The Final Country (40 page)

“Yes, sir,” he said, then shook my hand, a businessman all the way. He knew when he was beaten. His grin flashed on and off like a faulty neon sign. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.” The little bastard cared more about what his mad aunt thought of him than the chance that I could send him to prison. As if people like Lomax ever went to prison. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I swear to you I didn’t know. I’ll provide anything you want. Anything.”

“Stop whining, put a cork in your greed, and whatever happens next, you clean it up. And you should get your aunt out of here because I can’t control what happens next.”

He nodded cheerfully, walked over to his aunt, escorted her to the driver, then bounced back to the table across from me, his grin wooden and lost. He sat down as if he was a very old man.

I stood up and said, “First, I want to report to Mrs. Lomax.” Sylvie looked up startled, as if she had forgotten that she had hired me, then she turned to the old woman, who patted her on the arm. Sylvie didn’t look comforted. She looked very young, confused, and afraid. “I don’t know what the Molly McBride woman had of yours, ma’am, but whatever it was, it died with her in a fire at the Punky Creek Mine up in Montana, died with her and Enos Walker. So you don’t have anything to worry about.” I wasn’t surprised that nobody was surprised. Except Lomax. He had heard about Punky Creek but not what it meant.

“And for public information, you people leave Tom Ben Wallingford’s place alone,” I said. “You don’t need it.” I had donated the ranch to the Texas A&M agricultural research center, designating its use, as Tom Ben had suggested, as a living laboratory to find more and better land-friendly ways to raise cattle. “Is it a deal?” Lomax held out his hand, but I ignored it this time.

He nodded slowly. He knew I had the mortal nuts on him, knew I wasn’t bluffing.

“What happened?” Travis Lee wanted to know. “You boys make a deal?”

“Right,” I said, “you old son of a bitch, we made a deal, but you’re not part of it. By the way, your bald-headed prosecutor buddy is dead, locked in a freezer with the pieces of the women he and his brother killed.” Travis Lee’s face collapsed, hollow and aged. “And you might as well tell Sissy to come outside,” I said. “She’s part of this fucking mess, too.” Travis Lee acted as if he hadn’t heard me, but after a moment he walked stiffly over to the back door. A moment later the dark figure slipped silently out the back door. Sissy looked her age now and terribly frightened that she wouldn’t get any older. “Hi,” I said. “If I were you, Sissy, I’d run for my life. Tomorrow Eldora Grace’s family will know how you used her to fake your death, so somebody will connect you to it somehow.”

“They didn’t tell me,” she wailed, then slumped into a chair.

“And you, old bastard,” I said to Travis Lee. “You better run, too. I’ve bought up every piece of bad paper you’ve signed. The only thing you own now is your boots and your bullfrog belt buckle. The two of you have blackmailed the last penny you’re ever going to get out of Betty.” It hadn’t taken too long digging through bank records to discover that Betty was broke, her money, I assumed, shoveled into the failed deals that her uncle, even after looting her trusts, had funded with blackmail. He wasn’t just broke, he was about to sink. The IRS wasn’t looking at me but at him. I had already started the paperwork to take the Lodge away from him. “I figure you planned it this way, you old fucker,” I continued. “You thought that because Betty and I were the beneficiaries of Tom Ben’s will, if I was killed with her piece, she would be convicted and couldn’t benefit, and it would all kick back to you. You just hired the wrong help.” The silence was louder than the rising south wind. The only sound, Sissy Duval’s sobbing. I dug under my cast for the wooden blade.

“You fucking people were all there that night, when Mandy Rae Quarrels dropped the hammer on Dwayne Duval,” I began to explain.

But the crippled old woman in the wheelchair interrupted with a grunt, then growled, her voice deep and ruined by the exploding chemicals of a heroin cooker. She nodded toward Betty, “It was her, there. Little Miss Priss. She’d be the fuckin’ chick dropped that second hammer, ‘cause ol’ Dwayne wouldn’t stop running his one-eyed snake up her dirt track,” she cackled. “Little bitch loved it. Loved it so much she had to kill sweet Dwayne — just like she gunned down her little nigger boy toy that time before.”

Betty’s face was stunned to tears, and Cathy turned to clutch her shaking shoulders.

“Well, I guess that’s how the cow ate the corn,” I said to no one in particular, completely blind-sided.

The crippled woman swept the shawl off her legs, cursed in Cajun French, and raised a stubby submachine pistol — a suppressed Mac-10 — with her scarred hands. The first unaimed sweeping burst scattered everybody around the deck. Except for me and my Corsican keeper. In those arrested moments before the gunfire began, that long moment when nobody moves because nobody believes it’s going to happen, I had slammed my shiv under the bodyguard’s chin, six inches of sharp cedar. Which was almost a mistake. All I did was knock out his false teeth. Somebody else had shot the real ones out. But the limber dagger of Hill Country cedar bent when it hit his lower plate, then drove through his tongue into the back of his throat. He was too busy strangling on his blood to bother with me as I tried to tear his mini-Uzi off the shoulder strap.

The bodyguard at the far corner went for his piece, but the kids came through just as I had asked.
It’s not a man,
I had told them over and over,
it’s a target.
I had drilled it into their heads. Bob’s round blew out the glass panel, then CJ’s round sliced through the little guy’s body armor and dropped him into a shapeless puddle. Then they took out the one in the middle of the deck the same way.

As I struggled to untangle the Uzi from the bodyguard’s shoulder strap, the second burst from the wheelchair was more controlled. A burst sprayed at Lomax as he dove under the table. His thumb popped off, flying through the sunshine like a cocktail frank. The table where Betty and Cathy sat caught the burst thrown at them. Then rounds popped over my head and exploded the glass walls behind me.

Betty rose long enough to throw her empty piece at the woman in the wheelchair, which bought me a second. I slipped behind the bodyguard, catching a quick glimpse of Mandy Rae’s ruined face. She looked as if I was the first target she had missed in her entire life. And now she’d missed me three times. Her glittering mad eyes said she wasn’t about to miss again.

I got behind the thick chest of the dying bodyguard as the next burst thudded into his Kevlar vest. Amanda Rae Quarrels didn’t get another chance. The bodyguard’s Uzi was in my hands now. Two three-round bursts dead center into the thorax area. The first ones shattered the stamped metal of the submachine gun so badly that Mandy Rae might as well have been holding a live grenade to her chest. My other rounds punched through the bloody chest, banging into the metal back of the wheelchair, driving it backward. The chair gathered momentum slowly as it drifted down the wooden ramp. It paused, then rolled across the hard-packed sand into the flat waves of the Gulf. Where once again it paused, as if for effect, then tilted its shapeless burden into the gray water. The wild-ass country girl had cut her last caper.

With both his partners down, the other guard quickly threw his hands into the air in surrender. His boss was dead. He was two thousand miles from home. The rest of the crowd, trapped by lies and foolishness long past, rose slowly, shadowed by the passing clouds. They just stayed there, too, as I swept the Uzi barrel across the group and focused on Wallingford, who slithered toward the house, Sissy held in front of him like a shield. But when I locked the barrel on Lomax, he just stared at me, his right hand clamped over the bleeding stump of his left thumb, staring without a flinch.

“You’ve never been closer to death, man, than you are this second,” I said, then lowered the barrel.

“I know,” he said, still not flinching. “Thanks.”

“You fucking people were all there that night,” I said to everybody else. “One of you cowards better have the fucking guts to get Dickie Oates out of prison…” I stopped. What could I threaten these people with that they hadn’t already done to themselves? I raised the submachine gun at Lomax again. “Do it.”

He nodded. I stopped long enough to empty the magazine into the sky — just about the only fun I had that day — then I tossed the ugly little weapon over the glass wall, and walked away.

As I passed Betty, she took off her glasses to look me angrily in the eyes. But it had no effect.

She had crossed that final border where betrayal becomes a way of life. Off to that final country from which no one ever returns. The country of lies. I almost told her that if she had told me the truth from the beginning, everything would have been different. But it would have been a waste of time. Cathy looked at me, too, but her eyes were full of death.

When I walked past the former Amanda Rae Quarrels, the shallow waves had ruined her. Ribbons of blood mixed with swirls of black dye and soft drifts of moving sand. She could have been a dead sea creature or a living tar ball, she could have been coming or going. I tossed the crumpled option into the water, watched it unfold, watched my note wash off the paper.

When did you find out you had married your fifteen-year-old daughter?

Amanda Rae Quarrels might be dead but her revenge lived on. I hawked up something from the back of my throat, something that tasted like bear spit. But I kept it to myself.

If justice were to be done, I guess, they would all be in prison. But it didn’t happen that way. As usual, the innocent suffer; the evil of greed lives on past all belief. Everything disappeared behind Hayden Lomax’s rich influences. Nobody’s in jail. And nobody’s disappeared except for Sissy Duval. She had stashed enough of Betty’s money to hide somewhere in Brazil. At least Richard Wylie Oates is out of prison. He’s home, farming. The Herreras were delighted to agree to my terms to buy the bar. Richie and Renfro are running the Lodge for me, turning it into a world-class B&B,
the
place for same-sex marriages in that part of the world. Travis Lee is out of business, out of any kind of business, stuffed into a retirement home in Georgetown, living on my charity, which he probably hates as much as he does sitting in his own shit every day. They say nobody ever visits. They say he’s dying. Slowly and painfully, I hope.

Afterward, the kids and I melted the rifles into scrap, cleaned up what we could, and burned the rest. They’re married now. Bob is copping in Gunnison, Colorado. CJ is pregnant, going to college at Western to get a teaching degree. I gave the bride away at the wedding at the top of a summer ski slope in Telluride, then sent them on a honeymoon to Paris. The ten days didn’t ruin them for middle-class American life, but it surely changed the way they looked at it. I wish I had gone along when they invited me. I’ve never been to Paris. With a bit more luck, Molly and I might have made it to the City of Lights.

These days I feel a bit more like a human being. Ever since the moment I donated all the money my ex-partner and I had stolen from the
contra-bandistas
to the International Red Cross. I didn’t realize that money had much meaning until I gave a bunch of it away. I also paid the taxes on my father’s blighted inheritance, which still left me with enough clean money to behave badly, or at least as badly as an old man can afford, as long as I want.

I’m back in the bar business again, sort of. I bought a little place from a couple of aimless Brits within walking distance of the waterfront in Belize City, a warm, placid place rife with friendly strangers, run-down, colorful, and forgiving. I live in a hotel room. Another place that isn’t mine. That’s the way it has to be now. I’ve searched the country fairly thoroughly for another copy of the Shark of the Moon. Without success. Sometimes love works that way.

The grass widow, Sherry, told me that rumor says Betty and Cathy came to a parting of the ways. Betty shares her ranch with a religious woman now. Maybe she has found a religion herself, one that forgives pathological lying and murder. Cathy has taken her act to California. I don’t know what to think about that. Or what to say. Sherry’s divorced now and for a while she’d fly down and sleep with me. Until we realized that we were holding hands more than making love. Petey and Carver D have visited a couple of times from Boston. Petey’s kicking ass at Harvard, which is a perfect revenge for a kid born to unreconstructed hippies in an alley in Austin. Carver D is happy, as funny sober as he was drunk, a gift I suspect I sorely lack. My ex-partner came down for a few days of bonefishing, but a hurricane was brewing, so we just had a few drinks, and a small conversation.

“Shit, man, you didn’t come out too badly,” he said. “The kids are happy, and the farm boy is riding his tractor.”

I begged to differ. “Let’s look at it this way, old buddy,” I said. “I discovered that the woman I loved had lied to me endlessly and unnecessarily, had murdered at least two men. For good reasons, perhaps, but murdered them nonetheless. My business partner turned out to be as crooked as a snake’s asshole. I killed a cop and a district attorney, broke a fat woman’s hand, beat the shit out of a one-armed man, and got the man I meant to keep out of prison killed. Shot a woman in a wheelchair. And God-fucking-dammit, I got Molly killed, too.”

“You never could look on the bright side of things, could you, Milo?”

“The children of suicides seldom do, buddy,” I said. “So leave it the fuck alone.” We sat silent for a long time, then I relented. “The wind’s calm as a nun’s breath,” I said, “but watch the swells. They’ve doubled in size the past hour. A big blow’s a-coming.”

He stood up, stretched like a man heading for his hotel, sighed, “Come see us this fall.”

“I’m going to Paris,” I lied, and he walked away without looking back.

It’s done. This may not be my final country. I can still taste the bear in the back of my throat, bitter with the blood of the innocent, and somewhere in my old heart I can still remember the taste of love. Perhaps this is just a resting place. A warm place to drink cold beer. But wherever my final country is, my ashes will go back to Montana when I die. Maybe I’ve stopped looking for love. Maybe not. Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I’ll sure as hell never go back to Texas again.