Still River

by Harry Hunsicker

  “Anybody else in Dupree’s organization know where I live?”

  Clairol shook his head.

  I got out and stretched. That was a mistake. I felt something give way in my side and my calf started to hurt again.

  “Heya, Hank. How do I get in touch with you? You know, in case I hear anything else.”

  “Preferably not with a Taser.” I flipped him a card with my cell phone number on it.

  “I’m sorry it got ugly back there.” Clairol squinted at the card before stuffing it in his shirt pocket. “What I told you, that’ll help, right?”

  I shut the door of the old pickup and walked away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I limped the rest of the way home, dodging cracks in the sidewalk and Mr. Martinez’s grandkids playing soccer next door. He sat in a lawn chair in front of the house, in the shade of a willow tree, watching his progeny scurry after the ball. The sun was high in the sky and it was hot. I could feel sweat hit my various abrasions and sting. Mr. Martinez raised his can of Coors to me but made no move to visit. He was a smart man and knew not to ask questions. He’d been to the river and back, walking up to the fringes of this world, the gray area between normal workaday life and the other side, the place where outlaws dwell, the thieves, the hookers, the gamblers, the bad folks like Coleman Dupree. I knew he saw the marks on my face and the limp and decided to keep to his own business. Sometimes I wish I were that smart.

  I walked to the front of my home and picked up the Sunday paper, leaning down carefully. When I came back up, Edwin, my neighbor on the other side, stood there. He held an uprooted flower in one hand, the other hand perched on his hip.

  He thrust the plant in my face and said, “Look at this.” His tone was that of an exasperated parent with a disobedient child.

  “Yeah.” I tried to keep the anger out of my voice.

  “What do you have to say about it?”

  I didn’t have anything to say since I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Edwin smirked. “This is the result of your visitors this morning. Those two men in the Lincoln. They parked on my flowers.”

  That would be Poon and Clairol, right before they blasted me with nine thousand volts and hauled my ass to the bar on Harry Hines, which subsequently exploded with me in it. I shrugged but didn’t say anything.

  “Just because you don’t plant any color doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t. Now look at them. Ruined.” He pointed to a flower bed in his yard, flush with the curb. It had a tire track in the middle. About half the people on the block had some flowers planted. Everybody but Edwin planted them adjacent to the house, not up against the street, where they might get run over.

  I smiled as much as my split lip allowed.

  His smirk deepened. He made a tsking sound. “You know the trouble with you is that you have no appreciation for anything aesthetic.” He stuck the damaged plant closer to my face and a tiny piece of dirt landed on my chest. “Just look at this, can’t you—”

  Edwin’s harangue stopped with a wheezing sound as my fist wrapped around his throat. He clawed at my fingers.

  I pulled him closer. “Edwin. I want you to blink if you can hear me.”

  Edwin blinked. Lots and lots of blinks, coming as fast as a hummingbird’s wings.

  “Good,” I said. “Now then, here’s the deal. Don’t ever touch me again. With your finger, with a speck of dirt, with anything at all. Don’t even let your breath get on me. Do you understand me, Edwin? Blink if you do.”

  A blizzard of blinks.

  “That’s good.” I released him with a shove toward his house. “Go sculpt something. It’ll make you feel better.” He looked at me and started to reply. Instead, he took several deep breaths and stalked back to his front door.

  I went around back, let myself in, and checked every door and window in the place, making sure everything was secure. The dog seemed halfway excited to see me so I gave her a Milkbone. I popped open the top of a people Milkbone, an ice-cold Coors Light. The first gulp was so good I decided to share, and poured a half inch into the dog’s bowl. Together we finished the beer. I opened another one, took a sip, and left it on the kitchen counter.

  Still limping, I went to the basement and opened the safe I kept there. I grabbed another blade, a Benchmade auto this time, and stuck it in my waistband. Next I pulled out a shotgun. It was a Remington pump and kicked like a pissed-off hippo but never failed to fire when I pulled the trigger. Olson had added a magazine extension tube that ran along the bottom of the eighteen-and-a-half-inch barrel so that it could hold eight rounds. I stuffed Winchester double-aught buckshot into its feeding hole until no more would fit. The sling doubled as a bandolero and held another ten shells. I filled it, too. On my workbench, I disassembled the .32 and cleaned it. When I was finished I reloaded it and stuck it back in the ankle holster. I repeated the process with my Browning, even though it was already clean.

  My work in the basement was finished. I went upstairs and reexamined all the bolts and locks and other safety measures. I kept the shotgun hung over one shoulder. Jack Washington didn’t know where I lived. Yet.

  Back in the kitchen I grabbed a strip steak from the freezer and set it on the counter to thaw. Ten ounces of marbled red meat sounded good for lunch. Beer in hand, I went into the office I’d set up in one of the bedrooms. The room was bare except for an old pine table with a Dell desktop and a printer on it. I pulled the drapes and turned on the computer.

  While the machine did its thing I drank beer. After a few moments I punched and clicked the right buttons at the right times. Pretty soon the Yahoo! screen appeared. I typed in “Trinity Vista Dallas” and waited. The answer came back in the form of a couple of dozen hits, ranked by relevance.

  Everybody and everything has a Web page. Pro–Trinity Vista and anti–Trinity Vista. Pro-Trinity, but anti-Vista. Anti-Trinity, anti-Vista, pro–Area 51.

  I clicked and surfed and hyperlinked and the picture became a little clearer. Part of it I knew already, other bits were new. The Trinity River, little more than a slow, trickling puddle most of the time, ran down the middle of a two-mile-wide floodway, between two dirt embankments. The area around the river was flat and grassy. It was also as dry as a Baptist picnic for 95 percent of the year. But get a few days of continuous storms and it soon resembled the Amazon during rainy season. The waterway also split the city of Dallas in two. North and south. For whatever reason, that had turned into the haves and have-nots.

  But then a funny thing happened.

  Dallas ran out of dirt.

  Except for suburbs two counties away, and the occasional vacant tract, the city was full, nowhere else to build. Too bad you couldn’t build on all that great river bottom land. Too bad it was floodplain and the structures would wash away.

  The person with the original idea was unclear but someone, either a city hall booster or a planner with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, had wondered aloud about recovering part of the floodplain of the Trinity. A couple of million dollars in feasability studies later, the answer emerged.

  It could be done.

  A series of levees and other reclamation projects would net close to a thousand acres of usable land. One thousand acres of prime terra firma, adjacent to downtown and the convention and tourist district, straddling north and south. The developers went apeshit at the suggestion, salivating at the thought of that much land ready to be covered with income-generating structures. Their spinmeisters pushed the notion that except for the large buildings everywhere, it would be an urban greenbelt of sorts, an oasis in the middle of a major metropolitan area.

  Then the guys with funny-sounding names and strange accents showed up. The people from the Olympics Committee. The city was still smarting over getting cut from the shortlist for 2012. When the U.S. Olympics officials put out feelers for host cities for the 2020 games at about the same time the Trinity Vista began to appear in the public consciousness, the powers that be realized this was Dallas�
��s one big shot at international respectability.

  Place the Olympic Village smack dab in the middle of the Trinity River.

  On the official Trinity Vista home page, I found a master plan of the proposed area. The oasis mentioned on the other page was tough to see, what with all the apartments, offices, and retail projects surrounding the Olympic Village. And of course the 100,000-seat stadium dead-center of the project.

  I drank the last of the beer and crushed the can. What had Aaron Young called it, a bridge between North and South Dallas? It didn’t take much of a real estate whiz to understand that it would be a very valuable bridge.

  Which led directly to my next question: Who gets to be in charge of the goose that’s going to lay that big, pretty golden egg?

  I was fairly sure of the answer but I needed confirmation. The computer hung on a recalcitrant Web page, so I went to the kitchen for another beer while the routers routed and the servers served.

  The steak was almost thawed. I got out a bag of salad and another Coors Light. By the time I returned the Internet was again cooperating and the Web page appeared. And I was wrong.

  The answer was not Strathmore Realty.

  The project was to be under the auspices of a consortium of developers, assuring that everyone got a piece of the pie. There were a couple of different companies for each type of development—office, apartments, and retail. A committee pulled from these groups would implement the Olympic Village. The head of the entire project, the lead developer, had yet to be decided. That position was between two companies.

  Click, click.

  Strathmore Real Estate.

  And the Aaron Young Company.

  The lead organization would be in charge and have a hand in every decision and piece of development. There would of course be compensation, by way of a percentage of the rents. More important, though, there would be power and prestige.

  And it had come down to Young and Strathmore. More specifically, Aaron Young and Roger Strathmore, Fagen’s son. On the Strathmore company’s home page, I found a picture of the family scion. He looked like his father but seemed lesser somehow, at least by way of my computer screen. Where Fagen had a prominent jaw, Roger had a slight overbite and a weak chin. His eyes were narrower than his father’s, but the nose was the same. I read the accompanying statement regarding the firm’s participation in the Trinity Vista project. The document was a panorama of power verbs, words like thrust and triumph and dominate. The term phalanx of empowerment appeared four times. According to the text, the fate of Dallas itself hung on the Trinity Vista; the city’s status as an economic powerhouse and cosmopolitan center of the arts would wither and fade away if the Vista wasn’t developed properly.

  I laughed out loud at that one. Cosmopolitan in Dallas was a vodka and cranberry cocktail, not a state of mind. It was something you bought.

  Before shutting off the computer, I clicked to the appraisal district Web site and did a search for Roger Strathmore, looking for where his home might be. He lived the good life, a six-thousand-foot estate in Highland Park, the wealthy island of a town sitting in the middle of Dallas. I wrote down the address. Next I ran Aaron Young’s name. Nothing came up. That didn’t prove anything, just that he didn’t own a house in Dallas County under his own name.

  Power off to the computer and I went to the kitchen. Growling sounds came from my stomach and my head felt funny again. Nothing quite like getting shot, Tasered, and almost burned up on Sunday morning to make a body shaky.

  I debated the wisdom of another beer but decided that maybe a wee tot of the Scottish Highlands would ease the nerves. I poured two fingers of Cutty Sark into a highball glass, sipping it as I heated up a heavy iron frying pan, dry. When it was hot, I sprinkled the thawed piece of meat with salt and pepper and placed it in the pan.

  Smoke and steam shot to the ceiling as the fat in the steak melted into the skillet. Four minutes on each side yielded a perfectly cooked strip steak, pink all the way through. I dumped some olive oil and balsamic vinegar on the lettuce and sat down to eat, another half a finger of scotch in my glass.

  Roger Strathmore lived on Miramar Avenue in Highland Park. It would take me about ten minutes to get there. I hoped he didn’t have big plans for the afternoon. I wanted to have a visit with him, see what he could tell me about the whereabouts of his father, and maybe a little info on the Trinity Vista. I ate steak and drank scotch. The plate had just gone into the dishwasher when my cell phone trilled. The number was unfamiliar.

  “Hello.”

  Clinking glasses. Laughter. Music in the background. Vera Drinkwater’s voice muffled and tipsy sounding: “H-Hank.”

  “Vera.” I sat on the kitchen counter and massaged a previously unidentified ache in my left thigh.

  “I’m at the Blue Goose, on Greenville Avenue.” The scratch of a lighter paused her voice for a moment. “Woman I work with called. Said to meet her and her boyfriend. He’s got a new Hog.”

  “That’s nice, Vera.” The Blue Goose was a Mexican restaurant sitting in the middle of a string of bars and eateries. Facing the street was a large patio with built-in misters and fans to keep the heat at bay. Sunday afternoons the place became the semi-official hangout of the biker wannabes, the fifty-something dentists and CPAs wearing leather vests and riding gleaming Harley-Davidsons. They parked their machines in front and sat on the patio, drinking beer, eating nachos, and talking bikes. Vera sounded like she’d skipped the food part and concentrated mainly on the beer.

  “Everybody’s having a good time,” she said. “But my brother’s still dead.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Can I come over?” The noise faded and I could tell she was moving. “You’re the only person who knew Charlie too.”

  “Got some stuff to do this afternoon.” I slid off the counter. “It’s about your brother.”

  “He was all I had.” A car door slammed and the ambient noise stopped. “Where are you now?”

  “I’m at home.”

  “What’s the address?”

  Don’t tell her. “Sycamore Street.” I recited the number.

  “Where’s that?” Automobile ignition noise in the background now.

  Don’t give her directions. “Head south on Abrams Road. You’ll find it.”

  She hung up without saying anything else. I washed down two aspirin with the last half inch of scotch, brushed my teeth, and sat down in the living room to wait. Nine minutes later the doorbell rang and Glenda went bonkers. I grabbed the dog and shoved her in the backyard. I returned to the living room and opened the front door.

  A wave of heat and humidity rushed in, enveloping the wobbly figure of Vera Drinkwater leaning against the door frame, sunglasses perched on her blond head. She wore a denim skirt that stopped midthigh and a pink sleeveless top with red ruffles on the sides. The front was unbuttoned to her sternum, exposing the tops of her breasts encased in a black push-up bra. Perspiration dappled her chest and upper lip.

  “It’s hot as shit out here.” She fanned herself with one hand. “Aren’t you going to let me in?”

  I stood aside and closed the door as soon as she walked into the living room.

  “What happened to your face?” She squinted at the cut on my lip.

  “It’s been an interesting day so far.”

  She nodded and then seemed to become aware of her surroundings. “Nice place. You always were a classy guy.” She did a quick turn around and took in the front third of my house. “Got any beer?”

  “Sure.” I led her into the kitchen and got two Coronas from the refrigerator. “Where’s Duane?”

  “Probably taking it up the butt from that pisswad Terry.” She drank a quarter of the beer in one gulp and rolled the bottle across her forehead. “Duane’s not exactly a stallion when it comes to the bedroom. Too many steroids. Too much looking at himself in the mirror.”

  I took a sip of beer but didn’t say anything.

  “But what am I gonna do?” Her tone was
resigned. “There’s no looking back. Can’t start over now.”

  “Why be unhappy, Vera?”

  She placed her bottle on the counter and moved to where I was, standing by the fridge. “Help me, Hank. My brother’s dead and nobody gives a shit but you and me.” Her voice choked with emotion.

  “Vera, let’s concentrate on finding who did this to your brother, okay?”

  “Please, Hank.” She stepped closer.

  I hesitated a moment and then took her in my arms. That would have been okay except she tilted her head up and kissed me on the cheek. I tried to push her away but she held on tight, moving her lips to mine. After a few seconds I kissed back. She pressed her body into me and what sounded like a whimper or a moan came from deep inside her. I felt her pain as a tangible force, wondering where her suffering ended and mine started. Pretty soon we stumbled out of the kitchen and left a trail of clothes in the hallway leading to the bedroom. We fell on the bed in a tangle of arms and legs. Her breasts were chalky white compared with the tanned skin of her shoulders and torso. She filled my senses, a heady mix of perfume, sweat, alcohol, and cigarette smoke. When we finished, she cried a little, over what had just occurred or her brother or something else, I couldn’t tell. She drifted off to sleep as I struggled to control my sinking eyelids.

  From a long way off I heard a buzzing sound. I opened my eyes and swatted at the noise by my ear. Long shadows dappled the far wall. I looked at the alarm clock and saw that it was three hours later than it should be. The buzzing was my cell phone. I looked at the number on the caller ID. Miranda and Ernie’s house. Please don’t let Ernie have died.

  “Hello.” Sleep colored my voice. Vera stirred beside me.

  “Hank?” It was Nolan.

  “Yeah. What is it?” I shook my head, trying to push out the fog.

  “Were you asleep?”

  I burped and tasted scotch and steak. “Maybe.”

  Vera sat upright in the bed and groaned as if she’d been having a bad dream.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Uhhh … yes. I mean no.” I rolled off the bed and rummaged around on the floor for my boxer shorts. My wounded calf started to hurt. “Lemme call you back.” I disconnected.