The Final Country

'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