Caddo Cold (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 7) Page 7

  “Okay.”

  Willett’s pontoon boat was no canoe, but the principle was the same. I tried timing my strokes with his and had to duck beneath a branch.

  At that moment we heard something that chilled our blood. It was a voice magnified through a handheld loudspeaker.

  “Mr. Mahoney. Mr. Travis. You are ordered to return to the crash site. If you do not, we will come get you. And we won’t be nice about it.”

  “Row faster, dad,” Jessica whispered, even though she didn’t have to. I could see the anxiety in her face.

  “You signed up for this,” I told her.

  We made it around another stand of trees in the water, though barely. The waterway opened up in front of us.

  “We’re almost to the lake,” Willett said. “Once we get out of this bayou, I’m never coming back, not in a million years.”

  “Never say ‘never’,” Jessica stated. She locked her arms around my torso from behind as I continued to row. She was either looking at the lake or her eyes were closed. It didn’t matter. Once we got out of there, there would be no coming back to the bayou for any of us.

  *****

  It was slow going, but over the next few minutes more distance and obstructions were put between us and them. The sound of the distant blades grew less.

  “I think we made a mistake, Bill,” Willett finally said when we were out of the bayou and on Caddo Lake. We swung into one of the main ditches and Willett abandoned his oar. I dropped mine as well.

  “I know,” I said. I turned around in the boat to meet his eyes. “They didn’t need the map because we led them to it. Which means that Holt is in some serious danger.”

  “If he ain’t already dead.”

  “I don’t think he’s dead,” I said. I don’t know why I said it, except that it felt right.

  “What makes you say that?” Jessica asked.

  “I just don’t see him dead, that’s all.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Willett replied.

  The sound of the distant helicopter blades grew louder, suddenly.

  We froze.

  “Sit tight,” Willett said. “They’ll never see us.”

  Not one of us dare move.

  The roar of the blades grew louder. They were coming right toward us.

  “There may be more than one tracer on this boat,” I said.

  Willett held up his hand and shook his head. It was the way a parent might motion a child for silence and calm patience.

  The helicopter moved towards us, then over us, and then finally past.

  We listened until the sound died slowly away.

  It’s somewhat unsettling to find yourself hearing something long after it’s gone. It took me perhaps a minute to realize the thrumming in my ears was my own heartbeat.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The lake narrowed into a long waterway. Willett had the motor going again at a leisurely pace, hopefully making us appear to be not overly hurried. Just some folks out for a ride on the lake. God knows we didn’t look the least like fishermen.

  “We’re back to Government Ditch,” Willett said.

  “Okay,” I said, glad to have the information. The uniform symmetry of the cypress-lined waterway spoke clearly of human design.

  Another boat passed slowly by, a flat-bottomed tourist craft. The people looked at us as interlopers, but a small child waved at me, and I returned the courtesy.

  “I think you can tell us now,” I said to Willett.

  “Tell you what?”

  Jessica turned her whole body towards him, getting his attention. “Tell us everything you haven’t told us yet,” she said. She didn’t sound too mean about it, simply very direct and to the point. I had to admire her pluck. Possibly some of me was rubbing off on her.

  “Ah,” Willett said, and then grew quiet.

  “And enough with the single syllables,” Jessica said.

  Willett laughed. “Alright, Miss,” he said. “I’ll lay it all on the table, but first let’s find a table to lay it on. Are you folks hungry? I’m starved and I’m tired of talking over the sound of this motor.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Where’s the nearest place to eat. And don’t say your house.”

  “Nah, not my place, unless you want to eat plastic explosives. We’re headed for the place right now. And there’s someone there you’ll want to talk to.”

  “Who could that be?” I asked.

  “He’s someone who may be able to help us. I’ll introduce you.”

  *****

  Twenty minutes later we put into a marina and Willett tied us off.

  I grabbed a wooden post and helped Jessica up onto the deck, then pulled myself up.

  A couple of kids with hot dogs and popcorn passed by, led by bored-looking parents.

  We followed Willett around to an entryway to the building. It stood out over the water on evenly-spaced broad pilings.

  “Who’s the guy you’re taking us to?” Jessica asked.

  “His name’s Dane,” Willett said. “Dane Fitzbrough. Don’t worry. He’s harmless.”

  Willett stepped through a door that had a glass window decorated with various licensing decals and a large ‘OPEN’ sign. The air that issued forth was cool and smelled of cooking food and stale beer.

  “A bar! Good,” I said, and followed.

  *****

  “Dane makes a killer chicken-fried steak,” Willett said as we entered the bar. Dane’s Place was not your standard local bar. While it had the obligatory brand-name beer signs in neon spread around the place and a makeshift bar constructed of bare wood and overlaid with coats of polyurethane such that it gleamed in the light, the smells wafting from the kitchen were of grilled steak and onions and deep fried foods. My eyes watered. I noted that Jessica began searching for a menu even before we sat down at a small table across the room. There were few patrons at the moment, besides ourselves, and they turned to look at us. Willett waved to a few of them.

  From where we took a seat I noted a collection of pennants from more than thirty different colleges along one wall. I quickly picked out half a dozen Texas schools by their colors and logo.

  The smell of food was overpowering. My stomach did a little flip-flop.

  A big fellow appeared wearing a red apron over a red-and-white checkered shirt came through a side door that led to the kitchen. He was about the proportions of Hoss Cartright of Bonanza fame with jet-black hair but for a little silver at the temples, and he wore tiny silver-rimmed glasses beneath dark, broad and furrowed eyebrows.

  “Dane!” Willett called to him.

  The fellow looked up in surprise.

  “Hey! Willett!”

  “Can I get a chicken-fried steaks with all the fixin’s?” Willett asked.

  “Sure. Give me a minute. Anything for you folks?” he asked Jessica and me.

  “The same here,” I said. I looked a Jessica.

  “Uh, biggest cheeseburger you’ve got. With jalapeños.”

  Dane smiled. “Mighty fine,” he said, and turned back toward the kitchen.

  “And when you bring ‘em out, be ready to sit down and talk,” Willett said.

  Dane shot Willett a quizzical look. “I don’t like the sound of that,” he said. “You never were much of a talker, Willett.”

  “Yeah. But this time I’ve got something to say.”

  “Well hell. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  *****

  Dane brought out three plates and three Budweiser beers and a soda on a large tray. He set it all down in front of us at our table near the rear of the place and took the seat across from me at Willett’s right elbow.

  “You folks eat,” he said. “Then I want to hear Willett talk. That itself will be worth the dinner.”

  Willett took a moment to introduce Jessica and me to Dane Fitzbrough. We shook hands briefly across the table, my hand disappearing in his much larger hand, then Willett and Jessica and I dug in.

  The food was hot and goo
d and the beer was ice cold and went down so fast that it made my vision blur.

  “You people were hungry,” Dane said when we were done. It was probably the fastest meal I’d ever eaten in my life. I felt stuffed.

  “Alright,” Willett said. “Dane, you remember Holt Gatlin?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I’m about to tell you everything you don’t know about him.”

  Dane’s jaw dropped half an inch. Willett had his full attention.

  *****

  Willett told the story, beginning with Holt and Molly Sue on the lake and something of what they had witnessed that night, through to Holt’s arrival back in town fifty years later, the stranger in town, Pierce Gatlin’s odd behavior, and the encounter with the helicopter we had just witnessed. When he was done, Willett sat there, unblinking.

  “If it wasn’t you telling me,” Dane began, “I wouldn’t believe it. Have you told Mr. Travis who I am?” Dane asked Willett, his eyes flicking back and forth between us.

  “Why don’t you tell him,” Willett said.

  “Call me Bill,” I said.

  “Fine. I’ll tell you myself and I’ll try to remember to call you ‘Bill’”

  Dane put his broad elbows on the table and folded his hands in front of him. He leaned forward and looked at the center of the table as if he were trying to bore a hole through it with his eyes, peering into the past.

  He began.

  *****

  “I came to Uncertain about six years back. I came here for a stated purpose, never accomplished that purpose, and sort of took a liking to the place. Well... I reckon that’s a lie. To tell the truth, I can’t see myself living anyplace else. I fell in love with Caddo Lake. Happens all the time, I understand, but it takes a certain kind of person to live in Uncertain.

  “None of that’s important.

  “I came here looking for UFOs. That’s right. Your face just did a funny little thing, Bill. Yours too, Jessica. Anybody I’ve ever told that to has done the same thing. A little bit of a ‘here goes a big fish story’ look. I understand it. It’s not very realistic to ordinary folks, but people like Willett and me, we ain’t all that ordinary. Neither, I suspect, are you.

  “I’ll grant you that you’ve probably heard it all. There are some people who claim to have been abducted out of their homes at night by strange beings who made them float through the air or put probes inside them. That kind of shit. Uh, pardon me, Miss. That’s something like what happened to me, but―

  “I suppose I’d better tell you.

  “I lived in Tupelo, Mississippi for most of my life. I worked for fifteen years as a barge pilot on the big river. Toward the end of that time I started having nightmares. Not regular, ordinary, scare the bejesus-outta-you nightmares; these things made me lose bladder control. A big fellow like me? Afraid of something? Not on your life. I’ve been in fights where I was outnumbered five-to-one and came out on top. But these here dreams... they were something I’d never experienced before. They were real, just as real as you’re sitting there looking at me.

  “What were those dreams?

  “Shapes, mostly. Men in weird suits. In the main one, I was riding along in the backseat of our old Chevrolet, my dad was at the wheel and my mom complaining about how my dad never paid enough attention to her, and he was there just nodding and sayin’ ‘uh-huh, uh-huh’, and I was trying to draw something on an Etch-O-Sketch I’d just gotten for my fifth birthday―that’s how I know how old I was―when the car slowed down. I looked up and my dad was being waved over. It was early in the morning, you see, and the sun was just coming up, and people in weird suits and helmets were trying to flag us down.

  “My dad tries to gun the motor to get past, but the engine just dies, you know.

  “He brakes and we stop and the whole damn car is surrounded. There’s all these men in these suits. I thought they were people from another world, like I’d seen at the movie theater in downtown Tupelo. Movies like It Came From Outer Space, or something. All that science-fiction stuff. But I was scared out of my wits.

  “And as I sat there, my momma and my daddy just went to sleep.

  “I did as well, but I could still see and hear. My body was out. Out like a light, you know, but I was awake and aware. My eyes were open and I couldn’t move a muscle. Couldn’t even blink.

  “Now this is all going on in my nightmare, around about 1985. I’m in a pilot cabin on a barge on the Mississippi River, you know, but it’s all too real.

  “And I had that same dream, night after night after night. And then I remembered something. Something my dad said a few days before he died at the hospital in Birmingham, Alabama.

  “He said: ‘Where I’m going those bastards can’t reach me. Those greasy bastards.’ Uh, pardon me again, Miss, but that’s what he said.

  “I didn’t understand it at the time. I thought he was talking out of his head, you know. My dad had Parkinson’s real bad. He shook all over and his head wasn’t right.

  “But back then, after waking up in the middle of the night for about a week on that barge and having to shower and change and put my clothes and bedding in the washer, I remembered my dad’s words.

  “‘Those greasy...’ you know.

  “Because that’s what those men were. Their clothes were slick. As if they’d just walked through a drive-through car wash during the wax cycle and the stuff never dried.

  “I can still feel their suits against my skin. . .

  “Sorry. It still makes me shake.

  “I put two and two together and I went to visit my mother. I had to walk away from my job―the company wasn’t going to let me take off, so I told them where they could put their job and took off anyway―but she refused to talk about it. She kept calling it ‘crazy talk’. Like maybe I was getting soft in the head like my dad. We had words between us that night. Hard words that I’ve since spent a great deal of time regretting.

  “I sort of went nuts after that for a few years. I started buying all the UFO magazines. Not the science-fiction stuff. I’m talking about the stuff where the people really believe they’d been abducted by aliens. Where they have pictures of cigar-shaped ships and interviews with former government and military officials. Crap like that. I went in for it whole-hog. Started making the circuit. Whenever there was a gathering of people, like a convention, I’d be there. I made the pilgrimage to Roswell, New Mexico in a travel trailer with a group of weird kids and an elderly couple.

  “I met a guy on the trip back at a party in Dallas. It was all ufologists―that’s what I called myself, a ‘ufologist’. He took me into a room and did a regression technique. I’m not really sure what it was, you know. It wasn’t exactly hypnotism. I’m following what he wants me to do and looking at my past, going backwards and forwards like it was a strip of film that I could wind and unwind and play and re-play.

  “And we came upon that morning when I was five. Except it wasn’t any dream. It was real. And all the while we were upstairs in this little house and this party was going on downstairs.

  “By the time I was done with it, I knew what it was, and I knew it had nothing to do with ‘UFOs’. I wasn’t sure what it had to do with, but I knew I was going to find out. When people ask me, I still tell them I came here after UFOs, just because what I really came back for was far worse.

  “During that little regression thing I remembered Caddo Lake. We’d been driving back home to Tupelo from my grandmother’s house. She lived in Conroe, Texas. My father had talked about stopping at Caddo Lake, but my mother complained about getting back before it got dark again, so we drove on. Only we didn’t just ‘drive on.’ We were delayed a day. A whole day missing from all our lives.

  “It was that day the men in yellow suits flagged us down and got ahold of us and did the things they did. So later in life, when I knew some of what had happened, I came back for the rest of it. For all the things I didn’t know.

  “I came here and started looking.

  �
��And somewhere along the way I stopped looking and began living again.

  “And that’s it.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “When did you two first meet?” Jessica asked. It was the most natural question in the world, and the way she said it she could have been asking of either Willett or Dane, or both of them at once. I was proud of her.

  The crowd had thinned down to just us in Dane’s little bar and restaurant.

  “I wouldn’t rightly call it a meeting,” Willett said.

  Dane and Willett turned to regard each other for a moment, and an unspoken communication passed between them.

  “Okay,” I said. “I think you’d better tell us.”

  “That day,” Willett said.

  “1960?” Jessica asked.

  “Yeah,” Dane said. He sighed loudly. “Willett was the kid lying next to me in the tent on the hospital bed with the rubber sheets. His eyes were open and he was staring at the ceiling. Like me he couldn’t move. But my head was tilted toward him and I could do nothing more than stare at him for hours.”

  “Caddo Cold,” Willett said. “They were trying to find it. They must have stuck us with needles a hundred times that day, drawing blood and looking at it under microscopes.”

  “The day you ran to the neighbor’s house?” I asked.

  Willett leaned forward. “They picked me up wandering along the road that misty morning. I was ready to talk to anybody. Like I said, I thought the whole world was dying.”

  The two men grew quiet.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Willett picked up his Budweiser can and drained the last drop.

  “Bill,” Willett said, “you said something about talking with Holt’s doctor. I’d like to know why.”

  I didn’t have to think long.