The Final Country (9 page)

With trembling hands, I managed to lift a large, flat limestone rock from between my knees and raised it in front of my face. When the skinny guy kicked, he broke the large rock in half with his lower leg, and the sole of his running shoe clipped the skin at the edge of my chin. He stumbled backward. In the bright sun his shinbone gleamed as yellow as pus before the blood covered it. But he didn’t go down. He lifted his face to the sky, growling with pain, then he looked down, stared at me, confused for a moment as if things hadn’t gone as planned. Then his hand darted to the belly pack with the hidden holster. The holster’s Velcro opening sounded like ripping flesh. I did the only thing I could, threw the piece of rock in my right hand. The bastard must have had the hammer cocked and his finger on the trigger as he started to draw the pistol out of the belly holster, because when the rock hit his wrist, he jerked the trigger, releasing a muffled explosion at his groin.

He went down this time, castrated or emasculated or both by the muzzle blast and the round, a froth of dark blood foaming from his crotch, mixing with the bright red gush pumping from the femoral artery in his left thigh. He sat there leaning against the low stone wall, tendrils of smoke from the melted nylon of the pack drifting around his face, his hands on his knees, the pistol forgotten between his legs, opening and closing his mouth as if his teeth hurt, as he bled out almost peacefully.

I just sat there, too. I couldn’t have helped if I wanted to. The skinny guy’s eyes frosted over before I managed to get a full breath into my lungs, and even that one was full of tiny knives. My chest hurt so badly, I could just manage to raise my arm high enough to touch the bloody scrape dripping from the point of my chin. And, hell, even if I could have gotten up, I probably would have put a round right between the bastard’s eyes for good measure. I didn’t know who this guy was, but he sure as hell took a lot of killing.

When I could finally get up, I hobbled carefully around the massive puddle of blood curdling in the dust, and I couldn’t help but notice that his hand was wrapped around a S&W Ladysmith .357. Just like the one I’d given Betty for her birthday, so she could stop carrying the huge .40 Ruger semi-automatic in her purse. Then a cell phone rang from Molly’s pack dumped on the edge of the bloody pool. But it seemed too much trouble and pain to pick it up, so I trudged up to the Caddy for my cell phone, trying not to think about it. Just as I refused to think what the sudden disappearance of Molly McBride and her car must mean.

* * *

The first deputy on the scene, a young man named Culbertson, took one look at the body sitting in a lake of crusted blood, ignored the ringing cell phone, then put me on my knees, my fingers laced behind my head while he patted me down and recited my rights, even while reminding me that I wasn’t under arrest. Yet.

“Where’s the piece?” he asked when he found the empty holster at the small of my back.

“In the front seat of my car, officer,” I said, “unloaded and sitting on my carry permit and my PI license.”

The deputy jerked me to my feet by the cuffs, and marched me up to his unit in the parking lot, leaving the crime scene unsecured. Frankly, in spite of the pain, I was already thinking like a lawyer. Not soon enough, though, as it turned out. When the kid held my head down to ease me into the back seat of the unit, I thanked him. Suddenly, the kid shoved me into the back seat.

“Thanks, kid,” I said.

The deputy stepped back, his hand trembling on the handle of his service revolver. “If I were you, you old son of a bitch,” he spat, “I’d keep my smart mouth shut. Ty Rooke had a lot of —” Then he shut up as another unit howled into the parking lot. He slammed the door so quickly, I just had time to get my feet inside.

Where I sat for a long sweaty time, watching the passage of a lot of cops. Gannon was first on the scene, walked stiffly past Culbertson’s unit without looking at me, then sent the deputy to watch over me. Then came the crime scene crew burdened with useless gear; the medical examiner with his team, loaded with false smiles; and several plainclothes detectives, teetering on cowboy boots, hip-shot by heavy revolvers on tooled leather belts, their eyes sullen with the code of the west, squinting as if they were John Wayne and I already swinging from a live oak.

Finally, Gannon returned after twenty minutes down at the crime scene, his suit coat soaked at the neck and armpits, his shoes dusty. He dismissed the young deputy, opened the unit’s door, rubbed his sweaty face, then bagged my hands after he helped me out of the unit.

“A little late to be bagging…”

“Don’t say another word,” he grunted, interrupting me. “Not one fucking word.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“Milodragovitch,” Gannon hissed from the corner of his mouth as he led me to his unit, “either shut up, or I’ll have you gagged.”

Which made me quite glad that after I called 911 on my cell phone, I left messages on the answering machines that picked up instead of Betty, Travis Lee, and Phil Thursby.

“Well, before you have me gagged, Captain, dig the cell phone out of the extra belly pack and hit star 69.”

Gannon didn’t even bother to look at me.

* * *

I kept my mouth shut all the way into Gatlinsburg and up to the jail on the top floor of the limestone courthouse, where they formally arrested me for capital murder, then held another reading of my rights, complete with three assistant DAs, Sheriff Benson in full dress uniform, and a television news crew. My buddy, Gannon, seemed to have disappeared. They booked me and let me piss into a jar and tested my hands for gunpowder residue before they roughly forced me into an orange jumpsuit and chained me to the table in an interrogation room for what seemed like a long time.

I knew they were watching me through the two-way mirror, so I tried to be calm without going to sleep, which I knew they’d take as a sure sign of guilt. Truth was I had killed men before, too many to suit me and several face-to-face, and I knew better than to dwell on it. Instead I concentrated on a lake high in the mountains of Glacier Park, Upper Quartz Lake, where the water was deep enough so that waterlogged firs hung upright in the clear water, where a single loon sang against the cliffs of the cirque just to hear himself. The other memories would have to take care of themselves.

And I’d had my share of dealings with police officers. I told myself I had nothing to worry about — no nitrates on my hands, I could feel the skinny guy’s footprint blooming across my bruised chest, and in the mirror I could see the scrape leaking down my chin — but something caught my eye at the small wire-glass window set into the doorway. The face peering at me, except for the glasses, which were rimless, could have belonged to the dead man. And these eyes had a burning message in them, too. Whatever the eyes were saying, I knew it was not good news.

* * *

Before they took me down to the courtroom to arraign me — as Gannon had told me, things moved quickly in small Texas counties — Culbertson and another grim-faced deputy put me in ankle shackles and cuffed me to a waist chain, then threaded a chain through the handcuffs. They hustled me down the hallway as if they wanted me to do the guilty-man shuffle, but I refused. When they tried elbow lock come-alongs, I ate the pain, and refused to hurry. When they pushed, I collapsed into their arms and managed to knock off their cowboy hats.

“Watch it, you shitbag,” the other one whispered harshly. “Either walk, or we’ll throw you down the stairs instead of takin’ the elevator.”

“Fuck you kids,” I said quietly as I grabbed the grim-faced one who reached for his night stick and stuck my thumb into the nerve center behind his thumb. “Push me again, asshole, and I’ll take you straight to hell with me. A dead solid promise.”

“Crazy old bastard,” the white-faced one said as he jerked his hand back and then hit me in the small of the back with a stun gun.

After that, at least I had the pleasure of making them carry me into the almost empty courtroom for my arraignment. I did my best to slobber on their tooled cowboy boots.

A nervous young man stood at the defendant’s table. My defender, I assumed, appointed by the judge since Texas didn’t have a public defender program, but I neither listened to the kid’s name nor shook his offered hand. The bald man who looked like the dead guy was standing at the prosecutor’s table beside a chubby woman in a suit of an unfortunate shimmering electric blue. Then the judge stepped up to the bench and slapped it with a large, hard hand. Judge Steelhammer, his name-plate said, didn’t need a gavel. Then he started talking, but I didn’t listen too carefully. The effects of the stun gun were still ricocheting around my aching body.

The bald man stood up, wearing a perfectly fitted khaki twill suit. Judge Steelhammer spoke directly to him. “I want to express my deepest regrets to the district attorney for the loss of his brother and to thank him for standing aside in this matter at hand.” The bald man nodded curtly, gave me a look, then left the courtroom.

Then the judge turned to me, his eyes as pale as ball bearings beneath his thick, dark brows. “Mr. Milodragovitch,” the judge rumbled, “you stand before me accused of capital murder, and believe me this court takes the death of an officer of the law, on or off duty, very seriously. How do you plead to the charge?”

Before I could answer, the doors banged open as Betty and her uncle rushed into the courtroom, Travis Lee shouting, “Your Honor, if you please — a moment to confer with my client before the plea?”

Judge Steelhammer looked as if he were one of those conservatives in Texas who hadn’t found Wallingford’s antics in the legislature amusing or his change in political parties convincing, but as an elected official Judge Steelhammer was nobody’s political fool. He smiled grimly and said, “Mr. Wallingford, please. I didn’t realize you’d taken up criminal law, but, please, take all the time you need.”

Betty, dressed in a Longhorn sweat suit and running shoes, as if just back from a run, sat down in the front row. Wallingford pushed through the gate, elbowed the public defender out of the way, slapped his briefcase on the table, and pulled me into his shoulder. I could swear that his blue pinstriped suit smelled of mothballs. “Phil’s in Houston, son,” he whispered, “so you’re going to have to make do with me. What did you do to make a sheriff’s detective assault you?”

I gave him the short version of the events and showed him the leaking scrape on my chin and the bruise spreading across my chest, the tread of the bald guy’s running shoes stamped very clearly over my sternum. Wallingford quickly convinced the judge to send an officer down to the lab for the dead man’s shoes. Even from the bench the judge could see that the arrow shapes on the running shoes’ soles matched my contusions. Then Steelhammer conferred with Travis Lee and the chubby woman. I kept my eyes on her wide, shining hips, afraid, or ashamed, to turn to look at Betty.

Everyone back in place, the judge conferred with the chubby woman and reduced the charge, then set bail at two hundred fifty thousand dollars, cash or property bond.

“Shit,” I muttered to Wallingford, “I can’t make that without dipping into the offshore accounts.”

“You fuck this up,” Wallingford whispered, “I’ll hunt you down like an egg-suckin’ hound.” Then he took a folded document from his coat pocket, turned to the judge, and said, “I have the deed to the Blue Creek Ranch, which has been appraised at well over that amount, and the owner, Miss Betty Porterfield, has agreed to post the bond.”

“I can’t let her do that,” I whispered as I turned to look at Betty. She looked away quickly. But the judge slammed his hand on the bench again, and it was done.

“We’ll see you outside,” Wallingford said curtly as the deputies took me away.

To a cell this time — a bit more roughly and not wearing their name tags — where we waited together as the paperwork was processed, and where I learned the dead man’s name for sure. “This is for Ty Rooke,” the deputy with the sore hand whispered as he ground the stun gun into the base of my spine the first time. “And this one is for me, motherfucker,” he hissed as he hit me with the stun gun the last time.

Or it was the last time as far as I knew.

* * *

The sunshine was flat by the time I climbed stiffly into the front seat of Wallingford’s crew cab Ford pickup. Betty sat stolidly behind the steering wheel and stared blankly out the windshield as I quietly thanked her for putting up the ranch and promised to raise the cash to replace the bond as quickly as I could. Wallingford sprawled across the back seat like a man who had spent the day bucking bales. In his rumpled courtroom suit. The air-conditioning was on high, and I shivered in my running shorts and thin shirt.

“You okay?” Betty asked, as I grunted and wrestled with the seat belt. She still didn’t look at me.

“For a guy who started the day by getting the shit kicked out of him,” I groaned. “And ended it in a jail cell with two psychopaths, I’m fair to middling.”

“There’s a photographer and a forensic pathologist waiting at the emergency room,” Wallingford said quietly from the back. “They work you over pretty good?”

“Nothing that will show,” I said.

“What did they do?” Betty said, finally looking at me, her fingers soft on my cheek.

“Nothing I didn’t deserve,” I admitted. “One of theirs is dead. And Fm the chosen asshole.”

“What else?” Wallingford said, sitting up now.

“They’re holding the Beast, my license, and my piece,” I said.

“How long?” Betty asked, as if it mattered.

“The Airweight’s probably history, and I suspect the Caddy will come back in lots of little pieces. It’s just stuff. Fuck it.”

“They can’t do that,” Betty said, but neither of us looked at her. We knew they could do damn near anything they wanted.

“You want to give me the rest of it?” Wallingford said. “The long version.”

“After the emergency room. In the bar,” I said. “I need something solid to lean on.”

* * *

When I didn’t show up for my shift, Mike Herrera doubled over without complaint. He even made a joke when I hobbled to the bar on Betty’s arm wearing a gray sweat suit we’d picked up at the nearest mall, Wallingford close behind me. But when I didn’t smile, Mike closed his face into a well-learned expressionless Mexican mask and brought the drinks without comment as we huddled at the empty end of the bar. We ordered drinks, then I asked Mike for the telephone so I could call the front desk to ask the reception clerk to pull the security tape from Molly McBride’s registration, and to make a copy and lock the original in the hotel safe.