“Oh… uh… Bill. God. Bill. I'm… so… so sorry!” Her voice broke.
She sobbed like that for five minutes until her sobs became whimpers and even the whimpers soon drew away into silence as I held her. We found ourselves looking into each other's eyes and she kissed me and I kissed her back and we were making love yet again, and I wasn’t thirty-nine but eighteen, or maybe sixteen, and our bodies and our thoughts and what we could see and touch and feel became one thing.
And it wasn’t even Tuesday yet.
CHAPTER THREE
It was Tuesday. I usually don’t know what day it is. I met Julie on Monday and either that was ten years ago or yesterday.
I was up by six a.m. and there she sat on my barstool in the breakfast nook, wearing my Notre Dame t-shirt and stirring coffee. An angel if there ever was one. I don’t ever recall using the breakfast nook for breakfast. What guy without a woman would?
“Hey,” I said, and she looked up. A smile spread across her face and I noticed the little dimple in her chin for the first time when she smiled big. Too angelic for even Notre Dame.
“Mornin’,” Julie said. It was a good sound for that room.
“Coffee, huh?”
“Yeah. Bill. I have to tell you something.”
“Here it comes, “ I said.
“Told ya to run.”
“And how fast. So what is it?”
“Bill. I like you a lot. I can't stay though. There's Jake and Freddie, two of Archie’s men. They wield guns the way lawyers wield briefs. If they find me I might not live through it, and if you're with me you definitely won't. And you're entirely too cute to fit for cement shoes.”
I took down my David Letterman cup and poured the last of the coffee. She was probably already on her second or third cup.
“Jake and Freddie, huh?”
“Yeah.”
She sighed, sipped at her coffee and looked off into space. I wished that I knew what she was looking at.
“I don't want to go, even though I know I have to,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. Sometimes it’s best if a fellow just lets a woman say what it is she wants to say. All you have to do is let her know you’ve heard her.
“Good. Just so you know.” She got up, came over to me where I leaned back against the stove. She put her arms around me and rested her head on my chest. I could smell her hair. It was fine hair, like baby hair. I’d been right that first morning. Was that yesterday? The scent of her stirred around in my head, making my knees weak.
Julie looked into my eyes. It was almost as if they'd changed color. They’d become more smoky, and all leprechaun green.
“Hey,” I said. “What you may not know is that I've got friends in low places.”
“That’s sort of hard to believe,” she said.
“Ha! Believe me.”
“Yeah?” she said. Her face was getting puffy, like maybe she’d start crying any second.
“Look,” I said. “I’m gonna help you. Wherever you have to go or whatever you feel you gotta do, I’m gonna help you.”
A tear paused, preparatory to rolling down her cheek.
“Sometimes I think you're not real,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve heard that before.”
“But you are. You really are. Okay, Bill. You can help. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to repay you.”
She wiped the tear away.
Fish shadows swam in my thoughts.
“We’ll think of something,” I said.
You can’t learn to get around in your own line of work without learning a little something about the history of your own particular area of specialization. One of my specialties was moving money around-legitimately. My clientele are special and they have special needs.
I’d started off as an investment counselor back in 1988 and quickly found that it’s not so easy to get ahead unless you have clients. I looked around at all the other fellows who graduated with me and found that few of them were earning more than enough than it would take to just begin to whet my appetite, and so I made a conscious decision to strike out in my own direction.
I originally started my firm out of an efficiency apartment three blocks off the drag in Austin. Why Austin? For one thing, I’d quickly grown tired of Houston during my five years there while attending the University of Houston. For another, it appeared that the market was pretty well cornered on the investment racket there by the late 1980s, about the time I graduated and was looking around for a way to make some money in my chosen profession.
And what’s my profession?
I help people.
Some of my clients have run into legal trouble-or maybe they want to avoid running into legal trouble, whatever the case may be-and I help them.
I’ve found that people fall into two categories. Cash rich, in which case they need to dump some of it-or cash poor, in which case they need some. That’s where I come in.
But we were talking about history.
Aside from all the required college classes with desiccated old instructors doling out daily chapter assignments, a certain amount of required outside reading and the re-interpretation of tax law changes that each student must digest and regurgitate, some of it going back to the nineteenth century, college for me had one saving grace: in my junior year I took a course in Criminal Syndicates of the Southwest, taught by an overweight and edgy former trial lawyer who had been in a car collision years before that had left him a paraplegic. However good or not so good he may have been in court in days gone by-and let me tell you, after the first day of class that year, I was certain that he’d been a god-he did one thing welclass="underline" he made the men and the times of his favorite era-the Great Depression-live and breathe. Since that class I’d held a grim fascination for historic Texas criminals, some of the notorious gangsters of the 1920s and 30s, and not just Bonnie and Clyde, who had little more going for them than a species of dumb luck and a tad more than their fair share of press. All by way of saying that there were other folks running around back then along the unpaved Texas back roads and through open range country. For instance, Raymond Hamilton and Joe Palmer were an unlucky pair who were once confederates of Clyde Barrow up in West Dallas. At one time Ray was public enemy #1. Both Ray and Joe were put to death in the electric chair about eight minutes apart back in 1935 for the killing of a prison guard during their escape from Eastham prison farm. At one time they’d had the entire nation looking for them. Ray and Joe were also confederates of Whitey Walker and Blackie Thompson, two of the worst desperadoes ever to hit the Southwest. In 1926, Whitey, Blackie and a fellow named Matthew Carpin put together one of the most successful though short-lived crime syndicates in U.S. history by taking over a mining camp called Signal Hill up in the Texas Panhandle. For one brief year they ran the illegal moonshine trade, set up gambling houses, whorehouses, master-minded and staged robberies, and took a cut from every job that went down within a hundred miles of the place. Things got so bad that Governor Moody had to declare martial law, and sent a detachment of Texas Rangers to bring some semblance of social order.
I recall noting the description by one of the Rangers as he topped the last North Texas hill just after sunset and looked down upon the mining camp. From the hills and valleys surrounding the sprawling, thrown-together patchwork town there rose a black pall of soot from the carbon black plants that had sprung up after the oil strike. And within a hundred yards of each well head there was a continuous plume of fire rising into the night, the burn-off of the escaping natural gas. The ranger scratched his head, turned to his companion and said: “My friend, all my life I have kept in my mind an image of what hell must look like, and now I have found it.”
That was Signal Hill. And in those days “Signal Hill” and the name “Carpin” were rarely spoken very far apart from each other. That name wasn’t exactly one of the nicest family names to carry around. I wondered how his offspring had turned out.