“Cooder is fresh out of C-4 and Prima.”
“Oh. Yeah,” I said. “Nitrates?”
“Yep. By the way. No smoking in the Suburban for awhile.”
“Fine by me,” I said.
Nitrates. That word called something to mind, but it slipped away. I looked up at Hank. Then I had it. The Oklahoma City bombing. A small truck filled with nitrates had taken out a whole multi-story building and all the people inside it. The first domestic terrorist bombing on American soil.
“Hank. Nitrates? You sure about this?”
He looked at me.
“What’s
I thought for a minute.
“Never had one,” I told him.
“Good. That’s what I’m here for anyway.”
I looked up through the trees into a patch of blue sky. Far off on the horizon there was a line of dark blue. A storm of some kind. More than likely, if my luck hadn’t undergone a change, it was bearing down on us.
I thought about nitrates.
I’d seen up close the results of two explosions in my life. One was the one I had just experienced first-hand, blow-by-blow, a little over two days past. An old man had died in that one. It hadn’t been very pretty. I knew I’d be carrying those last few moments with Dock around with me for the rest of my life.
My first explosion, however, had to do with a tractor-trailer rig that had wrecked and blown sky-high at the entrance to our country neighborhood when I was a kid of about fourteen years of age. A dynamite company had leased the pasture behind us and they stored gun powder in trailers all along the back forty. At first I had thought that one of the dynamite rigs out back had let go, but a glance out the window and a quick count ruled that out. I ran down the road that led into our dead-end neighborhood on a spring morning before the school bus was due and I saw the wreckage out on the highway. There were about ten thousand little steel rings in a circle about a hundred yards in radius, the “o-rings” that were supposed to keep the gunpowder hermetically sealed. Amazingly the driver had lived through it. I remembered wondering at the time if he would ever haul dynamite or gunpowder again. If it had been me, I knew I sure as hell wouldn’t.
Explosions. Storms. One or the other, or possibly both were coming, bearing down upon us with all the inevitability of fate.
“I’ve come this far,” I said, and climbed out into the herd of dogs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
We went back to downtown Childress.
Where were Agents Cranford and Bruce when we needed them?
We stopped for a bite at a Sonic Drive-In on the main drag through town.
Hank ordered for us while I made a phone call at the gas station pay phone next door.
“Bill! I’m glad you called! I didn’t know how to get hold of you.”
“What’s going on, Kathy?” I asked. She sounded pretty excited.
“I found something in the State Archives. A letter. It was in the restricted stuff, so you didn’t hear it from me.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“It was inside an envelope with the letterhead of the Dallas Sheriff’s Office and addressed to the Governor of Texas. I think it may be a hand-written note from that guy you told me to look up.”
“What guy?”
“The U.S. Marshal. Blackjack.”
“What’s the note say, Kathy?”
“Okay. Hold on.” She put the phone down. I listened to the surface of her library counter for a minute, then she was back. “Got it. Ready?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s dated the eighth of September, 1926. It reads: ‘Roger, Feels like this playing both ends against the middle is going to wind me up dead. There’s a lot of money in this town, but getting close to the shine is work. These people are scum of God’s Earth, but they are sly. If I don’t hit pay dirt in a week, I’m out of this God-forsaken hell-hole. If you don’t see me in ten days after receiving this, then I’m dead. Send cavalry anyway. Best, BJ.’ That’s it. What’s it mean, Bill?”
“It means that the cavalry got there too late, Kathy.”
“Why do you need to know all this stuff, Bill? And why was this restricted? This stuff happened over seventy years ago.”
“Because, darlin’,” I said. “Those were real people and they had real families, and some of those families, the sons and daughters-and most certainly the grandsons and granddaughters-are still around up here.”
“Oh,” she said. “They could be affected by this after seventy years?”
“Is the South still affected by the Civil War? Is Germany still affected by the Nazis?”
“Uh. Yeah. I see your point,” she said. “By the way, where are you calling from?”
“Childress, Texas. Kathy, this is about money, whiskey, horses and kidnapping. If I recall correctly, Roger Bailey was the Dallas Sheriff. He used to sell the bicycles that Clyde Barrow stole over in West Dallas. Sold them out of his pawn shop. This was when Clyde was still a kid, just getting his start in crime. Bailey knew what he was doing.”
“Wow. Nice guy. Was everybody on the take back then, or not?”
“Not everybody, Kathy, but sometimes the lines blurred.”
“Okay,” she said. “I still don’t understand all the secrecy.”
She had a point. I didn’t either. “Well,” I replied. “What if somebody started going around saying your grandfather made his fortune from illegal whiskey, robbery and murder-for-hire?”
“Hah! I think maybe he did, Bill.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. Still, you’re right. I wouldn’t like it.”
“Exactly. Also, I think there’s even more to it all than just hoodlumism.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Don’t know. I’ll tell you if I find out.”
“Uh,” she said. “On second thought don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
I looked up. Hank drew his hand across his throat and tapped on a non-existent watch.
“Gotta run, darlin’,” I told her. “I’ll see you later.”
“Um. Bill? Uh. I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Just spit it out.”
“Well, okay. I don’t want to go out with you.”
What? I thought. “I thought I was just buying you dinner. You know, friends?”
“Oh. Okay. Good. I’m glad you thought that. It makes it easier. I still can’t.”
“Alright,” I said. “Why?”
“‘Cause,” she said. “What you do is too dangerous. I don’t want any part of it.”
I paused two beats, let it sink in.
“Good,” I said. “I always knew you were a smart girl.”
We exchanged goodbyes and hung up.
“Well,” I said aloud to myself. “I’ll be damned.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
