Arrowmoon (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 8)

by George Wier

  He hung up.

  There was a series of popping sounds out there. Another, different gun was going off.

  *****

  Daylight.

  My exhaustion was gone. I was hungry and thirsty and dog-tired, but I felt good.

  Another five or ten minutes had passed after the last series of gunfire. I was wondering if Lief was still alive. I was wondering if Tate was going to make it and whether or not someone I had never met before was about to walk into the barn and start pumping bullets into the three of us. I wondered these things right up until the moment that a silhouette framed the doorway.

  It was Luke, Lief’s hired hand.

  “You fellows alright?” he asked.

  “No, Luke,” I said. “But is Lief alright?”

  “He’s fine. We got him.”

  “Who did you get?”

  “The sniper. Mind if I sit down?”

  There was something wrong with Luke’s voice. It had a far-away sound to it.

  “Sit down, Luke. What happened?”

  Luke plopped down on the hay-strewn earth and sat staring at Tate Lancing. He wasn’t going to talk unless I got him to.

  “You shot him, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Luke said. “The sniper’s dead.”

  “It’ll be okay, son,” I said.

  “I can’t see how.” He put his head in his hands and started bawling.

  I’d heard grown men cry before, but not like that. It was a despairing wail ― the sound of innocence lost.

  I wanted to say more, but couldn’t think of anything. So I did what I normally do; I improvised. I remembered something I’d read in a book once on how the mind works.

  “Tell me what happened again,” I said. “Start to finish.”

  Through a lot of tears and hitching sobs, he told the story. He’d been sitting out there at the end of the road when he’d heard the shots. He’d known for sure it was his boss this time, and had taken to the woods at a run. When he burst through the trees into the clearing a man was running. Lief was chasing him with his shotgun booming fire and the sniper had stopped to return fire. Lief was most certainly a goner, but then Luke cut loose with his pistol. It had been a lucky shot at fifty yards distance. The man fell and never moved again.

  Lief had told Luke to check on the rest of us. By the time he walked into the barn the gravity of it had hit him. He had killed a man.

  “Okay,” I said. He’d stopped crying. “Tell it to me all over again. Don’t leave out a thing.”

  He told it. Before he was done Lief was standing there in the doorway, listening.

  Luke’s eyes were dry. He was bored with the telling of it.

  “Tell it again, Luke,” I said.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Do as he says,” Lief said.

  “Oh. Hey boss.”

  Luke told it all over again from start to finish. Somehow, miraculously, it was working. At the very end of it he was calm. He stood up.

  “I saved your bacon, boss,” he said. “How about that raise you promised me.”

  “Better give it to him,” the Judge said.

  “What did I miss?” Tate asked. I pulled the edge of the sock away from the hole in his neck. The bleeding had very nearly stopped.

  “Nothing,” I told him.

  *****

  Judge Sinclair called his granddaughter back and had her call off the rescue. She did, however, insist on coming on out herself. Lief and I directed Luke the best we could on how to get out of the place and let him take the Range Rover with Tate Lancing, under the care of the Judge, out of the place.

  Lief and I heard approaching sirens through the woods: an ambulance coming. Luke would likely meet them on the county road and place Tate in their care and hopefully return.

  At our feet was the sniper.

  He lay on his back; a young fellow of about twenty-five. His hair was buzz-cut and he was clean-shaven. There was a neat hole on the left side of his back, an inch away from his spine. One of Luke’s thirty-eight rounds had found his heart and there was surprisingly little blood. He’d died instantly.

  He wore hunter camouflage trousers and jacket. His boots were green lace-up brogans.

  “What do you make of him?” Lief asked me.

  “Can’t say,” I said. “You already looked for I.D., I take it?”

  “Yeah. Nada.”

  “What’s your first impression, Lief?”

  “That clean hair-cut, his age, his clothes. I don’t know, but I get the feeling he’s some kind of government agent.”

  “That’s what I thought too,” I said. “I didn’t want to admit it until I heard it from you.”

  “What do we do with him?”

  “Nothing. We wait. The Judge’s granddaughter is on her way. We’ll let her tend to him.”

  The sun was over the trees and a cold front had blown in.

  “I think it’s time,” I said.

  “For what?” Lief asked.

  “To open that safe.”

  “I forgot all about that.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  *****

  The door came open with a whine from one of the hinges.

  “A pistol and a book,” Lief said.

  “Yeah.” I handed the pistol to Lief and he checked it over.

  “Loaded for bear,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  I picked up the book, unwrapped a leather draw string, opened it.

  “A diary of some kind,” I said, leafing through it.

  “Who wrote it?”

  “I don’t know yet. It’s dated 1899 on the first page.”

  Lief whistled. “Tate was right. It’s old.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Also, it’s written in German.”

  “Can you read it?” he asked.

  “I took German one year in High School,” I said, “but I took the class because there was this girl I liked. I flunked the class.”

  Lief laughed.

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  Lief stuffed the pistol into his belt. “Can I see it a minute?”

  “Sure.” I handed it over.

  Lief turned the pages slowly. No doubt he was taking pictures of it with his eyes in case any of it was needed later.

  “Here’s something,” he said. “Pictures.”

  “Let me see.”

  Lief handed them over. They were old tin-type photographs. A church, a chair in a room, an old man posing.

  “Any of it make sense?” he asked.

  “Not yet. Keep looking.”

  Lief found a list of names and what looked like ages that went on for pages. After each name there was an “X”.

  “This gives me the willies,” Lief said. He handed the journal to me.

  “Jockovitch wanted that highway stopped because of this journal,” I said.

  “I’ve met Jockovitch, Bill. That’s a man with an agenda.”

  “I know.”

  “Put all of this together with that dead sniper out there, Lief. Tell me if you get anything out of it.”

  Lief paused. He glanced at the safe. His right hand fingered the butt of the pistol in his belt. He looked outside at the wrecked helicopter and toward where the sniper’s body lay, then he glanced over at the journal and the photographs in my hands.

  “I’ve got a hunch, Bill,” he said. “And I don’t like it.”

  “I think I’ve got the same hunch,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  There are some people who believe that we never landed on the moon in 1969; that it was a government propaganda campaign done with TV cameras and staged sets at Area 51 in order to convince the public that we had won the space race. There are folks who are certain that Nikola Tesla was responsible for t
he Tunguska Blast of 1908; that he had invented a death ray, bounced it off the moon and hit Siberia with it as a test. Some are sure that aliens crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and that the true story was quickly covered up with the tale of a crashed hot-air balloon experiment. Many “know” that JFK was killed by the mafia, or by the CIA, or by both that terrible day in Dallas. There are some that claim, and are completely convinced, that Elvis filled their gas tank outside of Macon, Georgia some time during the 1980s.

  The rest of us tend to take all of these ideas and lump them into one neat category and label them “conspiracy theory.”

  I had my own ideas about some of these theories, took the standard and accepted explanation on most, and had no interest whatsoever in what was left over.

  The standard, history book line goes something like this: Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Siberia was hit by a meteorite, a balloon crashed in a field outside of Roswell, and Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy. And, as my wife would say, “Elvis has left the building,” meaning, of course, the man was dead.

  But...

  A barn in the woods not far from the Brazos River in East Texas held a journal written in German. Someone from Boston had known about it and had successfully halted the progress of a major highway construction project until it could be retrieved. A sniper, identity unknown, had died because of it and the man who had unlocked the safe was on the way to the hospital, his future in the hands of fate, or Vishnu, or God. However, you cannot take a hunch to the bank and expect the teller to cash it.

  I needed more.

  Also, like Lief, I needed a bite of food, a shower, a shave, a change of clothes, and about twelve hours of sleep.

  Luke returned with the Range Rover while I was pouring through the journal and putting what few words and phrases I understood of German together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  “How’s Tate?” Lief asked Luke when he pulled up to where we were sitting in the sun a dozen yards from the barn and killed the Range Rover motor. I wished I would never have to enter that barn again but there was one more thing there left to do.

  “He’s seen better days,” he said. “The paramedics took him. One of them said something about the bullet was likely lodged close to his spinal cord. They put his head in some kind of brace where he can’t move it. Also, they’ve got IVs in him and are pumping oxygen into him. Unless he has a heart attack or something, he’s probably gonna live.”

  “He’s lucky that shot didn’t take his head off,” Lief said. “I’ve never heard of anyone being so lucky.”

  “The Judge go with them to the hospital?”

  “Nope. That must be him and his granddaughter now.”

  Another vehicle emerged from the woods; a big Dodge Ram pickup.

  Luke whistled.

  “That lady,” he said. “She’s some looker.”

  *****

  “The way my grandfather tells it, you may have saved his life, as well as Tate’s,” Darla Sinclair said. She shook my hand, then Lief’s. She had a strong grip, even though she looked delicate.

  Darla Sinclair had long, dark brown hair. Most policewomen I had met wore their hair in a ponytail or kept it cut butch. Not Miss Sinclair. Her hair was long and flowed down her back. She was a tall woman, but athletic. Also, she wore kevlar armor underneath her police blues. While I could admire her youth and her beauty and her blue eyes, it was Lief and Luke who were smitten.

  She thanked us again and got right down to business.

  She examined the body carefully, asked if we had found any identification on him. I told her we had looked, but there was nothing to find.

  “I’ve never seen him before,” she said. “But I’ve seen fellows like this before.”

  “What do you make of him,” I asked.

  “FBI,” she said. “I hope not, though. If it is, this is damned serious.” She looked around at us. “I mean more serious than a crooked Sheriff.”

  She stood up.

  “What’s next, granddad?”

  Judge Sinclair rubbed his jaw.

  “I think these boys need some rest. Let’s go to your house, Darla. I’ll call Maudelle and let her know that everything is alright.” He turned to Darla. “You’re not to tell your mother or your grandmother anything about this, alright?”

  Darla Sinclair shrugged.

  “Alright, then,” the Judge continued. “Do you have enough places for these men to sleep?”

  “I do. There’s my bed and there’s the couch. But I want to go arrest Noonday.”

  “We can’t,” the Judge said. “Not yet. I’ll make some phone calls and use your fax machine. We have to get the District Attorney in on this if we’re going to do this right. And I have a court order to write, right Mr. Prescott?”

  “If you say so, Judge.”

  “I do. Get those men of yours to work, and let’s all get out of sight. I have a feeling this place will be hopping soon.”

  “What about the body?” I asked.

  “What body?” The Judge said.

  And that settled it.

  *****

  Before leaving, Lief and I walked over to the tree where the sniper had been perched.

  I looked carefully among the dead leaves that lay thickly upon the ground until I found what I was looking for: a spent cartridge shell. I was no longer concerned about fingerprints and so I simply picked it up and put it in my pocket.

  “Alright,” Lief said. “They’re waiting. Let’s go.”

  “One more thing to do first, Lief,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Let’s close that safe and give the dial a spin. And I want to try and wipe those chalk marks off of the front of the thing.”

  “Oh. Like we never got it open?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s just plain mean, Bill,” he said, and began laughing.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Darla Sinclair lived in a small wood frame house in the Camp Creek Lake community south of the town of Franklin. We went the long way around, taking the Old San Antonio Road along the southern border of the county and then back north again along a farm-to-market road and pulled up at her front porch at a few minutes after 9:00 a.m.

  Lief was still on his cell phone with his construction crew as the rest of us went into the house. The last bit of conversation I heard was Lief telling someone: “When I come back out there, you’d better have the trees knocked down all the way up to that barn in the woods.”

  The Judge ensconced himself at Darla’s writing table off the kitchen and began typing on his granddaughter’s computer.

  Lief came in and he and I flipped a quarter to see who got to sleep in the bed. I lost. It was fine by me. I was ready to sleep on the floor if need be.

  I drank half a gallon of water, threw myself on the couch and was instantly asleep.

  And dreamed.

  I was somewhere in Central Europe. A mist lay over the countryside, and there were abandoned houses on overgrown lots at the side of the road as I walked along. Whenever I tried to peer closely at one it receded into the fog, which I took to mean that inspection was forbidden.

  The road was a cobbled affair but the stones clanked beneath my feet with a hollow sound. I looked to find that the stones were actually the crowns of skulls, bleached a dull grayish-white by traffic and the weather.

  I noticed that someone walked behind me. I turned. It was Sheriff Noonday. His face was just a blur, but I knew it was him. He had a pistol pointed at me.

  “Go on,” he said. “You have to know everything, don’t you?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Fine. You’ll find out, but you won’t like it. After that you can fix my lawnmower and give my dog a bath. That’s if you survive.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where are we goi
ng?”

  “Just keep moving,” he said.

  We walked on. I was chilled to the bone but decided not to complain. I suspected the Sheriff didn’t handle complainers well.

  The road wound around a large hill. To our left there was a valley over which the mist had settled among the forest, giving it a sinister aspect. The treetops down below poked above the mist like tombstones. To our right the hill marched up in a series of terraces into the low clouds.

  I was getting tired, but I was too apathetic to complain.

  The road straightened, the valley disappeared and we came into a small village dotted with even more abandoned and disheveled houses with steeply slanted roofs of aged slate and terra cotta.

  “Keep going, East Texas,” Sheriff Noonday said to my back. “Stop when you get to the church.”

  “Church?” I asked.

  “Right. All back-sliders find their way back to church.”

  I didn’t retort, but instead kept plodding forward. The stones, the skulls beneath my feet had become smaller, as if they were the skulls of―

  Children

  ―pygmies. I thrust the knowledge of what they were away from myself.

  The church reared ahead at the turning of the road. It was a dilapidated affair. I had seen it somewhere before, but I couldn’t place when or where. Perhaps I’d seen it on a postcard.

  I shivered.

  I stopped at an angle to the church ― the same angle that I recalled from before ― and there was a face in a broken-out second-story window. The face was blurred, much like the Sheriff’s face.

  I wanted it to be a woman’s face, for some reason, but I couldn’t hide the fact even from myself that I knew what it was: the face of a child.

  “Go on, Bill,” the Sheriff said at my back. “Go on inside.”

  I turned suddenly and grabbed the gun from his hand.