George Wier - The Last Call

“I’m still here,” my voice reverberated off the bathroom walls, echoed back at me. My stomach felt like it had a ball of lead in it, engulfed in a sea of acid.

“That’s good,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said. About negotiations and attitudes and crap like that.”

“Well,” I said, attempting to put some of the nervousness out of my voice. “I guess that’s a good thing.”

“It’s a good thing, Mr. Travis.”

“So you know who I am. Good for you. Then you know that when somebody snaps at me, I snap back.”

“It depends on who draws the first blood, doesn’t it? Also it depends on who’s right and who’s wrong, right?”

“Listen,” I began. I was sitting in the dark, but there was a picture filling up my vision; a perfect picture in three dimensions and with sound and motion. Dock’s life blood squirting out of him and the labored breathing of a dying man. “You drew the first blood,” I told him.

“Not really,” he said. “But I will draw the last blood. That is unless we can come to a meeting of the minds.”

“What’s your bright idea?”

“You bring Julie back to the ranch, and I’ll promise that I won’t hurt her. Or the kid.”

I laughed at him. “Julie’s not mine to give,” I said, “and even if I could, I wouldn’t trust you.”

“But you’d trust her?”

He had a point there.

“I’ll make this easy for you, Mr. Travis,” he said.

I interrupted: “Don’t do me any favors. Only friends do favors.”

“Call it a good will gesture, then. I’ll let the little girl go, in exchange for Julie. Even she’ll go for that.”

“No way,” I said. “No trades.”

“Let me talk to Julie, then.”

“Nope. That ain’t gonna happen.”

The phone clicked off.

I went back to bed, but couldn’t sleep. If the call had been nothing more than Carpin’s attempt to keep me unbalanced, then it had worked.

Somewhere after 3:00 a.m., I went back outside and tapped lightly on Hank’s door. Absently, I wondered if maybe I was being watched from somewhere through a starlight scope. I hoped I wasn’t. I’d never considered myself to be photogenic, but I was willing to bet that I would make a good target.

Hank’s door opened a crack.

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

“My head is killin’ me. I seem to remember something about red and blue lights. And a jail. Was I in a drunk tank?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn. I gotta lay down.”

“Okay,” I said. “Get some sleep. We’ll get up early and get some breakfast.”

“G’night.”

“‘Night.”

Back inside our almost pitch black room, I lay down and snuggled in with Julie.

And somewhere before sunrise I made my first real mistake. I went to sleep at the wrong time.

“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.

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!