Black Water Rising

“Well, I’m just saying, Cole might have said more than he should have or even more than he meant to. Two people get together in the dark, there’s no telling what might come out.”

“True,” Lonnie nods. “But her name’s not on any of the paper­ work, none of it I’ve seen. I talked to some of the High Pointers who moved out of Ainsley’s neighborhood, and all of the real estate papers these people got came out of a law firm in Dallas, everything signed by an Alexander Bakker.”

“What’s his deal?”

“He’s a former D.C. lobbyist, used to work at a firm that had Cole Oil as one of its biggest clients. But we’re talking ten, fifteen years ago. I’ve been chasing this story on my own for months now, and that’s as close as I can put Bakker to Cole Industries.”

“That’s pretty close.”

“Not close enough, not enough for my editor to take on the Cole brothers. They’re fucking hometown heroes. I mean, these people got schools named after ’em, for God’s sake. They built parks and arts centers and all that kind of crap. Not to men­ tion they employ, with all their satellites and subsidiaries, some­ thing like twenty percent of the workforce in the entire county. Nobody wants to take that shit on unless you’re talking about something real serious.”

“Price gouging isn’t serious?” Jay asks.

“Not unless you can prove it.”

“What about the oil coming up in Ainsley’s backyard?”

“Prove it’s theirs,” Lonnie says, setting her bottle down hard on the table. It lands somewhere south of Brownsville on the map. “Trust me, I been round and round on this one.”

The music in the restaurant changes. It’s something slow and bluesy now, a single woeful guitar and a woman’s words in Span­ ish that Jay doesn’t understand.

“You think Elise Linsey had any idea what she was getting herself into?”

Lonnie shrugs again. “Don’t matter no way. She’s in it.”

Jay looks out the front window of the restaurant. There are clouds moving in, blackening the sky. It’s going to storm again, he thinks. “He used her and then he tried to get rid of her.”

“You really think Thomas Cole tried to get this girl killed?” Lonnie asks softly, careful not to let the words drift past their table. They seem to both know that their whole conversation has been leading to this one question.

Jay shrugs.

What the hell does he know, really?

He turns his head toward the window again, watching the changing light in the sky, wondering how long before the clouds break beneath their own weight, how long before the storm hits. “I’ll tell you what, though,” he says, his eyes still pointed toward the window and the charcoal sky. “If you can put Dwight Sweeney and Thomas Cole together, I mean, find some connec­ tion between the two of them.” He turns to look at her. “There’s your story.”

Chapter 27

Rolly’s girl at the phone company can give them sixty days, going back to sometime in June, but any records beyond that are stored on the eleventh floor, she says, on a mainframe that she does not in any way have access to. By whatever romantic or pecuniary arrangement he and the girl have worked out between them, Rolly is able to get the phone records in hand by Thursday, the day Judge Vroland had set for the pretrial hearing in Elise Lin­ sey’s case. Rolly brings the printed pages by Jay’s office around lunchtime. He comes in smelling like a chili dog and drinking a Dr Pepper out of a paper bag. He takes an open seat across from Jay, lights a cigarette, and stretches out his long legs.

Jay flips through page after page of phone calls to and from Elise Linsey’s west side town house, marking the numbers that show up repeatedly, careful to note any calls to or from Wash­ ington, D.C., of which there are quite a few.

He asks Rolly how many of the phone numbers he was able to identify.

“It’s whatever the girl could give me,” Rolly says.

Jay starts with the D.C. calls—six to Elise’s place through June and early July, and two calls from her place to the same 202 number in late July. The most information the girl at the phone company could get, Rolly reports, is that the calls came from a phone line within a telecom network run by the U.S. govern­ ment. To get more specific about who or what office the 202 number belongs to was a phone call the girl was not willing to make without knowing why Rolly was asking in the first place.

Jay makes a note to turn the number over to Lon Philips.

The Houston calls are easier to identify.

Jay recognizes one of them on his own. He’s called Charlie Luckman’s downtown office enough to be able to recite the dig­ its in his sleep. According to the phone logs, Elise Linsey made her first call to Mr. Luckman’s office on August 3, the day the discovery of Dwight Sweeney’s body made the paper.

That she did not call a lawyer right away, on the night of the shooting, even, is not all that surprising to Jay. What is interest­ ing, though, is the fact of who she did call at 1:27 in the morning, early Sunday morning, August 2, not two full hours after the gunshots they heard on the boat.

The phone number, 713-247-4475, appears on nearly every page of the computer printout, showing up once, sometimes twice a day, for months. The correlating address, Rolly tells Jay, is a residence located at 1909 Willowick Road, not even a stone’s throw from the River Oaks Country Club. According to Rolly’s girl at the phone company, 247-4475 is one of two residential phone lines belonging to a Thomas P. Cole.

Jay thinks again of the night of the shooting:

Elise, bruised and nearly beaten, came within an inch of her life, twice. He pictures her in the backseat of that car, how she fought, shooting her way out of a bad situation. He remembers pulling her from the bayou, barely breathing, and dropping her off in front of a police station. Somehow, she had survived it all. And the first person she called was Thomas Cole. The very man Jay suspects of having orchestrated the hit on her life.

“My god,” he mumbles to himself. “She has no idea.”