After The Fire (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 9)

by George Wier

  I knew something was wrong when I turned onto my street and saw my home around the gentle sweeping curve ahead.

  The house was pitch black. Not even the amber light from the doorbell was there to greet me.

  I had thought the whole affair with Sol’s goat and Eloise’s sniper shots and Perry Reilly’s kidnapping was done for the night. Nothing doing. While I have no idea what lurks in the hearts of men, I do know one thing: Evil never sleeps.

  No. Nothing was over for the night. Not by a long shot.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I stopped two houses down and turned my headlights off, but kept the engine running for a minute while I regarded my dark home.

  There should be a light in my study. I almost never turn my desk lamp off. Also, at the very least, there should be the muted light from my fish tank dancing on the windows. My fish tank is a fifty-gallon job with enough exotic fish that it should be a local attraction.

  No. The place was dark. The power was out.

  I had paid my bill only a week before. No. Something was definitely not right.

  I fished out my cell phone and thumbed it on. It chortled at me and the light on the panel dimmed and then went out. Just great. I had not charged it and the power had run down.

  I looked down at the police radio and thought about picking it up and making a call to dispatch, but I had no idea what channel to call out on or who would pick up on the other end. Also, I imagined that Jessica would catch hell from Patrick and the Sheriff for letting her father drive her county cruiser and for the unauthorized use of a police radio.

  No. I was alone.

  I felt on the seat beside me and found the .38.

  I looked at the house, and as I did, something arose inside me. Maybe it was anger. I don’t know. I was dog-tired. What they call ‘beat’. But I knew the moment I felt the cold weight of the gun in my hand that I was going inside, and no devil in hell was going to stop me.

  Out in the night, the walk two houses down to my own home felt...surreal.

  Julie must have taken Franklin with them out to Nat’s ranch. The dog was starting to get on in years, but he always barked his fool head off whenever visitors came calling.

  My home is a split-level affair on a high ridge in Westlake Hills west of Austin. Out back is a ten-mile strip of nature preserve, what city planners referred to as a ‘green belt’. The neighbors are quiet and sedate, and I almost never saw a cop or heard of a crime along my street. I suppose that there’s always a first time.

  I held the gun in my right hand pointed down at the pavement as I walked along. When I got to the edge of my property I stepped up onto the grass and behind the shadow from the street lamp cast by my neighbor’s live oak tree. There I waited. Took stock.

  The minutes ticked by.

  Nothing.

  I walked to the side of the house and then to the side fence. I lifted the latch carefully and pushed it slowly open. When was the last time I had used it? Possibly it had been weeks.

  Into the complete darkness back of the house, I very nearly tripped over Michelle’s tricycle, but I moved slowly enough that I was able to catch it and keep it from flipping over and making a racket. I moved it aside, and stood there, listening.

  More nothing, but for the distant chirping of crickets in the woods in the dark beyond.

  I came to the back corner of the house, peered around it and waited for my eyes to adjust. Somewhere close by me, within a few feet, was the now invisible electrical box. The city used to send out a meter-reader once a month to take a reading of it, but in this digital age it’s all done by computer.

  My eyes hadn’t adjusted at all. Everything was still pitch black but for the stars overhead through the trees.

  I stepped into the flower bed—a bed perpetually devoid of foliage—and felt along the wall with my left hand until I found the electrical box.

  The lid was off of it. The little lock tag had been cut and the thing had been opened.

  I shivered. Someone had cut the power deliberately. And maybe, just maybe, they were still around.

  My fingers fumbled over the contours of the open box until I found the switch. In daylight, the thing would have been a faded red, almost pink with age and wear. At the moment, it, like everything else around me, was the color of death.

  I stood there for a moment, considering. If I threw the switch, there was a chance that it would work and the power would come on. If that happened, the security light where I was standing would likely come on. Also, every item in the house that normally stayed on would switch back on—the microwave oven in the kitchen, the DVD players in the family room and whatever lights Jessica and I had left on, the fish tank upstairs, the desk lamp...everything. I would be announcing myself with broad, bold exclamation points to whomever had done this small but powerful bit of vandalism.

  I decided.

  I gave the switch a flip and dodged to my left, away from the house and behind the tree that I knew was five feet away, all the while expecting the report of gunfire, or the slash of a blunt weapon...or anything.

  The lights came on, and to make matters far worse, nothing else happened.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I waited until the security lamp went off. For three minutes I stood behind the oak tree in my back yard, peering around it at the back of the house, the yard, and the vicinity of the storage shed. There was no movement.

  When the twin bright bulbs beneath the eaves of the house winked out, I moved slowly away, keeping the tree between myself and the motion detector. It’s a funny thing about motion detectors—the devices measure not simply motion, but rates of motion over time. Try sneaking up on the supermarket automatic doors sometime. If you walk slowly enough—say, a minute to cover several a dozen feet—you can be well below the motion rate threshold set for detection of a person intending to walk inside, therefore the doors won’t open. It’s an interesting experiment. There in my backyard, I tried it with my meager home security system and found that it worked. The lights didn’t come on.

  I held up the .38 and moved in relative darkness. Through the garden doors on my back porch, I could see that the lights had come back on inside the house.

  I moved until I determined that I was twenty feet away from the detectors and then increased my pace. Making the porch without incident, I moved up them until I was standing by the glass. I peered inside.

  No movement. Nothing.

  I tested the sliding door. It was locked from within, and I didn’t have a key to it. No one did. When we came home, we always used the front door or the door from the garage. Now that the garage was Jessica’s bedroom, that way was now cut off. I would have to remedy that little defect in the near future.

  Franklin’s doggie door was at my feet, disguised as it was by a sheet of lexan that could have pass for frosted glass on cursory inspection. Likewise, the narrow sheet of glass above it was crossed with pieces of black plastic to make it look stylized.

  I bumped Franklin’s door and it moved on its upper hinges.

  I had a way inside, not the front door, of which I was suspicious. Then again, if someone was inside, they’d know I was home—that I had turned the electricity back on. It was either Franklin’s doorway, or a trip around front past the motion detector and the light.

  I made like Franklin.

  The way inside was narrow, and I had gained a few pounds over the years. So sue me. Approaching fifty years of age, a fellow begins to wear some of what he eats. It was a slow, noiseless, yet tight squeeze, and I didn’t loose any buttons, nor was I accosted entering my home. The whole while I held the .38 at the ready.

  Inside. I stood, listening. The gentle hum from the deep freeze was the only sound.

  I stepped up the three steps to the open doorway from the family room looked.

  Faint green flashes greeted me—the clock from the DVD system demanding someone set the time to something other than 12:00.

  I moved across the family room and to the kitchen.


  My senses were finely attuned, extending outward. If there was someone breathing somewhere on the ground floor, I believe I would have heard them unless they were on the opposite side of the house. I had been in dark houses before, with an intruder moving around not far away. I knew what it felt like. This situation wasn’t it. But still, there was...something. I knew not what.

  The kitchen revealed a whole heap of nothing. No dark intruders, no black pajama-clad ninjas, nothing but the suspicions of an aging investment counselor.

  The door was open to Jessica’s abode, and a dim light was on in there.

  I waited to the side of the door, nosed my head around to peer inside, my gun ready.

  Empty.

  Likewise the laundry room, the front door entryway, and the dining room.

  First level clear, I whispered to myself.

  The stairs beckoned.

  I was halfway up them, moving about as slowly as I had moved away from the backyard security light, when all the lights inside went off again, and I was plunged into complete blackness.

  *****

  I ran down the stairs in the dark, flew to the front door, opened it, shot outside and to the side and ran along the front of the house. I dodged around the corner of the house and to the gate as it opened.

  Whoever the dark figure was, I detected a quick movement, or rather an attempt to get out of the way, before my flying leap connected with him.

  Tiny explosions of light went off in my head as I connected with his stomach and I heard a distinct “OOF!” and then we were on the ground.

  I used the .38 like a club and hit him once where I thought his face was.

  He ceased moving.

  I stood, ducked around the corner and found the switch and flipped it and the lights came on.

  Back to the figure again, but I couldn’t make out his face in the darkness. I felt for his wrists, grabbed them, and pulled his dead weight into the light of the security lamp.

  It was Chuck Holland. His nose leaked blood but he breathed. I turned him on his side so he wouldn’t asphyxiate on his own blood.

  I set down on the ground with my back against the oak tree and waited. Every three minutes the security light went off, which was how I kept time. Each time it did I waived and arm up and down rapidly and it came back on.

  When he groaned loudly and his eyes popped open, he lay there and regarded me.

  “Hey there, Chuck,” I said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Chuck Holland sat on my family room sofa and nursed a swelling nose with a ice cubes dropped into a kitchen mitt. He sat, looking at me with sheepish eyes.

  “Where you been?” I asked him.

  “No bear,” he said, which I translated as nowhere.

  “You’ll have to tell me what nowhere is like sometime. It must be awfully nice. No responsibility. No compunction to call anyone, or to live up to any...uh, promises.”

  He looked away.

  I looked up at the clock on the wall—the only clock in the house that ran on its own internal batteries, and saw that it was getting close to five a.m.

  “Jessica will be home soon,” I said. “The least she could arrest you for is criminal trespassing.”

  “Ad boast?” he asked, meaning, at most?

  “That depends,” I said. “That depends on whether or not you hit Perry Reilly—a friend of mine whom I sent to check on you—on the back of the head, bound and gagged him and stuffed him into the backseat of your dad’s vintage car and locked him up pretty tight.”

  “Ah non’d doh bot your dalkin’ bout,” the translation being, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  “Have it your way,” I said.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Doan ander id.”—Don’t answer it.

  I picked up the gun beside me, stood and said, “Why don’t you wait right here.”

  The couch where Chuck sat was in direct line of sight from the front door. I’d be able to watch Chuck and answer the door at the same time. The way he sat there with his overly large frame gaining inertia as the early morning hours wore on, I didn’t think I’d have any further trouble with him for the remainder of the night.

  I flipped the porch light on, looked through the window. It was a woman, her back to me. Then she turned her back toward the door and I recognized her.

  It was Shawn Tannen.

  *****

  I looked past her and saw not a news van but a dark-colored sedan. At least it wasn’t Perry’s silver jaguar.

  I opened the door.

  “Bill, I need to talk to you,” she blurted out.

  I turned my head and noted Chuck in my peripheral vision, sitting where I had left him in the cone of light cast by the family room table lamp. I turned back to Shawn.

  “What about?” I asked.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Uh. Maybe,” I said. “But I’ve got company at the moment.”

  “This won’t take that long.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “All right,” I said, and opened the door fully.

  She noted Chuck Holland sitting there in profile to us and stopped. He still held the kitchen mitt to his face. Chuck’s head turned slowly.

  “Uh...you’wah Chawn Dannen,” he said.

  “That’s right,” she said, coming into the family room. “And who are you?”

  “This is Chuck Holland,” I said. “The fellow that I sent Perry looking for earlier...I don’t remember when that was.”

  “Yesterday,” she said and stood regarding him. “What happened to you, Mr. Holland?”

  “Stop,” I said. “Right now he sounds like a cartoon character. I’ll talk for him, up to a point. He was playing some very unfunny games and I cold-cocked him in the nose with the butt of this thirty-eight pistol. It was pitch black and I didn’t know who it was. Otherwise, I would have shot him. The nose isn’t broken, to my profound regret. He should be all right. At the moment, he bleats like a sheep.”

  “Ah,” she said. “What does this have to do with Bebe the dead goat and with Driesel getting shot?”

  “And Jessica getting shot,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah. And Jessica.”

  We stood there looking down at Chuck. He brought the kitchen mitt away from his nose and I saw that it was a lovely bluish purple. He looked from Shawn to me, and back again. He started to speak, but Shawn cut him off as only a reporter can.

  “I’ve been hearing a lot of stories,” she said. “The disease cluster map. Does this have to do with that?”

  “Ah doan doh baht chure dalkin’ bout.”

  “Of course you don’t,” I said. “The fellow that filled my flash drive with a load of nothing, allowed me to swear him to secrecy about everything—which was a broken oath, as I see it—then makes like the invisible man and disappears and then when someone goes looking for him, they get hit over the head, bound and gagged and stuffed into the back of said fellow’s father’s antique car in the garage below said fellow’s very own garage apartment. To add to the list, Mr. Reilly’s silver I’m-going-through-a-perpetual-midlife-crisis-mobile also made like the invisible man’s invisible car and has dropped off the map. Then when we go to have a look at the area for which my friend the conspiracy nut and evil genius pulls up a Centers for Disease Control disease cluster map, we get shot at by who we think is the former Eloise Gunderson—now Gallenkamp—and the reporter’s cameraman gets shot in the leg and Jessica gets plugged in the chest, except she was lucky to be wearing kevlar. Jessica shoots the would-be sniper out of a tree, then we find out she never fired a shot. But! A shot DID come from somewhere and somebody for sure fired it. So, no. You couldn’t possibly know anything, Chuck. Let me tell you something, my dear old friend, I am one tired son-of-a-bitch. I wonder if you have any idea why I’m tired.” For effect, my hand started to do a little shiver and shake at the end of my arm. In the hand was the .38.

  “Oh-day. Oh-day,” he said, which I translated as ‘Okay’. Ch
uck set the kitchen mitt aside.

  “See if you can talk normal enough not to have to repeat it,” I said.

  “Eloise. It was her idea.”

  “From the beginning?” I asked, and lowered the thirty-eight. “From before I even came over to your place?”

  “Yeth.”

  Something clicked into place for me—the one thread I had been overlooking out of all the threads running through this spider’s web. I had been looking for the one common denominator of everyone involved: Sol, Eloise, Chuck, Perry...everyone. I had been looking outside myself when I should have been looking in. I was the common denominator.

  “I’ll bet you first met Eloise in the waiting room of my office.”

  Chuck nodded.

  “And you laid some kind of elaborate plan. You wanted to trap me into something. You got Sol involved, somehow. How much does he know?”

  Chuck shook his head slowly. “Next to nothing,” he said, making an effort to enunciate correctly. “Ellie is playing him like a violin.”

  “This is about several things at once, isn’t it? It’s about Sol Gunderson’s bank account and the fact that Eloise was never satisfied with the settlement. She thinks she is justified in taking it all. That about right?”

  Chuck nodded again.

  “Is it also about an even bigger fish?” I asked.

  “Doan know what you mean,” Chuck said. He was getting used to talking regularly now.

  “Something about that creek being poisoned? Or was all of that just camouflage?”

  “I...doan know.”

  “Where is Sol Gunderson?” Shawn asked.

  Chuck slowly shook his head, as if he wasn’t going to talk. I started to raise the thirty-eight again, but Shawn put out her hand and pushed mine back down. “Let me,” she said.