I found myself asking myself why I should be worrying over men dead these many years gone by.

I could have answered myself, right then and there that Tuesday morning as I held my car door open for Julie and tossed a travel bag into the backseat. I could have reminded myself that while times change and mankind appears to progress, there are some who still abide in the dark and heed no law except the grim laws of survival and revenge.

We rolled up I-35 toward Georgetown, Texas. Our destination: a new strip mall that was under construction and a visit with a very old friend. Julie still wore Notre Dame, her hair once again in a ponytail and the bitch-glasses perched forward on her delicate nose. She: beautiful. Me: practically a dead man.

She was trouble. Green eyes and reddish hair. And she wastrouble. No way I could have run.

So I had to start thinking about Hank Sterling.

Back around 1988 when I was first struggling to make it-or die in the attempt-one of my clients was Hank Sterling.

Hank was a different breed, an aging Vietnam veteran who liked to drink beer, build things, and blow them up. Like many of my clients, he had the Midas touch. He ran a one-man construction and demolition company out of his house in Killeen, Texas, did perhaps one job every year or two, and in the meantime welded spare parts together in such a way as to call the result art. For instance, there’s a megalithic piece of his work entitled “Dreams of Flight” out in front of the courthouse in my home town. The thing looks more like a melted pterodactyl that it does an airplane-not exactly the kind of thing I would have spent county money on, but that’s just me. The interesting thing was that somebodyliked it. And Hank himself was sort of like that. Same as his art he wasn’t for everybody, but for some reason the two of us had gotten along just fine over the years.

Hank called me up one day with a special problem. He had half a million in cash and he needed to get rid of it. A certain IRS agent had been nosing around in his business and Hank wanted to make sure certain revenuer didn’t catch the scent of undeclared greenbacks.

After that I put Hank in contact with an accountant who could manage his money, help him legally avoid paying more than he had to, and who could handle his sudden bouts of alcoholism and wildcatter fever. But, being Hank, from time to time he still had need of my services, and I was never the kind of fellow who could turn down a friend in need.

In 1989, there was a knock on my door in the middle of the night. Two men in black suits and sunglasses were there on the doorstep of my apartment and they had questions for me. Not about myself or what I did for a living, but about Hank Sterling-his whereabouts, his routine, his habits, and the possible location of the IRS agent who had taken an interest in him. Apparently the man was missing.

What did I know about it? Nada.

After that the two of us were never as close, but he still called me when the need was great.

At the moment I needed his advice more than anything; and it never hurt to have a friend in your corner, especially someone who knew how to fight.

*****

North Hills Shopping Center in Georgetown was mostly complete, even though the marquee twisted in the wind, suspended by cable from a mobile crane outfit sitting on a new parking lot. A Randalls grocery store and a Walgreens had already moved in, along with a few specialty stores.

I parked near the construction zone and Julie and I got out into the morning sunshine. There wasn’t so much as a wisp of cloud in the sky and the breeze felt fine.

We found Hank. He was nailing wooden studs in place with a pneumatic nail gun. His shirt was sweat-soaked and his jeans were torn at the knees, which was about his usual attire. Anyone who didn’t know him would have asked where the boss was. The fact of the matter was that Hank wasthe boss.

When he saw the two of us he grinned really big giving us a toothsome smile. He put the nail gun down, walked over to me and shook my hand in an iron grip.

“Damn good to see you, Bill,” he said.

“You, too!” I said.

“Who’s this?”

“This is Julie.”

They shook hands.

“Girlfriend or client?” he asked.

“Both,” Julie said.

“Okay,” he said, and looked at me. Maybe it was the look on my face. I don’t know. “You want to talk, don’t you?”

“You have the time?”

“Sure.”

Hank preferred his own kitchen to a restaurant; one of the little quirks I’ve never understood about him. Go figure. It was getting up toward lunch and a quick poll from Hank showed three hungry people.

We ended up following Hank the thirty miles back to his home in Killeen. Every now and again Hank would attempt to sink his foot through the floorboard of his ’69 Ford Fairlane, and shoot ahead of us by a mile or more, then he’d slow down and let me catch up.

The land rolled by, the sun beat down relentlessly in the Texas spring, that spring like all others that I could ever remember. A spring, a week, a day of pure hell and beauty. I suppose that when I was a kid, I must have held a fervent wish that my life would go just the way it was going now, and to that kid, if he were watching, all this must seem about perfect.

CHAPTER FOUR

I parked my Mercedes across the street and Julie and I walked across a front lawn that was a couple of weeks overdue for mowing. The weeds slapped at our ankles and shins. By and large the whole place was pretty much as I remembered it.

The front porch was rickety, the paint peeling back in places, and there was a front porch swing that had the various parts of an old carburetor laid out on a large piece of torn cardboard, waiting for re-assembly at some future date. The screen door was off and leaning up against the side of the house. The remnants of abandoned mud dauber nests seemed to be everywhere. The doorbell appeared to be out of commission, hanging out several inches from the door-facing with wires going this way and that. Yep, some things never change.

Hank held the front door open for us.

“Come on in. Come on in. Don’t mind the mess.”

We followed him through an undulating pathway to the kitchen. Hank had become a collector over the years. The house looked like it had survived an endless series of failed garage sales, but only just barely.

Julie walked ahead of me, turning around a couple of times with arched eyebrows and a twisted, sardonic expression on her face. I almost laughed out loud.

We all sat down at the kitchen table. There was far less clutter in the kitchen.

We looked around as we took our seats. Up on the windowsill above the sink was a line of glass telephone pole wire insulators from the early twentieth century. On the counter stood an ancient toaster oven from about 1950.

Hank opened his refrigerator, reached in and brought out three Pabst Blue Ribbon beers and set them in front of us. While he was doing this I found myself wondering if the refrigerator was actually an icebox, one of the kind that required an actual block of ice from a deliveryman with a set of ice hooks. But then the transformer kicked in with a deep, gravelly, electric hum.

Hank sat there at his kitchen table with us in his antique-store house with a shit-eating grin on his face and basked in the glow of my green-eyed client. He shifted his innocent, blue Paul Newman eyes my way and dropped a knowing flick of a wink. I wondered what the hell that was all about.

“So. What brings you here, Bill?”

“Her,” I said.

*****

Julie’s story was believable-so believable, in fact, that the sheer detail of it had me re-creating it visually in my mind as she walked me through it.