An Absence of Principal Read Online Free PDF Page A

Texas in the late spring, or any time for that matter, had developed that only made it more difficult to see. Fifteen minutes must have passed before he watched the man in the silver Honda get out of his car and walk into a small wooded area next to the gas station. He could see nothing and didn’t know if the man in the silver car was in the woods alone or if he was with someone.
    A moment later, Tony saw a flash and heard a loud pop. He squinted and wiped the moisture off his car window and saw a fuzzy figure, what looked like a tall black man. Or maybe just a tall man, he could’ve been white, or Latino, Tony thought. He couldn’t say who exactly he saw run out of the bushes and get back into the silver car. Whoever it was carried what appeared to be two large shoe boxes. The car sped off, north up the Kermit Highway. The direction the car was headed made it appear as if whoever was driving wasn’t headed back to Midland. The driver was just trying to get as far away as fast as he could.
    Tony pulled onto the Kermit Highway and headed the same direction as the speeding Honda. He had hoped to catch up, but there was no way. After trailing the car for three or four miles Nail turned and headed back to Midland. There would be no preaching tonight. Not after what he had just seen. Or thought he had seen.
    Two minutes after the pop and the flash, the phone rang at Fire House 8 on the west side of Odessa.
    “There’s a dead man in the brush behind the abandoned gas station at 1960 and the Kermit Highway,” the voice on the other end of the line said.
    Click.
    Before the dispatcher could even say hello, much less ask for more information, the call dropped. The firehouse dispatcher checked enhanced 911 records and showed the call had come from a cell phone somewhere in Ector County. Untraceable.
    Odessa police responded to the location and quickly confirmed the caller was precise in explaining where the dead man would be. There he was: Black. Mid-30s. Single bullet wound to the head. Execution style. Two days later the medical examiner’s report would note two things of interest: the man had cocaine residue on all ten of his fingers. Not terribly surprising. The ME would also find that despite the proximity of the weapon to the fatal entry wound – less than 12 inches – the bullet had entered at an angle. That usually only meant one thing, the examiner thought to himself.

Garrison Trask, who ran his own one-man law office in Midland, opened the Odessa American Saturday morning to read the news of the death of Junior Walker, a 35-year-old unemployed auto mechanic with a history of drug arrests. Garrison thought little of it. There was likely more than a handful of these kinds of stories in newspapers across the country on this same morning. Another vagrant trying to make a life by dealing dope meets an untimely and unfortunate demise. Nothing terribly compelling about that, sad to say.
    Garrison was alone in the office as he was every Saturday, the one day of the week when he could put aside jail visits, interviews with clients, courtroom appearances and all the other details that often interrupted his detective work, his favorite part of the week. As much as he liked investigations, he knew having to bring on someone who specialized in that area was the only way his practice could stay afloat if he hoped to keep up his nearly spotless won-loss record in trials. He had even placed an advertisement in the Texas Legal Journal , which went to anyone and everyone associated with the profession. It was the farthest he had ever gone in seeking outside help in the office, and he wasn’t sure he was completely comfortable with the notion of working with anyone else. Trask had included in the ad the salary he was paying: $42,000 for a qualified candidate.
    Trask worked in such a faraway outpost, where unless you were in the oil business few people relocated to voluntarily. He knew it would be a challenge to find someone who had