Damn but she was gorgeous. Those green eyes the color of a field of clover. Shiny auburn blond hair down to her delicate shoulders. A smallish bone structure with a perfect thin neck and oh so perfect little wrists.
Mr. Travis, she began, and sniffed once, delicately.
Call me Bill.
Bill. Have you ever been afraid?
There are some people that you just dont cross. Julie Simmons had made it a point to cross the exactly wrong person, a North Texas liquor baron named Archie Carpin, distant relative to the Carpins of Signal Hill and Stinnett up in the Texas Panhandle.
Id read up on the Carpin Gang and some of the 1930s depression desperadoes before, back in the days when I actually did my assigned college research. Id even gone once and kicked around up in Hutchinson County in North Texas, poked my nose into the abandoned, decaying buildings and rust-encrusted oil derricks of that ghost town. It was private property and I didnt exactly have permission, but when youre young you tend to think youve got license to look where you want, do what you want. Also, you tend to think and act like youre immortal-at least I did, which at that time, was pretty close to the truth. What was amazing to me was that anybody else knew about Signal Hill and those old-time gangsters, but here was this pretty girl who had cut me off in traffic giving me chapter and verse.
Back during the early 1920s the Carpin brothers ran the small slapped-together oil boomtown a few miles east of Stinnett in what was little more than a den of bootleggers, gamblers and other criminals of low order. During those days of big bands and prohibition, men on the far side of the law either rose to the top of the heap or got stomped under. For a brief time the Carpins were on the top of that heap. When Signal Hill was cleaned out by the Texas Rangers in 1927, the former boomtown imploded and the Carpins, who had managed to avoid arrest and capture, had dispersed. When I went up there to look around back in the mid 1980s there was little left. So when the girl with the bitch sunglasses and the too-cute frown mentioned Carpins name, I naturally questioned her on it, and she not only admitted that the man who was after her was one of those Carpins, but that he was proud of his heritage.
There was one question though, once I put it to her, that she didnt want to answer, and therefore, it was the one thing that I had to keep putting back in her court each time she attempted to bat it away. The question was, of course: What did you do?
When she finally told me, I had to contain myself from bursting into laughter.
She finished the story. I could tell that shed left out quite a bit.
Im not sure I can help you, I said. She frowned. There was bit of shocked
expression on her face.
Look, I said. Miss Simmons, my clients are
What?
Well. I have to walk a very I just cant-No one could just walk in and ask someone to Look, if we so much as took one step outside of the bounds of-
She kept turning her head slowly, cocking it, waiting for me to finish. I found I didnt have the words.
Mr. Travis, she said. Its two million dollars.
Im not normally impressed with money, of any denomination. But two million?
So youre not exactly here to turn yourself in, I said.
Getting arrested wouldnt be half bad. Id stand a better chance of surviving, I think, she said. But if I dont get some help and dont get arrested, or get somewhere safe, then Ill be dead.
She must have caught the quizzical look on my face.
I dont have the money on me! she said.
I looked closely at her, searched for some hint, some shred of evidence in her eyes that something of what she told me wasnt true. I didnt find it.
She unzipped her small, tan clutch purse and pulled forth three pathetic-looking, wadded-up hundred dollar bills. She was about to give them to me.
A tear slipped down her cheek.
Very suddenly the room felt warm, like someone had cranked up the heat. Possibly my ears were turning red again. I couldnt let her give me the money, no matter what else was going to happen.
Miss Simmons-
Julie, she said, her voice just above a whimper. Her face was flushed and the muscles around her mouth were tight.
There, across from me over the dark gulf of my rosewood desk, was a girl who was used to helping herself. A girl who took her chances, to be sure, but who normally won out in the end. And here she was at the end of her rope. I at least knew enough to know that I had to know more, and that if it were possible, I would help. And it wasnt as though I had any choice in the matter. No woman I had ever known had thus far been able to penetrate my armor with the simple expedient of tears. But it was not only this that drew me to her so inevitably and completely-it was also the simplest and yet most profound of feelings. And it was actually her feelings. It was her sense of utter embarrassment that she had to ask for help to begin with.
Julie. I said. Are you hungry?
Starved, she said after a short pause. Her head tilted to the left. A little smile was on the verge of taking up residence.