Slow Falling (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 6)

by George Wier

  I checked my watch and was appalled at the lateness of the hour.

  Well, at least I had no other reasons not to go home.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When I pulled into my driveway at home, Hank Sterling was standing there at the edge of my headlights leaning against the closed tailgate of this pickup truck, his arms crossed.

  As I climbed out of my car, the night overhead was an immense patchwork of stars, and I was reminded of an astrophysical term for remote areas of the sky: they call it 'The Deep Field'.

  “Hank? What are doing here?”

  “Waiting for you,” he said, and stepped forward to shake my hand.

  “I didn't think you got out much these days.”

  “I do just fine,” he said.

  “Well, come on in. It's pretty late, though. Penny's been waiting and the kids must be asleep, so we'll have to be quiet.”

  “That's fine,” Hank said, and followed me on into the house.

  *****

  Inside my home I got a better look at Hank. He appeared far healthier than he had in perhaps ten years. Several years back Hank had nearly checked out on us by taking a bullet through a lung. For several of the intervening years he had essentially been out of commission. Something had changed, and I wanted to know what.

  “Mr. Travis,” Penny called from the living room, where she was ensconced in my favorite recliner watching a muted pay-per-view movie.

  “Didn't think I was coming back, huh?” I asked.

  “Oh, hello Mr. Sterling,” she said and waved.

  Hank waved back.

  “No,” Penny said to me, “I just didn't expect you till around dawn.”

  “Now what makes you say—” I began, but Hank cut me off.

  “It's almost dawn now.”

  I gave him a cold look and he raised both arms in instant surrender. His movements were light and quick. Maybe he was on some miracle drug or something.

  “Anyway,” Penny said, “the kids are fast asleep. I offered for Mr. Sterling to stay and watch the movie with me, but he's Mr. Lone Wolf, I suppose.”

  “It just didn't seem right, Bill,” Hank said, “me camping out waiting for you in your living room with your young and pretty secretary.”

  “You're not so old, Mr. Sterling,” Penny said, and chuckled.

  “I'm old enough for you to call me Mister, apparently. Heck, I'm sixty. Old enough to be your—”

  “Great grandfather?” I interjected.

  “I was going to say 'Uncle'.”

  “Alright,” I said, “that's enough. It's late and I'm exhausted. Penny, you can either sleep on the couch or head home. It's your call.”

  “Oh, I'm staying,” she said.

  “Why's that?” I asked.

  “Because, Julie made me promise to.” At that moment I knew that Penny was on a first-name basis with my wife, while I was not. Interesting.

  “She did, did she?” I asked. “Hmph.” I turned to Hank. “And I suppose she also called you from the hospital?”

  Hank smiled. “That she did, Bill.”

  “Okay,” I said. “This is enough conspiracy for one night. You,” I said, pointing to Hank, “come on up to my study. We'll have a quick drink and talk. And you,” I pointed at Penny, “you just...”

  “What?” she asked, giving me the Little Miss Innocent look.

  “You...” I let it go and sighed. “Well. Carry on.”

  I turned and Hank followed me up the stairs.

  *****

  In my study I poured two drinks, handed one to Hank and set the other on my coffee table. Hank looked at it uncertainly, lifted it and sniffed, then set it beside him where he plunked down in my easy chair. I told him I had to check on the kids and would be right back. He dismissed me with a wave as I closed the door behind me and made my way down the hall.

  The first room was Jennifer's. She was sleeping in her baby bed, half in and half out of her nightgown. I regarded her for a full minute in the glow of her Hello Kitty night light. She had her mother's face and her mother's strawberry blond hair, but she had my eyes.

  I leaned over the railing and kissed her forehead. She smiled in her sleep and I backpedaled quietly and out the door.

  The next room was Jessica's. I paused and listened at her door. Not a peep. Normally it was traditional for me to knock, so I gave two of the lightest ever taps on the door. Nothing.

  I opened the door slowly and there was Jessica, sitting up in the center of her bed, her head moving from right to left and the headphones on her head threatening to fall off.

  I turned the light on and she stopped.

  “What are you doing awake?” I asked. “Do you know what time it is?”

  Jessica pulled her headphones off.

  “Aren't you 'sposed to knock?” she asked.

  “I did.”

  “Oh. You shoulda knocked louder.”

  I scanned her room: goth posters, modern metal bands, death-heads glared back at me. Quaint.

  “Sorry for not knocking loud enough,” I said, not meaning it. “How's mom?”

  “She called me an hour ago. She knew I'd be awake. She says Michelle is sleeping fine. A strong, healthy baby girl. Dad, when are you and mom going to have a boy?”

  “Don't start that,” I said. “Right now I'd like to raise the brats I've got.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Dad, since I got my learner's permit, I want to drive Ashley and Jake to the lake. They're having Teen Night at The Oasis.”

  “Dude,” I said. “You are not driving to The Oasis. Not in my car, nor mom's car, nor anybody's car. Once you pass the driving test with a real, living DPS Trooper beside you, we'll talk then. But not until, okay?”

  “Whatever,” she said, tossed her head and yawned.

  “I'm going to turn out your light. I'd like for you to sleep sometime. This lifetime, that is.”

  “No dad, wait,” she said, suddenly bright. “I forgot. What happened with the old dead guy?”

  “You and dead things,” I said. “What's up with that?”

  “No, it's not that, I just—”

  “You want to go along with me, I know. Like the time with the satanic worshippers.”

  “Yeah!”

  I chuckled. “Tell you what. You help mom with the kid when she comes home... and I mean really help her, and we'll talk about The Oasis. But no adventures for you.”

  Jessica's eyes brightened half-way through my spiel, but then went dull on the 'no adventures' part.

  “I never get to go with you!” she exclaimed loudly.

  “Shh. Sleeping baby.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” she said in a whisper. “Still, will you at least tell me what's happened so far?”

  “Later. Hank Sterling is waiting for me in my study.”

  “Uh oh,” she said.

  “What's that mean?” I asked.

  “He's like you, dad. He never met a bad situation he didn't like.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That's it. Time for bed. Light's out, Miss Sixteen Year Old.”

  She plopped back on the bed and put her headphones on.

  “Fine,” I said, flipped her light off and stepped out of her room.

  *****

  “So before you ask me whether or not you can help me, why don't you tell me what you did.”

  Hank sat in my easy chair, my bookshelf towering behind him in the muted glow of my library reading lamp, his legs crossed and looking comfortable. I wasn't sure how he'd take my question, but then again I didn't care. I wanted to know. I'd held his hand both before and after his surgery in North Texas all those years ago, and I had known then that if he pulled through that his life would be vastly different. And it had been, or at least until now.

  “You mean, why aren't I dead or dying?” he asked.

  I noticed that he hadn't taken a sip of his drink. It was eighteen year-old scotch, but I let it go.

  “I do thank you kindly for the drink, Bill, but you had it poured before I could say anything.
” He lifted the glass beneath his nose and sniffed again. “Smells wonderful.” He handed the glass to me and I set on the end table at my elbow.

  “Start talking,” I said.

  “Well. Let's see. I was looking at a few years with bouts of occasional pleural bronchitis and pneumonia, or at least until I succumbed and ceased breathing. But then something happened.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well, it was sudden. It was one night right after you got back from that escapade of yours over in College Station—the one about the lost treasure and the French ship.”

  “Julie had Jennifer then. I never told you about that one,” I said.

  “I know you didn't, but Julie did. She's been keeping me up on your goings on. She probably did that because she knew you wouldn't.” Hank leaned forward and placed an elbow on his knee and supported his head with a lone hand. His eyes twinkled in the dim light of my study, and I knew I was in for a hell of a story.

  *****

  I was sitting there in my living room and I realized my oxygen bottle was a little low. My prescription had me on it for no less than four hours per day, you know. I looked at that bottle and decided to check it. I hefted it in my hands and felt the weight of it. You know, those damned things weigh almost the exact same weight that a mortar shell weighs. I noticed that then, and that got me to thinking back on my years over in Southeast Asia. And it wasn't the firefights I thought of or the jungle rot trying to eat away my feet. What I got in my head was a flood of faces. All the guys in my various platoons. Those who lived, those who died. It didn't matter. I was just remembering their faces, their little mannerisms, the way they talked and such. There was this one guy named Pinkney who was from Maine, and he sure enough said 'ayuh' a lot. There was this other fellow from Queens, New York, and had this wonderful, thick Queens accent. Anyway, I was thinking about those guys and I felt something else in the room there with me. You might say it was a specter. The Shadow of Death or some-such. It was there and I could sense it. It was real and it was intensely personal. I knew at that moment that my time was almost done. Oh, I didn't know when. But if I had to give you an answer, I would say it was soon. That's what the specter seemed to want to tell me. If he could speak words out loud, he would have said: “Soon, Henry Archer Sterling. Soon for you.” And I got to looking at it all. Another bottle of oxygen. Another episode of Lost. Time marches on and we don't notice. And then it's too late to do anything else except notice. Then I thought about you, Bill. I thought about your wife and your family and your newborn baby. I saw the future, also. I saw you coming to my funeral and wiping your eyes and shaking hands with a bunch of people you never met but that claimed to be my family and friends from long ago. And afterwards, days, months later, I saw you running off into the blue on another one of your damned adventures and I wasn't even cold yet in the ground... And it was too much.

  I decided. At that very moment, I decided. I dropped the oxygen bottle and listened to it roll under my chair. I took the tubes from around my neck and out of my nose and I threw them across the room. I got up and walked through the house and turned on every damned light in the place. Then I went and turned on all the outside lights. I brought Dingo in the house and emptied the sack of dog food on her bowl until it spilled out on the floor.

  Then I left.

  I used to have this friend named Harry Wu who was a black belt karate expert. I hadn't seen him in ten years, but I went and looked him up. I explained to him very carefully what I wanted to do and he listened to me and nodded in all the right places. I told him that I had decided to live.

  You know, the guy who was my physical therapist when I first got out of the hospital was the only person who told me the straight truth. And it's notable that none of my friends, including you, Bill, did. I'm not blaming you. I wouldn't dare. It's just... sometimes it takes a stranger to speak the truth we don't want to hear. This fellow, he tells me that I have five to seven years left in me on the outside, and then I'm dead. I tried to tell him that I was planning on a good twenty-five more, but he shook his head and said 'No, not in my experience. The pain threshold is too solid,' he said. 'It's a real barrier and ninety-nine percent of people don't have the strength to push through that barrier.' Well, the son of a bitch was right. Most don't. But I did. And it wasn't physical therapy that did it for me, or at least it wasn't the clinical kind. It was Harry Wu.

  What Harry did for me was he lent me that little extra push every time I wanted to quit. We got me pushing the limit of my body in every way imaginable. And we didn't start out slow and easy, either. I had told him that if he didn't try to kill me in the first few days, then I'd fire him and find somebody who would. But I needn't have even said that. Harry understood. It's takes someone who understands mind-over-matter to really get it, and you won't find many in the modern medical establishment who would or could.

  Harry helped me get moving. We moved and stretched my body in every way conceivable and inconceivable. And I screamed a great deal, but he's got one of those great big quonset huts for his dojo and the sound pretty much stays in there, let me tell you. We got me exercising. We got me doing things I wouldn't have done twenty-five years ago.

  We changed my diet. Do you know that I'm a damned vegetarian now? Me, Mr. Barbecue himself! I don't eat eggs or drink milk or eat cheese. I don't eat any, I mean any processed foods of any kind. Most of my food is raw, except for my brown rice, which I cook myself. My blood pressure is seventy over forty-five. I can do two hundred situps right now without breaking a sweat. I can run ten miles like it's nothing. I can—you get the picture. Hank Sterling, the builder. Hank Sterling the demolition man. Hank Sterling the drunkard. That Hank Sterling is dead. But the man in this new body... he has been recalled to life. But what life? And that's where you come into it, Bill.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It could have been a scene right out of one of the old Mannix or The Rockford Files or Magnum P.I. television serials. Hank handed me his business card. It read:

  Sterling Investigations

  Licensed and Bonded

  Trust – Confidentialty – Security

  I flipped it over on the back and there was his website, his cell phone number and an office address. The office was in Austin. The last thing I knew, Hank lived in Killeen, sixty miles away.

  “You've moved to Austin?” I asked.

  “Got an apartment. Dingo's with me, too. We're partners.”

  “I can't think of a better one,” I said, and chuckled. I took a last long pull of my scotch. “When did this all go down?” I asked him after I got my breath back.

  “The business cards are new. I picked them up yesterday. The office, I rented last month. I've already started moving my stuff in there. There's not much, really. A desk, a phone, a computer, a couple of plants. You know the drill.”

  “Yeah, I do.” I slid the card into my pocket.

  “Actually,” he said, “a fellow doesn't need an office if he has one of these.”

  Hank reached down to his side and brought up a cell phone; an elaborate one.

  “It's an Android,” he said. “It's got full internet access, email, the whole nine yards.”

  “Impressive. Got any cases?”

  “Yep. Moe Keithley.”

  “Alright,” I said. “I think you'd better start talking again.”

  *****

  Patrick Kinsey had called Hank right after I left the hospital. By the time Patrick, Dr. Hague, and I were infiltrating the Central Texas Diagnostic Technology compound, Hank was already parked and waiting in my driveway. And also by that time he'd already cast his own net for the whereabouts of Moe Keithly.

  Hank had found out where Moe's law office was located and who his secretary was by using his new-fangled phone, and with it he'd also called Moe's secretary up and gotten the inside scoop on Moe's plans. Moe had already drafted the opening couple of chapters for what his secretary described as 'a sensational book'. And he was in Southwest Texas doing his backgr
ound research. He'd moved all his scheduled clients to near the end of the coming week and wasn't planning to be back in the office until Thursday. Hank also knew the name of the town he'd gone to: Leakey, Texas.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “What do you mean by that? Damned good, I'd say.”

  “Okay, then. Pretty okay. That better?”

  Hank laughed. “It'll have to do I suppose,” he said, and sighed dramatically.

  “Hey, it's your life. You were the one who decided to be recalled to it. So, Charles Dickens, what's next?”

  “A few hours of sleep. Then we're off to Leakey.”

  “You're off to Leakey, you mean,” I said. “I've got a wife and baby I need to bring home tomorrow.”

  “Well, I thought of that. Like I said, I talked to Julie before.”

  “Oh crap,” I said. “Here it comes.”

  Hank laughed.

  “Just saying her name does that to you, doesn't it. I remember the first time—”

  “What'd she tell you?” I cut him off as quickly as I could.

  “She told me to get you out of Austin. That you would be completely in the way if you stayed and virtually worthless, especially while you're in the middle of... whatever the hell you call these things.”

  “She said that, did she?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yep.”

  “Alright,” I said. “But we stop by the hospital on the way out of town. Give me till ten o'clock. I need my beauty rest.”

  Hank sprang to his feet. It was good seeing such energy from him, but myself, I moved more like the old man he had been when I last saw him.

  “I'll let myself out. Get some sleep, Bill.”

  Hank was already moving out the door.

  I sat in the silence there in my study for perhaps five minutes. No sound, but for the gurgle of my fish tank in my bedroom down the hall and the hiss of the central air blowing coolness on my face. I regarded the two files I had dropped on the table underneath the glass of scotch Hank hadn't drank. I would have to look through those files. Thus far I hadn't had the chance.