Caddo Cold (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 7) Read online

  CADDO COLD

  A Bill Travis Mystery

  George Wier

  Copyright © 2012 by George Wier

  Published by

  Flagstone Books

  Caddo Cold—A Bill Travis Mystery

  1st Kindle Edition

  May 1, 2012

  Cover photograph copyright © 2009 by Raghavendra Thodime

  Courtesy of Big Stock Photography (bigstockphoto.com)

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes written in connection with reviews written specifically for a magazine or newspaper.

  The Bill Travis Mysteries

  (in chronological and publication order):

  The Last Call

  Capitol Offense

  Longnecks & Twisted Hearts

  The Devil To Pay

  Death On The Pedernales

  Slow Falling

  Caddo Cold

  and coming soon:

  Arrowmoon

  (First chapter at the end of this book)

  Short Stories by the Author

  (available on Amazon)

  Duckweed

  In The Radio

  The Eternal

  The Grab

  Five Tales – A Short Story Collection

  For further information about the author, visit:

  www.georgewier.com

  or

  www.billtravismysteries.com

  DEDICATION:

  This one is for those who wait―the fans. Your readership and encouragement is my balm. Thank you.

  CADDO COLD

  CHAPTER ONE

  When Holt Gatlin fell, he fell hard.

  He had been working on re-roofing the aged and defunct theater in Karnack, Texas, when a piece of slate came loose beneath his feet and sent him in a whirling plunge to the ground below.

  Holt was fortunate in that he didn’t break his neck. That was about all anybody could say about the incident: “Holt was lucky he didn’t break his neck.”

  This was first told me by Willett Mahoney, Holt’s carpentry foreman. I had been trying to reach Holt to tell him that he was two million dollars in the black after a stock split and a couple of fast trades on my part. Instead I got Willett, who answered the phone at Holt’s house. Willett told me the tale. It was the first time I’d ever heard him utter more than a singular grunt.

  Willett gave me the number for the hospital in Marshall, Texas, twenty-five miles away. When I called the hospital and asked for Holt’s room I got Pierce Gatlin, Holt’s nephew; a man I’d never met.

  When I asked how Holt was doing, I heard that line again, exact words, same inflection. On top of that I was told how Holt would have a long row to hoe, the colloquial way of saying that his recovery would be tough, at best. He had a broken arm and wrist, three cracked ribs and a pulverized femur.

  After I hung up with Pierce I just sat there at my desk for a bit and let the news settle in.

  If he pulled through Holt would almost certainly be retiring, for the second and final time.

  *****

  I first met Holt Gatlin the day after his sixty-fifth birthday. He came into my office on San Antonio Street near downtown Austin―no invite and no appointment. When he left three hours later I knew I had landed a potentially valuable client as well as made a new friend.

  Holt had retired from the paper factory near Huntsville, Texas and after thirty-five years was moving back home near Karnack, Texas, an insular East Texas town half surrounded by Caddo Lake, Texas’ only natural lake. I remembered from my Texas Almanac that all the rest of the lakes were man-made. Karnack’s smaller, companion town name was Uncertain, Texas. When the locals of the smaller berg nestled against the southern lake shore decided to incorporate in 1969 in order to obtain state licensing to sell liquor, the secretary at the meeting filled in the blank on the form for incorporation “Uncertain”, which actually meant “it’s late, we’re tired, that’s enough for now, we’ll decide later.” But once you fill in the blank on an official form, it becomes the way things are, so the town of a hundred and fifty souls became ‘Uncertain’ thereafter, and thereby hangs a tale. Uncertain is a few miles from Louisiana. Despite legend, this factor has nothing to do with its name.

  Before heading back to the town where he grew up, Holt made the trip to Austin on the advice on an acquaintance to see me about doing something with his retirement account. I was astonished at the figure on the statement he handed to me: two hundred and seventeen thousand dollars.

  I asked Holt how he had managed to salt that much away. To my knowledge, no factory ever paid that much in wages, even to a foreman, which was Holt’s position during most of those thirty-five years.

  Holt looked at me with his sober, teal-colored eyes and said: “Oh. You know. Here and there.”

  His expenses, he went on to explain, never amounted to much. He had roomed with an elderly lady on Avenue “O” in Huntsville for most of those years and she had never increased his rent. The last month he was there he paid thirty-five dollars; the same amount he had paid the day he walked through her front door in 1970. Also, he drove the same Ford pickup truck that he had bought when he was a sophomore in High School, so he never had to make car payments. Also, as a hobby, he whittled out complete chess sets.

  “Chess sets?” I had asked him.

  “Yep. The game.”

  He admitted to me that he had never learned how to play, nor had any interest in it whatsoever, but he had heard once that a fellow had paid a thousand dollars for an intricately-carved chess set. Holt studied up on it and took to whittling. He had a business card printed up and went around to all the antique stores within a fifty-mile radius during his weekends. He sold his first chess set for two hundred dollars in 1972. Since then he had produced over forty of them. The highest he’d ever been paid was ten thousand dollars sometime during the mid-1990s. He wrote “For Deposit Only” on the back of the check and dropped it in the night slot at his bank and forgot about it, just as he had done with every other check that resulted from his hobby.

  And over the course of the three years since he walked into my office, I had helped him turn his nest egg into an egg farm. That’s what I do, by the way. Turn nest eggs into egg farms. By way of saying that I work as a financial consultant and accountant.

  And now, in his golden years, Holt had taken a fall and had fallen damned hard. Which left me with a problem. I had control of his resources, but I had no provision for what to do if he were to die. I ruminated over this for a several days while putting in occasional calls to check up on him.

  Holt underwent extensive surgery on a cold Saturday morning in early December and came through it.

  I finally got him on the phone in person on Sunday night by calling his room at the hospital in Marshall directly.

  “Oh,” he said. “How are you, Bill?”

  “Me? I’m fine, Holt. The question is, how are you?”

  “I’ll live. Not sure if that’s best, but looks like I will. That’s not the important thing, though.”

  “What, Holt? What could be more important that you living and getting well?”

  He paused. I could hear his labored breathing.

  “Holt?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Good. You were about to tell me something.”

  “I know. I’ve been refusing the pain medication because I don’t like to be without my faculties, so I wasn’t―”

  “Nodding off,” I finished. “I understand.”

  “Yeah. I was thinkin’.”

  “Holt,”
I said. “Most of the time thinking is a waste of time. Spit it out, okay?”

  “Alright. I’ve got to tell somebody, and I can’t tell that nephew of mine. He ain’t here anyway, which is a good thing.”

  I clammed up and waited.

  “Bill, this ain’t easy for me to say. But if I know you, you’re not gonna say a word until I say it.”

  I breathed loudly to let him know I was still there.

  “There are bayous in this part of the country. Some places no one’s ever seen, I think. There’s a stretch of one that has a little island in it. It’s all bald cypress and Spanish moss and alligators back in there. But―” Holt coughed. I heard a low moan of pain.

  “Holt?” I could tell that he was hurting, and something awful, but there was about two-hundred-and-fifty miles between us, and, consequently, little I could do except wait.

  “Damn!” he said. “I’m. . . I’m here. Barely.”

  “What’s on the bayou on the island, Holt?”

  “Some people. Or what’s left of them.”

  “People,” I said. “What people?”

  “They’re just skeletons by now. I. . . I haven’t been back there in. . . it’s been some fifty years, now. But I go to sleep with them every night, Bill. Every. . . every night of my sorry life. I hear the screams, Bill. I hear the crunch of metal and tree limbs snapping and I hear them crying in pain in my head. I want it to stop, Bill. But it won’t ever stop. I’ve been hearing it every night of my life since that night. Since 1960. My God... why won’t it... stop?”

  He was crying. I don’t like it when grown men cry, and especially not when it’s a man I consider to be my friend.

  His sobs faded out. I heard the telephone receiver at his end clank against something metal.

  “Holt.” I said, raising my voice. “Holt!” I waited. I could hear a faint voice. Someone was there in the room with him.

  The receiver was jostled around again.

  “Who is this?” a gruff voice asked.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “You first, buddy. What are telling my patient?”

  “Take care of him, Doc,” I said. “You take real good care of that old man.”

  “Are you family? I thought I had met all of the family.”

  “Tell Holt that Bill is coming. Would you do that?”

  “Fine,” he said. I wasn’t sure I believed him. “Good bye.”

  The sharp click in my ear had a note of finality to it that I didn’t care for.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I added up three reasons to get in my car and drive east. The first, and most important, was that I had a friend who needed me. If nothing else, he needed somebody to listen to him. Second, I needed to get him to draft some kind of a will. Holt didn’t believe in lawyers. I’d gotten that through the many conversations I’d had with him over the years. I planned on stopping by a bookstore and picking up a Do-It-Yourself Will Kit. The third reason, however, was the most compelling of all: screams and moans of pain from people now fifty years dead and gone.

  I stopped by Penny’s desk―that’s my secretary―on my way out.

  “Going to see Mr. Gatlin?” she asked.

  “Have you been eavesdropping on my phone conversations?” I asked her.

  She hmphed. “No sir,” she said. “I don’t have to do that. You’re plenty loud enough for me to hear you through your door.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I’ll try to tone it down. Yeah, I thought I might run over there.”

  “It’s a couple hundred miles,” she said, and gave me a sheepish smile.

  “Don’t you worry about it,” I told her.

  “Sir,” she said. “I never worry about you.”

  I paused in mid-stride, turned toward her.

  “And just why is that?” I asked.

  “Somehow, Mr. Travis, you always seem to make it back home.”

  I turned back to the door without a word, and then Penny laughed out loud.

  I turned again.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s just...” she giggled. “You always have to buy a new pair of shoes when you get back. And honestly, sir... when are you going to get a new car?”

  “New car?” I asked.

  “They make them, you know. Every year. If I can afford one, I know you can.”

  “I pay you too much,” I said.

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “For just a secretary. The truth is when you’re gone on these... trips of yours, I have to do a lot of your work for you, and you know it. And that’s why you pay me as much as you do. For instance, the Lief Prescott account. I had to move his mutual funds really quick when I got the word―the word that was intended for you―off your fax that Fremont Financial was about to go into that board meeting. I saved him fifty thousand dollars because that’s how much he would have lost had I waited for you to tell me to do it, which you couldn’t because you weren’t here. And Fremont did file for Chapter Thirteen bankruptcy. But it was nothing you don’t tell me to do every day.”

  I sighed. “I know, Penny. That was when Hank and I were chasing after that Moe Keithley character. You helped with Julie and the kids during that, and you ran the office as well. I do rely on you, and sometimes you do have to make calls for me. You’re smart and I don’t pay you enough. Not really. When I get back we’ll have a talk. A real talk.”

  “Um... what about?”

  “About sponsoring you for some of the courses I had to take.”

  Penny crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair.

  “I’ll talk to Julie about this first,” she said, but there was a knowing smile on her face. Somehow I had the feeling that I was being set up. I’m not much on paranoia and I don’t generally hold with conspiracy theories, but I do know one sure thing: the women of this world stick together, and they are out to get us. And me? I’m surrounded by women.

  “You do that,” I said, and laughed. “How long have you been working for me and Nat?”

  “A long time,” she said. “Over six years.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I made it out the door with my wits intact.

  I had to laugh to myself. This was what I was born to do. To try and outwit the women in my life. One day all of us men will be working for women. And maybe that’s as it should be.

  *****

  I stepped out into the light December chill. A bit of a wind was blowing; the herald of the ghost of cold Christmases past.

  First, I went home.

  Julie was in the kitchen cooking dinner. It smelled good.

  “Where are you off to now?” she asked.

  “What makes you think I’m going somewhere?” I asked.

  “It’s that look,” she said. “It’s that ‘on-the-trail-of-something’ look that’s painted in bold letters on your forehead.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Are you sure that Penny hasn’t talked to you already?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Should she have?”

  “No,” I said. “Okay. Yeah, I suppose I’m heading for East Texas. And by East Texas, I mean deep East Texas. Bayou country.”

  “No shooting, Bill,” she said.

  “What?”

  “No shooting. Just plain old straight business, okay?”

  “There’s no reason that I can see for anybody to do any shooting.” Julie moved quickly between sink and stovetop and got the teakettle going. Somewhere along the way my adventurous wife had settled down into domestic bliss.

  I felt a tug on my pants cuff and looked down.

  A warm smile greeted me. It was Jennifer, our middle child.

  I reached down and picked her up and held her in the air at arms length.

  “YOU... are getting to be HEA-VY,” I said.

  “I know it, Daddy,” she said. “Mommy says the same thing. What’s heavy?”

  “Heavy is you. Heavy is a big sack of potatoes. Heavy is a ship that can’t help but sink.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  I put her dow
n and she ran off singing the Blues Clues song. There was a TV going somewhere blaring out the theme.

  “She’s getting big,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. I was the same way,” Julie said. “When are you leaving?”

  “Uh,” I looked at her, then at the sink piled high with dishes, then at the stove. “After dinner and after I help you wash the dishes and get the kids settled in.”

  “Good answer.”

  *****

  I was intending to get away by 9:30 p.m., but then I had to have The Talk with Jessica.

  Jessica is our oldest child, our adopted half-Samoan, half-Caucasian American girl, and a handful at that. She just had her seventeenth birthday and gave us constant reports as to her increased level of her maturity. So far as I was concerned, the jury was still out.

  It was the first day of Christmas Vacation from school, and Jessica had gotten it into her head that she was free as a bird until some undetermined future January date. What she had been digging for was carte blanche to get behind the wheel of Julie’s car and go anywhere she wanted to, at any time. Also, she had dropped subtle hints that she was responsible enough that I should buy her a car, at which point I normally did either of two things: ignored the comment or hit back with a definition of responsibility that markedly implied she should figure out a way to buy her own car. But that wasn’t the topic of The Talk this night. No, The Talk was about the two touchiest subjects of all: school and boys.

  Julie and I had decided late one night while whispering in bed that if I would have The Talk with Jessica―with whom Julie she seemed to have the roughest time―then she would take the other two when it came their turn. I had thought it was a fair deal at the time, but sometimes Julie has a way of putting one over on me.