The Final Country

FOUR

When Molly McBride pulled her Ford Probe rental into the parking lot above the overlook, I climbed out of the Caddy, dressed for my part as the innocent jogger. Except for the floppy camouflage jersey that covered the S &W Centennial Airweight.38 strapped to the small of my back. Molly still wore the Tulane jersey, which nearly covered the bulky Glock stuffed into a fanny pack at the base of her back, and baggy sweats, her hair tucked under a New Orleans Saints hat that almost hid her scrubbed face. Neither of us acted as if we expected to greet each other as lovers or friends, so we just walked down the trail to the overlook. To the left, the creek bounced down the limestone shelves to join the deep well of the artesian spring. From above, the Blue Hole looked like an eye into a better world, clear and cold, yet somehow warm with the shafts of mid-morning sunlight filling the water. The shifting wind had died, and the cloudless sky seemed endless.

"Don't you have any questions?" she asked, a bit nervously.

"What's to know? The guy makes a move on you, I stop him, then let the cops deal with him. He doesn't, I follow him back to his car and check him out. It should be simple."

"I wish you'd just kill the bastard," she said, then patted her fanny pack.

"You didn't hire me for that," I said. "And if you start letting off rounds from that cannon, you'll probably shoot me or some poor software engineer across the hollow. Why don't you put it back in the car?"

"Why don't you put yours back?"

I shook my head, patted her shoulder, she smiled nervously again, then I searched the broken rocks of the slope above the overlook until I found a shadowed nook between two scrub cedars ten feet above the overlook as Molly stretched her legs against the low stone wall below. And we waited.

The guy had picked a good time. Mid-morning the park was usually empty, the dawn joggers off their offices, the lunchtime joggers still tied to their desks. Not much foot traffic at all: an older couple walking their ragged mop dog; a college couple more interested in grabbing each other than running; and three singleton joggers in expensive Lycra suits.

Then a fourth, a tall, gawky bald-headed man, shuffled up the switchback from the creek bottom. He ran like a duck, feet splayed, elbows flapping like his oversize shorts and belly pack. A classic nerd, even to the thick horn-rims he wore. But he paused as if to catch his breath as the trail opened into the overlook, so I rose on my haunches. Molly hadn't even turned. With a quickness I couldn't believe, the jogger was behind her, his bony forearm around her neck in a choke hold, hissing something I couldn't hear in her ear.

I didn't even consider the.38, just rushed down the rocky slope and slammed a right hook into the nerd's kidney. The duck-footed guy grunted like a man hit with an axe handle and dropped to one knee as Molly spun away. I caught a glimpse of her red, frightened face as she dumped her fanny pack and fled. But even as he dropped to his knee, the guy caught me in the right thigh with a hard back-thrust blow from his bony elbow. For a moment I thought I'd been shot but managed to roll away and scramble to my feet, my right leg no more use than a boneless tube of flesh. I reached for the Airweight now, but the skinny guy front-kicked me in the chest so hard I left my feet and landed on my butt against a clutter of limestone shards on the side of the trail. Once again I felt as if I'd been shot, in the heart this time, mortally wounded, nailed to the ground, my hands dangling uselessly in my lap. The skinny guy moved toward me in some sort of martial arts shuffle and he had death in his angry eyes. Mine. I had no doubt that the kick aimed at my chin meant to snap my neck like a match stick.

With trembling hands, I managed to lift a large, flat limestone rock from between my knees and raised it in front of my face. When the skinny guy kicked, he broke the large rock in half with his lower leg, and the sole of his running shoe clipped the skin at the edge of my chin. He stumbled backward. In the bright sun his shinbone gleamed as yellow as pus before the blood covered it. But he didn't go down. He lifted his face to the sky, growling with pain, then he looked down, stared at me, confused for a moment as if things hadn't gone as planned. Then his hand darted to the belly pack with the hidden holster. The holster's Velcro opening sounded like ripping flesh. I did the only thing I could, threw the piece of rock in my right hand. The bastard must have had the hammer cocked and his finger on the trigger as he started to draw the pistol out of the belly holster, because when the rock hit his wrist, he jerked the trigger, releasing a muffled explosion at his groin.

He went down this time, castrated or emasculated or both by the muzzle blast and the round, a froth of dark blood foaming from his crotch, mixing with the bright red gush pumping from the femoral artery in his left thigh. He sat there leaning against the low stone wall, tendrils of smoke from the melted nylon of the pack drifting around his face, his hands on his knees, the pistol forgotten between his legs, opening and closing his mouth as if his teeth hurt, as he bled out almost peacefully.

I just sat there, too. I couldn't have helped if I wanted to. The skinny guy's eyes frosted over before I managed to get a full breath into my lungs, and even that one was full of tiny knives. My chest hurt so badly, I could just manage to raise my arm high enough to touch the bloody scrape dripping from the point of my chin. And, hell, even if I could have gotten up, I probably would have put a round right between the bastard's eyes for good measure. I didn't know who this guy was, but he sure as hell took a lot of killing.

When I could finally get up, I hobbled carefully around the massive puddle of blood curdling in the dust, and I couldn't help but notice that his hand was wrapped around a S &W Ladysmith.357. Just like the one I'd given Betty for her birthday, so she could stop carrying the huge.40 Ruger semi-automatic in her purse. Then a cell phone rang from Molly's pack dumped on the edge of the bloody pool. But it seemed too much trouble and pain to pick it up, so I trudged up to the Caddy for my cell phone, trying not to think about it. Just as I refused to think what the sudden disappearance of Molly McBride and her car must mean.

The first deputy on the scene, a young man named Culbertson, took one look at the body sitting in a lake of crusted blood, ignored the ringing cell phone, then put me on my knees, my fingers laced behind my head while he patted me down and recited my rights, even while reminding me that I wasn't under arrest. Yet.

"Where's the piece?" he asked when he found the empty holster at the small of my back.

"In the front seat of my car, officer," I said, "unloaded and sitting on my carry permit and my PI license."

The deputy jerked me to my feet by the cuffs, and marched me up to his unit in the parking lot, leaving the crime scene unsecured. Frankly, in spite of the pain, I was already thinking like a lawyer. Not soon enough, though, as it turned out. When the kid held my head down to ease me into the back seat of the unit, I thanked him. Suddenly, the kid shoved me into the back seat.

"Thanks, kid," I said.

The deputy stepped back, his hand trembling on the handle of his service revolver. "If I were you, you old son of a bitch," he spat, "I'd keep my smart mouth shut. Ty Rooke had a lot of -" Then he shut up as another unit howled into the parking lot. He slammed the door so quickly, I just had time to get my feet inside.

Where I sat for a long sweaty time, watching the passage of a lot of cops. Gannon was first on the scene, walked stiffly past Culbertson's unit without looking at me, then sent the deputy to watch over me. Then came the crime scene crew burdened with useless gear; the medical examiner with his team, loaded with false smiles; and several plainclothes detectives, teetering on cowboy boots, hip-shot by heavy revolvers on tooled leather belts, their eyes sullen with the code of the west, squinting as if they were John Wayne and I already swinging from a live oak.

Finally, Gannon returned after twenty minutes down at the crime scene, his suit coat soaked at the neck and armpits, his shoes dusty. He dismissed the young deputy, opened the unit's door, rubbed his sweaty face, then bagged my hands after he helped me out of the unit.

"A little late to be bagging…"

"Don't say another word," he grunted, interrupting me. "Not one fucking word."

"What the hell is going on?"

"Milodragovitch," Gannon hissed from the corner of his mouth as he led me to his unit, "either shut up, or I'll have you gagged."

Which made me quite glad that after I called 911 on my cell phone, I left messages on the answering machines that picked up instead of Betty, Travis Lee, and Phil Thursby.

"Well, before you have me gagged, Captain, dig the cell phone out of the extra belly pack and hit star 69."

Gannon didn't even bother to look at me.

I kept my mouth shut all the way into Gatlinsburg and up to the jail on the top floor of the limestone courthouse, where they formally arrested me for capital murder, then held another reading of my rights, complete with three assistant DAs, Sheriff Benson in full dress uniform, and a television news crew. My buddy, Gannon, seemed to have disappeared. They booked me and let me piss into a jar and tested my hands for gunpowder residue before they roughly forced me into an orange jumpsuit and chained me to the table in an interrogation room for what seemed like a long time.

I knew they were watching me through the two-way mirror, so I tried to be calm without going to sleep, which I knew they'd take as a sure sign of guilt. Truth was I had killed men before, too many to suit me and several face-to-face, and I knew better than to dwell on it. Instead I concentrated on a lake high in the mountains of Glacier Park, Upper Quartz Lake, where the water was deep enough so that waterlogged firs hung upright in the clear water, where a single loon sang against the cliffs of the cirque just to hear himself. The other memories would have to take care of themselves.

And I'd had my share of dealings with police officers. I told myself I had nothing to worry about – no nitrates on my hands, I could feel the skinny guy's footprint blooming across my bruised chest, and in the mirror I could see the scrape leaking down my chin – but something caught my eye at the small wire-glass window set into the doorway. The face peering at me, except for the glasses, which were rimless, could have belonged to the dead man. And these eyes had a burning message in them, too. Whatever the eyes were saying, I knew it was not good news.

Before they took me down to the courtroom to arraign me – as Gannon had told me, things moved quickly in small Texas counties – Culbertson and another grim-faced deputy put me in ankle shackles and cuffed me to a waist chain, then threaded a chain through the handcuffs. They hustled me down the hallway as if they wanted me to do the guilty-man shuffle, but I refused. When they tried elbow lock come-alongs, I ate the pain, and refused to hurry. When they pushed, I collapsed into their arms and managed to knock off their cowboy hats.

"Watch it, you shitbag," the other one whispered harshly. "Either walk, or we'll throw you down the stairs instead of takin' the elevator."

"Fuck you kids," I said quietly as I grabbed the grim-faced one who reached for his night stick and stuck my thumb into the nerve center behind his thumb. "Push me again, asshole, and I'll take you straight to hell with me. A dead solid promise."

"Crazy old bastard," the white-faced one said as he jerked his hand back and then hit me in the small of the back with a stun gun.

After that, at least I had the pleasure of making them carry me into the almost empty courtroom for my arraignment. I did my best to slobber on their tooled cowboy boots.

A nervous young man stood at the defendant's table. My defender, I assumed, appointed by the judge since Texas didn't have a public defender program, but I neither listened to the kid's name nor shook his offered hand. The bald man who looked like the dead guy was standing at the prosecutor's table beside a chubby woman in a suit of an unfortunate shimmering electric blue. Then the judge stepped up to the bench and slapped it with a large, hard hand. Judge Steelhammer, his name-plate said, didn't need a gavel. Then he started talking, but I didn't listen too carefully. The effects of the stun gun were still ricocheting around my aching body.

The bald man stood up, wearing a perfectly fitted khaki twill suit. Judge Steelhammer spoke directly to him. "I want to express my deepest regrets to the district attorney for the loss of his brother and to thank him for standing aside in this matter at hand." The bald man nodded curtly, gave me a look, then left the courtroom.

Then the judge turned to me, his eyes as pale as ball bearings beneath his thick, dark brows. "Mr. Milodragovitch," the judge rumbled, "you stand before me accused of capital murder, and believe me this court takes the death of an officer of the law, on or off duty, very seriously. How do you plead to the charge?"

Before I could answer, the doors banged open as Betty and her uncle rushed into the courtroom, Travis Lee shouting, "Your Honor, if you please – a moment to confer with my client before the plea?"

Judge Steelhammer looked as if he were one of those conservatives in Texas who hadn't found Wallingford's antics in the legislature amusing or his change in political parties convincing, but as an elected official Judge Steelhammer was nobody's political fool. He smiled grimly and said, "Mr. Wallingford, please. I didn't realize you'd taken up criminal law, but, please, take all the time you need."

Betty, dressed in a Longhorn sweat suit and running shoes, as if just back from a run, sat down in the front row. Wallingford pushed through the gate, elbowed the public defender out of the way, slapped his briefcase on the table, and pulled me into his shoulder. I could swear that his blue pinstriped suit smelled of mothballs. "Phil's in Houston, son," he whispered, "so you're going to have to make do with me. What did you do to make a sheriff's detective assault you?"

I gave him the short version of the events and showed him the leaking scrape on my chin and the bruise spreading across my chest, the tread of the bald guy's running shoes stamped very clearly over my sternum. Wallingford quickly convinced the judge to send an officer down to the lab for the dead man's shoes. Even from the bench the judge could see that the arrow shapes on the running shoes' soles matched my contusions. Then Steelhammer conferred with Travis Lee and the chubby woman. I kept my eyes on her wide, shining hips, afraid, or ashamed, to turn to look at Betty.

Everyone back in place, the judge conferred with the chubby woman and reduced the charge, then set bail at two hundred fifty thousand dollars, cash or property bond.

"Shit," I muttered to Wallingford, "I can't make that without dipping into the offshore accounts."

"You fuck this up," Wallingford whispered, "I'll hunt you down like an egg-suckin' hound." Then he took a folded document from his coat pocket, turned to the judge, and said, "I have the deed to the Blue Creek Ranch, which has been appraised at well over that amount, and the owner, Miss Betty Porterfield, has agreed to post the bond."

"I can't let her do that," I whispered as I turned to look at Betty. She looked away quickly. But the judge slammed his hand on the bench again, and it was done.

"We'll see you outside," Wallingford said curtly as the deputies took me away.

To a cell this time – a bit more roughly and not wearing their name tags – where we waited together as the paperwork was processed, and where I learned the dead man's name for sure. "This is for Ty Rooke," the deputy with the sore hand whispered as he ground the stun gun into the base of my spine the first time. "And this one is for me, motherfucker," he hissed as he hit me with the stun gun the last time.

Or it was the last time as far as I knew.

The sunshine was flat by the time I climbed stiffly into the front seat of Wallingford's crew cab Ford pickup. Betty sat stolidly behind the steering wheel and stared blankly out the windshield as I quietly thanked her for putting up the ranch and promised to raise the cash to replace the bond as quickly as I could. Wallingford sprawled across the back seat like a man who had spent the day bucking bales. In his rumpled courtroom suit. The air-conditioning was on high, and I shivered in my running shorts and thin shirt.

"You okay?" Betty asked, as I grunted and wrestled with the seat belt. She still didn't look at me.

"For a guy who started the day by getting the shit kicked out of him," I groaned. "And ended it in a jail cell with two psychopaths, I'm fair to middling."

"There's a photographer and a forensic pathologist waiting at the emergency room," Wallingford said quietly from the back. "They work you over pretty good?"

"Nothing that will show," I said.

"What did they do?" Betty said, finally looking at me, her fingers soft on my cheek.

"Nothing I didn't deserve," I admitted. "One of theirs is dead. And Fm the chosen asshole."

"What else?" Wallingford said, sitting up now.

"They're holding the Beast, my license, and my piece," I said.

"How long?" Betty asked, as if it mattered.

"The Airweight's probably history, and I suspect the Caddy will come back in lots of little pieces. It's just stuff. Fuck it."

"They can't do that," Betty said, but neither of us looked at her. We knew they could do damn near anything they wanted.

"You want to give me the rest of it?" Wallingford said. "The long version."

"After the emergency room. In the bar," I said. "I need something solid to lean on."

When I didn't show up for my shift, Mike Herrera doubled over without complaint. He even made a joke when I hobbled to the bar on Betty's arm wearing a gray sweat suit we'd picked up at the nearest mall, Wallingford close behind me. But when I didn't smile, Mike closed his face into a well-learned expressionless Mexican mask and brought the drinks without comment as we huddled at the empty end of the bar. We ordered drinks, then I asked Mike for the telephone so I could call the front desk to ask the reception clerk to pull the security tape from Molly McBride's registration, and to make a copy and lock the original in the hotel safe.

I drank the Scotch in one long painful swallow, wiping out the taste of the pissant pain pills, which were all I could talk out of the ER doc. Well, it didn't have to go on too long. I had a stash of codeine in the gun safe on the north side of Austin. Wallingford sipped at a pint of draft beer as Betty stirred her coffee thoughtfully, her face carefully blank after she heard me mention Molly McBride's name. I didn't think much about it at the time, just ordered another Macallan, a water back this time.

"You sure you don't want to sit down?" Betty asked.

"Sitting down is the last thing on my mind."

"This isn't the best venue to tell your story," Wallingford suggested.

"Here or nowhere," I said. "This is the only time you're going to hear it." Then I turned to Betty. "Maybe you better have a drink, too, hon. This isn't going to be pretty."

Betty ordered a shot of Frangelico, dumped it into her coffee, then stared stiffly into the remains of the sunset. Wallingford reached for his notebook, but I stopped him with a look. Then I ran down the whole sordid story. Betty never flinched. Not even when I finished by saying, "Please don't ask me if I'm as stupid as I look, because I am. And Betty, before you say anything, I need a quick favor."

"What?"

"Go in the bathroom. Check the serial number of your revolver against your carry permit."

"Order me another drink," she said as she picked up her large purse and walked quickly out of the bar.

"What's that about?" Wallingford wanted to know. "What's going on?"

"Just hope I'm wrong," I said, then signaled for another drink.

She seemed to be gone a long time. Travis Lee put his hand on my shoulder, then said, "Milo, I know this might not seem the right time for this question, but given your troubles, maybe it is. Have you thought any more about that investment opportunity I was tellin' you about?" He had been nagging at me for weeks about some surefire investment he wanted me to help him with. I guess I must have looked at him as if he were insane. "Another time," he said quickly, patting me softly on the shoulder.

Betty came back, her tear-stained face white, her fingers trembling as she gunned the liqueur. "Serial numbers don't match," she said quietly. "Guess I should go to the range more often."

"Right," I said. "Shouldn't we all."

"And it's worse than that," she said, a sudden blush rising so hard up her face that her freckles nearly disappeared beneath the flushed skin. "I gave that woman the Annette McBride story," she said, then paused for a long moment. "And the dog, I gave her the goddamned dog. She came around saying she was doing a piece for a San Francisco environmental paper about trying to save the Blue Hole, and she pumped it all out of me." Then she added carefully, "In a motel room bed. It started when you went to Montana."

"Wonderful," I said. "I'll be fucked." It was all I could think to say. Her admission hit me like a jolt from the stun gun. Hell, I knew that Betty had slept with several women in the years after she had been raped. But I didn't know what to think about this. I shook my head as if I'd just been hit, then laughed. Or something like a laugh, only hollow and empty, like a sleeping dog's dreaming bark. "Well, whoever the hell she is and whatever the fuck it is that she does for a living," I said, "she's damned good at her job." Then I barked again.

Betty's eyes brimmed with tears. I had to look away.

"But why?" Wallingford wanted to know.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't even know how to begin guessing."

Wallingford excused himself, leaving Betty and me alone in the uncrowded bar.

A room service waiter came into the bar to hand me a videotape. "Room clerk says it's in the right place."

"Thanks," I said, then when the kid left, turned to Betty, and said as softly as I could, "And thank you, too."

"For what?" she asked quietly.

"You didn't have to tell me," I told her. "At least now I know that we were both being set up. But I have to admit that I don't know what to think or what to feel or anything. Except maybe I'd like to hit somebody."

"Hit me."

"No, I'd rather hit a stranger," I said. "Or myself. Fuck it, I'll think about it later."

Betty didn't say anything, just leaned over to hug me, her wet cheek against mine. I leaned into her body and bit my lip when a series of back spasms hit under her hard embrace, but she felt it, moved her hands lower to knead the jerking muscles.

"I'm off for a couple of days. I could… could stay with you tonight," she murmured with a soft sob. But she felt me shake my head. "What the hell, I've already been stood up once today."

My mind was cluttered with too many things to think about what she had said. One of the things we had fought most often and most bitterly about since I had moved out of the ranch house was Betty's constant refusal to stay with me at the Lodge. "I don't think so," I whispered into her shoulder.

Which is how Wallingford found us. "You folks are crazy," he said. "This is no time for spoonin'."

"Don't be stupid, Uncle Travis," Betty said over my shoulder. Sometimes she seemed constantly angry at her uncle.

I stood up as straight as I could, took a deep breath that felt as if somebody had hit me in the chest with an axe handle, then leaned heavily on the bar. "Look, folks," I said. "I really appreciate your help. Why don't you two take off? I'm going to have a couple of more drinks, then a double dose of these pissant pain pills, and I'm going to bed. I'll think about all this shit when I wake up. I'll call you two tomorrow."

Travis Lee slapped me on the shoulder and wished me a good night. Then Betty hugged me again, perhaps harder than she meant to. I sagged against the bar.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"I'm fucking fine," I snapped.

They finally left, and I wrapped myself around my Scotch.

Which is how Gannon found me later as he served the search warrant for my room and the court order to confiscate my passport.

"Hell, I don't have even have a passport," I said – I didn't have a passport in my own name, but several in other names; I'd been prepared to run all my adult life – and my room was clean. Everything important was in the gun locker. Except for Billy Long's cocaine, which was taped inside the emergency light in the elevator.

"And I'd like you to watch the search," Gannon said. "If you don't mind, Mr. Milodragovitch."

"As long as you'll give me a hand, and I can take my drink," I said.

"You want your lawyer?" Gannon asked. "I think I saw him standing around the lobby phone bank."

"No fucking lawyers," I said, then held out my elbow for Gannon to grasp.

As Gannon helped me down the hall, he said quietly, "You're walking like an old man."

"It don't take much of this shit to make you old."

"I'm sorry about that."

"I'm not complaining," I told him honestly.

"They're just kids. And sometimes payback is part of the job description."

"Right, but the stupid bastards were bragging and laughing in the locker room," Gannon said.

"It ain't the worst thing that ever happened to me.

"I don't want to hear the worst," Gannon said, almost smiling as we stopped at the unnumbered door of my room.

Gannon tossed the room with a quick and practiced expertise without leaving the least mess. I complimented him. "Good work, man, the only thing you didn't find was the mouse fart."

"Right lizard boot, you goddamned drunk," Gannon said as he wrote a number on the back of one of his cards and left it by the telephone. "This is my personal cell phone. Call me before you leave town. We'll have a drink somewhere down the road. In another county. Maybe you'll tell me what really happened."

"I've got no plans to leave town," I said.

"You better leave," Gannon said. "Believe me. Word around the courthouse is that Steelhammer plans to dismiss your charges tomorrow, so you'll get your bond, your piece, your car, and your license back. Until the grand jury convenes in three weeks and comes in with a capital murder indictment. Tobin Rooke is a mean, smart son of a bitch, and he and his twin brother were as tight as two baby snakes in a single egg. They've never lived apart. So you can bet your ass he's gonna nail you for something, and it won't be pleasant. You can count on that."

I used the arms of the chair to push myself upright, then said, "He better bring his lunch this time, Captain, 'cause they fucked with the wrong dog."

"Forgive me for pointing it out," Gannon said, "but clearly you ain't as tough as you think."

"I dug my own grave once," I said, "but I ain't buried in it yet."

Gannon's face remained impassive. "You need a hand back to the bar?"

"You really want to know what really happened. Off the record?"

"Rooke was a complete asshole, man," he said, "but you know I can't go off the record with a suspect. Not on a mess like this."

"Well, fuck you then," I said. Then I told him the whole story. Except for the fact that it seemed that Molly McBride had stolen Betty's revolver.

"That doesn't make any sense," Gannon said.

"You're telling me," I said, "unless he was moonlighting as a hit man."

"I've always thought he was dirty – too tight with rich folks – but hiring out for a hit? I just don't know," Gannon mused.

"The son of a bitch was going to kill me," I said. "There's not a smidgen of a doubt in my mind."

"You sure you just didn't piss him off?"

"Right," I said. "Have you got the technology to get a photo off this tape?"

Gannon shook his head. "Not without involving other people in the department. And I don't think you want that. Try this guy downtown." Gannon picked up his card off the telephone table and scribbled another number on the back of it. "Let me know if I can help."

"You can help me back to the bar," I said. And he did. Later, I made it back to the room leaning on Mike Herrera's shoulder. But I couldn't sleep. I grabbed my smokes and a beer out of the small fridge and shuffled outside to the balcony that overlooked the hollow.

No matter how I looked at it, I couldn't come up with a reason why an off-duty sheriff's detective would want to kill me. Unless it had something to do with my vague campaign to save Enos Walker from an undeserved hit from the state's needle. The slice of the moon was smaller than the night before and it seemed somehow sharper, the soft rush of the Blue Hole somehow farther away.

It was two the next afternoon before I could struggle to the Jacuzzi. Mike brought me a Bloody Mary and a plate of Pete's hottest tacos. The weather had held, and I found myself basking in the sunlight like a lazy dog.

"So what are we going to do now?" Betty asked as she squatted behind me.

"First, stop sneaking up on me," I said.

"You didn't call," she said. "And I was afraid you never would."

I leaned back far enough to see her face. She looked as if she hadn't slept any better than I had. "You're right," I admitted. "I probably wouldn't have. I need to work some things out."

"Let me help," she said. "I've got to help. I'm involved, too, remember."

"I don't know," I said. "I suspect that things are going to get worse before they get better."

"Some people are better in a crisis," she said, "than they are in day-to-day life."

"Don't I know it?"

She leaned down to help me out of the Jacuzzi. It was a little more difficult than either of us expected. "How do you feel?"

"As if I've been hit by a train, love."

"Well, keep it in mind, old man; you aren't as young as you used to be."

"Hell, I never was," I said.