The Final Country

  “My father always told me free advice usually wasn’t worth what it cost,” I said. “What do you want for a retainer?”

  “To hell with that. Sell everything you own,” Thursby said, ignoring me, “and learn to speak Portuguese.”

  “Brazil?”

  “You’ll like it there,” Thursby said, “the women are pretty and the drugs are cheap.” Then Thursby took another tiny sip of the champagne, hopped off the stool, and turned to leave. “Let’s start with fifty thousand.”

  “I’m too old to move again,” I said as I waved him back. “Give me a couple of days,” I said quietly as I leaned over the bar, “and I’ll come up with the money.”

  “Clean?”

  “As clean as I can make it. But if it isn’t, will you take that case, too?” I asked.

  “Not my style,” Thursby said flatly. “Put it in my overseas account. You’ve got the number.”

  “If you had a sense of humor,” I said, pushing a standard PI contract across the bar, “you’d be dangerous.”

  “Dead wrong,” Thursby said as he signed it so I would at least have a little confidentiality coverage and left, saying, “Don’t abuse this. I don’t want to have to defend this thing in court.”

  Later that afternoon, as predicted, Judge Steel-hammer dismissed the charges and released the bond, and the Sheriff’s Department released the Cadillac and the Airweight. Of course, when I picked them up, the Beast came back with a location beeper under the gas tank and the Airweight with a broken firing pin. Gannon stopped by after work, so I complained to him about the alterations in my machinery. He just leaned on the bar as if trying to decide what to drink.

  “You’re lucky you’re not dead,” Gannon chuckled, “and the Caddy stashed in a chop-shop in Nuevo Laredo.”

  “I’d forgotten how lucky I was,” I said. “Thanks for reminding me, Capt. Gannon.”

  “Call me Jimmy.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “You’re still on duty.”

  “Not now,” he said.

  “Well, we still haven’t had that drink.”

  “Last time I saw you, Milo, you had them all,” Gannon said. “I’ll have whatever your lawyer drinks.”

  “I do that sometimes,” I said as I filled two flutes with some of Thursby’s champagne, “but I seem to remember an offer of help.”

  “I think I offered to help you pack.”

  “How about something else?” I asked.

  Gannon lifted his glass and his eyes narrowed as he frowned. “What’s in it for me?”

  “Enos Walker,” I said. “Lalo Herrera is coming out of retirement to cover my shifts and manage his sons and the bar, so I can give this my full attention.”

  “What the hell’s Walker got to do with Rooke’s death?”

  “Damned if I know,” I admitted, “but it sure seems like my troubles started there.”

  “What do you want?”

  “The case files on the Dwayne Duval shooting. That’s all.”

  “That was before my time,” he said. “I think the state boys handled the investigations back then. I’d have to sign the files out.”

  “Whatever happened to interdepartmental cooperation?” I said.

  “Not my department,” Gannon sighed, then we clicked glasses. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Please,” I said quietly.

  Gannon savored the champagne. “Here’s to the good life.”

  “And a copy of those files.”

  I didn’t really have any real hope that Gannon could or would get them to me, but it seemed like a good idea to get him in the habit of at least trying to do favors for me. We finished the flutes, then he walked slowly out, as if the single glass of champagne had made him wistful.

  Gannon was barely out of the bar when Travis Lee stepped through the door and pulled up a stool at the end of the bar next to the glass wall over the hollow. At least he set his cowboy hat on the bar, so I didn’t have to point out the sign prohibiting umbrellas. He smiled, ran his fingers through his thick gray hair as if to remind himself that he still had it.

  I held up the champagne bottle.

  “A headache in every swallow,” he snorted. “Turkey on the rocks,” he said. “A double. And a beer back.”

  After I got his drink, I poured myself another glass of champagne. No sense in losing the expensive fizz. As I lit a cigarette, Travis Lee bummed one off me. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “Haven’t had one in twenty-five years,” he said, then hit the cigarette so hard that he burned a half-inch of it into ash. “Damn, that’s good.”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Oh, I was just in the Lodge, so I thought I’d stop in and see how your back’s coming along and remind you that we have a chance to make a lot of money very easily and very quickly,” he said.

  “I got some other stuff on my plate right now,” I said.

  “What? Tending bar?” he said.

  “I’m just giving Mike a few days off so he’ll cover my shifts while I try to dig out from under this load of crap that has fallen on me,” I said. “Phil says I’ve got about three weeks.”

  “Where are you planning to start?” he asked, but he didn’t sound either interested or confident.

  “First I’m going to talk to the kid that shot-gunned Dwayne Duval.”

  “What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Oddly enough, he seemed interested now.

  “I don’t know exactly,” I admitted. “It’s just a place to start.” I didn’t tell him that Sissy Duval had lied to me. If you can’t follow the money, I thought, perhaps you should try to unravel the lies. “You didn’t know this Duval character, did you?”

  “I bought a drink or two off him in the old days,” he said. “I’ve known his widow since she was a kid.”

  “Sissy?”

  “Yeah,” he sighed, then tossed off the Turkey. “She used to be a pistol. Haven’t seen her in a while.” Then he looked at me as if he knew I had. But I didn’t say anything. “You think Duval’s death is connected somehow to the, ah, young woman who, ah …” He paused to sip on his beer. “That killing was a long time ago.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Every case has to start somewhere,” I added, “and what’s the point of being a private eye if you can’t follow a hunch. If I believed in a rational world, maybe I’d still be a cop.”

  Travis Lee looked at me as if I were insane, finished his beer, and my cigarette, then said, “Well, son, call me when you come back to the rational world.” Then he picked up his cowboy hat, set it on his head carefully, and strolled away like a man without a care in the world.

  * * *

  Since I was Phil Thursby’s investigator, I didn’t have any trouble getting an appointment with Dickie Oates. The prison officials hated Thursby almost as much as they were frightened of him, so they even let me talk to Dickie in a small conference room. Somewhere beneath the hard-ass con who sat down across the table from me, I could see the lanky, snaggle-toothed lop-eared kid with a round, open face that Oates must have been at the time of the Duval killing. But now Oates was all busted knuckles and scars. A crooked nose parted his face, and dark shadows lurked deep in his bright blue eyes. All in all, though, he didn’t look too bad for all his years as a guest of the Texas Department of Corrections. But we both knew the real story was worse than his face and body showed.

  “So why the hell is Phil Thursby interested in reviving my appeal?” Oates asked, smiling cynically. He didn’t have to ask who Phil Thursby was. “My fuckin’ lawyer ain’t.”

  “Look, Mr. Oates,” I lied as I opened a leather legal-sized notebook, “we don’t know if he’s interested or not. Right now. But he has a team of interns who do nothing but read transcripts and old case files. One of them pointed out that there seemed to be something missing in your story.”

  “Like what?”

  “Why don’t you tell me the story,” I suggested, “and I’ll see if it’s there.”

>   For the first time, Oates smiled slightly, scratching at his left eyebrow, where a new scab nestled, then he locked his hands on the table, eager now, hopeful, it seemed, for the first time in a long time.

  “Okay,” Oates began, “so I’m playing pool in this joint with a bunch of my frat bro’s, and somebody started bitching about table roll and scratching on the eight ball or some shit. Nothing too loud, just guys mouthing, when this coked-up asshole who said he owned the place threw us out.

  “So what the hell, we had words, but we went. I was the last one out the door and stepped around the corner to take a leak between the wall and my pickup, and while I got my pecker in my hand, this fucker slams my face into the rock wall with his forearm. When I turned around, he blasted me good…” Oates touched his crooked nose.

  “When I hit the ground, he put the boots to me. Pretty hard. Till some women pulled him off, three or four of them, then one of them helped me to my pickup.”

  “What do you remember about that woman?”

  “Not much,” Oates said. “Tall, lots of hair, blond maybe, nearly as fucked up as the guy.”

  “What did she say to you?”

  “Nothing much,” Oates said. “Apologized, sort of, called him an asshole. That sort of shit.”

  “She suggest payback?”

  “Yeah, well, maybe,” Oates said, frowning again. “Ain’t you leading the witness, Counselor?”

  “Ain’t my problem. Your shotgun, was it in the gun rack?”

  “Not a chance, sir,” he answered. “It was my Daddy’s quail gun, and I wouldn’t hang it up in a rack like some asshole redneck. I had it in a case behind the seat.” Oates shook his head sadly. “When that little detail came out in court that was the end of any talk about a manslaughter plea. My lawyer said I was lucky the prosecutor didn’t go for first degree. The jury was filled with Gatlin County corporate crackers. They would have given the needle for sure.”

  I knew from the courthouse rumors that Steelhammer had a record of coming down hard on college students who came into his county to break the law. Then because I didn’t have any other questions, I asked, “You ever do any cocaine back then?”

  “Shit, man, it was Austin,” he grumbled. “Back in those days ever’ third sorority girl had ‘I Love Champagne, Cadillacs, and Cocaine Cowboys with Cash’ tattooed under her pubic hair.”

  “Ever buy any out of Duval’s Place?”

  “Not me,” he said. “There was a rumor that the guy who bought for the frat house got his product there. But, hell, I didn’t know shit from wild honey in those days.”

  Then I wondered, “This lady you were talking about, she say anything else?”

  “Sometimes when I dream about it, man, she does,” Oates said. “She asked me if I had a gun in my truck.”

  “When you dream about it? Spare me the psychological bullshit,” I said. “I know you’ve got more time on the couch than a retired hound dog.”

  “That couch shit doesn’t happen much in the Texas Department of Corrections, man. Not much,” Oates said seriously, refusing to be denied. “But I dream about that night all the time, almost every night when I can get to sleep, so how the hell am I supposed to remember what really happened? In the dream, most of the time, she calls him over, so I think he’s coming after me again, and, man, I was already fucked up. Four cracked ribs, two broken fingers on my right hand, a crushed nut, and my nose, well, it felt like it was touching my ear. So I up and shot the motherfucker when he came after me. Once in the guts, then once in the face.”

  “In the face with the second barrel?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “They said?”

  “At the trial.”

  “You don’t remember?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Oates whispered, shaking his head. “The first shot hurt my hand and my head so much, I don’t remember the second one. Hell, for a while it looked like the bastard was gonna pull through, but he already had some kinda sinus infection, and it got into his brain. So that fucked the dog for me.”

  “You don’t remember anything else about the women?” I asked as I closed the notebook. “I don’t remember a single woman on the witness list.”

  “You know how it is. My lawyer couldn’t find anybody who admitted they were even there. Not even my friends.” Oates sucked a tooth and shook his head. “You think you can do anything?”

  “All I can do is try,” I said, then handed Oates a card. “You remember anything about the woman, even dream anything, you call me collect.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sometimes we don’t remember things until we’re talking about it.”

  “Thanks,” Oates said. “I’ll try not to take advantage of the offer.”

  “Take care,” I said, resigning myself to collect conversations with Oates.

  “Next time, bring in a lungful of smoke,” Oates said quietly. “Secondhand smoke is the only kind we get in here.”

  “Right,” I said, then started to leave. “How do your parole hearings go?”

  “Man,” he said, “I don’t know. I don’t have a record out in the world and not much bad time in here, but they treat me like I’m a fuckin’ serial killer or something. That snakefucker of a prosecutor has showed up every time.” Then he paused, a sly look flitting across his face. “You’re the dude that killed his brother, ain’t you?”

  “It was an accident,” I said. “And they dropped the charges.”

  “Those Gatlin County assholes,” he said. “Those corrupt bastards will find some way to nail you.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. But I didn’t have any more hope than Dickie Oates did when I left.

  When I climbed stiffly into the passenger seat of the El Dorado, Betty turned from behind the wheel and considered me. “We gotta do something about that back, Milo,” she said. “Pills and hot tubs don’t seem to be doing a bit of good.”

  “That’s for damn sure,” I said. “Thanks for taking the time off to drive me over. I don’t think I could have made it without you.”

  “No problem,” she said quietly, a stiff smile on her face. Then she started the car, saying, “I didn’t take off. I quit. For a while.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly quit,” she said. “I just took an unpaid leave.”

  “What did they think about that?”

  “I sort of own the practice,” she said quietly, “so I don’t much give a shit what they think.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said, wondering why she worked nights in her own clinic. Maybe she was trying to stay out of trouble, working nights. That’s what I had told myself back when I tended bar at night. I didn’t know. But she had said she was better in a crisis than in everyday life. Maybe that explained it. Since it seems a crisis always pulls into your driveway after midnight.

  “There’s a lot of things about me you don’t know,” Betty said, a grim smile on her face as she eased out of the prison’s parking lot.

  I wondered what those other things might be, but right then they didn’t seem very important.

  “But about your back?”

  “What?”

  “You remember my friend Cathy Scoggins?”

  “The ditsy broad who’s always stoned?”

  “She’s a damn fine acupuncturist,” she said, “not a broad. Why don’t you let her work on your back?”

  “Has she ever worked on you?”

  Betty paused a moment, then said, “Not exactly, but she’s had good luck with some of my patients.”

  “Dogs and horses and scabby calves?” I said. “Why not? Will she let me get stoned, too?”

  “She’ll probably insist on it,” Betty said.

  After a long pause, I said, “I don’t know what to say about you taking off from work.”

  “Just say ‘thank you,’ you fucking idiot.”

  “Thank you, you fucking idiot,” I said, but my heart didn’t seem to be in it, so I popped
a couple of codeine tablets and leaned the seat back, and drifted off as quickly as I could.

  * * *

  We were hunkering over barbecue plates at Black’s in Lockhart before Betty asked me what I had learned from the Oates kid.

  “Not much that makes sense,” I admitted. “I know that he’s doing too much time for the crime, and Steelhammer was the judge. But I’ve got this funny feeling about the shooting. I’d bet the farm that somebody else — probably this woman he dreams about — fired the second barrel into Dwayne Duval’s face that night.” And just that easily I picked up another chore: keep Enos Walker out of the execution chamber, get Dickie Oates out of prison, keep Betty Porterfield out of trouble, and keep my old ass out of jail. “Or something crazy like that,” I said, then drifted off into worrying.

  “Well, that’s certainly an insane idea,” Betty said sharply, bringing me back. “What the hell’s that got to do with your troubles?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The only thing I know is that when I talked to Dickie Oates, it’s the first time I’ve felt like somebody’s telling the truth since I had a drink with Enos Walker.”

  “Jesus, Milo, the kid’s a convicted killer,” she insisted. “He’d say anything, right? And Walker’s a stone criminal.”

  I had to agree but I didn’t want to let that go by, and continued, “Sissy Duval told me that this Mandy Rae character and Enos Walker showed up in town with twenty keys of Peruvian flake and went into business. It sounded like they cornered the market for a while, and I can’t help but think that’s somehow connected. But I don’t know what it’s connected to. All I know is that nobody was trying to shoot me until I went looking for Walker. Which is a question I intend to explore at some length with Sissy Duval tomorrow.” Then I paused. “You said you knew those people a little bit?”