by George Wier
“What?” Jessica asked her.
The woman wore running shorts and t-shirt and had her hair in a pony tail.
“Before!” she exclaimed.
“Before what?” I asked her. My hearing was beginning to improve.
“Before the explosion. Saw him running. Weird guy.”
I grabbed her arm.
“Who?” I demanded. “Which way?”
She pointed back down the street, in the general direction of Sarah’s house and the docks.
“Weird guy. Wearing a black robe and a hood.”
I turned to Jessica.
She looked up at me, knowing what I was going to say before I said it.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll stay here. Be careful, dad.”
*****
I ran.
One block. Two.
I ran to beat the devil.
The devil once lived in Cleveland. The devil affected a very staid accent, but as a front for a respectable businessman. Appropriately enough, the devil now lived in Waco.
I passed on by Sarah’s house with a mere glance.
Red and blue lights rounded a corner, came my way and a wall of wind passed with them: two fire trucks and an ambulance responding to a fire that was now out.
No stitches in the side, no shortness of breath, no pain, no attention on the body at all—I might as well have been running through outer space. And I knew, knew better than I knew my multiplication tables and knew better than I knew all my credit card pin numbers and that water runs downhill that I was going to catch up with him. And then, ha, yes, assuredly, sincerely and your obedient servant—then there would be hell to pay.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The fierce growl of the motor greeted me with my first running footsteps on the marina boardwalk. He was fleeing into the night, fleeing into the arms of Lake Travis, my namesake’s waterway.
Halfway up the boardwalk the marina jerked an inch beneath me, shuddered.
I laughed.
In his mad flight, the devil had forgotten to untie his dock line.
A turn to the right and down the narrow aisle I could see at the end the boat straining against the line and a dark figure trying to untie it.
At the last instant he looked up, saw me, and I leapt the eight feet of black space and over the spume of spray of the motor.
We connected with a jolt and I bore him backwards hard into the steering column. His left shoulder connected with the gear lever and the boat went into overdrive. He squirmed and wiggled beneath me as I felt the bow raise up high and the motor dig down into the lake water.
Water spilled over the stern.
I pushed myself backwards, drew back a fist and popped the guy in the face. Something gave way beneath my knuckles. Possibly it was his nose. In my head I heard Jessica say: “Yay, dad!”
The bow lifted up higher and for a moment we were standing there, the bottom of the boat directly behind him, then he fell forward into me and the boat closed off the sky overhead. I fell backwards under his weight and we both sank into the cold lake.
The boat thumped down above us with a resounding slap. I lost orientation for a moment but then felt something solid behind me. I felt with one hand while I grasped for him with the other. It was a submerged marina piling, slick with encrusted slime.
The boat motor made strange strangling sounds, choked, caught again, and then choked into a lasting silence.
His body shuddered and then went lax. I pulled him and he floated to me in the inky blackness.
With one arm around him and the other held over my head for protection, I kicked my feet, hoping I was moving upward.
I broke the surface.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I pulled his inert, solid dead weight up onto the dock. I turned him over, bent to him and listened and felt for a breath.
Nothing.
“Give me one good reason why I should save you, you son of a bitch,” I told him.
Nothing.
I wanted an answer, an answer to all of my questions. His body lay there as if it were mocking me.
“No,” I said. “You don’t get off that easy.
I placed my hands below his rib cage and pushed upward where I guessed his diaphragm to be. The results were immediate. Lake water spewed from his lungs.
He coughed.
His eyes flittered open and he coughed again.
I waited.
He vomited more lake water. And again.
Faint red and blue strobe lights played upon his face. The cavalry was finally coming.
He coughed once more, and his upper body jerked. A fine spray of water, the last bit of Lake Travis, escaped his lungs.
“Wha—what?” he managed.
Quite possibly I shouldn’t have pulled him back from the brink.
My body hurt, my pride hurt, my arms felt leaden and sore, I was wet and cold. He had very nearly succeeded in killing everybody. And then the image of Jessica’s face hovering over me swam before my vision. He had almost taken Jessica from me.
That decided it. I hit him in the face with my fist as hard as I could and he went out again, cold.
*****
I was amazed to find the idol still in my pants pocket.
I handed it to Patrick.
“This is the thing, huh?”
“Yep,” I said. “Perry handed it to me right after the house exploded.”
“Where’d you get this, Mr. Reilly?”
We were all at the Point Venture guard station. My hair was beginning to dry. Jessica had her arms around Howard Block’s beefy torso, likely because my own was still soaked.
Perry shifted from one foot to the other.
“I. . . Uh. I took it from inside her house.”
“After you broke in?” Patrick asked.
“Uh. Yeah.”
“Okay. I don’t mind telling you, I don’t like you, Mr. Reilly,” Patrick said.
“I know,” Perry said. “Nobody does.”
“While that’s probably not true, I can’t bring myself to sympathize with you. But, things have turned out, so far, for the best.”
“How the hell do you figure that?” I asked Patrick.
“You’ll find out, Bill,” he said. “First things first. Take your daughter home, then I want you to meet me at the hospital.”
“Oh,” Jessica said. “I forgot about Mr. Cannon. How is he?”
“Your father will tell you, after he pays Mr. Cannon a visit. Go home, Jess. Your mother’s probably worried sick.”
“Oh. Shit,” she said.
I gave her a look.
“Sorry,” she said.
I rolled my eyes, doing my best to imitate exactly how she usually rolled hers at me.
“So?” I asked. “That’s it? Go check on Walt?”
“No. There’s more. I’ll want you there when I take that man’s statement.”
At that moment the ambulance rolled slowly past and turned left onto the highway back towards town. From the rear window a deputy sheriff waved to Patrick.
“Good,” I said. “I’ll sure be there.”
“It’s settled, then, Ranger Travis.”
“Whoa! What?”
“Ranger Block told me. He deputized you in the field. I don’t know about official, and I don’t care.” Patrick handed me the gun I had given him on the docks. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve got a new contact in the Texas Rangers.”
“Yayyy DAD!”
Jessica released Ranger Block, who was grinning ear to ear, and threw her arms around me, wet dad or no wet dad.
“Oh no,” I said.
Julie was going to kill me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
His eyes opened slowly. I had my hand in his and he squeezed it when he recognized me. I released his hand and he reached up and pulled the clear plastic breath mask from his face with an unsteady hand.
“Friend or foe?” I asked him.
“Friend,” he whispered and a thin smile spr
ead across his craggy face.
“That’s good,” I said. “Same here.”
Walt put his hand down to his side and tried to push himself up in the bed. I reached around his shoulders and helped slide him upward and then doubled his pillow and stuffed it behind his head.
“That better?” I asked.
“Yeah. I need to tell you...a few things.”
“All in good time,” I said. “The doc says you’re likely going to pull through. No sign of pneumonia.”
“Well. Alright.”
“Man of few words. I like it.”
“I do have to tell you,” Walt said.
“Okay. Give yourself a chance to catch your breath.”
“Fine,” he whispered, the word fading into a faint wheeze.
After no more than five interminable minutes after his eyes had fluttered open, Walt told me. He told me everything I should have known and much I had guessed since our first meeting that Monday after Perry Reilly and his curvaceous assistant discovered a body in Town Lake.
*****
It was the Fall of 1992 in Houston. For some reason it’s always seems like fall for me in Houston.
Her name was Esperanza and she was beautiful. Dewey introduced her to me as his wife, but I was in love with her from the moment I first laid eyes on her, and I was damned from that moment on. Men like me don’t love. We can’t. We’re supposed to be the dying breed, clothed in iron flesh, no assembly required, heart not included. I fell hard for her. It seems as though I spent a whole minute without drawing a breath, and when I took her hand in mine I felt it—the jolt. It was a live line between us. We were connected at that moment, soldered into place. Even the word “electricity” is so paltry for what it really was, but it’s the one word that comes closest. I was shocked. Stunned. And when I woke up from being stunned and pieced the word “wife” together with her in my head, I knew I was a dead man. Dewey was like a brother to me, and I never had any brother. I saw it in her dark brown eyes. We were going to be lovers, and there wasn’t a damned thing either one us could do about it.
I coached Dewey’s son, Joshua, in Little League. The boy could hit anything thrown at him, and when he connected it was like watching Babe Ruth. Josh threw his whole body into a swing—the ball was his the moment it left the pitcher’s hand. Good eye, that one. He could probably see the individual beats of a hummingbird’s wings.
She arranged it and we both knew it. I was to take Josh home after practice but she showed up on the pretense of picking him up. We sent Josh home with one of the other kids instead. Our first intimate encounter was on the seat of my pickup truck behind a 7-11 store not far from downtown just as the sun was going down. It’s amazing what a man can do when he is single-minded of purpose.
After that, it was posh hotel rooms and forged registries. Then, when Dewey had to be in Austin, I would spend the night in their bed with her, his kids just a few walls away. They knew what was going on, but they didn’t care for her. The tension in that house was palpable, and it had existed before I ever came onto the scene. Those kids didn’t care for her the way I did. And not the way Dewey did.
She took me to a shop in Houston once, a place that had religious artifacts and icons. Old stuff. Weird stuff. She was thrilled.
We spoke Spanish together when we were alone like that, even though neither one of us is Hispanic by heritage. So I asked her what she was looking for. “El Senor Diablo,” she told me. I was mesmerized. “I recently met a fellow in Waco,” I told her, and then I confided in her about my ongoing cases. She was intensely excited. She made me promise to take her with me when I made a couple of upcoming arrests in South Texas.
I have never been so manipulated and controlled in my entire life. I knew thoroughly what was happening, but there was simply nothing I could do.
Just after New Years, 1993, the entire house burned to the ground. Officially, there were no survivors. I spent two solid weeks locked in a hotel room, crying my heart out like a child. It was a deep hurt, Bill. She...and he and the kids. All gone. When I came out of that hotel room I was thirty pounds lighter and I was mad as hell. Not the kind of mad where I could break things. Mad like one of the boys back in ‘Nam when they’d seen their buddies blown to kingdom come and had that thousand-yard stare in their eyes. I was probably like that. I don’t know. All I know is that I was intent on blood.
I pushed my way to the front of the investigation, and that called for every ounce of pull I had. My Ranger Captain at first wouldn’t let me so much as ask questions, but a quiet visit to Ann Richards’ ranch tipped those scales in my favor.
I’ll never forget Governor Richards. I mourn her so much now. That day I went out to her ranch she made me spill the entire story. It wasn’t in what she asked me, it was the look in her soulful eyes and the depth of her understand-ing that pulled the complete confession out of me.
She said: “Walt, let me make a phone call.” She left the room and came back inside of two minutes. “You’re the man,” she said. And that was all there was to it.
I went to work. The trail lead from the burnt-out remains of the family home in Houston to the Fire Marshall’s Office, and from there back to Austin and the Governor’s staff. I went over communications between them and the Fox Government in Mexico and found something, a note about the across-the-border drug trade at Brownsville and Matamoros. I made calls to the Fox Government and that got me nowhere.
I went to Mexico. Vicente Fox was cooperative with me. He had liked Dewey, and all it took was a well-placed note to a staffer—along with a wad of hundred dollar bills about the size of a horseapple—to get the old red carpet rolling. I got the names of the chief drug traffickers in and around Matamoros and I went visiting. Not very bright, I know, but when you don’t care if you get yourself killed or not, you can go through quite a bit that would balk any sane man. And that’s just it. I wasn’t exactly what you’d call sane. Not by a long shot.
I killed six men in Matamoros just getting to the right man, Manuel Pena. I beat a confession out of Pena. He knew who had put out the contract on Dewey. I left him with maybe two teeth in his head. Last I heard he was no longer in the drug trade. Pena sweeps streets for a living now, but at least he’s still alive.
The name from Pena took me to Guadalajara.
And there I found out something, or rather, came to suspect something. It was possible that she was still alive. This from an old man, the head of a drug empire that stretches across five continents. With his dying breath he told me the truth: Dewey had never been the target. It was Esperanza. It was her all along. And it was for the sake of his own salvation he had ordered the hit. He had recently come to know Jesus, and he was attempting atonement for his many sins. Before I was done with him, I got chapter and verse on Satan, his minions, and on the woman I loved. And one other thing. A name.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“Burnet,” I said.
He nodded.
I knew I would have to tell him. The time had run down to that, and there was no turning back from it.
“She’s dead, Walt,” I said. “She’s really gone.”
I can’t abide seeing a grown man cry. I took myself away from there and left my friend to his agony. Odd that walking away from my friend was both so difficult and so easy at the same time.
*****
Yet another hospital room and bed, yet another form supine beneath stark white hospital sheets. But this time, the person in the bed was handcuffed to the bed rail.
Patrick nodded to me.
“Wake up!” I said.
Blue eyes fluttered open, looked around in confusion. Shackled wrists jerked against the bedrail, setting up a clatter. Then a long sigh of resignation.
“You are under arrest,” Patrick said, and continued with the Miranda litany.
“Do you want an attorney?” Patrick asked.
The prisoner shook his head.
“Fine. Ready to talk?” Patrick asked. “It’s either now or its lat
er. Later would be less kind.”
“I’ll talk,” the prisoner said.
“That’s good. Bill, you’re up.”
“Who killed Phil Burnet?” I asked.
“I did.”
“You set the house on fire last night?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“You made or procured the explosives for the marina?”
“Yeah.”
“You shot Walt Cannon?”
“No. She did it. But I was there.”
“Okay,” I said. “Who murdered Dewey Bingham and the kids?”
“I did.”
“You got all the museum pieces out of the house before you torched it last night—the paintings, the ivory, everything. Where is it all?”
“Two storage lockers on Ben White Boulevard. I’ve got the key... Well, I had the key.”
“It’s right here,” Patrick said.
“Which facility? Which locker?” I asked.
“Lone Star Self Storage. Number C55 and 57.”
“What is this?” I asked, and pulled the figurine out of my back pocket and held it up.
“It’s the Ebony Devil. Worth more than anything I’ve ever owned.”
“Where is it from?”
“Stolen. From a specific vault in the Vatican.”
“You were paid by a certain Drug Lord in Mexico to kill Esperanza?”
“Yes.”
“Okay” I said. “Now. What’s your real name, and why didn’t you follow through with the contract hit?”
“My real name is John Burnet. I killed my older brother, Phil, I killed Dewey all those years ago. And I did it all... for love.”
*****
From John Burnet, I got the rest of the story.
It all came back to her.
Phil Burnet had been innocent all along. His brother John, though, different story. He had loved her, like almost every man with whom she came in contact. Dewey Bingham, Walt Cannon, and even Perry Reilly.
Sarah Banks—Candace Bingham—Esperanza De La Cruz. Once High Priestess of a major satanic drug cult. Was she guilty?
