Caddo Cold (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 7)

by George Wier

  “That ought to do,” Willett said.

  “Let me do it,” Jessica said.

  “Uh,” I began, “I don’t think so.”

  “Let’s stove in one of the back porch windows,” Willett said. “It’ll be the easiest to replace.”

  “Fine,” I said. I took the rock from Jessica and handed it to Willett.

  We followed Willett around back again and we mounted the porch. Willett hefted the rock. He was about to do it when he paused and held out the rock to Jessica.

  “Let her do it, Bill,” he said. “She wants to, and I just don’t have the heart.”

  Jessica grinned.

  I nodded my reluctant ‘okay’, and Willett and I stood back. Jessica raised the rock over her head with both hands and lobbed it into the center of the window pane. It shattered inward and Jessica gave the universal gesture of victory, a downward pull of her arm and fist.

  “That was worth the whole stupid trip!” she exclaimed.

  “Good job,” I said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Willett reached inside and unlatched the window and after a moment got the frame with its jagged glass shards up and out of the way.

  Before he could ready himself to climb through, I volunteered Jessica for the job.

  “Why me?” she asked.

  “Because you want to do it,” I said, “and because you’re younger than either of us and much smaller.”

  “Right,” she said. “Dad, you do this sort of thing all the time, don’t you?”

  “I’ve never―well, maybe once or twice.” I interlaced my fingers for her, making a step with my hands. “Come on. And mind the glass on the floor inside.”

  Jessica, for all her short stature and petite size, felt pretty heavy. Fortunately she was up and through in no time.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m in.”

  I could hear the crunch of glass beneath her tennis shoes.

  “Open the back door for us,” Willett said.

  We waited at the door, which was no more than ten feet from the window, but then Jessica stuck her head out the window again after a moment.

  “Uh, dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think I’d better open the back door.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Well, I think you’d both better come through the window and see for yourself.”

  *****

  Willett went first and gave me his hand and helped pull me inside.

  Shards of glass cracked and crunched beneath our feet.

  Jessica stood back from the back door of Holt’s house and pointed. Willett and I knew then why she had balked at opening it.

  There was a small piece of brownish putty there. It had two wires in it that led to a small metal plate that had been screwed into the wood of the door where it opened. There was another, similar plate screwed into the door facing with yet two more wires that ran to a nine-volt battery that rested on the floor beside the door.

  “Damn,” I said. “I think that’s plastique.”

  “Yeah,” Willett said.

  I felt a chill, but it wasn’t from the wind coming in through the window.

  “Let’s take a look at the rest of the house and then get the hell out of here,” Willett said.

  Willett reached down and pulled the wires out of the putty. He reached over to a shelf not far away, came up with a piece of stray newspaper, scraped the wad of putty off of the door with the paper and wrapped it up and put it in the pocket of his windbreaker.

  “Ordnance,” he said. “Just in case we need it later.”

  “Wow,” Jessica said. Her eyes were wide. “Explosives. Just like Mr. Sterling carries.”

  “Who?” Willett asked.

  “No one,” I said. “Jessica. Chill.”

  “Okay.”

  Willett reached down, took the battery in his hand, ripped the battery and wires away from the door with a sudden jerk and tucked them into his other pocket.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  The doorway to the rest of the house was open. Willett led the way.

  The house was a wreck.

  Every cabinet door, closet and dresser drawer was open and the contents were strewn across the floor.

  “Somebody was in a hurry,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  We moved slowly through the house, but I saw no other explosive traps until we got to the front door, where we found a duplicate of the one Willett had disarmed.

  Ten seconds later the bulge in Willett’s pocket had doubled.

  “Let’s get out of here, dad,” Jessica said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Wait a sec,” I said. I turned to Willett. “If Pierce didn’t find what he was looking for here, where do you think he went?”

  “Who’s Pierce?” Jessica asked.

  “Holt’s nephew,” I said. “Hush now, Jess. We’re thinking.”

  I turned back to Willett. “Who was the last person here?” I asked. “I mean, besides Pierce?”

  “Me,” he said. “Oh, shit. I see what you mean. It could be that Pierce has gone to my house.”

  “Would Pierce know where you live?” Jessica asked Willett.

  I gave her a frown. Still, though, it was a good question.

  “To my knowledge he’s never been there,” Willett said, “but all he would have to do would be to ask anybody who lives in town and they might tell him.”

  It was my turn to say it: “Let’s go, Willett.”

  *****

  We left the house locked, but for the broken back window. To do this we had to unlock the door and let Jessica lock it from inside, then help her back out the broken window.

  When we got back to the cars, I introduced my idea.

  “Hold on a sec, Willett. I think you should leave your truck here. First of all, everybody is used to seeing your truck here. Second, Pierce may not try to come back inside if he sees your truck here. He’ll be wondering why you weren’t blown up, but if he walks around he’ll see the window and figure out that you either outsmarted him or didn’t have a key and got in any way you could. Third, he won’t be looking for my car. And I’d rather have you riding with us than letting Jessica drive by herself in my car, especially when there are desperate people about with murder in their hearts.”

  Willett took a moment for the idea to settle in. “You’ve got some good points there.”

  “He does,” Jessica said.

  “Fine by me,” Willett said, but I’m calling shotgun.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’d rather Jessica be in the back seat anyway. Pierce doesn’t have a gun does he?”

  “If he does, I haven’t seen it.”

  “Alright,” I said.

  When we were back in the car, Jessica stuck her head forward between the seats and began asking questions. Not that I could have stopped her.

  “Why would they move Holt to Houston?” she asked.

  “I don’t have all the answers,” Willett said. “But it seems to me like those army boys never found their plane, or if they did then there’s some reason nobody should go near it. Maybe it was carrying something. Something...”

  “What army guys?” Jessica asked.

  “Long story,” I said. “Willett, you were saying the plane was carrying something. What?”

  “What plane?” Jessica asked.

  “Stow it,” I said. “And be patient.”

  “It’s okay,” Willett said. He turned in his seat to face Jessica. “Alright, kid, here goes. Some time about forty years ago, Holt Gatlin disappeared from Uncertain and Caddo Lake. It was after he saw a plane crash somewhere on the lake or in one of the bayous. I think it was an army plane and it was carrying something... nasty.”

  “Nasty,” Jessica repeated. “Got it.”

  I had the feeling suddenly that there was more that Willett knew, but for some reason hadn’t told me. I’d learned to trust such feelings.

  “Yeah,” Willett said. “Like when a tra
in wrecks near a town and all of a sudden everybody within a half a mile has got to evacuate. Something like that. I think they need Holt.”

  “Because he was the only one that knew where it crashed,” Jessica said.

  “Right,” Willett agreed.

  “So that map you’ve got, Willett,” I asked, “is it what I think it is?”

  “The map to the crash site? Yep.”

  “Is it just a regular map?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Willett said, and smiled.

  “Thought so,” I said.

  “You guessed it already, haven’t you?” Willett asked.

  “I think so. You’re not the kind of fellow who would take something that wasn’t yours. So if Holt gave you the map, I figure that at the time you didn’t know he was giving you the map, and probably he didn’t know it either. Or remember it.”

  Willett grinned.

  “That night,” I said. “That night Holt gave you the chess set. The chess set is the map.”

  “Pretty good, Bill,” Willett said. “Pretty damn good.”

  “What chess set?” Jessica asked. “I’m confused.”

  *****

  It was Willett’s turn to talk.

  The little town of Uncertain passed back by us as Willett talked, occasionally stopping his narrative to give me directions.

  “Like I said,” Willett began, “that chess set was real nice. It had what Holt called ‘purfling’ all around it. I looked up that word in the dictionary. That’s when you carve a trench in the wood and fill it with something and make it flush with the rest of the surface. They do that to fiddles. Makes them look nice and makes them sound good at the same time. The purfling around the edge of the board was done in ebony. But the squares, Bill. Those squares were lined in gold. The white squares are made of abalone, which is some kind of sea-shell material, and the black squares were made of volcanic rock―obsidian. The whole damn thing was too nice for the likes of a fellow like me. Belongs in some kind of art place. I tried to return it to him that next day but he wouldn’t hear of it.

  “That next Monday morning, two days after our little birthday celebration, Holt and I were rained out of work and had to take the day off. I had the chess set on my coffee table at the house. I was sitting there just studying it. Then I had an idea and got up and drove down to Marshall and hung around waiting for the local used bookstore to open. I figured if any place had a book on chess it would be that place. I found a paperback book and bought it and drove back home. I set up the chess set with all the pieces of it the way the book said and I was just sitting there, admiring it.

  “That was when I noticed the discoloration. Some of the squares were lighter than the others, both the black and the white. I moved all the pieces off again and held it close.

  “It was Caddo Lake. The shape of it was right there on the top of that chess set.

  “Holt’s words―the asleep but staring-eyed Holt―came back to me. I wasn’t sure what I was dealing with, but there were a lot of pieces to the puzzle floating around. The sunglasses fellow and his questions; Pierce meeting with that fellow on the sly; Holt’s spell; the rumors about Holt being gone all those long years.

  “All those things were going through my head as I studied the smooth surface of that heavy chess board. I was looking down on a lake I’ve known all my life and seeing pictures in my head. Pictures of little coves and cypress swamps. And that was when I ran across the dimple. It was way off to the edge near one of the corners. Just a little ding where there shouldn’t be one. But this was a smooth dimple, filled in with clear epoxy. From an angle you can’t see it well, but looking squarely down on it, it jumps out at you. I had a great-aunt who collected Persian rugs, and―this was when I was just a little fellow―she told me how those weavers got so perfect in their skill that their rugs had to have at least one flaw purposefully included so as not to revile Allah, who is the only one who should create something perfectly. I thought about that too. The whole damned set was perfect, Bill, but for that one dimple and that faint discoloration that created an exact map of Caddo Lake.

  “And it hit me. The dimple. That’s where it was. That was where Holt had come across something with people dying and him not being able to help and that screwing up his whole life.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Willett lived on the west side of Uncertain on the southern edge of Caddo Lake. From memory I knew that the Texas-Louisiana border bisects the lake, so we couldn’t have been more than a stones-throw from the Louisiana state line.

  When we pulled up under the shaded canopy of live oak trees that lined the long driveway to his house, a blue-tick hound began barking. It was a deep-throated and mournful sound.

  I found myself wishing that Franklin, our family dog, could bark like that.

  There were three choices, as I saw it: Either Pierce and Mr. Sunglasses had been there and gone, they hadn’t come yet, or they weren’t coming at all.

  My stomach groaned as I stepped out onto the springy rye grass and weeds that comprised Willett’s yard.

  “Let’s check it out first,” Willett said, “before we try barging in. If we don’t have any surprises waiting for us, I’ll rustle us up a bite to eat and we can think about what to do next.”

  “Sounds fine by me,” I said.

  “Food would be good,” Jessica stated.

  Willett’s house was a pier-and-beam―or what could have been more appropriately called stilt-and beam―built six feet off the ground. There were concrete steps leading up to a wolmanized wooden deck that ran the width of the house. A hog-wire fence enclosed the entire structure and the howling hound dog was there on the front porch. I stopped for a moment and found I could see all the way to the back yard and another fenced enclosure with even more dogs. Right off I counted six of them.

  At the rear of his property the lake began. I could see bald cypress knees back there by the hundreds and a small outboard motor boat was tethered to a low-hanging branch.

  “Weird house,” Jessica said. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Willett said. “It’s just home.”

  “You get much flooding?” I asked.

  “Every once in awhile the lake gets up during the rainy season―that’s January through April―or when a hurricane comes in from the Gulf.”

  Willett stopped.

  “Somebody has been here,” he said.

  He pointed.

  There were tire tracks leading up to the edge of the fence. The weeds were pressed down in two narrow strips.

  “They weren’t careful,” Willett said.

  “Maybe they were in a hurry,” Jessica said.

  “Could they have gotten past your dogs?” I asked.

  “My dogs are so lonely out here they would welcome anybody as a long-lost friend. I didn’t train them to be guard dogs. I just like dogs. I don’t have anything to guard.”

  “We’ve got to be careful, Willett,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “Those two bombs on Holt’s house,” I said. “Those were meant for you. But you knew that.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose you’re right.”

  *****

  Through one of the windows off of the deck we could make out the interior of the house through cupped hands.

  The place had been trashed.

  The chess board, however, was there on his coffee table, but the game pieces were knocked over and scattered.

  “He didn’t see the map,” I said.

  “Yeah,”

  “Is that your back door over there?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Willett said. His hands were cupped around his eyes to shield out the glare of the day through the trees. “I see it.”

  I could barely make out the blob of putty and the wires. The two metal plates were obvious though.

  “Do we want to break in any more windows?” I asked, and chuckled.

  Willett stepped back from the window and regarded me.

  “Not now. No one
else is going to come out here and open those doors. What do you think we should do, Bill?”

  “What about Mr. Gatlin?” Jessica asked.

  “She’s right,” I agreed. “I’d like to find him. He and I have unfinished business.”

  “It’s finished for the moment,” Willett said. “But we’ll find him. I don’t think they took him to Houston anyway.”

  I waited for Willett to elaborate, but he declined to do so.

  I didn’t have to think long.

  “The hospital in Marshall,” I said. “I want to talk to Holt’s doctor.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me too. But probably for different reasons than you.”

  “Such as?” Jessica asked. I had to admit, she was getting good with her questions.

  “Never mind that, for now,” Willett said. “I’d have thought you’d want to see the other thing first.”

  “The crash site!” Jessica exclaimed.

  “Exactly,” Willett said.

  “Alright,” I agreed. “But after that, I want to find Holt’s doctor and give him a piece of my mind.”

  “Fine,” Willett said. He turned to Jessica. “Do you have any aversion to water, Little Miss?”

  “Me?” she replied, the excitement evident in her voice. “Hell no!”

  *****

  Jessica and I got the opportunity to get to know Willett’s dogs fairly intimately. There were eight of them, all told, and each one wanted to smell us, lick our hands, and generally get very personal. Our legs were soundly thumped again and again by wagging tails. One of the bigger ones, an Irish Wolfhound, jumped up and splayed his paws over Jessica’s shoulders. He was large enough to dance with her. She giggled and winced as he licked her face.

  Willett and I laughed.

  We made it through Willett’s back gate somehow and climbed up onto his boat, a small pontoon craft. He untied it, threw the rope on the deck and stepped expertly aboard.