by George Wier
Before the trip was done I found myself drifting through memory. I revisited Heidi as I had known her all those years before. I dropped in on Brad and Mary Jo, had a few beers and a few laughs. Sandy and Dottie and their kids welcomed me into their little home, and this time I lost heavily at Monopoly to a smiling child. Sheriff Williams and her deputies and her family had a barbecue picnic together in my mind, and I was welcome at their table. We drank longneck beer and talked about county politics. And then, as I parted company with each one in turn, I began looking ahead as the miles passed and all evidence of the sun disappeared, toward a future beautiful and terrible. What might it discover in what strange lands?
I found my way home after a time, to my wife and my new baby. And when I came into our room and found mother and daughter together and the little one grasped my finger in her oh so tiny ones and gave me a very large smile, I knew that living would be taking on far more meaning than it ever had before.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Louis du Orly and his ill-fated ship and crew are entirely a product of this author’s imagination, and to my knowledge, no such adventure occurred in actual history. But calculate, if you will, how many ships in history never made it home to port and you can see that the events I have described here are entirely possible, especially given the treacher-ous nature of the mid-Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.
I knew a Heidi in high school, a year ahead of me, but this Heidi is not that Heidi by any means. I’ve always liked the name.
Brad Fisher is a composite of many friends, old and new, as is his wife, Mary Jo.
I don’t know where Mike Fields came from. What author truly knows where his characters come from? But that question, of course, is purely rhetorical.
I hope Officer Harvey Leonard is fictitious.
The power company in this book is fictitious, as are each and every character associated with it.
The counties and cities as given here are real. However, Brazos County does not have a black female Sheriff, nor has it ever had one to my knowledge. I wouldn’t mind seeing that changed in the future. Likewise, I have never met the Sheriff of Grimes County.
The hole is fictitious. To my knowledge, such does not exist. There are, however, dark places, unknown and seemingly unknowable, deep down there beneath us all. A world of staggering beauty if light were to find it and eyes were to see it. If these, however, are not indeed real, then they are at least real in my mind.
Human nature is the most difficult thing for any author to accurately portray, as we are insubstantial beings and our thoughts are our own possessions, impenetrable to the end. I have attempted at every turn to put into words the impressions I have sensed from the many people I have known throughout my life. For me, these characters live and breathe, but that is only right. If it were not so, then the error would be of the greatest magnitude.
Sometimes I feel as though my mind is like so much clay, there for the world to indelibly impress its imagery and subtle nuances. In this way, life for this author is rich surpassing any treasure of the ancient world. And that, in the final analysis, is the only thing which I can truly share with you, reader. My friend. My treasure is your treasure.
George Wier
Austin, Texas
Read the prologue and first chapter of George Wier’s next thrilling
Bill Travis Mystery:
THE DEVIL TO PAY
Coming soon
PROLOGUE
Phil Burnet retired as curator from the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco, Texas on his sixty-third birthday having filed early for his social security benefit. His mind was made up to settle down and do what he had for thirty-five years sworn before God and family he would do: fish all day, every day, until he died. He had proclaimed on more than one occasion that when they found his dead body with his old cane-pole in his stiff hand, they shouldn’t bother trying to remove it, but instead weight his body down and shove him on into the water. He’d be much happier that way and it would balance the books between him and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for all the fish he was to have taken during the intervening years, for which he had planned on the round number of forty — forty years of catching, cleaning and frying his own supper. His grandfather had lived to be 102, and he was aiming to best him.
Phil Burnet went fishing that first Saturday after his retirement dinner and was never seen alive again.
*****
The Colorado River is a thoroughly dammed and level-controlled waterway after it meanders its way down from the high North Texas plains to become Lake Travis. Below the lake’s broad dam is a spillway where the waters again begin to resemble a very broad river that snakes its way for miles through West Austin suburbs for the upwardly mobile and affluent in the high hills to become what is locally known as Town Lake, recently renamed Lady Bird Lake after President Johnson’s widow.
The waterway and shores of Town Lake have been sculpted over time into a large city park with stands of native trees, hike and bike trails and picnic areas, much of the funding for which was gleaned through the influence of the long-lived former president’s wife.
On a Saturday afternoon, exactly one week to the day after his first and final foray into his retirement pastime and at a time optimum for city residents to enjoy the tranquil lake, Phil Burnet put in an appearance again. Phil Burnet was thoroughly dead. Dead did not come much deader.
The discovery of the body was ultimately attributed to one Perry Reilly, a local, who had taken his canoe and his new young and beautiful insurance associate out onto the water for a little “quality time.” Perry was a womanizer. This he knew and couldn’t help. His father had been a womanizer. His grandfather had raised three different families during three different eras, and if family rumors were true, had fathered other children that did not show up on the family tree charts kept by the estimable elderly family hens. So, for Perry Reilly, the blue blood had run true. Angela Thompson was beautiful, she was unattached, she was an associate, and she was twenty-five years his junior, which, according to Perry’s moral compass, made her fair game.
He was alternating his paddle strokes along Barton Creek toward Town Lake and occasionally pointing at something on either bank in order to distract Angela long enough to hopefully catch a fleeting glance near where her legs joined beneath cotton athletic shorts and the brownish shadows began there in the narrow gaps. Angela Thompson wore baggy clothing when not in the office. It was the style, and today Perry approved.
Angela peered into the waters, intently.
“Perry. Stop. Hold a sec.”
“What is it?” he asked. He had almost added a ‘Darling’ on the end of his question, but training took hold and saved him.
“It’s... Tell me what that is.” Her voice had become no more than whisper. Her brows frowned, her eyes squinted. She pointed.
“Lean back for a second. We both can’t look at the same time. This thing will tip over.”
She looked away, opposite side, and closed her eyes.
Perry looked over the side and saw something down there: eight, ten feet down, possibly more. The shadows and the light did strange things in deep water. Shapes melded and blended and anything could look like anything, this he knew. But he also knew that what he was seeing was what was there.
He swore under his breath.
There was movement for a moment down there, an upward drift of something. It looked like a hand with a single extended finger, pointing at him in accusation.
“Perry?” Angela said, distress in her voice. He looked. Her eyes were still shut and she was squeezing them tight.
“Hush, now,” he said.
There was a quick flick of motion down there and something black and round darted away toward the shadows beneath the trees overhanging the wide creek. A turtle. Biggest mother he had ever seen. The lake was full of the beggars.
Perry Reilly then did the bravest thing he had ever done in his entire life. He reached into his shirt pocket and removed his cellul
ar phone.
“I gotta make a call,” he said.
CHAPTER ONE
Walt Cannon stopped by my office on a Sunday morning at about the same moment that the portal gates of hell opened up and black things began slithering forth.
My name is Bill Travis. I’ve got a home and a wife full of children and have no business with trouble, or at least I shouldn’t. I could have tried telling that to Walt Cannon and a lot of good it would have done me.
“I need your help, Bill,” Walt said.
“Have a seat, Walt,” I said, knowing I shouldn’t. Walt is likable, though. He’s a lean and muscled fellow, a tad over six feet in height and carries an air of authority about him even when he isn’t in uniform, which at the moment he was. Looking at Walt’s face is like looking back a century into the seamed face of an Old West cattle drover. In his younger years Walt would have made a good Marlboro Man.
“What’s the trouble?” I asked.
And so he laid it out about Phil Burnet and his retirement and his vanishment and return. Perry Reilly’s name came up when I asked who had found him.
“Perry’s my business neighbor,” I said. “The insurance office right next door.”
“Right,” Walt said. “I didn’t even think about you, Bill, until I walked out of his office and looked this way. It’s been a while.”
“It’s been forever,” I said, remembering a certain barbecue beneath the metal sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex at Walt’s West Texas ranch.
“A lot happens in a few years.”
“That’s all too true. Why me, Walt? I can get my partner Nat to keep your books, maybe even cook ‘em —” I looked at his face. “Just kidding,” I said. “But really, why me? I don’t have a license to investigate. Legally, I can’t even ask questions. What gives?”
“Because,” he said, and paused. “First, it’s not my investigation. It’s being handled by the locals as a simple murder case, even though any Ranger has, by tradition, jurisdiction anywhere in the state. On this one I dare not go very far myself.”
“Then why were you talking to Perry?” I asked.
He sighed, uncrossed his legs and shifted in his chair. This was it. The mule was about to get the two-by-four right between the eyes. I leaned back in my chair and stared at him across my disheveled desk.
Walt looked at his hands. They were reddish, rough and leathery. His knuckles appeared to have knuckles.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” he said, and I allowed the silence that followed to linger. I wasn’t about to speak.
“Bill, there are some folks in the Ranger Service that are pretty sure... They think... Aw hell. Might as well spit it out. They think I killed Phil Burnet.”
*****
I remembered one time Walt telling me about a kid who had said to him: “I heard you’re a Texas Ranger.” Walt replied: “That’s right,” to which the kid replied with a damning question: “What position do you play?”
There’s little romance in any line of work. A job, I have found, is a job. But for some men and women their job is their life. That’s what I was thinking about when I asked Walt Cannon the question that no one else I know would have been brazen enough to ask: “Did you, Walt? Did you kill him?”
“No,” he said slowly, if ‘no’ can be said slowly. “But I would have. I sure as hell wanted to.”
And then somewhere I felt a black door opening.
“I suppose,” I said, “you need to tell me more about Phil Burnet.”
