Death On The Pedernales (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 5)

by George Wier

  “Second. He had already divorced and remarried by the time Lydia Bristow was murdered.”

  “Where is that damned food?” I asked.

  “Patience,” Felix said. “Patience. Good cooking takes time.”

  “Right. I forgot.”

  “In 1975, Barbara Bristow was murdered at a boarding school in the northeast.”

  “New England, huh? Massachusetts, I’ll bet.” I said.

  “Right. That’s where many of the boarding schools are.”

  “Both of those with the purple rooms? Even the one in Massachusetts?”

  “Right. Ah, good, here comes the food,” Felix said.

  Deputy Ladd Ross got my attention with a whistle.

  “Mr. Travis,” Ladd said from the window of his cruiser two parking slots over, “I just got a call from my wife. She thinks she might be going into labor. I’ve gotta go.”

  “We can handle it without you. It’ll be boring. Routine.”

  “Thanks.” Ladd back and out and was gone.

  “Now there’s a guy with problems,” Felix said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Pregnant wife about to deliver. Kids. Payments to make.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “which is why I understand him, I think.”

  Felix nodded.

  The food finally arrived and we divvied it up. Felix and I sat there taking in the night while we ate—moths dipped in and out of the glare of sodium arc lamps, and young girls on roller skates puttered back and forth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “You said two. Two Bristow kids are coming. Three Bristow daughters have been killed. If he had three sons and three daughters, where is the unaccounted for third son?” I asked when we got back on the road.

  “The eldest son. Brent. No ones knows where he is. We don’t even know what he looks like.”

  “Maybe he’s dead.”

  “Maybe, but there's no record of his death. We’ve talked to the other two living Bristow kids. No comment.”

  “Family secret,” I said. “Neat. What about that first investigation? Lydia Bristow? I’d like to hear all about that. And especially if there were any investigator notes regarding the family.”

  “I’ve got the whole damned file practically memorized, Bill,” Felix said. “And I’ll tell you all about it. But here we are.”

  Felix pulled off the highway on the edge of town into a gravel drive grown over with high weeds. There was a rusted iron gate there in square hog-wire fashion. Many of the iron cross-pieces were missing. I couldn’t make out much beyond the gate except more tall weeds, mostly bitterweeds. The gate had a large padlock on it.

  I waited while Felix fished out a key and unlocked the gate. The rusted chain clanged against the fence and dropped to the pavement. He swung the door open a couple of feet—about as far as he could push it without too much effort against the overgrowth—and we slipped inside.

  *****

  The first thing I noticed as we moved through a jungle of weeds was the quiet beneath the black, star-strewn sky. Dodging the clinging weed stalks that towered over our heads became a bit of a gymnastics exercise. Though the night was cool, by the time we came through I had broken a light sweat. Felix hardly seemed bothered by the effort.

  After fifty yards or so the weeds abruptly gave way to a large paved area a few hundred feet wide. I could imagine lumber trucks doing three-sixties in that space a long time ago. Beyond the lot a hulking, dark building blotted out the stars on the horizon. Felix played his small but powerful flashlight over the yard and the light reflected off of tin siding. A 1960s Peterbilt truck cab sat hunkered on flat, dry-rotted tires near the far edge of the lot away from the building, its glass broken out and its body beginning to rust through in places.

  “No one’s been here in all this time?” I asked, breaking the stillness.

  “Me,” he said. “Also my former partner. We would come back here every few years.”

  “Looking for the one thing you missed before.”

  “Right.”

  “I hate to tell you this, Felix,” I said, “but just because you feel like you’re missing something, doesn’t mean there was ever anything there to miss to begin with.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “But it doesn’t help knowing that, does it?”

  He laughed softly, an odd sound in the vast quiet of the Bristow lumber yard at night, decades after it had ceased operation. And, of course, there was no reason for him to answer a question for which we both knew the answer.

  We walked and the structure grew in size. By the time we came under the eaves of it, it blotted out half the world.

  “This way, Bill,” Felix said.

  I followed him along the wall where the wind had peeled back the tin in places.

  “Hey, Felix,” I said. “Places like this, open to the world, are havens for skunks and all kinds of nasty things.”

  “Yeah, I know. We’ll be careful.”

  We came to an open doorway and stepped inside, our footsteps echoing back to us out of the gloom.

  “Let me see that light,” I said.

  He handed it to me and I shined it at our feet.

  There was a layer of dust and trash there, but most importantly, there were footprints. Possibly they were fresh. There was no way to tell.

  “Places like this,” I whispered, “it may not be just animals. Homeless people, maybe. Who knows.”

  Felix nodded. He took out his gun, pulled the slide and checked the load, then released it.

  “Safety first,” he said.

  “Be prepared,” I replied.

  We made our way across the large shop floor with its tall, skeletal and empty steel lumber racks toward the distant office area, a free-standing building contained within the larger structure. The place called up images from my childhood while reading Tolkien’s account of the underground dwarven city of Moria in The Lord of the Rings, or possibly Verne’s Journey To The Center Of The Earth. The place was like both of those fictional accounts—vast, ancient, spooky, and clearly abandoned.

  “1969,” I whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “I have a sister born that year,” I said.

  “Ahh,” Felix whispered. We were, in fact, both whispering. The place had that effect on us. Any sound louder than a hushed whisper tended to echo and roam into far away black and hidden places where possibly lurking ears might hear them. Darkness and vastness are component parts of the unknown, which is the first element of that emotion we call fear. Anyone disbelieving that notion should take a turn at spelunking through underground caverns sometime.

  Felix moved the light down the long wall of the office area and found the open entryway.

  “In there,” he said.

  The air was stale inside the building-within-a-building, and laden with the aroma of animal droppings and small dead things, dessicated or perhaps even mummified with the passage of time and little moisture.

  Desks had been moved aside, chairs broken. Old office equipment that had probably ceased to function before their abandonment littered the place. Production charts and maps of old truck routes were there on the walls, some torn, others whole but clearly outdated.

  “Main office,” Felix said softly. He played his light about and found three more doorways, one closed and nailed shut, another wide-open yet hanging askew by only the top hasp, and the last nothing more than another yawning black portal. You had to step up six inches from the concrete floor.

  “Residential is in there,” Felix pointed with the light. Motes of dust stirred in the beam and drifted lazily.

  A long hallway, multiple doors, all closed.

  “Lovely,” I whispered.

  “It's the last door on the left.”

  Old boards creaked underfoot, a little too loud for my taste. I attempted to walk softly anyway. Little good it did.

  I felt cold, which in the dark is a specter which makes for bad company.

  We were at the door
. The door. The first door and the one before all others. The chili dog moved around in the pit of my stomach like something alive and I tasted acid on my tongue. Julie was right—I should never eat like that. I wasn’t a kid anymore.

  “There’s not much to see,” Felix said. “Bristow had the room repainted. Last time I was here it was stone-empty.”

  The door was missing its knob, so I simply pushed and it swung inward smoothly. Not even a creak.

  “Oh crap,” I said.

  “Good God.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Clean alright. ‘Stone-empty’, to quote Special Agent Felix Bruce, the man with two first names. Empty, that is, except for invisible thread more felt than seen against near pitch black.

  “I don’t believe this shit,” Felix said.

  “The rooms are getting darker. Almost totally black.”

  “Which means?”

  “Someone’s running out of purple.”

  “Very funny,” Felix said.

  “And they’ve been busy as hell, which leaves out several people I can name offhand.”

  “Name them,” Felix demanded.

  “Lydia Stevens. She’s out of the running. Also, she’s in jail. Also, she wouldn't have been born in 1969. Which makes me think of something.” I paused. “I don’t know what, though.”

  “Alright. She’s out. That’s a given.”

  “Buster LeRoy,” I ticked him off with a second upright finger, as if that gestured forever exonerated him.

  “Keep going,” Felix said, as if in agreement.

  “Burt Sanderson.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Burt ran, but probably not for any reason we’d likely be able to come up with.”

  “But that means he knows something,” Felix said. “He may even know who did this.” And I saw it right then in the eerie light and shadow cast by Felix’s flashlight, aimed as it was at the floor and backlighting his face in a parody of a child’s late night play: the years gone by, the files shuffled and reshuffled, the names tossed out and back and to and fro like a boomerang competition, only this competition was for keeps. This field goal of this competition was to be the first to nail a killer, once and for all. This case was Felix’s specter. The ghost that haunted him. And now, for the first time, he was close onto the heels of the killer.

  “I’d say Burt has known that much all along,” I said.

  And then the blinding light took us both off guard.

  *****

  Blazing brightness from the other end of the hall. I tried to shield my eyes. Beside me Felix was in motion, trying to bring his gun to bear and shield his eyes at the same time.

  “Move further and you’re dead,” the voice said. Burt Sanderson. And not the least bit bored.

  I squinted away from the light and tried to get my eyes to adjust. In the meantime though, it was time for some serious talking.

  “Hello, Burt,” I said. “I’m glad you’re alright.”

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  “Aliens have stolen your mind, Burt,” I said calmly. “Whoever’s in there, give Burt back to us.”

  “Shut up, Travis,” he said.

  “Burt,” I said, “we’re buds. You even let me win at pool.”

  “I’d never do that.”

  “You mean I won fair and square? You’re too kind. Are you sure? It was your table.”

  “I told you to shut up.”

  “Yeah,” Felix said. “Shut up, Bill.”

  Felix was right in there with me. He was using my first name. It’s harder to kill someone with their first name rattling around in your head. It's too personal. Or at least that’s the theory. Who knows?

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m shutting up Burt. See, Felix. I’m shutting up.”

  A loud report roared down the hallway and I flinched. Splinters from the wood flooring flew up into the air. Dust drifted down in the lightest of drizzles. The silence that followed was the first cousin to deafness. Felix coughed beside me. My hearing was still there, at least a little.

  “I said shut the hell up.”

  I started to say ‘okay’, but thought better of it.

  “That’s better. Drop the gun.”

  Felix very slowly bent and set the gun down.

  “Kick it over here.”

  Felix looked at me. I nodded. Our eyes were starting to focus. Felix kicked the gun and it rolled and rattled down the hall towards Burt and the light.

  The light wavered and dropped a foot as Burt reached down for the gun.

  Felix leapt inside the black room and for just an instant I felt a little bit like a cartoon character who has walked off a cliff into thin air.

  Burt’s gun roared once more as my body went into motion, finally obeying the order from its supreme commander to do so.

  I slammed the door behind me. Felix pressed a gun into my hand. A backup pistol. I heard the snick of a slide slamming back. How many of the damned things did he have?

  Through the closed door we heard it, the sound of something running into something else and the foot of a desk or chair screeching on concrete.

  Burt was running.

  I jerked the door open again onto blackness and Felix followed me out and down the hall at a dead run.

  “Remember the step down,” Felix snapped at my back. His flashlight bobbed behind me, making a weird play of light and dark. “Watch for ambush.”

  “Shut up,” I snapped back at him.

  I could hear the fading footsteps going off into the warehouse but they were disequal. Burt had hurt himself a little. Good.

  Through the office and out again.

  “Stop, Burt,” I called. “We just want to talk.”

  The answer came: a small starburst of flame in the dark that for a mere instant illuminated a wide path between the lumber racks, followed by a whistle and a loud spatter as the bullet slammed into the outside wall of the office structure. The whole building echoed with the report an instant later.

  And the chase, as they say, was on.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “I don’t think he wants to,” I said as Felix came up beside me. His light moved and bobbed and occasionally caught the bottoms of running feet in the distance, one slower than the other. Burt was definitely hobbled a bit, but coming out of it rapidly.

  “Wants to what?” Felix huffed.

  “Talk.”

  Felix raised his right arm and gun preparatory to snapping off a shot but I gave his arm a graceless chop with my left.

  “Hey!”

  “We need him, okay?”

  At that moment there was another noise ahead of us. Burt had encountered the far wall. A door slammed open and Felix caught the movement of it and zeroed in on it with his flashlight. We were catching up rapidly, but Burt was outside and we were in.

  For a moment I thought Felix was going to stop at the door and do the standard backwards stance with the snap-look before moving, but instead we plowed on through it and outside, Felix’s massive form leaping through the doorway first.

  Another brilliant beam of light erupted, this time missing us entirely. Burt was there with the ambulance door open. One hand held the powerful portable spotlight and the other lifted a gun at us, trying to take aim.

  Felix weaved one way while I dodged the other. Burt’s gun tracked first Felix, then me. He was going to shoot but his arm snagged on one of the tree-like weeds and he cursed.

  His gun fired but the shot was wide.

  Felix returned the shot, his pistol a mere firecracker compared to the larger caliber gun Burt was using. But Felix’ little gun was enough.

  Burt cried out in pain, dropped the light and the gun and grabbed his hip as he fell down, hard.

  I got to him first.

  Felix was there an instant later, shining his light down first at the wound, then at Burt’s face.

  “Son of a bitch!” Burt cursed through clenched teeth.

  “It’ll feel better,” I said.

  �
�When?” he asked. If he ground his teeth any harder they would start shattering.

  “When it quits hurting,” I said.

  “I need—hospital,” Burt said through gritted teeth.

  “Why should we bother with that?” Felix asked.

  “Have to... hospital. Answer... to all questions... hospital,” Burt said, and then his eyes rolled slowly back in his head, and he was out like a light.

  *****

  I drove while Felix tended to Burt in back. I’m not worth much when it comes to the sight of blood. I don’t see how trauma nurses and ambulance drivers can do their job. Would I be able to handle it in a life and death emergency situation with someone spurting blood? I’d like to think so. Anybody would. But given the purplish spots that swam before my eyes as I turned the ambulance around and followed the trail Burt had blazed through the high weeds in getting there, I wasn’t so sure. I kept my speed low, just in case.

  The trail lead over some pretty rough ridges in the landscape, but the headlights kept to the narrow trail, which looked like it had been used often over the years. I was beginning to wonder where, exactly, it lead when my headlights picked out a low, barbed-wire fence that had been cut neatly between two posts. Beyond that was an equally narrow dirt and gravel road. The ambulance bounded up from the ditch as I jerked at the wheel and headed us back towards town.

  “Where is this fabled hospital?” I called behind me.

  “Just head to town,” Felix said. “I’ll get you there.”

  *****

  The hospital was a long, one-story affair. I followed the signs to the ER, no lights or sirens because I wasn’t sure how to turn them on, or if I managed to get them on, how to turn them back off again.

  I pulled up to the set of double doors and honked the horn, long and loud.

  A little slip of a girl in light blue scrubs walked out, frowned, then turned around and ran back inside. Within thirty seconds we had a team of them out there with us, and in an orderly sense, confusion reigned.