The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  “Well, look who’s back,” Elena said. “How’s it feel, jerk-off? Got it all worked out? Or are you going crazy?”

  “I love trippin’,” I grunted. “Just love it.”

  Elena looked briefly concerned, then shook it off. Rico’s jacket was half open, his chest cinched by a tight elastic tube top. Elena put her hand on his shoulder as if to exhibit his beauty, then tugged down the elastic band to expose well-formed women’s breasts nestled on his chest. Trinidad, Colorado, the transsexual capital of America, wasn’t that far away.

  I must have looked confused because Elena fondled her brother’s silicone breasts, saying, “You should have heard your shrink buddy’s wife moan when she saw these babies.” Rico actually seemed embarrassed, as if having breasts hadn’t been his idea. Then she paused, pulled down Rico’s pants, and grabbed his enormous but misshaped penis. “And, boy, did she scream when she saw this beauty.” It had a strange bend to it, and seemed mottled and marred with scar tissue as if it had been dipped in lye or boiling water, then burned with a cigar. This time I was sure he was embarrassed because he blushed. It made me wonder what the old man had done to him as a child. She slammed it against the side of his thigh like a small club. “Think how your girl friend’s going to squeal when he sticks it up her ass. And you, what are you going to say when he sticks it up yours, you asshole.”

  “What the hell?” I sputtered, watching the red spray echo my words.

  Elena seemed to be in charge because she spit out the words. “Your fucking doctor friend,” she said, “he wrote all those books about how it’s somebody else’s fault. It’s never the fault of the asshole who did the shit! And he got that bastard, the one who killed Dougie, out of jail. You don’t know what our mother went through to have Dougie!” She was almost screaming now as her brother fondled his oddly flaccid penis. “Well, we showed him whose fault it was. We watched his face as you told him about how his patients died. You made a great witness. We knew he’d call you when Rico broke into the files. It worked like a dream. We would have gotten them all, your wife and all the rest, but we ran out of time. Next summer. We’ll finish next summer.”

  “What I did on my summer vacation,” I said. I was almost calm now. Except for the blue flashes and the trailers flickering behind every movement. “Why the fuck didn’t you just kill him when you killed the stripper?” I asked him, but Elena answered.

  “The stripper?” Elena answered, honestly confused as far as I could tell. “We were saving her.”

  Rico slapped his dick against his leg again, speaking for the first time, his voice strikingly effeminate. “We wanted him to suffer like our mother did. We wanted to watch him lose everything.”

  “Guess you left town a little early,” I said, my lips rubbery. “He’s lost everything. Somebody killed him.”

  “No!” Rico screamed. “That was for last. That was for me.”

  “We wanted all of them to suffer,” Elena said.

  “Suffer,” Rico hissed.

  “Is that the only thing that makes your fucking ugly horse cock straighten out?” I asked as loudly as I could. “Suffering?”

  Boy, was that the wrong question. Or perhaps the right one. He was on me like a snake, his long, slender fingers at my throat. I’d have been dead in seconds, but he made a small mistake. His grip lifted me just enough for me to slip my hands off the peg that held them in the air. I was still handcuffed but free. Except from the stinging slices of Elena’s whip popping flesh off my ribs.

  However, nothing I did—smash his nose, tear an ear, try to gouge an eye, try to wedge his arms apart—had any effect on his iron grip. From somewhere out of my dim, now wavering and quickly disappearing, past life, I remembered something that an old marine had told me about choke holds. “Break their fuckin’ fingers one at a time, son, one at a time.”

  When his first little finger snapped, Rico grunted, and Elena moved toward Claudia. When the second one snapped, she reversed the whip in her hand, shouting, “I’ll kill the bitch!” He still held on, though, through one ring finger, but he started to falter when I cracked the second ring finger. Elena had her whip around Claudia’s neck, screaming something very much like bloody murder, when Rico went into shock, released my throat, and flopped senseless to the floor.

  I didn’t know if I could make it to Claudia in time. But as it turned out, I didn’t have to make the trip. Johnny Raymond in full combat gear stepped through the gym door and put a three-round burst of M16 fire over Elena’s head, then another, then a third. It was like being trapped in a steel drum with a Chinese New Year’s celebration. Then he darted over to Elena and slammed the rifle barrel against the side of her head. Too hard, I thought. Deafened by the gunfire, I couldn’t hear the squishy sound as her skull collapsed, but I could see it.

  Where the hell had he come from? Then it was almost clear in my drugged mind. He was Claudia’s source in the police department, and she hadn’t been calling her mother all those times.

  He held her to him, screaming something I couldn’t hear. Then it came through the echoes, “Flat tire! Flat tire!”

  It took a bit to sort things out. To hose me down and slap gauze pads over the worst of the bleeding cuts, to find my clothes and the handcuff keys, to pump an ampule of morphine into Claudia, and wrap her unconscious body in a blanket and stash her in my pickup. When I seemed about to lose it, Johnny brought me back by setting my broken nose with his hands. That flash of pain was very real. He used my cuffs on Rico, set and splinted his fingers as best he could, then dragged him to his rig. Elena was another deal. I suspected that without medical attention, she would be dead meat very shortly.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he finally said. Standing next to my pickup, he was sweating, almost white with fear and excitement. As far as I could tell, he was as crazy as the twins. “I broke into your office, stole all your case files, and copied them as if they were mine,” he said, his voice quivering with something akin to pride. “As far as anybody knows, I broke this case.”

  Shit, man, I thought, you must really want this fucking job. “What about all this mess?” I asked. “There’s blood and fingerprints everywhere.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said, plunging another morphine hypo into Claudia’s butt. “Just get Claudia over to Angel Fire. East of Taos. Shadow Mountain Condos, number forty-six. Can you do that for me, Sughrue? Take care of her, okay? She’s the heart of me. Get out of here. Run. Call me in two weeks. I’ll take care of these assholes. I’m sure the bastards kept souvenirs. I’ll turn them up before I leave. When I get to Chama, I’ll call in a dust off for the girl and turn the guy over to the locals. I’m sure this place is reeking with evidence. But you go the other way. And go now. You never saw me.” Then he added seriously, “Remember. Give me two weeks.”

  When we shook hands, his hand was firm and solid with love and care for Claudia, but quivering with madness. Fuck me, I was just the stalking horse in this quagmire and, oddly enough, perhaps the only sane person in sight.

  I couldn’t believe it, but it was still daylight when we crossed the divide beyond the Brazos Cliffs. For hours as we fled the scene, I was still tripping like crazy. The highway seemed to suck at my tires, the curves changed when I was in them, and deadly beasts lurked in the forest shadows. Coming down the pass, I stopped at a turnout to pee and grab a beer before I realized that I had been weeping as much as bleeding. Chances are that if I hadn’t been a flake, I would have died or gone mad, either in the gym or on the road. I gobbled a few pain pills and gunned the beer, hoping to come down a little bit. At least, it had stopped raining down my face.

  Claudia stayed deeply drugged all the way to where Johnny had an old SEAL buddy from the Mekong Delta, an ex-Alburquerque cop who handled security at the ski area east of Taos. He was waiting in the parking slot of number 46, a two-story condo with a hot tub and stocked with food and drink. He gave me the keys, asked no questions, just helped me carry a naked woman in a Navajo blanket into one o
f the bedrooms.

  “Does she need a doctor?” he asked. “We’ve got a guy on call at the lodge.”

  “I’ll know tomorrow,” I said. “Right now see if you can come up some pain pills, some tranquilizers, and some antibiotics.”

  “Already in the first-aid kit under the sink,” he said. “What about you, man? You look like shit.”

  “Worry about Johnny,” I said. “He’s over the edge. See if you can get hold of him.”

  “Shit,” he muttered. “We did two tours in the same hooch. He’s a dangerous son of a bitch, and I owe him my life, but I don’t think I want to know what this is about. I know he’s a chief of detectives now, but when he came by to set this up, he was as crazy as a kid on his first night ambush. Decked out for war. Weapons, a load of C4, and a case of willy peter grenades in the backseat. He’s still a commander in the reserves. I didn’t want to know what he was doing, so I didn’t say anything. He called in an old debt, so I left it alone.”

  “I guess we’re both in his debt,” I said.

  “Stay as long as you need,” he said. “It’s mine. My name is Paul Mendoza. Your name is John Bridges. The pantry’s full. What’s mine is yours. If you need anything else, charge it to the condo account. I’m going fishing. Deep sea fishing in Florida, maybe.”

  Then he shook my hand. “For Johnny,” he said, “wherever he is. I don’t think I want to know what happens next.”

  “You got it,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He faded into the night, and I suddenly felt calm. Fucked over, misused, and drenched with lies. Sad but calm. I didn’t know why, but whatever it was, I took it into Claudia’s room and finished it, holding her through the long night.

  Except for occasional flashbacks, my trip was over by the next morning, but Claudia’s seemed to go forever. She flinched when a cloud crossed the sun or when somewhere in the building a door closed too loudly. When a late fall thunderstorm rattled the peaks above us, she started crying, then wouldn’t stop until she passed out from exhaustion. She couldn’t stand the feel of clothes on her skin, then couldn’t stand to be naked. And she couldn’t stand to be alone. I had to carry her to the bathroom and hold her hand while she sat on the toilet weeping. I got as much hot soup into her as I could, and the occasional sleeping pill and Vicodin so she could at least sleep a few hours without the horrors coming back. I tended her wounds and bruises as best I could. And settled her in the hot tub when she could stand it. The wounds seemed mostly superficial, but I knew they cut deep. And from what I saw on the muted television, they were bound to be deeper soon.

  Through all this, two things kept coming back: Elena had said they were saving the stripper for next summer and that my wife was on their list. I didn’t know what to think about either of those things.

  Finally, two or three days after we arrived, I fell asleep, a long, dreamless sleep, and woke to the smell of bacon and eggs frying, the sputtering of a coffee pot, and the popping jerk of a toaster. Claudia stood in the compact kitchen, wrapped in her robe, her hair washed and combed straight back, moving slowly, but moving.

  “If you’re half as hungry as I am,” she said, “you’re awake now.”

  “Do I have time for a shower?”

  “Hurry, or it will be all gone.”

  As it turned out, we had to do it all over again because the first breakfast disappeared so quickly. We even found a bottle of whiskey to pump up the second pot of coffee, all of this without another word passing between us. I dug a pack of cigarettes out of my duffle, lit one for her and one for me. We smoked.

  “I’ve got a few questions,” she said calmly, “but no apologies.” Her cigarette trembled in her hands. I just nodded. “Acid?” I nodded again. “How long am I going to be crazy?”

  “Stay fairly sober, work out a little harder,” I said, “and in a few weeks you’ll be fine.”

  “I thought I was going to die, CW,” she said. “I thought that if I didn’t go insane, I was going to die.”

  “Not an uncommon reaction to such a heavy dose,” I said. “You’re tough. You’ll be fine. Trust me.”

  “I do trust you,” she said, “but how can you trust me, ever again?”

  “You were in love,” I said.

  “Fuck, no. He was in love,” she said. “Crazy in love. And I got caught between the rock and the hard place, between a madman’s ambition and his misplaced love. Maybe it was my fault. I used him all these years; then he used me. The moment I dumped Butch, Johnny was all over me with this insane notion of leading you to Guilder. Then he threatened to rat me out—he’d leaked things to me over the years that might cost me my ticket, even buy me some jail time.” She paused, then said, “Christ, we never even slept together. I suspect he hadn’t slept with a woman in years.”

  I didn’t much like the idea that I had to tell her he never would now. “I think he went a little bit mad. He could have done what I did if he hadn’t been hamstrung by the law,” I lied. “He gets the credit now anyway. He takes it to the grave with him.”

  “What?” she said, stubbing out one cigarette, then lighting another.

  “His Explorer went off a switchback going down Conajos Pass,” I said. “Johnny and the twins were killed.” There seemed no point in telling her that Johnny hadn’t turned Rico over to the local law or called for a dust off for Elena or that the gym had burned to the ground, a fire so hot that only white phosphorus grenades and C4 could have caused it, as they did the fire in the Explorer.

  “My God,” she said, “all this for nothing—”

  “Not for nothing,” I said. “The locals found half a dozen graves under the goat pen and lots of gruesome souvenirs in a stash in Rico’s cabin. I don’t think the girl knew. He’s the one who drove the bus back and forth, and I guess he couldn’t survive his bad blood.”

  “That’s so terrible,” she said, tears breaking like a fresh spring from her dark blue eyes, and I reached to comfort her.

  I won’t make any excuses for what happened next. At first we fucked for comfort, and having found comfort, we went at each other like rabid teenagers—we didn’t have enough holes in our bodies or enough things to stick in them; even our wounds seemed to need each other, our skin one single burning scar—then we made love like veterans of some distant, inconclusive war. Then like clichés, we stood on the balcony, smoking in the twilight as if nothing had happened.

  “You were in the war, weren’t you?” she asked softly. “You’ve got more scars than a practice corpse. How did you survive?”

  “Luck and geography,” I said, smiling now at the memory of Nacho’s giant trigger finger in the hole in my fatigues jacket pocket all those years ago. “That’s all there is.”

  “Which was this?” she asked, her mouth against mine.

  “All of the above,” I said, “and a bit more.”

  “Well, I hope it worked,” she said. “Because I did it for you, CW.”

  “What?”

  “Small payment for all the lies,” she said, then she kissed me in that soft and easy way that says good-bye better than a thousand words. “And I guess I needed it, too. Thanks. Johnny would never have worked it out. Two deaths made to look like suicides, an accidental one, then the mess in Mac’s office—”

  “I was just lucky,” I said. “And nobody’s sure what happened in Mac’s office. I can’t work it out.”

  Then she suddenly turned serious and said, “Speaking of working it out, CW. If you don’t tell Whitney, I will.”

  “Thanks,” I said, unsure if I actually meant it.

  “What are you going to do about it?” she asked, touching my face lightly.

  “Leave it alone,” I said. “Nothing else to do.”

  “No, you idiot,” she said. “About your nose.”

  “You don’t want to know,” I said.

  “You’re probably right,” she said, then turned away, heading back inside where the television rumbled with strange cheers.

  So we left it there among cheapja
ck condos, odd temporary monuments to greed and empty thrills, nestled below ancient mountain slopes, rosy and pink as raw flesh in the alpenglow. They seemed to almost touch the dark blue sky above, as a lover’s hand almost touches the cheek of the lost loved one in passing.

  At that terrible moment, thinking of Whit, I realized that the cheering behind me was a football game, a Thanksgiving football game.

  FIFTEEN

  AS USUAL, THOUGH, the bad news wasn’t even beginning to be over. I put Claudia on her flight home from the Colorado Springs airport—she didn’t linger over our good-byes; she couldn’t get away fast enough. I took myself to an ER, and had my fucking nose rebroken, then reset, before I drove up to Evergreen to talk to the woman who owned the rottweiler that ate rocks. If this was a circle, I wanted to complete it. I suspected my meeting with Lonnie Howell in her driveway hadn’t been an accident.

  Another winter was about to come to the Colorado Rockies. The aspen leaves fluttered one last silvery salute, then drifted like frail broken china toward the rocks and pine needles below, but the air was still high and dry, the prospect of snow still an empty threat. Denver huddled in its hole, the shield of smog waiting to be pierced by ice.

  The woman had washed the silver threads out of her hair, and her jersey dress held the shape of a much younger woman. She might have been her own daughter, but there had been something childless about her and the house the first time we met. Her eyes still sparkled with silent amusement when she answered the door, but they quickly grew round and serious, frightened into a deeper brown, almost as dark as her dyed hair when she recognized my face beyond the splinted nose and the raccoon eyes.

  “Oh, my god,” she moaned, then burst into tears. She fled down the small entryway, then darted into the living room, and dove onto a rich leather couch, her face buried into the placid flank of her dog, unmuzzled now.