by George Wier
LONGNECKS & TWISTED HEARTS
A Bill Travis Mystery
GEORGE WIER
Copyright © 2013 by George Wier
Published by
Flagstone Books
Austin, Texas
Longnecks & Twisted Hearts—A Bill Travis Mystery
First Print Edition
January 2013
ISBN‑13: 978‑1481109093
ISBN‑10: 148110909X
Cover map photograph Copyright © 2008
by Olga Brovina
Cover bottle photograph Copyright © 2007
by Travis Manley
Both images courtesy of bigstockphoto.com
All Rights Reserved.
This is a work of fiction. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes written in connection with reviews written specifically for a magazine or newspaper.
The Bill Travis Mysteries:
The Last Call
Capitol Offense
Longnecks & Twisted Hearts
LONGNECKS & TWISTED HEARTS
A Bill Travis Mystery
DEDICATION
For Sallie, as always.
PROLOGUE
The French ship ran toward the lowering sun. Behind her, south-eastward, perhaps forty nautical miles distant, the wall of slate gray pursued: Hurricane.
The marauder’s master emerged from his cabin, tromped up the companionway steps to the pilot deck and raised his glass.
They had been running before the storm for a week; as if it were a bloody hunt and themselves the prey.
“Capitan,” his commander called to him. “There is land.”
The Captain turned, raised his glass and peered through it. There was land: it was the familiar long and narrow strip of sand bar that an earlier Spanish explorer had named Corpus Christi, which meant “Body of Christ”, perhaps for the fact of his deliverance from just such a storm as followed. Spaniards were superstitious. Louis considered that it was almost a form of blasphemy itself to go around naming things after Deity. Still... He turned back toward the distant wall of gray. If there was, truly, a personage — Deity himself — then he might be angry at Louis and his ship for the theft, if not the murders.
For the last six days the storm had tracked the ship and men across the Gulf of Mexico, as if consciously following every turn of the pilot. It was enough to make a man superstitious.
The day before the storm appeared, Louis du Orly and his crew had sacked a galleon on the Spanish Main, just off the coast of the island named for the order of friars who now inhabited it: Dominica. They had taken five huge crates from the hold of the Spanish ship, each crate containing a treasure trove of gold and gems, and then they had burned the ship to the waterline. Now, belowdecks, Louis had a dozen papists — the survivors of his conquest — in chains. He would return them to France for use in an exchange of prisoners. Perhaps his old Captain himself could be returned to him.
But the storm — some of his men thought it was the Wrath of God himself — pursued. And France was so far away.
“Bear north,” he called. “Head for Matagorda. We will take shelter on the Brazos de Dios.” In the Latin tongue it meant “The Arms of God”, but in truth it was little more than a wide, muddy river that emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, named such by that idiot LaSalle. The story was that LaSalle, pursued by Indians, had stumbled upon the river, at first believing he had found the Mississippi. He swam it, and upon the other side he sank to his knees and offered a prayer to Divinity for delivering him, thus consecrating the river in God’s name. The Indians, more worldy-wise, had not attempted the crossing. Perhaps they were not mere savages. Perhaps they were wise. The Brazos was treacherous. If stories were true, half as many as had attempted the crossing had not made it. There were tales of great eddies in the current that would swallow any craft lesser than a large sailing ship. Also, there were great beasts; reptiles up to thirty feet in length that could eat a man whole. A year before, Louis had taken Le Royale up-river perhaps ten miles and there had observed a great geyser of water and sand. As he brought his ship nearer, he observed a thing that was part fish and part reptile slink into the water and disappear. Through the course of his life Louis had found that legends, by and large, were not true. However, such stories were usually based upon some fact — some thing, however idiotic, and usually mis-observed. He would not himself have believed the animal existed had he not seen it. Yes, the Brazos was treacherous. But there was greater danger from sandbars, from the Indians, from disease and ignorance than there was from legendary dragons.
The Brazos was the only navigable river within range. It was his only option.
The storm followed them, as if driven by a diabolical intelligence. An intelligence with a taste for revenge.
Perhaps Satan, then. Louis could never bring himself to put his faith in a benevolent Deity. A malevolent one, though, was more realistic given the nature of life. Regardless, he would have to drive Le Royale far up-river to escape, and all the while the storm would be bearing down hard upon them. Sailing up-river through the meandering channel would take time, and time was a luxury he could ill afford.
It was the year of the Christian Savior 1673. The whole world was being swallowed up by Christianity, or so it seemed. Louis had narrowly escaped heresy charges himself by going to sea at the age of fifteen. His parents had been Huguenots, both slaughtered during the Purge when he was just a lad of eight. He had grown up under the uncertain guidance of his mother’s brother.
Louis had been outspoken and willful. He did not believe in the Christian God, and had forever refused to take part in worship. He was one of a select few who had no God except his own ability to make his way in the world and do more than survive; Louis du Orly would commit the greatest blasphemy of all: he would flourish and prosper or die in the attempt. Thus far in his life he had found no middle ground between these two extremes.
From the seaport at Brest he entered the merchant employ of a garrulous shop-keeper, Simone Le Blanc, who while engendering Louis’ loyalty would later sell his contract to a trading company that was set to sail for the New World.
And here he was, a hold laden with the ripest fruit of the New World — gold — and he was running like the coward he was certain his men now thought him to be.
“Monsieur Le Fitte,” he called to his mate.
“Capitan?”
“I am about to do something. Something untried. If any ill befalls me, you are to take command.”
“Oui,” the young man replied, fear etched into his features. “What are you going to do?”
“I am going to make a pact with the Devil,” Louis said. He turned from the quizzical gaze of his officer and looked toward the sandbar.
They were short of the bay by perhaps a hundred miles.
His eyes tracked back to the storm.
It would be close. Far too close.
He was twenty-five years old now, and had spent the last seven years of his life terrorizing the Spanish on the high seas. His Lettres de Marque gave him license in the name of the King to burn, pillage, and sack the Spaniards’ ships. Just now the Dutch and the English, aside from his own shipmates, were his only friends.
Louis smiled and turned his eyes from the coming hurricane toward the steps down into his ship. He shut the gentle salt breeze outside behind him and plunged into the darkness belowdecks.
There on his desk was the chest, its gold framework limned with a shimmer of dying sunlight from the port window.
It had
taken him days to work out the intricate lock. The pick tools, most of them garnered from among the crew, lay scattered across the desk. From memory he made quick work of the lock, and at the small snik sound, lifted the lid.
It lay inside upon a tiny mattress of fleece.
He reached in and withdrew the cold object and turned it about in his hands, his eyes roving over it, looking for any seam, any mark that might betray its maker or its manner of manufacture. There was none.
The object was in the shape of a wish-bone, no more than twenty inches high, and heavier than any normal metal, including gold itself. He had discovered its purpose by accident on their third day of flight from the storm. It had been beneath his coat, its bluish, smooth metal against his shirt, when he went down into the hold to inspect the treasure.
Before he could remove his key from his breeches, he felt the tugging.
This object of the Aztecs was pulling toward the door, as if it hungered. It came free of his shirt and pressed hard against the inner lining of his coat, tugging, shifting.
Louis had backed away from the hold door carefully, and as he did the tugging diminished, slowly. “Gold,” he had thought. “It hungers for gold.”
Later, sitting at his desk, he had watched the closed chest that contained the object. He had waited and thought on it while he waited.
If word of the thing were to spread among the Spaniards, they would come for him. They would track him to the ends of the Earth and seize it.
And it had whispered to him that same terrible night: I hunger, Louis.
Later that night he had awakened from a fevered dream and stood for an hour regarding the chest, waiting for it to speak again.
And now, this day, with the hurricane almost on top of them and the men in fear, Louis du Orly reversed himself along the passageway and emerged again upon the deck.
He strode to the foredeck of the ship. The men there stopped their work to watch him.
Louis du Orly lifted the object to the sky.
Overhead the slate gray clouds banked as if they were a mountain about to tumble down upon them. They heaved forward each passing moment with the weight of the great storm behind them.
“Hear me!” he du Orly cried. “Hear me, Storm. Hear me, God. Hear me, Satan!”
The men stood still, their mouths open and their eyes wide as their captain shouted towards the sky.
“I command you to deliver us!”
The lightning bolt flicked to him faster than the eye could travel. It danced and wove through the object, his arms, his brain, and then exited his left boot.
He fell, and knew no more.
*****
Louis du Orly awoke with a metallic taste in his mouth and a powerful thirst.
He sat bolt upright from his bed. Outside, the wind howled and the rain peppered the port window.
Le Fitte was by his side.
“Where are we?” Louis asked.
“On the Brazos de Dios.”
“Safe?”
“The hurricane is here. We have lost two men.”
“How long? How long was I asleep?”
“Three days.”
“Three?”
“Oui. I feared for your life.”
The ship swayed and rocked, driven hard by the wind and rain. Louis tried to sit, but his lieutenant pushed him gently back down.
“Rest, Capitan. Please. We will need you, if we are to survive this.”
Louis nodded and laid his throbbing head back onto his feather pillow.
“How far? How far up-river?” he asked.
“A hundred miles. Possibly more.”
“Impossible,” Louis exclaimed.
“We have not once had to tack against the wind. The river is wide and deep and the way has been clear. It is a miracle sent from — It is a miracle.”
“Where? Where is the blue bone?” Louis asked.
“In the chest.”
Louis’ eyes turned toward the table, and as he did, a lance of sheer pain went through his skull. The chest was there.
“Locked?” he asked.
“Even so.”
Louis felt unaccountably tired. His strength ebbed away quickly. He gripped his lieutenant’s hand, fought to gather his thoughts to say something, something important, he felt, but as he grasped for it, it fled.
And darkness descended upon him again.
“Rest, mon Capitan,” Le Fitte said.
Du Orly snored softly.
CHAPTER ONE
It seems there is never a good time for anything to happen in life, good or bad.
For instance, I was in a courtroom about to hear the closing arguments in a lawsuit between a friend of mine and the guy who had rooked him out of a neat hundred-thousand bucks when I got the word that my best friend from childhood had been killed.
Bradley Fisher and I had known each other from second grade straight on through. I never had a brother, but if I had I don’t know that he could have been any closer to me than Brad had been. Once.
I’d had a feeling of intense wrongness from the moment my head hit the pillow the night before. That feeling had intensified in my dreams and I awakened covered in a cold sweat around three-fifteen in the morning, that time when the night seems to be its darkest and the hope of any light is a world removed. I read once that three-fifteen is the witching hour. I never knew any witches to confirm it, but still, it’s an hour that’s best slept through. Somehow I got back to sleep, nuzz-ling into the warm, slumbering cocoon that is my wife.
The trial resumed at nine as if the night had never occurred. But my usual slim breakfast turned into a ball of nervous lead around nine-thirty and despite the fact that I had my head in the very serious game that was unfolding before me, the sense that something, somewhere, had gone south stayed with me.
My pager vibrated.
I don’t normally carry a cell phone or a pager, but Julie was scheduled to deliver at any time and if all went well I’d be a father.
Somehow I knew that the oppressive and disquieting feeling of wrongness had nothing to do with Julie or the baby.
I jumped in my seat. The vibration in my pants pocket felt like an electric shock — as if I’d touched a live wire. I fumbled in my pants pocket, attempting to look nonchalant.
A row ahead of me, just past the inlaid wood barrier between the public and the court, my friend looked over at me with a puzzled expression on his face. I used my face to try to convey a shrug. It worked. He nodded once, giving me an “Okay.”
The 979 prefix on my pager told me at once that the number was from back home — Bryan, Texas, my hometown, or at least within the same area code.
My throat went dry.
It was Brad’s home phone number.
The judge looked at me. He had a practiced, concerned look on his face.
I shook my head: Nothing.
“I gotta go,” I whispered.
The Judge nodded.
*****
“Hello?” It was Brad’s wife Mary Jo who answered the phone.
“Mary Jo. It’s Bill.”
“Oh God, Bill. Brad’s dead.”
I felt the blood drain out of my head. Suddenly I was leaning against the smooth travertine blocks that made up one of the walls outside the court room. I tried to say something, but I had no breath.
“Bill, I’m so sorry —” Mary Jo choked down into heavy sobs.
Somehow I managed to breathe.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I knew they were going to kill him. I tried to tell him. But Brad doesn’t — didn’t listen to me.”
“Mary Jo. It’s not your fault. Brad never listened to anybody.”
It was true.
I recalled an instance where Brad hadn’t listened. Back around early 1990 Brad had called me up in a frenzy to get me in on the ground floor with him in what would later be called the junk bond market. He invested eighty thousand dollars, the bulk of his inheritance from his father, and sat back and waited for
it to turn into a cool million. I did my best to warn him off of it without making him wrong or thoroughly raining on his parade. I’d wanted him to hold back. To try ten thousand first, or maybe five. He wasn’t having any of it. I’m not even sure he heard me. There are no dreams quite like golden dreams — money falling from the sky like pennies from heaven. And there was no way that Brad was going to let the dream walk on by.
When the bottom fell out of the junk bond market I called him up, hoping that I wasn’t too late. I’d had the disturbing image in my mind of my best friend holding a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. But Brad was all right. It was okay for me to breathe easy. You live and you learn. “Don’t ever worry about me, Bill,” he had said. “I’ll always be here.”
Except he wasn’t. Not anymore.
“Bill?” Mary Jo said. I could hear the concern in her voice. She’d just lost her husband and here she was worried about me.
“Don’t worry about me, Mary Jo,” I told her.
“That’s what Brad always told me. Don’t repeat him, Bill.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try not to. But it’s hard.”
“Bill, I know who did this. I know who killed him.”
“Okay, Mary Jo. I’m coming. Right now.”
*****
Outside the Travis County Courthouse I walked the block over to where I parked my Mercedes during the trial. Along the way I called Julie.
“How you feeling, Darlin’?” I asked her.
“I’m fine. Why aren’t you in the trial?”
“Baby, I just got some bad news. My old running buddy, Bradley Fisher — his wife paged me while I was in Court. Brad’s dead.”
“She called me and I gave her your pager number,” she said. “She didn’t sound so good but she wouldn’t tell me anything.”
