The Last Call

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I’d learned a long time ago that the only way to head off trouble was to face it head on. Doing anything else only tends to stack it up deeper further down the road. So, I was hoping that my little call to Pat Kinsey would be worth something later on. Also, I was hoping beyond hope that Julie would get something out of what I was doing. She’d been running for some time, it appeared, probably mostly from herself. Maybe I was just kidding myself, but what I was wishing for most of all was that she’d begin to face up to whatever she had done.

Me, I’m no saint. I’m basically lazy, and I’ve found it far simpler to get along in life by looking, confronting, and stopping the stone before it gets too much inertia going down that long hill. Sometimes, waiting too long before trying to stop it gets you nothing but flattened by it.

Julie sat next to me on the couch while I dialed Archie Carpin’s number.

“Do you want to talk to him first?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

I got a ring.

“Start talking,” the voice said. It was a masculine voice.

“If this is Archie, Julie wants to talk to you,” I said.

There was a long silence. I could almost hear the gears turning.

“I don’t care much for talk,” he said.

“I can understand that,” I said. “But the fact remains that talking is better than shooting.”

“Who says?”

“Marshal Dillon, for one. The word we’re looking for here is negotiation, I think.”

“Well,” he said. “Really, I ought to kiss her. She killed my number one competitor. Nobody else was brave enough to do that.”

“Are you talking about Mr. Neil? Your horse-racing competitor?”

“The one and only.”

It was my turn for silence. I looked at Julie. She was petting Dingo. Also, she was biting her lower lip.

“How did he die?” I asked.

“Somebody put a very large caliber bullet through his neck. Like to have cut his head off.”

“Well damn,” I said.

“That’s ancient history. What I want to know is where she put it.”

“I thought he died last week,” I said.

“Last week and a million years ago are about the same. Dead is dead. I repeat: so where did she put it?”

“Put what?” For a moment my question was sincere. I had forgotten about the money. Then I got the picture in my head: the close lightning and the fat drops of rain and the grating metal-on-metal sound of the vent cover opening and two million sliding down into oblivion.

“Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “I want that money.”

“Oh… That money. Well. That’s also why I’m calling. To open negotiations.”

“I won’t negotiate,” Carpin said.

“That’s what Julie said. But people can change, Archie,” I said.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about a deal,” I said.

I noticed Hank looking at me rather studiously. He nodded his head “no”.

“The money first, then we talk,” Carpin said.

“No way,” I said. I didn’t have to hesitate.

“I know she stashed it somewhere,” he said. “There’s a certain little girl who will attest she didn’t have it the last time she saw her.”

“What little girl?” I looked at Julie. Her eyes went wide as I watched.

“You don’t know?” Carpin asked. He laughed; a great hollow chuckle with about as much humor as a lynching party. “Hah! That figures. Tell Julie the kid is safe right here with me. Ain’t that right, little darlin’?” his voice had become distant. He was holding the mouthpiece away. I pressed the phone against my ear so hard that it hurt, but I couldn’t make out a response.

“Carpin,” I said quickly. “You’re related to the Signal Hill bunch, aren’t you?”

“Hell yeah I am. That was my granddaddy.”

“Not that I want to win friends and influence people or anything, but your granddaddy was low-life scum of the earth. I’m surprised you never changed your name in shame. A sorrier cutthroat never walked,” I said, and hung up.

“Who’s the kid?” I asked Julie, immediately upon hanging up.

“Oh God,” Julie said. “I put her on the bus. I watched the bus leave that night. He’s lying. He can’t have her.”

“Have who?” Hank asked.

“Jessica.”

Isn’t it interesting how when you think you’ve got things pretty well nailed down, they start jumping around again? For me that normally doesn’t happen. I don’t like it much.

The room was still, but things were jumping.

She was about to lose it. I could tell. Another minute, maybe ten seconds, and she’d lose it for sure.

I reached out to her, grabbed her arm just as she was pushing herself up from the couch. Her wrists were bony and delicate, so I made sure not to break them. I’ve got a pretty good grip.

“Julie,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “you can tell us all about Jessica, and that’s probably a lot more important than any amount of money right now, but I want to know one thing first.”

I could see the terror in her eyes, the indecision. She looked toward Hank, who sat stock still.

“What?” She said.

“I have to know. The guy you called… The guy who helped you… Ernest Neil? He’s dead. It happened a few days before you and I met. Carpin said that you killed him. Is there anything you need to tell me?”

“Bill… I-no! I didn’t kill him. I haven’t killed anybody, ever- except- my parents.”

“You were away,” I said, “in rehab. You weren’t home when they were murdered.”

She was either going to hit me or start crying. I wished she’d do one or the other and get it over. I watched the war of conflicting emotions play itself out in her features. “I know,” she said, finally. “But I should have been there.”

“Bill told me about that,” Hank said. “If you’d been there, you’d have been dead too.”

“Do you know how Ernest Neil died?” I asked her.

“Of course I know,” she said. Her face was flushed, as I’d seen it only a few nights before after I’d awakened her from the nightmare. “He died in my arms.”

“Are you ready, Hank?” I asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s saddle up,” I said.

The hammering rain had slackened down to a steady drizzle.

We all climbed back into Dock’s suburban.

“Which way are we headed?” Hank asked.

“North,” I said.

Julie took the front seat. Chevrolet makes Suburbans wide, and it seemed like a mile across to where she was sitting. That was okay. Just at the moment she wasn’t my number one pal.

Within ten minutes we were back on the Interstate, headed north and into the drab, gray curtain the world had become.

When we stopped at Hank’s place it was ostensibly for supplies, but when Hank caught on to my real why, he wasn’t having any of it.

“Goddammit, Bill. I’m going with you. I’m not staying here.”

“Thanks, Buddy,” I told him. “I appreciate everything, really, but you didn’t sign up for what we’re headed into. Hell, you’re about as bunged up as I am. You should take it easy for a few days. If I need you I’ll call.”

Hank stepped around me and dropped a case of water bottles into the back of the Suburban. There in the growing stack was also a couple of boxes of ammunition for the stack of rifles and shotguns in the rear cargo area.

Hank whistled to Dingo and made a motion with his arm. Dingo hopped up into the back, turned and regarded me and barked once.

“See,” Hank said. “Dingo agrees with me. We’re going.”

Up front Julie turned back my way and smiled.

I gave her my best withering frown. She laughed.

I was at first certain that Jessica was Julie’s daughter, only to find out differently. Julie had had a close friend named Lindsey, a high-dollar prostitute in Vegas. Lindsey had been murdered by one of her clients, a Silicon Valley millionaire turned playboy named Horace Farkner who spent nearly every weekend in Vegas when he should have been home with his wife and kids. Farkner had fallen into a fatal attraction for Julie’s friend back in the late 1990s and Julie was there for Jessica from the moment they both heard about Lindsey’s death. Apparently, when Lindsey demurred one time too many in the face of Farkner’s continuous pleas to run away with him, the man decided that if he couldn’t possess her then no one could. During a heated argument in which furniture was smashed and mirrors broken the man attempted to separate her head from her body with a six inch piece of shattered glass.

The five year-old half-Anglo, half-Samoan girl, had stayed with Julie from that night forward.

As we tore along the Interstate toward Dallas and Fort Worth, I did a little mental math. Jessica would be eleven years old now, or thereabouts. It was good information to plan with. Kids that age can think, and sometimes they can act.

On the outskirts of Fort Worth, I remembered something. I sent Julie and Hank into a Cracker Barrel restaurant just off the Interstate, found a pay phone for myself and started dialing.

I got Kathy on the first ring. When you live in a town as long as I had lived in Austin you get to know a lot of people. There might be a million people living in the city, but I’d found you couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone you knew. My friend Kathy was one of those people. I tended to bump into her around town and at the oddest of places, which in itself was passing strange, given Kathy’s profession. She was a librarian at the University of Texas Center for American History.

“Hello, Library.”

“Kathy, it’s Bill Travis.”

“Hi Bill Travis, what can I do for you today, since you’re not actively stalking me.”

“Hey,” I said. “Last time I looked up from my favorite bar stool you were coming in the door, so I wonder who has been stalking whom.”

“Touche. What’cha need, Bill?”

“A little research. Signal Hill. It was an oil boomtown up near Borger. The Texas Rangers shut the town down around 1927. There was a fellow named Carpin running half the town up there.”

“Carpin. Got it.”

“Good. I’d like to know when he died. Also, I’d like to know what happened after the town was shut down. Where all the money went. That sort of thing. I seem to remember something about a U.S. Marshal who went in there and never made it back out. Anything you can dig up would be helpful.”

“Okay, Bill. You gonna do me a favor some time?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Dinner.”

“Um. Okay. I’ll buy you dinner, Kathy. Should I wait a few days for the information?”

I could hear her flipping pages of some kind. Maybe she was reading about Indian incursions against the settlers or something.

“Nah,” she said. “Call me tomorrow morning.”

“Thanks, Kathy. You’re a peach.”

“I don’t like peaches. Can I be something else?”

“Okay, when I see you next you can pick your fruit.”

“Bye, Bill Travis.”

“Bye, Kathy.”

We hung up. I heard a bark and looked back toward the suburban. Dingo had her head out the driver’s window and her front paws on the steering wheel.

“Dingo,” I said. “You’re a clown.”