The Final Country

SEVEN

Betty's pickup and Cathy's rig were parked in the driveway, so I parked behind them, limped up the steps to ring the doorbell. When the tiny Judas gate opened in the door, I could see Betty's blue eyes smiling at me. She let me in quickly, double-locked the door, then held me tightly, whispering apologies against my lips. I could smell the mota and wine on her breath, could feel the smiling laughter on her face. It made my old heart sing.

"I'm sorry, honey," she said. "First, I badger you into letting me share your troubles, then first time I get scared, I turn on you. I'll forgive you, if you'll forgive me."

"Not necessary," I said, meaning it. "But no more running away, okay?"

"I promise," she said, stepping back so I could see her face. "But you have to promise not to treat me like a child."

"A child?"

"No more trying to protect me, okay?"

"That's going to be a little bit harder."

"Listen, you son of a bitch," she said, stomping her foot, "I'll never see forty again, I don't qualify as a vestal virgin, and you may be from Montana but you're not Gary Cooper."

"Love," I said, "that's a deeply stoned metaphor, but I'll do the best I can to do whatever you want."

"You'll do whatever I say?" she asked, laughing, her lovely face turned to the ceiling.

"Within reason."

"To hell with reason," she said. "Say yes. Or leave."

"Yes."

"And uncross your fingers."

I did.

"Cathy's ready to fix your back again," she said. "You shouldn't be taking off on long trips while your back is in such a mess."

"I can sure as hell go for that," I said and let her lead me upstairs into the lowering sun that burst through the glass wall with the western exposure, its bright shafts hanging in the smoky air like golden bars. But Cathy was not imprisoned. She flitted about the large, open room like a happy bat. Within moments she had me stoned senseless, naked, and stretched on the table. When she got a full view of my back, she didn't say anything, just sucked in her breath.

"What kind of drugs do you have in your system?" she asked calmly.

"Four codeines, three beers, and two short lines," I admitted dreamily.

"You got any more of that blow?" she asked.

"Inside pocket of my vest," I said. I heard the search, a couple of lines chopped and snorted – maybe even one by Betty, who never did coke – then Cathy touched the new bruise softly.

"What the hell did you do? Run into a bulldozer?" she said.

"Probably a light-loaded and suppressed five-point-six-millimeter round."

"Jesus," she sighed. "That's good blow. Makes me remember why I gave it up. Almost worth losing my license for."

"You don't have a license," Betty chuckled from the corner.

"I have a degree from the London school," Cathy said smartly, "and an idea."

"What?" Betty asked.

"Leeches," she said.

"Leeches?"

"I can have that bruise improved in a half-hour or so," she said. "If you can stand the sweet, squirmy little guys."

"Shove a couple more codeines down my throat, and let the squirmy little bastards loose."

The leeches felt like small strips of liver wriggling on my back, then no feeling at all. Even as Cathy removed them. Then she went back to the needles again. I didn't feel them at all.

Except for the smell of that even stronger incense, that was just about the last thing I remembered until Cathy slowly removed the needles. Once again they seemed to want to remain in my skin. My back felt wonderful, and I had another errant erection that almost hurt as Cathy flipped me over. Before I had a chance to even consider it or think about it, Cathy's mouth slid, wet and warm, over me, once, then twice, then so swiftly I didn't have time to protest, she slipped out of her leotard and mounted me, the slippery, tight hold of her cunt sliding quickly over me, gripping me like a living beast. I opened my mouth to say something, but what I'll never know, because the pink shadow of Betty's thigh swung over my face and her soft red pubic hair covered my mouth. My tongue, with its own volition, darted into the wet darkness, and I was lost in their dream for as long as they wanted.

Golden moments: the women lying side by side beneath me – Betty pale as a pink rose and as comfortably erotic as a sultan's odalisque, and Cathy as brown as a sunburnt bone and slippery as gristle – as I lapped and humped and snorted like a puppy; once paused inside Betty's softness while Cathy sat backward on her face, tiny, sharp teeth darting at my nipples; and that wonderful moment when all three of us convulsed in the throes of a single giant orgasm.

Other moments of startling clarity: still sitting on Betty's face, Cathy shoved a long nipple into my mouth, shouting "Bite!" then came again like a freight train, and I realized that these women had made love before; when Betty came under Cathy's mouth it was as if a long cool sigh had rippled a crystalline pond; and when I came inside Cathy's tight cunt, Betty covered my mouth with hers in a long gentle kiss that almost eclipsed my orgasm.

After they were done with me, and I had recovered enough to pee, I slogged to the john, then rejoined the naked women on a pile of pillows against the western wall where we sipped vodka on ice and smoked dope until full dark. "By way of apology," was the only explanation Betty bothered giving me; "you can't leave me behind now," her only reason.

"A little fun never hurt anybody," Cathy suggested.

"What if I'd died?" I asked, holding up a glass of Absolut. Suddenly, recalling what the Molly McBride woman had told me about clear whiskey and her father in Lake Charles.

"We would have chopped you open with an axe, filled you with rocks, and dumped you in Town Lake," Cathy said. "Parked your pimp car on Ben White with the keys in it, stolen your clothes, snorted your cocaine, and fucked your friends. Assuming you have any left."

"Right," Betty said, laughing, open and happy.

"A good thing I kept my wits about me."

We chattered, as aimlessly as baby birds, until the sliver of moon scratched the top of the dark sky.

Late the next morning, bleary-eyed in spite of a long, tangled sleep, over a breakfast of chicory coffee, fresh fruit, and stale croissants, Cathy asked me, "Have any fun, cowboy?"

"Make that 'cowpoke,'" Betty said.

"Never done that before," I admitted.

"Never?" the women asked in unison.

"Had a chance once," I said, "but had to turn it down."

"Why?" they asked, but when I didn't answer, they rambled along without me.

But I couldn't help but think about the time I'd turned down a chance to sleep with two women. At the end of a long, tiresome domestic case back in the late sixties – one of my first – when I caught the young married woman with her lesbian lover in a Billings motel, both of them Meriwether high school teachers, she offered me their bodies whenever I wanted, if I'd just give her the pictures, and if I'd lie. If it got to court back in those days, she was sure she'd lose any claim to her children to her creep of a husband who headed the education department at Mountain States College. If I slept with the women, both solid Montana women, I'd feel obligated to lie. That didn't feel right. So I tossed her the film, gave the professor his retainer back, and walked away from the whole thing. Over the years, I had watched the young woman's children grow up rather nicely, then once they were off to college, she divorced her idiot husband, moved with her lover to Portland, and as far as I knew, lived happily ever after.

Unlike me, who always had wondered what it would have been like. And now that I knew, oddly enough, I felt slightly used, the memory blooming into a seed of doubt that clouded the lovely memories of the night. But these women – one who loved me, one who thought I was Irish – had no bones to pick with me. So I shook it off, poured more coffee, and took out a cigarette.

"Outside, cowboy," Cathy said gently.

I nodded and took my cup of coffee into the small enclosed patio off the kitchen that overlooked the dam-bound Colorado River. Betty said she needed a shower, and left as Cathy cleared the table. Outside it was as if clouds hadn't been invented yet. The high blue sky glistened like a baby's first tooth. Only the shadows held any trace of the norther as the morning blossomed with sun-warmed air. I was on my second cigarette when Cathy came out with the coffee pot to join me. She took the cigarette from me, had a long drag, then blew a series of perfect smoke rings that hung for a long time in the still air.

"You service other people's addictions well," she said as she handed me the cigarette.

"Thanks. I guess."

"You know, Betty and I have been friends all our lives," she said without preamble, "and I hope you have some idea how much she loves and depends on you, old man, and how hard this is for her. Maybe you should think hard about giving it up."

"It's too late to quit," I said, wondering again why everybody wanted me to stop the investigation.

"I don't know exactly what's going on with your troubles," she said, "but please take care of her. Please."

"She's already made me promise not to protect her," I said, then laughed.

"What did you say?"

"Yes," I said. "But I was lying," I admitted, laughing again, washing the shadows from the edges of my mind. "I'll keep her as far away from the trouble as I can. You can count on that."

"And you can count on me, too," Cathy said. "Anything I can do to help."

"How did you fix Sissy Duval's orgasms?"

"Went out to her great-granddaddy's place for two weeks," she said, "and fucked all the resistance out of her. Taught her that sexuality is best when it's bound to love, but it ain't all that bad when it's just random fun. Trouble was, she loved that asshole, Dwayne. For reasons nobody ever understood."

"When was this?"

"Oh, I don't know. Sometime after Dwayne took up with Mandy Rae," she said, "and before he got blown away. Skinny son of a bitch had destroyed her confidence."

"Where?"

"In bed, you idiot."

"No, where was her great-granddaddy's place?"

"A shack surrounded by abandoned pump jacks, old time oil patch machinery, and a bunch of slush pits somewhere near a hole in the road south of Lockhart," she said. "Town had some kind of funny name. I can't remember exactly. But it was on his first big-time producing lease."

"Can you show me where it is?"

"I'm not sure. The old man's name was Logan, though, and she called the place Logan's dump – that's about all I remember. Why?"

"I think somebody's trying to kill her."

"Why in hell would anybody want to kill Sissy," she said. "I've always liked her, but she's such a frivolous bitch."

"Maybe you better tell me about it," I said.

But before Cathy could start her story, Betty came out of the house, her smile as bright as a dew-sparkled rose, shaking her fluffy light red hair golden in the sunshine. "Okay, kids," she said, "no fooling around without me."

"Dammit all to hell," Cathy snorted. "I always knew you were a selfish bitch. Ever since you stole my four-colored pen in the third grade."

"It was mine in the first place," Betty said, grinning. "And besides, it was a three-colored pen in the fourth grade."

"Just proves my point," Cathy said, faking a sulk as she leaned her head on the flagstone wall. "And Miss Batson always liked you better."

"That's because I didn't shoot her in the butt with spit wads and rubber bands," Betty said.

"She had the kind of ass that invited pain," Cathy whispered into the shadows.

"What's on the agenda today?" Betty asked, her hand warm on my cheek.

"Road trip," I answered. "I've got to go to Houston, then Louisiana to look into some shit."

"How long?"

"Don't exactly know how long I'll be gone," I admitted.

"How long we'll be gone," she corrected me, "and if we're going, I've got to run out to the ranch, then see if Tom Ben's hands can look after the stock while we're gone."

"It would be safer if I went alone," I said.

"Not a chance, cowboy."

"Then I'll pick you up at Tom Ben's," I said. "We can leave your truck there."

"I'll give you a call on your cell phone before I head out to Tom Ben's place."

Betty gave Cathy a hug and me a long sweet kiss, then left.

"Alone at last," Cathy said, her wrist to her forehead. Then she ruffled her short dark hair. "You got time for this story?" she asked seriously. "It's going to take a couple of Bloody Marys."

"I counted on at least one."

Once we had drinks in hand and perched on stools at the breakfast bar, Cathy sighed, then said, "Austin in the seventies. What a fucking circus. It was like Hollywood with cowboy boots. Or maybe, what we thought Hollywood was like. Or maybe, we thought we were starring in our own movies. It was seventy-three and I'd just come back from acupuncture school in London, a fairly upright young woman – never as stuffy as Betty – but close. By eighty-five I'd been married and divorced three times, had the clap twice, and overdosed three times, twice on purpose, and spent most of my time hanging out with the kind of guys who were interesting when they were rebellious students at UT. But now they drove beer trucks and dealt the drugs they didn't smoke or stuff up their noses – Christ, I married two of them, much to their regret, and their daddy's trust funds – but at the lowest moment Betty and I hooked up with Sissy and. Mandy Rae and their crowd." Then she paused for a long breath. "Nobody has the constitution for that kind of action. I don't know how I survived."

"How'd you get out?"

"Woke up one morning with Enos trying to strangle me with his dick," she said, "while fucking Dwayne was trying to squirm his skinny dick up my ass. It was too much. I stepped back, watched them go after each other without me as an excuse. Then I just stayed away, so unlike most of the rest of them, I survived those years without suffering rehab, jail, or death. Believe me, cowboy, I paid for this life. And I intend to enjoy it."

"I noticed that," I said. "I'm sort of interested in where Mandy Rae's cocaine came from."

"Nobody seemed to know," Cathy said. "Mandy Rae had dumped her first husband – some old guy who pushed tools on an offshore drilling rig out of Morgan City, or somewhere down in coonass country – then hooked up with Enos, maybe in New Orleans, I don't remember exactly. But they came to town with kilos, not ounces, and it kept coming – more coke than any of us had ever seen, and shit even purer than yours. By the way, why don't we do a short line?"

"It's always the people's cocaine," I said. "That keeps it simple."

"Good plan," she said.

Afterward, Cathy's story drifted through those lost days, which seemed so happy at the time, and for many of the people it had turned out so sadly. Some people should never have a drink. I knew at least a hundred people who were alcoholics midway through their first teenage beer. They either survived or didn't. And the drugs.

Just after my forced resignation from the Meriwether County Sheriff's Department, I had been on a toot, during which I offered an anthropology graduate student a hit off my doobie before we made love. The next weekend the young woman, behind three hits of Purple Haze acid, had tried to fly out her apartment window. Luckily, she lived on the second floor and landed in a snowbank. She broke three ribs and lost the tip of her little finger to what she called an interesting case of frostbite. Three months later, arguing with her new boyfriend over where they were going skiing, she shot him in the butt with a.22 short to get his attention. When that seemed to have no effect, she shot herself in the thigh. They drove all the way to Bozeman before they decided prescription painkillers sounded better than bleeding all over the chutes above Bridger Bowl, so they checked into the ER. The boyfriend later died in a Mexican prison, but the young woman grew up to be the head of a chain of drug rehab clinics in California.

Nobody knows when or where addiction begins. I also knew I couldn't count the number of people who had done cocaine without either becoming hooked, going crazy, or losing their jobs. But the dozen or so who had gone down the hard way, went that way from the beginning, and ended very badly.

"Maybe it wasn't us or the, drugs or even the sex," a sad-faced Cathy said, "but the shitty moral force of all the whitebread assholes who tried to impress their will on us, make us behave, and live their frightened little lives."

I nodded, but slowly because I didn't know.

"Maybe it's always been a religious war," Cathy whispered, "like the abortion thing." Then she stood up, shouting, "Well, fuck 'em. When they die and find there ain't nothing afterward, think how silly they'll feel."

"I thought they were dead?"

"I've always hoped that there's just enough afterlife for the assholes, just a nanosecond where they understand that this is all there is," she said.

"Here's to the final answer," I said, raising my glass. We finished our drinks.

"I've got a client in about fifteen minutes," Cathy said, then gave me a fierce hug and a kiss like a punch in the face. "Kick ass and take names, cowboy. Mi casa, su casa, mi amigo. Stairtown. That's where Homer's place was."

"Thanks," I said, then left.

Down in the Caddy I checked my voice mail. Except for six hang-ups, it was empty. So I went down to the Four Seasons, grabbed my gear, stuffed the Browning into a shoulder holster under my vest, and checked out. I drove out to the gun safe to pick up some more traveling cash, then headed the Beast toward the Lodge, for a shower, packing, and a change of clothes. The Caddy felt good under my hands and butt, as close to home as I got to feel these days. I almost felt guilty when I checked the mirrors for a tail.

But it was a waste of time. When I unlocked the door of my suite, the drapes along the south wall were open, flooding the room with smoky sunlight. Two large men in dark suits and darker glasses were outlined against the glare. Another slimmer one in a light suit stood a bit apart from them, leaning lightly on the heavy bag hung from the ceiling, the strong sunlight gleaming off his glasses and bald head. A dark-haired woman wearing a round, black hat with a wide brim and a half-veil that hid her face sat in one of my easy chairs, a slim cigarillo smoking between her red-tipped fingers. A low-cut black dress exposed a soft round cleavage that seemed to glow in the shadow of the hat. She smelled like money all the way across the room. Beside her, the bulk of an old, fat woman moldered in an electric wheelchair. She was also dressed in black and wearing a veiled hat covering a square, heavy face. Even through the veil, though, I could tell that her skin was riddled with pitted scars and hairy moles. Her hooded eyes glared angrily at me. The visible wings of her hair were so deeply black they had to be a cheap wig or an oil spill.

I had the Browning from beneath the vest with a motion so quick and smooth it surprised even me, my two-handed combat stance solid, the sights locked on the younger woman, hammer cocked, safety off. But I hadn't bothered putting a round in the chamber.

"Very nice, Mr. Milodragovitch," the young woman said, her voice husky, tired, worn from smoke and drink, and deeply unimpressed. She spoke carefully, with a slight accent, as if English wasn't her first language. Maybe Spanish, I told myself. The old woman's eyes rose, glittered madly for a second, then dropped.

"Three days a week at the range," I said, only lying a little bit. I'd been avoiding the range more often than I'd been there for months. Even with earmuffs my ears rang for hours after fifty rounds. Just as I'd avoided the heavy bag because my hands ached so badly after a workout. "And clean living," I added.

"You won't be needing that." The woman tilted her head toward the corner of the room where a third man in a dark suit covered me with a shoulder-strapped mini-Uzi with a large suppressor on its barrel.

"You'll be the first, lady," I said.

The woman nodded to the third man, who calmly draped the assault weapon back under his coat. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see that the men in the dark suits seemed to be Latinos, Secret Service radio earplugs in their ears. They even had the easy but alert stances of real professionals, their faces in a bland, almost happy repose. They were on the job.

"Just calm down, Mr. Milodragovitch," the man in the tan suit, Tobin Rooke, said, his thin lips barely moving.

I moved the Browning slightly, aimed it at the heavy bag, then pulled the trigger. Although the hammer falling on the empty chamber sounded as loud as a grenade in the closed room, nobody even flinched, or even moved until the echoes of the hammer died, when Rooke lightly touched the heavy bag as if it were swinging.

"Fuck all of you," I said. "Whoever the fuck you are."

"I believe 'whomever' is the correct usage," Rooke said so quietly that I nearly didn't hear him.

"I've been to college," I said, charging the Browning and shoving it back into the shoulder holster. The next time I pulled it out, I wanted to have a round in the chamber. "It's obvious I ain't gonna impress anybody unless I put a round up their nose. So what's the deal, lady? Since I assume you're in charge." She nodded. "A nice hat, too. I haven't seen a hat with a veil since the forties." My mother had worn one just like it to my father's funeral, black gauze wreathed with expensive sherry fumes.

"Thank you," she said without irony. "I understand you are looking for the woman known as Molly McBride," she added.

"Molly McBride?" I said, more than somewhat surprised. "What's it to you?"

"I want to talk to her," the woman said. "She has something of mine, and since you don't have an actual client, I thought perhaps I might provide you one. If you would be so kind."

I had no idea what to say at this sudden turn.

So the woman continued: "I know you don't need the money, Mr. Milodragovitch, so I'm going to offer you something much more important."

"What's that?"

"Your freedom," she said quietly.

"Who the hell are you, lady? And what do you have to do with my freedom?"

She took a long drag on the little cigar, then blew a long, slow billow of smoke into the stolid air. "I'm Mrs. Hayden Lomax," she said, "and this man, as you well know, is Tobin Rooke, the district attorney of Gatlin County, and he has an envelope containing a contract, a small check, a bench warrant for a material witness, the woman who calls herself Molly McBride, and a DA's special investigator badge and identification. Of course, he had to use your booking photo, so the picture's not too flattering, but it's clearly you." She didn't bother introducing me to the old lady in the wheelchair.

"A bail jumper warrant would be better," I said, "but isn't there some sort of conflict of interest here?"

Mrs. Lomax presented me with an icy sneer that should have frosted my balls, and she kept staring at me, silently, until the old woman pinched her arm. "As an officer of the law, you answer to me, not some crooked bail bondsman," she said quickly without a trace of irony and as if she had been waiting all day to say the line. Then she nodded to Rooke to answer the rest of the question.

"There are not now, and upon successful completion of your contract, will be no charges pending," Rooke said primly. "This McBride woman, whoever she might be, is a material witness in a homicide. So this is all, however personally abhorrent, perfectly legal. Your business partner, Mr. Wallingford, has examined the documents and approved them. You are certainly free to consult him at this time." Rooke slipped a cell phone out of his perfectly draped suit, punched redial, then crossed the room to hand me the phone.

"Where the hell are you?" I said when Travis Lee answered. "It sounds like you're next door."

"Sippin' Tennessee whiskey and lookin' at this pile of caca de toro on my desk, and wonderin' where my next fortune's comin' from," he said.

"What the hell is going on with this Lomax woman?" I asked.

"Sounds to me like a chance to pull your ass out of the pigshit," he said. "I'd be on it like a duck on a June bug, if I were you."

"What's the woman want?"

"Who cares what she wants?" he said. "She's Hayden Lomax's last trophy wife, so whatever Sylvie Lomax wants, she gets. So maybe you better ask her yourself."

"Thanks. I will." I handed the cell phone back to Rooke, who gave me a manila envelope. "What do you get out of this?" I asked Mrs. Lomax. "Aside from the sheer pleasure of using your money like a club?"

"Don't think of it as a club, Mr. Milodragovitch," she said, a wisp of a smile like a thread of smoke flickering around her face, "but more like a willow switch."

"Thanks for correcting me," I said. "I assume you mean that a willow switch tickles before it stings? Believe me, lady, I'm tickled shitless, but that doesn't answer my question."

"I was warned that you'd be like this."

"Who warned you?"

"Someone who knows your type," Mrs. Lomax crooned. "Like a pup with a bone: you don't know if you should chew on it, bury it, or hump it."

"Aside from the fact that I don't have any idea what you're talking about," I said, "what do you want from me?"

"When you locate this Molly McBride person and inform the Gatlin County authorities," she said, "you've completed your chore. They'll handle it from there. That's all you need to know."

"Why use me to find the woman," I said, "instead of the police or one of the big firms?"

"It's in your interest to give this chore your full attention," she said calmly. "I prefer the people who work for me to also be personally motivated." Then she stood up, leaving the little cigar smoking in the ashtray. I was clearly dismissed, and Mrs. Lomax was already out of the room in her rich mind.

"Don't you have to swear me in?" I asked Rooke.

"I don't think that's necessary in this case," Rooke said, his steel gray eyes glittering with what had to be rage, madness, or both.

"Well, I sure as hell do," I said, "but not with these goons for witnesses. Let's go down to the bar. I feel safe in bars."

"I'm sure you do, Mr. Milodragovitch," Mrs. Lomax said with a coy smile. Then she snapped, "Handle it, Rooke." She swept past us with a rustle of silk, a waft of sandalwood, and the solid weight of a gold chain swinging at her waist, a golden snake curled up her arm. Up close the young woman obviously wasn't nearly as old as her makeup made her look from a distance – not even thirty, I guessed, wondering why a young woman would want to look old – she wasn't even as old as she sounded, but her green eyes, as hard and unyielding as malachite, looked older than the dark side of the moon. Her fine features, framed by coal black hair, seemed chiseled from an ancient marble as pink and bloody as the froth from a sucking chest wound. As she walked out the door, her hips swayed like willows in the wind and her bare white shoulders gleamed like a hot flame in the smoky shadows. The last bodyguard, a large man with a pair of puckered scars in the middle of both cheeks, paused long enough to put out the smoking cigarillo, then stepped behind the old woman's wheelchair.

"Of course, if you talk about this deal, man," the bodyguard whispered, in an accent that sounded as if it were from further away than Mexico, "I will personally cut you into small pieces and feed you to the pigs."

"Thanks," I said as the bodyguard walked past, pushing the old lady. "Sorry I called you a goon." But the tiny curl of the bodyguard's lip suggested that my apology wasn't even slightly accepted.

"Let's get this over with, Milodragovitch," Rooke said as he started to follow the procession out the suite doorway.

"Don't we need a Bible or something?"

Rooke spun in the doorway, his body obviously as quick and well trained as his twin brother's had been, his jaw violently clenched, his words reduced to a thin, hard stream. "When this is over, you dumb son of a bitch," Rooke hissed, "I'm going to devote my life to destroying yours."

Given the attempts on my life, Rooke's threat didn't seem all that big a deal so I fumbled through drawers until I found a Gideon Bible, remembering that Gannon had said that the Rooke brothers had been closer than twin snakes in a single egg. The vision of baby snakes wearing glasses popped into my head. The laughter just bubbled out.

"What the fuck are you laughing about?"

"Just wondering if you slept with your forked tongue up the rich lady's ass," I said, "or took off your glasses and stuck your whole fucking head in?"

He would have come for me, but the bodyguard with the scarred cheeks laid a hand on his shoulder.

So, oddly nervous and slightly excited and more solemn than I would have imagined, in the middle of a bright fall afternoon in the Texas Hill Country, with Lalo Herrera in all his ancient Latin elegance as one of my witnesses and a bored software salesman the other, I became a peace officer for the second time in my rowdy, misbegotten life.

After Rooke slithered hastily out of the bar followed by the salesman, Lalo poured two shots of Herradura, then raised his shot glass. "Buena suerte," Lalo said, then Lalo and I sipped the smooth fire of the tequila. Lalo ran his hand through his thick hair, still crow-wing black in his seventies, and leaned over the bar.

"Milo," he said quietly, "I was born in this country of skulls…"

"Skulls?"

"Before you Anglos came, my people called this place La Tierra de Calaveras," he said. "The land of skulls."

"Any particular reason?"

"Perhaps some bandidos who used to raid down in that country south of the Nueces River had a hideout or a cave around here. Or some other people say maybe the Tonkawas left the skulls of men they had eaten piled around old campsites. No one knows. I'm just certain that many bodies are buried in this county," he said as he poured us another shot, "and many of them entombed by people very much like those who just departed. Buena suerte, amigo."

"But when I'm down to bones and ashes, mi viejo," I said, "I plan to sleep in my grandfather's ground."

I detoured through the lobby on my way back to my room. The Lomax gang was loading up. The old woman's wheelchair whirred quietly up a ramp and into the side of an extended frame black Mercedes limo with darkly smoked glass windows as Sylvie Lomax supervised. The bodyguards climbed into a Mercedes sedan of their own. A better work ride than I'd ever had.

Back in my suite, as I showered and packed my war bag, I did a casual and unsuccessful sweep of the rooms for bugs, wondering how the hell Mrs. Lomax had known I was coming by my place. When I finished, I stood in the middle of the room. Her scent still hung in the air, sweet and light beneath the burning rope stink of her cigarillo. I reconsidered the job I had taken. Maybe I should have called Thursby instead of Travis Lee. I used the room phone to call Phil Thursby, but he was in court and wouldn't be out for hours. I promised to call back. I called Travis Lee again at his office but only got his machine.

It took almost an hour to wind my way through traffic almost back to Austin, then around the lake west to the southern entrance of Tom Ben's twelve brush-choked, gully-broken, hardscrabble sections along the southern fork of Blue Creek. The entrance to his place was marked only by a battered mailbox in front of an electronic security gate. Cattle rustling was back in style these days. After somebody buzzed me in, I knew I had to cross half a dozen cattle guards and go through as many electronic gates at the electrified cross fences before I got to the main house. Tom Ben didn't much care for trespassers or modern-day cattle rustlers. His place covered a patch of land that was flatter than Betty's but broken by a series of shallow branches and dry washes so that it seemed rougher country than Betty's place. His place had suffered more from the thorny invasion of South Texas brush. But he worked it harder. At several places I saw teams of D-9 cats pulling anchor chains or root plows to clear the brush for grass pasture and hay fields to feed the small herd of Brangus cattle he ran, along with small bunches of Spanish goats he kept for barbecues.

Tom Ben still lived in the simple tin-roofed single-story fieldstone structure surrounded by a wide, shaded veranda that his great-grandfather had built. Except for electricity and indoor plumbing, it hadn't changed since it had been built just before the Mexican-American war. But the outbuildings – a hay barn, an abandoned dairy barn, and half a dozen sheds – were structural steel and as shiny as a new dime.

Betty and her uncle sat in cedar rockers on a small deck under a trio of live oaks, a pitcher of iced tea between them. Tom Ben looked nothing like his younger brother. The old man was short and sturdy, solid arms and legs and a round, drumtight belly that jutted angrily from his thick-chested body. He almost always dressed in bib overalls, rundown cowboy boots, and a battered banker's Stetson that looked as if it had been used a dozen times to swab a newly born calf or reinsert a cow's prolapsed cervix.

"You're gonna tear the bottom out of that fancy car, boy!" Tom Ben shouted as he always did, except when I arrived on horseback. "When the hell are you going to get some real Texas transportation?"

"When I want a sore ass more than a bad reputation," I answered.

"You're walking like a man who's been throwed and stomped, anyway, Milo," the old man growled.

"You should see the other guy."

"Yeah, I should have burned out that fuckin' Rooke family thirty years ago when I caught that trashy bunch roastin' one of my prize billy goats."

"You ready?" I asked Betty. She nodded. I tossed her my keys. "Why don't you move your stuff, love. I need to confer with your uncle for a minute."

Betty hesitated for a second, then took off.

"What's up, Milo?"

"I seem to have gotten even more mixed up with the Lomaxes this morning," I said. "And I wanted to ask you about a story I heard a few years ago."

" 'Bout that option to sell I supposedly signed? According to what Betty told me, you and me maybe crossed paths with the same slippery cooze."

"Maybe."

"Well, I'm glad Betty ain't here to hear this," Tom Ben said, "'cause it don't make me sound like much of a gentleman. Ah, hell, this young woman came out one Sunday when I was watching the Cowboys. Said she wanted to write a piece about my Brangus bulls for American Cattleman. Had a camera and a tape recorder and copies of some of her articles and everything. Even said she'd pay me for my time. And, hell, she knew her cattle and she was driving a cherry Jimmy pickup. She was as polite as she could be – apologized for coming during the Cowboys game, offered to come back when I wasn't busy. Of course she was as pretty as a new colt – looked more like a movie star than a journalist. But I was having my evening Jack Daniel's early that day, like I always do when the Cowboys are playing, and I offered her a splash, and hell… one thing led to another. Goddamned woman could drink, boy. Before I knew it, I'd done an interview, and some other stuff, signed a release, taken a check without looking at it, and made a damned fool of myself… Well, I bet you know the rest." The old man paused, removed the limp Stetson from his thinning gray thatch, then blushed.

"What did you do?"

"When I got my clothes back on, looked at the size of the check, and realized that I hadn't even looked at that release, I locked all the gates, and sent some hands on horseback to drag the bitch back. When she found a locked gate, she tried to head cross-country. Banged up her pickup a little bit and tore up 'bout ten thousand dollars' worth of fence-line, and hid that signed option before my hands caught up with her." He paused, dug in the pocket of his overalls for a blackened stub of a pipe. "Wouldn't have done her no good anyway," he added, but I wasn't listening.

"What happened then?"

"She fought my boys like a wet cat till they got her hog-tied and locked in the corn crib in the dairy barn with a pile of unshucked ears I keep for the goats, then I told her about the rats and mice in the corn, and reminded her that wherever you find rats and mice, you're bound to find rattlesnakes. Hell, she spent ten days in there drinking stale water and doing her business in a bucket, but she wouldn't say a word. Though I was damn sure it was that fuckin' Lomax who sent her. So we stashed her classic Jimmy pickup in an old line shack over there on the northwest pasture beside the catch pond."

I remembered seeing the shack and the pond one of the times I had ridden one of Betty's saddle horses over to the old man's ranch.

"Hell, I had half a mind to bury it in the bottom of the pond 'cause we'd just dug it, but that model is such a great truck, I couldn't bring myself to do that. Then my hands dropped the bitch off in downtown Austin, and I tried to forget about the whole mess.

"Believe me, boy, these days when I have my evening whiskey, I lock all the doors and windows first," Tom Ben said, then laughed bitterly. "And I keep waiting for that piece of paper to show up. That fuckin' Lomax will get this place over my dead body." He paused to light his pipe, then a snort of laughter blew out the match. "And not even then actually," he added.

"Is this the woman?" I unfolded one of the head shots Carver D had scanned off the Lodge registration videotape.

The old man nodded, suddenly sad. "If that goddamned Travis Lee hadn't come limping back from jump school all shiny in his uniform while I was still in Korea, everything would have been different."

"Sir?" I said, confused by this sudden turn in the conversation.

"You didn't know? Son of a bitch ran off with the woman I was supposed to marry when I got back from Korea," he said, stood, then jammed his shapeless Stetson back on his head, and rolled on his old bow legs and frozen feet back to the veranda steps where he stopped and turned. "Betty said you gave away a piece of family land one time."

"I kept enough to be buried in," I said.

"What'd it feel like?"

"Since my great-grandfather had sort of stolen the land from the Benewah Indian tribe," I confessed, "it didn't exactly feel like a family place."

Tom Ben thought about that for a moment, rubbed his chin, puffed on the stubby pipe, then said, "Goddamned little brother of mine brought home the mumps from high school, too, so there was never going to be any children for me, either." Then he shook his head, grinned ruefully, then stepped into the shadows of his house.

I looked at the photograph one more time, folded it, and stuffed it back into my pocket, then stepped off the porch, and walked to the Caddy where Betty waited. I grabbed the manila envelope out of the front seat, and we stepped away from the car.

"I should have known she was a professional," I said.

"He told you about the woman?" she said. "He must really like you," she added. "He's never even told me the whole story. Just hinted about it."

"Right," I said, "and he mentioned something about Travis Lee running off with his fiancée."

She nodded sharply.

"What happened?"

"After a fling," Betty said, "Travis Lee dumped her to marry a rich girl, and she committed suicide. Tom Ben never spoke to him again."

"You mean your uncles never speak?"

"Sometimes through lawyers. Sometimes through me."

"And you never said a word to me?" I said, amazed.

"Down here people aren't raised to talk with your mouth full or about family stuff," she said. I assumed that by "down here" she meant Texas, which seemed to have a different set of rules of family behavior than the rest of the world. "Why? Is it important?"

"At this point I don't have any idea what's important," I said, "but it's sure as hell interesting. Wait until I tell you why I'm late." I handed her the manila envelope.

"You're kidding," Betty said after she discovered Gatlin County's new approach. "How's it feel? One minute behind bars. The next behind a badge."

"Actually, I'm not going to wear it. I'm going to carry it in my pocket."

"What now?"

"We're going to cash this little check," I said, "Then we'll find out how Mrs. Lomax knew I was going by my place."