Bordersnakes

  Milo left me at home for a couple of days, resting up, while he drove to Southern California. Holding Whitney was like holding my heart in my mouth. Catching Baby Lester was like chasing a greased, rawhide pig. I suspect it hadn’t been that way for Milo. He spent three nights with Maribeth at her condo in La Jolla. But he hadn’t mentioned it yet.

  “What time’s that deputy supposed to be back at the substation?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know.

  “Now,” I tell him, without glancing at my watch.

  —

  Americans seem obligated to erase the past. Wipe out the names, even. I suspect the seaside village of Highwave, California, had once been called Las Olas Altras, but now it sounds like a proctologist’s chore. Just like the sheriff of Cocachino County. We spent all afternoon at the courthouse in Glory while Milo looked for the right way to kiss the sheriff’s ass before the stumpy politico would let us even talk to the deputy, Don Henriksen, who’d been on duty at the Highwave substation when Rita Van Tasselvitch’s body went off the bridge into the Copia River.

  The substation must have been built before Proposition 13. Bulletproof glass and iron doors keep the visitors from the squad room, and the dispatcher issues official plastic visitors’ badges to us before we are allowed to shove on the locked and barred door while she fucks with the buzzer. Finally, inside, we find almost new desks mounted with state-of-the-art computers and braced with soft-seated swivel chairs. The empty holding tank looks clean, almost comfortable, and the weapons racked along the rear wall look as if they’ve never been shot.

  Deputy Henriksen is losing his blond hair, and with his goofy grin he has the look of pure country, but it hasn’t affected his cop face. I notice that right away. Just as soon as Milo asks him how he likes working in a small community, then plays his old Meriwether County deputy experience on the kid. Henriksen talks to Milo as if he’s the sheriff’s favorite uncle. When in fact, the sheriff is Henriksen’s least favorite uncle. But this is an open murder case in one of the smallest rural counties on the North Coast, and Doug isn’t anxious to talk about it. No matter how much and how easy the small talk. But finally Milo finds the key. Fishing. Milo invites him to come to Montana and go trout fishing on his ranch.

  What ranch? I think.

  Turns out that Henriksen’s family had been commercial fishermen for several generations up at Fort Bragg, but between the government and the Japanese there were no fish anymore. So over the years the family had taken to law enforcement instead of marijuana farming, as most everybody else had.

  “Yes, sir,” Henriksen says, “the drug problem along this section of the North Coast is terrible.”

  “How’s that?” Milo says.

  Too many fucking cops, I think.

  “Mexicans have moved in,” Henriksen says. “Mafia is trying to corner the crops. The growers are carrying automatic weapons…It’s a war out there.”

  Right, I think, but the fucking government started it.

  “I take it, Deputy, that you think that Miss Van Tasselvitch’s death was connected to this war?” Milo says softly, then adds, “I’m Russian myself, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that name…”

  “Oh,” Henriksen says brightly, catches himself, then shrugs. It won’t hurt to talk to us a little bit. “That was a professional name. She used to be a stripper down in the city. Had her name changed. Hard to believe, you know, after looking at the body…”

  “Shotgun tore her up pretty bad?” I say.

  “That’s right. One big mess,” he says, turning to me finally. Since I had taken off my gimme cap and let my ponytail fall out, Henriksen had treated me as if I were a redheaded stepchild. Or an idiot cousin. “Rita must have put her hands over her face when the guy popped a cap on her.”

  “I heard somebody tied her hands to her face,” Milo says.

  Henriksen stares at Milo for a long second. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “The FBI.”

  “Oh. Well, it was a mess, whatever. No fingerprints, no teeth. A real mess,” he says as if he’s talking about the weather.

  “How’d you identify the body?” Milo asks.

  “Oh, easy,” Henriksen says. “The tattoos, and her size, you know. She put on a few pounds since she twirled her tassels down in the city.” Then he laughs like a boy. “About a hundred-weight, man. She was a big, big woman. Everybody knew her. Hell, everybody in the county had seen her hitchhiking naked at one time or another. Last time I saw her naked was right over there in that holding tank. Couldn’t believe it was the same woman my Uncle Leo…the sheriff…he had some pictures from the old days, of her, with her…tits showing. Uncle said her tits were so big his cowboy hat just barely fit on one…can’t think what he was doing with…”

  Milo and I look at each other.

  “When was that?” Milo asks.

  “Musta been twenty years ago.”

  No. When she was in the tank, I say. So Milo won’t have to play the bad guy. Why was she arrested? And what made you think she was our Rita?

  “Oh,” he says, looking at me hard. “It musta been when she came back from Mexico. Four or five months ago,” Henriksen says. “She got a hard-on at some damn Texan down at the Hog’s Rest Inn. Thought he’d insulted her. Took six officers to get her off him,” Henriksen says proudly. “Rita’s about as tough as they come. Hit that damn Texan between the eyes so hard the shit ran out of his ears for an hour…”

  Texans don’t have a great reputation anywhere outside of Texas. And sometimes I wonder what we really think about ourselves at home.

  “…so when we got her back here, we stuffed her in the tank. And like always she took her clothes off. Stunk up the place, too. Don’t know how those people slept…ah, lived in the same house with her.”

  “People?” Milo says. “Place?”

  “Yeah,” Henriksen says, sighing, “Rita’s ex-husband gave her a place up the river…Oh, you know, the Copia ain’t really a river. Just an estuary with a couple of freshwater springs at the head. That’s where the place is. Only way you can get there is by boat. My cousin Oscar rents boats down at the Copia docks. But you better catch him before noon.”

  Milo stands up before Henriksen invites us home to meet his mother, then says, “Thanks, Deputy Henriksen. If you think of anything else, son, give us a call up at the Cliff Point Lodge.”

  “Oh, jeeze,” Henriksen says. “Your client must have some heavy bread. When the sheriff sends me out of town, I’m lucky if I’ve got enough expense money to stay at Motel Six and eat at Burger King.” Then he turns to me, saying, “Oh, and her social security number.”

  What?

  “Our Rita had the same social security as the Rita in Montana.”

  “Well, thanks. And good luck with those job applications,” Milo says as we hurry to the door, both thinking we might as well flee ahead of the game, and without reminding him that we had a lot of information the sheriff probably didn’t mean for us to have.

  “Oh, hell,” Henriksen says, a wide, honest grin across his Nordic face. “San Francisco’s too close to home, and LA’s too damn far away.”

  —

  Back at the hotel, faced with an extravagant half-eaten fresh seafood dinner, Milo sips a double single-malt, aching for a cigarette. The restaurant doesn’t have a smoking section—hell, the state of California doesn’t seem to have a smoking section anymore—but I don’t want him brooding alone in his room, staring at his gray face in the bathroom mirror. He’s gained a few of the lost pounds back and still looks dangerous, like a bad cop or an expensive hit man, but I worry about him. I had been out of town, working rustlers undercover for the Wyoming Cattleman’s Association, when Milo went over the deep end that last time, the time he gave up death drinks and live rounds, but I had heard enough about it from Chief Jamison not to want to see it happen again.

  “Quit fucking worrying about me, Sonny,” he says suddenly. “I think this expensive dinner is giving me the shits.” He stands up, stretches, a
nd grabs his down vest against the coastal chill. “Let’s find a bar-burger and a place where I can smoke, and we can figure out who the fuck this Rita Van Tasselvitch really is…”

  —

  Fucking Milo. The old fart’s pretty smart sometimes. Like that bit when he made me remember the afternoon I got shot. For a long time the last thing I remembered was singing along with Warren Zevon. “Heartache Spoken Here,” I think it was. I remembered that. And the dusty film on Wynona’s eyes. Dusty film with a piss-fir needle mired in it. At the hospital, they said, I sang that song over and over again. Until Whitney showed up. Someday, I suspect, I have to talk to her about Wynona’s death. Milo told me that on the long drive from Fairbairn to Austin. Like I say, he’s pretty smart sometimes.

  But Milo had no more luck back in Meriwether breaking into the true identity of Rita Van Tasselvitch than the FBI did. Not that the Feds were any great shakes at finding people who wanted to stay hidden. Particularly if they weren’t professional criminals. Supposedly, they had access to a lot of information that we, as private citizens, didn’t. But luck wasn’t their strong suit. It was mine.

  —

  We had to drive all the way across the Coast Range to Glory on U.S. 101 to find the bar that Milo wanted—right number of Harleys outside, right parts of the neon sign burned out—a place called “Tarzan’s,” run by a huge, handsome Hawaiian-Samoan whose mother had a twisted sense of humor, the bartender said, naming her son Tarzan. Milo laughs easily, and the bartender goes on. People just talked to Milo. Even when they didn’t have much to say.

  As Milo stuffs his gullet with a double cheeseburger and a double bait of Walla Walla sweet onions, I watch him load the information inside his head. After the burgers, he says about the only thing I hear about that time in the desert: “Best meal I ever had was a pound of stolen raw hamburger and an onion.”

  So, I say, you don’t think this body is our Rita Van Tasselvitch.

  “Don’t know,” he murmurs. “Could be, I guess. People said she was a tall pretty woman running to lard. During her time at Mountain States nobody took a picture of her. Nobody.” Milo pauses for a cigarette. “And the only print they found was a partial thumb under the toilet seat in Jacobson’s wife’s bathroom. At least the feds think it’s hers. Nobody really knows. Hell, the federal grand jury had to no-bill her for lack of evidence on the bank fraud. They had to go for some idiot RICO indictment or something.” Milo thinks for a second, then waves for another pair of beers. “Actually, I’m just being nice. Not a fucking chance she was the right woman.”

  I nod at the speculation and decline the beer, since I suspect I’ll be driving back across the winding mountain roads in the fog.

  “All the people I talked to, Sughrue,” Milo continues, “everybody had a different story. Students, faculty, friends—they all saw somebody different. Shit, one of those burned-out bush-hippie-vets you used to hang out with claimed…What the hell was his name?”

  I explain that I know more than one burned-out veteran.

  “The one you used to buy hash from.”

  Todd, I guess. He claimed to have a Chi-Com connection.

  “That’s him,” he says smiling. “Good hash, too,” he adds, inhaling deeply, then letting all the air out of his lungs with a sigh. I suspect the memory of THC lingers in the body for years afterward.

  “During one of his rehab periods,” Milo says, “he worked out at the pulp mill. Anyway, he took a couple of classes at the college and said that he thought Rita was really a bartender named Lee Ann or Roy Ann or something like that, a tall, skinny woman who used to work out at the Pinetop Palace…”

  Roriann, I correct him.

  “You knew her?”

  Light-fingered, bad-tempered skinny coke-whore bitch? I say, then add, I nearly fucking married her.

  “I never knew that,” Milo says with a smile.

  You didn’t know shit then, man.

  “What happened?” he asks.

  She wanted me to spank her, I say.

  “What?”

  I don’t know, man, I admit. One night we’re in bed and out of the blue she asks me, “Didn’t you say something the other night about wanting to spank me?”

  “What did you say?” Milo asks.

  What the hell, I tried, I say, but she could tell that my heart wasn’t in it. After that she didn’t want anything to do with me. Even after I asked the bitch to marry me.

  “Ain’t love grand,” Milo says, then nearly laughs as he orders a shot of schnapps. Which he guns happily, then smiles for the first time in a long time, until we leave several slow beers later.

  —

  Maybe it’s in the blood, or the genes, but few men like to share their women. Roriann, on the other hand, simply refused to fuck one man at a time. Okay, she was good enough in bed…no, strike that. In the right mood, she was more fun in bed than any other woman I’d ever slept with. Period. Fun and dangerous as a wildcat. A sexual encounter with her usually left me covered with scratches, bites, and blood. And perhaps if she had been open about it, it might have been worth it. But her major mood was anger; her major thrust, deception. She could lie quicker and better than a criminal lawyer. And she loved to steal shit. Any shit. In the four months we were involved, I hated to take her out in public. I can’t count the number of times I had to cover restaurant checks she tried to walk, twelve-packs of beer and giant bags of potato chips I had to pay for after she shoplifted them, or the ounces of cocaine she lifted from my stash. Once, over in Deer Lodge, she lifted a giant prison guard’s gimme hat while he was in the can. Roriann nearly got me killed over that one.

  And although she wasn’t smart or educated, she was sly and quick. Somewhere, maybe television or drunk women, she had picked up some version of feminism and political correctness that was frightening in its simplicity: Whatever she did was right for women and politically correct.

  “She nearly drove me mad,” I tell Milo as I’m driving back to the inn. “Nearly got me killed.”

  “She ever show any poetic tendencies?”

  “Only in bed,” I admit.

  “Probably not our girl,” he says. “Woman like that, she’d have killed Jacobson,” he says, then laughs at me again.

  Some people recover from tragedy far too quickly for their own good.

  —

  The next morning about nine o’clock after a breakfast of French pastries and double espressos—not everything in California is a bad idea—Milo and I step out into the fog where we find Sheriff Henriksen leaning his bulky, rumpled body against the Beast, a deputy-driven patrol unit blocking our exit.

  “Glad I caught you boys,” he says, pointing the chewed-off nub of a short pipe at us like a zip gun. “I wanted to be sure to say ‘thanks for visiting my county’ and ‘goodbye.’ ”

  Milo excuses himself for a moment, grabs some cigarettes out of the glove box, then leans against a Mercedes parked in the space next to the Caddy, opens the pack of Dunhills, and offers one to the sheriff, who pauses, then takes it. Milo lights them both. I try to fade into the fog. Milo says that even in a suit and tie I look like a felony in progress.

  “One of the really great things about California,” the sheriff says, “is that everything happens here last.” Milo raises a furry still-black eyebrow. “This morning, because of the time difference, sir, I had a chance to speak to both the sheriff’s department in Meriwether County and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Montana. You guys ain’t exactly their favorite folks.”

  “What’s the problem, Sheriff?” Milo asks calmly. “We haven’t caused any trouble in your county, have we?”

  The sheriff has a tiny hangover, I believe, just enough to make his cigarette smoke tremble in the cold, cloudy air and to make his beady eyes watery.

  “You pumped my deputy down at Highwave as dry as an old bone,” he answers. “I’ll have to prime that boy’s pump with a couple of months of straight midnight shifts.”

  “I don’t think that’s a
crime,” Milo says quietly, “sir.”

  “Interfering with an active criminal investigation certainly is,” the sheriff says, “sir.”

  “Obstruction of justice, I believe they call it, sir,” Milo says. “But I don’t believe we’ve even started to obstruct. And we have no intention of doing so. We’re both licensed and bonded in other states, we both checked in with your office. Identified ourselves and explained what we were doing here. We’ve complied with the law. Sir.”

  “What happens, mister,” the sheriff says as he steps around to the rear of the Caddy, “if I make you open this trunk?”

  “Supposing you can get a warrant before I can call a lawyer?” Milo says. “Not a fucking thing. Sir.”

  “We’re gonna follow you out of the county, buddy,” the sheriff growls, then tosses his cigarette butt between his tiny polished boots and grinds it out, “and if you cross the white line, boy, we’re gonna be on your ass like stink on squat.”

  Milo leans over and picks up the sheriff’s cigarette butt and drops it in his shirt pocket, then takes out a micro tape recorder that he must have grabbed during the cigarette moment. “Actually, if I were you, Sheriff Henriksen, I wouldn’t follow me anywhere,” Milo says calmly, “because if I see you behind me, I’m driving directly to Glory, between the lines with my partner on the video camera, of course, and I’m going to find the last pissant lawyer who beat your socks off in court, then sue you to the death.”

  Then Milo switches off the recorder. “Or you can give us a couple of days,” Milo adds, “have every piece of information we turn up, even go along with us, and walk away with a sizable contribution to your campaign chest.”