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

by George Wier

  “Beautiful ship,” I whispered.

  “Nice,” Isabel whispered back. “That was Ed’s pride and joy. He never flew it.”

  I panned the light around the room, picking out myriad small details: several red metal tool cabinets—the kind with the greased, sliding drawers—a yellow rolling mop pail with squeegee and mop, shelves lined with containers of fluids, paint, butyrate dope, oil drums.

  And in an area at the rear of the hangar, roughly ten feet square, was a bedroom complete with an old army cot, a nightstand with an old-fashioned double-bell alarm clock, an old and comfortable-looking sofa, and a seventies-style Curtis-Mathis television.

  “Over there,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Isabel said, “not much has changed. I haven’t been out here in years.”

  We walked to the bedroom area, our footsteps echoing off the ceiling high-above.

  Ronnie stepped past us into the place, and stood in front of the cot, staring downward.

  I came up beside him and lit the cot with a cone of bright light. In the backwash from the light I regarded his face in profile. His eyebrows were raised in disbelief. I followed his gaze back to the cot and tracked the light upwards to the see the defiling black splotches there.

  Blood. Dried blood. His father’s blood.

  “I’m sorry, Ronnie,” I said. “I don’t know if anyone told you. Your father is dead.”

  Ronnie shook his head ever-so-slowly. He knew.

  “Bill,” Isabel said, “let me see that light.”

  I handed it to her. She shined it down at the floor. She knelt, looked under the cot, reached out with her other hand and dragged a metal container to her. The shrill shriek of metal on concrete echoed throughout the large chamber.

  “This is it, I think,” she said.

  It was an old World War II-style ammunition box, olive-drab green.

  “Let’s open it,” I said, and knelt beside her.

  She held the light steady while I flipped a metal butterfly catch. I opened the lid and let it fall back where it made an overly loud clatter. Who says I’m a quiet guy?

  Inside there were pictures, old black and whites. I pulled out a loose stack of them, took the first one, flipped it over and read aloud: “Me with buddies, somewhere in France.” I handed it up to Ronnie, who took it, looked at it for a moment, and slipped it into his blue jeans pocket.

  The next photo down was a five-by-seven. A tall, rangy fellow with a sunburned red face and a kid riding on top of his shoulders. Both were smiling, laughing. On the reverse it said: “Me and Ronnie - good times.”

  I handed it up to Ronnie past Isabel’s knowing eyes which met mine and quickly flicked away. Ronnie took it, stared at it.

  We looked up at him, waiting.

  Before our eyes his face slowly began to change. The tears began. His face quivered. His body began to shake.

  Isabel and I stood.

  She took his arm and pulled him gently to the couch and set him down.

  Ronnie began bawling, like the child he was, the child he had always been. The sounds drifted away and came back to us in echoes and rode their way out again on the wake of his grief.

  We watched him. For long minutes that seemed like hours, we waited for the fit to pass. It was slow going, but as it passed it became apparent to us that something else was happening. Something entirely unlooked-for.

  Ronnie pulled in huge gulps of air and it came back out again in hard grunts, half-articulated.

  Words. He was trying to form a word.

  The next intake of breath was more shallow, but still a fair amount of wind, and he made the sound again, this time lower, more discernable.

  I wanted to tell him to try again. I found myself leaning towards him.

  Isabel Armstrong’s hand touched my arm. ‘Wait’, that meant.

  I thought for a moment he wasn’t going to try again, but then it came. Not an inarticulate whoop, but the clearest, purest of syllables.

  “Dad-deeee” he coo-ed softly.

  Isabel looked at me and nodded. I returned the nod. Tacit consent. Mutual agreement. This was well and good and right, and no other explanation could possibly fit as well as that.

  “Nooo dad-dee.”

  And the mute shall speak.

  I did then what any decent person would do. I did what was called for, what was in front of me. No one witnessing such an event could possibly ask why it was that I knelt beside Ronald Bristow, took my sleeve, and wiped the mingled tears and snot from his face.

  I stood again.

  Why was it I felt good? And why was the flesh of my throat hard and swollen, aching and yet so perfectly right?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The life-confirming sight of seeing a grown man slough off a terrible and persistent childhood and interminable years of darkness shattered when the killer descended upon us.

  He came with the stealth, speed and the inexorable cold-blooded determination of a shark—a shark that bore its teeth in his hand.

  I felt a prickle along my spine, and whipped around. The instrument glanced off my ear and struck my left shoulder and the speed with which my knees folded and my arms came up made for a blurring effect. I fell to the side, my forearm saving my face from collision with the concrete floor. The dullness of the strike was counter-point to the explosion of pain in one of my knees.

  Momentary darkness, lasting through a cacophony of sound.

  I ate dust, felt the prickle of graininess on my lips and tongue. My incisors ached, my shoulder was numb and my knees sent lances draped with garlands of plum-red roses into my head.

  I moved my head and my vision wobbled, cleared, wobbled again, cleared even more. I pushed against the floor, ground my teeth against the pain and heard my father telling me: “It’ll feel better, Billy, when it quits hurting.”

  Thanks, daddy.

  Motion, all around me.

  An arm came up, its backdrop the ribs and trusses of the hangar roof in a weird play of light and shadow. Two knights were locked in mortal combat. In the alternating dark and light, one of them, his spare frame dancing about, was the killer. The other, wielding the light in two hands much like Luke Skywalker, was Isabel Armstrong.

  The tire iron, black weapon, clanged against light.

  Another face, garish, cartoonish, wholly surprised, moved in and out of the light beyond the two. Ronnie.

  My eyes moved back to the dueling pair without thought.

  The killer grunted as he swung again, bringing his weapon down from overhead this time. A cry of mingled fear and effort escaped Isabel’s lips. She brought the flashlight up in the final second and the tire iron struck a glancing blow.

  Somehow I stood and launched myself.

  Isabel's arms flailed back from the blow and I knew she wouldn’t recover from it in time for the next one. I ducked beneath the descending tire iron, came up against the killer in a tackling embrace that seemed almost intimate, and bore him backwards. The iron flailed into the wing of Edgar Bristow’s airplane and clattered away into the darkness. The killer lost the battle to keep his feet and went down beneath me.

  I tasted coppery blood, heard, felt and tasted the explosive exhale from his lungs. Spittle ran down my face. I pushed hard against him as his hands moved between us, clutching and grappling. I slung one hand in a half-formed fist and cuffed him, the blow seemingly about as heavy as a child pressing a finger into cotton candy—no doubt the effect of adrenalin coursing through me. When that happens there is only cause and effect, and effect counts for nothing.

  I swung again, connected more solidly this time. The adrenalin began to bleed away.

  I billowed upwards, floating for a moment, and then saw I was suspended. I snapped a look left. Ronnie’s hulking form, perpendicular to me, took two broad steps and set me gently down.

  I lay on my side, stunned for a moment. Ronnie took two more broad steps back, reached to the ground and lifted the killer into the air with one hand, his left, in a smooth, g
raceful movement. Darth Vader, eat your heart out.

  The killer’s eyes flickered open.

  “Let me down,” he said. “I’ll be good.”

  With his right hand Ronnie reached forward and clutched the killer’s chin.

  I knew what I was about to witness. I tried to form a thought into a word and propel it outward, but thought never found the correct word, until Ronnie stated it himself.

  “No,” Ronnie said, clearly, cleanly, and shoved the chin backwards as he pulled the killer’s trunk to him.

  The crunch was audible. The grand-daddy of all chiropractic adjustments—this one permanent.

  Ronnie released the body.

  Isabel helped me to my feet. My knees gave me fits on the way up, but I stood.

  Ronnie walked slowly to his father’s bunk and sat himself down. We watched him for a moment, wordless. What kind of words were there for that? He laid his head on Edgar Bristow’s dirty pillow and sobbed.

  *****

  Felix walked calmly inside a moment later, his gun drawn. He took a look at the scene and put his gun in his shoulder holster.

  Isabel helped me over to the body.

  She shined the light downward, revealing the face.

  “Hello, Reg,” I said.

  Reg didn’t answer.

  “Why him?” Felix asked.

  “Enoch Arden,” Isabel said.

  “What?” Felix asked.

  “Oh,” I said. “Tennyson. Tell us, Dr. Armstrong.”

  “Call me Isabel,” she said. “Before that night—that night Burt came home all bloody—before that he was acting all funny. Sort of like a hurt puppy. I remember thinking ‘maybe he’s in love.’ I’m sure of it now.”

  “1969?” Felix asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Go on, Isabel.”

  “Both of those boys. Reg and Burt. They were always with her. They played in sand piles. They explored the countryside together. The three of them were inseperable.”

  “Alfred Lord Tennyson’s tale,” I said. “Enoch Arden and the other boy loved this girl. They lived on an island, one of the Channel Islands, I think. It’s poetry’s original love triangle.”

  “Bill,” Isabel said, “Trantor’s Crossing is an island. Try living here for awhile and you’ll find out it’s true.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “Reg even told me once himself. ‘It isn’t wise to intervene in a love triangle.’ Something like that. Instead of share her, or wish her happiness with Burt, Reg killed her. Of course Burt didn’t even know she was his own half-sister.”

  “All of this comes back to me. I suspected my own son,” Isabel said. “If I had thought about it, studied it close enough...”

  “You couldn’t have known,” I said. “Even when Burt disappeared that time and Barbara Bristow was found murdered in Massachusetts...”

  “Yeah?” Isabel asked.

  “I think Burt was following Reg. I think he knew what Reg was going to do. I think Burt even took Ronnie with him on that long journey. How they got there and how they got back is probably an adventure story all its own. And if it’s true, it would explain the purple room and the black thread more than a thousand miles from here.”

  “But he didn’t get there in time to save her, did he?” Isabel asked. “Oh God. My son has borne so much.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Isabel,” I said. “And it wasn’t Burt’s fault.” I gestured towards Reg’s lifeless body. “It was his fault.”

  “All those years ago. And he was just a kid,” Felix said, unbelieving. I suspected that the answer had been there in front of him all along. All those years of pouring through the files. All the interviews. The long, lonely trips back to the abandoned lumber yard. “How could a child do that? How could a child commit murder?” Felix asked.

  We regarded the body in silence for a moment.

  “I think I know,” I said. “It’s the one thing people—especially parents—always forget.”

  “Go on, Bill,” Felix said. “I’m curious what you think about how a kid could possibly do something like that.”

  “We hear about it sometimes on the evening news, usually somewhere far enough away that it doesn’t bother us quite so much, but even then it gives us a bit of a shiver. Some blood-curdling story about how some child has shot his parents, or bludgeoned his brother or sister, or some other heinous unaccountable act. And we wonder what could possess such a child. A demon maybe, we think. Or what they saw on television. But there’s one thing that all of the theories in the world omit.”

  “And what’s that?” Felix asked, before Isabel could.

  “Kids,” I said. “They are people, too. And people are capable of anything.” I could have gone into it further, about my ideas of good and evil, about restraint and remorse, but the fact of the matter was that none of my ideas about it mattered a damn. It simply was.

  I turned and regarded Ronnie, lying there twenty feet away on his father’s cot, his eyes closed. Would he be able to banish his demons now? Now that the demon was dead? I hoped so.

  And the silence that ensued there in that space stretched itself out, interminably, until it touched the dawn.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  And the rains came.

  All cycles repeat. The children grow up and grow old. Loved ones are lost and the circle closes. The evil comes among us and is banished from our midst. And all droughts are ended by torrential rain.

  From an old bent-wood rocking chair on the front porch of Buster’s and Samantha’s home, I watched it fall and sipped scotch whiskey. The air was laden with the sharp scent of the downpour and it came down in sheets, drowning not only all sight beyond several yards out but also the possibility of coherent conversation beneath the level of a shout. It was just as well. We hadn’t all that much to say to each other. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed.

  Buster held Samantha’s hand, the two of them taking in the scene before us. It was good to see him out of the hospital and recuperating. He had been warned to take it easy, but I suspected trying to tell Buster LeRoy he had to do something would work about as well as trying to tell Congress they couldn’t pass laws.

  We had made it back from the trip into town just before the rain came and I had a new suit hanging from a dresser knob in one of the LeRoys’ spare bedrooms. I thought about that suit. Would I look as good in it as I had believed myself to appear in the dressing room mirror of the department store downtown? If only Julie had been there. But then again the whole excursion would have taken an extra hour and we would have gotten caught when the sky unleashed its onslaught.

  We would need to get dressed and ready in another hour. After all, there was a funeral to attend.

  I raised my half full glass and tasted smooth liquid fire, listened to the rain, and bided the time with my friends.

  *****

  They came to town, just as Felix had said they would. Hurricanes one can get out of the path of. Relatives looking for the loot, no one can predict.

  And Bill Travis? He decided to stand directly in the path of the storm.

  I watched as they filed in one by one at the funeral home.

  The day had cleared. The wind was cool and laden with moisture. Central Texas had gotten its soaking and the storm had passed as quickly as it had come. But in those forty-five minutes Trantor’s Crossing and the surrounding countryside had received the bounty of five inches of rain. First the dying grass and then the cedar trees would drink most of it up, and what was left over would filter down into the aquifers, carrying on the ageless cycle of natural purification. Fine days like this, they could make a fellow dismiss the thought of living anywhere else.

  The front door to the funeral home stood open wide to receive family and guests, providing a view of the small parking lot and the close-cropped brilliant green grass beyond. This initial gathering would not be an actual viewing, since it was closed-casket. Given the condition of the departed and the limitations of modern cosmetology, I understood completel
y. It was, though, a time for the survivors to gather and whisper in quiet under the cover of canned organ music. I can’t stand organ music.

  The first to arrive was an elderly gentleman who crept along at a snail’s pace. He used a broad, natural wood cane with a rubber stopper at the base for support. He needed it. He moved on by without a nod my direction. I didn’t bother to ask Lydia—who stood beside me in a resplendent black dress—who the old-timer was. She nodded her head in the negative, meaning: I don’t know. I had him pegged as Edgar Bristow’s brother. Probably the one person there besides Ronnie who didn’t give a damn about money.

  The next fellow up was a different story. He was in his mid-forties, like me. He was tall and thick, seemingly composed of the lumber logs he doubtless once milled in his father’s shop.

  “That’s Dresser,” Lydia whispered.

  Dresser Bristow looked at me, briefly, or I should say looked through me, his face a mask, then turned forward to the open entryway to the long aisle and its inevitable destination. He was going to take it hard, I could tell. Not the fact of his father’s death. Not that. I already knew he wasn’t going to get what he had come for. None of them were.

  There were more of them, and they brought their children and their grandchildren. They were young and bright and old and worn by the vicissitudes of life. To summarize, well, they would have done better to have spent the day in a park or horseback riding. There would be little joy for any of them this day.

  *****

  The service was long. I hate those, and didn’t bother to listen very closely. Instead I watched the family as they sat there, quiet and stony and filled with anticipation. I already knew the story, and they weren’t going to like it.

  I turned and took a long look at Lydia Stevens there at my side. She turned to me quizzically.

  “What?” she whispered.

  “Reg must have used some form of hypnosis on you that night you lay there in that jail cell. Felix Bruce and I found Reg’s journal when we ransacked his house this morning. Also we found a couple of stacks of books on hypnosis. I believe that while you were asleep, he injected you with a powerful drug. He told you what to do, where the gun would be waiting for you.”