The Final Country

  “Of course, if you talk about this deal, man,” the bodyguard whispered, in an accent that sounded as if it were from further away than Mexico, “I will personally cut you into small pieces and feed you to the pigs.”

  “Thanks,” I said as the bodyguard walked past, pushing the old lady. “Sorry I called you a goon.” But the tiny curl of the bodyguard’s lip suggested that my apology wasn’t even slightly accepted.

  “Let’s get this over with, Milodragovitch,” Rooke said as he started to follow the procession out the suite doorway.

  “Don’t we need a Bible or something?”

  Rooke spun in the doorway, his body obviously as quick and well trained as his twin brother’s had been, his jaw violently clenched, his words reduced to a thin, hard stream. “When this is over, you dumb son of a bitch,” Rooke hissed, “I’m going to devote my life to destroying yours.”

  Given the attempts on my life, Rooke’s threat didn’t seem all that big a deal so I fumbled through drawers until I found a Gideon Bible, remembering that Gannon had said that the Rooke brothers had been closer than twin snakes in a single egg. The vision of baby snakes wearing glasses popped into my head. The laughter just bubbled out.

  “What the fuck are you laughing about?”

  “Just wondering if you slept with your forked tongue up the rich lady’s ass,” I said, “or took off your glasses and stuck your whole fucking head in?”

  He would have come for me, but the bodyguard with the scarred cheeks laid a hand on his shoulder.

  So, oddly nervous and slightly excited and more solemn than I would have imagined, in the middle of a bright fall afternoon in the Texas Hill Country, with Lalo Herrera in all his ancient Latin elegance as one of my witnesses and a bored software salesman the other, I became a peace officer for the second time in my rowdy, misbegotten life.

  After Rooke slithered hastily out of the bar followed by the salesman, Lalo poured two shots of Herradura, then raised his shot glass. “Buena suerte,” Lalo said, then Lalo and I sipped the smooth fire of the tequila. Lalo ran his hand through his thick hair, still crow-wing black in his seventies, and leaned over the bar.

  “Milo,” he said quietly, “I was born in this country of skulls …”

  “Skulls?”

  “Before you Anglos came, my people called this place La Tierra de Calaveras,” he said. “The land of skulls.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Perhaps some bandidos who used to raid down in that country south of the Nueces River had a hideout or a cave around here. Or some other people say maybe the Tonkawas left the skulls of men they had eaten piled around old campsites. No one knows. I’m just certain that many bodies are buried in this county,” he said as he poured us another shot, “and many of them entombed by people very much like those who just departed. Buena suerte, amigo.”

  “But when I’m down to bones and ashes, mi viejo,” I said, “I plan to sleep in my grandfather’s ground.”

  I detoured through the lobby on my way back to my room. The Lomax gang was loading up. The old woman’s wheelchair whirred quietly up a ramp and into the side of an extended frame black Mercedes limo with darkly smoked glass windows as Sylvie Lomax supervised. The bodyguards climbed into a Mercedes sedan of their own. A better work ride than I’d ever had.

  Back in my suite, as I showered and packed my war bag, I did a casual and unsuccessful sweep of the rooms for bugs, wondering how the hell Mrs. Lomax had known I was coming by my place. When I finished, I stood in the middle of the room. Her scent still hung in the air, sweet and light beneath the burning rope stink of her cigarillo. I reconsidered the job I had taken. Maybe I should have called Thursby instead of Travis Lee. I used the room phone to call Phil Thursby, but he was in court and wouldn’t be out for hours. I promised to call back. I called Travis Lee again at his office but only got his machine.

  * * *

  It took almost an hour to wind my way through traffic almost back to Austin, then around the lake west to the southern entrance of Tom Ben’s twelve brush-choked, gully-broken, hardscrabble sections along the southern fork of Blue Creek. The entrance to his place was marked only by a battered mailbox in front of an electronic security gate. Cattle rustling was back in style these days. After somebody buzzed me in, I knew I had to cross half a dozen cattle guards and go through as many electronic gates at the electrified cross fences before I got to the main house. Tom Ben didn’t much care for trespassers or modern-day cattle rustlers. His place covered a patch of land that was flatter than Betty’s but broken by a series of shallow branches and dry washes so that it seemed rougher country than Betty’s place. His place had suffered more from the thorny invasion of South Texas brush. But he worked it harder. At several places I saw teams of D-9 cats pulling anchor chains or root plows to clear the brush for grass pasture and hay fields to feed the small herd of Brangus cattle he ran, along with small bunches of Spanish goats he kept for barbecues.

  Tom Ben still lived in the simple tin-roofed single-story fieldstone structure surrounded by a wide, shaded veranda that his great-grandfather had built. Except for electricity and indoor plumbing, it hadn’t changed since it had been built just before the Mexican-American war. But the outbuildings — a hay barn, an abandoned dairy barn, and half a dozen sheds — were structural steel and as shiny as a new dime.

  Betty and her uncle sat in cedar rockers on a small deck under a trio of live oaks, a pitcher of iced tea between them. Tom Ben looked nothing like his younger brother. The old man was short and sturdy, solid arms and legs and a round, drumtight belly that jutted angrily from his thick-chested body. He almost always dressed in bib overalls, rundown cowboy boots, and a battered banker’s Stetson that looked as if it had been used a dozen times to swab a newly born calf or reinsert a cow’s prolapsed cervix.

  “You’re gonna tear the bottom out of that fancy car, boy!” Tom Ben shouted as he always did, except when I arrived on horseback. “When the hell are you going to get some real Texas transportation?”

  “When I want a sore ass more than a bad reputation,” I answered.

  “You’re walking like a man who’s been throwed and stomped, anyway, Milo,” the old man growled.

  “You should see the other guy.”

  “Yeah, I should have burned out that fuckin’ Rooke family thirty years ago when I caught that trashy bunch roastin’ one of my prize billy goats.”

  “You ready?” I asked Betty. She nodded. I tossed her my keys. “Why don’t you move your stuff, love. I need to confer with your uncle for a minute.”

  Betty hesitated for a second, then took off.

  “What’s up, Milo?”

  “I seem to have gotten even more mixed up with the Lomaxes this morning,” I said. “And I wanted to ask you about a story I heard a few years ago.”

  ” ‘Bout that option to sell I supposedly signed? According to what Betty told me, you and me maybe crossed paths with the same slippery cooze.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, I’m glad Betty ain’t here to hear this,” Tom Ben said, “‘cause it don’t make me sound like much of a gentleman. Ah, hell, this young woman came out one Sunday when I was watching the Cowboys. Said she wanted to write a piece about my Brangus bulls for American Cattleman. Had a camera and a tape recorder and copies of some of her articles and everything. Even said she’d pay me for my time. And, hell, she knew her cattle and she was driving a cherry Jimmy pickup. She was as polite as she could be — apologized for coming during the Cowboys game, offered to come back when I wasn’t busy. Of course she was as pretty as a new colt — looked more like a movie star than a journalist. But I was having my evening Jack Daniel’s early that day, like I always do when the Cowboys are playing, and I offered her a splash, and hell… one thing led to another. Goddamned woman could drink, boy. Before I knew it, I’d done an interview, and some other stuff, signed a release, taken a check without looking at it, and made a damned fool of myself… Well, I bet you know the rest.” T
he old man paused, removed the limp Stetson from his thinning gray thatch, then blushed.

  “What did you do?”

  “When I got my clothes back on, looked at the size of the check, and realized that I hadn’t even looked at that release, I locked all the gates, and sent some hands on horseback to drag the bitch back. When she found a locked gate, she tried to head cross-country. Banged up her pickup a little bit and tore up ‘bout ten thousand dollars’ worth of fence-line, and hid that signed option before my hands caught up with her.” He paused, dug in the pocket of his overalls for a blackened stub of a pipe. “Wouldn’t have done her no good anyway,” he added, but I wasn’t listening.

  “What happened then?”

  “She fought my boys like a wet cat till they got her hog-tied and locked in the corn crib in the dairy barn with a pile of unshucked ears I keep for the goats, then I told her about the rats and mice in the corn, and reminded her that wherever you find rats and mice, you’re bound to find rattlesnakes. Hell, she spent ten days in there drinking stale water and doing her business in a bucket, but she wouldn’t say a word. Though I was damn sure it was that fuckin’ Lomax who sent her. So we stashed her classic Jimmy pickup in an old line shack over there on the northwest pasture beside the catch pond.”

  I remembered seeing the shack and the pond one of the times I had ridden one of Betty’s saddle horses over to the old man’s ranch.

  “Hell, I had half a mind to bury it in the bottom of the pond ‘cause we’d just dug it, but that model is such a great truck, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Then my hands dropped the bitch off in downtown Austin, and I tried to forget about the whole mess.

  “Believe me, boy, these days when I have my evening whiskey, I lock all the doors and windows first,” Tom Ben said, then laughed bitterly. “And I keep waiting for that piece of paper to show up. That fuckin’ Lomax will get this place over my dead body.” He paused to light his pipe, then a snort of laughter blew out the match. “And not even then actually,” he added.

  “Is this the woman?” I unfolded one of the head shots Carver D had scanned off the Lodge registration videotape.

  The old man nodded, suddenly sad. “If that goddamned Travis Lee hadn’t come limping back from jump school all shiny in his uniform while I was still in Korea, everything would have been different.”

  “Sir?” I said, confused by this sudden turn in the conversation.

  “You didn’t know? Son of a bitch ran off with the woman I was supposed to marry when I got back from Korea,” he said, stood, then jammed his shapeless Stetson back on his head, and rolled on his old bow legs and frozen feet back to the veranda steps where he stopped and turned. “Betty said you gave away a piece of family land one time.”

  “I kept enough to be buried in,” I said.

  “What’d it feel like?”

  “Since my great-grandfather had sort of stolen the land from the Benewah Indian tribe,” I confessed, “it didn’t exactly feel like a family place.”

  Tom Ben thought about that for a moment, rubbed his chin, puffed on the stubby pipe, then said, “Goddamned little brother of mine brought home the mumps from high school, too, so there was never going to be any children for me, either.” Then he shook his head, grinned ruefully, then stepped into the shadows of his house.

  I looked at the photograph one more time, folded it, and stuffed it back into my pocket, then stepped off the porch, and walked to the Caddy where Betty waited. I grabbed the manila envelope out of the front seat, and we stepped away from the car.

  “I should have known she was a professional,” I said.

  “He told you about the woman?” she said. “He must really like you,” she added. “He’s never even told me the whole story. Just hinted about it.”

  “Right,” I said, “and he mentioned something about Travis Lee running off with his fiancée.”

  She nodded sharply.

  “What happened?”

  “After a fling,” Betty said, “Travis Lee dumped her to marry a rich girl, and she committed suicide. Tom Ben never spoke to him again.”

  “You mean your uncles never speak?”

  “Sometimes through lawyers. Sometimes through me.”

  “And you never said a word to me?” I said, amazed.

  “Down here people aren’t raised to talk with your mouth full or about family stuff,” she said. I assumed that by “down here” she meant Texas, which seemed to have a different set of rules of family behavior than the rest of the world. “Why? Is it important?”

  “At this point I don’t have any idea what’s important,” I said, “but it’s sure as hell interesting. Wait until I tell you why I’m late.” I handed her the manila envelope.

  “You’re kidding,” Betty said after she discovered Gatlin County’s new approach. “How’s it feel? One minute behind bars. The next behind a badge.”

  “Actually, I’m not going to wear it. I’m going to carry it in my pocket.”

  “What now?”

  “We’re going to cash this little check,” I said, “Then we’ll find out how Mrs. Lomax knew I was going by my place.”

  EIGHT

  When the electronics guy’s meter hit the peg, he had me drive the Caddy into a soundproofed and electronically baffled garage where he worked until late afternoon carefully and silently removing the bug from behind the dome-light casing, where it drew its power from the car’s battery. “State-of-the-art for this kind of equipment,” he said, “good up to a quarter mile.” Then he stuck it to the headliner inside a plastic thimble. “Should approximate the sound,” he said.

  As I paid the bill for sweeping the Caddy, I whistled. “Shit, I’m in the wrong part of the business.”

  “Somebody’s got to protect us against the government, man,” he said. “They can read the newspaper headlines on your front porch and hear an ant fart if there’s a telephone in the house.”

  “I’d like to get my hands on the creeps who put that piece in my car,” I said as I counted off the last hundred-dollar bill. “Nothing personal, buddy. But I always thought you electronics guys jacked off too much.”

  “Gotta do something since we don’t have to pound the shoe leather,” the guy said, then laughed.

  “Ex-cop?” I said.

  “Shit, man, nobody can afford to be a cop these days.”

  I should have listened to him. Before I climbed into the Caddy, I pulled out my cell phone and started to check my voice mail one last time.

  “Excuse me, boss,” the guy said. “I wouldn’t use one of those gadgets if I was worried about electronic surveillance. They’re a pretty easy tap.”

  “Could I borrow your telephone?”

  “Make yourself at home,” he said. “But if you’re interested, I can do better than that.”

  “How?”

  “It’ll cost you a bundle up front and a fairly stiff monthly fee — in cash — but I can come up with five scrambled cell phones. Of course they can only talk to each other.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  The only message on my voice mail was from Gannon. He wanted me to call him on a land line.

  “Don’t’ you trust your own people?” I asked without preamble when he answered.

  “There’s a prize in every Cracker Jack box,” Gannon said, “and a devious heart in every fucking cracker down here. Where the hell are you?”

  I gave him the name of the chain motel bar just off I-35 North.

  “I’ll turn the siren on and be there in thirty minutes.”

  “Why?”

  “Now that we’re colleagues, Milo, we should talk.”

  * * *

  Gannon showed up looking very uncomfortable in a full-dress uniform. The leather straps of his Sam Browne belt stretched tightly over his jacket, as if he were restrained, and each time one of his new cowboy boots hit the floor, he grimaced as if he had just stepped on a thorn. He looked as if his cowboy hat hurt like a migraine.

  “Joining the enemy?” I asked. r />
  “You’re now looking at the chief of patrol,” he grumbled as he pulled up a stool to our stand-up table and ordered a cup of coffee. “Sheriff said either get into uniform or get gone. He didn’t have to add that he’d prefer gone.”

  “What brought this on?” I asked.

  “I think they’re pissed because I didn’t shoot you at the golf course,” he said. “They let Culbertson go, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Nobody tells me anything these days,” he said.

  “So what did you want to tell me?”

  “If I were you, Milo…” Gannon started to say.

  A lanky cocktail waitress with a smile like a classic Buick grille stopped at our table and waited until I removed the gray plastic case of cell phones so she could set our oversized happy hour drinks down. She wanted to run a tab, peddle plates of appetizers, work on her tip, and maybe even tell us the story of her life. Sometimes the friendliness of the natives drove me nuts. I threw a wadded fifty on the tray and told her to keep it. When she smiled, the Buick seemed to be speeding into my face.

  “If I were you, Milo, I’d mail my badge back to the bastards. Preferably from a foreign country. They’re setting you up for something.”

  “That’s old news. Finding out what for will be half the fun. You have any ideas? They want me out of town and not looking for Enos Walker? Or they want me to finger the McBride broad? Or maybe they’re planning to frame me for my own attempted murder? What the hell do they have in mind?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Gannon said. “And there’s not a single rumor around the courthouse. That’s the frightening part.”

  “Lomax owns most of the county,” I said. “Maybe he’s got something in mind?”

  “I did some checking around,” Gannon said, “moving easy and slow. Lomax draws more water than just owning the county. He’s asshole buddies with every political bigwig from the new governor ‘ all the way up and down. But Lomax has been down in Central America for the past three weeks. Some kind of mine disaster. And with his clout, if he wanted you dead, buddy, you’d be meat fragments floating in cowfeed or recycled aluminum or holding up a bridge on some highway down in Mexico.” Then he paused to rub his chin thoughtfully. He looked like a man polishing a middle-buster plow. “Do you have any chance at all to find the McBride woman?”