The Final Country (37 page)

Now that I had a place to live and get ready for the endgame, I had to find some professional help. I usually worked alone, but my experience with the salt-and-pepper bodyguard team in Dallas and Fresno’s rescue of the McCraveys had changed my mind about a lot of things. This job seemed to call for help. So I crutched out to my giant pickup, hopped in, and drove to a turnout at the top of the Blue Hollow Rim, then unlimbered my cell phone.

Bob Culbertson had moved back in with his folks when he lost his job, and his mother told me that Bob was supposed to be out looking for work, but she suspected that this time of the afternoon he was probably drowning his sorrows in some low-rent beer joint. “I don’t understand it,” she said. “That kid really liked that job, and if he can’t find something soon, I’m afraid he’ll just go back in the Army. He was an MP, you know.”

She said Bob would probably be checking in shortly, so I left my number and told her that I might have something for him involving law enforcement. But I didn’t explain that the job was going to be along the lines of breaking the law, instead of enforcing it. My cell phone trilled before I could start the pickup.

* * *

The terrible force of coincidence that had plagued me since the day I had followed Enos Walker into the bar took one more shot at me. Bob Culbertson and Carol Jean Warren were playing pool at Over the Line. Leonard Wilbur was even behind the bar, holding a clipboard and counting bottles again. Even though he looked me directly in the face as the bartender handed me a beer, Wilbur didn’t recognize me. I took that as a good sign.

I took my beer and walked down to the pool table where they were playing for ten dollars a stick. Culbertson looked a bit down in the mouth.

“You kids looking for work?” I said. They looked up startled. Neither of them had any idea who I was. I promised myself that if I survived all this, I was going to shear the hair and shave the beard. I couldn’t do anything about the mustache, but maybe it wouldn’t make me look like a dead man.

After I straightened out the confusion and introduced them, I took them into town for a late lunch at Threadgill’s to explain to them what I wanted.

Carol Jean, who had discovered, as one often does, that working in beer joints wasn’t nearly as much fun as hanging out in them, said yes without even asking what the job might be or how much it might pay. Bob was a bit more reluctant. He still wanted to pursue a career in law enforcement. So instead of explaining, I asked him a question.

“How’d you lose your job?” I asked.

“County budget cuts, they said.”

“When you went down to check on Ty Rooke’s body, did you hear a cell phone ringing in the other fanny pack?”

“Sure. Why?”

“That’s why you lost your job,” I said. “They wanted to be sure that your testimony would be suspect. I’d bet money that you’ll find a letter in your file, dismissing you for fucking up evidence somehow.”

“Well, that’s a goddamned lie.”

“That’s how they work it,” I said. “They write the lies on official documents. That way they’re almost impossible to deny. But I think I can fix it.”

“I think I’d be interested,” Bob said slowly.

“Just where the hell do I fit in?” Carol Jean asked, a hunk of chicken-fried steak speared on her fork.

“I don’t know exactly,” I admitted, “but you strike me as the best sort of Texas woman,” I said. “You can drive a stick shift, shoot a weapon, you’re computer-literate, you’re dead solid honest, and you’re probably dangerous.”

“And not all that hard to look at, either, Carol Jean,” Bob said, smiling as she blushed.

“My friends call me CJ,” she said, then turned to me. “How did you know I could shoot?”

“Honey, between your mother and your soon-to-be ex-husband I knew your whole life story before I found you the first time,” I said.

“My mother! Goddammit, she gave me up?” she squealed. “If it hadn’t been for her, I would never have married that lame son of a bitch anyway. At least there were no kids and no foolin’ around. Those are the hardest things to get over in a divorce. I remember that from my mother’s two disasters.”

“Hey, I need a couple of drivers, a couple of bodyguards who don’t look like thugs, and a couple of smart snoops,” I said. “So a cowgirl and a boy scout will suit me fine. Maybe the bad guys won’t pay any attention. I can only promise the work will be interesting and the pay excessive.”

“Jesus, what do you need protection for?” Bob said. “Ty Rooke was just about the toughest motherfucker I ever saw —”

“You don’t have to say ‘motherfucker’ in front of me, Bob,” CJ interrupted, “just to prove you’re not a boy scout.”

“— and you took him out,” Bob finished, trying hard neither to blush nor glance at CJ.

“That was pure luck, kiddo,” I said. “Unfortunately, the most important element in survival is luck. I’m just trying to reduce the factor that luck plays in this little effort to wind things up.”

“Sounds good to me,” CJ said, and Bob nodded eagerly. “So what do we do now?” CJ said. “What you said, it’s all true,” she added blushing. “All but the part about the stick shift.”

“So what do we do now?” Bob said.

“Gather up your shit and let’s move deeper into the Hill Country,” I said. “And you can teach CJ how to drive a stick shift.”

“I’m sorta without wheels,” CJ said.

I told her to toss her stuff in Bob’s pickup and ride out with him. Once she learned to drive a stick, she could use Tom Ben’s ranch truck.

* * *

So we had six weeks of relative calm, working the phones and the computers, working the exercise machines, and eating Maria’s great food. She missed Tom Ben, her loneliness eating at her like a cold wind, but she kept our systems running on
chili verde,
chicken enchiladas, and
came asada.
We ate so well that a night out for us was a visit to McDonald’s to soothe our fiery gastrointestinal tracts. The three of us had taken a couple of quick trips in rental cars — one to Little Rock and one to Albuquerque — to pick up two Remington 7mm Magnum rifles with Weaver scopes, a stun gun, a little Sundance .22 derringer, and a S&W stainless steel Ladysmith from private party newspaper ads or gun shows. We also picked up a used telephone van for cash.

Back at the ranch Bob and CJ sighted in the rifles and ran rounds through them until the weapons felt like parts of their bodies. CJ ran me through two-a-day workouts as if I was training for the senior Olympics. When she wasn’t trying to kill me, CJ spent her daylight hours digging in the dust of courthouse records in the five counties around Gatlin. When I wasn’t working out or recovering, Bob and I worked the phones, mostly international calls. In the early evening hours Petey hacked his way into most of the computers we needed. Even if he couldn’t get in, we could find out who to bribe. They left that to me, resplendent in my new wardrobe of tweed suits. At night, Bob and I followed CJ around the pool tables, bars, and beer joints of Gatlin and Travis counties, picking up bits and pieces of information, tracking tidbits of gossip, following the rills of rumors. I continued my ruse with the crutch and the light cast on my left arm, and discovered that more people talked to me about more things in my guise as a crippled old codger than they ever had when I was a hard-nosed private dick.

But finally the picture was as clear as we could make it without getting personally involved. But before I visited Tobin Rooke, I had to face Rollie Molineaux with the death of his daughter. And confess my sorry part in that loss. I wanted that chore out of the way before we moved onto the really hard part of the job.

Although I didn’t have a clear ,picture in my head of what had happened that night at Duval’s so long ago and the endless repercussions that echoed through a dozen people’s lives, I climbed into the pickup and slipped out the back gate in the middle of a star-shot night, hoping to at least clear my conscience.

* * *

When I got to Houston, I discovered that the Longhorn Tavern had fallen prey to a new freeway exit, which made me oddly sad. I wondered what had happened to Fat Annie and Joe Willie Custer, where they had gone when the beer joint had closed, wondered where we were going to go when the last good beer joint finally fell all the way down. Rollie’s house was empty, too, a for sale sign in the yard. He wasn’t hiding, so he wasn’t hard to find. But Rollie Molineaux was the last person I expected to help fill in the picture.

I found him sitting in a worn lawn chair on a dock jutting into the dark, sluggish water behind a bait shop on one of the many unnamed arms of Bayou Teche. A cigarette jutting out of his crooked, gray-stubbled jaw, a beer between his legs, and a battered captain’s hat tilted at a rakish angle on the back of his head.

“Mr. Molineaux,” I said when I stepped onto the dock. “I’d like to talk to you.”

Rollie turned, a half-grin exposing a brown stain on the partial plate in the side of his mouth. “Hey there,” he said. “You be lookin’ like you might be that bastard who broke my jaw, but you’re a mite older.”

“Not as old as I feel,” I admitted.

“Sit a bit and have a brew,” he said, nodding toward the lawn chair beside him, then digging into the cooler at his feet. “Unless you’re lookin’ to beat on me some more, man.”

“Sorry,” I said as I sat down.

“Ain’t no big thing,” he said, handing me a beer.

“I’ve got some bad news for you.”

“Ain’t nobody brought me much good news lately.”

“Your daughter is dead,” I said, laying it out as quickly as I could.

“Yeah. I figured when I didn’t hear from her when Jimmy Fish went down that no news might be bad news. He do her?”

“No, it was an accident,” I said. “She got shot up in Montana.”

“Montana,” he said as if it was a foreign country. “What she be doin’ up in that cold country?”

“Helping me on a job.”

“Well, ain’t that the shits.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“They said Jimmy got shot, too,” he said. “You do him?”

“Some French guy put one in his ear.”

“Guess I’m not surprised,” he said. “He was bound to get shot someday. I should have put one in his head years ago when I thought he was foolin’ around with my baby girl. You know how it is, man. Sometimes you got a best friend like a bad woman. No matter what they do, you keep hangin’ around.” Then he paused to open another beer, his odd apology ended. “What happened? Up there in Montana.”

“Oh, hell,” I said. “This guy I was looking for, he was beating me to death, and she put a .22 round up his nose. But he pulled the trigger at the same time. He pulled the trigger, but the people who started this, they’re the ones who killed her.”

“Ain’t that the shits,” he said again.

“I couldn’t stop it,” I admitted. “It tore the heart right out of me.” I pulled the Shark of the Moon out of my pocket. “She was a fine woman,” I said. “She talked about you a lot. I think she’d want you to have this.”

Rollie looked momentarily uncomfortable, then he held up the stone to watch it shine in the sunlight, and he smiled. “She must have thought well of you to tell you about this ol’ thing. Belonged to her Momma. I picked it up down in Belize on a run once.” He didn’t have to say what kind of run. “The mortal shits.”

“You know, the people who got her mixed up in all this, I think they should pay,” I said. “I intend to make them pay. But I need your help.”

“Anything, man.” I showed him the photo of Amanda Rae Quarrels. “Sure,” he said. “That would be Amelia Fontinot, you bet, after she bleached her hair. This is her Daddy’s old place. Jimmy left it to me. She’d be his half-sister, you know, younger. She married that old Desmond Quarries fellow from Morgan City, but I think Jimmy was fuckin’ her and he sold her off to Des. He’d do things like that, you know. But she don’t much look like that no more. Last time I saw her, I didn’t even recognize her.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?” I asked.

“Shit, I don’t know. Seven, maybe eight years ago,” he said. “Back when I still had a boat. Jimmy and I picked her up off a tanker in the Gulf and brought her home. With some young girl. Hell, she didn’t even say kiss my ass, thanks, or goodbye. But I sure got fucked over later. Couple of weeks later the DEA came calling. They found a bag of smack on my boat and that was all she wrote. Goddamned woman must have left it there. I was lucky to stay out of the joint. But they finally believed me. I never ran any coke or heroin. Nothing but smoke. That was my rule.”

“When you and Jimmy were working offshore, you ever work for Hayden Lomax?”

“That cheap son of a bitch,” he said. “Nobody with any sense ever worked for that sorry junkhouse outfit. Only people ever worked for Lomax was three-fingered winos like ol’ Des.”

“Thanks,” I said, finishing my beer and standing up. “I got to be going now.”

“Let me know what happens,” he said.

“You already know too much,” I said. “Thanks again.”

Then I left him sitting in the warm, soft sunshine, left him with his memories, and the dark shadows of the stone. And a clear conscience, I hoped.

As I walked back through the bait shop, I glanced once more into the dusty webbed shadows. A dozen glass-eyed deer and boar heads glittered in the shadows. I didn’t have to ask who had killed them. An old woman, her face blurred behind fat and great hairy moles, sat in a funky heap behind the counter, knitting at an unidentifiable hunk of clothing, her hooded eyes gleaming, the wings of her coal-black hair shining like a pair of obsidian axe blades.

* * *

Driving back from Houston I took a quick detour by Stairtown and Homer’s place. Of course, there was no body in the mudpit. Sissy’s BMW had disappeared, too. The old shack was scrubbed as clean as a dog’s plate. No crime scene, no evidence, no past or future. The pumpjacks rocked and buzzards drifted across an empty sky while I had a beer and a couple of cigarettes, mourning the dead woman in the pit.

On the outskirts of Austin I called Reverend Walker. He said he didn’t want me at his church and he didn’t want to be seen in public with me, but I didn’t give him any choice.

He stood at the bar of the Four Seasons, a large, uncomfortable man sipping at a tonic water. He turned to glower at me as I edged in beside him but smiled aimlessly when he saw the white hair and the crutch and nodded politely without a glimmer of recognition. Once I had a drink, I leaned over to whisper, “I’m sorry, man, but your brother is dead.”