The Last Call

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Sheriff Thornton must have been having a hell of a time keeping the reporters back and away from the scene of all the devastation we had caused. When I arrived back there about one o’clock that day in the front passenger seat of Agents Bruce and Cranford’s car, I almost didn’t recognize the place. The narrow blacktop highway leading to the ranch was lined with news trucks, jeeps and ordinary gawkers, each attempting to gain entry or get a glimpse of what was going on.

It made sense. The explosion last night had lifted us all up off the ground. It was a wonder that any one of us had lived through it, except for one thing: Hank really had known exactly what he was doing.

As we rolled over the cattle-guard-the same cattle-guard where Hank and Dingo and I had stood in the pouring rain last night-I saw two Sheriff’s deputies escorting a dejected cameraman and a young reporter with a torn dress back off the property. She held a microphone that wouldn’t be seeing any action and a broken high-heel shoe. Also she wore a priceless expression.

“Interesting effects you cause,” Agent Cranford said from the back seat.

The comment didn’t merit a reply. We trundled on up the driveway and wound through the low hills and around back. I looked to the left. All the windows on that side of the house were shattered. Also, the house appeared to have shifted some on its foundation. I wondered if it would ever be habitable again. Not that it mattered. There was no one left to live there.

There was nothing left of the stables but scattered sticks of wood and strips of tin roofing. The whole place looked as though it had been hit by a tornado. Which it had. A tornado named Hank Sterling.

Men with black ATF jackets sifted through the wreckage. As we passed slowly by I saw that one fellow was helping another up out of the exposed hole in the ground where the south part of the stables had once stood. Carpin’s still operation-or what was left of it- had been exposed for the whole world to see.

I chuckled out loud.

Agent Bruce shot me a look, appeared to smile and frown at the same time.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Just that-I didn’t know Hank was going to do that. He must have been listening better than I was to Julie. He couldn’t have planted those nitrates better if he’d had a set of blueprints.”

“Uh huh,” Agent Bruce said. Why couldn’t I remember his first name? “By the way, I got a call from a friend of yours. A fellow named Kinsey.”

“Patrick,” I said. “Well. What did he want?”

“He wanted to know if you were okay. Also, he wanted to make sure that I knew that he knew all along where you were going and what you were doing. That’s true, right?”

“Pretty much,” I replied. I was pondering the significance of the question as I turned and looked back at Agent Cranford.

“It’s my idea, Bill,” he said.

The car pulled to a stop.

“What idea?”

“You and Hank were acting as citizens deputized in the field.”

It sunk in. There was going to be no backlash from all the hell we’d caused. No charges preferred or filed. No grand juries, no true bills, and no defense lawyers.

“Who do I have to kill?” I asked.

“Nobody,” Agent Cranford said. “Actually, I’ve been hoping that you might help bring somebody back to life. Or if you can’t, then let us know what happened to him.”

“McMurray,” I said.

“Right.”

I thought about it. About Hank lying there in the hospital. I thought about his new chance at life. About everything he’d told me-that night at the truck stop, a life and death struggle in the dark ending in gunshots. I thought about greed and about bottom-feeders moving around in the murky dark of a lake bed.

“You have the tape, don’t you?” I asked. “You know what McMurray was trying to do to him?”

“Yeah,” Agent Cranford said. “Right here,” he said. He held it up for me to see. The cassette tape had a dingy-brown label on it and Hank’s scribble across it: Creedence Vol. 2.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it. Everything I know.”

I turned to see Sheriff Thornton looking at me from ten feet away. He was leaning back against a Caterpillar backhoe with his arms crossed and his hat tipped up in front.

“But first,” I said. “Let’s go solve another mystery. A much older one.”

It took the backhoe ten minutes to clear out the entrance to the tornado shelter. When the job was done there was an eight foot pile of mud, clay, rock and manure a few yards away.

The door was composed of rust and concrete, and while there was a large padlock hanging from one fused-together mass of rusted iron, I knew it wouldn’t take much to break through.

“Let me see that sledge,” I said.

A sheriff’s deputy gave me the handle. I dropped down into the pit. The men above me crowded around.

I swung once, twice. On my second pass, the steel head connected with the padlock and the hasp, and both tore free and landed in the mud at my feet.

“Crowbar,” I called up.

One was handed to me after a moment.

I slid the business end between the concrete wall and the doorway and shoved.

Nothing.

“Some help down here,” I said.

One of the sheriff’s deputies, a young fellow in his twenties, dropped down into the hole next to me.

“Together,” I said.

We both shoved on three and then there was a loud creak and an eerie, hollow echo. The door came open an inch, two.

Up above someone wedged a two-by-four into the top of the doorway and shoved.

The door came open, pushing mud out of the way in a smooth arc at our feet.

I stepped into the cellar.

“Who’s the corpse?” the Deputy Sheriff next to me asked.

I stepped over and picked up the stacks of bills and stuffed them back into the satchel. Zipped it up.

“I didn’t know until yesterday,” I said.

Behind us, other men crowded around.

There was a note under a layer of dust on the card table, next to a skeletal hand.

The sheriff was right there beside me. Agent Cranford shoved his way up next to me.

“Go ahead,” I told Sheriff Thornton. “Read it. But before you do, take a look under that jacket. See if you don’t find a tin star.”

The sheriff lifted the jacket. There, pinned to the vest underneath, was a badge.

“What the hell?”

“The United States Government has been wondering what happened to this man for the last eighty years,” I said.

“That’s a fact,” Agent Cranford said.

“What’s his name?” the Sheriff asked.

“Jack Johannsen,” I said. “About eighty years ago this man was a United States Marshal for North Texas, and Oklahoma.”

The sheriff lifted the note from the table, blew dust from it.

“How the hell did he get here?” the sheriff asked.

“Carpin locked him in here. Archie’s grandfather.”

“The note says: ‘Tell my people, I died for someone that I thought was a friend.’ What does that mean?” Sheriff Thornton was looking at me.

“It refers to a betrayal. How familiar are you with your North Texas crime history, Sheriff?” I asked him.

“I know a fair amount,” he said. “But I’m always willing to learn more.” He crossed his arms.

“Okay,” I said. “Back in 1927 the Texas Rangers were sent into the Borger area to establish martial law and clean up the town.”

“I’ve heard about that, all my life,” Sheriff Thornton said.

“Tell him the rest of it, Bill,” Agent Cranford said.

“They shut down the mining camp at Signal Hill and arrested about fifty men. During those days the two most prosperous businesses in those parts was the Sheriff’s Office and the undertaker. It was rough; it was quite literally hell, and even the Sheriff’s Office was on the take, so Governor Moody sent in the Texas Rangers. When they did, a lot of men scattered. As you know, Sheriff, Archie Carpin owned this ranch. His grandfather was partners with a man named Whitey Walker. Walker and Carpin ran Signal Hill and Borger and practically the whole Panhandle of Texas. Walker fled the Rangers and enjoyed a crime spree down in Central Texas until he was killed during an attempted prison escape. But Carpin and his brother, they simply went home. It looks like they brought somebody home with them.”

We all turned to regard the corpse.

“Jack Johannsen was the U.S. Marshal sent into Signal Hill to investigate rumored prohibition violations. He never made it back to civilization.”

I reached into my shirt pocket and brought out the photo that Agent Cranford had given to me at the rest stop two nights ago.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a photo of three men, all sitting at a table enjoying a drink. The one in the middle is Whitey Walker. The one on the right is Matthew Carpin. The fellow on the left,” I said. “I dunno, but it looks a lot like Jack Johannsen. Him,” I pointed. The man in the photo and the crumbling corpse in the chair were wearing the very same clothing.

If I had a camera that could look backwards through time, what might I see? In my imagination the iris on my camera lens opens to reveal a row of Model-T Fords parked in front of a line of hitching rails near the entrance to a clapboard saloon. There is a red patina from clay dust covering everything and an ever-present fiery glow on the horizon, north and south. That glow is there whether it’s night or day. Right this minute it’s nighttime. The air here is a fume. I can hear shouts, catcalls, and the incidental loud pop of a firearm discharging somewhere the next block over. In essence it is Perdition. It is Mordor. It is 1926 in the North Texas oil patch.

Inside the saloon three men sit at a table that is hardly big enough for the elbows of one man. On the table is a bottle of whiskey and three shot glasses.

One of the men is used to carrying a badge, but he isn’t wearing one now. It’s the wrong thing to possess in this place. In the waistband of his slacks, however, is an old Navy pistol. When he stands the whole world can see it, but right this moment he is sitting, sipping his whiskey. The gun alone is enough to deter trouble in this place, unless of course someone knows his secret. If that turns out to be the case, then he will die the way Wild Bill Hickok died: a bullet to the brain from behind. He knows this. But right now his back is to a wall and he is among men who consider him to be a friend.

The whiskey bottle is nearly drained.

One of the regulars in the saloon wanders by, says: “Blackie, can I take youse guys’ picture wid my new camera?”

“Sure, Slick,” one of the men says. “Go right ahead.”

Smiles fade from three faces.

“Say ‘rotgut’.”

“Rotgut,” the three men say in unison. There is a flash of light.

“Thanks, fellahs.”

Slick waves and moves on.

The man in the middle-the one minus the badge-watches a couple of whores pass by through the window across the way from him, follows them and the sound of their laughter as they pass the front of the saloon.

When he turns back again, one of the two men beside him has a gun drawn and pointed at him. The other man across from him pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket and lays it on the table.

“You ever drink with a dead man before, Blackie?” the man with the gun asks to his friend sitting across from him.

“Nope. Have you, Matt?” The man with the note says. He begins to unfold the note.

“This is my first time, too,” Matt says.

“What you got to say about this, Jack?” Blackie asks.

Jack recognizes the note. Not the latest one, but an earlier note. Maybe the latest one got through.

Jack wipes his forehead with his sleeve. “How did you fellows know?” He asks.

“Your friend in Dallas,” Matt says. “He was our friend long before you ever came down the pike.”

“Goddamn you, Roger,” Jack says to the absent traitor. “May you rot in hell.”

“Oh,” Blackie says. “This is hell. Right here. And I have the feeling that our buddy Roger would get along here just fine.”

“You guys gonna kill me? Best get to it.”

“Not yet,” Matt says. “We’re going to ransom you first.”

And outside the window on the hard-packed and heavily rutted Main Street a dust-devil moves desultorily along, kicking up trash and sending it a hundred feet into a smoky, carbon-black sky.

“I think, Sheriff,” I said, “that at the last minute Dallas Sheriff Roger Bailey had a change of heart. Maybe he tried to get Johannsen out. Maybe all he did was send word to the governor. There’s a record of that, at least. Whatever he did, though, it was too little.”

“And too late. That’s what that means, then: ‘for someone that I thought was a friend.’”

I didn’t need to reply. We were in agreement.

“There’s more,” Agent Cranford said. He held out another piece of paper to me. I took it.

It was a telegram.

“Read it,” he said.

“GOVERNOR MOODY STOP THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT DOES NOT PAY RANSOM STOP GOOD LUCK GETTING THAT BOY OUT OF THERE STOP SIGNED HH.”

Cranford must have noticed the quizzical look on my face, even in the dim light.

“H.H. stands for Herbert Hoover. At least I’m pretty sure it does.”

The room began to feel even more close than it had when I first entered. I shuddered. Goose bumps stood up on my arm.

“What is it?” Sheriff Thornton asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Like hell. Tell me.”

“It’s just that… You ever been to one of those exhibits where they keep the three thousand year old mummies?”

“Naw. Can’t say as I have.”

“If you did, you’d know the feeling,” I said.

“Okay. Now I don’t want to know,” he laughed. It was a nervous laugh. “But you better go ahead and tell me.”

“It’s being trapped. Not for seventy years, or even a thousand. But for eternity.”

We were quiet for a bit. The men behind us shifted around. I heard quick whispers in the gloom.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s get out of this place. But Sheriff Thornton, I’ve got a suggestion for you. You don’t have to do it, but I think we’ll all sleep better.”

“What’s that?”

“After all the dust settles on this thing and all the reporters go home, I’d have your backhoe operator dig out this whole thing and expose it to the open sky.”

Sheriff Thornton laughed. It sounded better than before.

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I’ll do just that.”

I handed him the satchel of money.

“Sheriff, you should count this, then bag it and tag it. If the proper owner doesn’t claim this in thirty days, then it belongs to Miss Julie Simmons.”

The sheriff took the physician’s bag.

“How much is in here?” he asked me.

“Two million dollars, or thereabouts.”

“And Miss Simmons? Is she your-?”

“Client. Yes.”

“Just what is it you do for a living, Mr. Travis?” Sheriff Thornton asked. I’d been waiting for the question for some time.

“I’m an investment counselor,” I said. “For instance, say you have too much cash, or not enough and you want to-”