Ghost of the Karankawa (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 10) Read online

  GHOST OF THE KARANKAWA

  A Bill Travis Mystery

  by

  George Wier

  Copyright © 2014 by George Wier

  Published by

  Flagstone Books

  Austin, Texas

  Ghost of the Karankawa—A Bill Travis Mystery

  First Ebook Edition

  November 2014

  Cover design by Elizabeth Mackey

  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.

  DEDICATION

  For Sallie, who always encourages me, this and all my work is humbly dedicated.

  PROLOGUE

  A stillness lay upon the land. Not a breeze, not a twitter of birds in the sparse thicket. No roosters crowing. Every rooster within ten miles had been eaten and their bones thrown to the dogs.

  William looked out over the field and listened to the silence. It had its own weight, its own solidity.

  He knew. Today was the day.

  Out there, just beyond rifle shot, spread around him in a three-hundred sixty degree circle were nearly five thousand Mexicans; the entire united army of General Cos and El Presidente Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

  Would there be tombstones for himself and his men, or would their bodies be heaped and burned, as was Santa Anna’s practice? Who could tell the future?

  There was no escape.

  The last little boy had been sent off nearly a week ago. Of those who remained there would not be a survivor. And there were married men and fathers among them. He felt the weight of it. These men would die for his own stubbornness.

  “Bill,” a voice behind him said. He recognized the raspy yet soothing voice of Crockett beside him. “Why’n’t you git some sleep?”

  “Because,” he said. “I cannot. All this is real. It is terribly real, you know.”

  “I know. I know. It ain’t your own hide you’re worried about, it’s the boys.”

  He turned to look at the dim shadow of Crockett, leaning against the stone parapet not three feet away. Crockett shrugged his shoulders.

  “What’s done is done, Bill Travis. It’s easier if you can accept that and get to the job at hand, which, right now, is to catch an hour of shut-eye so you can command when they come.”

  “Wish I had some tobacco,” Travis said. “That sure would be nice. I never was a man of vice, you know. But some tobacco. That sounds good right now. I doubt there’s any left in the fort.”

  “I know how you feel. A man needs a good vice. Or two. Or for that matter probably at least he needs three. One that only he himself knows about, another that he can share with his family and his friends, and still another that he can show to the whole world.”

  “My friend,” Travis said. “You’ve got a different sort of philosophy than I’ve ever heard.”

  Crockett’s silhouette held out something to him. He reached and grasped the object. It was a worn, chewed-leather pouch—something of Indian manufacture.

  “I lost my pipe,” Crockett said, “but it’s fine for chewing. Just put a plug of it in your jaw. It’ll put the starch in your drawers.”

  “Mighty fine,” Travis said. “Thank you, kindly, David.”

  He took the pouch, opened it and encountered moist, shredded tobacco leaves. He put a small wad of the stuff inside his jaw, closed the pouch and handed it back to Crockett and waited.

  “Sweet stuff,” he said.

  “Since I lost my pipe I decided to soak the tobacco in some molasses. Don’t reckon I’ll be needing it for smokin’ again,” he said, and looked out over the firefly glow of low campfires spread across the horizon like the stars above them.

  “No. I reckon not,” Travis said.

  There was a lump in his throat, and it wasn’t from the tobacco, which was beginning to burn in his jaw. A red knot of pain pulsed down his forehead. The pain of loss, of foreknowledge. Of failure.

  He was glad for the dark. Crockett wouldn’t see his tears.

  “I never told you,” Crockett began, “about the Karankawa.”

  “The Karankawa are all dead,” Travis said.

  “Maybe they are and maybe they’re not. This ain’t about a live one anyways.”

  “It’s about a dead one?” Travis spat a stream of tobacco onto the stone of the old Spanish church, what locals called The Alamo. His spit was beginning to flow, now. Also, he wished Crockett would leave him alone with his misery. Apparently, that wasn’t to be.

  “Yep. Dead as a doorknell,” Crockett said.

  Travis sighed. “Why don’t you tell me,” he said, knowing full well that he would regret saying it. The sun was two to three hours below the eastern horizon on this, the last day of his life, and a garrulous old Indian-fighter wanted to tell stories about dead cannibals. Perfect.

  “Down on the coast there was the Karankawa tribe. Some say they ate their enemies when they defeated and captured them, but it’s the Spaniards that tell that tale, and they were guilty of the same when they were shipwrecked and without food, so you can pretty much discount the cannibalism stories. The Karankawa’s neighbors were Tonkawa, Caddo Mound Builders, Kickapoo, Comanch, Apache, and down south there were Aztecs and other races that built pyramids and sacrificed people by pulling out their hearts while they were still beating. There are still Indians on this continent, and one day we’ll have a real fight on our hands, once we’re through fighting the Mexicans. Out west they’re still pretty thick. We keep shoving them that direction.”

  “Get on to the dead Karankawa, David,” Travis interjected. Time was becoming precious to him.

  “I’m gettin’—so, there was this leader of this Karankawa tribe. A great Chief. He had all the women he could stand and he’d defeated most of his enemies. The only worries he had was from hurrikens and sickness and whether or not there was enough food.

  “Along comes this ship full of white men and they weigh anchor in Matagorda Bay within sight of the front door of this chief’s grass hut.”

  “What was his name?”

  “The white men. I don’t know. Some Spaniards. Conquistadores.”

  “No,” Travis said, spitting again. “The Indian. What was his name?”

  “Probably something unpronounceable. Doesn’t matter.”

  “All right. If you say so.”

  “Where was I?” Crockett asked.

  “Conquistadors.”

  “Right. So these Spaniards come ashore in their longboats. They’ve got shiny armor and swords and they’ve guns and gunpowder and they promptly showed their power by making thunder and punching holes through the Chief’s warriors.

  “That was it. Here was an enemy the chief couldn’t defeat. You couldn’t shelter from it like you could from a storm. You couldn’t snipe at ‘em from behind trees because the Spaniards had range on ‘em. It was defeat.”

  Crockett had reached one of those moments. A pause with depth to it. You could drop the night into his pause and it would swallow it.

  Travis looked outward into the night. The campfires were burning low out there, even as he watched.

  Defeat. The end of an Age. The end of a dream. The Mexicans would come. He and his men would kill many of them, but it would be like trying to hold back the sea. It would be the end. But, maybe, just maybe it would be the beginning of something as well. Something new and strange. He suddenly felt this must be true, even as he listened to Crockett’s sonorous voice and the muted snores of one of the me
n twenty feet away.

  In that moment something awoke inside him—just a little flicker of something. He was listening to Crockett, sure, but he was also suddenly not there at all.

  William B. Travis hovered in the air. Down below him his body listened to Crockett and spat tobacco. He was above the bowl of the world—above the campfires and the sleeping men, many of whom would be dead within a few short hours and floating, freed from their bodies and above the fray, like himself at this moment.

  If he chose to, he could advance the scene below him forward a day—and there it was! A heap of burning bodies and a plume of smoke rising in the noonday sun. He advanced it again and a city sprang up about the old mission church and people walked sedately beneath the boughs of trees that had grown up in the new park the mission had become. Again he spun the vista and the horizon became filled with people and fast-moving objects and tall buildings.

  He was tugged downward. He looked down and could make out the faint shadows of two men standing and talking on a wooden platform behind a shell of stone wall. They were nothing more than ghosts in this strange place.

  One of the men was himself.

  He snapped back into his head so violently that he shuddered and almost fell.

  Crockett’s voice continued in its drifting, sonorous manner.

  “The chief detected that the Spanish were afraid of this God of the crossed-stick and he reckoned that they were afraid of anything they couldn’t either see or punch holes through with their thunder-sticks. The Spanish worshiped force but they were frightened witless at the prospect of the supernatural. So before the Chief was to be executed, he spoke. He told of how a great white god had visited him. A god that floated in the air and had a commanding voice like the storm, yet as soothing as spring water. And he said that the god told him that strangers would come in great baskets on the water. That they would shine like the sun and bring thunder from sticks. They would come into the land and be consumed one by one.

  “And the chief Spaniard asked how they were to be consumed.

  “And the Karankawa told him: ‘By their own greed will they fall. When their hearts are not pure and they take the lives of the red men in the name in their god, they will be consumed by the spirit.’

  “‘What spirit?’ The Spaniard asked.

  “‘The god did not say. But he said they would know by what spirit. It would be the spirit they resisted most.’

  “Pretty wise old fellow, that.” Crockett continued. “They spared his life right then and there. He died of sickness not long after, like most of the natives. Spaniards were never very big on bathing, you know. A holdover from a hatred of the Roman Empire. The Romans bathed every day, so if the Romans did it, you knew it had to be bad. The Spaniards spread disease among the Indians, and I think that’s what killed most of ‘em.”

  “I thought this was about a ghost,” Travis said. He was firmly back inside his head again, but still felt a little spinny.

  “It is. It is. Ain’t you been listenin’?” Crockett asked.

  “Yeah. What else is in that tobacco, besides molasses?” Travis asked.

  “A little bit of everything. Say. You all right?”

  “Yep. In fact I’m feeling some better. I think I’ll take that catnap now. But first, I’ve got a story for you.”

  “Well shoot. I’d like to hear it.”

  “One day, right here there will be a park. People will come and sit under great, spreading shade trees and watch colored fish swim in still ponds. A great city will spring up around us, here, greater than any city ever seen before on Earth, and men will travel without the benefit of horses or even their own legs.”

  Crockett was silent. Travis studied the silhouette, looking for some sign that he was getting what he was saying.

  “And one day my own descendant, my namesake, will come talk to me here, just as I am talking to you.”

  “Is that it? That the story?”

  “Yep. It is.”

  “You better stick to commanding and let me tell the stories, Colonel. Is that all right with you?” Crockett chuckled.

  “That’s fine, David. That’s just fine. Then here’s my command to you. You get yourself an hour of rest as well.”

  Both men spat together.

  “Yes sir,” Crockett said. “That I’ll do. Just as soon as I hear you snoring.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’m not much on things that go “bump” in the night. Sure, there are probably such things as ghosts and such, or at least there are enough people talking about the subject that there has to be something or else there wouldn’t be so much talk. But most of the ghosts I know are walking around in garden-variety human bodies looking for the remnants of their misplaced lives. Which brings me to Evanston Cooper.

  Cooper is no spirit-chaser. The man probably doesn’t even have a creed, other than money. So when he told me about his sister, Catherine, and about how he got sucked into her world of troubles, Cooper did what he always does best whenever he has a problem—he throws money at it. Sort of the way Congress does.

  “Bill,” he said from the chair opposite me, across half a mile of desktop—or at least I found myself wishing the distance was that—“I’ll pay you to go down there to Anahuac and talk to her. She’s all het up on the subject. She thinks this ghost is murdering people.”

  “What’s that you say?” I asked. And later wished the hell I hadn’t.

  *****

  Cathy Cooper had already married and divorced and remarried and divorced by the time Evanston came into my life, a client with far more money than any sense of enough. Her latest last name was Baha, a name resembling the beginning of a laugh—or a laugh cut short. Ms. Baha lived on the Texas Gulf Coast near the town of Anahuac, an insular berg far from civilization. Anahuac was like Austin in every respect except all of them. It had no newsstands, hemp shops, collision repair motorplexes, canoe rentals, or lobbyist’s offices. Also, it didn’t have my home or my wife and children. I was not hot on the idea of taking off into the blue, Evanston Cooper’s offer of cool cash notwithstanding. Thus far, though, he hadn’t given me a figure, and I’m not the kind of guy who charges for such services. Not that I would begin to entertain the notion of doing it anyway.

  “Why don’t you try Hank Sterling? He’s got an office here.” I said.

  “Sterling?”

  “An old friend. He doesn’t need the money, so he’ll probably ask twice what you’re willing to pay. What he does need is a way to use up his time. The guy is lousy with time on his hands.”

  “I don’t know him. I do know you, Bill.”

  I thought about it.

  I’d been through Anahuac before. There’s not much to the town there. In deep east Texas the towns have donut shops in place of hemp clothing stores, outboard motorboat stores for collision repair places, and the highway patrol in place of canoe rental boutiques and lobbyist’s offices. Also, they have cypress swamps, alligators, cottonmouth water moccasins, swarms of mosquitoes the size of helicopters, and a righteous indignant sneer for out-of-towners. Also, they talk slowly. Did I mention that I’m originally from that general quarter of the world? There’s a reason I live in Austin.

  “Okay,” Cooper said. “Let me tell you about the ghost killer.”

  “I’m all ears, sir.”

  Cooper laid it all out for me.

  It began with the shrieks in the night. You can’t spend much time in the country at night in East Texas without hearing a shriek, this I know. There are barn owls, bobcats, feral cats, pumas, and weird people trying to emulate all of them. But these shrieks began in town and emanated from the Chambers County Library.

  The first shriek was heard by a man named Purcell Lee. Never trust a man with a first name longer than his last one. It was about midnight when Lee heard it. He was walking along Bolivar Avenue, and just approaching the intersection with Cummings, smoking a cigarette and talking on his cell phone to an internet bimbo he’d met from Petaluma, California. His un
limited minutes meant an unlimited amount of time talking dirty to women who didn’t actually know him and were unaware of his true appearance. According to unnamed sources, Purcell Lee was an ugly man. Lee was bald because he wore a hat twenty-four seven, indoors and out. His acne scars had impact craters. He had false teeth, his bib overalls were two sizes too large for him and he lived in a six-by-fourteen foot trailer with dry-rotted tires and no clear title. Lee was currently running for county commissioner for his precinct. His one campaign donation of fifty bucks from the local American Legion Post was enough to keep his cell phone in operation. His lone fear was winning his first-ever run for office.

  Lee heard the screech from the library and then did what any rational, civic-minded red-blooded American man would do. He put his phone in his pocket, forgetting to turn it off mid-conversation with his lady-caller, and loped back in the direction of the Sheriff’s Office. Along the way he noted the smell—a heady, pungent odor that lent additional fear and a burst of speed to his footfalls, not that folks like Purcell Lee can run worth a damn in the first place.

  The Anahuac Sheriff’s Office is actually housed in the Chambers County Law Enforcement Building, a one-story brick affair across the street from the Chambers County Courthouse, an unremarkable building for a mostly unremarkable, if not historic, town. There Purcell Lee got the attention of Harley Feltheimer, who was working the night shift and manning the police radio.

  Anahuac is on the north side of Galveston Bay and mostly inaccessible to direct traffic unless the driver is looking for it—or lost. As such, its action-to-mind-numbing-boredom ratio is quite low. Feltheimer was asleep. Lee woke him up by shouting unintelligibly.

  A sheriff’s cruiser was dispatched. The on-call deputy had to be rousted out of his slumber—he was at home, in bed—and responded to the call by walking two blocks west. Lee waited, and when the angry deputy came in and reported nothing amiss at the library, Lee went home, which was where he was found the next day when one of his drinking buddies stopped by with a warm six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best beer. Lee was dead. Possibly a three thousand year-old mummy could be considered deader, but not by much.