George Wier - The Last Call

“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.”

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 of us.”

“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.