The Bill Travis Mysteries

The Bill Travis Books
A Texas crime novel series
by George Wier

Completed Novels In The Series; Bill Travis Works In Progress; The Planned Bill Travis Mysteries; Links To Interesting Sites and Books; Books Currently Reading; Some Art By The Author of The Bill Travis Mysteries; A Few Short Stories; Other Fiction Books (Non-Bill Travis) I'm Currently Writing; Nonfiction Projects; A Short Story Fragment; Newcomers! Welcome!; News!; The Other Bill Travis; Notes From Central Texas; Real Texas Mysteries; Austin
proposed cover Completed Novels In The Series: The Last Call Capitol Offense Longnecks And Twisted Hearts The Devil To Pay Death On The Pedernales Caddo Cold Arrowmoon Bill Travis Works in Progress: After The Fire Slow Falling The Planned Bill Travis Mysteries (In Order), by George Wier The Last Call Capitol Offense Longnecks And Twisted Hearts The Devil To Pay Death On The Pedernales Slow Falling Caddo Cold Arrowmoon After The Fire Ghost Of The Karankawa Desperate Crimes Mexico Fever The Lone Star Express Trinity Trio Buffalo Bayou Blues Reveille In Red Bexar County Line The Long Goodnight Wolf Country (prequel) Manhunt (prequel) Borderline (prequel) Links to Interesting Sites and Books: Milton T. Burton's Blog Cinco Puntos Press Friday's Forgotten Books The Art of William B. Montgomery Spectrum Photography Duggan House Museum Texas Ranger Hall of Fame Suggested Books: Every Town Needs A Trail by Jen Ohlson The Borderland: A Novel of Texas by Edwin Shrake Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir Edited by Duane Swierczynski (I highly recommend Milton Burton's "Encore" and Bill Crider's "Cranked"! Every story is excellent!--gw) Sunset And Sawdust by Joe R. Lansdale Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale Over The Wall: The Men Behind The 1934 Death House Escape by Patrick M. McConal Warden by Jim Willett The Rogue's Game by Milton T. Burton Read a Review The Sweet And The Dead by Milton T. Burton Read a Review Books Currently Reading: A Mammoth Murder by Bill Crider The Portable Lansdale: Sanctified and Chicken Fried by Joe R. Lansdale Foreword by Bill Crider Fragment: A Short Story Fragment by George Wier I was holding a book when the change came. The book was entitled "Automobiles of the 1930s." In the next moment the title at the top of the facing page read "Ein historie dess Falkenswaagens". I nearly dropped it. That's when I knew that Denk was messing around with alternate time-lines again. finis A Few Short Stories by the author of The Bill Travis Mysteries: A Day In The Life The Bill Travis Journal Entries Duckweed Mystery/Action Adventure Nickel Cup World War II Veteran And The Stars Came Out In Purgatory Horror Seven-eights Rainmaker Science Fiction The Gold Pot Poker Fiction The Grid Fiction Letters To The Galaxy Science Fiction The Coat Man Fiction The Devil And Mr. Tom Bean Noir Fiction & Austin Other Fiction Books (non-Bill Travis) I'm Currently Writing: The God Wars The Footprinters Invasion: Earth Crossroads Fantastic Adventures Volume One: The Byway Gate Leaving The World Nonfiction Projects: A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY OF CRIME IN TEXAS FROM 1600-2000: The Crimes, Perpetrators, Lawmen, Judges, and Institutions of Crime and Criminal Justice In The Lone Star StateThroughout History; Together with Indices of Texas Crimes, Criminals, Law Officers and Statistics	One Man Photograph Copyright 2009 by George Wier - All Rights Reserved New Moon Over Austin Photograph Copyright by James A. Dumas - Spectrum Photography (Thanks, Jim! ) Newcomers! Welcome! There have been an increasing number of viewers of this site. All readers who would like to contact the author may do so by email at: texaswier@gmail.com. All comments are welcome, and I will try to respond to each. Additionally, invididual sample chapters of books are available just by asking. If you've gotten hooked into a story and desperately want to finish it, please drop me a line. And thanks for stopping by! News! Update: See this author's recent book review of The Lost Ones, by Ian Cameron, on Friday's Forgotten Books website. The Bill Travis books are currently under negotiation. As part of this I am re-drafting Death On The Pedernales. It will be longer and much better. The Last Call went through seven (count 'em, Seven) drafts. Why should this one be any different. The collaboration between this author and Milton T. Burton now has a tentative title: Long Fall From Heaven. The first few chapters are posted here. Enjoy! "Duckweed", a short story, is to be published in Akashic Book's Noir Series. This edition is entitled Lone Star Noir, edited by Bobby Byrd and John Byrd. The release is scheduled for Summer 2010. The first Bill Travis prequel, Wolf Country, is under way, the bulk of the story and action of which occurs when Bill was 19 years old. The piney woods of East Texas will never be quite the same again. Thanks go to the following individuals who have helped Bill Travis get along this far: Sallie Wier, Mary K. Selby, Danny Bresset, Lee Spiller, David Potter, Alex Potter, Jeff Fischer, Ray Fisher, Megan Creel, Deborah English, Milton Burton, David A. Williams and Rocky Molidor. Each of these folks are early readers, and their comments and advice has been invaluable. Since several of you folks have proofread them all, I suppose I'll have to learn to write much more quickly. -gw The Accounting Firm of Bierstone & Travis (possibly) The Other Bill Travis: Some guys don't know when to quit! And that's a good thing for the rest of us. Imagine what the world would be like if this guy had given up. I shudder to think. This is William Barret Travis, the defender of Alamo fame. A Texas icon, the original rabble-rouser. The kind of guy who would spit in a tryant's eye. And did! This guy, and 182 other men, held off Santa Ana and his Mexican Army for 13 days, giving General Sam Houston enough precious time to recruit and train an army. The lives of these men were bought dearly. The Bill Travis Mysteries bear no relation to this man in any form. The original Bill Travis does, however, deserve a great deal of our respect. Where would we be today without him? Notes From Central Texas: [Excerpt from "Author's Note" in The Devil To Pay]: "One of the chief problems any author has is with his characters: what they say and what they do. A very good friend of mine and early reader, Megan Creel--a fantastic author in her own right--once informed me as to the degree Bill Travis miffed her by what he said and did. And while she didn't put it in those exact words (Megan is far more plain-spoken than that) I thought I clearly understood what she was saying until I realized she was looking to me for some explanation--as if I had something to do with what Bill Travis said and did! I told her: "Yes, Megan, I feel exactly the same way," or words to that effect. All by way of saying that Bill Travis, his family, his friends, and even his antagonists, are prone to say and do just about anything, and what they say and do is, and I suppose, always will be beyond the scope of my control. And that is as it should be. When I began this series of books in about the Fall of 2004, I had every intention of writing no more and no less than what these characters told me to write. I didn't want any pattern, any script, any formula. What I wanted was something approximating the quality and texture of fine-grained sandpaper--I wanted "reality", with all its grit, its stains and splotches, its prevailing winds and currents, and its propensity to exceed the expected. A casual look at any great work will clearly show a disdain for formula. In a word I wanted "organic." But even that concept falls far short of what I wanted. What I really wanted was Bill as we find him here. I wanted him as alive as I was. I wanted him to feel the same air as me and my eventual readers felt. I wanted him to taste the same weak tea, to feel the same Monday evening tiredness and the self-same Friday night expectancy we all feel. And I wanted something else--that other element that keeps us all hanging on, even in the darkest hour: I wanted him to win in the end. I wasn't sure if he was going to (and I'm still not) but I sure as hell was pulling for him then when I typed out those first words: "All the hell started on a Monday..." REAL TEXAS MYSTERIES The Marfa Lights: In my book Capitol Offense, Bill has a little run-in with the Marfa Lights. What are they? Nobody knows. It's a bonafide Texas mystery. I've been there myself, witnessed them. They're little balls of light, bobbing up and down just after sunset, phasing through the colors of the spectrum and doing odd dances, disappearing and reappearing further on. They move faster than anything manmade (that we know of) can travel, and, according to local accounts, they've been doing it since before the invention of electricity. The Juniper Springs* Stage Coach Gold: This one is a real mystery for any of my readers who happen to like using Google Earth. There was a stage coach robbery a very long time ago. I've triangulated where the old accounts say the strong box was hidden in a cave with three skeletons, as discovered by a certain Mexican sheep-herder who bugged out to New Mexico and later to California because of his intense fear of ghosts (and who can blame him?). And guess what I found? I had to laugh when I saw this after hours of pouring over the old texts and working with Google Earth. As they say, "'X' marks the spot". If you don't believe that the above "X" is manmade, then tell me please why there is no other foliage like it in the entire area, why it is a perfect "X", and why it is 600' x 600', or roughly TWO football fields? I find it likely that someone wanted to be able to find it again. Anyone living near these coordinates and wanting to investigate, get permission before trespassing. I'm pretty sure this is where the gold and silver used to be. 31 degrees, 55 minutes 01.59 seconds North, 104 degrees, 47 minutes 37.60 seconds West. And while you're mountain climbing (or hill climbing--take your pick) you might as well get the panoramic view from atop El Capitan, just a stone's throw away. * page 181 if you click on this link El Capitan, Guadalupe Range, Texas Some Art by the Author of the Bill Travis Mysteries: Recent oil painting -gw "Tree" - gw "Fall" - gw "Feedstore" -gw "Out Back" a doodle on 3x5 note paper for Sallie. -gw This is Texas as it was. A Republic of Texas fiver Thank you for stopping by. Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoy my books. Sincerely, George Wier	[Excerpt from Slow Falling]: PROLOGUE The song goes: “She wants what she wants when she wants it. . .” sung in a slow drawl. The steel guitar comes in right on time between this line and the next, which is essentially the same line repeated many times, and then fades into the background where it belongs. You can hear the music outside the old country tavern next to the row of Harley-Davidson motorcycles which are all outfitted in chrome and leather and wearing a thin veil of dust. An orange-pink glow hop-scotches along silvery, polished mufflers like distant slow lightning, the reflection of a rapidly dwindling sun. Engines tick away road heat like old clocks winding inevitably downward, and for a moment the bikes become the mechanical counterparts of flesh and blood riding-beasts of old, though these hot-blooded animals drink in high octane and spit fire and their masters are the riders of dragons, if in no other place than their own minds. For now the masters are inside tanking up and telling tall tales out of school while their mounts outside bide the time. Inside, they are, to a man, doctors, lawyers, and sundry account executives, the starched white-collar usually worn on week days now hanging in dark closets, having been placed there by paid maid services or dutiful wives who dream of the men they could or should have married instead. The wide boards beneath their boot-shod feet are oak planks with even cracks between that could swallow a silver dollar, but only ever swallow grime and spilt beer. “I’m telling you, they went over that cliff,” a high- pitched, sand-papery voice intones. The speaker is white-haired, close-cropped, and he hasn’t shaved since Friday morning. He thumps the table. "Boom.” “More like tumble-tumble-tumble- tumble -–OOF!” another voice states, and laughs out loud. “It’s not funny,” White-hair says. “Those are some hair-pin turns up there, and the bottom is five. . . hundred feet down.” “You almost said ‘five-thousand.’” There is no reply to this quip. Instead White-hair tastes his beer with a thin, quick tongue. Winces. “Besides,” the other voice says, “I think it’s someone’s practical joke.” His voice is deep, commanding, yet bored. Also he is younger than White-hair by twenty-five years. “You go out and put up a cross at a particularly bad hair-pin turn way up in the hills, you tack a board to it and paint ‘Lee and Grace--Rest In Peace’ on it, and what do you get? I’ll tell you. Every guy on a bike heading into that turn slows way the hell down just to read it. It conjures an image, you know. I can almost see them myself. Grace has got her arms around Lee. She reaches down and gives his junk a good squeeze, he turns his head to smile back at her, then all of a sudden she’s screaming in his ear. He looks up but it’s too late. Through the guard-rail and down in slow motion like Thelma and Louise while Grace is screaming and flailing her arms about and Lee’s yelling ‘Mommmmaaaa’. It’s bullshit. That’s what I say.” “I think there’s a story there,” White-hair says. “It could make a good book, maybe.” “The sad story of Lee and Grace,” the other man says. “I thought you were a bankruptcy lawyer.” “I am,” White-hair says. There are a dozen peacockish men and a few rough-looking women in the long, undulating room, and toward the back brood a pair of coin-operated pool tables with tell-tale wear spots crying out for new felt. Blurry, color-faded balls click into one another while clouds of blue cigarette and cigar smoke slowly tumble about eight feet overhead like indoor weather. In essence, the place is it’s own time zone wrapped up in a time warp and shielded from the remainder of Earth by an IQ-dampening field of blaring, introverting, badly-written and badly-sung country music. You could call the place Honky-tonk Heaven or Nowheresville or Shit-kick Inn, take your pick, except for the fact that a long, hand-painted sign on the tin roof outside proclaims it as Sonny’s Place, whoever the hell Sonny is or was. The bartender’s name is Pud. “Hey Pud! Another pitcher here!” Pud slaps his meaty arm across the counter and flexes his fingers. “Ten bucks,” he says. “Come on, man. You know I’m good for it,” the voice says. “Ten bucks,” Pud repeats. Pud sweats. He sweats constantly. He sweats as much behind the bar as he does at home in the middle of the night while wondering if there exists a woman that is thin-waisted, thin-wristed, and as pretty enough for his tastes as she is--and of necessity must be--unmindful of his smell, the last of which he is too well aware. His doctor has labeled his malady as adrenal-fatigue, which sounds too much to him like an old-woman’s disease. He knows it will kill him one day, suddenly and without warning. Alexander Hamilton crosses Pud’s palm and cool, salving medicine is administered from a rusted spigot. The front door opens with nary a rustle. In walks a thin man. Not just thin, though, but gaunt. The word that comes to mind is ‘emaciated.’ His clothes are nearly falling off of his bony frame and are apparently held up by their heavy dirt content alone. The man is covered in dirt from head to foot. He could be a grave-robber, but upon closer inspection--if one can look for more than a fleeting glance at such a specimen without wincing away--the bets shift over toward the grave-robbee column. And, as is traditional when confronted by the supernatural, the weird, the fantastic, or the downright ugly, conversation in the room comes to a grinding, gear-stripping halt. “Falling,” the man croaks into the room. The music blares on. The incident of the appearance of the gaunt man is palpable, and the passage of time has no power over it. Pud takes three steps to his right and unplugs the juke box, whereupon a species of silence ensues. The silence is made even more thick by the distant, oscillating rattle of the deep freeze somewhere to the rear of the kitchen and by big trucks moving along the Interstate a mile away over the fields. Every head turns. Not a few faces register disgust. “Falling.” “Say, old-timer,” White-hair speaks up, his voice little more than a thin whistle. “You look like you could use a drink.” “Or a sandwich,” Pud says. “Or two,” the man who thinks road-side crosses are the first relative to a bad joke intones, then adds: “Or a bath.” White-hair titters and very nearly speaks, but the bulging eyes of the dirty man track toward him, fall upon him, devour the words before he can form them in his mind. “The Falling,” the man says, and then, heeding his own words, tumbles forward onto the oak floor. “Shit,” Pud says, and comes around the bar as chair legs scrape backwards around the room. They gather around him in a circle, the formerly mildly-inebriated now stone-sober. Pud begins to reach downward but his thick slab-of-lard hand pauses in mid-air. The figure stirs, coughs, and flecks of blood spray the floor. “Shit,” Pud intones again. It is his anchor-word. It is a word that ends all words. “Faw-ling,” the man says. A trickle of blood runs from his mouth, followed by a syrupy flood of it. It pools there on the board and runs into the wide crack. “That man,” a busty woman wearing a skin-tight tank top says, “is dead.” “What the hell do we do?” White-hair asks. “Good God,” Pud says. “I think maybe I better call Sonny.” CHAPTER ONE Things come in threes and its while reeling from the second that the third hits, as if the universe is saying “I told you so, even though you didn’t want to believe me”. At least that’s the way it always seems to happens to me. For instance my secretary, Penelope, had a fight with her live-in boyfriend, and I was at the police station with her and in the process of helping her get a restraining order placed on his skinny, ne’er-do-well ass, when I got a call from my wife telling me that she was having labor pains--and although that by no means is a bad thing, it’s still in the classification of a thing to be handled in one fashion or another. So, I was on my way to meet Julie at the hospital, and worried sick (not solely about Julie, no--I was concerned about the whole troop: Julie with the baby trying to come into the world, our youngest little girl no doubt strapped into the back seat of Julie’s Ford Expedition, while Jessica, our adopted daughter, the ink not yet fully dry on her Learner’s Driving Permit, was likely hunched over an unfamiliar steering wheel and grinning from ear to ear like the little demoness she was as she dodged through the self-same traffic) when I got a call from Dexter “Sonny” Raleigh, who proceeded to fill me in despite protest on the event of dirty old man suddenly dropping dead at his roadside tavern way out south of town, in another county entirely. “You won’t be held liable, Sonny,” I said. “Bye, Sonny.” “You’re sure?” he said before I could hang up. I whipped around too-slow interstate feeder-road traffic and punched the gas. I could almost hear my twenty-five year old Mercedes say “Hunh?” right before it kicked into a high whine and the squirrels underneath my hood started doing triple-time on their little habitrail wheels. “Certain, Sonny,” I said. “Look, I’ll call you later. I’m in the middle of something.” A horn blared as I dodged two lanes over and around an eighteen-wheeler, the driver having let loose with his air-horn. “Sounds like you’re in a demolition derby,” Sonny said. “Uh. Almost,” I admitted. “I gotta go, Sonny.” “Come by my place tonight, Bill,” he said. “May not be able to,” I said. “Julie’s in labor.” Sonny guffawed loudly. “Bill,” he said, when the laughter quieted and just as I squeaked through an intersection on a yellow light, “you should find out what causes that.” “Very funny, Sonny. Here, talk to Penny. I’m driving.” I tossed my cell phone in Penny’s general direction and her hands did a little juggling act with it for a moment. “Mr. Raleigh,” Penny said, all business-like, which is both upsettingly disarming and cute at the same time, “is it alright if Mr. Travis returns your call at some other time?” “You go, Penny,” I whispered. She punched my arm. “Ow,” I whispered, and made my right tire dance around a low curb. We were two blocks from the hospital. I could hear Sonny’s laughter and his deep voice. “Fine. Fine. Tell that sonuvabitch to call me tonight,” “Thank you, Mr. Raleigh,” Penny said and hung up. “Really, sir,” she said, “where do you get these people? “The same place. . .” I began, then let it go. It wouldn’t have been very nice. I had been about to tell her: ‘the same place you came from.’ “You were saying?” “Never mind! We’re here.” # There is something about being in the delivery room. No father should ever do it, despite what all of the nature-nurture holistic-approach people have to say about it. What those folks won’t tell you about is what it’s like to be in the same room with the woman you love as her insides are turned out for her, which is what it’s really like. They won’t mention the curtain of pain she radiates, nor the nature of the ill-formed words she is likely to sling your way during the afore-mentioned inside-out process. Take a loving bundle of pure love and intimacy and transform it into a writhing, spitting wildcat in a burlap sack, and you’ve pretty well got the whole thing pegged. That is, before and during. Fortunately afterwards, the concerned husband having survived the unholy encounter with his wits intact and enough blood in his head to assure he stays on his feet, it’s different all over again. Needless to say, I turned my head when they cut the cord. “Oh Bill,” Julie cooed. “She’s so precious.” “Yeah,” I swallowed, throat-lump approaching grapefruit proportions the moment after I turned to gaze upon the new Travis. Julie was holding her, swaddling clothes, the whole bit. “Her name?” an attentive nurse asked me, and placed a firm, balancing hand on my shoulder. I looked at Julie and she looked up at me and began crying. “Uh,” I said. “If it’s what we agreed on, then her full name is Michelle LeAnn Travis.” Julie nodded, both smiling and boohoo-ing at the same time. I leaned over and peered at the tiny, pinched face. Something happened then, something entirely unexpected. Possibly I had dreamt it. Michelle’s eyes popped open, she took a look at me, frowned, and then sprayed my face with throw-up. “Aww,” the nurses proclaimed in unison. The doctor laughed. “Michelle loves her daddy,” Julie said. The doctor patted my back and handed me a towel. “It’s a good, healthy sign,” he said, which actually rang true with me. Sometimes you have to walk through hell to get a little slice of heaven. Austin Austin, Texas, is the perfect place to begin an adventure. Austin is home. Once you've visited here, you'll never forget it, and you'll want to return again and again. Known around the world as the undisputed Live Music Capitol (especially during South-By- Southwest), it is so much more. The best food, the best plays, the most interesting--and colorful-- people, Austin has more to offer than any other city on Earth. Here's how it all began: This is Austin, Circa 1840. Notice the old Capitol Building on the hill above the town. Below is an 1873 map: And an 1885 map: And here is a photograph of Austin today! Needless to say, the place has grown! Down the hill (south) of the Capitol is the Colorado River, which snakes up through the rugged hills west of Austin, as shown here: Austin is this author's home. And you might find Bill Travis around here somewhere too. Treaty Oak