The Final Country (23 page)

“But you enjoyed it,” she said softly. Betty had assumed the stone face of a die-hard liberal, I thought, so I didn’t say anything else, didn’t remind her that she shot her rapist five times in the back as he left the bedroom.

“I fucking hate it,” I said. But knew she didn’t believe me. Hell, I wasn’t exactly sure I believed myself.

“Where are we going?” she finally asked.

“Houston Hobby,” I said. “I’m flying to Vegas. I have to get there before they wire Molineaux’s jaw together.”

“What about me?”

“I was hoping you’d drive the Caddy out to Vegas for me,” I said. “Maybe I can wrap this thing up by the time you get there, then we can drive out to Big Sur, spend a few quiet days, cool out.”

“I think you’re just trying to get rid of me,” she said stiffly. “Why don’t we just drive straight through?”

“I’m too beat up,” I admitted.

“All right,” she agreed, very reluctantly. “But you leave all the firearms in the trunk. And all the coke. And that nasty little sap, too.”

“No problem,” I said.

“Listen,” she said. “I’m only going to ask you this one more time. Drop this crazy stuff. Let’s go home. You can dump the badge, and this silly chore. We can afford to fight them in court. Let the Lomaxes find somebody else to follow their crap around.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s way too late for that. Try to remember what’s at stake. Whatever Enos Walker did, he doesn’t deserve to die for it. Dickie Oates has been in prison for a long time. If he doesn’t get out soon, he’ll never have a chance on the outside. And perhaps I should remind you that I’m a little old to start serving time.” I didn’t have the heart to remind Betty that Ty Rooke had blown his nuts off with her pistol. “I could run but I couldn’t hide from myself.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re right,” she huffed tiredly, the days of drinking and the morning of adrenaline sapping her energy. “I think you’re absolutely insane, but I’ll do this one last thing. But you have to promise me that you won’t do anything until I get there. Just find the woman and wait. All right? Promise?”

“It doesn’t always work that way,” I said.

“Promise, Goddammit.”

“Okay,” I promised. “I’ll try it your way.”

She didn’t answer. Just looked at me. We pulled to the curb so Betty could drive the rest of the way to the airport, and I could unstrap the Browning from under my arm and repack my war bag. I made a point of showing her the bindle I had taken from Billy Long’s desk, but didn’t say anything about the one I had taken out of Sissy’s cabin. As we pulled up to the departure area of the curb, I gave her one of the scrambled cell phones, then leaned over to kiss her cheek. It was as stiff as rawhide. She didn’t turn her head.

“I’ll call you when I get there.”

“Whatever,” she said. “I may stop at home to spend the night.”

“Whatever,” I echoed, then kissed her cheek one last time, and climbed out. She drove away without looking back.

* * *

As I waited for the next Southwest shuttle to Dallas Love Field, I worked the phones. I called Carver D. He told me that Doris Fairchild seemed to be carrying somebody else’s driver’s license. Nobody caught it until after the lady in question had made bail through a Dallas firm, disappeared without a trace, forfeiting her bond. The real Doris Fairchild was a waitress in Big Spring. Lewis Poulis of Poulis Investigations, on the other hand, was the real deal, although a bit too good and clean to be true. Carver D asked me what I wanted him to do with the Lomax file. I told him to fax it to me at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas. “Hayden Lomax is pretty much an open book,” he said, “but Sylvie is a blank page.” Then he added that Hangas had mentioned that he still couldn’t find Eldora Grace, and nobody seemed to know where she had gone. I wanted to call Gannon to see if he could check with the Caldwell County Sheriff’s Department to see if Sissy Duval’s body had been found but thought I’d best wait until he was home.

So I called the bar to check on my other business. Lalo Herrera informed me that the bar seemed to be attracting several on-duty and off-duty Gatlin County deputies, but I told him not to worry. I’d take care of it when I got back. Then I called Phil Thursby. He suggested that since I had the money, I might be better off fighting the case in court, instead of getting involved with Sylvie Lomax and whatever shifty shenanigans she had devised. I agreed with him. But the sorry truth was that I was having more fun than I had in years. When I talked to him, the sheriff of Bastrop County sounded happy, too. He didn’t seem to mind that the woman had jumped bail or that somebody had abandoned a van-load of high-tech electronic gear in his county. He just hoped the FBI didn’t bigfoot all over his treasure before he could get his paperwork through the court.

“Who’d the van belong to?” I asked.

“Texas plates were stolen off a wrecked van,” he said. “And the VIN is on a hot list out of Howard County. Paperwork is top-drawer. It would have passed anything but a felony stop. Wonder what that little dyke was doing down in my county?”

“Up to no good,” I said.

“By the way, what was your name?”

“Hayden Lomax,” I said, then replaced the telephone in the hook.

* * *

When I got to Love Field, I cabbed to the Hyatt, picked up my fax from Carver D, checked in, showered, and changed clothes, had a room service lunch, then called Lewis Poulis, who agreed to see me as soon as possible. Perhaps because I used my own name. Then I called one of the national security outfits to arrange for a couple of bodyguards to escort me from the hotel to Poulis Investigations, then to DFW. I did a couple of lines of Sissy Duval’s coke, which tasted surprisingly like Billy Long’s personal stash, then grabbed my bag, dropped the key on the television, and went down to meet my protection. It was expensive and the paperwork a bore but at least I knew I’d get out of Poulis Investigations alive. As we drove away, in a Lincoln Town Car, the shoulders of the two hugely muscled salt-and-pepper bodyguards filling the front seat, their necks as thick as elephant legs, and their eyes as bright as foxes, I wondered why I’d never thought of doing things this way before. Asking for help turned out not to be as tough as it sounded. I asked them about the layout at Poulis Investigations, then asked them to stop at a hardware store on the way.

Poulis Investigations was located in an industrial slum not too far from Love Field in a cinder block building surrounded by a chain link fence topped with razor wire and security cameras. The bodyguards didn’t say a word when we pulled up in front.’

“You picking up something, sir?” the driver asked.

“Delivering something,” I said. “If I’m not back in an hour, boys, call the cops.”

The driver looked at me with a smirk. “That won’t be necessary, boss. We’ll bring you out,” he said. “These fucking guys are all ex-Army. Think they’re tough because they’re Gulf War vets.”

“They never played in Green Bay in December,” the other one growled, chuckling. “By the way, sir,” he added politely, “you might want to wipe your nose.”

Clean-faced and through the gate, I was ushered directly into the boss’s office. The nameplate on Poulis’s desk identified him as Col. Lewis Poulis, USA, Ret., and the large retouched photograph of an ex-president behind him suggested he was either a deeply committed Republican or an ex-CIA asset. Poulis was a small, compact man with a potbelly that looked as dyspeptic as his shaved head and smirking face. He looked as if he fancied himself as a pretty tough nut, but I could tell from the 8x10 photo of him in his dress uniform that he didn’t wear any combat badges. I sat down in the padded chair across from Poulis, a chair subtly tilted forward to keep the person sitting in it slightly off balance. As if I needed anything to tilt me off dead center.

“You know who I am, Colonel,” I said, “and you probably know more about me than I do, so you know what I’m here about.”

“Actually, sir, I don’t,” Poulis said, exchanging his smirk for a smug smile.

“One of your operatives — Doris Fairchild, she said her name was,” I said, “left a van full of electronic equipment that is in the custody of the Bastrop County sheriff.”

“As I told the sheriff when he called, and, as I’m sure you know, anybody can have a business card printed up. No one by that name has ever been employed by this firm,” Poulis said calmly, “and I offered to open my personnel files to him. I’ll make you the same offer, Mr. Milodragovitch. Professional courtesy, you understand.”

“Give me a break,” I said. “How about the lawyers who arranged her bail? Ever work for them?”

“We do a lot of work for a lot of law firms,” Poulis said. “And the lawyers for major corporations.”

“And, of course, your client contracts are confidential,” I said.

“Of course.” The smug smile again. Which drove me nuts. I recognized that smile, the smirk of chickenshit Army officers who had never heard a shot fired in anger, the bland simper of corporate criminals in front of Congress, the toothy, cynical, self-righteous beam of money and corruption, the smile that never dies. “Of course, you understand, they have to be.” And that shit-eating grin again.

“Well, let me suggest that if anybody,” I said tightly as I suddenly felt the coke boiling through my blood. “Let me fucking suggest,” I growled as I stood up and pushed the heavy desk hard into Poulis’s tight little belly, so hard I knocked the short man’s breath out and tore all the wires underneath loose, and pinned him like a bug against the wall under the large photograph, “if anybody, lawyer, doctor, or corporation chief, mentions my name, and you take the case, I’ll spend the rest of my life wiping that fucking little smile off your face.”

“The rest of your life may not be all that long,” Poulis wheezed angrily.

“You fucking assholes have been trying to kill me since I was sixteen,” I said as I grabbed his stubby nose and twisted it until it bled, “and it ain’t worked yet.” Then I slammed Poulis’s head against the ex-presidential portrait until it fell off the wall and Poulis’s eyes flickered back into his head.

* * *

“How did it go?” the driver asked, leaning against the car, the back door open, his partner standing by the gate. But then he saw the three guys in uniforms dashing out the front door. “You probably want to go now, sir?” he said.

“I think it’d be best,” I admitted. “And it might be best if those assholes didn’t follow us.”

“I figured something like that,” he said. “Earl’s got it covered.”

I glanced back. Earl had picked up my hardware purchases, looped the short length of chain around the gate posts and slammed the large padlock on it, then stepped over to the car. “Delivery complete, boss?” he said.

“Little bastard’s nose is badly out of joint and bleeding a bit, but the spooky little fucker had probably been doing coke all afternoon.”

“Of course,” they answered in unison, Earl with a grin as sharp and large as a linoleum knife. I never did get the driver’s name.

* * *

On the flight from DFW to Vegas, I went through the Lomax files that Carver D had collected. Carver D hadn’t just gathered the facts. He had spiced the information with choice bits of gossip, rumor, and innuendo.

Hayden Lomax might be on the Fortune 500 list now but he had been born in a small town in East Texas. His mother, the women’s basketball coach at a small religious college, had died during the emergency cesarean section, and his father, a semi-alcoholic itinerant roughneck, had abandoned the child into the arms of his wife’s horse-faced sister, Alma, a Baptist spinster high school English teacher, a strict, dour woman known for her jump shot, the passionate length of her prayers, and the fiery depths of her anger. She, like her sister, had been a hard-nosed point guard on the college’s basketball team. Although Alma was occasionally known to beat the young Hayden senseless, then pray with him until he forgave her, mostly she doted on the boy, alternately spoiling him, then working him like a Trojan, forcing long hours at the backyard hoop, and at least one weekend a month driving the boy to Houston, Austin, or Dallas so he could see major college basketball.

Alma made the boy keep his grades up, too, stay out of trouble, mostly, and kept him away from the dinner table every night until he sank twenty straight free throws. She had plans for the boy, but genetics defeated her. Try as he might, practice as much as he could, Hayden Lomax never grew a smidgen past five nine. When his father died in a beer joint fracas, rumors, which spread like a laughing flu through the small town, suggested that Alma had hired a hit man to revenge herself on Stubby Lomax for his short genes, but no proof was ever forthcoming.

So the only scholarship offers Hayden received were from small colleges. Alma did what she could: cashed in her teacher’s retirement, moved to Austin, took the only job she wanted, a night janitor at the university field house, and spent her days grooming Hayden for his walk-on debut at the university. He was a good ball-handler, a sharp, accurate passer, a dead-solid foul shooter, a bit too quick with his fists for a short guy, but full of hustle, and he would not quit. In spite of his lack of an outside shot, he was the perfect whitebread complement to the playground moves of the urban kids on the team. If he’d been taller and had a better outside shot, Hayden might have made the perfect sixth man, the guy who could spark a slumping team, could make the right steal, draw the right foul, sucker-punch the right point guard. But no matter how hard he tried, how hard Alma prayed, how much she leaned on him, he never quite made the transition from walk-on to star. He had his moments, but spent most of his college career riding the bench. And he never started a game. Not once in his years of college ball.

After graduating with a business degree, Hayden married a horse-faced girl from Brazoria, who looked a lot like Alma, and whose father had just inherited three junkhouse offshore drilling rigs from his father-in-law. Hayden’s father-in-law was a high school principal and knew nothing about the oil business. Neither did Hayden, but he learned. He went at business as he had at basketball, with more ruthless hustle than talent. In the oil patch success didn’t depend on his height. During the early years, he had survived the Arab oil embargo, the boom, the next bust, acquired his first ten million dollars — and a double-handful of lawsuits filed by disgruntled partners. After his first wife had fallen to her death from the floor of one of his offshore rigs, he acquired a small construction company in Gatlin County, Overlord Sand and Gravel. Overlord Minerals grew like a refrigerator fungus in the cold darkness of states and countries that fostered a lack of regulation with the love of a bribe. His oil interests spanned the world from Maracaibo to Burundi to Ghana to the North Slope; his construction companies paved bits and pieces all over the planet; his petrochemical plants and gold mines polluted a dozen countries; his political ties spread like a cancer; Hayden Lomax moved like a hyena in the rotten wake of the multinational prides, living well on their scraps because he never went completely public, he owned most of it, he owed no one an explanation.