Bordersnakes

  “Milo, I’ve got food, water, weapons, and ammo cached all the way to the border,” he admitted. “They come for me, man, I can make it across the desert to Castillo then across the border to Enojada in twelve hours. Eighteen carrying Baby Lester on my back.”

  “What about Whitney?” I asked, but he just climbed in the Caddy without answering.

  In the afternoons, we read or watched television, waiting soberly for Jack to call.

  But he came to the hotel in person.

  I poured him a large drink, which he poured down his throat, then another, without effect. “All right,” he said, his thirst quenched, “you were right. The money helped. It’s all gone, but this is what I’ve got.” And he had plenty.

  Teddy Tamayo had pulled some strings in Las Cruces and gotten him a copy of the ballistics report from the sheriff’s department. This was the piece. And it still had a serial number. According to the ATF computer the revolver had been bought at a pawnshop in Austin by one Raymundo Lara. He even had the address. Then the bad news. It had been reported stolen ten months before Sughrue was shot. The fingerprint guy also had some good news and some bad. He was able to draw some latents off the weathered surface; but as far as he could tell, whoever had handled the revolver last had burned his fingerprints off.

  “It could be any of ten thousand assholes along the border,” he said.

  “No, just one,” Sughrue said, then walked into the other room.

  “Thanks,” I said. “How’s Rocky? When I called yesterday, the hospital said he’d checked out.” Jack just looked at me. “Well, how is he?”

  “Three-fingered,” he said sharply. “And as far as I can tell, Mr. Milodragovitch, you ain’t exactly worth it.” He didn’t say it, but I could hear “bad cop” in the bottom of his voice.

  “Hey,” I said. “I didn’t start the beef with your little brother. He could’ve cost me my eye, he could’ve gutted me, he could’ve killed me. So back the fuck off.”

  “Just stay away from my family,” he said softly.

  “And one more thing, Jack,” I said. “You want to muck around in my past, ask somebody who knows. Leave the asshole county mounties out of it. Call the fucking chief of police in Meriwether. Jamison.”

  “Maybe I’ll do just that,” he said. “But if I were you, asshole, I’d get the fuck out of town. And take your partner along. He’s even less popular than you are.” Then he left.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Sughrue asked from the door.

  “A clash of personalities,” I said. “How far’s it to Austin?”

  —

  Damn near six hundred miles, as it turned out. And most of it in the cold, windy rain. But by noon-thirty the next day we tooled up South Congress toward the capitol, our trip a blur, slowed only by a quick detour to the graveyard where Sughrue’s grandparents were buried down by a little town called Kyle. The norther had passed on southeast, leaving blue skies and sunshine, Austin all rain-washed limestone and shining glass.

  “Anybody ever tell you that the Texas state capitol building is taller than the one in Washington?” Sughrue asked, oddly excited. I knew he had mixed feelings about Texas, but as we drifted through the Hill Country, where I hadn’t seen many actual hills, Sughrue recounted some good memories of Austin. Mostly involving music, drugs, and women. But most places are like that. If you were there during the sixties.

  “Washington State?” I said to torque him a bit for bragging about Texas all night.

  “D.C., you jerk,” he said. “Bet you didn’t know that.”

  “Interesting,” I said, staring at the capitol building across the river. “Anybody ever tell you it was pink?”

  You would have thought I had called his poor dead Avon Lady mother a whore. From his stories, I knew she was the best gossip in Moody County down along the Muddy Fork of the Nueces River, where Sughrue had been raised. And that she didn’t exactly live celibate after Sonny’s father drifted west when he came back from WWII.

  “Just look at it,” I said among his spits and sputters and useless denials. “The fucker’s dog-dick pink.”

  “It’s the light,” he said, then sulled up on me. All the way to the Hyatt Hotel by Town Lake.

  After we unpacked in the suite, I poured my first drink in days, then let it set on the desk as I took out the telephone book.

  “Sughrue,” I said. “Raymundo Lara is listed.”

  “No shit?” he said, then came in from his room. He picked up my Scotch, but I took it away from him. I’d failed that test. The first sip of the Macallan single-malt was worth the wait. This time.

  “You know,” I said, “sometimes I forget why I quit drinking.”

  “You were a fucking drunk,” Sughrue pointed out.

  “Must have been the cocaine made me drink like that,” I said.

  “Or maybe the crank,” he said. “You were a Hoover. You’re lucky to be alive, old man.”

  “What’s with this ‘old man’ shit?”

  Sughrue paused, swirled his Scotch, then sipped it, before he answered quietly. “You’re a serious man, Milo,” he said, “and it always made you seem older. And you always took care of people. Like you cared more about that sort of shit than I did.”

  Then he sipped the malt whiskey slowly again. “I’ve always felt like a kid around you,” he said, “so that makes you older.”

  I reached into my bag and found my favorite sap, the one with the circle of lead in the head and a piece of spring steel in the leather handle. “Next time you call me ‘old man,’ kid, I’m going to break both your elbows.”

  “Guess we have to get divorced right now, old man,” he said, then grinned.

  “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” I said, “but I’m not married.”

  “Good point,” he said. “Maybe I can catch Whitney at the store…”

  “Go ahead,” I said, “this is a good hotel. We’ve got two telephone lines.” Sughrue started for his room. “Hey. How come you don’t have a telephone in the trailer? The lines run all the way out there.”

  “I tried, man. But every time the son of a bitch rang,” he said, standing in the doorway, “my fucking heart stopped. I don’t even know why.” Then he closed the door.

  Moments later I heard the murmurs of his heart as he talked to his lady-love and his boy-child. I tried Lara’s number, but nobody answered. At least it hadn’t been disconnected.

  —

  So I kept trying the number through the afternoon as we cruised Austin, following Sughrue’s directions, sightseeing through his past on the soft afternoon, more like spring than fall. Turned out Sughrue hadn’t really spent much time in Austin for twenty years. Things had changed.

  We went for a bar-burger lunch out by the Low Water Crossing at a beer joint called the Lakeway. Not only had it obviously been attacked by yuppies—we could tell by the awnings and the chi-chi menu posted outside—but it was closed, too. So we ate across the street, in a place that seemed to think it had invented funk, sitting under a tin roof on a deck that jutted out over the blue sparkling water. The drinks seemed overpriced but they were large, and the food just average, but the waitress was lovely and cheerful, and it was pleasant until some pissant on a tremendously noisy jet-ski decided he had to show his stuff to the small crowd of late lunchers. Halfway through our sandwiches we gave up, Sughrue muttering under his breath about some people’s children.

  “Tonight we’ll find a chicken-fried steak,” Sughrue promised as I listened to Lara’s number ring unanswered.

  “Great,” I said, “but I’ll bet we’ll find yuppies there, too.”

  “Chicken-fried steaks are bad for your heart,” he said, Texas proud.

  “Let’s have two,” I said, “apiece.”

  We took the Low Water Crossing across the lake and then got lost among expensive houses. A shortcut, Sughrue called it. At least we found a place to wash the road dust off the Beast. As we were sitting outside on a bench like a couple of turtles soaking up the soft fa
ll sunshine, I remembered something.

  “Did you leave your Browning under the front seat?” I asked Sughrue.

  “Yeah,” he answered sleepily. “Why?”

  “Won’t they be worried?”

  “Hey, man, this is Texas. Everybody’s got a pistol under the front seat.”

  “What do you think people carry in Montana?” I asked. “Horse turds?” But he was already asleep. I could see that I was going to have trouble with Texans. They seemed a bit self-centered to suit me. Particularly Mr. Chauncey Wayne Sughrue. For a guy who supposedly hated it, he seemed awfully much at home.

  When we got to the corner in south Austin where his grandfather had built a little house stick by stick, Sughrue couldn’t believe it. Some asshole had built a strip mall right on top of it, complete with a convenience store staffed by Paki’s.

  “Jesus,” he said, “there wasn’t anything here. Nothing at all. Now look at this. Goddammit. When the old man lost his place down between Kyle and Buda, he took a job with the state, him and my granny. They went out to the state farm on Webberville Road…”

  “In most places, Sonny, the state farm is where they keep minor-league criminals.”

  “Retards, down here,” he said.

  “You mean the mentally challenged?”

  “Them, too,” he said, but he was someplace else. “He raised hogs for the state, bacon and ham and sausage for all the institutions around Austin back then. Had all these big retarded guys helping him. My mother was always nervous around them, but they just seemed like big kids to me.”

  “And you were a big kid, too?”

  “Started paying adult prices at the movies when I was eight,” he said, smiling, “and buying beer at twelve.” Then he cracked two beers out of the backseat cooler. “Hey, Milo. If we wrap this shit up quickly, maybe…”

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe, we can take a turn down to South Texas, Moody County, maybe…”

  “This ain’t a vacation,” I said, but I had a large swallow of cold beer and gave in to his disappointment. “But we’ll try,” I said, and Sughrue smiled so broadly, we didn’t drive by Raymundo Lara’s address. We took the rest of the day off. And the evening, too.

  But I didn’t stop trying Lara’s number. The last time I tried, as we had a midnight drink in the bar on the top floor of the Hyatt, he still didn’t answer. I thought about driving past the house, but I had made it this long without a DUI, and somehow I didn’t think Austin, Texas, the place to begin. It might have been worth it, though. At least to Lara.

  —

  Before sunrise the next morning Sughrue ran me halfway around Town Lake. When we finished, he wanted to brace Lara at six o’clock in the morning, before work, but I insisted on a little background first. And a lot of coffee.

  We worked the usual routines—the city directory, the library, the county courthouse, the credit bureau—only to discover a lot of boring details, none of which made him sound like the sort of guy who would need a cheap .38: Lara was current on his credit cards and mortgage; a registered voter; honorably discharged from the U.S. Army; thirty-six years old; once divorced, twice married, most recently to a woman named Analise Navarro from Del Rio, whose only court record was an action to revoke her license to cut hair.

  “Why would they do that?” I asked myself.

  “Nine times out of ten,” Sughrue said, “it’d be for dealing coke out of her chair.”

  We checked for convictions but found none.

  Because Raymundo was bonded, we assumed he had no police record, either. He had been a computer programmer before he took the job as a loan officer at a small state-chartered bank on the Bastrop Highway south of the airport, Pilot Knob Farmers Home Savings and Loan. It was interesting that he had been born in El Paso, and he’d paid cash for his house.

  So we had some cards printed up that said we represented a local insurance agency—even used the right name—then bought a couple of cheap suits and plastic briefcases, rented an anonymous Dodge van, and walked up the stone path of the nice little native rock three-bedroom bath-and-a-half ranch-style in a corner lot in a neat northwest Austin neighborhood off Shoal Creek Boulevard.

  “Did I used to do this for a living?” I asked Sughrue as I rang the doorbell. “Or did I just do it for fun?”

  “Fun,” Sughrue answered nervously as I pushed the button again. “Oh, shit,” he said, peering around the corner of the house. “Phone line’s cut,” he whispered. Then we both smelled it at the same time—cold copper blood, sharp gunpowder residue, death—and strolled casually back to the van.

  “What now?” Sughrue asked as we drove slowly away. “Call the cops?”

  “You’ve got family,” I said, “so I’ll go in tonight. Whatever’s in there will keep. And this is our only chance to see it.”

  —

  It had been so long since either of us had broken into a place, neither of us had a set of lock picks. Jeweler’s tools are almost as good. I had to find different places to buy a black jumpsuit, black sneakers, a watch cap, camo paint, plastic gloves, and two handheld radios. It took the rest of the day, a dozen conversations with survivalist Nazis all over central Texas, and most of our portable cash, so we didn’t get to case the neighborhood as well as I would have liked before dark. At least Lara’s house was rock-solid and silent, and his neighbors didn’t keep outside dogs.

  None of that seemed to matter, though, when I rolled out of the van as Sughrue slowed to take the corner. I was so scared—not nervous, scared—couldn’t catch a breath as I rolled sideways for a sudden but absolutely necessary piss among the weeds beneath the front shrubbery, thinking invisible as hard as I could. But I was out of practice. I felt like a giant steaming dog turd. So much for in and out in fifteen minutes. It took that long to make myself belly around the house to the back door, which was thankfully unlocked. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t have unlocked the expensive dead bolt with the key.

  Once inside the closed porch, the odor of violent death was nearly overpowering, even stronger than the Vicks I had rubbed under my nose. I slipped into the kitchen, which was full of expensive appliances, and closed the blinds against the slanting shafts of the streetlight, then crept into the dining room, where the blinds were already tightly closed. Before I could turn on the flashlight, though, I heard a hushed belch, then the slow click of dog paws coming from the hardwood hallway.

  I played dead, or maybe I fainted, then heard quiet padding across the dining room carpet. Suddenly, a soft, warm “whoof” came from the darkness above my face, a large tongue lapped at my face, and Sughrue’s harsh whisper boomed in my ear. “Ready?” he asked through the earplug.

  “Fuck no!” I hissed back, then switched on the flashlight.

  An old Black Lab bitch stood over me, breathing hard and wet, her grizzled muzzle in my face and her front legs braced widely. Even in the hooded red light, I could see the dark crusted blood on her shoulder. I scratched the old girl’s ears, then eased her out of the way so I could stand up. She circled once, painfully, then curled in my spot and stared at me mournfully. But when I moved away to search the house, she hobbled after me.

  —

  An hour later, when Sughrue, lights off, whipped around the corner to pick me up, Sheba—as her name tag said—was still with me, wrapped in a clean beach towel. I had taken one that Lara had stolen from a South Padre hotel.

  “What the fuck?” Sughrue wanted to know. “And where’s your watch cap?”

  “In my pocket,” I said. “I puked in it. Turn at the next corner. Then let’s have some headlights. And find me a fucking telephone booth.”

  It took so long to locate the Emergency Veterinarian Clinic in north Austin that Sheba fell asleep in my lap. She didn’t complain, though, when I took off her tags and carried her to the front door and tied her to the knob with a leash I’d found hanging on the closed porch. Then back to the telephone booth to call the vet.

  A young woman answered, “Dr.
Porterfield. How can I help you?”

  “Hey, hey, doc,” I stammered, only half-faking. Then I told her that she had a dog named Sheba with two gunshot wounds tied to the front door. The vet must have had a walk-around telephone, because I heard her sigh in exasperation when she opened the front door. When she began to curse me and shout about calling the cops, I started to explain that I hadn’t shot the dog, but she wouldn’t have believed me, so I hung up as the vet shouted something about AKC numbers and how she’d have my ass in a sling. But as I climbed back in the van, sighing, I knew that it was already deep in a bloody sling. “Hotel room, Sonny, and whiskey.”

  And he did it just right, didn’t say another word until after I showered the dog blood and slimy fear-sweat off my suddenly old and ungainly body. Even then, all he said was, “That bad, huh?”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  —

  The slick bastards who had tortured and killed the Laras hadn’t made many mistakes: the cut telephone line; a single blood track from the woman’s nipple; and the floppy disk they left in the laptop computer.

  They must not have found what they wanted, though, because the whole house had been professionally, painstakingly tossed, everything put back in place, neatly, but not too neatly. The homicide detectives wouldn’t buy the murder-suicide setup for too long.

  But it would look good for a minute. Cocaine and whiskey glasses were scattered across the bedside tables. And it looked like an enraged killing. The barrel of the single-action western-style revolver, a Ruger Blackhawk .44 Magnum, had broken off half a dozen of the woman’s teeth at the gum line when somebody jammed it into her mouth. And Lara had taken his round in the temple, sitting on the toilet naked, as if in terrible remorse.

  “They made one other mistake,” I said to Sughrue in the sitting room between our bedrooms. “They shot the dog. With a twenty-two. And I couldn’t find one in the house.” My hands were still shaking so hard the ice rattled as I held up my empty glass for Sughrue to fill.

  “Are you going to be okay, man?”

  “I feel like a fucking ghoul, but don’t worry about me,” I said. “Worry about the bastards who did this.” I gulped air, but my lungs still smelled of corruption. “When I started this shit, Sonny, I thought I needed you to help me find that pissant banker. He doesn’t seem so important now.”