The Final Country

FIFTEEN

Now that I had a place to live and get ready for the endgame, I had to find some professional help. I usually worked alone, but my experience with the salt-and-pepper bodyguard team in Dallas and Fresno's rescue of the McCraveys had changed my mind about a lot of things. This job seemed to call for help. So I crutched out to my giant pickup, hopped in, and drove to a turnout at the top of the Blue Hollow Rim, then unlimbered my cell phone.

Bob Culbertson had moved back in with his folks when he lost his job, and his mother told me that Bob was supposed to be out looking for work, but she suspected that this time of the afternoon he was probably drowning his sorrows in some low-rent beer joint. "I don't understand it," she said. "That kid really liked that job, and if he can't find something soon, I'm afraid he'll just go back in the Army. He was an MP, you know."

She said Bob would probably be checking in shortly, so I left my number and told her that I might have something for him involving law enforcement. But I didn't explain that the job was going to be along the lines of breaking the law, instead of enforcing it. My cell phone trilled before I could start the pickup.

The terrible force of coincidence that had plagued me since the day I had followed Enos Walker into the bar took one more shot at me. Bob Culbertson and Carol Jean Warren were playing pool at Over the Line. Leonard Wilbur was even behind the bar, holding a clipboard and counting bottles again. Even though he looked me directly in the face as the bartender handed me a beer, Wilbur didn't recognize me. I took that as a good sign.

I took my beer and walked down to the pool table where they were playing for ten dollars a stick. Culbertson looked a bit down in the mouth.

"You kids looking for work?" I said. They looked up startled. Neither of them had any idea who I was. I promised myself that if I survived all this, I was going to shear the hair and shave the beard. I couldn't do anything about the mustache, but maybe it wouldn't make me look like a dead man.

After I straightened out the confusion and introduced them, I took them into town for a late lunch at Threadgill's to explain to them what I wanted.

Carol Jean, who had discovered, as one often does, that working in beer joints wasn't nearly as much fun as hanging out in them, said yes without even asking what the job might be or how much it might pay. Bob was a bit more reluctant. He still wanted to pursue a career in law enforcement. So instead of explaining, I asked him a question.

"How'd you lose your job?" I asked.

"County budget cuts, they said."

"When you went down to check on Ty Rooke's body, did you hear a cell phone ringing in the other fanny pack?"

"Sure. Why?"

"That's why you lost your job," I said. "They wanted to be sure that your testimony would be suspect. I'd bet money that you'll find a letter in your file, dismissing you for fucking up evidence somehow."

"Well, that's a goddamned lie."

"That's how they work it," I said. "They write the lies on official documents. That way they're almost impossible to deny. But I think I can fix it."

"I think I'd be interested," Bob said slowly.

"Just where the hell do I fit in?" Carol Jean asked, a hunk of chicken-fried steak speared on her fork.

"I don't know exactly," I admitted, "but you strike me as the best sort of Texas woman," I said. "You can drive a stick shift, shoot a weapon, you're computer-literate, you're dead solid honest, and you're probably dangerous."

"And not all that hard to look at, either, Carol Jean," Bob said, smiling as she blushed.

"My friends call me CJ," she said, then turned to me. "How did you know I could shoot?"

"Honey, between your mother and your soon-to-be ex-husband I knew your whole life story before I found you the first time," I said.

"My mother! Goddammit, she gave me up?" she squealed. "If it hadn't been for her, I would never have married that lame son of a bitch anyway. At least there were no kids and no foolin' around. Those are the hardest things to get over in a divorce. I remember that from my mother's two disasters."

"Hey, I need a couple of drivers, a couple of bodyguards who don't look like thugs, and a couple of smart snoops," I said. "So a cowgirl and a boy scout will suit me fine. Maybe the bad guys won't pay any attention. I can only promise the work will be interesting and the pay excessive."

"Jesus, what do you need protection for?" Bob said. "Ty Rooke was just about the toughest motherfucker I ever saw -"

"You don't have to say 'motherfucker' in front of me, Bob," CJ interrupted, "just to prove you're not a boy scout."

"- and you took him out," Bob finished, trying hard neither to blush nor glance at CJ.

"That was pure luck, kiddo," I said. "Unfortunately, the most important element in survival is luck. I'm just trying to reduce the factor that luck plays in this little effort to wind things up."

"Sounds good to me," CJ said, and Bob nodded eagerly. "So what do we do now?" CJ said. "What you said, it's all true," she added blushing. "All but the part about the stick shift."

"So what do we do now?" Bob said.

"Gather up your shit and let's move deeper into the Hill Country," I said. "And you can teach CJ how to drive a stick shift."

"I'm sorta without wheels," CJ said.

I told her to toss her stuff in Bob's pickup and ride out with him. Once she learned to drive a stick, she could use Tom Ben's ranch truck.

So we had six weeks of relative calm, working the phones and the computers, working the exercise machines, and eating Maria's great food. She missed Tom Ben, her loneliness eating at her like a cold wind, but she kept our systems running on chili verde, chicken enchiladas, and came asada. We ate so well that a night out for us was a visit to McDonald's to soothe our fiery gastrointestinal tracts. The three of us had taken a couple of quick trips in rental cars – one to Little Rock and one to Albuquerque – to pick up two Remington 7mm Magnum rifles with Weaver scopes, a stun gun, a little Sundance.22 derringer, and a S &W stainless steel Ladysmith from private party newspaper ads or gun shows. We also picked up a used telephone van for cash.

Back at the ranch Bob and CJ sighted in the rifles and ran rounds through them until the weapons felt like parts of their bodies. CJ ran me through two-a-day workouts as if I was training for the senior Olympics. When she wasn't trying to kill me, CJ spent her daylight hours digging in the dust of courthouse records in the five counties around Gatlin. When I wasn't working out or recovering, Bob and I worked the phones, mostly international calls. In the early evening hours Petey hacked his way into most of the computers we needed. Even if he couldn't get in, we could find out who to bribe. They left that to me, resplendent in my new wardrobe of tweed suits. At night, Bob and I followed CJ around the pool tables, bars, and beer joints of Gatlin and Travis counties, picking up bits and pieces of information, tracking tidbits of gossip, following the rills of rumors. I continued my ruse with the crutch and the light cast on my left arm, and discovered that more people talked to me about more things in my guise as a crippled old codger than they ever had when I was a hard-nosed private dick.

But finally the picture was as clear as we could make it without getting personally involved. But before I visited Tobin Rooke, I had to face Rollie Molineaux with the death of his daughter. And confess my sorry part in that loss. I wanted that chore out of the way before we moved onto the really hard part of the job.

Although I didn't have a clear,picture in my head of what had happened that night at Duval's so long ago and the endless repercussions that echoed through a dozen people's lives, I climbed into the pickup and slipped out the back gate in the middle of a star-shot night, hoping to at least clear my conscience.

When I got to Houston, I discovered that the Longhorn Tavern had fallen prey to a new freeway exit, which made me oddly sad. I wondered what had happened to Fat Annie and Joe Willie Custer, where they had gone when the beer joint had closed, wondered where we were going to go when the last good beer joint finally fell all the way down. Rollie's house was empty, too, a for sale sign in the yard. He wasn't hiding, so he wasn't hard to find. But Rollie Molineaux was the last person I expected to help fill in the picture.

I found him sitting in a worn lawn chair on a dock jutting into the dark, sluggish water behind a bait shop on one of the many unnamed arms of Bayou Teche. A cigarette jutting out of his crooked, gray-stubbled jaw, a beer between his legs, and a battered captain's hat tilted at a rakish angle on the back of his head.

"Mr. Molineaux," I said when I stepped onto the dock. "I'd like to talk to you."

Rollie turned, a half-grin exposing a brown stain on the partial plate in the side of his mouth. "Hey there," he said. "You be lookin' like you might be that bastard who broke my jaw, but you're a mite older."

"Not as old as I feel," I admitted.

"Sit a bit and have a brew," he said, nodding toward the lawn chair beside him, then digging into the cooler at his feet. "Unless you're lookin' to beat on me some more, man."

"Sorry," I said as I sat down.

"Ain't no big thing," he said, handing me a beer.

"I've got some bad news for you."

"Ain't nobody brought me much good news lately."

"Your daughter is dead," I said, laying it out as quickly as I could.

"Yeah. I figured when I didn't hear from her when Jimmy Fish went down that no news might be bad news. He do her?"

"No, it was an accident," I said. "She got shot up in Montana."

"Montana," he said as if it was a foreign country. "What she be doin' up in that cold country?"

"Helping me on a job."

"Well, ain't that the shits."

"Yes, sir," I said.

"They said Jimmy got shot, too," he said. "You do him?"

"Some French guy put one in his ear."

"Guess I'm not surprised," he said. "He was bound to get shot someday. I should have put one in his head years ago when I thought he was foolin' around with my baby girl. You know how it is, man. Sometimes you got a best friend like a bad woman. No matter what they do, you keep hangin' around." Then he paused to open another beer, his odd apology ended. "What happened? Up there in Montana."

"Oh, hell," I said. "This guy I was looking for, he was beating me to death, and she put a.22 round up his nose. But he pulled the trigger at the same time. He pulled the trigger, but the people who started this, they're the ones who killed her."

"Ain't that the shits," he said again.

"I couldn't stop it," I admitted. "It tore the heart right out of me." I pulled the Shark of the Moon out of my pocket. "She was a fine woman," I said. "She talked about you a lot. I think she'd want you to have this."

Rollie looked momentarily uncomfortable, then he held up the stone to watch it shine in the sunlight, and he smiled. "She must have thought well of you to tell you about this ol' thing. Belonged to her Momma. I picked it up down in Belize on a run once." He didn't have to say what kind of run. "The mortal shits."

"You know, the people who got her mixed up in all this, I think they should pay," I said. "I intend to make them pay. But I need your help."

"Anything, man." I showed him the photo of Amanda Rae Quarrels. "Sure," he said. "That would be Amelia Fontinot, you bet, after she bleached her hair. This is her Daddy's old place. Jimmy left it to me. She'd be his half-sister, you know, younger. She married that old Desmond Quarries fellow from Morgan City, but I think Jimmy was fuckin' her and he sold her off to Des. He'd do things like that, you know. But she don't much look like that no more. Last time I saw her, I didn't even recognize her."

"When's the last time you saw her?" I asked.

"Shit, I don't know. Seven, maybe eight years ago," he said. "Back when I still had a boat. Jimmy and I picked her up off a tanker in the Gulf and brought her home. With some young girl. Hell, she didn't even say kiss my ass, thanks, or goodbye. But I sure got fucked over later. Couple of weeks later the DEA came calling. They found a bag of smack on my boat and that was all she wrote. Goddamned woman must have left it there. I was lucky to stay out of the joint. But they finally believed me. I never ran any coke or heroin. Nothing but smoke. That was my rule."

"When you and Jimmy were working offshore, you ever work for Hayden Lomax?"

"That cheap son of a bitch," he said. "Nobody with any sense ever worked for that sorry junkhouse outfit. Only people ever worked for Lomax was three-fingered winos like ol' Des."

"Thanks," I said, finishing my beer and standing up. "I got to be going now."

"Let me know what happens," he said.

"You already know too much," I said. "Thanks again."

Then I left him sitting in the warm, soft sunshine, left him with his memories, and the dark shadows of the stone. And a clear conscience, I hoped.

As I walked back through the bait shop, I glanced once more into the dusty webbed shadows. A dozen glass-eyed deer and boar heads glittered in the shadows. I didn't have to ask who had killed them. An old woman, her face blurred behind fat and great hairy moles, sat in a funky heap behind the counter, knitting at an unidentifiable hunk of clothing, her hooded eyes gleaming, the wings of her coal-black hair shining like a pair of obsidian axe blades.

Driving back from Houston I took a quick detour by Stairtown and Homer's place. Of course, there was no body in the mudpit. Sissy's BMW had disappeared, too. The old shack was scrubbed as clean as a dog's plate. No crime scene, no evidence, no past or future. The pumpjacks rocked and buzzards drifted across an empty sky while I had a beer and a couple of cigarettes, mourning the dead woman in the pit.

On the outskirts of Austin I called Reverend Walker. He said he didn't want me at his church and he didn't want to be seen in public with me, but I didn't give him any choice.

He stood at the bar of the Four Seasons, a large, uncomfortable man sipping at a tonic water. He turned to glower at me as I edged in beside him but smiled aimlessly when he saw the white hair and the crutch and nodded politely without a glimmer of recognition. Once I had a drink, I leaned over to whisper, "I'm sorry, man, but your brother is dead."

Walker spun quickly, recognizing me now. "Watch yourself, old man," he growled. "Just watch it."

I had a slow swallow of Scotch, then faced him. "It's true," I said. "He's dead, and I am very sorry."

"What happened?"

"Nothing that's going to come back on you."

"And the girl?" I nodded. "Damn," he said grimly. "It didn't have to happen that way."

"It's done," I said. "You've been doing good work for a long time. Keep it up. But what you need to do now is get a lawyer and an accountant to destroy every trace of any connection with Hayden Lomax."

"Why?"

"Just do it."

"You can't go up against Lomax," he said. "He'll turn you into fish food."

"Maybe not," I said. "Not if I've got the mortal nuts on him."

"Good luck," he said. "You'll need it."

"Thanks."

As I left, I heard Walker order a double Wild Turkey rocks from the bartender. I hoped he stopped after one. A man carrying that sort of guilt shouldn't be drinking hard. It could kill him.

I sent the kids off to Vegas with a bundle of cash for Fresno and to get them out of town. I had a couple of days to waste until Friday night, so I spent it reloading some.22 hollow point shorts and sitting on the porch carving seasoned cedar sticks into thin, sharp strips that would fit under my cast.

Late one afternoon as stately storm cells drifted up from the Gulf, trailing rain like silver skirts, Carver D and Hangas showed up without calling. I didn't even bother to ask how they had gotten through the gates. Hangas climbed out of the driver's seat, then walked slowly around to open the back door of the old Lincoln, his grin bright in the spring sunshine.

"My man looks good, doesn't he?" Hangas said as Carver D slipped out of the limo.

Carver D had dropped thirty or forty pounds. His eyes were clear, his voice resonant, and although he wasn't exactly nimble on two canes, he was moving. And smiling as he eased into the rocker beside me.

"What the hell are you guys doing out here?" I said.

"If you'd answer your telephone or return your calls," he said, "we wouldn't have to break into your solitude."

"I've been busy," I said.

"Busy," he said, sweeping his cane through the pile of shavings between my feet. "Busy as a beaver, I see." When I just kept running the blade of the Old Timer down a length of cedar, Carver D continued. "You're planning something awful, aren't you? Some kind of terrible revenge?"

"I'm retired."

"You're a base liar," he said. "You need Hangas to help?"

I glanced at Hangas resplendent in his tailored suit, smiling as calmly as a cobra might smile. "He's the most dangerous man I know," I said, "and I appreciate the offer. But nothing's happening."

"Milo, you shouldn't lie to your friends."

I had no answer for that. So we left it there, chatted until one of the thundershowers rattled the tin roof, then they left.

Tom Ben was never able to talk about the Rooke family without including the phrase "carpet-bagging goat-fucking white trash." The family had moved down after the Civil War, had scammed a section of land in the hills behind the Bad Corner, but as far as I could find out, they never had been charged with sexual congress with farm animals. Over the years the family had sold off pieces of the land, drifted off to California, or various institutions, penal or otherwise, leaving the twins sole owners of a five-acre plot right in the center of the unzoned tangle of the old home place, a jungle of variously sized lots, crooked roads, and Hill Country scrub land, and a gravel pit. Shortly after Tobin finished law school and Ty had been promoted to plainclothes, with financing that should have raised IRS flags, the boys had built a rambling brick home. They dated enough to forestall rumors of homosexuality, but never married. And except for a reputation left over from their college years for being particularly vicious bar fighters, their characters were beyond reproach in Gatlin County. Or as a retired deputy had said to me one night in a beer joint out on Lake Travis, "The best reputations money can buy."

Every Friday after he finished at the courthouse, Tobin Rooke stopped for a couple of glasses of white wine at the only upscale bar in Gatlinsburg, then drove down to Austin for a stop at the Whole Foods Market, then home for whatever he did on his lonely Friday nights. We had followed him for weeks, and his pattern never changed. But I followed him in the repainted van this Friday night just to be sure.

I let him put his car in the garage, watched the lights come on, then pulled the van in front, and went up to the door. He opened the door when I rang the bell. He had no reason not to open the door: a telephone company van in front of his house, an old man in a telephone company uniform and carrying a telephone company tool kit at his door. He couldn't see the stun gun in my hand, the latex gloves, or the hand with the sap glove on it. I let him say, "Yes?" before I hit him in the chest with the stun gun.

Maybe I missed with one of the electrodes. Maybe his suit coat got in the way. Or maybe these Rookes were impossible to get down. Whatever, he got enough charge to fling him backward off his feet, knock his glasses off, and scatter health food across the carpet. But he didn't pause, just rolled up to his feet ready to kill as I stepped through the door.

He was on me like a spider, sweeping the stun gun aside as if I wasn't there, then had me in a choke hold a moment later. We crashed around the living room for a few seconds as I tried to buck him off. Unsuccessfully. I was a dead man until I finally managed to dig the derringer out of my pocket and fire the two rounds over my shoulder. I missed him, but the powder burns and percussion cone got him off my back long enough for me to slap him with the sap glove, cracking the skin over his cheekbone. He still didn't go down, but at least he paused, his hands protecting his face. I hit him in the liver hard enough to lift him off his feet. He finally went down.

When Rooke came back, after the third or fourth glass of ice water in his face, he found himself stripped to his shorts, his hands and legs cuffed to the legs of a metal kitchen chair leaning against the refrigerator door. I didn't trust duct tape to hold him any more than I trusted myself not to shoot the crazy bastard in the eye. He came back to consciousness as if he had never been away.

"Do you know who I am, old man?" he said. "You're in a shit-load of trouble."

"Do you know who I am, asshole?" I said. "You're probably in more trouble than I am."

"What do you want?" he asked, not missing a beat. He knew who I was now. "We can work something out, Mr. Milodragovitch."

"I'd really like to know who hired your brother to kill me."

"That's going to be a problem -" he started to say.

I interrupted by placing the derringer against the fold of his armpit and pulling the trigger. It was a light load, but the powder burn seared the skin and the notched hollow point carved a deep groove through his flesh, a painful red, white, and black furrow. I had some idea of how much this must have hurt, but Rooke seemed totally surprised. Before he got his breath back, I sloshed a bit of organic habanero salsa onto a dish towel. He looked as if he couldn't believe what was happening. Then I snuggled the cloth into the wound, and taped the towel over his shoulder.

Rooke didn't have much to say. He seemed to have fainted. He just sprawled in the chair and drooled while I cleaned him up and started my search of the house.

"Well," I said half an hour later – the bastard hadn't even bothered to lock the entrance to the basement -"since you know who I am, asshole, and if I don't care that you know who I am, then you probably realize that when I leave here, you don't have much of a chance of being alive. It's simply a matter of how much pain you can stand."

"Bring it on, you son of a bitch."

"Since you threatened to ruin my life, and as far as I can tell you're still trying – rumor has it that you're planning to convince the grand jury to indict me for Billy Long's death – there's some other stuff you should consider," I said. "Credit card records put either you, your brother, or both of you in six cities across the country in the past six years where young women have been raped, tortured, mutilated, and killed. You never came to the FBI's attention because you bastards are law enforcement. You covered your tracks perfectly, cleaned the crime scenes professionally. You used different setups and took different parts of the body each time. Was Annette McBride the first? Or just another one? What the fuck were you doing? And how stupid was it to keep your souvenirs in a freezer in the basement?

"Oh, you're surprised that I know about the basement, you sick son of a bitch?" I said. I'd been around some bad people in my life, but I'd never been in the presence of a monster. I could have wished that some genetic malfunction in the egg had created these bastards, but I didn't believe it. Evil just exists. I could only hope it wouldn't infect me when I destroyed this particular version. "The basement's not in the building plans, sure, but what the hell did you do with all that cement you bought? And you bastards sold a dozen dump truck loads of topsoil. How fucking stupid and greedy can you be? Why didn't you just dump it in the lake?"

Rooke shook his head so hard that drops of sweat flew off his bald head. I could see his lips moving but no words came out as I removed the salsa-soaked dish towel from under his armpit. I found a pile of dish towels neatly stacked in a broom closet, wet one and used it to mop the salsa off his wound, then filled another with ice cubes, and placed it under his arm. I could almost hear the sigh of relief and could see the smile forming on his thin lips.

"So you want to tell me who hired your brother, Rooke?" I asked as I replaced the empty rounds in the derringer. "Or you want me to put another round in you? I know some places that will hurt even more. A hell of a lot more."

He wanted to tell me but he just couldn't bring himself to do it. Over the next hour or so, I thought I was going to either run out of rounds, hot sauce, or soft tissue before he broke. He wept like an angry child as I carried his naked, bloody body over my shoulder down the hidden basement stairs behind a workbench in the garage.

"Tell me who hired your brother," I said as I sat him on a desk chair and rolled him into the walk-in freezer, "and I'll let you live." Rooke wanted to believe me, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do it. He shook his head wildly. "Fuck it," I said, and put a point-blank round into the maze of tiny bones in his left wrist, then another, then dumped the rest of the habanero sauce into the wounds.

He couldn't get the name out fast enough. I was mildly surprised. But only mildly.

This sort of thing was more my ex-partner's style than mine, and I knew I'd never feel quite the same about myself again. But it had to be done. And it was. I reloaded the derringer, slipped it over his right thumb, then walked out, locking the freezer door behind me. The screams of pain had ruined to rage. I glanced in the porthole. I assumed Rooke had tried to turn the pistol around in his hand so he could shoot me in the back. Because it lay between his bound feet. I left him there in that terrible room of his own making, left him without looking back.

When I got back to the ranch, the kids had gotten back from Vegas early, driving straight through once they realized I had sent them on a useless chore to get them out of the way for a few days. I had some idea how the night with Tobin Rooke might go and I didn't want them involved. They wanted to know what had happened, but I snapped at them, told them to shut up so harshly, they actually stayed quiet. And never brought it up again.

I needed a bar, but they were all closed, so I made the kids stand around the fire pit and drink with me until dawn as we ditched the gear I'd taken, the telephone uniform, and even the tires off the telephone van. Bob melted the derringer down with a welding torch. I didn't think anybody would want to investigate Tobin Rooke's disappearance too hard. Particularly after the law found where he was hiding.

During that long night's aftermath, I discovered why CJ had been blessed with two names at birth, and managed to listen to the details of every arrest Bob had made during his time as an MP in Germany, but finally about dawn the kids ran down and drifted off to bed. I seemed to have been pouring the tequila into a hole inside me, a hole that I could not fill. Whatever sort of drunken relief I had been seeking refused to come. I took the Herradura bottle and a six-pack around front. I meant to sit on the porch and watch the sunrise, but I was drawn to the abandoned dairy barn. The flat sunlight scattered like tiny knives off the corrugated steel walls. I went inside, into the tin shadows to sit on the cot and drink. Sunlight shot through the bullet holes in the wall, shafts of light as solid as the rounds that had given them form. I had a dozen things to think about, but the memories of Molly filled my mind. I dug Tom Ben's worthless option out of my billfold, stared at it until the letters blurred in front of my eyes. Fucking greedy bastards. They had started it, and now I had to finish it. But right now all I had to do was hope that I'd be able to finish the tequila before it finished me.