Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  BEXAR COUNTY LINE

  A Bill Travis Mystery

  GEORGE WIER

  Copyright © 2020 by George Wier

  Published by

  Flagstone Books

  Austin, Texas

  Bexar County Line—A Bill Travis Mystery

  First Ebook Edition

  April 2020

  Cover design by Elizabeth Mackey

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes written in connection with reviews written specifically for a magazine or newspaper.

  The Bill Travis Mysteries

  (in chronological order):

  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 (forthcoming)

  The Young Bill Travis Mysteries

  The Incredible Sanskrit Karaoke Barbecue (forthcoming)

  DEDICATION

  For Sallie, always.

  CHAPTER ONE

  First of all, you can’t shoot someone without there being consequences. Even if the shooting was done in self-defense and you were the one doing the shooting, there are indeed ramifications. My name is Bill Travis, and yes, I shot somebody.

  Despite the fact that Dale Fluckinger had it coming—and you can place your bets as to whether or not this at least afforded me the opportunity to feel better about it while I spent the first half of the night at the local police station, and the second half down at the Texas Rangers barracks, even if it was strictly procedural—I had a bad taste in my mouth when I left the barracks in the pre-dawn hours, and it wasn’t my conscience bothering me about it, either.

  I’d recently had a run-in with a motorcycle gang that got in between two competing wineries in the Texas Wine Region, a narrow strip of south central Texas real estate running east and west along Highway 290 so as to make of the highway the meat in a grape sandwich. Each member of the motorcycle gang that had been directly involved in the incident between the aforementioned two wineries was still either in the hospital, behind bars, or, as John Wayne used to say, pushing up daisies. But a cryptic voicemail I had recently received from Ladd Ross, less than a month after the Wine Tour fiasco, had put the motorcycle gang back in the glare of my headlights. Literally.

  So why should I have anyone in my headlights, much less a biker and a criminal scumbag the likes of Dale Fluckinger, of the San Antonio, Texas, Fluckingers, the last of a line of knuckle-dragging neanderthals left over from before the last Ice Age, when wooly mammoths roamed the Earth? That would be the first question. And if you asked me, here would be my answer: because. Because the Dale Fluckingers of the world ultimately find themselves caught in the act under the blinding, withering LED headlight glare of a new midnight-blue 2020 Chevy Suburban recently purchased by a part-time Special Texas Ranger with nothing better to do than to make sure there no longer remained on the face of the Earth any trace of the motorcycle gang who nearly killed his wife and all the other passengers of the Wine Tour. That’s why.

  The incident with Fluckinger went down at 11:03 p.m. on a Friday night on the outskirts of Shertz, just across the Bexar County line. Bexar County, of course, encompasses all of San Antonio and then some—half a dozen towns and townships that are little more than urban sprawl and bedroom communities for the all-devouring metropolis at its beating heart. That heart may thump ever-so-slowly, but let me tell you, it never misses a beat, which is why I spent the better part of the night there attempting to explain everything. But like most things, my explanations seldom wash, either with the powers-that-be, or the more important powers-that-be: my family.

  “I understand everything you just told me, Bill,” Ranger Captain Bryant Biggs stated. “I understand that he wouldn’t comply. I understand that there was a witness who corroborates your story. Yes, you had to shoot him. What I don’t get is why you were there in the first place.”

  So I had to start all over, which meant that I had to explain to Captain Biggs the events of the month previous, omitting of course certain fantastic portions of it.

  After I was done, Biggs held up his hand, palm forward, looked at me with those round, sober, unblinking brown eyes of his and said, “Well all right, Bill. I get what you’re saying. There were two wineries. The bikers got involved. There was this conspiracy. You solved two murders. You shot a man.”

  “Captain Biggs, you’re speaking in four words.”

  “What’s that you say?”

  “Every sentence you say has four words.”

  He frowned.

  “I’m just saying. There’s not much alteration. In your speech pattern. It’s sort of hypnotic. Unless you’re doing it by design. Hell, you’ve got me doing it.”

  “I don’t do that,” he said.

  “You just did.”

  “Oh, guess I did.”

  “You’re still doing it, sir,” I said. “I’m sorry. I tend to say what’s on my mind.”

  “Nothing wrong with...saying what’s on your mind.”

  “Thank you, sir. As you were saying?”

  “Okay, so you shot a fellow. Have you taken some time off? Spoken with a counselor or anything?”

  “My wife is my counselor. And my kids.”

  “No thoughts of suicide?” he asked me.

  I laughed. “You’re doing the four-word thing again, sir. But no. And not just ‘no’ but ‘hell no.’”

  “Just asking. So let’s go back over all of this again.”

  “I submitted my report.”

  Captain Biggs tapped the report beside him on his desk. “Yeah. You did. It’s right here. What I’m trying to understand, Special Ranger Travis, is exactly how—and why—you were in the situation you were in that brought you to have to shoot Dale Fluckinger.”

  I sighed. “All right, sir. You win. I’ll start over.”

  Biggs leaned back in his chair, put his Lucchese boots up on his paper-strewn desk and tilted his Resistol hat back by jabbing his index finger upwards. “I’m all ears.”

  At that moment, for some reason, I noticed the overtly large size of Captain Bigg’s ears, but I didn’t say anything.

  I could almost feel all my gears grinding to a halt. Once everything was dead and stopped in that little menagerie I call a head, I started all over from scratch.

  When it came down to it, Captain Biggs finally accepted my real and underlying reason, but he had to actually hear me say it, first.

  Here’s what I told him.

  *****

  As I turned onto the street in the ramshackle neighborhood just south of Shertz, Texas, that the National Crime Information Computer gave as Dale Fluckinger’s address, I noticed movement three houses down. A couple of figures were struggling in a yard, bathed in light by both the outside lights from the shotgun house and from the street lamp high above.

  I floored my vehicle for about three seconds, then tromped on my brake and came to a stop on the curb.

  Someone was beating up someone else, and it was decidedly a one-sided affair. The only one with fists blurring was the man on top, a long-haired muscle-bound cretin in a black, sleeveless tee-shirt and dirty faded blue jeans.

  I climbed out in a hurry. “Hey! Stop it!”

  The guy on top either didn’t hear me or didn’t care. If the beating continued much longer, the bloody pulp of a man on the receiving end would become a lifeless corpse.

  I reached into my shoulder holster—the latest present given to me by my daughter, Jessica, who was turning out to be not only one of the best law enforcement officers I’d ever known, but also a crack shot—and removed my .357 Smith & Wesson magnum. I also had a speed-loader filled with .38s on my belt, but that was for the unlikely instance where I found myself having to empty the revolver. .357 rounds are almost as bad as .44 rounds. They can leave a real hole in a person.

  I cocked the sidearm.

  The hand in the air paused.

  “That’s better.”

  The cretin stood up. In the light of the street lamp I saw that this was Dale Fluckinger. He was a few years older than his last police photo, which also showed him as having short, buzz-cut hair, but his size, build, and the rough cut of his jib was enough. This was the fellow who was gunning for me and possibly my family.

  He came toward me. There was the clear snik sound of a switchblade, and the street lamp flashed upon the weapon that seemed to magically appear in his hand.

  “Drop it, Dale,” I said.

  He kept coming.

  “You’re about to prove you’re as stupid as your rap sheet indicates.”

  Another three steps. He was almost in range to kick the gun out of my hand. In another two seconds he would be close enough to stab me.

  I fired.

  There is a certain satisfying feeling that comes with a firearm bucking in one’s hand. It’s a feeling that is several hundred years in the making, encompassing the battles of the musketeers of the French kings, Napoleon and his bloody wars, the American Revolution, the Civil War and all the wars since, but its most proper placement as far as texture of feeling is concerned must reside in the American West. That is to say that while I don’t relish shooting people, I do love shooting.

  Dale Fluckinger spun around almost twice and crumpled onto the grass. I had shot him through his left shoulder, about four inches to the left and above his heart, which is, technically speaking, a miss.

  “Shit,” I said.

  *****

  “So what is it you’re not telling me?” Captain Biggs asked.

  I could’ve hit him. “Sir, the only real pertinent matter that I left out of the whole affair when I told you everything previously, was about the text messages I received from Sheriff Ross.”

  “Well why didn’t you say so? I think you’d better show them to me.”

  And so I did.

  The text message from Ladd Ross to me read:

  Bill, Chet Herndon was found beaten to a pulp last night in Trantor’s Crossing. Before he died in the hospital of internal bleeding, he gave me a couple of names from what’s left of the original motorcycle gang who chased you: Corey Pleasant and Dale Fluckinger. NCIC comes back with a long rap sheet for both. Not nice guys.

  My reply to Ladd, of course, was a question:

  What did they want to know?

  To which Ladd replied with the answer:

  All about you, and your family.

  And that, of course, was the real reason.

  Captain Biggs handed my phone back to me. “You could have saved a lot of time by showing me that to begin with. It’s your family, isn’t it? The real reason?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “But that’s not why you shot him, right?”

  “I shot him because he wouldn’t drop the knife.”

  “Well,” Captain Biggs took his feet off of his desk and sat forward again, “that’s good enough for me. Let’s you and me call the hospital and see what’s going on with Mr. Fluckinger, shall we?”

  I nodded. “Fine, sir.”

  Biggs called the hospital. After a mere handful of one, two and four-word questions, he seemed satisfied, hung up his phone and once more regarded me with those oh-so-sober, blinkless eyes of his. “The bullet has been taken out and they’ve patched him up. They’re moving him to the Bexar County Jail right now. He’ll be in there for a few days, likely in the dispensary, until he heals up enough to put him in the general population. He’ll have to be charged with something, though. Fortunately, we’ve got until Monday to do it, unless of course there’s a magistrate who can see him before then. I don’t mind telling you that there’s a good chance, though, that a Grand Jury will no-bill him for any charge.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “I won’t go into the politics of the thing. No sir. But, even before that, the real hurdle will be getting it past the District Attorney. Again, politics.”

  “Crap. What about the fellah Fluckinger was beating to death?”

  “From what I can tell he’s another biker from a rival gang. No real rap sheet, though. The fellow’s name is Brinson Meyer.”

  “He didn’t look the biker type,” I said. “I just thought he was someone who had gotten in Fluckinger’s way.”

  “Meyer clammed up about it when the Shertz cop questioned him in the Emergency Room. Apart from multiple lacerations, a lot of bruises, and a cracked rib, which was thoroughly taped, Meyer was treated and released.”

  “He didn’t want to press charges against Fluckinger.”

  “Not even.”

  “Crap again.”

  “You said it. Tell you what, why don’t you go home, Bill. It’s been a long night and your wife is probably worried about you. You should call her as soon as you walk out of here and then head back home to Austin.”

  “I think I’ll take you up on that, sir.”

  I started to stand, but Captain Biggs cleared his throat.

  “Sir?”

  “You haven’t been much on the inside of how things run in the Rangers, but it’s customary to be dismissed, first.”

  “Sorry, sir. I’m aware of that, it’s just I’m kind of tired is all. Also, I’m kind of tired of motorcycle gangs. The criminal kind, that is.”

  “You and me both. I do thoroughly understand. All I was going to say is, we take care of our own. Don’t worry about Fluckinger from this point.”

  This gave me pause for a moment. This time I returned Captain Biggs’s sober stare. “Captain, I should say thank you, but I don’t know what to thank you for.”

  Biggs permitted it to hang in the air between us for a moment, then put his hand down lightly on the desk. “Don’t thank me for anything. Nothing has happened to thank me for.”

  I gave him half of a smile. “Still, sir. Thank you. Permission to depart?”

  “Granted. Take care, Bill.”

  “Yes.”

  I got up and retreated from the Ranger station.

  *****

  When I got back to my truck, I sat for a moment in the silence and the heat of the night, replaying everything that had occurred thus far.

  I finally arrived at the one thing to hold onto from it all: for the moment, my family was safe from the likes of Dale Fluckinger.

  I called Julie.

  “Hello, baby,” she said.

  “Hi. I’m coming home. Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. It’s late.”

  “It’s actually early, but I love you.”

  “Yes. Same here. Come home.”

  “I’m coming. Is Jessica there? Driesel too?”

  “They’re here. Jess is downstairs. She’s awake. She and Driesel have been taking turns being awake. I don’t like this danger stuff.”

  “I wish I hadn’t told you, but...”

  “But you had to.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s okay. I knew it when I married you.”

  “I tried to warn you.”

  “You did warn me.”

  “Well, there’s that.”

  “Come home,” she said.

  “I’ll be there before you know it.”

  And that was it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  For some reason it seems that I don’t get much sleep these days. It’s not that I worry about anything in particular and it’s not that I have supreme challenges in life. Nothing like that. It’s just that every time I turn around there’s something vying for my time and attention.

  Take Jennifer, for instance. The girl is a teenager now, and in no more than a couple of years, she’ll be...driving—and the mere thought of that eventuality nearly drives me around the bend—but in the meantime, her mother, her older sister, and yours truly act as her taxi service.

  Lately she’s been taking Haikido Karate. I didn’t try talking her out of it, or anything, which was why I found myself wanting to give myself a good, swift kick in the backside when she shook me awake at 9:30 a.m. the next morning asking me to take her to Karate class.

  I groggily rolled over to ask Julie if she would do it, but that half of the bed was empty. I looked up at my daughter with what I was sure was bleary eyes. “Where’s mom?”

  “Dad, she took Junior, Megan, and Michele, and went shopping or something.”

  “Shopping.”

  “Or something.”

  “Where’s Jessica?”

  “She’s on duty. Come on, dad. I don’t have all day.”

  “Someone is supposed to be on guard duty at this house at all times until further notice.”

  “Mom said you shot someone last night. She made it sound like we’re all out of danger.”

  “But you see, honey, we’re not out of danger. I’m thinking we may all need to retreat to Uncle Nat’s ranch for awhile.”

  “That would be stupid. There’s nothing to do out there. He doesn’t even have good high-speed internet access! I think he still does dial-up!”

 

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