Bordersnakes

by James Crumley

  Carver D and Sughrue talked for a full hour, nonstop, as they guzzled whiskey chased with pitchers of beer and chomped on enough nachos to feed a Mexican village for a week. Quite an unlikely pair to be running a military post weekly newspaper. Sughrue had been there because he actually had a degree in English, some newspaper experience, and it was a more interesting job than checking out basketballs and towels at the gym like the rest of the football team. Carver D had been there because nobody else would have him around.

  Their pasts successfully recounted, Carver D got down to business before Sughrue got too drunk to read. From a pocket not readily visible in his refrito-splattered suit, Carver D withdrew a sheaf of folded papers.

  “Don’t ask where I got this,” he said, then handed us copies of the Lara homicide report. “This is all they’ve got right now.”

  “Jesus, they’re not buying this murder-suicide shit, are they?” I said once I had scanned the report.

  Sughrue stuffed his copy into his back pocket without folding it. “Fucking fairy tale,” he said.

  “Please,” Carver D said. “I lost my wings years ago.”

  “I thought you said the department here was straight,” I ventured.

  “Within reason,” Carver D said, then waved his empty platter at yet another leggy Austin coed. “So what does that tell us, gentlemen?”

  “Some captain is on the take?” Sughrue suggested.

  “Or the feds stepped in,” I added.

  “All that water out in the Gulf,” Carver D said, “and all those desert miles along the Mexican border. And you know what the ladies down here say…”

  “What?”

  “They love champagne, Cadillacs, cocaine, cowboys, and cash,” he said as the waitress slid another platter of nachos under his raft of chins.

  “Carver D,” she added, “you are a fool. Lying to tourists like that.” Then she smiled with the face of a young woman who had never even taken an aspirin.

  “I was born and raised in Moody County,” Sughrue said.

  “Where’s that?” she asked, then flounced away.

  “When we were at Fort Lewis,” Carver D said, “I seem to remember that you claimed to be from New Mexico, Sughrue.”

  “Well, I am. Sort of,” Sughrue answered.

  Carver D laughed like crazy, then said, “Son, no matter how much you deny it, you are a Texican to your bare-bone butt.”

  “And damn proud of it, too,” I added.

  Sughrue grabbed the pitcher, then stormed off for a refill.

  “He hasn’t changed much,” Carver D said, sucking down another cubic foot of smoke. “What happened?”

  “Vietnam,” I said. “He fucked up. Fragged a family on Canadian TV. That’s how the DIA got their hands on him.”

  “He didn’t seem the type,” Carver D mused.

  “Then some other shit came down over the years,” I continued, “and a few years ago his lady got killed, and he took her boy to raise. Most recently, though, he got gut shot in New Mexico, married in the hospital, then went to ground for a couple of years. Now we’re on this crazy chase across Texas.”

  “On your way to Hades, I suspect,” he said, “like everybody else who ever stopped in.”

  “I guess he’s never had much of a chance to change,” I said. “He is what he is.”

  “There’s that,” Carver D said. “Those silly boys at Fort Lewis were going to either beat me or butt-fuck me to death. I’ve seen my share of violence, my friend, but Sughrue was something else. He kicked over a double bunk, grabbed a pole, and laid waste. If it hadn’t been for me, he would have killed those boys. As it was, he scared them so bad they begged us to lie to the MPs. And never tried to get even. Even with me.”

  “Sonny can be a handful.”

  “Those guys all went to Vietnam,” he said softly. “Only Sughrue came back in one piece—if you can call it that. Sometimes I have to admit to myself that maybe Canada was a mistake…but that’s heavy water under the bridge of sorrows and lost highways…all the young boys gone for soldiers…”

  Then he pushed the nachos away, made the whiskey bottle bubble, and looked at me seriously. “I see you’re not a drinking man, Mr. Milodragovitch.”

  “I have been,” I said, “and probably will be again. But that night at the Laras’ house burned most of the fun out of it.”

  “Fun?” Sughrue said as he set the pitcher on the table. “What the fuck is that?”

  “What about the floppy?” I said.

  “What about my suit?” Carver D said, sounding drunk for the first time.

  I handed him a thick envelope, saying, “First-class round-trip ticket to Seattle, enough cash for a week in a four-star hotel, and two made-to-order Italian suits.”

  “By gad, sir, you have style!” he exclaimed. “Panache!”

  “For a Montana hayseed,” Sughrue said, actually sounding pleased that I’d impressed his old buddy.

  “I grew up with whorehouse money,” I admitted.

  “So did I,” Carver D said, “but I never learned how to properly squander it.”

  Sughrue started to say something about my lost fortune, but he stopped when he saw my face. Perhaps I hadn’t completely gotten mired in his search for vengeance, hadn’t lost my purpose.

  “As much as I’d love to, Mr. Milodragovitch, I can’t take your gift so generously offered,” Carver D said sadly. “Like many of my generation I never leave the Austin city limits.” He chuckled and set the envelope on the table in front of me. “As for the floppy disk you copied,” he added, “it took my cyberpunk boyfriend twenty-seven minutes by the clock to break into the file, but the information is encoded and locked behind a password, and since Lara once served his country as a cryptographer for the Army Security Agency, I’m sorry to say that Pinky suggests that it could take a National Security Agency program to break the code. And nobody has hacked into their computers for some time.

  “According to another friend, though, the disk probably contains records of money transfers. And some bad news: God and the DEA will figure it out before you do. Or perhaps I should say ‘we.’

  “Because in exchange for your story, should there ever be one, we’ll keep after it,” Carver D said, then waved at a young skateboarder with orange hair sprouting from one side of his head, who came immediately to help heave Carver D to his feet. “And remember: Follow the money.”

  “Who said that?” Sughrue said. “Marx?”

  “Chandler, I think,” he said, then leaned heavily on his cane and the young man as he fondly helped Carver D up the steps and out of the beer garden.

  “I think he liked you, old man.”

  “But he loves you, kid. Let’s go back to the hotel and sip good Scotch until we figure out what to do next.”

  “I thought you had another date, Milo.”

  “It was a maybe,” he said, “a perhaps.”

  But when we got back to the room, Maribeth had slid a note under the door. Her husband never made it to divorce court. He dropped dead on the steps of the courthouse. Which made the divorce superfluous. And she thought perhaps spending the night together so soon might be unseemly. But she had left some telephone numbers: Austin, Crested Butte, La Jolla, and someplace called Port Aransas.

  “Should I send flowers?” I asked Sughrue after reading the note aloud.

  “Damn straight,” he said. “You’ve got style.”

  “Guess that’s a no,” I said, and we laughed our way up to the bar, only to find it closed.

  —

  Over the telephone the next afternoon, the president of the Pilot Knob Farmers Home Savings and Loan, Travis County’s newest state-chartered bank, sounded so country I expected him to have a cowlick, tractor grease under his nails, and cowshit on his boots.

  Leon Firth didn’t disappoint me too badly later that afternoon. He ran his bank business out of a double-wide trailer not even as nice as Sughrue’s. And although his nails were freshly manicured, his hand was roughly callused and w
ork-hard when I shook it. But I hadn’t counted on the Texas affection for hair spray: a cow’s tongue couldn’t have mussed that hair-helmet; maybe not even a gun butt. I thought I detected a stirrup scuff on the inside of his expensive ostrich boots, but he could have spilled aftershave on the pebbled vamp. The stuff certainly smelled as if it might have scoured leather.

  I also had my shit together: two days’ growth of beard; a stretch limo with a cellular telephone rented for cash and driven by Carver D’s large black friend; my eyes bloodshot from one of Sughrue’s powerful needle-thin joints; and the night before I’d slept in my most expensive suit.

  “So how can I help you, Mr. Soames?” Firth asked, after a white-haired woman who looked like his grandmother had served the coffee in china cups. If she wasn’t his grandmother, surely they went to the same hairdresser.

  “I want to open an account,” I mumbled.

  “What sort of account?” he asked, smiling at me with capped teeth.

  “Ever’ kind you got, buddy.”

  “Every kind?”

  “Checking, savings, CDs, annuities,” I said. “The whole fucking ball of wax. But I have to have instant access to the money. Can you dig it, man?”

  Firth looked a little worried, but strove bravely forward. “How much did you plan to deposit?”

  “Three and a half million,” I said, “give or take a couple of hundred K.”

  “Give or take?” he said, suddenly interested.

  “In cash,” I said.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said carefully. “Can I see some identification, please?”

  “It’s in the limo,” I said, “with the cash.”

  Firth stood up, touched his hair as if it might have escaped somehow during our brief conversation. “I’m sorry, sir,” he crooned, “but I suspect you’d be happier at some other financial institution. We don’t handle deposits like yours.”

  “Hey, man,” I said, standing also. Checking my back and glancing nervously out the window. Reaching under my suit coat, then cursing under my breath when I didn’t find a piece. “I’m in a bind here, asshole. I’ll pay ten cents on the dollar. Add it up, sucker. Three hundred fifty K. For nothing.”

  “I’m truly sorry, sir,” he said, moving around the desk toward me. He must have hit the panic button. “But we just don’t do business that way.”

  “The fuck you don’t,” I said. The door opened behind me, and the burly guard I’d seen in the bank put his hand on my shoulder. “What do you think I am, you fucking hayseed? The fucking FBI? And tell your boy that if he touches me again, I’ll jerk his arm out of the socket and shove it up his ass.”

  “Please, sir, don’t make us call the law.”

  “Here,” I said, picking up the telephone on his desk. “I’ll call for you. You boys got 911 out here in the sticks?” The bank guard tried to grab me in a wrist-lock come-along, but I was already spinning, so instead he caught my elbow in the nose. He sat down abruptly. “Big mistake, kid,” I said. Then kicked him smartly in the ear.

  “And you, too,” I said to Firth, whose hands scrabbled at a desk drawer, then stopped. “Don’t be an idiot,” I said, stepping around the desk and pinning his hand in the drawer with my thigh. “Take it easy. It’s just a fuckup. Obviously, my people didn’t talk to your people yet. I’ll be back tomorrow.” Then I stepped back to release his bleeding hand. “And by the way, Leon, the next time you try to pull a piece on me, man, I’ll kill you, your family, and everybody you ever said hello to.”

  Then I mussed his hair and left.

  —

  “What do you think?” Sughrue asked me over the cellular telephone from his rental unit parked down the highway as the limo pulled out on the road.

  “Oh, man, they stink like fried shit,” I said back.

  “I think you’re right, Milo,” Sughrue said. “I watched in the spotting scope as some guy with a bloody nose and a grandmotherly type just ran to their cars. And some other guy is standing on the back steps trying to comb his hair and use his cellular telephone at the same time.”

  “Perfect,” I said into the telephone. And meant it. Then I ran down the glass barrier between the driver, Hangas Miller, and me. “Mr. Miller,” I said. “You look like a man who has perhaps seen some military service.”

  “Three tours in the Southeast Asian war games as a senior master sergeant, Third Marines, sir,” he said in a voice that sounded as if he carried a small grenade in his throat. “But call me Hangas, please, sir.”

  “I’ll call you Hangas if you call me Milo,” I said. He nodded with a smile, and I slipped forward to the jump seat. “Things didn’t go exactly as planned in there, so the rest of this could be fucked, too. How deeply you want to be involved in this shit?”

  “Any friend of Carver D’s is a friend of mine,” Hangas said softly, holding his hand over his shoulder. I shook it. It felt like a brick. I slipped five hundred in twenty-dollar bills into it.

  “We better do this after dark. So let’s drive around till then, act like we’re trying to lose a tail, but not too seriously. Then drop me at the Omni Hotel,” I said, “and park as close to the lobby door as you can, like I’m on my way right back out. Be generous with my money. A couple of minutes later, some people are going to come around…”

  “What kind of people would that be?”

  “You know the kind. Too much money, not raised right,” I said. “And not nearly as tough as they think they are.” Hangas, who could probably drive his hand through a cinder-block wall, smiled like a man who was just exactly as tough as he thought he was.

  “Trash,” he said.

  “Uncle Tom ’em a little bit,” I suggested, “then sell me out. Don’t take the first price, though. And if they want to muscle you, sell me out immediately.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked, astounded and disappointed.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt,” I said. His laughter sounded like an avalanche. “But if you want to shuffle up to the room behind them…far be it from me to step on your fun, Hangas.”

  Hangas drove the limo aimlessly around Austin as the grandmother and the bank guard did a pretty good job switching a front-and-back tail. Sughrue and I thought we had it set up pretty good. I’d rented two connecting rooms and the one across the hall at the Omni, and we planned to take whoever showed up when they tried to go into the room I’d rented in Rocky Soames’s name, thinking that not even these guys would want to chance gunfire in a fairly crowded hotel, and that a scuffle, if we controlled it quickly, might go unnoticed.

  But as usual the bad guys didn’t behave. Which I guess is their job.

  Hangas had just done a U-turn on South I-35 at the Onion Creek Parkway exit when the cellular telephone rang. It was Sughrue.

  “Milo,” he said, “we’ve picked up company: two cowboys in a blue Ford four-wheel-drive pickup; two Hispanic suits in a white Lincoln; and two yuppie types in a Taurus. So stop fucking around, man. Act like you’re going someplace, before they make me…Fuck it, man. They’re looking too hard, seen too much of me, man. I’m outa here. I’ll stay on the parkway, take the next exit, if the assholes don’t follow me.”

  “Plan B, huh?” I said.

  “What’s Plan B?”

  “I thought you had one,” I said.

  “Asshole,” Sughrue said, cursing as he thought. “Let’s go to the parking lot at Mt. Bonnell. There’s always a crowd up there this time of the afternoon, drinking beer and getting ready to watch the sunset. Tell Mr. Miller to take Riverside to the Mo-Pac, then Bull Creek to Mt. Bonnell Road. Fuck it, he’ll know the way. And that should give me time to get there.”

  After I gave Hangas the change in plans, I told him to stop at the next convenience store. Preferably one with a lot of lights and maybe a cop car, so I could get the aluminum suitcase out of the trunk.

  “If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll get the suitcase,” Hangas said. “There’s something back there I need, too.”

  Hangas found a place at the corne
r of Lamar and got a golf bag and my suitcase out of the trunk, while I bought a carton of Camel straights and a case of Coors as blithely as a wino on a lark. In the backseat, I dumped the suitcase, then changed clothes as quickly as I could. Up front, I could hear Hangas rattling through the golf clubs.

  “You don’t look like a golfer,” I told him, glancing into the front seat. Hangas had pulled a heavy cane out of the bag. He twisted the handle, which opened into a shotgun breech, into which he dropped a 12-gauge buckshot round. “And that doesn’t look exactly like a nine iron.”

  “Carver D calls it his asshole driver,” he answered, slipping the cane under the seat. “He’s not crazy about people playing through.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m not up on the etiquette of the game, but I can see why they might not.”

  Then Hangas and I got in an argument.

  Which I finally won. But not easily.

  —

  When we got to the Mt. Bonnell overlook, the afternoon had faded to dusky gray, that time of day when the black road eats the headlights and the ashen air turns impenetrable. Sughrue’s ghostly figure leaned against the hood of his Japanese rental, his hands wrapped in hard leather work gloves. I slipped the spring-handled sap into my right back pocket.

  Hangas pulled into the lot and, much against his wishes, let me climb out with the case of beer and my aluminum suitcase, which I cached in the trunk, and then he drove slowly away. He had to wait while the grandmother and the bank guard rolled past as if they hadn’t a care in the world.

  By the time the rest of the convoy arrived, Sughrue and I were mounting the steps to the overlook itself, where a half dozen college students watched the final act of a fairly mediocre sunset. They looked at Sughrue and me oddly when we stopped next to them. When I opened the case of beer and told them to make themselves at home, they remained suspicious, but they did grab a couple of beers.

  On the parking lot below, the bad guys had a short conference. One of the Hispanics, a tall thin guy who looked as quick as a snake, seemed to be in charge. After a moment they came up the hill, the yuppies and the bank guard in the lead, the cowboys circling through the cedar scrub, scrabbling in their slick-soled boots. And the two suits split up, hanging outside and behind the other groups.