Probably one of those Desert Eagle.50 cannons, I thought. 'Is everybody in this fucking place stupid?' he asked, waving arms like small logs, but I didn't think he wanted an answer. Walker shoved the pistol under his belt, slipped on his shades, and said, 'You ain't finished your drink, old man.'
'I think I've had enough,' I said. Unfortunately, getting older had not made me any smarter.
'Don't push your luck.'
'Fuck it,' I said and left the drink on the bar.
'Maybe you ain't as smart as I thought you were, old man,' he said.
'I expect that wasn't your first mistake today.'
That nearly kicked it into the cesspool. But suddenly Enos Walker grinned and placed his hands gently on my shoulders, smiled, then said, 'You got balls, old man.' Then he laughed his bitter, hopeless, hard-timer breath right into my face, breath as rank as the winter den of a grizzly. He picked up my drink, slowly poured it down his throat, grabbed the remains of the bottle from the bartender, then left without a backward glance. As he hit the door, the bartender let out his breath, then leaned against the back bar while he guzzled another drink. I headed to the back to check the damage, which was, as I suspected, extensive.
Long had been a tall man with long gray hair, perhaps even good-looking before the muzzle blast had burned off his face and the heavy round had scattered the back half of his head all over the whorehouse wallpaper and a Troy Aikman poster behind him. A clot of hairy gray matter hung from the quarterback's upper lip like an incipient mustache. I thought the kid looked better with some hair on his face.
The bartender peeked around the edge of the office door, then hit the floor in a dead faint. I checked his pulse and made sure that he hadn't swallowed his tongue, then pulled him over to the side and propped up his feet on a chair. As I did, a meaty fart fizzled out of his backside.
I went back to the office. From the look of the desk – cluttered with scales, folded and unfolded Snowseal bindles, milk sugar, and a Jack Daniel's bar mirror – Long had been cutting cocaine and breaking it down into grams, but there was no sign of the source, an ounce bag at least, which was probably riding away in Enos Walker's leather pocket. The right-hand drawer of the desk was partially open; an empty cash box, a Rolodex, and a partial box of.50 Magnum pistol rounds were visible.
'Stupid bastard,' I said, but wasn't sure who I was talking to. Because I used the nail of my little finger to flip through the Rolodex to the Ds and wrote down the telephone and address of the only Duval listed, somebody named Sissy. But that wasn't the real stupid part. I wrote it down on the back of the largest bindle, the one that had 'mine' scrawled on it. Maybe it's a clue, I thought, as I shoved the bindle into my shirt pocket.
The battered black guy in the Cowboys jersey had disappeared when I went back through the empty joint. I picked up the only purse I saw and a custom cue case with CJW embossed on it. Outside, Carol Jean leaned against the fender of the El Dorado, looking sweetly befuddled, the tip of her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated, twirling her cue like a demented majorette.
'Took you long enough,' she said, not looking at me. 'I would have gone with that big black dude. But he didn't ask.'
'A piece of luck, sugar.'
'What the hell happened in there, anyway?' she asked. 'Sounded like a bomb or something.'
'Something,' I said. 'You got wheels?'
'Nope. I came with Vernon, but he jumped in his pickup and took off like a spotted-ass ape.'
'How about money?'
'Baby Joe sent you, huh?' Carol Jean said as she dangled the twenty from her crimson nails.
I nodded as I dug out another one, then handed it to her. 'Listen, kid, carry your ass over to that telephone booth across the street,' I said, 'and call a cab.'
'Shit, man, I can get a ride.'
'I'll just bet your sweet ass you can,' I said, 'and that's probably a better idea anyway. Go home to the hubby, lie like a Navajo rug…'
'A Navajo rug?'
'Complex but serene, simple but beautiful,' I explained.
'Are you on drugs, man?'
'Just high on life,' I said, 'and happy to be alive.'
'At your age you should be.'
'Listen,' I said, slightly miffed, 'just keep your head down for a couple of months. I'll tell the cops I missed you, and you tell them you were at home watching soap operas.'
'That bad, huh,' she said, then finally stopped twirling to look at me.
'Let's just say that Mr. Long lost his head,' I said.
'Jeez,' she whispered. 'Anybody get hurt?'
'Hey, next time you want to take off, at least talk to Baby Joe first. He's a little miffed about the teeth and the tits.'
'Things change,' she said as she broke down and packed her cue. 'But never quite enough,' she added sadly, then just as quickly grinned brightly, as lively as a baby chick. 'Is that what you do for a living? Find people?'
'Hard times, people, lost dogs,' I said as I lit a cigarette.
'Want to see these puppies, old man?' she asked, smiling as she cupped her new breasts.
'Not right now, sugar,' I said, 'I've got a headache.'
Carol Jean squealed with laughter. It sparkled like a wire behind my eyes. She pranced out of the parking lot, then across the highway, where she stuck out her thumb. The first passing pickup smoked its tires stopping to give her a ride.
Truth is, I would have liked nothing better than to rest my weary head on her firm young chest. Maybe it would wash the image of the dead man out of my head. But I knew better. Nothing ever really washed the images of the dead away, not tears, or time, or whiskey. At eleven, I'd seen my father on the floor of his den, the top half of his head demolished by a Purdey double-barrel. Some years later, but not long enough to suit me, when I was stuck in a muddy front-line trench in Korea near the end of the war, everywhere I looked, everybody looked dead. Except the dead don't blink. So I finished the cigarette, ground the butt into the settling dust, walked across the road to the dirtier convenience store, stashed the bindle behind the toilet tank, bought a couple of beers, then went back to the empty joint to call the cops, preparing myself for their serene complexity.
Of course, it wasn't that simple. Absolutely nothing in Texas had been simple yet. The bartender had revived and disappeared, and I didn't want to be in the office, so I dialed 911 from the pay telephone in the parking lot. When the dispatcher answered, I told her that there had been a shooting at a place called Over the Line. 'Again,' she immediately said as if she were a regular, then asked for my name and the details.
I thought about lying, wiping my prints and heading for Montana – but elk season was probably over and it was too late to catch the brown trout run on the Upper Yellowstone – so I decided against running. I had too much invested in Texas now.
After several hours of the usual cop rigmarole, most of it done by rote because everybody knew Billy Long was headed to no good end, I wound up in a small gray office filled with the inevitable paperwork clutter of a cop's life in the limestone fortress of the Gatlin County courthouse across a messy desk from a large, paunchy man with tired gray eyes and an even more exhausted suit.
'Mr. Milodragovitch, I'm Captain James Gannon, chief of detectives for the Gatlin County Sheriff's Department,' he said in some sort of gravelly East Coast accent, 'and I've got some good news for you. We found the bartender at home – one Leonard Wilbur – and when we sobered him up a little bit, he verified your story.'
'I can go home?'
'They're typing up your statement right now,' he said, ignoring me. It was clear Gannon was a street cop disguised as a deputy sheriff and that he wasn't ever going to answer a question. 'There's a couple of things bothering me. Maybe you can set me straight.'
'I feel a little more cooperative now,' I said. 'Your deputies pushed me pretty hard.'
'They're just kids and they've covered a lot of confused and bad calls at Billy Long's place,' Gannon said, but it
