“If Enos Walker’s in town,” Hangas said after he tasted the wine and nodded to the bartender, “nobody’s seen him. And a lot of folks down here know him. From his basketball time. He was big stuff when he transferred down from Oklahoma City College. Until he went bad and got kicked off the team. According to his brother, the preacher.”
“You get a chance to talk to Eldora?” I asked.
“That Mrs. Grace, she’s one fine-looking woman,” Hangas said, then paused to savor the wine.
“And about your age, too,” I suggested.
“Perhaps a mite older and more serious than I prefer,” Hangas said, smiling. “I’m too busy taking care of Mr. Carver and keeping an eye on my younger children to have time for any serious women.”
“I thought your youngest two were already in college?”
“One at Rice, one at Baylor. But college is the most dangerous time,” Hangas said seriously. “Waco one weekend, Houston the next, and I’m sort of involved…”
“Both places?” I said, but Hangas just smiled as serenely as a black Buddha. “So what did Eldora have to say?”
“Not much,” Hangas allowed, “but I got the distinct feeling that she was a bit worried and didn’t actually know where Mrs. Duval had gone.”
“I don’t like that.”
“I don’t think Eldora does either,” Hangas said. “You want me to ask her again tomorrow?”
“Day after tomorrow,” I said. “If she’s really worried, you’ll know for sure.”
“Sounds good to me,” Hangas said as he finished the wine. “Mr. Carver says you’re in some deep shit. If there’s anything I can do, please don’t forget to call.”
“Thanks for the ride,” I said. “I’ll get the drinks, then grab a cab.”
Hangas nodded politely, then eased through the crowd as easily as a shade in spite of his size. I had another before I settled the check, slightly surprised that Hangas’s glass of wine had cost almost twenty dollars.
“Good price for a glass of wine,” I said to the bartender. “Grapes mashed by virgin feet?”
“Some folks have taste —” the bartender started to say.
“Right,” I interrupted, “but usually they pay for their own drinks.”
“— but Mr. Hangas has great taste,” he added with a gentle laugh.
* * *
When I taxied back to the Lodge, I found Betty in my room, wearing a silk nightgown I’d never seen, and propped up on my king-size bed, drinking Negra Modelo out of the bottle and eating shredded beef taquitos as she watched a rented movie.
“Looks like you’ve adjusted nicely to the twentieth century,” I said as I kicked my boots off.
“It’s not that I don’t like it,” Betty said. “It just wears me out sometimes.”
“You mean you’d rather chop kindling for the cookstove and pump a Coleman lantern for light,” I said flopping beside her, “than call room service.”
“Most of the time,” she said. “You remember calling me last night?”
“I don’t recommend knee-walking nostalgic drunks more than once or twice a year,” I advised. “I was homesick.”
“I could tell,” she said. “You must have asked me a dozen times to go to Montana with you. But not until spring.”
“And what did you say?”
“Maybe. If you’re not in prison,” she said. “Or working some idiot case.”
“Thanks,” I said, slipping my arm under her neck and my mouth next to her ear, a new easiness between us. “Anybody call but me?”
“Fucking phone rang all day long,” she said. “Until I finally turned it off. My Uncle Trav and Phil Thursby want you to call them at their offices tomorrow. Something about money.”
“What?”
“Uncle Trav said he wanted to talk to you about that investment thing and Phil wanted a retainer.”
“Wonderful.”
“And some guy named Renfro wanted you to call him back no matter what time you got in. He said it was very important.”
“Renfro? I don’t know anybody by that name. He say what he wanted?”
“He said he couldn’t say over the telephone,” Betty said, then reluctantly added, “he claims to be a friend of Sissy Duval’s. A good friend.”
“I expect Sissy’s got loads of good friends,” I said, snuggling closer to Betty’s soft, warm body.
“This one sounded more like her hairdresser than her boyfriend.”
“Maybe I’ll call him. Tomorrow. Maybe he’s got work for me,” I said. “I don’t seem to be making any money working for myself.”
“And some woman who wouldn’t leave her name wants you to find somebody for her. But she wouldn’t say who,” Betty said. “She said she’ll keep calling.”
“Just what I need. More clients.”
“You just use your clients as an excuse to be nosy,” Betty said. “And me as a place to relieve your hangovers.”
“Not every time,” I said as I slipped the gown off her small breasts. “Not every time.”
“Okay,” she said, chuckling as she slipped the rest of the way out of the gown. “Just this once.” Then she paused, naked in my arms. “I know you hate this,” she added softly, “but we have to talk about the Molly McBride thing…”
“She conned me,” I said. “I fucked her, and it nearly cost me what’s left of my life. What’s left to talk about?”
“Well,” Betty said as she rolled away, then spooned against me, as if it was easier to talk to the drapes than me. “I slept with her five or six times…”
I clenched my tongue between my teeth to keep silent. “How’d it start?”
“At a meeting of the Preservation Society,” Betty said. “She asked me for some background over a drink… and as soon as you came back from Montana you dove back into this idiot detective thing, and we seemed to be in the midst of an endless and silent fight, so much for so long, I guess I’d given up on us, and one thing led to another. I guess you know how it was.”
“Yeah, unfortunately.”
“You knew that I’d done it before… during the bad times… But this was different. More intense. At first, I felt terrifically guilty,” Betty said, “so I was a bitch. Then I convinced myself that you were leaving, so I didn’t feel guilty at all, which made me even more bitchy.”
“I guess I should have noticed.”
“Listen, I love you,” she said, “and I know you love me. I even love the way we love each other. But I hate the life you live.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it, “but it’s the only life I’ve always enjoyed, the only one I can bear to live. And it’s far too late to change. But you were half-right about one thing.”
“What’s that?” she asked, the sneer loud in her voice.
“This bar thing was a mistake,” I said.
“Well, that’s wonderful news,” she said. “Since I told you not to go into business with my uncle.”
“Only once,” I said, but she didn’t smile. “And it’s not him,” I continued. “I’m used to being at home in a bar, and the people who come in here aren’t my people. I got tired of them and taking care of business. I guess I felt that I had to go back to my kind of work or roll over and die.”
“And it nearly killed you,” she said sharply.
“Ah, fuck it,” I said, thinking our moment had passed, and began to disentangle myself from her.
But she turned, rolled into my arms, weeping, and said, “No. Fuck me.”
Afterward, I slumped into a brief nap, then woke out of a dream I couldn’t remember, the hangover still jangling through my nerve sheaths. So I eased out of bed and into my clothes, then picked up the cell phone and Renfro’s number, and went down to the bar, had a drink, then returned the call.
Renfro showed up so quickly, I suspected he had been waiting in his car outside the Lodge. He was a tall, bulky, but slightly effete man who couldn’t talk without fluttering hands and a nervous giggle.
“So Sissy is an
old friend of mine, you know,” he said as he pulled up a stool next to mine, “and she asked this favor, you know, so I said yes. I’d go by myself, but she insisted I bring you along for protection.”
“Protection? From what?”
“It didn’t make much sense, really. She said somebody’s been following her,” Renfro said, “and now that she’s shaken the tail, she just wants to go away.” Renfro patted a large envelope in his inside overcoat pocket. “And not come back for a while, you know.” Then he spread five hundred-dollar bills in front of my drink. “She said to give you this. Okay?”
“How’d she get hold of you?”
“Called me at work on my cell phone,” Renfro said. “From a pay phone, I think,” he added. “She was worried about bugs on her phones.”
“Should be all right,” I said. “Okay, I’ll go with you. I’ve got a bone to pick with her.”
“You want to talk to her?”
“She fucking lied to me.”
Renfro laughed. “If every man Sissy had lied to got to talk to her, it’d wear the hide off her little pink ears, you know.” Then he laughed again. “She did mention something about that, though.”
“Good. I’ll hold the money,” I said, “and if she wants it, she has to talk to me.”
“I suppose that’s okay.”
“So where are we supposed to meet her?” I asked, then finished my drink.
“I’m not supposed to tell you that,” Renfro said, “until we’re there.”
“We’ll take my ride. We have to make a stop at my gun locker on the way.”
“What for?”
“Well, it seems that I’ve pissed off somebody around here,” I said, “so I’m not going off in the darkness with somebody I don’t know without a Kevlar vest and my favorite piece under my arm.”
“Wonderful,” Renfro said, laughing and clapping his large hands. “I haven’t played with guns since sixty-eight.” I raised an eyebrow. “I was a company clerk with the Marines in Hue during Tet. We were all on the line. Even the cooks. We beat their asses silly that time, you know, had the war won, then the politicians sold us out. Chicken fuckers.”
“That was a long time ago,” I said, “and I’ll bet you haven’t fired a round since then.”
“You’d win the bet,” Renfro said, then shoved the five bills at me again. “Sissy told me she owed you at least this much. The price of her lie.” Then he pulled the envelope out of his coat and handed it to me. “This is her getaway money.”
“I wonder where she’s going?” I said.
“Not very far,” Renfro said, laughing as he stood up. “It’s only ten grand, and a woman with Sissy’s tastes can’t get very far on that.”
SIX
Sometime after midnight, Renfro and I were standing on the sixth green of a very dark golf course somewhere on the south side of the string of lakes along the Colorado River north and west of Austin, so far from town that the city lights were only a faint smudge against the low ceiling of the clouds. The sixth hole was raised and bunkered, nestled on the verge of a live oak motte. The norther still pumped a cold misty wind across the Hill Country, spiced with occasional bursts of even colder raindrops the size of dimes, which clattered like hail off our vests. We listened quietly as the wind rattled the live oaks madly. Renfro had insisted that if he couldn’t have a weapon, he should at least have a flak jacket. The flag marking the hole flapped like a lost bird. The Browning Hi-Power felt oddly heavy under my arm, less comforting than I hoped.
“It’s so dark I couldn’t see my ass, if my head was up it,” I said. “And she’s a half-hour late.”
“She’s always late,” Renfro whispered nervously. “I wish I could afford to get away. Sissy’s great fun to travel with. Completely insane and terribly organized.”
“Well, I won’t give her the money,” I said, “unless she promises to take you along.”
The tall man nodded again.
Renfro had been very interested when I jerked the DA’s location beeper off the Beast and stuck it under one of the Lodge’s vans, but he didn’t ask any questions. And during the detour to pick up the Browning, a couple of extra magazines, and my Kevlar vest, Renfro hadn’t even commented. Except to insist on a vest, which I didn’t much like, and to give me directions through the dark back roads.
“You think she’s coming?”
“Of course,” Renfro said, giggling. “She’ll be late for her own funeral, but she’ll be there with bells on… What the hell?”
Renfro started slapping at his chest, then at his other hand, muttering curses.
The red dot on the back of his glove exploded in a fluff of fake rabbit fur as I shoved him down and dove in the same direction, shamelessly using Renfro’s bulk as cover and scrabbling for the Browning. Two more silenced subsonic rounds thumped into Renfro’s vest as we rolled toward the nearest bunker. I fired back along the line of the laser sight glistening in the rainy mist. One round hit what sounded like a car; another snapped through glass; the third, fourth, fifth rounds disappeared into the heart of the dark wind.
But the sniper wasn’t deterred. His rounds scattered divots from the green. As I shoved Renfro’s unconscious bulk into the safety of the deep bunker, then rolled in behind him, a round skipped off the Kevlar vest over my left shoulder blade. It felt as if I’d been hit with a twelve-pound sledge. I pressed against the sand beneath the lip of the bunker as another half-dozen rounds chopped at the edge of the green above it. The sniper just wanted me to know that he knew where I was. My whole left side felt paralyzed, as if all the bones on that side of my body had been shattered as I flopped into the bunker.
Across the golf course, I heard the grumbling slide and clunk as a van door shut. Then it drove rather sedately off into the stormy night. Without lights.
I crawled up to the edge of the green, both hands on the Browning, and counted to a hundred before I checked on Renfro, who gasped at the cold air with shallow breaths and had a faint feathery pulse in his cold neck. I propped his feet high against the bunker, then slithered into the tangled oaks, where I waited on my knees for another hundred count. Impatience had killed a lot of people, and I didn’t plan to be one of them. I had used up all my luck when the sniper decided he didn’t want the sound of rifle shots in the night. If the rounds hadn’t been suppressed and subsonic, the vests would have been useless.
Even with his, Renfro still might die of internal injuries. And without mine, the round would have shattered my shoulder blade, scattering bone chips like shrapnel through my viscera. Just the thought of it made me shiver long enough for my back to break out in spasms again. Even five years after the spent .25 round had hit me after it went through the general’s elbow, I could still follow its twisting, burning path through my guts.
When I finally stopped shaking, I stood up as slowly and quietly as my battered back would let me, then pussyfooted through the motte, and eased into my car, turned the key, and ran down the windows in the hope that I would hear the killer’s approach under the gusting wind. I waited a full five minutes by the lighted digital clock before I started the car and switched the heater on high. While I waited to warm up, I considered my problems.
Since I had followed Renfro’s directions through the dark without paying much attention to them, I didn’t know exactly where we were, and I didn’t much fancy just driving off into the night. Even if Renfro was dead, my spent shell casings would be hell to find in the dark, even with a flashlight. If worst came to worst I could change the firing pin in the Browning, or melt the piece down. But there would be telephone records connecting me with Renfro, plus witnesses in the bar who had seen us leave together.
No way I could walk away from this, and being surrounded by police didn’t sound like such a bad idea. Hell, even a jail cell didn’t sound too bad at this moment. As long as it wasn’t in Gatlin County.
So I dug Gannon’s card out of my billfold, then called him at home. He answered on the first ring. He didn’t sound li
ke a man who had just been dragged out of a deep sleep at two-thirty in the morning. “What now?” he asked. He sounded wide awake and very annoyed.
“Sorry if I woke you,” I said. “It’s Milodragovitch and I’ve got a bit of a problem.”
“Milo?” Gannon said, not happily. “You didn’t wake me up. Somebody reported gunfire at the Arrowhead Country Club.”
“That would be my problem,” I interrupted. “I’ll meet you on the sixth green with another body.”
“You ever think of becoming a mortician?”
“Too late to change careers at my age,” I said, “and this one may not be quite dead.” Then I hung up. I grabbed a down vest and a clean T-shirt out of my travel gear, then a survival blanket out of the winter gear junk box I kept out of a long Montana habit, then trudged back to the bunker, wrapped Renfro’s shattered hand as tightly as I could, then bundled him in the vest and the blanket. Then I just crouched there, waiting in the cold, wet wind. But I didn’t unload the Browning and set it on the green until the first unit, complete with lights and sirens, roared down the cart path toward the green where I stood next to the flapping flag, my hands raised.
“Not you again,” the deputy groaned as he climbed out of the unit and trudged up the bank. His face was shadowed under the plastic-covered cowboy hat, but I recognized the voice from the jail cell. The kid followed procedure, put me on my knees and cuffed my hands behind me, then checked on Renfro. But as the kid helped me to his feet, he muttered something under his breath.
“What’s that?” I said, preparing myself for the worst.
“I said, ‘Thanks.’”
“What the hell for?”
“For not snitching me off the other day,” the kid said. “Looks like maybe I was a little bit out of hand.”
“I was an asshole,” I admitted, “so I’ve got no complaint. What’s your name?”
“Bob Culbertson,” he said quietly. “No hard feelings?”
“Not a one, Bob,” I said. “You’re the one working nights.”
“Forever and a night, the captain said.”
“I’d shake your hand, kid, but I seem to be tied up.”
The Final Country Page 11