The Devil To Pay (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 4)

by George Wier

  My regular workaday job in the real world is as a financial consultant. I developed the knack early on in life of making money make more money, and with my degree from the University of Houston, the state and federal certification allowing me to roll investments over, around and generally through the hoops both for myself and for my clients, I’m pretty well set. But on occasion I am confronted with something that no one else—including, in many instances, the local law—is able to handle, and it’s only then that I step up and take a hand. And usually, in those cases, the problem has little to do with balance sheets or figures or tax shelters. Those times are just—trouble. And it’s not that I like trouble, particularly, it’s just that I have found that trouble has always had a way of finding me. So I keep an office for my business just west of downtown Austin on San Antonio Street in an old Greek Revival home built in the 1890s. I wouldn’t dream of working anywhere else. My partner is Nathaniel Bierstone, Texas’ Lieutenant Governor as well as my wife’s uncle. And as far as family is concerned, there’s my wife Julie and our adopted daughter, Jessica, and our little miscreant, Jennifer. I spend a great deal of my life energy supporting them. But when trouble comes calling it’s like anything else—it’s by degrees, one step after the other until my toes are mired in it up to my collar bone.

  Here’s how it all got going this time, innocently enough.

  *****

  “Are you ready?” she asked me.

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  “Let’s go, then. Throttle full. Release the brakes.”

  The cockpit rumbled, setting up a vibration throughout my entire body. That same feeling came back to me, that sensation I recognized from age seventeen when I taxied my first airplane down a runway and took to the skies.

  We began to pick up speed. From memory, I used the foot pedals to keep the nose of the Cessna as close to the center stripe as possible. The brownish, dying grass by the side of the runway flashed past as we gained speed. I glanced at my instructor, gave her a quizzical look: Is everything right, here? She gave me a curt nod.

  At fifty knots I pulled back gently on the yoke and the front of the plane came up. Within a few heartbeats the ground was dropping away beneath us and there was nothing but blue sky with distant, puffy clouds ahead.

  I had been promising myself I would return to flying lessons in the nebulous future, in that mythical time when there was time. Time enough to devote to it. Time enough away from other pursuits. No such continuum, I have found, truly exists. We have to make our time right now, or else it will never be.

  “Good, Bill,” Denise Lipscomb said over the roar of the engine. “You’re a natural.”

  I gave her a faint smile and made sure both the altimeter and the airspeed were increasing at approximately the same rate.

  When I was seventeen I took flying lessons for awhile. I never fully completed the training, however, never got a certificate to fly solo. And since then I had regretted it. The feeling of total freedom that flying affords had been just out of my reach since. It felt a little too much like taking a prisoner from his cell for a day, taking him out to the wide-open outdoors, giving him the feel of the wind and the sight of mountains in the distance, and then locking him away again when darkness fell once more. I vowed then and there, as we reached and passed a thousand feet in altitude, to make sure my kids would enjoy this same feeling of freedom in the sky. I would teach them myself.

  I leveled us off at five thousand feet and flew west. We were flying to Trantor’s Crossing, a rustic little berg nestled in the rocky, rolling hills fifty miles due west of Austin, to do touch-and-go practice landings at the small municipal airport there, then back home.

  “Trim us up a bit,” Denise said.

  I adjusted the elevator trim tab and eased back on the power. The only real difference between flying and driving is the added dimension of up and down. While you correct your right and left attitude by moving the yoke like a steering wheel—which moves the ailerons on the wings and banks you the desired direction—controlling up and down is accomplished by a pull or a push on the yoke. The trim tab on a plane is a fine-tuning control which makes constant up- and-down correction unnecessary and makes for a much smoother flight. Picture the wheel tab for channel-tuning or volume control on any old radio, make it as big as small coffee-cup saucer and you got it. What I know about flying you could probably write on a yellow sticky note, but I got that much from ground school.

  Below us the city played out to the brown hills west of Austin. And then I had twenty minutes of flight which seemed no longer than about two.

  *****

  When I lined up for the runway at the Trantor’s Crossing Municipal Airport I saw flashing red and blue lights in the distance, over by an aircraft hanger. Police and emergency vehicles.

  “Um. . .” Denise began. “Set us down, Bill. I know people here. I want to see what’s going on.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  I concentrated on the upcoming approach and landing. A landing is, after all, no more than a controlled crash on a smooth surface. And prior flying time and the ground school instruction looked like it was paying its dividend. Flaps at full, keep the plane lined up, watch the whisper of a cross-wind, crab into that wind a bit, reduce power down to about a quarter, nose up, come in gently on the numbers. It’s really a piece of cake, except, of course, when it’s not.

  For me a good landing is like a perfect golf putt or making the basketball shot with nothing but net. And that’s what happened. We landed like a leaf sighing down from a tree.

  “Perfect,” Denise said.

  Power back up, I rolled us on down the runway and taxied in, already missing the feeling of flight. I guided us over to the edge of the tarmac and killed the engine, turned the magnetos and radio off.

  We watched the tableau unfold before us in front of the hangar.

  *****

  There were four county deputy sheriff’s cruisers, a City of Trantor’s Crossing black and white police cruiser, an ambulance, a fire department vehicle and half a dozen uniformed men and women milling around outside the open hangar doors. Whatever was going on, it was a big to-do. The municipal airport lay five miles from the town on a long, narrow plateau in the Texas Hill Country, and it wouldn’t be a usual event to have representatives of all local law enforcement so far away from town unless something terrible had occurred. I couldn’t help the cold place I felt blossom and expand deep down in my gut.

  “What do you think—” I began, but Denise cut me off.

  “Bad. Something bad. I hope it’s not—”

  “Somebody you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s go see,” I said.

  We climbed out of the aircraft and walked across fifty yards of tarmac. A sheriff’s deputy glanced our way and then went back to his discussion with another deputy.

  As we walked up, the deputy gave us his full attention. “You can’t go in there,” he said.

  “What’s happened?” Denise asked.

  “Who are you folks?” the deputy asked us.

  “I’m Bill Travis,” I said and stuck out my hand. When you do that, they have to take your hand and act neighborly, or refuse, and end up looking like a jerk. The deputy, to his credit, shook my hand.

  “This is Denise Lipscomb,” I said.

  “I’m Ladd Ross. Sheriff’s deputy. You two just up and flew in here?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m from Austin. Denise is teaching me how to fly.”

  “Whatever in the world for?” he asked.

  “Well. Because, you see—it’s there. And I already know how to drive and how to dive. In water, that is. Flying is all that’s left.”

  “What’s happened here?” Denise asked again.

  “A killing,” Deputy Ross said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Somebody killed old Edgar Bristow, that’s who.”

  “Oh no!” Denise said. The shock was evident on her face. I put out my arm behind her, just in
case she was about to faint. Denise was about my own size and if she went down I wanted to be ready. Clearly, she knew the deceased. Or, what’s the word they use nowadays? Decedent. A cold word, that one.

  I had known Denise for no more than a couple of months. She had come highly recommended by a good friend of mine. Also, her fees were nominal compared to that of the large, corporate-scale flight training schools. During our first meeting at an old hangar where she kept her plane, I found myself instantly liking her.

  I waited until the shock was replaced by grief, which is ten times better than shock, and far more safe. People have been known to drop dead from receiving bad news.

  “Who was this fellow to you, Denise?” I asked.

  “He was like the father I never had,” she said.