Agent Cranford followed us back to the motel. Julie and I helped a snoring Hank out of the car and into his room. Dingo followed us in.
Hank needed a bath. I wasn’t his Momma, so I decided to wait and see if she showed up to bathe him. He was a friend, but I hadn’t signed up for that job yet.
“You two go get some breakfast,” Cranford said when I came out of Hank’s room. “I’ll stay here until you get back.”
“Uh. Thanks,” I said.
Julie waited until we were in the Suburban headed out of the parking lot before asking me: “Why do you trust those guys?”
“They sprung Hank out of jail.”
“Yeah, but what’s their angle?”
“I wish I knew.”
We had a late breakfast-that was more of a lunch than anything-at a Mexican Restaurant. The food was pretty good, but not as good as the Austin venues I was used to.
When we got back to the motel, Hank was still zonked.
Cranford and Bruce waved and drove away as soon as we unlocked our door.
“You’re right,” I said to Julie. “They’re pretty weird. Nice, but weird.”
Julie and I passed the rest of the day in each other’s company.
I kept expecting Hank to wake up. I kept expecting the phone to ring. I kept a watch out for light blue Ford F-150 pick-up trucks.
Night time.
We were back inside the hotel room, in the same bed. In the dark with her body pressed against mine, it was like we’d never left the room from the night before. The events of that day hadn’t even happened. We did things in the night that young people do in the back seats of their parents’ cars.
Afterwards, I went outside and smoked one of her cigarettes. At one time in my life I smoked only when I had a beer in my other hand, so this was new for me. Julie had been craving a cigarette for the last several days. She’d gotten some when we had stopped for lunch.Maybe I wouldn’t turn it into another bad habit. Like sleeping with my clients, for instance.
A white, late model Ford sedan pulled up next to the Suburban. A lone figure emerged under the bright orange-ish light.
Agent Cranford.
I waited for him.
I’d forgotten to give the Suburban a thorough going-over and remove the GPS bug that had been planted there.
The North Texas night was cooler than the previous one. The door behind me was open just a crack. Julie was in there in the dark, snoring softly.
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.