“Drug money?” I asked, and Solly nodded. “You guys were stealing drug money from the CIA? Jesus. How much?”
“You can’t count it in dollars,” Solly said. “Let’s just say that they sold out a dozen American troops, twenty Chinese mercenaries, and two hundred Meo civilians …”
“Then sent us in to dig up the list,” Frank said. “What did we lose, Sarge? Nine KIAs and fifteen wounded …”
“I don’t know what this shit is about,” Lenny growled, “but me and my daddy are walking out of here, or Wynona dies.”
“Frank,” I said, “give him Sarita.” Joe Don humped his wife over his shoulder like a sack of shit without even checking to see if she was alive.
“Back off, Carney,” I said, “and check Wynona.” And like a good soldier, he did. Immediately. He dug open the collar of her snowsuit, felt for a pulse, then said, “It’s weak, Sarge, but it’s there.”
“If she’s hurt,” I screamed at Joe Don, “you fucking die!”
Joe Don turned to walk away, and Solly shifted his weight on my back as if raising the pistol, whispering, “You fucking die.” So I just let his weight pull us over, and the round he fired went into the white-clotted sky. He got another one off before I rolled over and started pounding him in the face until Frank pulled me off, saying, “It’s not polite to hit a cripple.”
“Kick him,” Jimmy suggested.
“What about Joe Don?” Barnstone said from his position above us, the long-barreled machine gun aimed toward the motor home in the parking area at the bottom of the trail.
“Put a burst over their heads,” I said, “to hurry them along.”
“Right, Sarge,” he said, then let the forest ring and rattle with the huge rounds. It could have been shouts of joy. Or the clatter of death laughing.
I carried her out of the depression and propped her in a clear space against the trunk of a bull pine. Somewhere beyond the cloud cover and the falling snow, the sun managed enough light to force the snowbanks to glow with a soft white shimmer almost like a flame, a glow that the deep golden highlights of her skin reflected. I found myself digging under her collar for the pulse, laughing and crying, then I felt the thin, thready tick of her blood under my fingers, then I eased the helmet off to expose the already blank stare of her eyes.
It seemed to take forever to find the wound: a needle-sized puncture in the corner of her right eye. At first I suspected chicanery from Joe Don, but Frank reached over my shoulder and opened the wound to expose the end of a long, thin stone sliver. I gave her my breath until her heart stopped forcing blood to the brain, then held her until the heat left her body, held her until Frank took her away from me.
“You have to let it go,” he said softly. “You have to let it go, Sarge.”
I stood up, spinning, looking for somebody to kill, but all I could find were my friends and a sad ugly biker and a crippled lawyer. And the remains of my love. We fell as deeply silent as the trees. Until somebody said: “Will this shit never end?”
Mopping up took place as if in a dreamy fog. I spent most of it snorting and drinking at Slumgullion’s while my old partner took care of me, occasionally pouring a bowl of soup down my throat and making sure that I had a safe place to pass out.
Solly handled most of the cleaning chores from his hospital bed, using his Washington contacts to dispose of the bodies and cover up the gunfire. He got out of the hospital just about the time I checked in.
Norman had come into the bar, probably to apologize, but I tried to kill him. He didn’t resist, but Beater Bob and the rest of the boys put the boots to me. I checked myself out as soon as I was mobile and made it to Norman and Mary’s wedding. In spite of the lies, I guess the love made it all right, even if his mother wasn’t there. Like most of us, when Norman ran out of choices, he lied for Solly. I couldn’t forgive him, exactly, but when Norman handed me the keys to his VW van as a peace offering, I accepted it. I kept his money, too.
Then I went back to the bar, where I stayed so long and solidly that one by one my buddies gave up on me.
Barnstone and Dottie rented a house and a lawyer, who managed to get them temporary custody of Lester. Even Carney rented a cabin up the Hardrock to settle in for the rest of winter, stole Solly’s goose for fowl company, and came to his senses so well, or so badly, that he enrolled in law school at Mountain States, and he was so busy with briefs that he had no time for self-destruction. Frank went home to spend Christmas with his kids, then checked into the hospital and checked out courtesy of a young doctor with a handful of sleeping pills.
After Jimmy and I buried him during a winter sandstorm in a small cemetery outside El Paso, after an explosive and blazing borderline wake, I came home, but Jimmy stayed at Barnstone’s to house-sit and take over the appliance business.
So I was alone at the bar when Solly rolled his wheelchair through the front door. I glanced at him, then turned back to my Scotch. “Sughrue,” my old partner said from behind the bar, “cool it. You hit a guy in a wheelchair and you won’t be able to come in here even if I buy the bar.”
“Fuck it,” I said, “there’s always another bar just down the street.”
But Solly followed me there, and to the next one, and the next, until I finally gave up and sat down at a table with him in the plush foolishness of the Riverside Lounge.
“I heard about Frank,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “Let me see your arms.”
Solly took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. I couldn’t tell how old the tracks were, but none of them were new.
“I’ve been clean a long time,” he said.
“You’ll never be clean.”
“You’d be surprised how easy it is to be a junkie when you can afford it,” he said. “But revenge is a dish better eaten cold.”
“Fucking idiot,” I said. “You wanted to kill the son of a bitch, you should have killed him there. Christ, he didn’t even know who you were.”
“Yeah, that kinda hurt,” he said. “I hear Joe Don had one hell of an oil fire down on the border.”
“You’re still connected pretty good,” I said. “The papers said it was the first shot in a border drug war.”
“Connected is not exactly the right term,” he said. “Did he know it was you?”
“I didn’t bother to send him a telegram,” I said.
“How much do you know?” he asked suddenly.
“How much do you want to know?” I said. He seemed to want to hear me say it. “Let’s see, Lawyer Rainbolt, you were up to your ass in the drug trade out of the Golden Triangle, and after your wife and kid fled from you in San Francisco, you freaked and fled and got popped with a pound of blow, somewhere …”
“Santa Barbara.”
“Rich territory,” I suggested, “then got your old buddies in the government to find you an out. That’s when you became a drug lawyer. You won all those cases because the bureaucrats with guns let you. What better informant can you find than one who beat the fuckers at their own game? In court.”
“I did some other good cases,” he said weakly, suddenly so old and tired that I knew I couldn’t kill him. “Good case work.”
“You shit,” I said. “You squeezed Norman until he lied to me, and Norman never lied before in his life.”
“Not much of a loss.”
“And back in the bush you shot up and played dead …”
“But Joe Don pushed the orders that sent you guys into the bush.”
“… and you fuck, you walked out on the nod and Willie saw it, then the two of you hit it, and you left him there with a spike hanging out of his arm. Don’t tell me you did good work, you son of a bitch. He’d never put a fucking needle in his arm before. He just smoked the shit.”
“Just a matter of time,” Solly said lamely. “And I saved your life at the river crossing.”
“I’d rather be dead,” I said.
“So would I,” he said, “but it would be better
if Joe Don was the one to die.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“I had him in the cross hairs a dozen times but I just couldn’t fucking pull the trigger anymore.”
“But the Cuban?” I asked.
“He just got in the way. Bad luck.”
“Boy, you were always officer material,” I said. “When you get back to the office, Lawyer Rainbolt, you make damn fucking sure that Joe Don never gets his hands on Lester. Ever.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said helplessly.
“Do it,” I said, then left him there at the table, watching the cold water tremble beneath the river ice.
As far as I know, he’s still there.
But if I had known that just talking to him would get me out of my slough of self-pity and bring me back to life, I would have talked to him sooner. Joe Don wasn’t going to stop coming after Lester through the courts, and Solly couldn’t stop him, so for the first time in years, it seemed, I knew what to do next.
It didn’t take long for me to discover that I couldn’t pull the trigger, either. I told myself that a bullet was too good for Joe Don, but I had to eat the truth every time I had him in the cross hairs of my scope.
It took a new plan, the rest of the winter, and enormous help from the Dahlgren boys, but I finally was set. So one lovely spring desert day, dressed in a stolen UPS uniform and hidden behind sunglasses and a new beard, I delivered my Mexican Tree Duck directly into the hands of Joe Don Pines in his almost bare office. Hard times in the oil business, I thought. Then I walked back to the elevators.
This is how it must have happened. Joe Don read the note I had taped over the hole in the duck’s back: “I understand that this fake belongs to you. It was constructed by my brother-in-law, a high school art teacher in Gadsen, New Mexico. What he told you was a river-clam pearl is just a rock-hard dog turd.” Then Joe Don had to lift the ceramic beauty out of the Styrofoam peanuts, admire it briefly, then hold it to his ear and shake it to hear the sound of the dog shit rattle.
Perhaps he saw the slim green form of the viper slip out of the duck’s back. Perhaps not. But once the snake struck him in the face, he knew what had happened—he was one of the hard guys across the clearing when the major got his—and maybe he knew who had made it happen. Maybe.
Whatever, Joe Don beat me to the ground. His body was embedded in the roof of a taxi outside the front door of the building. I didn’t give it a second glance as I climbed into the UPS truck Jimmy had stolen to go with my uniform.
I think it was Francis Bacon who suggested something along the lines that revenge was a wild justice. I’m not sure about that. I don’t even think about it very much. All I know is that when I heard Joe Don’s screams echo down the marbled hallway, I felt good, and when I sat in Barnstone’s backyard in Meriwether the next afternoon, holding Baby Lester laughing in my arms, I felt better. It was almost as if the little fart understood that I had served his purposes.
“I hope you guys get along okay,” Barnstone said.
“We get on fine,” I said.
“And you take as good care of yourself, Sughrue,” Dottie said, “as you do of Lester.”
“What?”
“Wynona would want you to raise the little guy,” Barnstone said. “We’re going home.”
And they did.
After a couple of months, Sarita, old and querulous now, stopped bothering me about the baby. I heard that she moved back to Mexico where she lives like a queen in exile alone in a desert hacienda.
So it’s mostly diapers and day-care and tending bar again these days, and I don’t have much time to think about the theories of revenge or justice. Or even time to talk about them. Except for the occasional afternoons when Carney drops by for a drink when I’m behind the stick at the Slumgullion and wants to talk about how he will be able to manipulate the legal system. “It’s like the war,” he said. “You must become the enemy to kill him.”
That’s what we were doing the beautiful spring day on my old partner’s fifty-second birthday when he came into Slumgullion’s sporting a brand-new suit and announced he was off to the bank to pick up his inheritance, which had been locked up all these years by his crazy mother’s will.
I poured us all a single malt Scotch. Carney and I drank ours, smiling. My old partner left his standing on the bar, saying he might drink it when he came back, then he hiked toward the bank.
Carney and I had another, slow and grinning. Which made it hard to remember the times when he had been death incarnate in black pajamas and I had simply been dead.
After half an hour or so, my old partner came back to the bar, an odd smile on his face. He gunned the shot of Scotch, grimaced, then said, “I’ll be goddamned.”
“Why’s that?” Carney wanted to know.
“I was going to buy the bar today,” he said, “but I was a year early.”
“How the fuck?” I said.
“I get the money at fifty-three, not fifty-two,” he said. “How the fuck could I forget something like that?”
“Drugs, sex, rock and roll,” Carney suggested, already thinking like a lawyer.
We laughed. Life is a joke. You just have to hope it’s funny. Instead of bad.
I whipped out my checkbook, wrote one to him for thirty thousand, which was about half the ill-gotten gains I had left, and said, “Will this do for a down payment?” Then I headed for the door.
“Thanks,” my old partner said. “Where the hell are you going?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but me and Lester, we’re Texas boys. I think we’ll go home. See if it’s still there.”
We all shook hands, and he let me get to the door before he hollered: “How am I going to explain to the government where this money came from?”
“Fucking lie about it,” I said. “They don’t mind lying to you.”
About the Author
James Crumley was born in Three Rivers, Texas and spent most of his childhood in South Texas. He served three years in the US Army before teaching at University of Texas at El Paso, University of Montana and University of Arkansas. He passed away in 2008.
His private eye novels featuring Milo Milodragovitch and C. W. Sughrue are regarded as masterpieces of contemporary crime fiction, praised by Dennis Lehane, Ian Rankin and George Pelecanos. He was awarded the Dashiell Hammett Award for Best Literary Crime Novel and the CWA Silver Dagger Award.
Also by James Crumley
ONE TO COUNT CADENCE
THE WRONG CASE
THE LAST GOOD KISS
DANCING BEAR
BORDERSNAKES
THE FINAL COUNTRY
THE RIGHT MADNESS
ONE
IT WAS A lovely, calm Montana summer evening, a Saturday night after a long weekend of softball. The full moon rose blazing over Mount Sentinel, outlining the maw of the Hellgate Canyon with silver fire. A streak of summer haze like a line of blood lay across the moon’s idiot face. The motel’s pool lights were reduced to dim glows. The hot tub shimmered around us like a pot of silver. The early August afternoon had been as hot as a fiddler’s bitch, and a molten slice of sunset still glowed with a hot golden flame along the jagged edge of the western horizon, but the early evening air had cooled quickly enough to draw vaporous swirls of steam from the heated water. The rising moon seemed to muffle the night for a moment. The only sounds were faint—the hiss of traffic over the Clark Fork bridge, the soft paddles from a gaggle of children in the pool, the romantic whispers of two young blond girls in oversized softball shirts leaning into each other, and the brazen chuckles squirting out of a coven of young men brewing drunken plots of disorder and early sorrow at a poolside table.
Then Mac ratcheted up the hot tub’s timer and broke the spell. The Jacuzzi jets thrashed the water, scouring away the moon’s blush. A whisper of fabric brushed my thigh and a flash of something black and shining caught my eye. I grabbed it automatically. When I realized what it was, I quickly stuffed the scrap of sparkling cloth into the poc
ket of my trunks.
“Random madness in the ER tonight, Sughrue,” Mac murmured from the other side of the hot tub. I assumed he would know. After a quick Vietnam tour and a stint in ERs up and down the West Coast, he had gone back to school, taken his boards, and become a psychiatrist, a position from where he could at least help, sometimes, and where he didn’t have to deal with blood and guts anymore.
Once, when I asked him why he had changed medical careers in midstream, he answered thoughtfully that he had enjoyed the battle against bloody injury and sudden death too much. Winning made him hysterical with victory, and losing nearly killed him. The ER was no place for a budding manic-depressive, he maintained. “A dangerous night, Sughrue,” he added, grinning. “What’s your pleasure? Shall we confront the danger?”
“The most dangerous thing I’m going to do tonight,” I said as I cracked my last beer, “is put my pants on and go downtown.”
“It’s downtown Missoula on a Saturday night,” Mac said, then dropped his cigar into the remains of his watery vodka. “You could be eaten by vegetarian hippies falling off the wagon, raped by closet Republicans,” he said, then added, nodding toward the table full of bulky and besotted young men laughing, “or beaten to death by deranged and defeated softball players.” State softball tournament weekend.
“I’ll take my chances,” I said. “You want to come along?”
“Is Whitney coming?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I can almost hear her pounding her laptop keys from here. Being married to a lady lawyer ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, Doc. Hell, she probably won’t even notice when I stop by the room to put on my pants.”
“How’s the separation going?” Mac said as he climbed out of the Jacuzzi.
“It’s not a separation,” I insisted. “She just took a new job.”
“A thousand miles away?” he said. “But it’s my personal and professional opinion that you’re handling it the right way.”
“How’s that?”
“You’re not taking it personally.” Then he added, smiling, “I’ll get dressed, tell Lorna we’re going, and meet you at the Depot. I need to talk to you about something anyway. It’s important.”