From what I knew of history going all the way back to the early 1900s, there were a number of potential technologies for heavier than air flight which could have been developed, and the helicopter had not been the most promising among them. In fact, from what I knew, most of the earliest test flights were the subjects for the newspapers in that they tended to be items of tragedy and gore.

  I thought back over the recent events that had led to me taking a helicopter ride with Ronnie Bristow at the helm, and I couldn’t come up with a rational and reasonable way that I could have avoided it.

  We were above the grape trellis fields and trees and headed for the highway a quarter of a mile ahead. Ronnie angled toward the west, boosted the power and tilted us forward, and there was a moment of acceleration pressing me back into my seat, coupled with the sense of dangling one’s feet over the precipice of a canyon. My stomach lurched. I looked down at the ground at a thirty degree angle a hundred yards or more in front of me and couldn’t make out anything except a blur.

  “Do you have to fly so fast?” I asked over the headset.

  Ronnie turned to look at me and shrugged, but he didn’t ease off. I suppose it was technically still an answer.

  Highway 290 was directly to the south of us as we angled in toward it. The vehicles: cars, vans, a stray motorcycle or two, and big eighteen-wheelers moved along it at a seeming snail’s pace.

  “ ‘ill?” Ronnie said, and pointed ahead.

  I looked and saw the back of the tour bus with its Austin Chamber of Commerce emblem against a white field.

  “Yeah. That’s it. Can you come alongside? Maybe on the driver’s side? I can maybe flag down Ms. Althea. That is, if she’s the one driving. I have no idea what’s going on in there.”

  Ronnie nodded and banked the helicopter sharply. We crossed over the highway at a forty-five degree angle at no more than a hundred feet in height. My stomach lurched again as we slipped down to just above the scrubby treetops and Ronnie eased back on the power.

  I looked to my right and saw that the bus was passing other vehicles. I squinted, cupped my hands to diminish the glare and made out a figure behind the bubble next to the driver’s seat. Whoever was driving the bus, it decidedly was not Ms. Althea. Nor did the figure seem to be female.

  The figure raised a hand and I could barely make out what it was. Some call it the Hawaiian peace sign, others might call it “the bird.” I found that my jaw had clenched and I was beginning to feel heat, but not from any external source.

  “Ronnie, get me over the top of that bus. I’m getting out.”

  Ronnie looked at me, raising an eyebrow as he did. When I turned to look at him, his eyes widened. He nodded.

  The helicopter gained altitude suddenly and banked to my right.

  I felt to make sure I still had the gun. It was still in my pocket. It’s not the best place for a gun of any kind, but it would have to do.

  The top of the bus drew closer and our shadow drifted up the south side of the bus until it disappeared completely. Suddenly we were hovering over it.

  There was a car—some kind of sports car—slowly drifting back toward us in the left lane. I gauged that the bus would be even with it and then past it in the next eight seconds. In the meantime, the driver had nowhere to go except the right shoulder, but it was none too wide and there was a bridge coming up.

  I opened the door and stepped out. My foot missed the helicopter skid and landed on the roof of the bus. I brought my other leg out and sort of collapsed on top of the thing.

  Ronnie took off.

  *****

  I was in a wind tunnel. There’s no other way to describe it. I was pressed back by the wind, and only the fact that I was hugging the roof of the bus and was digging in with the rubbery tips of my shoes was enough to keep me from blowing straight off the back.

  Closer to the right side than the left, I inched forward a few feet to about where I thought Leroy and his wife were sitting. There I banged on the roof in Morse Code to create the following letters:

  OPEN DOOR

  I waited and did it again.

  When I was about to repeat it again, I faintly felt a series of thumps in response, and translated it:

  OK

  That was easy enough. I began inching myself forward toward the front of the bus, about another ten feet.

  The bus moved beneath me suddenly as the massive vehicle changed lanes. I couldn’t see the road immediately ahead from my vantage point, but figured that the driver was slaloming around slower moving vehicles. I wondered, absently, the identity of the bastard who was driving.

  When it seemed like we were settled back into one lane, I continued my advance.

  In my mind’s eye, I kept going back to what the immediate interior of the bus, just inside of the door was like. First of all, I recalled that the first step up was all that high when the front of the bus was hunkered down with the hydraulics used to lower it for the loading and unloading of passengers, so I estimated the actual floor just inside the bus to be about nine feet down from the roof. There was a step up immediately after this of about eight inches, then another one, of about six inches, which put the passenger on the main level. But above all this, to the left and just inside the door was a bar set about head height when one stepped up onto the main level. Head height for me was about five foot nine, or thereabouts. Additionally, directly to my right was an inch-thick piece of metal rod—sort of like a runner—held in place every three or four feet by a metal bracket that was screwed down into the roof. If I could hold onto it—and if it could bear my weight—and when the door opened, use it to swing inside, then I might actually survive the ordeal. And if I was able to swing inside and get my left foot on top of the bar inside, then I would be inside.

  All of these were ifs, but the first if showed up and turned into reality as the door came open.

  The bus abruptly tried to change lanes, then came back.

  There was a fracas going on inside there, and I had caused it.

  I reached for the bar beside me, shoved on it. It held.

  Using the bar, I pulled myself over to it and stuck my head out over the yawning canyon between myself and the blurring asphalt in shadow beside the bus.

  I dipped my head and looked inside.

  Leroy and two women were fighting with the driver, who was desperately trying to keep one hand on the wheel and the other hand wrapped around a gun.

  I turned myself around and holding onto the metal runner, brought my left leg off the bus.

  There comes a point in anything where one is committed. The laws of physics take over, and no amount of calculation in the universe is going to undue what has gone before. Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, boulders roll downhill, and no amount of wishful thinking in the world is going to hold back the storm.

  In another instant, my right leg followed my left and the wind whipped at me and I held on.

  The wheel jerked back to the right and the majority of my body came inside. I forgot all about the bar at head height and let go of the runner.

  As I fell, I felt something clip the top of my left ear and I saw the explosion from the barrel of the gun and heard the report.

  My heels struck the upper step and I fell backwards, but a hand grabbed my belt with the speed of a striking snake. The crown of my head struck the rubber of the lowest step, and for an instant this blow was transmitted all the way up to my feet.

  But I was pulled upward.

  The door closed.

  One of the women gave the wrist to the hand that held the gun what appeared to be a karate chop, and the gun clattered to the floor.

  My eyes swam for a moment, and I grasped at the hand groping for mine. My eyes focused on the face of Dickerson Linton. He strained and I helped him, my right hand on the entry railing. I came slowly upright.

  Julie had been the woman administering the karate chop.

  “You’re late,” she said to me. She retrieved the gun at our feet and held it on the driver, who stared straight ahead and gritted his teeth. The gun was a revolver. Julie cocked it.

  “Pull this bus over now and don’t try anything, or I will end your existence.”

  “She means it,” I said.

  The driver slowly relaxed.

  “Fellow tried to kill us all,” Leroy said.

  “That’s not very nice,” I replied.

  The bus dropped in speed. There was a wide turnout ahead, and the driver angled for it. Within the next ten seconds we were parked.

  I never once had to use my own gun.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The passengers of the Lone Star Wino Express, as I had taken to calling it, at least mentally, were happy to help with making sure that Chet—the bus hijacker and my prisoner—was in a seat all to himself. I used the set of handcuffs loaned to me by Sheriff Ladd Ross and cuffed him to the seat by the expedient of one cuff around his left wrist and the other around the base of the seatbelt holster protruding up between the seats.

  “Why don’t you take a break,” I told him.

  “Very funny,” he said.

  Ronnie Bristow’s helicopter buzzed past outside, so I got up and went to the front door, opened it and stepped outside.

  When he came back around, I waved and Ronnie waved back, then tilted back toward the winery and was gone past the treetops within seconds.

  I re-entered the bus, closing the door behind me and as I walked back toward Julie I noticed that Ms. Althea sat dazed in the front passenger seat.

  “Ms. Althea?” I asked.

  “Bill, she’s had a rough time today,” Julie stated.

  “I’m okay,” Althea said, weakly. “At first I thought I was having a heart attack, and then, after I was seated back here, I realized it was the first time I had ever been hijacked, the first time anyone ever pointed a gun at me. I sort of panicked, after the fact.”

  “That’s perfectly understandable,” I said. “Do you need to go to the hospital? Get checked out?”

  “No. I’m going to be fine. It was just my nerves is all.

  “Yeah. Makes sense. Do you think you’re good enough to drive?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  “It would probably be the best thing for you to get back on the old horse and ride.”

  “Yeah.”

  She started to pull herself up, and it was at that moment that I noticed the utter quiet inside the bus, apart from the engine running and the whisper of the air conditioning system. When she stood fully, the other passengers first began clapping, then hooting and hollering.

  The chant went up, “AL-THEE-UH...AL-THEE-UH...AL-THEE-UH!” and Julie and I found ourselves muttering it along with them.

  Ms. Althea blushed and made shooing motions, and quickly turned in embarrassment and resumed the driver’s seat up front. Without warning, she put the bus in gear and turned us out onto the highway.

  *****

  I had Ms. Althea take us straight back to the hotel in Fredericksburg. When we arrived, I sat inside the bus as everyone made their way off and into the hotel. Julie was reluctant to leave me with the prisoner, but I insisted she go on up. She kissed me and complied. Ms. Althea utterly refused to leave until Chet and I were off the bus, so I called Ladd Ross and explained what happened—leaving out, of course, how I was actually able to get onto the bus—including taking Chet as my prisoner. He told me to sit tight. He would call the Gillespie County Sheriff and have them come pick up Chet. I would have to report in at the Sheriff’s Office myself that night and write a full report. I hate reports.

  A couple of Sheriff’s deputies came by and Chet was taken off the bus and given over to them. One of them was one of the female deputies who had been at Temperance Bledgrave’s house. She took one long look at me, likely checking out my bruises, and gave me a knowing smile.

  After Chet was hauled away, I turned to Ms. Althea outside the bus. Night had fallen. I was tired and hungry.

  “Where are you going now, Mr. Travis?”

  I walked beside Ms. Althea toward the front door of the hotel.

  “I have to run upstairs and let Julie know that I’ve got to meet a witness at a local tavern. After that I’ll have to head down to the Sheriff’s Office—wherever the hell that is—and spend a few hours writing a report.”

  “Oh. You going to put that fellow away? That Chet fellow?”

  We paused before the elevator.

  “Maybe. He did hijack a bus and almost gave you a heart attack, and for that I’d like to put him away for a long time. But I suspect I’ll be able to get some information out of him in return for leniency.”

  “Oh. You’re after bigger fish, then.”

  “I am. I want the killer or killers.”

  “Mr. Travis, I thought you were just some guy. I thought you and your wife were just boring couples like everybody else.”

  “I haven’t found a single person on your bus to be boring. Least off all, you.”

  Ms. Althea smiled. She straightened her back and it was as if nothing at all had interfered with her day.

  “All right, then,” she said. “I’m going to go rest. I’m in room number two twenty-one. If you need me for your report, I can come down to the Sheriff’s Office. It might even be exciting.”

  “I can assure you, it won’t be. But I may just do that. Thank you, Althea.”

  “Thank you, Bill.”

  We stepped onto the elevator. She punched her floor number and I punched mine.

  When the doors opened onto the second level, she stepped off without saying a word, a pleasant smile still painted on her face.

  “Well what do you know,” I said to myself.

  *****

  Julie tried to convince me that I should beg off of the meeting with Sebastian, citing my injuries and what must have been a look of tiredness. Oddly enough, I wasn’t in pain. In fact, I felt exhilarated. I suppose that’s what happens with me whenever I get close to something. I have to know and I have to complete the mission, and no force on Earth is going to stop me.

  This night no one was playing live music for the sparse patrons. I had forgotten what day it was. Not that it mattered.

  Sebastian was waiting. He had a longneck beer in front of him.

  “Say,” I said, “aren’t you supposed to be the big wine guy?” I took a chair opposite him at the hardwood table.

  “I’m the wine guy and you are the wise guy, Mr. Travis.”

  “Yeah. I get that from my kids. I can’t help it.”

  “How many kids?”

  “More than I can count, sometimes. Let’s just say it’s a houseful, with some spillover. By the way, we can talk for awhile but I can’t be too long. Also, I can’t have any alcohol on my breath because I have to go down to the Sheriff’s Office here in town. There was a bus hijacking today.”

  “Really? Who was it?”

  “Chet. The name ring a bell?”

  “It does.” Sebastian took a long tug at his beer, set it down on the table and sighed. “All right, you and I need to come to some kind of arrangement. I will tell you everything you want to know that I do know. Most of it what I know will probably not be helpful to you. But some of it will. Some of it will be important.”

  “Understood. How about this. If you’re not involved in any way in any criminal activity, I will keep anything you tell me in confidence and won’t tell a soul how I found out. Unless, of course, that is that I need to obtain a warrant of some kind. Even then, I will try to refer to you as a ‘cooperating inside informant.’ How does that sound?”

  “It sounds like I’m a rat.”

  “That’s an ugly word, but from the point of view of the person or persons you’re informing on, rat is apt.”

  “All right. I have been at the winery since it opened. I am not just the door man. No, I’m the vintner. It just so happens that our current crop of grapes are in their casks in the aging barn, and I like being in control of the operation from the growing and harvesting, through to the mashing, and to the mixing and fermenting, and then once that’s done, I like to keep watch over the girls up front to make sure they’re not giving it all away. I pride myself in my job, Mr. Travis. I’m damned good at it.”

  “No doubt. No doubt. So what is the deal with Mr. Herndon? He’s been taken over by Ronnie Bristow and his CPA.”

  “I know about that, of course, and while I do not have my hands in the till with regard to the actual finances of the place, Herndon is doing things I don’t agree with.”

  “Like favoring his grandson Cleetus over his granddaughter, Sylvia? You know, Ronnie’s girlfriend?”

  “Yes. That.”

  “And hiring a criminal biker gang?” I asked.

  “Yes, that too.”

  “How about harassing the people at Purgroy?”

  “I never knew anything about that.”

  “Okay. What about riding their bikes through Temperance Bledgrave’s property to get over to Purgroy the back way, without using the main roads.”

  “I have seen them taking that road when they leave. I knew nothing about their going onto the property of the other winery.”

  “All right,” I said. “So what do you know that I don’t know?”

  “I know that Chet is Cleetus’s younger brother. I overheard them talking this morning outside the office. I was in there to collect my paycheck for the month.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “This was before your confrontation with Cleetus today. Before there was any official word over here about what happened to Bobby Kennedy. Cleetus told Chet there was someone poking around. That he was from a tour bus. He described the tour bus and even gave him the license plate number. He told Chet to hijack the bus at gunpoint, drive it over to the gorge—wherever the gorge is—and run the bus off into the gorge with everyone still aboard.”

  “And Chet agreed to this?”

  “He did. Cleetus threatened to kill him if he didn’t do it.”

  I was aghast, and I paused for a moment as it hit me. The image of that bus full of people, including my wife, the mother of my children, falling front first into some Central Texas gorge made the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stand up.

 

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