The Final Country

by James Crumley

  “Who’d the van belong to?” I asked.

  “Texas plates were stolen off a wrecked van,” he said. “And the VIN is on a hot list out of Howard County. Paperwork is top-drawer. It would have passed anything but a felony stop. Wonder what that little dyke was doing down in my county?”

  “Up to no good,” I said.

  “By the way, what was your name?”

  “Hayden Lomax,” I said, then replaced the telephone in the hook.

  * * *

  When I got to Love Field, I cabbed to the Hyatt, picked up my fax from Carver D, checked in, showered, and changed clothes, had a room service lunch, then called Lewis Poulis, who agreed to see me as soon as possible. Perhaps because I used my own name. Then I called one of the national security outfits to arrange for a couple of bodyguards to escort me from the hotel to Poulis Investigations, then to DFW. I did a couple of lines of Sissy Duval’s coke, which tasted surprisingly like Billy Long’s personal stash, then grabbed my bag, dropped the key on the television, and went down to meet my protection. It was expensive and the paperwork a bore but at least I knew I’d get out of Poulis Investigations alive. As we drove away, in a Lincoln Town Car, the shoulders of the two hugely muscled salt-and-pepper bodyguards filling the front seat, their necks as thick as elephant legs, and their eyes as bright as foxes, I wondered why I’d never thought of doing things this way before. Asking for help turned out not to be as tough as it sounded. I asked them about the layout at Poulis Investigations, then asked them to stop at a hardware store on the way.

  Poulis Investigations was located in an industrial slum not too far from Love Field in a cinder block building surrounded by a chain link fence topped with razor wire and security cameras. The bodyguards didn’t say a word when we pulled up in front.’

  “You picking up something, sir?” the driver asked.

  “Delivering something,” I said. “If I’m not back in an hour, boys, call the cops.”

  The driver looked at me with a smirk. “That won’t be necessary, boss. We’ll bring you out,” he said. “These fucking guys are all ex-Army. Think they’re tough because they’re Gulf War vets.”

  “They never played in Green Bay in December,” the other one growled, chuckling. “By the way, sir,” he added politely, “you might want to wipe your nose.”

  Clean-faced and through the gate, I was ushered directly into the boss’s office. The nameplate on Poulis’s desk identified him as Col. Lewis Poulis, USA, Ret., and the large retouched photograph of an ex-president behind him suggested he was either a deeply committed Republican or an ex-CIA asset. Poulis was a small, compact man with a potbelly that looked as dyspeptic as his shaved head and smirking face. He looked as if he fancied himself as a pretty tough nut, but I could tell from the 8x10 photo of him in his dress uniform that he didn’t wear any combat badges. I sat down in the padded chair across from Poulis, a chair subtly tilted forward to keep the person sitting in it slightly off balance. As if I needed anything to tilt me off dead center.

  “You know who I am, Colonel,” I said, “and you probably know more about me than I do, so you know what I’m here about.”

  “Actually, sir, I don’t,” Poulis said, exchanging his smirk for a smug smile.

  “One of your operatives — Doris Fairchild, she said her name was,” I said, “left a van full of electronic equipment that is in the custody of the Bastrop County sheriff.”

  “As I told the sheriff when he called, and, as I’m sure you know, anybody can have a business card printed up. No one by that name has ever been employed by this firm,” Poulis said calmly, “and I offered to open my personnel files to him. I’ll make you the same offer, Mr. Milodragovitch. Professional courtesy, you understand.”

  “Give me a break,” I said. “How about the lawyers who arranged her bail? Ever work for them?”

  “We do a lot of work for a lot of law firms,” Poulis said. “And the lawyers for major corporations.”

  “And, of course, your client contracts are confidential,” I said.

  “Of course.” The smug smile again. Which drove me nuts. I recognized that smile, the smirk of chickenshit Army officers who had never heard a shot fired in anger, the bland simper of corporate criminals in front of Congress, the toothy, cynical, self-righteous beam of money and corruption, the smile that never dies. “Of course, you understand, they have to be.” And that shit-eating grin again.

  “Well, let me suggest that if anybody,” I said tightly as I suddenly felt the coke boiling through my blood. “Let me fucking suggest,” I growled as I stood up and pushed the heavy desk hard into Poulis’s tight little belly, so hard I knocked the short man’s breath out and tore all the wires underneath loose, and pinned him like a bug against the wall under the large photograph, “if anybody, lawyer, doctor, or corporation chief, mentions my name, and you take the case, I’ll spend the rest of my life wiping that fucking little smile off your face.”

  “The rest of your life may not be all that long,” Poulis wheezed angrily.

  “You fucking assholes have been trying to kill me since I was sixteen,” I said as I grabbed his stubby nose and twisted it until it bled, “and it ain’t worked yet.” Then I slammed Poulis’s head against the ex-presidential portrait until it fell off the wall and Poulis’s eyes flickered back into his head.

  * * *

  “How did it go?” the driver asked, leaning against the car, the back door open, his partner standing by the gate. But then he saw the three guys in uniforms dashing out the front door. “You probably want to go now, sir?” he said.

  “I think it’d be best,” I admitted. “And it might be best if those assholes didn’t follow us.”

  “I figured something like that,” he said. “Earl’s got it covered.”

  I glanced back. Earl had picked up my hardware purchases, looped the short length of chain around the gate posts and slammed the large padlock on it, then stepped over to the car. “Delivery complete, boss?” he said.

  “Little bastard’s nose is badly out of joint and bleeding a bit, but the spooky little fucker had probably been doing coke all afternoon.”

  “Of course,” they answered in unison, Earl with a grin as sharp and large as a linoleum knife. I never did get the driver’s name.

  * * *

  On the flight from DFW to Vegas, I went through the Lomax files that Carver D had collected. Carver D hadn’t just gathered the facts. He had spiced the information with choice bits of gossip, rumor, and innuendo.

  Hayden Lomax might be on the Fortune 500 list now but he had been born in a small town in East Texas. His mother, the women’s basketball coach at a small religious college, had died during the emergency cesarean section, and his father, a semi-alcoholic itinerant roughneck, had abandoned the child into the arms of his wife’s horse-faced sister, Alma, a Baptist spinster high school English teacher, a strict, dour woman known for her jump shot, the passionate length of her prayers, and the fiery depths of her anger. She, like her sister, had been a hard-nosed point guard on the college’s basketball team. Although Alma was occasionally known to beat the young Hayden senseless, then pray with him until he forgave her, mostly she doted on the boy, alternately spoiling him, then working him like a Trojan, forcing long hours at the backyard hoop, and at least one weekend a month driving the boy to Houston, Austin, or Dallas so he could see major college basketball.

  Alma made the boy keep his grades up, too, stay out of trouble, mostly, and kept him away from the dinner table every night until he sank twenty straight free throws. She had plans for the boy, but genetics defeated her. Try as he might, practice as much as he could, Hayden Lomax never grew a smidgen past five nine. When his father died in a beer joint fracas, rumors, which spread like a laughing flu through the small town, suggested that Alma had hired a hit man to revenge herself on Stubby Lomax for his short genes, but no proof was ever forthcoming.

  So the only scholarship offers Hayden received were from small colleges. Alma did what she cou
ld: cashed in her teacher’s retirement, moved to Austin, took the only job she wanted, a night janitor at the university field house, and spent her days grooming Hayden for his walk-on debut at the university. He was a good ball-handler, a sharp, accurate passer, a dead-solid foul shooter, a bit too quick with his fists for a short guy, but full of hustle, and he would not quit. In spite of his lack of an outside shot, he was the perfect whitebread complement to the playground moves of the urban kids on the team. If he’d been taller and had a better outside shot, Hayden might have made the perfect sixth man, the guy who could spark a slumping team, could make the right steal, draw the right foul, sucker-punch the right point guard. But no matter how hard he tried, how hard Alma prayed, how much she leaned on him, he never quite made the transition from walk-on to star. He had his moments, but spent most of his college career riding the bench. And he never started a game. Not once in his years of college ball.

  After graduating with a business degree, Hayden married a horse-faced girl from Brazoria, who looked a lot like Alma, and whose father had just inherited three junkhouse offshore drilling rigs from his father-in-law. Hayden’s father-in-law was a high school principal and knew nothing about the oil business. Neither did Hayden, but he learned. He went at business as he had at basketball, with more ruthless hustle than talent. In the oil patch success didn’t depend on his height. During the early years, he had survived the Arab oil embargo, the boom, the next bust, acquired his first ten million dollars — and a double-handful of lawsuits filed by disgruntled partners. After his first wife had fallen to her death from the floor of one of his offshore rigs, he acquired a small construction company in Gatlin County, Overlord Sand and Gravel. Overlord Minerals grew like a refrigerator fungus in the cold darkness of states and countries that fostered a lack of regulation with the love of a bribe. His oil interests spanned the world from Maracaibo to Burundi to Ghana to the North Slope; his construction companies paved bits and pieces all over the planet; his petrochemical plants and gold mines polluted a dozen countries; his political ties spread like a cancer; Hayden Lomax moved like a hyena in the rotten wake of the multinational prides, living well on their scraps because he never went completely public, he owned most of it, he owed no one an explanation.

  Except the pack of his silent, swarthy foreign partners. And his aunt, who still lived with him on Almadura, his ranch estate that took up more of Gatlin County than Tom Ben owned. Lomax had all the money in his part of the world but for some reason he never explained, he wanted more, he wanted Tom Ben’s ranch, wanted to develop the last large piece of open land in the county. Maybe it was simply greed, maybe just madness. He seemed to have no other vices, except for beautiful women and having his way like a spoiled child. He didn’t drink and there had never been even a rumor of drugs in his life. After the death of his first wife, Hayden had dallied and married and divorced several actresses and models and heiresses over the years. About three years was the usual length of their stay, but he had been married to Sylvie for almost seven.

  Sylvie Catherine Bessiere had arrived at the University of Texas with an American passport and a transcript and diploma from a boarding school in Marseilles, which had since closed its doors. She was allowed to register provisionally as a first-year graduate student in French, but at such a late date it suggested to Carver D that some sort of regent or alumni pressure had been applied. She met Hayden Lomax at the dedication ceremony for an athletic dormitory annex bearing his name. Sylvie hadn’t bothered withdrawing from the university. They were married the next weekend. A few months later Sylvie’s crippled French aunt joined Alma at the ranch, one big happy family. Or so it seemed.

  Access to information about the big happy family was tightly controlled, Carver D wrote — when they left the estate they traveled like royalty: closed limos, private airplanes, and a phalanx of bodyguards — but neither Hayden nor Sylvie were particularly circumspect about their sexual liaisons. Although a persistent rumor insisted that they had agreed not to see just one other person at a time, thus preventing the complications of infatuation or romance. For people like that, I supposed, it made a perverse sense.

  TEN

  I had been going to Vegas for various things for thirty years. Foolishness, mostly — gambling, whoring, that sort of thing — and I also had married my fourth wife there on a cocaine toot almost twenty years before, one of my several marriages in which the divorce seemed to take longer than the marriage. Except for my second wife, who had died in a car wreck with four sailors on a mountain curve outside Susanville, California, it seemed all my divorces were like that. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I stopped getting married. Eventually. And I seemed to have stopped gambling about the same time, too. I had heard that the new corporate Vegas — which was as unfamiliar to me as if I had never been there — was just as sharp, shifty, and greedy as the old one but not quite as friendly. I rented a Mustang convertible at the airport, then checked into one of the less expensive Strip hotels, a faux-stucco castle not too far from Molly Molineaux’s address, using the Malvern ID, hoping to lose myself in the crowd of nickel slots players.

  During a room service meal and a couple of beers, I skimmed the classified ads, found a 10mm Glock 20 for sale — a pistol I didn’t particularly like — called the number, slipped into a pair of thin leather gloves, then drove into a bedroom neighborhood beyond the UNLV campus, where I paid an out-of-work pit boss as much cash as he wanted without dickering for the pistol, a nylon holster, and three loaded clips. Judging from the man’s shaking hands and sweating face, the cash would be up his nose before I got back to the hotel. I found a twenty-four-hour auto parts store, bought a can of Armor All, then went back to the room, broke the piece down, unloaded the clips, and sprayed every surface that might hold a fingerprint. Often, buying a pistol in America is easier than buying drugs. I wondered if perhaps it shouldn’t be the other way around. Then I packed the pistol, the fake ID, the cocaine, and my badge into a briefcase, dropped the briefcase at the desk to be locked in the hotel’s safe, then drove through the sparkling electrical night into the soft dark of the desert to call Betty on the scrambled cell phone.

  “I’m at Cathy’s,” she explained when she answered. “The ranch house, it seemed so … I don’t know,” she said. “Lonesome, maybe.”

  “I hope I haven’t ruined your lifestyle by taking you out into the world,” I said, then chuckled.

  But she didn’t. “It’s a goddamned wild-goose chase,” she said seriously. “That’s what’s ruining our lives. Where are you staying?”

  “I’ll probably be moving around,” I said. “Take your time on the way out here, love. Take I-10 to Phoenix, then go north to I-40, cross at Bullhead City, then check into the Golden Nugget in Laughlin, and call me on the scrambled cell phone. I’ll meet you there.”

  “And just how fucking long am I supposed to wait?” I could almost hear her foot tapping on the other end of the connection.

  “Trust me. I’ll be there.”

  “Trust you?” she said. “Ha. Isn’t that a little far out of town?”

  “We’ve had a lot of luck so far,” I said. “There’s no need to push it. I don’t want you in Vegas until I’m sure what’s going on.”

  “Remember, cowboy, you don’t do a single goddamned thing until I’m there,” she said. “Just look around, all right?”

  “Trust me,” I repeated.

  “I sure as hell hope I can,” she said, sounding very far away, “I feel very goddamned left out.” In the background I could hear Willie Nelson singing the opening bars of “Redheaded Stranger.”

  “And tell Cathy to kiss my ass,” I said, but Betty didn’t laugh, so I hung up.

  * * *

  The next morning, though, my luck ran out big-time. Molly Molineaux’s address was one of those chain mailbox drop and packing outfits instead of an apartment complex, and on a busy street, not exactly a place I could stake out without drawing the attention of the local police. So I took myself down t
o the police station like a good little boy. It took two hours to work my way past a bored desk sergeant, a surly lieutenant, and into the office of a deputy chief, a tall, thin man named G. Donald Willow, with drooping jowls and wispy hair. Somebody once told me that when you meet a man who uses an initial in front of his name, you should at the very least lock up the hen house. And not because you’re worried about him stealing the eggs. Even a sardonic smile didn’t lift his wattles as he tossed my license back to me. I hadn’t used my badge because I didn’t want anybody in Gatlin County to know where I was in case Willow checked.

  “Okay, partner,” he drawled. “What the hell do you want?”

  “Well, sir, I wanted to let the local law enforcement know that I was in town,” I said. “I’m looking for a skip,” I added even though I suspected it was already a lost cause.

  “If you’ve got a name and address and a warrant,” Willow said, “I’ll have him picked up.”

  “All I have is a picture and places he sometimes hangs out,” I said.

  “Degenerate gambler?”

  “That’s what his boss says.”

  “No criminal charges involved?”

  “No, sir. The boss is his brother-in-law. He just wants him back.”

  Willow looked out the window into a desert sunshine as thin as his hair. “I just love you out-of-town assholes. Do you have any idea how many of you creeps show up every day,” Willow said. “If you had a bail-jumping warrant, maybe, instead of a license that means as much to me as a sheet of used toilet paper, I might give you permission to hang around my town. But being as how you’re some low-rent peeper without a warrant, my advice for you is to gather up some local licensed professional help.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said, confused.

  “Hire yourself a licensed private investigator here in town,” Willow said, handing me a card, “because if I catch you on the street — loitering, shadowing, or spitting — you’ll spend your Vegas vacation in a holding cell. But you probably called it the drunk tank back in the old days.”