The Final Country (2 page)

“Goddamn that was good, man,” the big guy said, then he noticed my drink. “Come on,” he said, laughing and dropping his hand like a grubbing-hoe handle on my shoulder. If he wasn’t careful, the big son of a bitch was going to kill me with affection. With his shades off, his eyes were an oddly gray shade of light blue, shining like tiny bulbs on either side of his hooked nose. “When you drink with Enos Walker, man, we don’t allow no sipping.”

You might as well argue with an avalanche, so I dumped mine down my throat, too, though I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Enos Walker had.

“Set us up again, bartender,” he said, “then I want to have a word with somebody who knew that fuckin’ Duval.”

The bartender’s hand shook a little this time as he poured, then he rubbed his sweaty head as if it had suddenly sprouted hair. “Ah, Mr. Duval ain’t been here for some time…”

“I just been in jail, motherfucker,” the big guy said as he held up his second bundle of whiskey, “not on the moon. Who the hell’s in charge these days? Either Duval’s buddies or that fuckin’ silver-haired bitch —”

“Mandy Rae?” the bartender interrupted, then snapped his mouth shut as if the name hurt his teeth.

“— one of ‘em owes me big-time, chubby.”

“I don’t rightly know nothin’ ‘bout that,” the bartender said.

“Well, who the hell you reckon might know,” Walker said, leaning easily over the bar and burying his index finger to the first joint in the bartender’s pudgy chest, “Mr. Fucking Pillsbury Doughboy?”

“Ah, maybe Mr. Long knows,” he answered with a tortured sigh.

“Billy Long? I remember that redneck piece of shit. Where is he?”

“He’s in the office,” the bartender said, thumbing over his shoulder, “but I don’t think he wants to be bothered right now.”

“No bother,” Enos Walker said, then gunned his drink and headed around the bar.

The bartender mopped his head with a bar towel, chugged a bubbling drink straight from the bottle, then sighed deeply as his right hand drifted under the counter. I reached over to pinch his snotty upper lip. Hard.

“What have you got under there?”

“Sawed-off double twelve,” the bartender whimpered as the whiskey courage squirted out of him like puppy piss.

“Better let me have it,” I said, “before somebody gets hurt. Stock first, if you don’t mind.”

The bartender handed me the shotgun, and got his upper lip back in return. I broke the piece open, ejected both shells, and handed it back to him just as we heard loud voices from the office. The shouting ended with an even louder gunshot.

“Oh my God,” the bartender moaned and shoved the sawed-off deeply into the ice.

Enos Walker came back to the bar, not hurrying, a huge semi-automatic pistol dangling from his hand. Probably one of those Desert Eagle .50 cannons, I thought. “Is everybody in this fucking place stupid?” he asked, waving arms like small logs, but I didn’t think he wanted an answer. Walker shoved the pistol under his belt, slipped on his shades, and said, “You ain’t finished your drink, old man.”

“I think I’ve had enough,” I said. Unfortunately, getting older had not made me any smarter.

“Don’t push your luck.”

“Fuck it,” I said and left the drink on the bar.

“Maybe you ain’t as smart as I thought you were, old man,” he said.

“I expect that wasn’t your first mistake today.”

That nearly kicked it into the cesspool. But suddenly Enos Walker grinned and placed his hands gently on my shoulders, smiled, then said, “You got balls, old man.” Then he laughed his bitter, hopeless, hard-timer breath right into my face, breath as rank as the winter den of a grizzly. He picked up my drink, slowly poured it down his throat, grabbed the remains of the bottle from the bartender, then left without a backward glance. As he hit the door, the bartender let out his breath, then leaned against the back bar while he guzzled another drink. I headed to the back to check the damage, which was, as I suspected, extensive.

Long had been a tall man with long gray hair, perhaps even good-looking before the muzzle blast had burned off his face and the heavy round had scattered the back half of his head all over the whorehouse wallpaper and a Troy Aikman poster behind him. A clot of hairy gray matter hung from the quarterback’s upper lip like an incipient mustache. I thought the kid looked better with some hair on his face.

The bartender peeked around the edge of the office door, then hit the floor in a dead faint. I checked his pulse and made sure that he hadn’t swallowed his tongue, then pulled him over to the side and propped up his feet on a chair. As I did, a meaty fart fizzled out of his backside.

I went back to the office. From the look of the desk — cluttered with scales, folded and unfolded Snowseal bindles, milk sugar, and a Jack Daniel’s bar mirror — Long had been cutting cocaine and breaking it down into grams, but there was no sign of the source, an ounce bag at least, which was probably riding away in Enos Walker’s leather pocket. The right-hand drawer of the desk was partially open; an empty cash box, a Rolodex, and a partial box of .50 Magnum pistol rounds were visible.

“Stupid bastard,” I said, but wasn’t sure who I was talking to. Because I used the nail of my little finger to flip through the Rolodex to the Ds and wrote down the telephone and address of the only Duval listed, somebody named Sissy. But that wasn’t the real stupid part. I wrote it down on the back of the largest bindle, the one that had “mine” scrawled on it. Maybe it’s a clue, I thought, as I shoved the bindle into my shirt pocket.

* * *

The battered black guy in the Cowboys jersey had disappeared when I went back through the empty joint. I picked up the only purse I saw and a custom cue case with CJW embossed on it. Outside, Carol Jean leaned against the fender of the El Dorado, looking sweetly befuddled, the tip of her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated, twirling her cue like a demented majorette.

“Took you long enough,” she said, not looking at me. “I would have gone with that big black dude. But he didn’t ask.”

“A piece of luck, sugar.”

“What the hell happened in there, anyway?” she asked. “Sounded like a bomb or something.”

“Something,” I said. “You got wheels?”

“Nope. I came with Vernon, but he jumped in his pickup and took off like a spotted-ass ape.”

“How about money?”

“Baby Joe sent you, huh?” Carol Jean said as she dangled the twenty from her crimson nails.

I nodded as I dug out another one, then handed it to her. “Listen, kid, carry your ass over to that telephone booth across the street,” I said, “and call a cab.”

“Shit, man, I can get a ride.”

“I’ll just bet your sweet ass you can,” I said, “and that’s probably a better idea anyway. Go home to the hubby, lie like a Navajo rug…”

“A Navajo rug?”

“Complex but serene, simple but beautiful,” I explained.

“Are you on drugs, man?”

“Just high on life,” I said, “and happy to be alive.”

“At your age you should be.”

“Listen,” I said, slightly miffed, “just keep your head down for a couple of months. I’ll tell the cops I missed you, and you tell them you were at home watching soap operas.”

“That bad, huh,” she said, then finally stopped twirling to look at me.

“Let’s just say that Mr. Long lost his head,” I said.

“Jeez,” she whispered. “Anybody get hurt?”

“Hey, next time you want to take off, at least talk to Baby Joe first. He’s a little miffed about the teeth and the tits.”

“Things change,” she said as she broke down and packed her cue. “But never quite enough,” she added sadly, then just as quickly grinned brightly, as lively as a baby chick. “Is that what you do for a living? Find people?”

“Hard times, people, lost dogs,” I said as I lit a cigarette.

“Want to see these puppies, old man?” she asked, smiling as she cupped her new breasts.

“Not right now, sugar,” I said, “I’ve got a headache.”

Carol Jean squealed with laughter. It sparkled like a wire behind my eyes. She pranced out of the parking lot, then across the highway, where she stuck out her thumb. The first passing pickup smoked its tires stopping to give her a ride.

Truth is, I would have liked nothing better than to rest my weary head on her firm young chest. Maybe it would wash the image of the dead man out of my head. But I knew better. Nothing ever really washed the images of the dead away, not tears, or time, or whiskey. At eleven, I’d seen my father on the floor of his den, the top half of his head demolished by a Purdey double-barrel. Some years later, but not long enough to suit me, when I was stuck in a muddy front-line trench in Korea near the end of the war, everywhere I looked, everybody looked dead. Except the dead don’t blink. So I finished the cigarette, ground the butt into the settling dust, walked across the road to the dirtier convenience store, stashed the bindle behind the toilet tank, bought a couple of beers, then went back to the empty joint to call the cops, preparing myself for their serene complexity.

* * *

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Absolutely nothing in Texas had been simple yet. The bartender had revived and disappeared, and I didn’t want to be in the office, so I dialed 911 from the pay telephone in the parking lot. When the dispatcher answered, I told her that there had been a shooting at a place called Over the Line. “Again,” she immediately said as if she were a regular, then asked for my name and the details.

I thought about lying, wiping my prints and heading for Montana — but elk season was probably over and it was too late to catch the brown trout run on the Upper Yellowstone — so I decided against running. I had too much invested in Texas now.

After several hours of the usual cop rigmarole, most of it done by rote because everybody knew Billy Long was headed to no good end, I wound up in a small gray office filled with the inevitable paperwork clutter of a cop’s life in the limestone fortress of the Gatlin County courthouse across a messy desk from a large, paunchy man with tired gray eyes and an even more exhausted suit.

“Mr. Milodragovitch, I’m Captain James Gannon, chief of detectives for the Gatlin County Sheriff’s Department,” he said in some sort of gravelly East Coast accent, “and I’ve got some good news for you. We found the bartender at home — one Leonard Wilbur — and when we sobered him up a little bit, he verified your story.”

“I can go home?”

“They’re typing up your statement right now,” he said, ignoring me. It was clear Gannon was a street cop disguised as a deputy sheriff and that he wasn’t ever going to answer a question. “There’s a couple of things bothering me. Maybe you can set me straight.”

“I feel a little more cooperative now,” I said. “Your deputies pushed me pretty hard.”

“They’re just kids and they’ve covered a lot of confused and bad calls at Billy Long’s place,” Gannon said, but it didn’t even border on an apology. Then he rubbed his worn face. “Well, sir, I’m a bit concerned about the fact that we couldn’t find the bulk cocaine that Long was cutting. Not even with the dogs. We found the cut stuff. But not the other.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that, Captain.”

“And then you wouldn’t let my boys go through your vehicle without a search warrant…”

“Which they got very quickly.”

“Well, things move pretty quickly in a small county down here, and in spite of urban sprawl, this is a very
small
county,” he said, sighing, “but you know what your refusal says to me?”

“No.”

“Well, sir, to me it says ‘ex-con’ or ‘ex-cop.’”

Gannon knew exactly who I was, but it was easier to play his game. “I was a deputy sheriff a long time ago,” I said, “up in Meriwether County, Montana. And I held a private investigator’s license up there for a long time and I’m duly licensed and bonded in the state of Texas.”

“Oh shit,” Gannon said, shaking his head in mock surprise. “You’re the guy who owns the bar at the Blue Hollow Lodge? How the hell did you ever get a liquor license with your record? Hell, the Gov did it for you, didn’t he?”

“Mr. Wallingford and I are partners in the motel,” I said, calmly, “but I own the bar outright.” Travis Lee Wallingford had served half a dozen terms in the state legislature from Gatlin County, both the House and the Senate, both as a Democrat and a Republican, but he was always more interested in inflammatory oratory than detail, and his favorite speech involved an empty threat to run for governor, a position that in the morass of Texas government was usually reserved for a figurehead, rich men or unsuccessful politicians at the end of their careers. So lots of people referred to him as the Gov, and not always in a flattering way. “And in spite of any rumors you may have heard, I don’t have a record of any kind. Down here or anywhere,” I said.

“Whatever,” Gannon groaned dramatically, “you’ve got too much local clout for me, Mr. Milodragovitch. Just sign your statement and be on your merry way.” Then Gannon paused to rub his face again. “Goddammit,” he said as he jerked his tie open, “sometimes I wonder why the hell I ever took this job…” Then he buried his face in his hands again.

“You playing on my sympathy, Captain? Good cop and bad cop at the same time?”

Gannon peeked like a child through his thick fingers, then lifted his smiling face. “Hey, it’s a small department, everybody’s got to cover two or three jobs.”

“What the hell are you doing down here?”

“My son-in-law teaches at UT,” he said. “I came down here to be close to the grandkids and…”

“Where from?”

“Bayonne, New Jersey,” Gannon said. “What the hell are you doing down here?” he asked as if he really wanted to know.

Even the dumbest cop had to be an actor occasionally, and I suspected that Gannon was far from dumb. “A woman,” I answered honestly.

“Ain’t it the shits,” he said. “Truth is my ex-wife moved down here after the divorce. She followed the grandkids down here, and I tagged along like a piece of dogshit stuck to her shoe. Damn woman took off after twenty-six years of marital bliss …”

“Hell, I’ve been married five times, and all of them don’t add up to half that.”

“Look,” Gannon said suddenly, taking my revolver and license out of a drawer, then leaned over the desk, clasping his meaty hands together, “can I put it to you straight?”