George Wier - The Last Call

“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.”

Julie got up during dinner for a bathroom break. It was probably the only chance I’d get for a while to talk with Hank alone.

“Hank, either I’m the most gullible fellow you ever saw, or I’m missing something vitally important.”

“It’s both,” he said. “But what’s on your mind?”

“I feel like every move I make is the wrong one. Also I’ve got this itchy feeling on the back of my neck.”

“I know what you mean. My short hairs have been on end ever since those pot shots through my living room window.”