by George Wier
“What is it?”
“I need a hot meal and a bed. At the same time I want Miss Stevens protected. Any advice as to where I can catch a cat nap?”
“Why does she need protection?” Burt asked.
“Because,” I said, not knowing exactly what I was going to say, “I say so. Look, Mr. Bristow is dead and the homicidal maniac that did it is at large. Molly Bristow’s ten-year old case is still open and unsolved—”
“Sweet Jesus,” Reg said.
“Getting the whole picture?” I asked.
He visibly swallowed. “We’ve got a couple of spare beds at the jail and the food isn’t so bad I can’t eat it. It’s not the Conrad Hilton, but it should do. It’s the safest place I can think of.”
“Fine,” I said. “Lead the way, Sir Reg.”
He turned for us to follow him, but shot a fast glance back at me, eyebrow raised.
“Never mind,” I said.
*****
“How did you find us?” I asked Reg, who drove. Burt rode shotgun beside him while Lydia and I were relegated to the back seat of Reg’s cruiser. There was the standard reinforced hog-wire mesh between the back and front seat, which made the rear of the car a holding cell. But the doors were unlocked and I still had a gun. Truth be told, I was thankful for the ride back to town. For those few moments inside the Bristow poolhouse I had dreaded the long hike back to the car with its attendant lop-sided conversation and over-powering fear of being followed.
“That was the easy part. All the County vehicles have global positioning devices on them, so if they’re ever stolen we can locate them like that—” Reg snapped his fingers as sharply and as loudly as he could, and I was instantly reminded of Lydia’s reference to a particular Mayberry deputy. “Second,” he continued, “you were at the edge of Bristow land. While it’s a four mile drive by highway, it’s probably less than half that over the fields. Which, by the way, makes me wonder something.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Are you nuts?” Reg asked. Burt chuckled.
“Why do you ask?” I said. I could see where this was going.
“Well, you’re out there walking across an open field on the darkest night of the whole damned year, meanwhile there’s a killer on the loose and every news organization in the western hemisphere is about to descend on this county.”
“Exactly, my friend,” I said. “Ex-actly!”
This time both Burt and Lydia laughed out loud.
*****
Within a few minutes we were back to Buster’s squad car. Lydia climbed in with me and I had to back up a full block before I could turn us around. We followed Buster to the heart of town.
At night the Chalmers County Courthouse appeared less than the product of late nineteenth century architecture as it is usually depicted in the slick pages of the travel magazines and more the gothic castle from the Middle Ages. The kind of place they would have filed a 1950’s Hammer horror flick. Just as with the Capitol Building in Austin, the rough-hewn rose granite of the Courthouse shone dull-white in the bright sodium arc lamps at each corner of the square.
Reg pulled into one of the reserved spaces alongside another sheriff’s vehicle. I pulled several spaces away from him, letting him know in my own little way that I would be parking where I wanted to.
“I need to use a phone,” I said when we all met on the sidewalk. I’d had the chance to retrieve mine from Denise’s plane, but had forgotten it, again. That’s how it usually works. Or doesn’t.
“Alright,” Reg said. “Follow me.”
We went up the short walkway to the Courthouse and Reg thumbed a switch by the door. Inside, through the plate glass doorway, the halls were dim.
“It’s Reg,” he said into a small speaker. “Open up, Ladd.”
The door clicked and we went inside.
*****
Reg had taken up residence–temporarily, I hoped–in Buster’s office. Apart from the carved brass plackard bearing Buster’s name on the large ornate desk, there were the rodeo trophies, complete with broncs and bulls and little gold cowboys, each with a hand in the air and the other bound by a rope. Each of these items announced whose office it really was.
Reg pointed to the phone on his desk.
I nodded to him. “Give me a minute alone, will you?”
Reg overtly rolled his eyes and I had to stifle the instantaneous urge to pop him a good one in the mouth. I’m not normally a violent kind of guy, but some people can really bring it out in me.
“Fine,” he said, and walked out.
Lydia shrugged at me and grinned.
I smiled back. “Uh, you too, okay?”
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”
She left abruptly and closed the door a little too hard.
Women, I thought.
*****
I called Julie.
“I’m at the jail,” I said.
“Oh shit. Do I have to come bail you out?”
I chuckled. “No, baby, I’m not in jail, only at the jail. Kids asleep?”
“Yeah. Why are you at the jail?”
“I promise you, baby, you don’t want to know.”
She paused, but it wasn’t a long one.
“You’re right. I’m going back to sleep, Bill. Will you call me tomorrow?”
“I sure will.”
“Baby, I met this girl,” I said.
“Should I be jealous?” she asked. She sounded suddenly a little less sleepy, for some reason.
“No. Not unless you’re feeling irrational right now.”
“I’m not,” she said. “Yet. What girl?”
“The daughter I should have had right out of High School. She reminds me of you a little, I think.”
“Pretty?”
“Of course. Gorgeous, in fact.”
“I’m starting to feel irrational, Bill.”
“It’s probably good for you. No worries, though. I think she’s in danger.”
“And you’re her white knight...”
“Come on. You know me, kiddo.”
That littlest of pauses.
“I do,” she said. “Okay. Can’t do much at the jail. That’s good. I suppose you’re spending the night there.”
“Maybe so. I don’t think this town is big on the hotel market. Who knows, I might get to sleep in a cell or something.”
“Alone in a cell, I hope.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.” I looked around Buster’s office. “This place is kind of quaint.”
“Bill, it’s all over the news.”
“What is?”
“The murder of Mr. Bristow. The County Sheriff under scrutiny. The whole nine yards.”
“This town leaks like a sieve,” I said.
“Be careful, honey,” she said.
“Good night,”
“Night.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I enjoyed a lavish late night dinner of hot dogs and french fries and old, cold coffee. I’ve always found it interesting how fake powdered milk clumps into bread-like lumps and floats on the surface when the coffee is cold.
Lydia demurred the meal and retired to a mattress in what used to be a holding cell, but that had no door. She rolled up in a too-small county-issue blanket like a girl-burrito and began snoring softly. Me? I wolfed down the food, swilled the coffee and lay myself down on a cot in the in the corner of the jail break-room. I found myself staring at an unpainted concrete ceiling. Ahh, the life.
Jail sounds intruded and were at the same time comforting: the clatter of food trays, hard-booted footsteps, indecipherable police radio chatter, exchanged words hushed in deference to the folks who weren’t actually prisoners but who were still trying to sleep. There was an undercurrent of quiet expectancy to it all—the early morning hours before the great battle where the outcome was far from certain. And then I felt it tugging at me like an insistent rip-tide to a swimmer far out of his depths: that other life glimpsed once in a rearview m
irror, that alternate time-stream where this setting was perfectly right. That life had its own universal laws, its own proportions and quantities. It smelled of old leather, gun oil, powdered aspirin, fingerprint ink and carbon paper. How had I ever escaped its tremendous gravity?
And as I lay there, prodding around the edges of that un-lived reality, sleep overtook me. And, of course, I dreamed.
*****
“A long time ago when we all lived in the forest”, the stories from the old continent sometimes began. The forest around me was the Black Forest of Germany, Mirkwood from the Lord of the Rings, and the piney woods of the Sam Houston National Forest in East Texas, all rolled into one. The spiders spun webs above me from a night ceiling and whispered sleep phrases. I shivered inside and counted the pairs of eyes reflecting in the glow from my light saber. Gilligan and the Skipper too were lost out there somewhere while Jack the Ripper listened to the voices in his head not far away. He didn’t know I could hear his thoughts, although they sounded as inarticulate as a police radio.
I moved through the forest, looking for caves. The monster’s cave was near, I could feel it. I looked up to see the grinning figure beside me. It was me.
“Hello, Bill,” he said. He wore a Stetson hat, a deputy sheriff’s uniform, and cowboy boots. He carried a gleaming .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver in his right hand.
“You’re late,” I said.
“Better late than never,” he said. His Texas drawl was thicker than mine.
“That’s what they say.”
“You should carry one of these,” he said, waving his pistol. “Better range than that damned thing,” he gestured toward my glowing stick of pure energy.
“Mine’s not as clumsy or rampant,” I said.
We walked on into the dark, the forest floor beneath us the consistency of a polished, hardwood floor.
“I can smell that black cave,” he said. “It’s mighty close by. And you’ll have to watch out for that monster. He’s almost completely invisible.”
“I don’t have to see him,” I said. “I just have to detect his effects.”
“His effects. What’s an effect?”
“Dark purple,” I said.
And woke up.
“Dark purple,” I whispered aloud.
I closed my eyes, and was instantly asleep once more.
*****
I awoke when Reg kicked my feet.
“They’re here,” he said.
“Dark purple,” I said to Reg.
“What?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. Who’s here?”
“The media. Just like you said.”
“I hate it when I’m right,” I said.
Reg held out Buster’s revolver, its grips toward me. I had laid it on the floor before throwing myself onto the cot no telling how many hours before. The way I felt, not too much time could have passed.
“I’m dubbing you Officer Travis,” he said, and dropped a badge on my chest.
“No thanks,” I said. I picked up the badge and turned it in the light. It was old and scratched but still serviceable. It bore the Texas Lone Star on the shield and the words ‘STATE OF TEXAS’ on a broad banner. I tried to hand it back to him.
“Take it or I’m locking you up until all this shit blows over,” he said.
I looked over Reg’s shoulder to see Burt and Ladd Ross standing there, their arms crossed.
I kept the badge and took the gun.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“The useful thing,” I told Burt, “seeing as how you’re both a paramedic and now a deputy sheriff, is that if you shoot somebody you can turn around and treat their wounds.”
“I hadn’t thought about that,” he said. “Thanks, Bill.”
We stood looking down from a second-story window from the Chalmers County Courthouse. The lawn and sidewalk below held a throng of people. There were little paired clumps scattered around the periphery, cameraman and reporter, each attempting to be out of the camera line-of-sight of every other pair and still keep the courthouse and the swelling crowd at their backs in the picture.
The uniform fit well, a little too well. The badge on my chest felt heavy and... well, right. Maybe a little too right.
“I wonder if Reg is going to open those doors at 9:00 o’clock,” I said, absently.
“Business as usual?” Burt said. “I wouldn’t count on it.” Somehow Burt managed to keep that bored and tired look going that he seemed to perpetually affect. “I heard Gladys downstairs calling all the county employees who work here one by one, telling them to stay at home.”
“Ah. Reg is sharper than he seems,” I said. “Lydia was right.”
“You watch out for that girl, Mr. Travis,” he said.
I looked at him. He looked away slowly. I almost said something, but didn’t. I didn’t want to dignify that kind of comment. I simply turned and walked away.
“No offense,” he said to my back.
As I walked down the stairs I heard a “sheesh” from that quarter. Whatever.
Gladys, the night dispatcher, buzzed me through the locked door back into the Sheriff’s Office on the first floor. Reg was there, dressed in a western business suit, bolo tie, cleaned and brushed Tony Lama boots.
“You going out there?” I asked him.
“Have to. Don’t worry. I’m not going to say anything. They’re bringing the Sheriff in. We’re going to make a wall of deputies for him to walk between. Since I’m going to be on camera, I might as well look good.”
I chuckled. “Who’s bringing him in, and why?”
“The feds. Last I heard he wasn’t being charged. I got a call from a fellow—”
“Agent Bruce,” I said.
“That’s him,” Reg said. “Agent Bruce said he was bringing Buster home and to be ready, no matter what the situation. After all this is over I can get Ladd to drive you back home to Austin, Mr. Travis.”
“Thanks,” I said.
*****
The black Crown Victoria pulled up at the back entrance to the courthouse. Reg turned the key in the lock and seven men hustled out and down the long sidewalk, myself one of their number.
A shout went up from the grass to the side. A cameraman, his long black hair and scraggly beard moving in the wind, threw down his just-lit cigarette and shouted: “He’s here! He’s back here!” and the race was on.
The door of the Crown Vic came open and Sheriff LeRoy bounded towards us. The car rolled away with the door still open. So much for shaking Mr. Bruce’s hand again so soon.
At that moment Mrs. LeRoy’s purple jeep slid into the spot vacated by the Crown Vic. Samantha LeRoy was out in an instant, running towards us.
The deputies, myself included, formed two lines along the edge of the sidewalk from the parking to the door of the Courthouse. From above I imagined we would look like a very long human equals sign. Buster, his frame moving at a half-run, was just at the entrance to our little law officer force field when the reporters, cameramen and gawkers hit us from both sides, microphones extended, voices raised and clamoring for attention, demanding answers.
As we repelled them a shout went up—betrayal and anger, swift and red and accompanied by curses and spittle from many lips.
To my left, Reg Morissey pulled his gun and aimed it point-blank at the head of the cameraman who had sounded the charge. The cameraman froze in his tracks, his jaw slack with surprise. Reg grinned, turned the pistol butt towards him and thumped his forehead, at which point the cameraman, long hair, beard and all, slumped to the grass like a dropped sack of potatoes.
It was all too much like the final play of a too-close football game, the quarterback demurring to pass but instead opting to run the ball to the goal line over and through the entire defensive line. And sometimes it works.
And this morning it did work.
In the light of what happened mere seconds following Buster’s run to seeming safety it would have been far better for everyone concerned, including Sherif
f LeRoy and Lydia Stevens, if he hadn’t made that goal.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The report stunned us all. It had that hollow, tinny, reverberating sound of a shot fired indoors.
For a moment there was stunned silence. Myself, the deputies, reporters—everyone froze. We then moved, merging into on mass towards the source of the report, gaining speed and momentum all the way.
A hand fell back onto the threshold and I grabbed the door before it could close on it.
Buster LeRoy’s hand.
And there, not ten feet away, a look of shock on her own face, the revolver still smoking in her hand, stood Lydia Stevens.
She dropped the gun and it clattered across the tiles.
*****
I looked down at Sheriff LeRoy. There was a neat round hole in his upper right chest. I couldn’t tell if he was still breathing.
Samantha LeRoy gave me a hard shove to move me out of her way, looked down at her husband, screamed shrilly, then fainted.
Reg Morissey stepped past me, his face as red as a beet, took three long strides toward Lydia and punched her square in the face, sending her backwards down the hallway.
And why was there lightning in the hall? It took a second for me to realize what was happening: camera-flash. The photographers were capturing as much of the moment as they could. I saw newspaper headlines and courtrooms in a not-too-distant future.
After that it was mayhem.
I looked down and Burt was kneeling over Buster, Burt’s ear pressed to his lips. Burt looked up at me and said the two most important words in the English language: “He’s breathing.”
Reg pulled a handkerchief from his pocket as if he was about to perform some kind of stage show magic trick, then surprised me by doing just that—he knelt down, covered the revolver Lydia had used to shoot Buster, scooped it up and made it disappear.
