The Final Country (18 page)

I had no idea what to say at this sudden turn.

So the woman continued: “I know you don’t need the money, Mr. Milodragovitch, so I’m going to offer you something much more important.”

“What’s that?”

“Your freedom,” she said quietly.

“Who the hell are you, lady? And what do you have to do with my freedom?”

She took a long drag on the little cigar, then blew a long, slow billow of smoke into the stolid air. “I’m Mrs. Hayden Lomax,” she said, “and this man, as you well know, is Tobin Rooke, the district attorney of Gatlin County, and he has an envelope containing a contract, a small check, a bench warrant for a material witness, the woman who calls herself Molly McBride, and a DA’s special investigator badge and identification. Of course, he had to use your booking photo, so the picture’s not too flattering, but it’s clearly you.” She didn’t bother introducing me to the old lady in the wheelchair.

“A bail jumper warrant would be better,” I said, “but isn’t there some sort of conflict of interest here?”

Mrs. Lomax presented me with an icy sneer that should have frosted my balls, and she kept staring at me, silently, until the old woman pinched her arm. “As an officer of the law, you answer to me, not some crooked bail bondsman,” she said quickly without a trace of irony and as if she had been waiting all day to say the line. Then she nodded to Rooke to answer the rest of the question.

“There are not now, and upon successful completion of your contract, will be no charges pending,” Rooke said primly. “This McBride woman, whoever she might be, is a material witness in a homicide. So this is all, however personally abhorrent, perfectly legal. Your business partner, Mr. Wallingford, has examined the documents and approved them. You are certainly free to consult him at this time.” Rooke slipped a cell phone out of his perfectly draped suit, punched redial, then crossed the room to hand me the phone.

“Where the hell are you?” I said when Travis Lee answered. “It sounds like you’re next door.”

“Sippin’ Tennessee whiskey and lookin’ at this pile of
caca de toro
on my desk, and wonderin’ where my next fortune’s comin’ from,” he said.

“What the hell is going on with this Lomax woman?” I asked.

“Sounds to me like a chance to pull your ass out of the pigshit,” he said. “I’d be on it like a duck on a June bug, if I were you.”

“What’s the woman want?”

“Who cares what she wants?” he said. “She’s Hayden Lomax’s last trophy wife, so whatever Sylvie Lomax wants, she gets. So maybe you better ask her yourself.”

“Thanks. I will.” I handed the cell phone back to Rooke, who gave me a manila envelope. “What do you get out of this?” I asked Mrs. Lomax. “Aside from the sheer pleasure of using your money like a club?”

“Don’t think of it as a club, Mr. Milodragovitch,” she said, a wisp of a smile like a thread of smoke flickering around her face, “but more like a willow switch.”

“Thanks for correcting me,” I said. “I assume you mean that a willow switch tickles before it stings? Believe me, lady, I’m tickled shitless, but that doesn’t answer my question.”

“I was warned that you’d be like this.”

“Who warned you?”

“Someone who knows your type,” Mrs. Lomax crooned. “Like a pup with a bone: you don’t know if you should chew on it, bury it, or hump it.”

“Aside from the fact that I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” I said, “what do you want from me?”

“When you locate this Molly McBride person and inform the Gatlin County authorities,” she said, “you’ve completed your chore. They’ll handle it from there. That’s all you need to know.”

“Why use me to find the woman,” I said, “instead of the police or one of the big firms?”

“It’s in your interest to give this chore your full attention,” she said calmly. “I prefer the people who work for me to also be personally motivated.” Then she stood up, leaving the little cigar smoking in the ashtray. I was clearly dismissed, and Mrs. Lomax was already out of the room in her rich mind.

“Don’t you have to swear me in?” I asked Rooke.

“I don’t think that’s necessary in this case,” Rooke said, his steel gray eyes glittering with what had to be rage, madness, or both.

“Well, I sure as hell do,” I said, “but not with these goons for witnesses. Let’s go down to the bar. I feel safe in bars.”

“I’m sure you do, Mr. Milodragovitch,” Mrs. Lomax said with a coy smile. Then she snapped, “Handle it, Rooke.” She swept past us with a rustle of silk, a waft of sandalwood, and the solid weight of a gold chain swinging at her waist, a golden snake curled up her arm. Up close the young woman obviously wasn’t nearly as old as her makeup made her look from a distance — not even thirty, I guessed, wondering why a young woman would want to look old — she wasn’t even as old as she sounded, but her green eyes, as hard and unyielding as malachite, looked older than the dark side of the moon. Her fine features, framed by coal black hair, seemed chiseled from an ancient marble as pink and bloody as the froth from a sucking chest wound. As she walked out the door, her hips swayed like willows in the wind and her bare white shoulders gleamed like a hot flame in the smoky shadows. The last bodyguard, a large man with a pair of puckered scars in the middle of both cheeks, paused long enough to put out the smoking cigarillo, then stepped behind the old woman’s wheelchair.

“Of course, if you talk about this deal, man,” the bodyguard whispered, in an accent that sounded as if it were from further away than Mexico, “I will personally cut you into small pieces and feed you to the pigs.”

“Thanks,” I said as the bodyguard walked past, pushing the old lady. “Sorry I called you a goon.” But the tiny curl of the bodyguard’s lip suggested that my apology wasn’t even slightly accepted.

“Let’s get this over with, Milodragovitch,” Rooke said as he started to follow the procession out the suite doorway.

“Don’t we need a Bible or something?”

Rooke spun in the doorway, his body obviously as quick and well trained as his twin brother’s had been, his jaw violently clenched, his words reduced to a thin, hard stream. “When this is over, you dumb son of a bitch,” Rooke hissed, “I’m going to devote my life to destroying yours.”

Given the attempts on my life, Rooke’s threat didn’t seem all that big a deal so I fumbled through drawers until I found a Gideon Bible, remembering that Gannon had said that the Rooke brothers had been closer than twin snakes in a single egg. The vision of baby snakes wearing glasses popped into my head. The laughter just bubbled out.

“What the fuck are you laughing about?”

“Just wondering if you slept with your forked tongue up the rich lady’s ass,” I said, “or took off your glasses and stuck your whole fucking head in?”

He would have come for me, but the bodyguard with the scarred cheeks laid a hand on his shoulder.

So, oddly nervous and slightly excited and more solemn than I would have imagined, in the middle of a bright fall afternoon in the Texas Hill Country, with Lalo Herrera in all his ancient Latin elegance as one of my witnesses and a bored software salesman the other, I became a peace officer for the second time in my rowdy, misbegotten life.

After Rooke slithered hastily out of the bar followed by the salesman, Lalo poured two shots of Herradura, then raised his shot glass.
“Buena suerte,”
Lalo said, then Lalo and I sipped the smooth fire of the tequila. Lalo ran his hand through his thick hair, still crow-wing black in his seventies, and leaned over the bar.

“Milo,” he said quietly, “I was born in this country of skulls …”

“Skulls?”

“Before you Anglos came, my people called this place
La Tierra de Calaveras,”
he said. “The land of skulls.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Perhaps some
bandidos
who used to raid down in that country south of the Nueces River had a hideout or a cave around here. Or some other people say maybe the Tonkawas left the skulls of men they had eaten piled around old campsites. No one knows. I’m just certain that many bodies are buried in this county,” he said as he poured us another shot, “and many of them entombed by people very much like those who just departed.
Buena suerte, amigo.”

“But when I’m down to bones and ashes,
mi viejo,”
I said, “I plan to sleep in my grandfather’s ground.”

I detoured through the lobby on my way back to my room. The Lomax gang was loading up. The old woman’s wheelchair whirred quietly up a ramp and into the side of an extended frame black Mercedes limo with darkly smoked glass windows as Sylvie Lomax supervised. The bodyguards climbed into a Mercedes sedan of their own. A better work ride than I’d ever had.

Back in my suite, as I showered and packed my war bag, I did a casual and unsuccessful sweep of the rooms for bugs, wondering how the hell Mrs. Lomax had known I was coming by my place. When I finished, I stood in the middle of the room. Her scent still hung in the air, sweet and light beneath the burning rope stink of her cigarillo. I reconsidered the job I had taken. Maybe I should have called Thursby instead of Travis Lee. I used the room phone to call Phil Thursby, but he was in court and wouldn’t be out for hours. I promised to call back. I called Travis Lee again at his office but only got his machine.

* * *

It took almost an hour to wind my way through traffic almost back to Austin, then around the lake west to the southern entrance of Tom Ben’s twelve brush-choked, gully-broken, hardscrabble sections along the southern fork of Blue Creek. The entrance to his place was marked only by a battered mailbox in front of an electronic security gate. Cattle rustling was back in style these days. After somebody buzzed me in, I knew I had to cross half a dozen cattle guards and go through as many electronic gates at the electrified cross fences before I got to the main house. Tom Ben didn’t much care for trespassers or modern-day cattle rustlers. His place covered a patch of land that was flatter than Betty’s but broken by a series of shallow branches and dry washes so that it seemed rougher country than Betty’s place. His place had suffered more from the thorny invasion of South Texas brush. But he worked it harder. At several places I saw teams of D-9 cats pulling anchor chains or root plows to clear the brush for grass pasture and hay fields to feed the small herd of Brangus cattle he ran, along with small bunches of Spanish goats he kept for barbecues.

Tom Ben still lived in the simple tin-roofed single-story fieldstone structure surrounded by a wide, shaded veranda that his great-grandfather had built. Except for electricity and indoor plumbing, it hadn’t changed since it had been built just before the Mexican-American war. But the outbuildings — a hay barn, an abandoned dairy barn, and half a dozen sheds — were structural steel and as shiny as a new dime.

Betty and her uncle sat in cedar rockers on a small deck under a trio of live oaks, a pitcher of iced tea between them. Tom Ben looked nothing like his younger brother. The old man was short and sturdy, solid arms and legs and a round, drumtight belly that jutted angrily from his thick-chested body. He almost always dressed in bib overalls, rundown cowboy boots, and a battered banker’s Stetson that looked as if it had been used a dozen times to swab a newly born calf or reinsert a cow’s prolapsed cervix.

“You’re gonna tear the bottom out of that fancy car, boy!” Tom Ben shouted as he always did, except when I arrived on horseback. “When the hell are you going to get some real Texas transportation?”

“When I want a sore ass more than a bad reputation,” I answered.

“You’re walking like a man who’s been throwed and stomped, anyway, Milo,” the old man growled.

“You should see the other guy.”

“Yeah, I should have burned out that fuckin’ Rooke family thirty years ago when I caught that trashy bunch roastin’ one of my prize billy goats.”

“You ready?” I asked Betty. She nodded. I tossed her my keys. “Why don’t you move your stuff, love. I need to confer with your uncle for a minute.”

Betty hesitated for a second, then took off.

“What’s up, Milo?”

“I seem to have gotten even more mixed up with the Lomaxes this morning,” I said. “And I wanted to ask you about a story I heard a few years ago.”

” ‘Bout that option to sell I supposedly signed? According to what Betty told me, you and me maybe crossed paths with the same slippery cooze.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, I’m glad Betty ain’t here to hear this,” Tom Ben said, “‘cause it don’t make me sound like much of a gentleman. Ah, hell, this young woman came out one Sunday when I was watching the Cowboys. Said she wanted to write a piece about my Brangus bulls for
American Cattleman.
Had a camera and a tape recorder and copies of some of her articles and everything. Even said she’d pay me for my time. And, hell, she knew her cattle and she was driving a cherry Jimmy pickup. She was as polite as she could be — apologized for coming during the Cowboys game, offered to come back when I wasn’t busy. Of course she was as pretty as a new colt — looked more like a movie star than a journalist. But I was having my evening Jack Daniel’s early that day, like I always do when the Cowboys are playing, and I offered her a splash, and hell… one thing led to another. Goddamned woman could drink, boy. Before I knew it, I’d done an interview, and some other stuff, signed a release, taken a check without looking at it, and made a damned fool of myself… Well, I bet you know the rest.” The old man paused, removed the limp Stetson from his thinning gray thatch, then blushed.

“What did you do?”

“When I got my clothes back on, looked at the size of the check, and realized that I hadn’t even looked at that release, I locked all the gates, and sent some hands on horseback to drag the bitch back. When she found a locked gate, she tried to head cross-country. Banged up her pickup a little bit and tore up ‘bout ten thousand dollars’ worth of fence-line, and hid that signed option before my hands caught up with her.” He paused, dug in the pocket of his overalls for a blackened stub of a pipe. “Wouldn’t have done her no good anyway,” he added, but I wasn’t listening.

“What happened then?”