Buffalo Bayou Blues (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 15)

by George Wier

  “No. Not a soul.”

  He shook his head. “See? You’re not so terribly bright as you thought, are you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes I can see things nobody else can.”

  “What are you talking about?” His hand was quaking. He’d have to shoot in the next minute, or lower the gun completely.

  “That,” I said, and pointed past him.

  He laughed. “That’s the oldest trick in the book. I’m not about to look away from you, Travis. You’re a rattlesnake.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said. “But that’s the descriptic that Cotton just used to describe you.”

  I took my gaze off of Dale Horner, and looked at the coming wave.

  Who knows how such things begin. Somewhere, perhaps, a little creek or a river floods its banks and spills over into an alternate course, or a small dam somewhere upstream gives way. Or perhaps a hundred million gallons of water falls from the sky over the period of an hour in one small area. However it begins, the result can be as devastating as it is awe-inspiring. I could only watch it come—a wall of water, a vast wave I knew would brush aside and possibly crush under it everything in its path.

  It came, and I waited for it.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  T he wall of water moving towards us began to take on magnificent proportions and as the edges of it slapped over the bank across the river, Horner became distracted by the sound. He held the gun on me, but his head slowly turned.

  “Shit,” he said, and the wave bore down upon him. It was shoulder high to him and it rolled his form under it. I leapt to my left, in the direction of the back yard and the crown of the hill, but there was no way I was going to make it, this I knew even as I did so.

  The water snatched me, took me, carried me beneath it in a jarring, stinging slap, then threw me back up again into the air.

  The rear of Horner’s neighbor’s house, to the east, passed by me in a moment. I looked for the man but couldn’t find him. Something hit my shins hard and catapulted me forward and into a roll beneath the water again.

  My lungs strained for air, but there was none.

  After a time I decided to stop struggling against the current and swim with it. The river twisted around to the north ahead, and my head was finally up out of the current. There was danger in sticking too close to the shore—there was no way of knowing if a fence, or a piece of steel spike was waiting for me to come along and impale myself on it, but to stay in the middle of the river also meant eventual tiredness, and the ultimate succumb to it.

  Bits of flotsam drifted past me, and I turned to look behind me and saw a car, bearing down on me. It was, oddly enough, a Mercedes. Fortunately, there was no one inside it, but I felt a moment of shear panic at the thought of it striking me and me rolling under it, and perhaps getting snagged on something and drowning there.

  The things that go through a fellow’s head when he is being swept along.

  I thrust myself upward as far out of the water as I could, grasped the hood ornament and pulled myself over it. In the next instant I was on the roof of the car, spinning slowly about with it. From this vantage point, I could see the neighborhood—the backs of houses, with their large, covered porches, potted plants, barbecue pits, and all the incidental fluff that people tend to accumulate.

  Then I saw a road. Oddly enough, it came down and seemed to plunge right into the water. At the crown of the street beyond, I saw a pickup truck blow through a stop sign traveling ninety-to-nothing. In that brief instant, the truck seemed familiar to me, but it was long gone.

  I rode on top of the car for some time, sitting there, breathing. Little pains began blossoming all over my body, but particularly from my legs and my torso. I saw blood on my legs, but decided to ignore it.

  “Look away,” I said to myself. “That’s the ticket.”

  I passed the strangest thing yet. There, plain as the dull gray morning around me, were several sets of rubber gloves, sticking up from a fence along the edge of a property, as if someone had put them there to dry, or perhaps as some kind of strange decoration. I shuddered at the prospect of this.

  There was still another bend in the river, and me and someone else’s Mercedes rode the middle of the current until, far ahead, I noticed movement.

  Someone was waving. Waving at me!

  As I drew closer to him, he began to take on the proportions of someone I knew.

  And then I remembered the dream. I had been in the river and I had seen Hank, but then I was drowning, and I had realized it was a dream and woke up. Would I wake up now, to discover this was all a dream? But it hurt to much to be anything other than real.

  It was Hank up ahead, and he was twirling a rope over his head. I was certain I was too far to the center of the river to possibly catch it, so I slid carefully over to the edge of the car and slipped back into the current and swam as hard as I could toward the bank.

  As I came even with him—and sure enough, it was Hank Sterling, right out of a dream!—Hank cast the wide loop of rope like a professional cattleman. I reached a hand up to catch it, but the loop missed my hand and came down around me.

  The rope went taut and the slipknot he’d tied did its job, because I was suddenly unmoving with a river raging around me. The rope was around my ribs and it hurt like hell. I couldn’t breathe, but I grasped where I thought it was in the water before me and found it.

  From the roadway, Hank turned a full circle, wrapping his end of the rope around his back, then, shouting something at me—or perhaps simply cursing—and straining and puffing, he began walking backwards.

  I came out of the current and lay at the edge of the road.

  For the briefest of instants, the clouds parted as Hank stood over me and looked down, and the sun came out behind his head and created—I swear it—a perfect halo.

  “Vacation’s over, Bill,” he said.

  *****

  “How?” I asked.

  “How what?”

  We were in Hank’s truck, parked fifteen feet up from the water line. The end of the street in front of us disappeared down into the raging torrent that Buffalo Bayou had become.

  “How did you know where I was? You had to have talked to Jessica, and Cottonmouth, and you must have also spoken with Detective Gresham. Actually, Gresham was the only one who might have known where I was going, unless you spoke with Ms. Delphina.”

  Hank shook his head. “Naw. None of the above.”

  “Well how did you get past the police blocks?”

  “Same way you do. I flashed my badge and told them I was with you. They got out of my way. Listen, Bill. You didn’t think that I would just come live with you and be a general nuisance and that would be that, did you?”

  “Well, I guess I figured...yeah, something like that.”

  “Nothing doing. I’m responsible for you. And Julie. And Jessica. The whole gang, in fact.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means that you can’t go anywhere except that I know where you’re going, that’s what it means.”

  “You...” and then it dawned on me. “You’ve got a GPS device planted on all of our cars, don’t you?”

  “I do. Yours, Julie’s, and Jessica’s. There’s one on mine, too—Julie and Jessica know about that one—just in case y’all need to track me down.”

  “Is that what family does?” I asked. “Follow you around on the global positioning system? From spy satellites in space?”

  He nodded. “Yep. That’s what family does, sure enough. By the way, you’re bleeding all over my truck.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I looked down at my legs to see that my pants legs had been shredded and that blood was running down my leg and onto the floor. There was a nasty gash there, and it looked as though a strip of skin about six inches long and half an inch wide had been scraped from my right shin. The left one seemed marginally okay. The problem was neither the blood nor the pain from the abrasion, but with my ribs and my
right knee. I had thumped something awfully hard while I was in the river while being carried along. The knee was already turning purple and beginning to swell. I seemed to recall feeling it twist out of true at one point, and then back into place. Knees, as a rule, are supposed to bend fore and aft, and mostly aft, but not left and right. This knee had taken it upon itself to go to the right. Also, inexplicably, the back of my right hand was bleeding and it felt as though something might have been broken there. Then I remembered the spice rack hitting it and the gun flying.

  “That’s going to hurt,” Hank said. “But that’s okay.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because. When it stops hurting, it’ll feel better.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a whole hell of a lot. Let’s go get some bandages or something. And I may need to have my ribs taped up. Damn. I may need an x-ray. It’s hard to breathe.”

  “All right.”

  “And let’s go get the car. It’s parked a little down the street from the Horner house.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I need to look in on my kids. And call Julie. And someone’s going to need to be on the lookout for Horner’s body. Also, Jessica’s gun is underneath Horner’s dishwasher.”

  “Hold on, there, cowboy,” Hank said. “One fire at a time.”

  “If you say so,” I said, and Hank started his truck, put it in reverse and eased backwards into the River Oaks neighborhood.

  *****

  We put in a brief appearance back at the roadblock. The officer released Cottonmouth into my custody and returned his gun to me for safe keeping. Hank drove us back to Horner’s house and I waited while he went inside and fished Jessica’s gun out from under the dishwasher. He was back outside within a minute.

  “Okay,” I told Cottonmouth, who stepped down from the bed of the Hank’s pickup , “Can you drive my car and follow us? The keys are on the front seat.”

  I was still sitting in Hank’s pickup.

  “Sure enough,” he said. “Where’re we goin’?”

  “The hospital,” I said.

  “I think that might be called for,” Cottonmouth said. “Only don’t drive too fast. I don’t know how to use that damned computer system you’ve got in there.”

  Hank nodded his agreement.

  *****

  On the way to the hospital, Hank told me how he had spent the last several hours dogging my steps.

  It had ceased raining and the sun was starting to shine through the clouds to the east. If we were lucky, it would be a bright Sunday afternoon and an uneventful trip back home. Jennifer was due in school Monday morning, and Jessica had to go back on duty at the Sheriff’s Office. I wondered whether Driesel was fit to be tied over her absence, or whether he was living it up. The things a fellow thinks about when it finally stops raining.

  Hank had come inside Horner’s house, checked it out, and gone into the back yard in time to see both of us taken by the massive wave that had rolled down Buffalo Bayou. He’d turned, dashed back to his truck, and drove through the neighborhood like a demon to get ahead of me.

  “There was this one spot,” he said, “right after a bend in the river, where I knew I had a chance to get ahead of you. There was no other place where there was any access, and I had to get past the golf course. It was about two miles down from where the wave caught you. I thought you might be dead, but I couldn’t help it. It was there, or nowhere.”

  “How do you know about the river?” I asked. “And about this neighborhood?”

  “I blew up a house here once,” he said. “I had to learn the whole place. All the streets, everything. But that’s a different story.”

  “Oh.”

  “Listen,” he said, “while you’re busy bleeding all over my truck, why don’t you tell me your story?”

  “What story?”

  “The last twenty-four hours. A lot, apparently, has happened since then for both of us.”

  And so, as we made our way through Houston traffic, and as little blue and black dots danced in and out of my vision, I told him.

  *****

  Dale Horner’s body was found three days later. Oddly enough, it had fetched up within a hundred yards of Horner’s own pier at Atwell, Inc., but across the river from it. This I found out via a phone call from Detective Gresham while I was recovering back home in Austin from my injuries: two badly scraped and bruised shins, a mild hairline fracture in my right hand, and a right knee that might never quite be the same again.

  “I was wondering if he would ever be found,” I said.

  “The bad pennies always turn up.”

  “Huh. Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”

  “Travis, the next time you come to Houston, why don’t you bring the family and see some of the sights? It’s not a bad town, you know.”

  “Oh, I know. I finished up my graduate degree there at the University of Houston. That was so long ago, though, that there may have been dinosaurs walking the Earth.”

  He laughed.

  “Seriously, though,” I said, “I’ve gotten word that Rick is going to re-open the Nite Wing.”

  “Yeah. Do you have any idea how much Atwell left him, besides the bar?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “About twenty million bucks. Atwell also owned the deed to the house in River Oaks. The bartender is getting that as well, and the grandson, Clark, is getting doodley-squat.”

  “Well, there is some justice remaining in the world.”

  “Here’s another thing,” Gresham said. “Remember I told you that there was a list in the will of some twenty other people?”

  “I remember.”

  “The were all former employees of the company. Horner had let all of them go at some point, before they could become vested. He did that so—”

  “So that he wouldn’t have to pay them a dime of pension money after they retired,” I finished for him. How much did they get?”

  “A million bucks, apiece.”

  I whistled. “I suppose he wasn’t such a bad fellow after all,” I said. Then I remembered something. “Say, whatever happened to Peanut?”

  “Peanut? Oh! The dog. He was taken by the Animal Control officers and put in a kennel. I found out that whenever there was an elderly person around, he was as sweet as could be, but when there was a kid or a young person, the dog would go ape and try to eat them. So, the director of the animal shelter knew this old lady who lived all alone. By my last report, Peanut has his own pillow just inside of a screen door looking out over a park where there are lots of squirrels. Apparently, he’s got the life of Riley, now.”

  I laughed. “That’s good to hear.”

  “Okay, Travis, I’ve still got a case load to handle here. If you ever find yourself with too much time on your hands, you’re welcome to come down and help me dispose of some of it. Or all of it, for that matter.”

  I chuckled, and it made my ribs hurt. There was a long, nasty scrape along my right side that would take days for the skin to heal, and a bone-deep bruise that could conceivably take far longer. Fortunately, though, nothing was broken.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve had enough for awhile. I think I’ll leave the detective work to the professionals, and set and read a book or watch a movie or two.”

  At that moment, Jennifer came into my den and plopped herself down beside me. Then she held her nose and said, “Ew. You smell like rubbing alcohol.”

  “And try to entertain my children,” I said to Gresham.

  “Okay. You do that. Take care, sir.”

  “Later.”

  And when I hung up, I realized that there would be no reason to ever talk to the man again, and that it was likely the last time I would ever hear from him or about him.

  Such are the ways of life, sometimes.

  EPILOGUE

  I t was a week and half later that I was invited back to Houston, and specifically, to the re-opening of the Nite Wing. The entire family was with me, including Hank, who was a
ccorded the honor of sitting at the head of our table. We were ten feet from the stage.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” Rick said. He held the microphone a little too close to his mouth, and his inflection was a little too hurried, as if he was not in the least used to speaking before a group of people, and especially not over a loudspeaker system. “It is my pleasure to welcome you to re-opening night. Tonight we have with us not three, but four top blues musicians.”

  The crowd clapped and hooted.

  “We have Blaine ‘Phonebooth’ Thomas...” and the crowd got downright noisy, “Dexter ‘Deuteronomy’ Jones...” and everyone got even louder, “Phyllis Symone...” and in addition to the clapping there were a few amorous-sounding whistles, “and our very own Willard ‘Cottonmouth’ Dalton!” At Cottonmouth’s name, the crowd went over the top with the cheering and clapping, and several people stood. I took the cue and stood as well, and everyone else at the table followed. A father should always lead—that’s my motto. I noted, as I stood clapping, that my ribs and my knee were beginning to hurt a little less than they had been.

  Across from me, Ms. Delphina grabbed Bubba and hugged him tight. The young man unsuccessfully tried to fight away from her in embarrassment, but then she released him and continued clapping.

  “So, without any more fanfare, to start us off tonight here is Phonebooth, singing the blues like only he can.”

  Phonebooth was a tall, skinny man in perhaps his early forties. He didn’t appear as though he’d had a particularly rough life, like most blues musicians, but then again the blues aren’t always about tragedy. Sometimes they’re about nothing more than the desire to sing your heart out.

  Phonebooth sang the song of which I’d heard a few strains during my lost weekend in Houston At the time, I’d been on an errand to find Dale Horner, so while I’d heard the music and some of the lyrics, I’d allowed it to fall past me like so many raindrops.

  I had to act mildly surprised when I heard my name during one of his stanzas, but I’d been tipped off by Cottonmouth that Phonebooth was going to do that, after he’d heard about how I had saved Cottonmouth’s life.