“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 ord
er 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.
FIVE
It took another full day of moving carefully between my bed and the Jacuzzi and gobbling pissy little pain pills before I could climb into Betty’s pickup so she could drive me by the locker, where I gathered up enough drugs to allow me a little movement, then she dropped me at Carver D’s house. Carver D had been burning cyberspace oil. He hadn’t dug up anything more on Sissy Duval, except that she wouldn’t come to the telephone or return messages and that after her husband’s death, she had sold the bar and license to a chain of self-service laundries down in the Rio Grande Valley, a chain that was suspected of washing more than dirty shorts. They had kept Billy Long as a manager until his untimely death, then quickly gave his job to the pudgy bartender, Leonard Wilbur. Carver D had pulled the court files on the Dwayne Duval shooting. He had been killed by a college kid from Mexia, Texas, a Richard Wylie Oates, who, except for traffic tickets, had never run afoul of the law before and whose folks were even cleaner. Oates had been convicted of second-degree murder, with Steelhammer on the bench. The jury had sentenced him to a huge jolt of hard time, which he was still serving outside Huntsville. He’d done fifteen and had been twice denied parole. Enos Walker had an older brother living in Austin, a preacher. But he didn’t answer his telephone or return messages, either.
“Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” Carver D suggested as he handed me the Molly McBride registration tape back, along with a sheaf of head shots of the lady in question. “You want to borrow Hangas?”
“Thanks,” I said, “but as soon as I get my ride back, Betty’s going to chauffeur me around.”
“Y’all back together?”
“Together might not exactly be the right word.”
“What’s that mean?” he asked, wiggling in his antique chair so hard that I thought the wheels were going to pop off.
“You don’t want to know,” I told him. “You have any luck with the serial number on the piece in Betty’s purse?”
“Got it as far as a gun dealer in Little Rock,” he said. “Usually a dead end there.”
“Well, thanks.”
“It’s great to be nosy for a purpose,” Carver D said. “Watch your back, man.”
“Just as soon as I can stand to look at it,” I said. “Now call me a cab.”
“You’re a cab.”
* * *
A couple of days later when Phil Thursby got back from Houston, where he had managed to plead a capital murder down to manslaughter-one even though the crackhead rich kid from Clear Lake had been caught on video and confessed to killing a Vietnamese convenience store clerk, he came into the bar while I was behind the stick giving Mike a much needed break. Thursby hopped on a stool, and shook his head slowly, almost painfully. Thursby had a high forehead above thick black-rimmed glasses and looked like a teenager playing a criminal lawyer in a high school play. But he had pale blue eyes, as restless and mad as a rabid dog’s, a thin mouth like a knife wound, a curiously deep and soothing voice, and he was one of the best criminal lawyers in the state. Except for an occasional glass of Veuve Cliquot champagne and a nose for trouble, Thursby seemed to have no vices. He bought his suits off the rack in the boys’ section at Penney’s, still lived in the small frame house off Red River where he’d been raised, and drove a battered Toyota Corolla with neither a radio nor air-conditioning. Wallingford said the little bastard didn’t need a radio because he listened to the voices in his head, or air-conditioning because he had liquid nitrogen in his veins.
“Remember, Milo, if Carver D wasn’t your buddy, I wouldn’t even talk to you,” Thursby rumbled as I pulled a cork and filled a flute for him. He took a tiny sip, nodded as if he approved, then added, “as far as I know Steelhammer plans to dismiss your charges, but when the grand jury convenes, and with your history, unless you happened to be hanging on the cross next to Jesus Christ that day and he’ll climb down to swear to it, Gatlin County will indict you. Tobin Rooke is almost as good as I am, but he lacks my convictions.” Thursby allowed himself a flicker of a smile, larger than an eyelash, but not much. “He knows he really hasn’t got a duck’s fart chance of stinkin’ in a blue norther to finally get you in prison,” Thursby continued, “but it’ll cost you a couple hundred K just to get it to a jury verdict, and believe me, they’ll convict, so then it’s another hundred for the appeal, with no guarantee that we can beat this before we can get it into federal court.” Thursby paused, sipped at a single champagne bubble, then added, “You want the best free advice I’ve ever given?”
The Final Country Page 8
