My first explosion, however, had to do with a tractor-trailer rig that had wrecked and blown sky-high at the entrance to our country neighborhood when I was a kid of about fourteen years of age. A dynamite company had leased the pasture behind us and they stored gun powder in trailers all along the back forty. At first I had thought that one of the dynamite rigs out back had let go, but a glance out the window and a quick count ruled that out. I ran down the road that led into our dead-end neighborhood on a spring morning before the school bus was due and I saw the wreckage out on the highway. There were about ten thousand little steel rings in a circle about a hundred yards in radius, the “o-rings” that were supposed to keep the gunpowder hermetically sealed. Amazingly the driver had lived through it. I remembered wondering at the time if he would ever haul dynamite or gunpowder again. If it had been me, I knew I sure as hell wouldn’t.

Explosions. Storms. One or the other, or possibly both were coming, bearing down upon us with all the inevitability of fate.

“I’ve come this far,” I said, and climbed out into the herd of dogs.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

We went back to downtown Childress.

Where were Agents Cranford and Bruce when we needed them?

We stopped for a bite at a Sonic Drive-In on the main drag through town.

Hank ordered for us while I made a phone call at the gas station pay phone next door.

“Bill! I’m glad you called! I didn’t know how to get hold of you.”

“What’s going on, Kathy?” I asked. She sounded pretty excited.

“I found something in the State Archives. A letter. It was in the restricted stuff, so you didn’t hear it from me.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“It was inside an envelope with the letterhead of the Dallas Sheriff’s Office and addressed to the Governor of Texas. I think it may be a hand-written note from that guy you told me to look up.”

“What guy?”

“The U.S. Marshal. Blackjack.”

“What’s the note say, Kathy?”

“Okay. Hold on.” She put the phone down. I listened to the surface of her library counter for a minute, then she was back. “Got it. Ready?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s dated the eighth of September, 1926. It reads: ‘Roger, Feels like this playing both ends against the middle is going to wind me up dead. There’s a lot of money in this town, but getting close to the shine is work. These people are scum of God’s Earth, but they are sly. If I don’t hit pay dirt in a week, I’m out of this God-forsaken hell-hole. If you don’t see me in ten days after receiving this, then I’m dead. Send cavalry anyway. Best, BJ.’ That’s it. What’s it mean, Bill?”

“It means that the cavalry got there too late, Kathy.”

“Why do you need to know all this stuff, Bill? And why was this restricted? This stuff happened over seventy years ago.”

“Because, darlin’,” I said. “Those were real people and they had real families, and some of those families, the sons and daughters-and most certainly the grandsons and granddaughters-are still around up here.”

“Oh,” she said. “They could be affected by this after seventy years?”

“Is the South still affected by the Civil War? Is Germany still affected by the Nazis?”

“Uh. Yeah. I see your point,” she said. “By the way, where are you calling from?”

“Childress, Texas. Kathy, this is about money, whiskey, horses and kidnapping. If I recall correctly, Roger Bailey was the Dallas Sheriff. He used to sell the bicycles that Clyde Barrow stole over in West Dallas. Sold them out of his pawn shop. This was when Clyde was still a kid, just getting his start in crime. Bailey knew what he was doing.”

“Wow. Nice guy. Was everybody on the take back then, or not?”

“Not everybody, Kathy, but sometimes the lines blurred.”

“Okay,” she said. “I still don’t understand all the secrecy.”

She had a point. I didn’t either. “Well,” I replied. “What if somebody started going around saying your grandfather made his fortune from illegal whiskey, robbery and murder-for-hire?”

“Hah! I think maybe he did, Bill.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay. Still, you’re right. I wouldn’t like it.”

“Exactly. Also, I think there’s even more to it all than just hoodlumism.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Don’t know. I’ll tell you if I find out.”

“Uh,” she said. “On second thought don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

I looked up. Hank drew his hand across his throat and tapped on a non-existent watch.

“Gotta run, darlin’,” I told her. “I’ll see you later.”

“Um. Bill? Uh. I don’t know how to tell you this.”

“Just spit it out.”

“Well, okay. I don’t want to go out with you.”

What? I thought. “I thought I was just buying you dinner. You know, friends?”

“Oh. Okay. Good. I’m glad you thought that. It makes it easier. I still can’t.”

“Alright,” I said. “Why?”

“‘Cause,” she said. “What you do is too dangerous. I don’t want any part of it.”

I paused two beats, let it sink in.

“Good,” I said. “I always knew you were a smart girl.”

We exchanged goodbyes and hung up.

“Well,” I said aloud to myself. “I’ll be damned.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

After Hank, Dingo and I bolted down our food we got back on the road.

“Turn left off the town square, Bill,” he said.

It was getting late in the day. All of three o’clock.

“Where’re we going?” I asked.

“Radio Shack,” he said.

“Sorry I asked.”

Surprisingly the town had one.

By four-thirty we were sitting under a shade tree down by a slow-moving creek on the outskirts of town.

I patted Dingo and watched Hank. He was ladling some very foul-smelling raw nitrates from a large-sized trash bag into a series of small metal cylinders. I started to ask where he had gotten the cylinders, then decided against it. I didn’t need to know.

A sheriff’s deputy car passed. I waved and the two patrolmen waved back.

“Think they know us?” Hank asked me.

“If they don’t then I’m willing to bet that they know ofus.”

“Remember when she told us about Carl, the jockey?” I asked Hank.

“Yeah. And Lefty. Jake and Freddie’s fathers.”

“Right. Well, remember when Julie said that Lefty liked to tell stories, only he-”

“He did a bad job of it,” Hank said.

“Uh huh. So Carl had to finish most of them. The story she told me in my office the first morning I met her was about a manure pile.”

“What? You’re kidding.”

“Nope. A story about a manure pile and some horse stables. At first I thought it was… Uh… Horseshit.”

“The story,” Hank said, “not the manure. Got it.”

“Right,” I told him. “So there was this bit of concrete poking up at the edge of the manure pile. It had a rusted out lid on it and an old padlock on top of that. All Lefty could say was that the manure pile had a ghost, and that it was the ghost of an old lawman. Carl corrected him and pointed out the concrete tube, about a foot and a half in diameter, and said it was the chimney for an old tornado shelter.”

“Makes sense,” Hank said. “Most of these old homesteads up here on the plains have them. Go on with the story.”

“Okay. Carl told her that a house had once stood right beside the tornado shelter, which was concrete with a steel door. In the ground on top of that was a vegetable garden. They used to fertilize the garden with horse manure. Later, after the house had been torn down and rebuilt higher up on the hill they stopped raising vegetables there. Later they built some new horse stables there-about the time that Archie Carpin was a kid-and because it was tradition, kept on dumping their manure on top of the old tornado shelter.”

“Okay,” Hank said.

“So, that night when Julie was on the run and Archie was coming back home, she had to ditch the money. She had Jessica-the kid-with her and all she could think of doing was getting rid of the money and getting the hell out of there. If those men had caught her with the money, she-they-would both have been dead.”