The Mexican Tree Duck

  “Any chance she took off on her own?”

  “I can’t imagine it,” he answered.

  “Or that she’s actually my client’s mother?”

  “You know she was educated in the States,” he said, “back when very few women of her class were allowed such freedom. She went to Smith, then took an M.A. at Cornell, and I know she also spent some time in El Paso, so it’s certainly possible that she had a child out of wedlock, then left it at the orphanage,” he said, then added, “but I can’t believe that she would have raised the child until the age of six and then abandoned it. I can’t see Sarita doing that. Not for a minute …”

  Joe Don paused, then stepped over to where I sat on the couch. He lowered his large frame onto the coffee table, then placed his hand on my shoulder. “She’s a wonderful woman. And I can’t think something like that about a woman I love. But she’s always kept her own counsel, so it’s possible,” he said. “But I can’t imagine it …” Then Joe Don stood up and began to stride around the room.

  “What makes you think you can find her when half a dozen law enforcement agencies can’t?” he asked suddenly.

  “I’m lucky,” I said, “and I have connections they can’t touch.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “So what do you want from Mr. Pines?” Townsend asked.

  “Just the answers to a couple of questions,” I said, “nothing more.”

  “Let me hire you,” Joe Don said.

  “I’ve already got a client,” I said.

  “I’ll pay you a bonus, anything you ask, anything.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “Too many bosses and too much money might confuse me.”

  “Len,” he said, “let me have your badge.”

  “What? No fucking way,” Len responded, standing up and sweeping his hand through his hair again. I realized who he looked like. “You’re not going to give my special ranger badge to this asshole,” he whined.

  Joe Don stepped over to Len and slapped him like a petulant child, then reached into his inside coat pocket, extracted a badge case, and handed it to me. “This is a Special Texas Ranger badge. There are only fifty of them in existence and the bearer carries the full force of the law, so I want you to take this one, and …”

  “No, thanks,” I said, then hefted it in my hand. “I know who carries these fucking things.” Joe Don looked confused. “Strikebreakers, bigots, and the hired ass-kissing lackeys of rich folks. I’m not a saint but I don’t fit into any of those categories.” I tossed the badge case to Len, who caught it, frowning, and gave me his best hard look.

  “I guess I don’t have anything to offer you, then,” Joe Don said, then slipped into his chair behind the black walnut desk.

  “Just answer one question for me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Well, I know you paid for the murder of Eloy Jones. I even know how much you paid the deputy for the cover-up. That part of the paper trail is clear. But I don’t know who you hired to cut his dick off and slice it like a little sausage. Can you enlighten me on that part?” I said.

  I got a reaction, but not exactly the one I had planned.

  Len cursed and without hesitation leaped into a flying heel kick aimed at my head. I guess if it had caught me, that would have been the end of my day.

  But I still remembered a few things from the old days: stay away from a knife fighter until you find a club or a gun; even with a gun, run from boxers because they’re likely to knock you out of your socks before you can think about pulling the trigger; and with karate guys, get inside as quick as you can and bite their nuts off because they usually forget the countermove for that.

  So I stepped inside of Lenny’s spinning leg, got as close as I could, and caught his thigh with my arms and chest. When I tried to bite his nuts off, I missed, but my teeth sank nicely into his silk-covered hamstring.

  When we stopped rolling around the floor, Joe Don stood in front of his treasures, his arms outstretched, and Len hopped around, holding on to his bleeding leg as if he’d been shot. He took one more try at me, somewhat hampered by his one-legged stance, so it was easy to duck my head and let the bones of his hand splinter against the top of my skull.

  Even on one foot he still rang my chimes, so I had to finish it quickly. I stomped on his lightly clad toes, the ones on his good foot, with the heel of my cowboy boot; that usually helps. Then he sat down on the floor like a sick child.

  Another piece of good advice I remembered: once you get a guy like Len down, you can’t let him up. I broke his right collarbone with the expensively large ashtray. He dumped a neat puddle of puke between his knees, then tried to stand up again. Fuck it, this guy was as tough as he thought he was. So I hit him behind the ear with the ashtray hard enough, I hoped, to kill him. Which barely made him dizzy. So I did it again. Finally, he splashed face-first into his own vomit.

  When I turned around, Joe Don had found a small automatic pistol somewhere and aimed it at me with a shaking hand.

  “Get on your fucking knees,” he said, reaching for the intercom, “with your hands behind your head.”

  “You guys have pissed me off, Mr. Pines,” I said. “Either pull the fucking trigger, man, or give me the gun before I make you eat the motherfucker. You’ve already pissed in your pants, anyway,” I said. When he looked down at his crotch, I took the pistol out of his hand. Then he peed his pants. I quickly unloaded and tossed it under the couch. “And quit looking at the intercom. You don’t want your people to see you like this.” He didn’t, so he sat heavily in his chair and fell on his hands, defeated. Then he began to try to gather himself back together like a man who knew how through long, sorry experience. “Swollen prostate,” he said, then stepped into a bathroom to change.

  “You know, Sughrue, I had a really hard time over there,” he said over fresh drinks, after Lennie had been removed and Joe Don chosen a new suit. He had washed his face, too, but he still looked like an angry child. “I just fucking saw too much, Sughrue.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I was a Jell-O salad from Travis to Tan Son Nhut. Then back. Guess I wasn’t cut out for it.” Joe Don looked at me as if I were a lower form of life.

  “Right, some of us just couldn’t cut it,” he said as if we belonged to the same guilt and whine AA group. “How long were you in Indian Country?”

  Indian Country, I thought. What an asshole. Joe Don probably said ’Nam, too.

  “Nine months in the bush,” I said, “scared shitless.”

  “Nothing wrong with being scared,” he said, as if he hadn’t been, “as long as you admit it.” Then he paused. “Actually, my wife told me that.”

  “Smart woman,” I said. “That’s what my counselor says.”

  “Flashback?” he asked.

  “Drug abuse,” I answered.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m not,” I said. “You have any idea where I might find your wife?”

  “Do you think I would be sitting here if I knew?” he replied.

  “I don’t know you well enough to know,” I admitted.

  “Trust me, I …” Then he paused, a rueful grin flickering across his face. “I guess that’s the wrong approach.” He stepped over to his desk and took a large checkbook out of his desk drawer, then scrawled one quickly and handed it to me. “That’s yours, Mr. Sughrue,” he said, “just for looking for my wife. No strings attached.”

  He’d made it out for ten thousand dollars. That part was fun. The fact that he could spell my last name wasn’t.

  “You’re missing a figure, sir.”

  “Oh,” he said, then acting as if he were the coolest rich asshole in the world, he corrected it to read one hundred thousand. He even initialed the changes as if every teller was just waiting to cash a check like that.

  “If it’s a gesture,” I said, “it’s an expensive one.”

  “Trust,” he sighed. “A man can’t do business without trust. There’s my e
vidence.”

  I stepped over to the desk, picked up his pen, wrote “for services rendered” in the memo space, then turned the check over and endorsed it and handed it back to Joe Don. “I don’t work on the come, Mr. Pines. Come up with the cash and a letter of employment,” I said, “then we’ll talk about trust.”

  Joe Don flinched but he rang for his personal assistant, scribbled a memo and handed the check and the slip of paper to her, told her to cash it, told her to fill out a standard free-lance contract, then when she left, he offered me another drink. I had to decline. Townsend had knocked me silly three times, and the afternoon tequilas hadn’t helped, either. Plus, I knew the night was going to be a bitch.

  “I’ll just wait for the cash,” I said, then sat down prepared to wait silently, but Joe Don obviously wanted to chat. Silence made him nervous. “You’ve got a hell of a lot of security for an oilman,” I said.

  “Life on the border isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “When I was a kid my mother used to hire a maid from Juárez who would work for ten, maybe fifteen dollars a week, and she would no more steal from you than from her priest …”

  As if that explained what I guessed at a half million a year on security. Or more. “I heard a rumor, Mr. Pines, that the last time you lost an election here, you promised to never set foot in Texas,” I interrupted.

  Joe Don chuckled expansively. He took no offense; he clearly loved to tell this story. “No, what I said was that I would never set foot on Texas soil again. I come in from the ranch or the spa in my limo. It delivers me to the basement elevator …”

  “I get it,” I interrupted again, then I glanced at the two remaining ceramic ducks. “What the hell are those things?”

  “Nobody knows,” Joe Don answered, his composure almost complete now. “They might be Olmec, they might be Mayan. Whatever they are, those tar-looking blobs around the back and the bill are human blood. We know that much. And when we had them X-rayed, it looked as if they contained three of the largest freshwater pearls anybody had ever seen. This anthropologist suggested that they were used in religious sacrifices. Pour the blood in the back, let the pearl purify it, then pour it out the beak.” Joe Don was proud and arrogant again, almost benign in his pride of ownership. He pulled the nearer one out of the case, held it next to his ear, then shook it. Hard. Even from where I stood, I could hear the lump bounce and echo inside the ceramic body. Joe Don seemed a bit too happy about owning the Mexican Tree Ducks. He had a rich man’s taste: he didn’t give a shit about anything but the story and the price; and the fact that he had the only ones.

  “The old blood doesn’t stink?” I asked, and he acted as if his feelings were hurt.

  “Of course not,” he said, dismissing the notion.

  “You find them in Mexico?”

  “No, not at all,” he said, serious again. “They were recovered a few years ago from a Spanish colonial wreck over on Padre Island. They had been buried high and dry in the dunes for god knows how long. I was over there with a lease man and we stumbled into them. I’ve spent a long ton of money trying to have them identified, but nobody seems to be able to place them into any known religion or tribe.”

  “Look like Mexican Tree Ducks to me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Mexican Tree Ducks.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just a goofy bird I used to see in my childhood.”

  “No, no,” he said. “They’re way too old for that.”

  I nodded, then asked, “Where’s the other one?”

  “The other one?” Joe Don seemed confused now. He had more moods than a bad actress. “Oh, right. I did say three pearls, didn’t I? You’re quick, Mr. Sughrue. It’s being cleaned and X-rayed …”

  Just then, much to Joe Don’s relief, his assistant came in with an aluminum briefcase, set it on the coffee table, then opened it so I could see the money. She looked like somebody’s mother until she said, “I hope hundreds are okay? They didn’t have enough smaller bills.” This woman had carried money somewhere before. I told her it would be fine, then she glanced at Joe Don and excused herself.

  “You want a bodyguard or something?” Joe Don asked.

  “Your money buys some trust, Mr. Pines, but not that much,” I said. “Besides, I didn’t get where I am by being afraid of dying,” I added just in case he might be wondering.

  “Where’s that?” he asked, smiling.

  “Alive,” I said, and left him standing beside the rest of my flock. Then I paused at the door. “Hey,” I said, “tell Lenny I’m sorry.”

  “Oh. No problem. Kid always did heal quick.”

  “Not that,” I said. “About accusing his adopted dad of killing his real one.”

  Then I finally left, hoping Joe Don thought he had seen the last of me.

  When none of his help followed me from Joe Don’s building to the airport, I stopped at a package shop, moved the money to a cardboard box, left the locator beacon intact in the briefcase, then went on to the airport to air-freight the money to Solly’s office. I called to check in and was quite happy to talk to the machine. Then I dropped off the rental car, left the briefcase under the seat in the unlocked unit next to mine, and walked over to the airport curb where Barnstone picked me up in a junky green GMC pickup he had borrowed from his neighbor of many cars.

  “Jesus, Sughrue,” he said as I tried to find a place to sit where a spring didn’t bite my butt. “You’re a pretty slick piece of work, man, and you sure know how to have a good time …”

  “Thanks for covering my back,” I said.

  “… but you’re a dangerous man.”

  “How’s that?”

  Barnstone drove north through the hard-time neighborhoods of east El Paso, thinking, tugging at the fringes of his red moustache.

  “It’s hard to explain,” he said, “but the easiest way to try is to say that you’ve rekindled emotions I had forgotten how to have,” he said seriously. “I saw the way you took Lenny out …”

  “Just lucky,” I said. “If I hadn’t gotten my teeth in his leg, they would have gathered me up with a police mop.”

  “It’s always luck,” he said, “or moral inspiration.” Then he stared into the traffic as we turned west on Transmountain Road, heading uphill toward the faint remains of sunset washing the sky above the Franklin Mountains. “That’s what I never had,” he finally said. “I didn’t believe in the war. Fuck, nobody worth a shit believed in the war. Not for very long. And if they did, they turned out to be Ollie North.” Then he paused to look at me. “Man, could I tell you some stories about what really went down in Nicaragua in those days. It’s a shitty world when the fucking drug smugglers know more about politics than the pissant Congress. But don’t get me started. Please.”

  I thought it kind of me not to point out that I hadn’t.

  We drove in silence to the top of the pass, then Barnstone pulled into the parking area. We climbed out, gathered up a couple of beers from a cooler in the back, leaned against the pickup, took long swallows, then watched the sunset die across the flat spiky miles of southern New Mexico.

  “Tell me that part about Baby Lester,” Barnstone said. “Again.”

  When I finished, Barnstone said, “How did you learn how to feel those things? I’ve been trying for years now, and patience is just about as much as I’ve learned.”

  “And persistence,” I said, “perhaps a little kindness.”

  “Those are external things,” he said. “It’s the feeling part that’s tough. Where did you learn it?”

  “My father,” I said before I could think, “he was sort of mystical and crazy.” Then I thought, quickly. “And an old buddy of mine—my ex-partner—he was a PI, but now he’s a dry bartender. And Frank, and Solly, and … Fuck, I don’t know. That’s just my best short list.”

  “Thanks,” Barnstone said, then glanced at his watch. “Let’s hit it. You guys will want to be off the ranch before moonrise, and we’ve only got about six hour
s until it clears the mountains …”

  “How do you know that?”

  “What?”

  “When the moon rises?”

  “I read the paper, man.”

  We laughed for a moment, then he got serious. “One favor, please,” he said. “No. Two.”

  “Sure,” I said. “What?”

  “Promise not to kill anybody.”

  “I’ll try,” I said, thinking of the night we had crossed the desert on our way to El Paso, “but I won’t let Frank or Jimmy or you die.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “How long’s it been?”

  I didn’t have to ask what “it” was. “I don’t talk about it anymore,” I said.

  “And how long has that been?” he pried.

  “Since I started dreaming about it,” I admitted. When he didn’t say anything, I asked, “What was the second favor?”

  “Oh,” he said as if he had forgotten. “I was going to ask you to let me come along, but you already answered that.”

  So we climbed into the pickup and moved on the ranch, racing the moonrise.

  PART FIVE

  FRANK AND JIMMY were already installed at the picnic table in Barnstone’s backyard. For reasons I didn’t want to think about, we seemed to have taken to staying outside as often as possible, as if we weren’t prepared for the confinement of four walls. I dumped a pile of brand-new night gear—black sweat suits, watch caps, sneakers, etc.—on the table. Jimmy and Frank looked at the gear but didn’t have any questions. Barnstone and I sat down and opened beers.

  As I explained as best I could to Frank and Jimmy about what had happened to me and the hunch that had grown out of it, I noticed Carney drift out of the shadows behind his garden to hunker at the edge of the light. For a moment it looked as if he were about to say something, then he lowered his face, and I looked back at the table and told them that Barnstone and I were going to hit Joe Don’s ranch that night. They could come along if they wanted.