The Final Country (38 page)

Walker spun quickly, recognizing me now. “Watch yourself, old man,” he growled. “Just watch it.”

I had a slow swallow of Scotch, then faced him. “It’s true,” I said. “He’s dead, and I am very sorry.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing that’s going to come back on you.”

“And the girl?” I nodded. “Damn,” he said grimly. “It didn’t have to happen that way.”

“It’s done,” I said. “You’ve been doing good work for a long time. Keep it up. But what you need to do now is get a lawyer and an accountant to destroy every trace of any connection with Hayden Lomax.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“You can’t go up against Lomax,” he said. “He’ll turn you into fish food.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Not if I’ve got the mortal nuts on him.”

“Good luck,” he said. “You’ll need it.”

“Thanks.”

As I left, I heard Walker order a double Wild Turkey rocks from the bartender. I hoped he stopped after one. A man carrying that sort of guilt shouldn’t be drinking hard. It could kill him.

* * *

I sent the kids off to Vegas with a bundle of cash for Fresno and to get them out of town. I had a couple of days to waste until Friday night, so I spent it reloading some .22 hollow point shorts and sitting on the porch carving seasoned cedar sticks into thin, sharp strips that would fit under my cast.

Late one afternoon as stately storm cells drifted up from the Gulf, trailing rain like silver skirts, Carver D and Hangas showed up without calling. I didn’t even bother to ask how they had gotten through the gates. Hangas climbed out of the driver’s seat, then walked slowly around to open the back door of the old Lincoln, his grin bright in the spring sunshine.

“My man looks good, doesn’t he?” Hangas said as Carver D slipped out of the limo.

Carver D had dropped thirty or forty pounds. His eyes were clear, his voice resonant, and although he wasn’t exactly nimble on two canes, he was moving. And smiling as he eased into the rocker beside me.

“What the hell are you guys doing out here?” I said.

“If you’d answer your telephone or return your calls,” he said, “we wouldn’t have to break into your solitude.”

“I’ve been busy,” I said.

“Busy,” he said, sweeping his cane through the pile of shavings between my feet. “Busy as a beaver, I see.” When I just kept running the blade of the Old Timer down a length of cedar, Carver D continued. “You’re planning something awful, aren’t you? Some kind of terrible revenge?”

“I’m retired.”

“You’re a base liar,” he said. “You need Hangas to help?”

I glanced at Hangas resplendent in his tailored suit, smiling as calmly as a cobra might smile. “He’s the most dangerous man I know,” I said, “and I appreciate the offer. But nothing’s happening.”

“Milo, you shouldn’t lie to your friends.”

I had no answer for that. So we left it there, chatted until one of the thundershowers rattled the tin roof, then they left.

* * *

Tom Ben was never able to talk about the Rooke family without including the phrase “carpet-bagging goat-fucking white trash.” The family had moved down after the Civil War, had scammed a section of land in the hills behind the Bad Corner, but as far as I could find out, they never had been charged with sexual congress with farm animals. Over the years the family had sold off pieces of the land, drifted off to California, or various institutions, penal or otherwise, leaving the twins sole owners of a five-acre plot right in the center of the unzoned tangle of the old home place, a jungle of variously sized lots, crooked roads, and Hill Country scrub land, and a gravel pit. Shortly after Tobin finished law school and Ty had been promoted to plainclothes, with financing that should have raised IRS flags, the boys had built a rambling brick home. They dated enough to forestall rumors of homosexuality, but never married. And except for a reputation left over from their college years for being particularly vicious bar fighters, their characters were beyond reproach in Gatlin County. Or as a retired deputy had said to me one night in a beer joint out on Lake Travis, “The best reputations money can buy.”

Every Friday after he finished at the courthouse, Tobin Rooke stopped for a couple of glasses of white wine at the only upscale bar in Gatlinsburg, then drove down to Austin for a stop at the Whole Foods Market, then home for whatever he did on his lonely Friday nights. We had followed him for weeks, and his pattern never changed. But I followed him in the repainted van this Friday night just to be sure.

I let him put his car in the garage, watched the lights come on, then pulled the van in front, and went up to the door. He opened the door when I rang the bell. He had no reason not to open the door: a telephone company van in front of his house, an old man in a telephone company uniform and carrying a telephone company tool kit at his door. He couldn’t see the stun gun in my hand, the latex gloves, or the hand with the sap glove on it. I let him say, “Yes?” before I hit him in the chest with the stun gun.

Maybe I missed with one of the electrodes. Maybe his suit coat got in the way. Or maybe these Rookes were impossible to get down. Whatever, he got enough charge to fling him backward off his feet, knock his glasses off, and scatter health food across the carpet. But he didn’t pause, just rolled up to his feet ready to kill as I stepped through the door.

He was on me like a spider, sweeping the stun gun aside as if I wasn’t there, then had me in a choke hold a moment later. We crashed around the living room for a few seconds as I tried to buck him off. Unsuccessfully. I was a dead man until I finally managed to dig the derringer out of my pocket and fire the two rounds over my shoulder. I missed him, but the powder burns and percussion cone got him off my back long enough for me to slap him with the sap glove, cracking the skin over his cheekbone. He still didn’t go down, but at least he paused, his hands protecting his face. I hit him in the liver hard enough to lift him off his feet. He finally went down.

* * *

When Rooke came back, after the third or fourth glass of ice water in his face, he found himself stripped to his shorts, his hands and legs cuffed to the legs of a metal kitchen chair leaning against the refrigerator door. I didn’t trust duct tape to hold him any more than I trusted myself not to shoot the crazy bastard in the eye. He came back to consciousness as if he had never been away.

“Do you know who I am, old man?” he said. “You’re in a shit-load of trouble.”

“Do you know who I am, asshole?” I said. “You’re probably in more trouble than I am.”

“What do you want?” he asked, not missing a beat. He knew who I was now. “We can work something out, Mr. Milodragovitch.”

“I’d really like to know who hired your brother to kill me.”

“That’s going to be a problem —” he started to say.

I interrupted by placing the derringer against the fold of his armpit and pulling the trigger. It was a light load, but the powder burn seared the skin and the notched hollow point carved a deep groove through his flesh, a painful red, white, and black furrow. I had some idea of how much this must have hurt, but Rooke seemed totally surprised. Before he got his breath back, I sloshed a bit of organic
habanero
salsa onto a dish towel. He looked as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. Then I snuggled the cloth into the wound, and taped the towel over his shoulder.

Rooke didn’t have much to say. He seemed to have fainted. He just sprawled in the chair and drooled while I cleaned him up and started my search of the house.

* * *

“Well,” I said half an hour later — the bastard hadn’t even bothered to lock the entrance to the basement —“since you know who I am, asshole, and if I don’t care that you know who I am, then you probably realize that when I leave here, you don’t have much of a chance of being alive. It’s simply a matter of how much pain you can stand.”

“Bring it on, you son of a bitch.”

“Since you threatened to ruin my life, and as far as I can tell you’re still trying — rumor has it that you’re planning to convince the grand jury to indict me for Billy Long’s death — there’s some other stuff you should consider,” I said. “Credit card records put either you, your brother, or both of you in six cities across the country in the past six years where young women have been raped, tortured, mutilated, and killed. You never came to the FBI’s attention because you bastards are law enforcement. You covered your tracks perfectly, cleaned the crime scenes professionally. You used different setups and took different parts of the body each time. Was Annette McBride the first? Or just another one? What the fuck were you doing? And how stupid was it to keep your souvenirs in a freezer in the basement?

“Oh, you’re surprised that I know about the basement, you sick son of a bitch?” I said. I’d been around some bad people in my life, but I’d never been in the presence of a monster. I could have wished that some genetic malfunction in the egg had created these bastards, but I didn’t believe it. Evil just exists. I could only hope it wouldn’t infect me when I destroyed this particular version. “The basement’s not in the building plans, sure, but what the hell did you do with all that cement you bought? And you bastards sold a dozen dump truck loads of topsoil. How fucking stupid and greedy can you be? Why didn’t you just dump it in the lake?”

Rooke shook his head so hard that drops of sweat flew off his bald head. I could see his lips moving but no words came out as I removed the salsa-soaked dish towel from under his armpit. I found a pile of dish towels neatly stacked in a broom closet, wet one and used it to mop the salsa off his wound, then filled another with ice cubes, and placed it under his arm. I could almost hear the sigh of relief and could see the smile forming on his thin lips.

“So you want to tell me who hired your brother, Rooke?” I asked as I replaced the empty rounds in the derringer. “Or you want me to put another round in you? I know some places that will hurt even more. A hell of a lot more.”

He wanted to tell me but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Over the next hour or so, I thought I was going to either run out of rounds, hot sauce, or soft tissue before he broke. He wept like an angry child as I carried his naked, bloody body over my shoulder down the hidden basement stairs behind a workbench in the garage.

“Tell me who hired your brother,” I said as I sat him on a desk chair and rolled him into the walk-in freezer, “and I’ll let you live.” Rooke wanted to believe me, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. He shook his head wildly. “Fuck it,” I said, and put a point-blank round into the maze of tiny bones in his left wrist, then another, then dumped the rest of the
habanero
sauce into the wounds.

He couldn’t get the name out fast enough. I was mildly surprised. But only mildly.

This sort of thing was more my ex-partner’s style than mine, and I knew I’d never feel quite the same about myself again. But it had to be done. And it was. I reloaded the derringer, slipped it over his right thumb, then walked out, locking the freezer door behind me. The screams of pain had ruined to rage. I glanced in the porthole. I assumed Rooke had tried to turn the pistol around in his hand so he could shoot me in the back. Because it lay between his bound feet. I left him there in that terrible room of his own making, left him without looking back.

* * *

When I got back to the ranch, the kids had gotten back from Vegas early, driving straight through once they realized I had sent them on a useless chore to get them out of the way for a few days. I had some idea how the night with Tobin Rooke might go and I didn’t want them involved. They wanted to know what had happened, but I snapped at them, told them to shut up so harshly, they actually stayed quiet. And never brought it up again.

I needed a bar, but they were all closed, so I made the kids stand around the fire pit and drink with me until dawn as we ditched the gear I’d taken, the telephone uniform, and even the tires off the telephone van. Bob melted the derringer down with a welding torch. I didn’t think anybody would want to investigate Tobin Rooke’s disappearance too hard. Particularly after the law found where he was hiding.

During that long night’s aftermath, I discovered why CJ had been blessed with two names at birth, and managed to listen to the details of every arrest Bob had made during his time as an MP in Germany, but finally about dawn the kids ran down and drifted off to bed. I seemed to have been pouring the tequila into a hole inside me, a hole that I could not fill. Whatever sort of drunken relief I had been seeking refused to come. I took the Herradura bottle and a six-pack around front. I meant to sit on the porch and watch the sunrise, but I was drawn to the abandoned dairy barn. The flat sunlight scattered like tiny knives off the corrugated steel walls. I went inside, into the tin shadows to sit on the cot and drink. Sunlight shot through the bullet holes in the wall, shafts of light as solid as the rounds that had given them form. I had a dozen things to think about, but the memories of Molly filled my mind. I dug Tom Ben’s worthless option out of my billfold, stared at it until the letters blurred in front of my eyes. Fucking greedy bastards. They had started it, and now I had to finish it. But right now all I had to do was hope that I’d be able to finish the tequila before it finished me.

Except for my two-a-day workouts, which CJ refused to let me stop, and a procession of legal messengers, everything came to a halt for a week. When I had the strength, I sat on the front porch with my pocketknife, whittling a pile of thin cedar blades, sipping slow, tasteless beers, and watching the cloud shadows drift across the breaks of the Hill Country. Finally, after lunch one day just as I was finishing the ninth or tenth blade, the kids rebelled, stomped out on the porch to demand action.

“Okay, boss-man,” CJ said sternly, “we can understand that you’ve been through some tough times, but quite frankly we’re gettin’ bored bein’ paid for doin’ nothin’.”

“That’s right,” Bob agreed.

I checked the tips of the wooden blades with my thumb until I found one to my liking, then said, “Bob, you drive up to Killeen this afternoon, buy a couple of gillie suits for you guys. Pay cash. Cover your tracks. And CJ, I need aerial photographs of Travis Lee’s place on the Gulf and a USGS topo map. When you get back, we’ll get out the fiberglass tape and build a slightly larger cast for my arm. Cash. No tracks.” They nodded and headed down the walk.