“Okay,” I said. “That’s enough. Time to shut up. I mean it.”
He tried to speak again.
I leaned forward, putting my ear close to his mouth.
“Bill,” he wheezed. “I was… supposed to remind you…”
I turned and looked at his eyes, up close.
Why did I feel like crying?
“What?”
“Bill, you did just fine.”
And that’s how I felt as I walked out into the early morning sunshine for what seemed like the first time, as if I had just been born with the rising of the sun.
Not perfect. Not apt.
Just fine.
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.”