The Final Country

SIXTEEN

Except for my two-a-day workouts, which CJ refused to let me stop, and a procession of legal messengers, everything came to a halt for a week. When I had the strength, I sat on the front porch with my pocketknife, whittling a pile of thin cedar blades, sipping slow, tasteless beers, and watching the cloud shadows drift across the breaks of the Hill Country. Finally, after lunch one day just as I was finishing the ninth or tenth blade, the kids rebelled, stomped out on the porch to demand action.

"Okay, boss-man," CJ said sternly, "we can understand that you've been through some tough times, but quite frankly we're gettin' bored bein' paid for doin' nothin'."

"That's right," Bob agreed.

I checked the tips of the wooden blades with my thumb until I found one to my liking, then said, "Bob, you drive up to Killeen this afternoon, buy a couple of gillie suits for you guys. Pay cash. Cover your tracks. And CJ, I need aerial photographs of Travis Lee's place on the Gulf and a USGS topo map. When you get back, we'll get out the fiberglass tape and build a slightly larger cast for my arm. Cash. No tracks." They nodded and headed down the walk.

"And before you go," I added, "somebody hand me my cell phone."

I finally returned Sylvie Lomax's calls. She didn't want to take my call, but I badgered and threatened various functionaries until she came on the line, breathless and angry.

"Mr. Milodragovitch," she said stiffly, "I thought all our business was concluded."

"Except for two things, Mrs. Lomax. I want to make a final report, in person," I said, "and I want to meet with your husband, also in person."

"I'm afraid that such a meeting would be quite impossible," she said.

"Tell him that I've got the signed option for Tom Ben Wallingford's ranch," I said. "Maybe he'll be interested in that. And if you're interested in maintaining your life in the current manner, you better make it happen. I'll tear this shit down around your pretty little Cajun head." She started to say something, but I rode right over her. "Ten o'clock in the morning three days from now." I wanted the meeting before the onshore breeze kicked up. No wind to push the rifle rounds. "And let's meet on neutral ground. Travis Lee Wallingford's place on the Gulf. On the deck. I'll come alone and unarmed. You people can bring as many guns as you want. Just as long as you're there, your aunt, and his Aunt Alma. These are my last days here, lady, so this is your husband's only chance to deal. And your only chance to save your ass."

"But there's not enough time," she wailed.

"Make time," I said. Before I broke the connection, I overheard a burst of Cajun French that I assumed was directed at the fat woman in the wheelchair.

Travis Lee wasn't any more interested in the meeting than Sylvie Lomax had been. Until I dangled the promise to let him broker any deal that might come out of the meeting. When I got hold of Betty, she flatly refused to attend. I reminded her that this was her last chance to influence the future of Blue Creek. Then she reluctantly agreed. Cathy was harder to convince, but I knew enough about her involvement to force her to come.

After the kids took off on their chores, I took the Ladysmith and sacrificed one of Tom Ben's goats. I gave the goat to Maria to butcher, dug the.357 slug out of the rocky dirt. Once I had packaged the revolver and the slug, I called Gannon at the courthouse to ask him to meet me at the bar. He was reluctant, but I made him promise.

Once we had hunkered over our drinks at the far end of the bar, he stopped grousing long enough to ask, "What the hell do you want?"

I waited, staring into the depths of Blue Hollow. "I understand Tobin Rooke is missing," I said slowly.

"You want to tell me how it is you know that, partner?" he said.

"Partner?" I said. "Is that your new boots talking?"

"Nobody knows outside the department," he said, blushing about his cowboy boots. "How the hell do you know?"

"You don't want to know," I said. "You search the house?"

Gannon looked around as if somebody might be listening in an empty bar in the middle of the afternoon. "It looks like somebody came in, tortured him, then took off with the body. My crime scene boys said nothing of value was missing from the house. I guess we're going to have to bring in the FBI."

"Hold off on that," I said. "Three days if you can work it. Then go back, check out the garage. There's a switch under the vise that unlocks the workbench. Pull it out. The pegboard will come with it," I said. "You'll find some stairs and some shit in the basement that will make you sick but it will nail down your job permanently and maybe even make you sheriff next election."

"So what do I owe you for this information?"

"Not much," I said. "You're one of the few people down here who never lied to me. But you could take care of this," I said, then handed him a package. "There's a Ladysmith.357 in here and a flattened round. Swap it for the one that killed Ty Rooke, fix the paperwork, and bring me the other piece."

"Not much?" he complained angrily. "Jesus, you're taking a chance."

"Right. But you'll do it," I said.

"Why should I?"

"Because it's the right thing to do," I said, raising my glass. "That has to be worth something to you."

"I hope this is goodbye," Gannon said, raising his drink.

"As soon as I have the piece in my hand," I said, "we can have that last drink, man."

"You're a son of a bitch," he said.

I sat at the bar, sipping slow beers and staring down into the sparkling water of Blue Creek as it streamed over the low water crossing in the park below. The afternoon shadows bleached the grass and the pale new leaves. Joggers wound through the paths. Winter seemed forever away. I intended to keep it away.

Gannon came back an hour later and handed me the package. He refused a drink, though, and refused to shake my hand. He was a cop, after all. After one more hard look, a sigh that came with an angry tilt of his thick jaw, he turned, and lurched out of my life. He still hadn't mastered cowboy boots.

Of course the last day had to be a perfect day. During the night before, battalions of storm cells moved through, resplendent with wind and lightning, but this morning, the Gulf was as gray and flat as a lead coin, the shallow swells gasping their last against the hard-packed sand. A breeze swept across the beach, dry enough to keep the humidity down, the air bearable. Great clumps of clouds passed overhead occasionally, providing snatches of shade.

Bob and CJ had been deployed since the night before. Their position wasn't perfect – we had to work the topo map and the aerial photographs by flashlight – but they were invisible, sight lines clear, buried in the dune grass down the beach from Travis Lee's house. I could only hope they wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger when the time came.

I arrived at Travis Lee's thirty minutes early, but the four Lomax bodyguards were already arranged around the glass-enclosed deck. I came without weapons, except for Betty's revolver, which I carried by the open cylinder. I set it on a table by the door, so I was clean when the bodyguards searched me with both their hands and a metal detector. They took my weighted crutch away, but CJ had made the cast on my left arm heavier than usual and camouflaged it even further with a sling. The bodyguard with the puckered scars on his cheeks hit me in the nuts fairly hard when he searched my crotch. I tried not to give him the pleasure of grunting and bending over, but I couldn't manage it.

"You're getting older every minute, old man," he said, "and I think maybe you're about as old as you're going to get, you fuck with my boss. Where's the paper?"

"Believe me, man, I'd never fuck with your boss. She's too good a shot," I said as I flopped heavily into a redwood deck chair. He ignored my comment. "This is just business," I added. When Travis Lee stepped out of the back door, I saw a shadowy figure half-hidden, and I asked for a beer. "Something in a can," I added. The scar-faced bodyguard nodded in agreement. Travis Lee went back inside without a word.

"You're smart, old man," the bodyguard said, patting me on the shoulder like an obedient child. "Stay that way. You'll live longer." Then he took up his stance directly behind me, his coat open for easy access to the mini-Uzi hanging under his arm. His compatriots leaned against the glass wall windbreak, one in the middle, the others at the far corners of the deck.

Travis Lee, dressed in his lawyer suit and black boots, his golden belt buckle gleaming dully in the sunshine, joined me at the table as he handed me a can of Tecate. Travis had a stiff bourbon in a heavy crystal glass wrapped tightly in his hand. "You want to let me take a look at the option, son?" he said.

"Lomax sees it first," I said, then added, "But you can hold it." Then I slipped it out of the cast and handed it over. He took it, trying very hard not to look at it or smell it. "You know, a bartender once told me that when Mandy Rae came through town she fucked everybody from the governor to his pet bullfrog."

Travis Lee looked at me oddly, then glanced down at the folded, rumpled paper. "Where's the check, son? The check was never cashed." I slipped the check out of my cast and handed that to him. It had been in the envelope the lawyer had handed me at Tom Ben's probate hearing. Travis Lee laughed, waving the check and the option together. "Looks like a negotiable instrument," he said. "We can do some business this morning."

"But it's my business, Wallingford," I said as I jerked the option and the check out of his hands. "So I'll take those back please. Bring him to me."

Betty and Cathy showed up on time, which I hadn't expected. They sat down at the table by the door, their faces pale and stiff, their eyes hidden behind dark glasses, their mouths pressed into straight, tight lines. Betty touched the Ladysmith carefully with one finger as if the piece might be alive.

"What's this?" she said to me.

"Your ticket out of this mess," I said.

"The detective gathers the suspects," Cathy said with a sneer.

"Suspects is not the word I would have chosen," I said. "You ladies should have killed me while you had the chance. Because you're going to regret it now."

Cathy's answering smile was only vaguely human. "Maybe you'll pay more attention to who you fuck now," she said.

"You can count on that," I said.

At least Betty had the grace to look away.

A few moments later I heard the Lomax parade arrive and park under Travis Lee's house. The quiet rumble of the stretch limo, the whirr of the wheelchair, the murmurs of their voices – all of the sound loud and clear as it echoed off the glass walls. Sylvie walked beside the driver, who guided the old woman's electric wheelchair up the ramp. The old woman had one shawl draped over her shoulders, another over her useless legs. She stopped her chair at the table nearest to the end of the ramp, and Sylvie sat beside her. Once again both were dressed in black.

Hayden Lomax and his Aunt Alma followed them. Lomax was middle-aged but still as trim and with the same bouncing walk that he must have had on the courts of his youth. He had arrived in a polo shirt, chinos, and deck shoes. As if down for a party weekend. His curly hair was shot with gray, but his face was cherubic, pleasant, complete with a boyish grin that he couldn't seem to control. For all the world, I'll swear he looked like an innocent.

His Aunt Alma walking beside him was something else. She had the countenance of an axe murderer. She had to be in her seventies but she wasn't even slightly stooped with age. In fact, she looked as if she could still get right in your face and go to the basket. Or knock you to your knees and make you pray for forgiveness until they bled. Lomax obviously deferred to her, and not just because he had to look up to her. The old woman was at least six inches taller than he was, even with his bouncing, youthful gait. Another thing was obvious: The old woman despised Sylvie and the woman in the wheelchair. When she happened to glance their way, her lips pursed as if she had just eaten a persimmon. Or smelled something deeply corrupt. This verified the rumors Bob and I had picked up in the bars from people who had once worked for the Lomaxes.

The Lomax parade gathered at the two tables nearest the ramp. Travis Lee fawned over them as he provided drinks. I stayed where I was, scratching not so aimlessly at the inside of my cast.

"Mr. Lomax," Travis Lee boomed as he brought him over to my table, "I'd like you to meet my partner, Milo Milodragovitch."

Lomax acknowledged me with a nod and his involuntary grin. "Milodragovitch," he said.

"That's Mr. Milodragovitch," I said, suspecting that he had never heard my name in his life.

"Be nice," the bodyguard whispered behind me as he slapped me lightly on the head.

"I've never heard that name before," Lomax said in an oddly high, piping voice, a voice that went with his silly grin. "What is it, Russian?"

"Irish, I think," I said. I was right. He didn't know who I was.

Travis Lee said, "Let's get down to business."

"First things first," I said. "Mr. Lomax, for reasons I won't go into, but I'm sure you'll understand shortly, it's imperative that this conversation be private, unrecorded. Believe me, sir, you're not going to want a record of this meeting. So if everybody will throw any electronic devices they're wearing or carrying over the fence, we can proceed privately." When he hesitated, I said, "What are you worried about, sir? You're not running for office, are you?" Aunt Alma chimed in loudly, "Forgive me, young man, but my nephew doesn't run for office, he owns the fools who bother."

Lomax had the decency to be embarrassed, so he gave an irritated wave to his men, who dumped their walkie-talkies and recorders without complaint. Lomax himself wasn't wired, but Wallingford was. He grumbled the loudest but quickly complied after Lomax snapped at him. Then he snapped again. Wallingford and the bodyguard stepped just out of earshot.

I leaned across the table, the option in my hand, and said very softly, "Mr. Lomax, after you look at this option, I want you to think long and hard before you say a word, and whatever you say, it's very important that you say it quietly. Very important."

"This is a copy," Lomax said quietly, confused.

"Read the words at the bottom of the document," I said.

He glanced down, then he sighed so deeply I thought he was going to faint. He grabbed his face as if to catch his infernal grin before it bled at the corners. "I knew it would come out someday," he whispered as two tiny tears formed at the corners of his merry eyes. "How the hell did you find out?" he said softly.

"Pretty much a string of coincidences," I admitted. "Your damned mother-in-law kept trying to shoot me."

"She's like that," he said.

"That's what I thought. An old boy has to watch out for a woman scorned. She just threw a few rounds at me. She buried a stone in your heart."

Lomax just shook his head slowly.

"The trick now is for you to keep quiet," I said. "Your future depends on my silence, just as much as my future depends on your silence. I know you've used your offshore rigs to smuggle cocaine," I said, "and that you set Mandy Rae and Enos Walker up in business. You've probably got too much political clout for me to touch you with the cocaine thing. But I can fucking promise you, if you don't behave, I'll break your aunt's heart and shove the pieces up your ass."

"Yes, sir," he said, then shook my hand, a businessman all the way. He knew when he was beaten. His grin flashed on and off like a faulty neon sign. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you very much." The little bastard cared more about what his mad aunt thought of him than the chance that I could send him to prison. As if people like Lomax ever went to prison. "I didn't know," he said. "I swear to you I didn't know. I'll provide anything you want. Anything."

"Stop whining, put a cork in your greed, and whatever happens next, you clean it up. And you should get your aunt out of here because I can't control what happens next."

He nodded cheerfully, walked over to his aunt, escorted her to the driver, then bounced back to the table across from me, his grin wooden and lost. He sat down as if he was a very old man.

I stood up and said, "First, I want to report to Mrs. Lomax." Sylvie looked up startled, as if she had forgotten that she had hired me, then she turned to the old woman, who patted her on the arm. Sylvie didn't look comforted. She looked very young, confused, and afraid. "I don't know what the Molly McBride woman had of yours, ma'am, but whatever it was, it died with her in a fire at the Punky Creek Mine up in Montana, died with her and Enos Walker. So you don't have anything to worry about." I wasn't surprised that nobody was surprised. Except Lomax. He had heard about Punky Creek but not what it meant.

"And for public information, you people leave Tom Ben Wallingford's place alone," I said. "You don't need it." I had donated the ranch to the Texas A &M agricultural research center, designating its use, as Tom Ben had suggested, as a living laboratory to find more and better land-friendly ways to raise cattle. "Is it a deal?" Lomax held out his hand, but I ignored it this time.

He nodded slowly. He knew I had the mortal nuts on him, knew I wasn't bluffing.

"What happened?" Travis Lee wanted to know. "You boys make a deal?"

"Right," I said, "you old son of a bitch, we made a deal, but you're not part of it. By the way, your bald-headed prosecutor buddy is dead, locked in a freezer with the pieces of the women he and his brother killed." Travis Lee's face collapsed, hollow and aged. "And you might as well tell Sissy to come outside," I said. "She's part of this fucking mess, too." Travis Lee acted as if he hadn't heard me, but after a moment he walked stiffly over to the back door. A moment later the dark figure slipped silently out the back door. Sissy looked her age now and terribly frightened that she wouldn't get any older. "Hi," I said. "If I were you, Sissy, I'd run for my life. Tomorrow Eldora Grace's family will know how you used her to fake your death, so somebody will connect you to it somehow."

"They didn't tell me," she wailed, then slumped into a chair.

"And you, old bastard," I said to Travis Lee. "You better run, too. I've bought up every piece of bad paper you've signed. The only thing you own now is your boots and your bullfrog belt buckle. The two of you have blackmailed the last penny you're ever going to get out of Betty." It hadn't taken too long digging through bank records to discover that Betty was broke, her money, I assumed, shoveled into the failed deals that her uncle, even after looting her trusts, had funded with blackmail. He wasn't just broke, he was about to sink. The IRS wasn't looking at me but at him. I had already started the paperwork to take the Lodge away from him. "I figure you planned it this way, you old fucker," I continued. "You thought that because Betty and I were the beneficiaries of Tom Ben's will, if I was killed with her piece, she would be convicted and couldn't benefit, and it would all kick back to you. You just hired the wrong help." The silence was louder than the rising south wind. The only sound, Sissy Duval's sobbing. I dug under my cast for the wooden blade.

"You fucking people were all there that night, when Mandy Rae Quarrels dropped the hammer on Dwayne Duval," I began to explain.

But the crippled old woman in the wheelchair interrupted with a grunt, then growled, her voice deep and ruined by the exploding chemicals of a heroin cooker. She nodded toward Betty, "It was her, there. Little Miss Priss. She'd be the fuckin' chick dropped that second hammer, 'cause ol' Dwayne wouldn't stop running his one-eyed snake up her dirt track," she cackled. "Little bitch loved it. Loved it so much she had to kill sweet Dwayne – just like she gunned down her little nigger boy toy that time before."

Betty's face was stunned to tears, and Cathy turned to clutch her shaking shoulders.

"Well, I guess that's how the cow ate the corn," I said to no one in particular, completely blind-sided.

The crippled woman swept the shawl off her legs, cursed in Cajun French, and raised a stubby submachine pistol – a suppressed Mac-10 – with her scarred hands. The first unaimed sweeping burst scattered everybody around the deck. Except for me and my Corsican keeper. In those arrested moments before the gunfire began, that long moment when nobody moves because nobody believes it's going to happen, I had slammed my shiv under the bodyguard's chin, six inches of sharp cedar. Which was almost a mistake. All I did was knock out his false teeth. Somebody else had shot the real ones out. But the limber dagger of Hill Country cedar bent when it hit his lower plate, then drove through his tongue into the back of his throat. He was too busy strangling on his blood to bother with me as I tried to tear his mini-Uzi off the shoulder strap.

The bodyguard at the far corner went for his piece, but the kids came through just as I had asked. It's not a man, I had told them over and over, it's a target. I had drilled it into their heads. Bob's round blew out the glass panel, then CJ's round sliced through the little guy's body armor and dropped him into a shapeless puddle. Then they took out the one in the middle of the deck the same way.

As I struggled to untangle the Uzi from the bodyguard's shoulder strap, the second burst from the wheelchair was more controlled. A burst sprayed at Lomax as he dove under the table. His thumb popped off, flying through the sunshine like a cocktail frank. The table where Betty and Cathy sat caught the burst thrown at them. Then rounds popped over my head and exploded the glass walls behind me.

Betty rose long enough to throw her empty piece at the woman in the wheelchair, which bought me a second. I slipped behind the bodyguard, catching a quick glimpse of Mandy Rae's ruined face. She looked as if I was the first target she had missed in her entire life. And now she'd missed me three times. Her glittering mad eyes said she wasn't about to miss again.

I got behind the thick chest of the dying bodyguard as the next burst thudded into his Kevlar vest. Amanda Rae Quarrels didn't get another chance. The bodyguard's Uzi was in my hands now. Two three-round bursts dead center into the thorax area. The first ones shattered the stamped metal of the submachine gun so badly that Mandy Rae might as well have been holding a live grenade to her chest. My other rounds punched through the bloody chest, banging into the metal back of the wheelchair, driving it backward. The chair gathered momentum slowly as it drifted down the wooden ramp. It paused, then rolled across the hard-packed sand into the flat waves of the Gulf. Where once again it paused, as if for effect, then tilted its shapeless burden into the gray water. The wild-ass country girl had cut her last caper.

With both his partners down, the other guard quickly threw his hands into the air in surrender. His boss was dead. He was two thousand miles from home. The rest of the crowd, trapped by lies and foolishness long past, rose slowly, shadowed by the passing clouds. They just stayed there, too, as I swept the Uzi barrel across the group and focused on Wallingford, who slithered toward the house, Sissy held in front of him like a shield. But when I locked the barrel on Lomax, he just stared at me, his right hand clamped over the bleeding stump of his left thumb, staring without a flinch.

"You've never been closer to death, man, than you are this second," I said, then lowered the barrel.

"I know," he said, still not flinching. "Thanks."

"You fucking people were all there that night," I said to everybody else. "One of you cowards better have the fucking guts to get Dickie Oates out of prison…" I stopped. What could I threaten these people with that they hadn't already done to themselves? I raised the submachine gun at Lomax again. "Do it."

He nodded. I stopped long enough to empty the magazine into the sky – just about the only fun I had that day – then I tossed the ugly little weapon over the glass wall, and walked away.

As I passed Betty, she took off her glasses to look me angrily in the eyes. But it had no effect.

She had crossed that final border where betrayal becomes a way of life. Off to that final country from which no one ever returns. The country of lies. I almost told her that if she had told me the truth from the beginning, everything would have been different. But it would have been a waste of time. Cathy looked at me, too, but her eyes were full of death.

When I walked past the former Amanda Rae Quarrels, the shallow waves had ruined her. Ribbons of blood mixed with swirls of black dye and soft drifts of moving sand. She could have been a dead sea creature or a living tar ball, she could have been coming or going. I tossed the crumpled option into the water, watched it unfold, watched my note wash off the paper.

When did you find out you had married your fifteen-year-old daughter?

Amanda Rae Quarrels might be dead but her revenge lived on. I hawked up something from the back of my throat, something that tasted like bear spit. But I kept it to myself.