'And?'
'Mr. Milodragovitch,' she said, turning to face me, 'I mostly do criminal work. I know cops. I know crooks. And stories get around.'
'What the hell do you want?' I asked, tired and angry now. What I really wanted even more than an answer to my question was another blast of that pure cocaine.
'I want you to sit down and listen to me for a moment,' she said, her head bowed, then raised into the moonlight. 'That's all. Please just listen to me.'
'So let me get this straight. Let me get this perfectly straight, okay? I don't get laid, right? I get a bedtime story instead? Wonderful.' But I sat down anyway.
'I don't blame you for being bitter,' she said, sitting across from me and grabbing my hands. 'Just listen, please.'
'What have I got to lose? Except pride, dignity, and my bad reputation?'
'Four years ago,' she said, clutching my hands harder, 'my little sister was running down by the creek when she lost her dog -'
'I don't fucking do lost dogs these days,' I said, perhaps a bit more angrily than I meant. She released my hands, then stood up to lean against the rail, her back to me.
'Ellie is a mutt,' she said into the night, 'a nothing dog, but Annette loved her. It had been a bad year. Our Daddy died early that year, and Annette's boyfriend had – well, white boys shouldn't smoke crack and hang around topless bars – and her favorite prof in the English Department killed himself. So when she lost Ellie, Annette went crazy.
'She stapled flyers to damn near every tree, took out a half-page ad in the paper, even tried to borrow money from me to rent a billboard…' Molly paused as if exhausted, her sigh full of some grief I didn't want to understand, then she turned to face me.
'Eventually,' she continued, briskly now, 'the man who had Ellie called, and offered to sell her back for a hundred dollars… They were to meet at the overlook above the spring, down there in the park. The cops know that much from Annette's answering machine tape…'
'The cops?'
'Two days later they found her body stuffed under a ledge above the spring,' Molly said, nodding toward the sleeping dog, 'and Ellie was sitting beside her. Maybe she'd never been lost at all.
'The son of a bitch had… he had raped and killed Annette… he had tortured her, raped her, killed her, then, my God, the son of a bitch cut her head off… they never found her head… we had to bury her without a goddamned head…' Then Molly paused again, heaved a great breath, then let the rest gush out. 'My mother couldn't take it. Six weeks later, she hanged herself.'
'Jesus,' I said. 'What can I say?' Both my parents had been suicides, so I had some idea of the confusion and guilt it caused.
But Molly was already moving away, back to the bathroom, leaving the dog and me in the pitiless moonlight.
And when she came back, she came back into my arms. Naked. Just as she was supposed to. Whispering against my neck, 'Don't say anything.'
Nobody ever knows how much is only real for the moment. Or how much is real forever. Maybe the momentary is all we'll ever know, the woman open beneath you, her lips wild with laughter, or riding high over you, her tears like hot wax on your chest. Molly was muscular and willing and lovely, and there were moments when I felt as if I might die, and moments when I knew I'd live forever. And even worse, a moment when I convinced myself that I was doing the right thing, somehow giving support and comfort to this woman.
Afterward, we leaned again on the rail over the dark wrinkles of the hollow, ice ringing like tiny bells in our glasses, the moon still molten, but the wind had shifted to the southeast, suddenly warm in our faces, our sweat unslaked.
'I never lived any place where you could work up a sweat in November,' I said. 'Just standing still.'
'I've never lived any place where piss froze before it hit the ground,' she said.
'Maybe I made that part up,' I admitted.
'I thought so,' she said.
'But no matter how cold it is,' I said, 'you can always put more clothes on.' Then I paused. 'But I've never figured out how to take enough clothes off when it's hot down here.' Then I paused again, turned to face her, touched the dark stone on her chest. 'What's this?'
'The only thing my mother left me,' she said quietly. 'It's called the Shark of the Moon.'
I looked more closely. The golden band no longer looked irregular now that I could see the snouts, dorsal fins, and tails of the golden sharks circling the dark pool of the stone. And etched faintly in the center I could feel another.
'So what the hell do you want from me?'
'Believe me. I've tried everything. I can't get anybody to help. Not the cops. Not the most desperate and sleaziest PIs. Hell, I even tried to put an ad in
Jesus, I thought as I tried to remember if John Wayne got laid in that movie, she's pulling out all the stops. 'I'm guessing here, but I'll bet you want to put an ad in the paper about a lost dog in Blue Hole Park, right? And you hope the same bastard will answer it?'
'I'm meeting him at ten o'clock this morning,' she said, 'on the same overlook where he took my sister…'
'What makes you think it's the same guy?'
'I knew it in my bones,' she said, 'when I heard his voice over the telephone. I fucking knew it.'
'You cut it pretty close.'
She reached into the chest of drawers and pulled out a Glock 20.
'You know, I've yet to meet a woman in Texas who doesn't carry a piece,' I said. 'It doesn't have a safety, it doesn't have a blow back lock, and the FBI thinks it's perfect.'
'They gave me a permit.'
'Everybody's got a permit as far as I can tell,' I said, wondering why all the major decisions of my life had to be made while I was slightly tipsy, mildly high, and stinking of bodily fluids. Or maybe it wasn't just the bad decisions, maybe it included the good ones, too. Whichever, I had no way to resist. 'Okay. I've got a black cherry El Dorado. Meet me in the parking lot at nine. I've got to look over the ground.'
She put her arms around my neck, saying, 'How can I ever thank you?'
'Consider me thanked, and I'll give you the family rate for a bodyguard day.'
'Family rate?'
'Three hundred instead of five,' I said, smiling, 'in cash, in advance.'
'The fuck doesn't count?' she asked.
'Nothing solidifies a deal like folding money. It doesn't change its mind and doesn't whine about respect the next morning.'
'That's for sure,' she said as she dug into her purse and handed me the money with a quick burst of nervous laughter. 'That's what I always tell my clients,' she added. 'The ones who are guilty, that is.' Then we laughed, shook hands, and I left her standing in the hard moonlight, listening to the faint murmur of the creek.
The upper reaches of Blue Creek wandered weakly through Betty's ranch, then crossed another ranch, before it wound onto her other uncle's place – Tom Ben Wallingford owned several sections – before it dropped in a small stream off the Balcones Escarpment to join the gush of the huge artesian spring at the base of the hollow, where Blue Creek became a wide, beautiful stream, pellucid water slipping over limestone ledges, pausing occasionally to form perfect swimming holes. Travis Lee, who had his job at the law school and later his private practice, donated most of his part of the old family ranch to the county for a park, taking a huge tax write-off and keeping a narrow strip of land on the north side of the creek. Leaving his older brother with his sections of mostly worthless scrub, particularly after the government dropped the mohair subsidy, land good only for deer leases, which the old man wouldn't allow. And, as Austin expanded northwesterly, development, which the old man hated. Tom Ben's
