Bordersnakes

by James Crumley

  “Not a chance,” he said with the calm of shock. “We’ve fallen into the den of snakes…” Then he fainted.

  I grabbed Suzanne’s hand, placed her thumb against the pressure point in her father’s armpit. “Hold that!” I shouted into her blank face. But her hand fell limply away. I slapped her, cursed her until she kept her thumb there. By then I could see men circling. “Help me!” I shouted at Kate, and we slammed the oak shutters over the wide window behind Kaufmann’s desk.

  Then I scrabbled under the desk until I found the Glock and the General’s .45. As I handed them to Kate, I told her, “I’ve got to shut the front door. You just reach around the doorframe and fire out the front door until I get it closed. You hear me?”

  She nodded, so I didn’t look back, just rolled out of the office into the great hall until I got behind the Plexiglas shield and rolled it to the door. Fucking rounds were hitting everywhere. And Kate was covering me like a pro, crouching and aiming her fire until I got the steel doors shut, and we retreated into the office.

  Automatic fire had begun to splinter the heavy shutters, and Suzanne had pulled her father to the floor for cover.

  “We have to get out of here,” Kate said.

  “Where?” I said. “And fucking how?”

  “The basement,” Suzanne said. “We’ll be safe there.”

  With nothing to lose, I gathered the shoulder holsters, pistols, and clips off the couch, wrapped them over my arm, then folded the General over my shoulder and followed the women across the great hall, down a winding set of stone stairs to a large solid door. Suzanne grabbed a key ring off the wall beside the door, unlocked it, and led us to her version of safety. A large, expensively furnished stone-lined chamber, more like a tomb or a bomb shelter than a living space.

  They couldn’t get in. We couldn’t get out. But Andy Jacobson poked his head out of the bathroom, wondering what the hell was going on. I set the weapons on a library table, doubled up my fist, and knocked the little bastard into the bathtub. I wrapped a tourniquet around the General’s arm, then stood under the shower over Jacobson’s unconscious body long enough to wash most of the blood and shit off me. I sat down in a soft leather chair with the shotgun across my knees, leaned back prepared to bleed to death. The round that Kate put into her father’s arm hadn’t stopped there. It was floating around somewhere in my guts.

  “Get that piece of shit out of the tub, Katie,” I said, “and fill it up before they figure out to turn off the water.”

  —

  “It’s not bleeding much,” Kate said later, washing my sweaty face with a cold washrag.

  “Thanks,” I said, not saying what I thought. Not much on the outside.

  Suzanne huddled over her father on the large bed, tending the tourniquet, trying to save his arm. A lost cause, I suspected. As lost as we were. Jacobson drooled, strapped into a chair in front of me. Kate had found me a bottle of brandy, which I sipped and tried not to swallow. Occasionally, we would hear muffled sounds through the oak-shrouded steel door. But when I wondered why the bodyguards didn’t blow the door, Suzanne pointed out that they needed the General to get to the money.

  “They want to kill you,” she said, the bloody planes of her face staring over her father’s slowly heaving chest. “Not him. Or me. Or Kate.”

  Kate leaned her forehead on my knee, whispering, “I’ll die before I let them kill you.”

  “Thanks, kid,” I said, my hand on her close-cropped head, “but that’s not necessary.”

  “Oh yes it fucking is,” she said, raising her face to me. “What was it you said? I always wanted to fall in love with somebody I couldn’t fuck.”

  “You people are sick,” Suzanne said, as she hurried into the bathroom for another towel.

  Kate and I laughed. Laughed loud enough to make Jacobson stir in his chair. His eyes followed Suzanne like a sick puppy’s.

  “Beautiful woman, hey?” I said to him.

  “Frankly, I liked her with a little more meat on her bones,” Jacobson said. “Suzanne,” he whined as she passed him again. But she ignored him. Kate and I were still giggling.

  Kate staggered into the bathroom to wash her face. Somehow the General’s corrupt blood had missed her.

  Or maybe it wasn’t in the blood. Maybe the General had learned corruption. At great government expense. Or maybe all the years in Central America had found the real bastard beneath all the breeding and education and gentility. Too often it seems that way. We send our legions among the savages in the name of democracy, and they learn violence and torture in the name of United Fruit. I wasn’t sure, now, if we had created General Kehoe, or he us, but I knew that we had created Emilio Kaufmann…

  And now all the bad guys were dead. Except for me. And I supposed I was dead, too. Shot by the only decent person in the whole fucking deal. And it was never about drugs or money. It was always about a goddamned western movie. In some way I didn’t exactly mind dying. As I drifted away, I heard the sounds of rushing air, felt the force of moving water, heard the great beasts singing…

  —

  “Look!” somebody screamed at me, slapped me. “We’ve been here all night. So what the fuck happens now?” Suzanne asked, standing over me, pointing a pistol in my face. A muffled pounding came from the door.

  I suppose I had drifted a long way, that the pounding had been going on for a long time. I meant to put a load of buckshot into Jacobson before I died. But suddenly it seemed too much trouble. You step on pissants. You don’t shoot them.

  “What?” was all I could say.

  “What happens now?”

  “We survive this shit, love, which seems a long chance,” I said dreamily, “your father dies in prison, and you wander the earth like a pariah dog. Again.”

  “But you loved me, dammit,” she demanded. “I fucking know you did. I can tell.”

  “Maybe I did,” I said. “I even put enough of Ray Lara’s money aside for you to finish the movie…”

  “I knew it,” she said. “I knew you loved me. I’ll give you the Puntarenas tape. Give you the formula. Just tell me how to get the money. Come on, goddammit, you love me…”

  “I’m not completely responsible for my character flaws,” I said, then looked into those hard green eyes. “Or yours. Maybe I’d’ve felt differently if you hadn’t put all thirty rounds into Aaron Tipton and your father hadn’t been such a scumbag.”

  “My father’s dead.”

  “Tourniquet mismanagement,” I suggested, then laughed.

  Suzanne clubbed me across the face with the pistol. “I’m going to give you to them,” she said. “They’ll make you talk about the money…”

  “No, you’re not,” Kate said, leaning over her father’s body, her shining face dripping tears. Then she walked over to stand in front of her sister.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “Let her, Katie. It’s fine. It’s a fair price…”

  “The General’s dead,” Suzanne said flatly. “It’s our only chance.”

  “Please,” I begged, “let her give me up. Please…”

  Perhaps it was the begging. Who knows? For the first time in a long day and night of blood and guts, Kate collapsed, her forehead again on my knee. I could hear the rain on Betty Porterfield’s tin roof as I drifted away again, could hear in the background the pounding against the door as Suzanne struggled with the locks.

  Then somebody else was slapping my face and cursing me.

  “Goddammit, Milo, you fucking son of a bitch.”

  And I knew it wasn’t the angels.

  Sughrue

  Fucking Milo.

  Dickerson and I find the gate to Kaufmann’s compound wide open and not a soul in sight. Which explains the pickup loads of furniture we had met on the road up. The small plane intended for Emilio Kaufmann has carried Whitney and Lester to El Paso, where they are safely locked in the DEA compound. Dickerson can’t call in backup and I don’t know anybody who might help Milo. Maybe not even himself. Like the open, unguarde
d gates, nothing makes any sense anymore.

  And the front doors of the mansion are wide open, too, the dark burns of an explosive charge scarring their width. Once inside, for the first time in my life, the phrase “charnel house” comes to mind. The place is stripped to the walls. Except for the dead bodies. The buzzing of carrion flies is as heavy as the smell.

  We work the house like a rifle squad, and the fear makes the air heavy. We breathe like gut-shot lions, our breaths louder than our footsteps. Until at last we find the basement stairs, the trail of blood black and flyspecked on the pale stone steps. Then the locked door, scarred with gunfire and sledgehammer blows. Covered by Dickerson, I pound on it with my foot until we hear the sound of the key in the lock.

  When it opens, Suzanne stands as if struck dumb as we brush past her, ready for anything. Except what we find. The dead General, Andy Jacobson bound to a chair, Katherine weeping, and fucking Milo holding a bottle of brandy against a blood-soaked towel, grinning like a happy drunk.

  Milo

  The first thing I did when I got out of the hospital was to buy Sughrue a new pickup. A loaded Dodge Ram 4x4 with a club cab. I hadn’t been gut shot as badly as Sughrue, but I had been gut shot and couldn’t help them load the truck; I supervised as he gathered his goods and family to head back to Montana, their Texas experiment over. Katie rode along to take care of Lester and, as she said, “Check out the broads in Montana.” Whatever Sughrue planned, I could tell that he was finished with this part of life.

  Suzanne has disappeared again. Even before her father’s funeral. They buried the old bastard with full military honors at the Fort Bliss cemetery. Hell, Ollie North walked on Iran-Contra, so why shouldn’t a dead man? Maybe we shouldn’t teach our soldiers how to smuggle.

  Of course, Suzanne has the formula for the Kaufmanns’ super drug and her witchy ability to become anyone she pleases, so I fear the world hasn’t heard the end of her. She also has the real copy of the Puntarenas tape, which I suspect implicates her father as much as Emilio Kaufmann.

  As far as Dickerson can tell, neither Kaufmann nor the General will be much missed in the drug trade, and nobody seems even vaguely interested in revenge. Maybe they’re just happy for the opportunity. Such is life along the border. Another kingpin smuggler slips into place as easily as a snake sheds its skin.

  Dickerson has postponed retirement to fight what he thinks is the good fight at the border. I tried to talk him out of it over several dinners, but he’s a good cop and refused all my arguments. The lost war goes on. Greed beats good sense every time.

  As soon as I was out of the recovery room after they dug the little .32 slug out of my viscera, Sam Dunston was standing at my bedside. Because I’d made Sughrue call him. For a piece of the movie, I provided enough money to finish the shooting and postproduction. Sam was as happy as I’d ever seen a man. Unfortunately, the old bastard died three weeks later of heart failure in the middle of a shouting match with the assistant director. Roy Jordan brought me one of the old man’s favorite bolo ties, the braids of dark sweaty leather held together with an obsidian spear point. He thanked me for making the old man’s last days happy.

  Of course, the preppie kid took over the movie, cut a politically correct piece of shit out of it, and somehow I lost the money I put up. But it wasn’t exactly my money anyway. I understand that’s how Hollywood works.

  —

  And once they removed the clips from my belly, I settled my affairs in El Paso. I shared a bottle of tequila with the Soames brothers over Rocky’s grave.

  Then in Austin I had many drinks with Carver D as I told him the promised story. He thanked me, then told me he had no place to publish it anymore, even if he could. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Someday the bastards will own it all.” I didn’t have to ask who the bastards were. The fat man seemed hugely sad as I left, and I promised to come back.

  Outside the beer garden Hangas climbed out of the Continental to let me know that all was not lost just yet. His boss had put most of the money from the sale of the Dark Coast into a foundation for alternative newspapers and investigative reporting.

  Then it was time to heave my sorry ass into the Beast and drive to Blanco. Take the long chance.

  Maybe Sheba heard the Beast rumbling over the last cattle guard. Or maybe Betty heard it. They never told me. But they met me at the last locked gate, Sheba prancing in the bright morning sunshine of the open winter, the tennis ball in her teeth, and Betty Porterfield with a small but true smile on her face.

  “Hey, bud,” she said, “you look rode hard and put up wet.”

  “Right,” I said. “Remember I told you I’d been shot at but never hit?”

  “Yep.”

  “Can’t say that now,” I said.

  “If I’d known you were coming, bud,” she said, “I’d have fixed breakfast.”

  “It’s not too late,” I said.

  “I guess it’s never too late,” she said, then opened the gate.

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