Текст книги "The Last Call"

Автор книги: George Wier

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CHAPTER TWENTY

“Wake up, Bill.”

It was Hank, shaking me awake.

“What? What?”

“Bill. She’s gone.”

Who’s gone?That’s what I wanted to ask, but before I could even articulate the question, the answer came to me.

“Julie,” I said.

“Yeah.”

My eyes darted around the room. All my stuff was there, but what little she had of her own was gone with her.

I got up on wobbly feet. Probably I looked like hell. I wasn’t starting to hurt yet. I was still in shock. Would be for some time. It would come though. This I knew.

“What happened?” I asked.

“She didn’t bother to check out,” he said. “Ohhh, my head.”

“She must have heard me.”

“Heard you what?”

“I got a call last night. It was Carpin. He wanted to trade the little girl for Julie. I told him no way. She must have been listening on the other side of the door. Decided to take him up on it.”

Hank nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “That must be it. I already went downstairs and talked to the owner. I apologized for the gun-play. Gave him an extra hundred-dollar bill.”

“And, Julie?”

“Oh. She banged on his office door about five-thirty this morning. Used his phone. A half-hour later a light-blue Ford pickup picked her up.”

“Jake. Freddie.”

“Yeah,” Hank said. “Also, she left you a note. It’s both short and sweet.” He handed me the note, written on motel stationery.

Bill, I gotta go. Me for Jessica is not a bad deal. Go home. You’d only get killed. -Julie.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Almost ten. Bill. It’s okay. I was asleep too. We can’t change it now.”

I wanted to curse. It wouldn’t have done any good. Red hot needles of betrayal were beginning to poke at my gut, my heart.

I could see that Hank wanted to ask me a lot of questions. He didn’t, though. Just the same, it was all right there on his face. I wasn’t anywhere near in the mood to talk, but then I guess he knew that.

“Hank. I’ll tell you all you wanna know. Not now. We’ve got to get going.”

I started putting my clothes on.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Right.”

I was warned.

She had told me to run. Very fast.

It didn’t help, though.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

My normal tendency is to go into a state of black despair when I lose someone whom I consider to be close. But I wasn’t depressed. I was angry, but who could I blame? I had known all along that something was going to happen, and that it would be something that I wouldn’t like.

It was simple anger. Deep inside of me, beneath the caldera of my exterior, there was a magma chamber burning hot. If I got just the wrong jolt at just the wrong time, whoever got in my way might have gotten hurt.

Once somebody did get hurt. It never made the papers or the seven o’clock news. I was never arrested, although technically, I could have been.

When I was seventeen I met my first enemy in life. I was a junior in high school and this other kid-if you want to call age twenty “kiddish”-thought I was scrawny and even-tempered enough to be his whipping boy. His name was Jose Rios. He’d been held back more times than Carter had little liver pills. I never forgot him. The teachers tended to turn a blind eye when he’d shove some kid in the hallway and spill his books. Jose had one of those chilling laughs, the kind one could imagine a kid with a sick sense of humor might have who liked to torture small animals just to hear them squeal in terror and pain. Jose was like that in the head department. Twisted.

Whenever he picked on anybody it was a lot like a cliche vaudeville act. First came the push. Second, books or furniture would spill, making a loud clatter. Third, heads would begin turning toward the source of the clamor. Fourth: silence. Last came Jose’s evil laugh. No drum roll. Just a perverted cacophonous titter turning into a belly-rolling laugh. Every time I saw it happen I got a little upset about it, sure, but the magma chamber hardly registered anything. There was more embarrassment than there was outright anger, and not enough heat and not nearly enough pressure to cause a blow-up.

Not enough, that is, until Elden Williams ran into Jose Rios on a particularly bad day in May near the end of that same year.

Every high school has an Elden Williams. Elden was a mildly retarded kid with an ever-present grin on his face. I had known him from the first grade forward, and while we had never actually been “friends”, I had learned to tolerate him a little better than most anybody else, including his teachers.

Elden loved school buses. After his Special Ed classes he’d usually show me a large foldout manila page with his latest creation on it. Sometimes it was an overly large greenish yellow bus with just about every race and nationality represented through over-sized too-squarish windows. Other times it might be a front view showing a fat bus driver, or even a top view. For Elden, school buses were It!

That Friday, when I looked up from the sidewalk where the fire ants were devouring the leavings of a thrown down sandwich in the bus yard and saw Jose ripping a large manila sheet in half and registered the tears streaming down harmless Elden’s face, the caldera of my whole self went pyroclastic.

Jose Rios spent three days in the hospital. Maybe he had been milking it for sympathy. That could have been it. But just maybe he hadn’t wanted to return to school and have to face me. All I do know was that I discovered what I was capable of. I never saw him, but I heard reports-he had a broken nose, a number of contusions on his head where I had reportedly rammed it into a school bus, and a cracked clavicle.

Volcanoes are blindly and unintelligently violent. If they were to have a viewpoint, I suspect it would be like that day in May when Jose set me off. All I could recall after hearing Jose Rios’ animal-torture laugh was whirling, blurring motion.

As we moved off into the heat and brightness of the new day, I allowed myself to feel what I was feeling. And as I did, I calmed. Thankfully, Hank kept quiet.

God bless ‘im.

“Your supplies,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Let’s go get ‘em.”

We were out into the countryside. The highway had become little more than a series of bridges over North Texas creeks and lowlands. It reminded me a little of summer camp; those roads, and Hank and Dingo and Julie to keep me company, much the same as good friends of summers past. But Julie wasn’t with us.

It was turning into a hot day.

Hank guided us.

Outside of Childress by about ten miles, Hank had me take a left down a gravel county road. We were exactly nowhere, I’d say. Hell, we could have been in the middle of remotest Africa, but for the presence of a few road signs.

I thought of the dream I’d had about Africa and Julie, and shivered.

We made another three miles down a narrow, gravel road; our only encounters, the occasional deer regarding us docilely like the interlopers we were.

Hank directed me to turn left.

We stopped and Hank climbed out and unhooked a barbed-wire gate, one of those kind that is nothing more than three strands of wire and a couple of posts. He dragged it off to the left, held it and motioned me through. I waited as he put the gate back and climbed back in.

We followed narrow ruts through high weeds.

“You sure you know where you’re going?” I asked him.

“Sure as anything else about this trip,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

About a half-mile through nothing but weeds and cow pasture and there was a house ahead among a grove of oak trees. As we approached I could make out a large double-wide trailer house up on blocks and minus its skirting. There was a bass boat on a trailer parked up close to the front porch and a couple of pickup trucks parked in the yard.

“This is it,” Hank said. “Stay here for a minute, Bill. And mind the dogs.”

“Dogs?”

Then I saw what he meant. I’d never seen so many dogs in one place. There were all kinds, from little terriers up to big tick hounds and every gradation in between, and they all came running up to the car, tails wagging and thumping against the Suburban. A big chow planted his paws up on my window, black tongue lolling and dripping drool. So far though, not one had so much as barked. I could hear a few nervous growls, though.

Hank moved between the trucks amid an entourage of canines scurrying about his feet and hips. He petted the taller ones that he could reach without bending over and stepped up on a wide porch. The porch had bowed wooden railings that had seen too much rain and not enough sealant. Hank knocked on the side of the house.

“Carpin,” I said to myself. “If you hurt her I’ll kill you.”

The front door opened. It was dark inside but for the fluctuating blue light of a television screen hidden from view.

I waited all of five minutes. Hank finally emerged from the house, dogs in tow. I rolled down my window.

“Okay,” he said. “I need your help, now.”

“What are we loading? I’ve already forgotten.”

“You ain’t forgot. You’ve got that woman on your brain and you can’t see or think of anything else. Come on. A little work will be good for you.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“Cooder is fresh out of C-4 and Prima.”

“Oh. Yeah,” I said. “Nitrates?”

“Yep. By the way. No smoking in the Suburban for awhile.”

“Fine by me,” I said.

Nitrates. That word called something to mind, but it slipped away. I looked up at Hank. Then I had it. The Oklahoma City bombing. A small truck filled with nitrates had taken out a whole multi-story building and all the people inside it. The first domestic terrorist bombing on American soil.

“Hank. Nitrates? You sure about this?”

He looked at me.

“What’s youridea?” he asked. It was a serious question.

I thought for a minute.

“Never had one,” I told him.

“Good. That’s what I’m here for anyway.”

I looked up through the trees into a patch of blue sky. Far off on the horizon there was a line of dark blue. A storm of some kind. More than likely, if my luck hadn’t undergone a change, it was bearing down on us.

I thought about nitrates.

I’d seen up close the results of two explosions in my life. One was the one I had just experienced first-hand, blow-by-blow, a little over two days past. An old man had died in that one. It hadn’t been very pretty. I knew I’d be carrying those last few moments with Dock around with me for the rest of my life.

My first explosion, however, had to do with a tractor-trailer rig that had wrecked and blown sky-high at the entrance to our country neighborhood when I was a kid of about fourteen years of age. A dynamite company had leased the pasture behind us and they stored gun powder in trailers all along the back forty. At first I had thought that one of the dynamite rigs out back had let go, but a glance out the window and a quick count ruled that out. I ran down the road that led into our dead-end neighborhood on a spring morning before the school bus was due and I saw the wreckage out on the highway. There were about ten thousand little steel rings in a circle about a hundred yards in radius, the “o-rings” that were supposed to keep the gunpowder hermetically sealed. Amazingly the driver had lived through it. I remembered wondering at the time if he would ever haul dynamite or gunpowder again. If it had been me, I knew I sure as hell wouldn’t.

Explosions. Storms. One or the other, or possibly both were coming, bearing down upon us with all the inevitability of fate.

“I’ve come this far,” I said, and climbed out into the herd of dogs.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

We went back to downtown Childress.

Where were Agents Cranford and Bruce when we needed them?

We stopped for a bite at a Sonic Drive-In on the main drag through town.

Hank ordered for us while I made a phone call at the gas station pay phone next door.

“Bill! I’m glad you called! I didn’t know how to get hold of you.”

“What’s going on, Kathy?” I asked. She sounded pretty excited.

“I found something in the State Archives. A letter. It was in the restricted stuff, so you didn’t hear it from me.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“It was inside an envelope with the letterhead of the Dallas Sheriff’s Office and addressed to the Governor of Texas. I think it may be a hand-written note from that guy you told me to look up.”

“What guy?”

“The U.S. Marshal. Blackjack.”

“What’s the note say, Kathy?”

“Okay. Hold on.” She put the phone down. I listened to the surface of her library counter for a minute, then she was back. “Got it. Ready?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s dated the eighth of September, 1926. It reads: ‘Roger, Feels like this playing both ends against the middle is going to wind me up dead. There’s a lot of money in this town, but getting close to the shine is work. These people are scum of God’s Earth, but they are sly. If I don’t hit pay dirt in a week, I’m out of this God-forsaken hell-hole. If you don’t see me in ten days after receiving this, then I’m dead. Send cavalry anyway. Best, BJ.’ That’s it. What’s it mean, Bill?”

“It means that the cavalry got there too late, Kathy.”

“Why do you need to know all this stuff, Bill? And why was this restricted? This stuff happened over seventy years ago.”

“Because, darlin’,” I said. “Those were real people and they had real families, and some of those families, the sons and daughters-and most certainly the grandsons and granddaughters-are still around up here.”

“Oh,” she said. “They could be affected by this after seventy years?”

“Is the South still affected by the Civil War? Is Germany still affected by the Nazis?”

“Uh. Yeah. I see your point,” she said. “By the way, where are you calling from?”

“Childress, Texas. Kathy, this is about money, whiskey, horses and kidnapping. If I recall correctly, Roger Bailey was the Dallas Sheriff. He used to sell the bicycles that Clyde Barrow stole over in West Dallas. Sold them out of his pawn shop. This was when Clyde was still a kid, just getting his start in crime. Bailey knew what he was doing.”

“Wow. Nice guy. Was everybody on the take back then, or not?”

“Not everybody, Kathy, but sometimes the lines blurred.”

“Okay,” she said. “I still don’t understand all the secrecy.”

She had a point. I didn’t either. “Well,” I replied. “What if somebody started going around saying your grandfather made his fortune from illegal whiskey, robbery and murder-for-hire?”

“Hah! I think maybe he did, Bill.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay. Still, you’re right. I wouldn’t like it.”

“Exactly. Also, I think there’s even more to it all than just hoodlumism.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Don’t know. I’ll tell you if I find out.”

“Uh,” she said. “On second thought don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

I looked up. Hank drew his hand across his throat and tapped on a non-existent watch.

“Gotta run, darlin’,” I told her. “I’ll see you later.”

“Um. Bill? Uh. I don’t know how to tell you this.”

“Just spit it out.”

“Well, okay. I don’t want to go out with you.”

What? I thought. “I thought I was just buying you dinner. You know, friends?”

“Oh. Okay. Good. I’m glad you thought that. It makes it easier. I still can’t.”

“Alright,” I said. “Why?”

“‘Cause,” she said. “What you do is too dangerous. I don’t want any part of it.”

I paused two beats, let it sink in.

“Good,” I said. “I always knew you were a smart girl.”

We exchanged goodbyes and hung up.

“Well,” I said aloud to myself. “I’ll be damned.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

After Hank, Dingo and I bolted down our food we got back on the road.

“Turn left off the town square, Bill,” he said.

It was getting late in the day. All of three o’clock.

“Where’re we going?” I asked.

“Radio Shack,” he said.

“Sorry I asked.”

Surprisingly the town had one.

By four-thirty we were sitting under a shade tree down by a slow-moving creek on the outskirts of town.

I patted Dingo and watched Hank. He was ladling some very foul-smelling raw nitrates from a large-sized trash bag into a series of small metal cylinders. I started to ask where he had gotten the cylinders, then decided against it. I didn’t need to know.

A sheriff’s deputy car passed. I waved and the two patrolmen waved back.

“Think they know us?” Hank asked me.

“If they don’t then I’m willing to bet that they know ofus.”

“Remember when she told us about Carl, the jockey?” I asked Hank.

“Yeah. And Lefty. Jake and Freddie’s fathers.”

“Right. Well, remember when Julie said that Lefty liked to tell stories, only he-”

“He did a bad job of it,” Hank said.

“Uh huh. So Carl had to finish most of them. The story she told me in my office the first morning I met her was about a manure pile.”

“What? You’re kidding.”

“Nope. A story about a manure pile and some horse stables. At first I thought it was… Uh… Horseshit.”

“The story,” Hank said, “not the manure. Got it.”

“Right,” I told him. “So there was this bit of concrete poking up at the edge of the manure pile. It had a rusted out lid on it and an old padlock on top of that. All Lefty could say was that the manure pile had a ghost, and that it was the ghost of an old lawman. Carl corrected him and pointed out the concrete tube, about a foot and a half in diameter, and said it was the chimney for an old tornado shelter.”

“Makes sense,” Hank said. “Most of these old homesteads up here on the plains have them. Go on with the story.”

“Okay. Carl told her that a house had once stood right beside the tornado shelter, which was concrete with a steel door. In the ground on top of that was a vegetable garden. They used to fertilize the garden with horse manure. Later, after the house had been torn down and rebuilt higher up on the hill they stopped raising vegetables there. Later they built some new horse stables there-about the time that Archie Carpin was a kid-and because it was tradition, kept on dumping their manure on top of the old tornado shelter.”

“Okay,” Hank said.

“So, that night when Julie was on the run and Archie was coming back home, she had to ditch the money. She had Jessica-the kid-with her and all she could think of doing was getting rid of the money and getting the hell out of there. If those men had caught her with the money, she-they-would both have been dead.”

“She got the lid open,” Hank said. “Didn’t she? The lid to the tornado shelter.”

“Uh huh. She did. It was mostly a blob of rust. She said she got crudded-up on all the wet manure from the downpour, but she got the damn thing open-“

”And dropped the doctor’s bag with the money down the hole.” Hank said, pleased with himself.

“Yeah,” I said. “Only she didn’t know about Blackjack. After all, it was just an old jockey’s tale.”

“Blackjack?”

“You’ll find out,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “We’re running low on time.”

Off to the east the line of dark clouds was much closer.

“I know,” he replied. “It’s time to get Julie and the little girl.”

“And the money,” I said.

Carpin’s ranch was fifteen miles outside of town and three miles from the state highway.

I got Dock’s Suburban up to eighty-five miles per hour and didn’t get any complaints from Hank.

About mid-way we passed a Dodge Ram pickup that had a headache rack on top. A county vehicle. Probably Sheriff’s Office.

I glanced in the rearview mirror, watched it slow down, turn off and whip around. It followed us for a mile or more, then slowed and pulled off to the side of the road.

I wondered, but then decided to forget about it.

The leaden gray leading edge of the storm front rolled and tumbled over us. Beneath it, in front of us and along the black eastern horizon, lightning forked down in brilliant trunks, searching, finding. Thunder pealed. From behind us the sun lit the land away north and east in an ethereal, orange-ish glow.

“Gonna be one helluva storm,” Hank said.

“Yeah. I think we should pull over and re-check our armaments,” I said.

We were loaded for bear. I had a.38 and Hank had his.25 caliber Walther and Dingo. Also he had a backpack stuffed with little metal cylinders with walkie-talkies taped to them.

“How’re you holding up?” Hank asked.

“Bout as well as can be expected,” I told him, but in truth, I was more than a little nervous.

When it comes to mortality, whether it’s your own or somebody else’s, that’s just the way it is. You feel it in your stomach, in the little nerve-endings in your hands and feet, over the sensitive skin along the spine. If I had to name the feeling, I’d call it fear.

I wondered if Hank felt the same.

“Let’s do this,” he said.

I started up the car and pulled out onto the road and headed straight into the coming blackness.

A few miles down the road from Carpin’s ranch the windshield started picking up little spatters of rain. As we advanced the drops become larger, the roadway underneath became slick. By the time we reached a large billboard that read “QUARTER HORSE RANCH” on the roadside, it was coming down in sheets, almost horizontal, right at us. I turned the windshield wipers on full. In our headlights the rain appeared to have a nexus, a central emanation point about eight feet in front of the car and about four feet above the level of the hood.

Night had descended, and it was a night right out of some story by Sterling Hayden, or perhaps Dean Koontz. The kind of night where the weather takes on a personality all its own.

I slowed us to a crawl. The last mile took all of five minutes, though it seemed a lot longer.

The rain came down so fast and thick and hard all at once as we pulled off the road near the main gate that visibility was down to twenty yards, even with the wipers flogging the windshield full tilt.

I looked at Hank.

“Are we doing this right?” I asked him.

“I’ve never done this before, Bill,” he said. “We’ll know soon enough. If we live through this, remind me to tell you that you did fine.”

I put the car in park.

“Leave the keys under the seat,” Hank said. “We may have to scoot pretty quick.”

“How are we going in?” I asked. Really, I was asking myself.

“Gun in hand. We go in together. You too, Dingo,” Hank said. Dingo stuck her head up front and licked Hank’s cheek.

It was my turn to say it: “Let’s do this.”