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
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
