by George Wier
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I wasn’t expecting it. That’s how bad things usually happen.
Heidi threw herself at me. Her arms went around me and she kissed my lips, furiously. Her arms were locked and her face pressed hard against mine.
I twisted, turned my head away from her.
“Don’t say ‘no’, Bill. God how I want you. All my life I’ve wanted you. I’ve dreamed about you. When Mike made love to me it was you, Bill. It was you thrusting into me.”
“Heidi!” I yelled. “Stop!”
She continued to wrestle with me, her lips burrowing hotly against my neck, her tongue snaking up to my ear where her pleas softened. She breathed into my ear, like a lover.
I grasped her arms and pulled them away with all my strength.
I pushed her away from me with all that I could muster and she fell backward onto the bed.
“NO!” she cried, and burst into tears.
“You don’t love me, Bill! You never loved me! You LIED.”
“I did love you,” I said softly. “Once.”
I hardened myself for the next volley, the one that I hoped would sink her for good and all.
“Once was enough, Heidi.”
She broke down into the most mournful wail I’d ever heard from a woman’s throat. A death wail.
I turned and walked out her bedroom door, closing it behind me.
I thought I was done. I was certain it was all through. I would go to my car, get in it, and go to the nearest police station and there lay everything out nice and neat.
I never got the chance.
“Wait, Bill,” the softest of voices said behind me down the hallway to the living room.
I turned.
The gun was aimed at my chest.
“Don’t be stupid, Heidi,” I said.
She smiled through her tears. Her face was flushed red. She had the wig back on and the tresses were bedraggled. Her smile spoke volumes on the subject of women scorned and madness. What was the saying? I couldn’t recall it at the moment.
“Stupid,” she said. “That’s me. That’s my whole life. I loved you, Bill, ever since that day in high school you walked away and didn’t want me anymore. How’s that for stupid? My best friend used to say that I wouldn’t have a man that would have me. God, that is too true.”
“I’m sorry for you, Heidi,” I said.
“You’re dead, Bill. Like your stupid friend Brad Fisher. He didn’t want me either. I only wanted him as a way to you. You left, Bill. You left my world and you left me here, alone. I’ve been dying Bill. At first it was a feeling in my soul. A numbness. A going away. Now it’s real. The cancer is real. I said I’d be dead before the year is gone. Now I see it’s a good thing.”
The gun leveled at me never wavered. Pretty soon, mere seconds now, perhaps, she was going to shoot.
“Heidi,” I whispered. “Don’t.”
Then I felt the other presence behind me, brushing by me. A shadow, passing.
Mike.
“Stop, Mike!” she shouted.
He came to an abrupt halt.
“What’re you going to do?” he asked. “Shoot Bill? Why? Because he rebuffed you, just like all the other men? Like Brad? Sleeping with them wasn’t good enough? You had to own them.”
It was my second time to be shocked. Mike knew. Mike, the man who knows everything. I’d once made him plow up the high school lawn with his face.
“No,” she said. “Not like Brad. Not at all like Brad.”
“Bill,” Mike said, his back still to me, “I wouldn’t let her kill you when you were in the hole, and I won’t let her do it now. I’m sorry, Bill. I can’t control my wife. I never could.”
“Shut up, Mike!” Heidi shouted. “You’re a worthless piece of crap. And you’re in my way!”
“I never was much of a man,” Mike said. Possibly he was talking to himself. “But I’m becoming one. This is where I make my stand. You can’t kill him, Heidi. By God, I won’t let you.”
Heidi laughed. “You’re right, Mike,” she said. “I can’t shoot Bill.” Her voice now no more than a whisper again, and I shivered.
“That’s right,” Mike said. “You’re not so stupid after all.”
“Wrong,” she replied. “I can shoot you.”
The report was the loudest thing I have ever heard.
The tall, bear-like figure before me fell backwards into my arms.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Who knows the twisted byways of the human heart?
Who knows what it is capable of?
Louis du Orly knew, perhaps. Brad Fisher may have had a clue when he warned Mary Jo not to call me for help. Mike Fields, I believed, was constitutionally incapable of knowing. He suffered from his own particular malady — he loved a woman who could not return his love. And now he was suffering for it, in the worst way a man can suffer. He was fighting for his life.
I watched the ER team go to work on him, his chest bare, blood congealing around a jagged hole.
The curtain was pulled, thankfully, and my view was cut off.
Mike might make it out alive, and doing so might be the roughest part for him.
*****
All my days I have searched for an answer to the question: “What makes people do things that will bring them misery and pain?” One author I had read hit if not it, then closest to it than anyone ever had before when he said something to the effect that a man has to have his life threatened several times a day or he feels as though he’s not really alive. I suppose he was right, in light of what I had found out about Brad and Mike and Heidi. How that author figured that out, I’ll never know. For me it seems to be the air knifing through my lungs, the too-bright glint of something coming my way, and even the coming darkness and the long hours before the dawn. Something, seemingly even something bad, as it were, is always better than nothing at all. I believe that holds true for everyone, myself included.
*****
On my way out of the ER, I dropped in on Jim Cook and Lawson Cooper. They had a contingent of Sheriff’s deputies surrounding them and getting in the way of the nursing staff. At first I had difficulty getting through them, then Cooper saw me and waved me on in.
“I’ve heard you may have saved my life,” he said.
“Nothing that dramatic. I just opened the door and got you to some good air. Tell me what happened?”
Jim laughed, but then rubbed his temple in obvious pain.
“It was a woman,” he said. “The wife of that guy we were watching. Small, thin woman —”
“I know her,” I said.
“Thought she was harmless. She had a squirt gun with her. A kid’s toy. Hell, when she pointed it me, I laughed. She laughed too. Then she squirted me in the face and my lights went out.”
“What do you think it was?” I asked.
“Chloroform,” Lawson Cooper said. He was on his feet now, albeit a trifle wobbly. “Did they get her?” he asked.
“She’s in custody,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Bitch.”
“Yep,” I agreed.
I spent the better part of the day with Larrabeth Williams at the hospital and met her family. I hadn’t known that she was married and the mother of two nearly grown boys. Each one hugged me tightly and thanked me for her life.
Outside the hospital window I could see news vans setting up to broadcast. They began to take up a significant portion of the visitor parking area and I watched with passing interest. At one point there appeared to be a heated exchange between a hospital administrator and a news reporter. I knew I’d be locating an alternate exit when the time came for me to disappear.
“Where are you off to now, Bill?” Larrabeth asked from her hospital bed as I inched my way to the door, preparatory to leaving.
“I’ve got a broken window to fix.”
*****
That night I put myself up at the same hotel I’d stayed in during my previous trip and was awakened with the dawn
by a cell phone call from the Texas Rangers. They wanted to talk. Go figure.
Sandy was there at the county courthouse when I arrived. I was thankful he wasn’t in irons. He’d given his statement and was on his way out in the company of the Texas Ranger I’d come to talk with. Sandy still had a bandage over his head. Likely, he’d spent the better portion of the night telling his story.
We paused before passing each other.
“Dottie knows I slept with Heidi Fields,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done it, blackmail or no blackmail.”
“You and Dottie gonna be all right?” I asked.
“I think so,” he said and rubbed the bandage over his brow. “Thank God I nearly got killed! It was the only thing that saved me from Dottie killing me when I told her. And if she was going to, I figured the best place to do it was at the hospital. I’m not joking, Bill.”
“I know.”
Sandy looked down at his feet. I waited.
“I suppose,” he said, “I’ve got some heavy-duty amends to make. Not only to my woman, but to my kids. I think even maybe on my job.”
I couldn’t help smiling.
“I’m not so sure I like seeing you this way,” I said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“All contrite. Where you are is just in a condition. A lower condition, mind you, than that of the trusted and benevolent husband and father, but it’s still just a condition. Recognize it for what it is and just do something about it. But blaming yourself? Maybe it makes it feel a little better for you, but it never works, at least not for long.”
Sandy smiled slowly at me and chuckled.
“All right,” he said. “All right.”
“How did you come by your nickname?” I asked. “‘Sandy’.”
“Stealing watermelons as a boy,” he said. “Once when the owner of this watermelon patch lit after us, all the other kids ran. One of my cousins got caught and got the tar whaled out of her. Me, I dropped to the ground and covered myself up with dirt and sand. When I got home I still had sand coming out of my ears. The name stuck from that day forward.”
“Who got caught?” I asked.
“I call her ‘Beth. You’d just call her ‘Sheriff’.”
We both laughed.
I extended my hand. He took it and shook hard.
“Thanks, Bill,” he said. “I owe you. For everything.”
“You owe me dinner and a game of Monopoly with your family,” I said.
The Texas Ranger shook hands with Sandy and gave him his calling card, then Sandy walked out of the Courthouse.
And then it was my turn.
*****
I brought in Brad’s tape and played it for the Ranger. The tape alone took the better part of an hour. I’d heard it all before, and did my best to ponder other things and not focus in on Brad’s haunting voice.
The tape detailed Sandy’s discovery of the hole and the treasure, Terry Throckmorton’s use of Brad’s talents as an engineer in discovering the uses of the ancient device and his suppositions on its composition and how it worked. It was Brad’s contention that it was shaped from a piece of meteorite that had contained trace elements of several heavy metals, including one that is designated with a question mark on old periodic element charts. The closest thing to it in “harmonic,” as he described it, was plutonium. That was the ‘why’ behind the core rods to begin with. Brad went on to detail the machinations of Heidi Fields and how he had given in to her, as Sandy had. If I could have spoken with Brad, just once, I would have talked him out of the whole thing, his tryst with Heidi especially. Once a person’s integrity goes, the sinking is as quick and as inevitable as a ship hulled below the water line. In the final analysis, that’s all integrity is: knowing what is right and then doing it.
The tape done, I passed the journal across the table. The Ranger leafed through it slowly for a minute, then slid it back to me across the wide table.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asked me.
“I thought maybe it belongs in a museum.”
He nodded.
“It’s an environmental disaster,” I said. “It has to be cleaned up.”
“I know,” he said. “When the water level drops down there, we’ll have the feds go in. They have ecological disaster-type people who can handle this kind of thing in their sleep.”
I hadn’t thought of that. The cave system had little pools dotting its eerie, otherworldly landscape. Nothing more. It was certain the water would recede.
“Sounds like the Corps of Engineers will have to fix that lake,” I said.
“No doubt,” the Ranger intoned, and yawned.
“Are you going to be there for the cleanup?” I asked him.
“Shoot. I hope not,” he said.
“Then can you pass the word along?”
“What word?”
“About the treasure. There’s a treasure-trove down there in the dark.”
“Oh. Yeah. I forgot. I’ll handle it.”
The conversation lapsed. I expected him to stand, but instead he thumped his pencil eraser on a legal note pad and looked at me expectantly.
“What happens to Heidi Fields?” I asked him. It was, perhaps, the main question of the day.
He sighed. “She’s going to the Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at the very least. It’ll be a voluntary committal. I’ve already spoken with her about it. She says she’s dying. I believe her. She’ll never go to trial. Wouldn’t be any point.”
He waited. I had a feeling that twisted in my guts. There was something this fellow needed to hear, and I hadn’t covered it yet.
Then it hit me.
“Sandy Jones told you everything, didn’t he? And by everything, I mean all.”
He nodded.
“I didn’t shoot Throckmorton. That one was a given. Is he going to be arrested and tried?”
The Ranger shook his head slowly.
“He’ll walk on that one, and on everything else,” he said.
The knot in my stomach loosened. That was it, as far as I was concerned.
The Ranger smiled. “I just wanted to hear you say it. You had a friend of mine pretty-well fooled.”
“Oh,” I said. “The Grimes County Sheriff. Sorry about that.”
“I’ll settle it with him,” he said.
“Then my thanks are due,” I said.
He pushed his chair back and regarded me.
“Can you deliver a message for me?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“It’s to Heidi.”
He nodded.
“Tell her I’ll never forget her. And I forgive her.”
What is a fellow supposed to feel at such a time? I wasn’t sure. Still, I felt something. It wasn’t a sad thing, nor the empty feeling I’ve had so many times before during my life. I thought back to a certain look, a certain glint in Heidi’s eye from years gone by — a lifetime ago. And then I knew. It was a sense of loss all right, but only of opportunity. What had occurred to precipitate these events, or, better, what had not occurred that would have, perhaps, averted it? I was never much into self-blame, but reflecting on it there under the steely-eyed yet bored stare of a Texas Ranger, the words of an over-used poem came to mind, and it was too right not to fit. I had taken a different road, a diverging path less-traveled, and that had made all the difference.
“I have something for you,” the Ranger said.
“What?”
He reached into the leather case beside his chair and slid it across the table to me.
I looked at it. Its smooth surface reflected the overhead fluorescent lighting.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” I asked.
“I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t like it. I don’t want it anywhere near me.”
“And you don’t need it?” I said. Of course he didn’t.
He shook his head slowly.
I pushed my own chair back. We stood, shook hands, and that, as they say, was
that.
*****
On the way to the parking lot opposite the courthouse, I dropped the thing in the county refuse bin. It landed with a loud plop on top of a pile of discarded jailhouse food. The box from which the stuff oozed bore a label that read, ‘Vanilla Pudding.’ The sign on the bin said, ‘Official Use Only — Penalty.’
Which was about perfect.
*****
I drove east across town, out of my way, and dropped du Orly’s journal in the return slot at the local natural history museum with a brief note that read:
Circa 1670 - 1683. The real life adventure of a French explorer who found friends, peace, and a final resting place in Texas.
I didn’t bother to sign my name.
*****
Before leaving town I made a phone call to the Bryan Police Department. I asked if Harvey Leonard was on patrol. He was. I asked the dispatcher to relay a message to him and gave it.
I waited there at the Shell gas station at the corner of 25th and Texas Avenue.
Seven minutes later the patrol car pulled in behind me. I got out, walked back to Officer Leonard’s window.
He rolled his window down, looked up at me.
“Will you take off those damned sunglasses?” I asked him.
He removed them, looked up at me with steely-gray eyes.
“Yeah? So?”
“She’s dying, Harvey,” I said. “They’re taking her to Rusk.”
It appeared there was a bone in his throat. He swallowed, hard. His lips tightened. He rolled his window up, put his car in gear and eased past mine and was off into traffic, accelerating away.
EPILOGUE
The drive back to Austin was filled with a dramatic sunset, the like of which I don’t believe I have witnessed before. The leading edge of a bank of intensely white and fluffy clouds piled mountainously high was limned with brilliant orange light much like permanent lightning, a product of the brilliant rays from a fading sun. All of this tapered away into a forever deep blue sky and presented an upside down landscape, the reflection of an Earth that might have been in some primordial time stream. It was the sort of scene that fantasy artists have always tried earnestly to capture, and have always, always fallen short. I’ve heard it said that when we have sunsets like that, that volcanoes are going off somewhere in the world, that it’s really just dust and soot and strange elements in the atmosphere filtering the dying sunlight, doing strange things to it. One could think that way — and I usually have to catch myself and yank myself back from thinking that way when I find myself doing so — but I’d like to think instead that it was a sunset heralding a new night and a new day beyond. And, hopefully, a sea change of some kind. A change not in the weather, but in the world, or at the very least, in my world.
