The Last Call

by George Wier

  I thought of a name: Ernest Neil. The name of the man who had died in Julie’s arms. That sounded rather poignant.

  “Hiya,” Agent Cranford said.

  “Hey.”

  “Nice night. Got another one of those?” he asked, referring to my cigarette. “I think I left mine down in the car.”

  “I don’t normally smoke,” I told him. “These are Julie’s. But it’s a smoking kind of night, you know?”

  “Uh huh,” he agree.

  I fished a cigarette out for him. I wondered if Julie counted them. Probably not.

  He took it with a thin smile. I thumbed the lighter. Held it for him as he lit up.

  “Thanks.” He drew deeply, paused, letting the nicotine bite, exhaled slowly. I’d say he was about forty-eight years or so. Conservative haircut. Clean shaven, even late at night. Forty-eight seemed sort of young to be looking at retirement. I hoped I was going until I was about ninety.

  “How’s Hank?” he asked.

  “Still sleeping it off,” I said.

  “Good. Ya know,” a touch of New England came through in his accent, “people here are real nice.”

  “Mostly,” I said.

  “Mr. Travis-”

  “Bill. Call me Bill.”

  “Fine. Bill, I’ve been wondering something.”

  “What?”

  “Just what is it you do for a living?” he asked. “If you don’t mind telling me.”

  “Financial consultant.”

  “Ahh. Okay,” he said. There was a little sparkle in his eyes.

  Suddenly I knew that he’d already read everything that his friendly, neighborhood FBI computer could spit out about me. Probably, he knew who my second grade teachers were when I’d forgotten the information a long time ago.

  There was an odd and long moment of silence as we smoked.

  “Got something for you,” he said finally.

  I waited.

  He fished something out of his jacket, handed it to me.

  It was a photograph.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked. The sodium arc light from the parking lot revealed an old black-and-white photograph of three men sitting at a small table. The men looked somber and serious. It was from a time when it was customary to put on your most dour face for a picture.

  Then it hit me what I was looking at.

  “This is Carpin, isn’t it? Matthew Carpin. The fellow on the right is Bryan “Whitey” Walker. Who’s that in the center?”

  “You’ll figure it out, Mr. Travis. Oh, sorry. I’m supposed to call you Bill. Old habits die hard, you know. Kind of like old law men. It’s getting late. Good night, Mr. Travis.”

  “Good night, Agent Cranford,” I said.

  He turned and went back the way he came, got into his car and left.

  I’d have to remember to get rid of that GPS bug on the Suburban.

  I studied the photo.

  Whitey was already going bald on top by the time he was in his late twenties, but this was earlier than that. The other fellow, Matthew Carpin, was a wiry little fellow. All three men at the table were nattily dressed.

  It hit me.

  The man in the center was Jack “Blackjack” Johannsen.

  Stirrings in the night.

  I listened to Julie breathe in the night as the dark thoughts came and went. Even though we weren’t touching, I felt the heat from her.

  Around two in the morning the phone rang.

  I grabbed for it before I was even fully awake.

  “Bill. You are not a very nice fellow.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said, you’re not a very nice guy.”

  I got up, the phone snugged against my ear. Stumbled around in the dark in my underwear. Outside? No good. Bathroom! I went inside in the dark and closed the door behind me, felt for the toilet, put the seat down and sat on it.

  I was cold all over.

  “You there?” Archie Carpin asked.

  “I’m still here,” my voice reverberated off the bathroom walls, echoed back at me. My stomach felt like it had a ball of lead in it, engulfed in a sea of acid.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said. About negotiations and attitudes and crap like that.”

  “Well,” I said, attempting to put some of the nervousness out of my voice. “I guess that’s a good thing.”

  “It’s a good thing, Mr. Travis.”

  “So you know who I am. Good for you. Then you know that when somebody snaps at me, I snap back.”

  “It depends on who draws the first blood, doesn’t it? Also it depends on who’s right and who’s wrong, right?”

  “Listen,” I began. I was sitting in the dark, but there was a picture filling up my vision; a perfect picture in three dimensions and with sound and motion. Dock’s life blood squirting out of him and the labored breathing of a dying man. “You drew the first blood,” I told him.

  “Not really,” he said. “But I will draw the last blood. That is unless we can come to a meeting of the minds.”

  “What’s your bright idea?”

  “You bring Julie back to the ranch, and I’ll promise that I won’t hurt her. Or the kid.”

  I laughed at him. “Julie’s not mine to give,” I said, “and even if I could, I wouldn’t trust you.”

  “But you’d trust her?”

  He had a point there.

  “I’ll make this easy for you, Mr. Travis,” he said.

  I interrupted: “Don’t do me any favors. Only friends do favors.”

  “Call it a good will gesture, then. I’ll let the little girl go, in exchange for Julie. Even she’ll go for that.”

  “No way,” I said. “No trades.”

  “Let me talk to Julie, then.”

  “Nope. That ain’t gonna happen.”

  The phone clicked off.

  I went back to bed, but couldn’t sleep. If the call had been nothing more than Carpin’s attempt to keep me unbalanced, then it had worked.

  Somewhere after 3:00 a.m., I went back outside and tapped lightly on Hank’s door. Absently, I wondered if maybe I was being watched from somewhere through a starlight scope. I hoped I wasn’t. I’d never considered myself to be photogenic, but I was willing to bet that I would make a good target.

  Hank’s door opened a crack.

  “Yeah?”

  “You okay?”

  “My head is killin’ me. I seem to remember something about red and blue lights. And a jail. Was I in a drunk tank?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Damn. I gotta lay down.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Get some sleep. We’ll get up early and get some breakfast.”

  “G’night.”

  “‘Night.”

  Back inside our almost pitch black room, I lay down and snuggled in with Julie.

  And somewhere before sunrise I made my first real mistake. I went to sleep at the wrong time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Wake up, Bill.”

  It was Hank, shaking me awake.

  “What? What?”

  “Bill. She’s gone.”

  Who’s gone? That’s what I wanted to ask, but before I could even articulate the question, the answer came to me.

  “Julie,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  My eyes darted around the room. All my stuff was there, but what little she had of her own was gone with her.

  I got up on wobbly feet. Probably I looked like hell. I wasn’t starting to hurt yet. I was still in shock. Would be for some time. It would come though. This I knew.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “She didn’t bother to check out,” he said. “Ohhh, my head.”

  “She must have heard me.”

  “Heard you what?”

  “I got a call last night. It was Carpin. He wanted to trade the little girl for Julie. I told him no way. She must have been listening on the other side of the door. De
cided to take him up on it.”

  Hank nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That must be it. I already went downstairs and talked to the owner. I apologized for the gun-play. Gave him an extra hundred-dollar bill.”

  “And, Julie?”

  “Oh. She banged on his office door about five-thirty this morning. Used his phone. A half-hour later a light-blue Ford pickup picked her up.”

  “Jake. Freddie.”

  “Yeah,” Hank said. “Also, she left you a note. It’s both short and sweet.” He handed me the note, written on motel stationery.

  Bill, I gotta go. Me for Jessica is not a bad deal. Go home. You’d only get killed. -Julie.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Almost ten. Bill. It’s okay. I was asleep too. We can’t change it now.”

  I wanted to curse. It wouldn’t have done any good. Red hot needles of betrayal were beginning to poke at my gut, my heart.

  I could see that Hank wanted to ask me a lot of questions. He didn’t, though. Just the same, it was all right there on his face. I wasn’t anywhere near in the mood to talk, but then I guess he knew that.

  “Hank. I’ll tell you all you wanna know. Not now. We’ve got to get going.”

  I started putting my clothes on.

  “Alright,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Right.”

  I was warned.

  She had told me to run. Very fast.

  It didn’t help, though.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  My normal tendency is to go into a state of black despair when I lose someone whom I consider to be close. But I wasn’t depressed. I was angry, but who could I blame? I had known all along that something was going to happen, and that it would be something that I wouldn’t like.

  It was simple anger. Deep inside of me, beneath the caldera of my exterior, there was a magma chamber burning hot. If I got just the wrong jolt at just the wrong time, whoever got in my way might have gotten hurt.

  Once somebody did get hurt. It never made the papers or the seven o’clock news. I was never arrested, although technically, I could have been.

  When I was seventeen I met my first enemy in life. I was a junior in high school and this other kid-if you want to call age twenty “kiddish”-thought I was scrawny and even-tempered enough to be his whipping boy. His name was Jose Rios. He’d been held back more times than Carter had little liver pills. I never forgot him. The teachers tended to turn a blind eye when he’d shove some kid in the hallway and spill his books. Jose had one of those chilling laughs, the kind one could imagine a kid with a sick sense of humor might have who liked to torture small animals just to hear them squeal in terror and pain. Jose was like that in the head department. Twisted.

  Whenever he picked on anybody it was a lot like a cliche vaudeville act. First came the push. Second, books or furniture would spill, making a loud clatter. Third, heads would begin turning toward the source of the clamor. Fourth: silence. Last came Jose’s evil laugh. No drum roll. Just a perverted cacophonous titter turning into a belly-rolling laugh. Every time I saw it happen I got a little upset about it, sure, but the magma chamber hardly registered anything. There was more embarrassment than there was outright anger, and not enough heat and not nearly enough pressure to cause a blow-up.

  Not enough, that is, until Elden Williams ran into Jose Rios on a particularly bad day in May near the end of that same year.

  Every high school has an Elden Williams. Elden was a mildly retarded kid with an ever-present grin on his face. I had known him from the first grade forward, and while we had never actually been “friends”, I had learned to tolerate him a little better than most anybody else, including his teachers.

  Elden loved school buses. After his Special Ed classes he’d usually show me a large foldout manila page with his latest creation on it. Sometimes it was an overly large greenish yellow bus with just about every race and nationality represented through over-sized too-squarish windows. Other times it might be a front view showing a fat bus driver, or even a top view. For Elden, school buses were It!

  That Friday, when I looked up from the sidewalk where the fire ants were devouring the leavings of a thrown down sandwich in the bus yard and saw Jose ripping a large manila sheet in half and registered the tears streaming down harmless Elden’s face, the caldera of my whole self went pyroclastic.

  Jose Rios spent three days in the hospital. Maybe he had been milking it for sympathy. That could have been it. But just maybe he hadn’t wanted to return to school and have to face me. All I do know was that I discovered what I was capable of. I never saw him, but I heard reports-he had a broken nose, a number of contusions on his head where I had reportedly rammed it into a school bus, and a cracked clavicle.

  Volcanoes are blindly and unintelligently violent. If they were to have a viewpoint, I suspect it would be like that day in May when Jose set me off. All I could recall after hearing Jose Rios’ animal-torture laugh was whirling, blurring motion.

  As we moved off into the heat and brightness of the new day, I allowed myself to feel what I was feeling. And as I did, I calmed. Thankfully, Hank kept quiet.

  God bless ‘im.

  “Your supplies,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s go get ‘em.”

  We were out into the countryside. The highway had become little more than a series of bridges over North Texas creeks and lowlands. It reminded me a little of summer camp; those roads, and Hank and Dingo and Julie to keep me company, much the same as good friends of summers past. But Julie wasn’t with us.

  It was turning into a hot day.

  Hank guided us.

  Outside of Childress by about ten miles, Hank had me take a left down a gravel county road. We were exactly nowhere, I’d say. Hell, we could have been in the middle of remotest Africa, but for the presence of a few road signs.

  I thought of the dream I’d had about Africa and Julie, and shivered.

  We made another three miles down a narrow, gravel road; our only encounters, the occasional deer regarding us docilely like the interlopers we were.

  Hank directed me to turn left.

  We stopped and Hank climbed out and unhooked a barbed-wire gate, one of those kind that is nothing more than three strands of wire and a couple of posts. He dragged it off to the left, held it and motioned me through. I waited as he put the gate back and climbed back in.

  We followed narrow ruts through high weeds.

  “You sure you know where you’re going?” I asked him.

  “Sure as anything else about this trip,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  About a half-mile through nothing but weeds and cow pasture and there was a house ahead among a grove of oak trees. As we approached I could make out a large double-wide trailer house up on blocks and minus its skirting. There was a bass boat on a trailer parked up close to the front porch and a couple of pickup trucks parked in the yard.

  “This is it,” Hank said. “Stay here for a minute, Bill. And mind the dogs.”

  “Dogs?”

  Then I saw what he meant. I’d never seen so many dogs in one place. There were all kinds, from little terriers up to big tick hounds and every gradation in between, and they all came running up to the car, tails wagging and thumping against the Suburban. A big chow planted his paws up on my window, black tongue lolling and dripping drool. So far though, not one had so much as barked. I could hear a few nervous growls, though.

  Hank moved between the trucks amid an entourage of canines scurrying about his feet and hips. He petted the taller ones that he could reach without bending over and stepped up on a wide porch. The porch had bowed wooden railings that had seen too much rain and not enough sealant. Hank knocked on the side of the house.

  “Carpin,” I said to myself. “If you hurt her I’ll kill you.”

  The front door opened. It was dark inside but for the fluctuating blue light of a television screen hidden from
view.

  I waited all of five minutes. Hank finally emerged from the house, dogs in tow. I rolled down my window.

  “Okay,” he said. “I need your help, now.”

  “What are we loading? I’ve already forgotten.”

  “You ain’t forgot. You’ve got that woman on your brain and you can’t see or think of anything else. Come on. A little work will be good for you.”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  “Cooder is fresh out of C-4 and Prima.”

  “Oh. Yeah,” I said. “Nitrates?”

  “Yep. By the way. No smoking in the Suburban for awhile.”

  “Fine by me,” I said.

  Nitrates. That word called something to mind, but it slipped away. I looked up at Hank. Then I had it. The Oklahoma City bombing. A small truck filled with nitrates had taken out a whole multi-story building and all the people inside it. The first domestic terrorist bombing on American soil.

  “Hank. Nitrates? You sure about this?”

  He looked at me.

  “What’s your idea?” he asked. It was a serious question.

  I thought for a minute.

  “Never had one,” I told him.

  “Good. That’s what I’m here for anyway.”

  I looked up through the trees into a patch of blue sky. Far off on the horizon there was a line of dark blue. A storm of some kind. More than likely, if my luck hadn’t undergone a change, it was bearing down on us.

  I thought about nitrates.

  I’d seen up close the results of two explosions in my life. One was the one I had just experienced first-hand, blow-by-blow, a little over two days past. An old man had died in that one. It hadn’t been very pretty. I knew I’d be carrying those last few moments with Dock around with me for the rest of my life.

  My first explosion, however, had to do with a tractor-trailer rig that had wrecked and blown sky-high at the entrance to our country neighborhood when I was a kid of about fourteen years of age. A dynamite company had leased the pasture behind us and they stored gun powder in trailers all along the back forty. At first I had thought that one of the dynamite rigs out back had let go, but a glance out the window and a quick count ruled that out. I ran down the road that led into our dead-end neighborhood on a spring morning before the school bus was due and I saw the wreckage out on the highway. There were about ten thousand little steel rings in a circle about a hundred yards in radius, the “o-rings” that were supposed to keep the gunpowder hermetically sealed. Amazingly the driver had lived through it. I remembered wondering at the time if he would ever haul dynamite or gunpowder again. If it had been me, I knew I sure as hell wouldn’t.