. All my friends are dead.”

“I understand your nickname now.”

“What?”

“Goodbye, Jolly,” I said, and hung up.

I made another call.

I had to wade through three different people at the Sheriff’s office until I got who I was looking for: an old friend of mine, Deputy Patrick Kinsey.

“Kinsey,” he said.

“Pat. This is your old friend, Bill Travis. I need a favor.”

“Bill? Bill Travis?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn. It’s been awhile. I thought I saw you one time across the room at one of those lawyer functions my wife’s always trying to get me to go to. By the time I got over to you, you were nowhere to be found. By the way, what happened to us? We used to really knock back the suds.”

“You got married, Pat.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Guess you’re right. I did. Okay, so that makes sense.”

“Yeah.”

“So what kind of favor?”

“First, I’ll give you something.”

“Shoot,” Pat said.

“That explosion in northwest Austin last night.”

“Okay, you got me. I’m all ears.”

“You recording this?” I asked.

“Not if you say not to.”

“Okay,” I told him. “Don’t.”

“Got it.”

“Write down a name. Got a pen?”

“Sure do. Poised for writing.”

“Good. The name is Carpin, with a ‘C’.”

“Carpin. Got it. Is that a first name or a last name?”

“Last. What I’ve got for a first name is Archie. I don’t know anything else, so I’ll guess it’s maybe an Archibald. Who knows?”

“Okay. This who I’m looking for?”

“Him or a couple of his flunkies. Two names. Flunky number one is Jake Jorgenson, I think. The other is Freddie Sanderberry. You might have to flip-flop those two last names, though. I never did write any of this down, so it might be all backwards.”

“Okay.”

“Jake and Freddie blew up the duplex. They drive a late model Ford F-150 pickup, light blue. Looks like it needs a coat of paint.”

“Coat of paint, got it.”

“Okay, so if you run all this through the National Crime Information Computer, I’ll bet you get diddley-squat. But, I’m willing to bet the FBI has a file on them, especially Carpin. He runs horses and moonshine stills up in North Texas, or rather, he did.”

“Geez Louise. Got it. You’re leaving out a whole lot,” he said.

“Protecting somebody.”

“One of your special clients?”

“As I recall, you were a special client of mine once,” I said.

“Bill, did you know the guy who died. Dock Slocum?”

“Yeah. He was… a friend of a friend. One of the good ones. He’s got people up in Gunnison, Colorado, if I recall correctly. You’ll find my car when you go over to his house.”

“I was just about to head over there and have a look around. Geez, Bill, I really think you ought to come in and talk with me about this one.”

I watched as Julie turned away from me and went up the stairs. Maybe she’d heard enough.

“Can’t do that, Patrick,” I said. “I’ve just told you everything you need to know right now.”

“Somehow, I have trouble believing that.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“All right,” he said. I could hear the resignation in his voice. “Where can I reach you, Bill?”

“If I need to, I’ll be reaching you.”

“You better write down my cell phone number,” he said. He gave it to me and I took it down. I could hear some shuffling over the phone line. Probably Patrick clearing his work space. Maybe I’d lit a fire under him.

“So what’s the favor?” he asked.

“When all this is said and done I may be seriously needing your help. For my client. Possibly for me too.” There was a long silence on the other end.

“Bill. I can do just about anything except break the law. But you know that.”

“I know. Wouldn’t want you to break anything. Might want you to bend a few things, though.”

“Bending. Now that I can do, if I have to. It depends on how far.”

“Good. I don’t know exactly what kind of help we may need, but it never hurts to have a friend in your corner, you know?”

“You got it. I’m plainclothes now anyway. It gives me a little latitude. Anything else?”

“I’ll let you know when, and if, the time comes.”

He was quiet for a bit.

“You sound sorta funny,” he said.

“Yeah, but nobody’s laughing.”

“Okay,” he said. “See ya.”

“See ya,” I said, and hung up.

I placed another call, this time to my office.

Penny answered.

“Penny. It’s Bill.”

“Mr. Travis! Mr. Bierstone has been looking for you. He’s had me leave several messages on your desk.”

“That’s fine, Penny. I may be out for a few days. It’s this Simmons case he wanted me to handle. Listen, Penny, I’ll be checking back in as I’m able. There’s a stack of bills that have to be paid in the second from the top drawer of my filing cabinet. There’s a small stack of blank checks in the safe. Pay those bills for me, would you?”

“Okay, got it,” she said. “Is that it?”

“Sorry, Penny. Just getting started. First thing is there’s this little kid. I’ll need some standard papers for her, assignment of legal guardianship, that sort of thing. You might ask Nat what all we’ll need. He loves doing that sort of thing. The kid’s name on the form will be Keesha White. A Kay, two ee’s, and a shuh. Guardian would be Coleeta White.” I spelled it for her. “She should be in the phone book as far as address and stuff. Tell Nat that it might be a good idea to go over and visit and get her to sign them when the papers are ready.”

“Okay… Got it. Is that it?”

I thought for a moment.

“Hold on a second, Penny,” I said.

“Julie!” I called.

I heard a distant voice say something that sounded like “bathroom.” Good. She was out of earshot.

Hank was standing there in the doorway where Julie had been before, Dingo right beside him. They both looked at me. Dingo barked once, gruffly.

“Okay, Penny,” I said. “One last thing. Have Nat call an old friend of mine. Deputy Sheriff Patrick Kinsey.” I told her the number. “Have Nat tell Kinsey everything he knows about Miss Simmons.”

“Okay. Is that it?”

“Is that it? Hmmm. Penny, does anything ever bother you?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“Good. You’re doing a fine job.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“One more thing. Just remind Nat to let Mrs. White know that he’s my partner. That way, nobody will be freaking out when he comes knocking.”

“Got it.”

“Penny, I might have to leave town for a few days. If you don’t hear from me by say-?”

“Monday?” I mouthed to Hank.

He nodded.

“Monday,” I said to Penny. “Can you come to my house and feed my fish? There’s a spare house key in my desk.”

“I’ll do that, sir. Have a good day, sir.”

Have a good day? Me? She didn’t know me very well.

I hung up.

Hank raised his eyebrows.

“What?” I asked.

I wasn’t sure why I’d asked for information on Julie, or why I’d asked Penny to pass it on to Nat Bierstone to do. That’s not like me. Usually I hit things pretty much head on, and the consequences be damned. But looking at it, I think maybe that it was some reflex action. A nod at self-preservation. I sometimes didn’t take too good of care of myself, I guess, the way I tended to fall into things like I’d just done.

If she’s willing to put you in danger, then somethin’ is not right.That’s what Lawrence White had said.

I had a feeling right then. That feeling of something not right.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I’d learned a long time ago that the only way to head off trouble was to face it head on. Doing anything else only tends to stack it up deeper further down the road. So, I was hoping that my little call to Pat Kinsey would be worth something later on. Also, I was hoping beyond hope that Julie would get something out of what I was doing. She’d been running for some time, it appeared, probably mostly from herself. Maybe I was just kidding myself, but what I was wishing for most of all was that she’d begin to face up to whatever she had done.

Me, I’m no saint. I’m basically lazy, and I’ve found it far simpler to get along in life by looking, confronting, and stopping the stone before it gets too much inertia going down that long hill. Sometimes, waiting too long before trying to stop it gets you nothing but flattened by it.

Julie sat next to me on the couch while I dialed Archie Carpin’s number.

“Do you want to talk to him first?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

I got a ring.

“Start talking,” the voice said. It was a masculine voice.

“If this is Archie, Julie wants to talk to you,” I said.

There was a long silence. I could almost hear the gears turning.

“I don’t care much for talk,” he said.

“I can understand that,” I said. “But the fact remains that talking is better than shooting.”

“Who says?”

“Marshal Dillon, for one. The word we’re looking for here is negotiation, I think.”

“Well,” he said. “Really, I ought to kiss her. She killed my number one competitor. Nobody else was brave enough to do that.”

“Are you talking about Mr. Neil? Your horse-racing competitor?”

“The one and only.”

It was my turn for silence. I looked at Julie. She was petting Dingo. Also, she was biting her lower lip.

“How did he die?” I asked.

“Somebody put a very large caliber bullet through his neck. Like to have cut his head off.”

“Well damn,” I said.

“That’s ancient history. What I want to know is where she put it.”

“I thought he died last week,” I said.

“Last week and a million years ago are about the same. Dead is dead. I repeat: so where did she put it?”

“Put what?” For a moment my question was sincere. I had forgotten about the money. Then I got the picture in my head: the close lightning and the fat drops of rain and the grating metal-on-metal sound of the vent cover opening and two million sliding down into oblivion.

“Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “I want that money.”

“Oh… Thatmoney. Well. That’s also why I’m calling. To open negotiations.”

“I won’t negotiate,” Carpin said.

“That’s what Julie said. But people can change, Archie,” I said.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about a deal,” I said.

I noticed Hank looking at me rather studiously. He nodded his head “no”.

“The money first, then we talk,” Carpin said.

“No way,” I said. I didn’t have to hesitate.

“I know she stashed it somewhere,” he said. “There’s a certain little girl who will attest she didn’t have it the last time she saw her.”

“What little girl?” I looked at Julie. Her eyes went wide as I watched.

“You don’t know?” Carpin asked. He laughed; a great hollow chuckle with about as much humor as a lynching party. “Hah! That figures. Tell Julie the kid is safe right here with me. Ain’t that right, little darlin’?” his voice had become distant. He was holding the mouthpiece away. I pressed the phone against my ear so hard that it hurt, but I couldn’t make out a response.

“Carpin,” I said quickly. “You’re related to the Signal Hill bunch, aren’t you?”

“Hell yeah I am. That was my granddaddy.”

“Not that I want to win friends and influence people or anything, but your granddaddy was low-life scum of the earth. I’m surprised you never changed your name in shame. A sorrier cutthroat never walked,” I said, and hung up.

“Who’s the kid?” I asked Julie, immediately upon hanging up.

“Oh God,” Julie said. “I put her on the bus. I watched the bus leave that night. He’s lying. He can’t have her.”

“Have who?” Hank asked.

“Jessica.”

Isn’t it interesting how when you think you’ve got things pretty well nailed down, they start jumping around again? For me that normally doesn’t happen. I don’t like it much.

The room was still, but things were jumping.

She was about to lose it. I could tell. Another minute, maybe ten seconds, and she’d lose it for sure.

I reached out to her, grabbed her arm just as she was pushing herself up from the couch. Her wrists were bony and delicate, so I made sure not to break them. I’ve got a pretty good grip.

“Julie,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “you can tell us all about Jessica, and that’s probably a lot more important than any amount of money right now, but I want to know one thing first.”

I could see the terror in her eyes, the indecision. She looked toward Hank, who sat stock still.

“What?” She said.

“I have to know. The guy you called… The guy who helped you… Ernest Neil? He’s dead. It happened a few days before you and I met. Carpin said that you killed him. Is there anything you need to tell me?”

“Bill… I-no! I didn’t kill him. I haven’t killed anybody, ever– except– my parents.”

“You were away,” I said, “in rehab. You weren’t home when they were murdered.”

She was either going to hit me or start crying. I wished she’d do one or the other and get it over. I watched the war of conflicting emotions play itself out in her features. “I know,” she said, finally. “But I should have been there.”

“Bill told me about that,” Hank said. “If you’d been there, you’d have been dead too.”

“Do you know how Ernest Neil died?” I asked her.

“Of course I know,” she said. Her face was flushed, as I’d seen it only a few nights before after I’d awakened her from the nightmare. “He died in my arms.”

“Are you ready, Hank?” I asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s saddle up,” I said.

The hammering rain had slackened down to a steady drizzle.

We all climbed back into Dock’s suburban.

“Which way are we headed?” Hank asked.

“North,” I said.

Julie took the front seat. Chevrolet makes Suburbans wide, and it seemed like a mile across to where she was sitting. That was okay. Just at the moment she wasn’t my number one pal.

Within ten minutes we were back on the Interstate, headed north and into the drab, gray curtain the world had become.

When we stopped at Hank’s place it was ostensibly for supplies, but when Hank caught on to my real why, he wasn’t having any of it.

“Goddammit, Bill. I’m going with you. I’m not staying here.”

“Thanks, Buddy,” I told him. “I appreciate everything, really, but you didn’t sign up for what we’re headed into. Hell, you’re about as bunged up as I am. You should take it easy for a few days. If I need you I’ll call.”

Hank stepped around me and dropped a case of water bottles into the back of the Suburban. There in the growing stack was also a couple of boxes of ammunition for the stack of rifles and shotguns in the rear cargo area.

Hank whistled to Dingo and made a motion with his arm. Dingo hopped up into the back, turned and regarded me and barked once.

“See,” Hank said. “Dingo agrees with me. We’re going.”

Up front Julie turned back my way and smiled.

I gave her my best withering frown. She laughed.

I was at first certain that Jessica was Julie’s daughter, only to find out differently. Julie had had a close friend named Lindsey, a high-dollar prostitute in Vegas. Lindsey had been murdered by one of her clients, a Silicon Valley millionaire turned playboy named Horace Farkner who spent nearly every weekend in Vegas when he should have been home with his wife and kids. Farkner had fallen into a fatal attraction for Julie’s friend back in the late 1990s and Julie was there for Jessica from the moment they both heard about Lindsey’s death. Apparently, when Lindsey demurred one time too many in the face of Farkner’s continuous pleas to run away with him, the man decided that if he couldn’t possess her then no one could. During a heated argument in which furniture was smashed and mirrors broken the man attempted to separate her head from her body with a six inch piece of shattered glass.

The five year-old half-Anglo, half-Samoan girl, had stayed with Julie from that night forward.

As we tore along the Interstate toward Dallas and Fort Worth, I did a little mental math. Jessica would be eleven years old now, or thereabouts. It was good information to plan with. Kids that age can think, and sometimes they can act.

On the outskirts of Fort Worth, I remembered something. I sent Julie and Hank into a Cracker Barrel restaurant just off the Interstate, found a pay phone for myself and started dialing.

I got Kathy on the first ring. When you live in a town as long as I had lived in Austin you get to know a lot of people. There might be a million people living in the city, but I’d found you couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone you knew. My friend Kathy was one of those people. I tended to bump into her around town and at the oddest of places, which in itself was passing strange, given Kathy’s profession. She was a librarian at the University of Texas Center for American History.

“Hello, Library.”

“Kathy, it’s Bill Travis.”

“Hi Bill Travis, what can I do for you today, since you’re not actively stalking me.”

“Hey,” I said. “Last time I looked up from my favorite bar stool you were coming in the door, so I wonder who has been stalking whom.”

“ Touche.What’cha need, Bill?”

“A little research. Signal Hill. It was an oil boomtown up near Borger. The Texas Rangers shut the town down around 1927. There was a fellow named Carpin running half the town up there.”

“Carpin. Got it.”

“Good. I’d like to know when he died. Also, I’d like to know what happened after the town was shut down. Where all the money went. That sort of thing. I seem to remember something about a U.S. Marshal who went in there and never made it back out. Anything you can dig up would be helpful.”

“Okay, Bill. You gonna do me a favor some time?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Dinner.”

“Um. Okay. I’ll buy you dinner, Kathy. Should I wait a few days for the information?”

I could hear her flipping pages of some kind. Maybe she was reading about Indian incursions against the settlers or something.

“Nah,” she said. “Call me tomorrow morning.”

“Thanks, Kathy. You’re a peach.”

“I don’t like peaches. Can I be something else?”

“Okay, when I see you next you can pick your fruit.”

“Bye, Bill Travis.”

“Bye, Kathy.”

We hung up. I heard a bark and looked back toward the suburban. Dingo had her head out the driver’s window and her front paws on the steering wheel.

“Dingo,” I said. “You’re a clown.”