The Final Country (20 page)

After I parked, I clipped the feed off the bug and hooked it to the small twelve-volt battery, set it in the thimble, stuffed the Browning under my arm and a set of cuffs in my vest pocket. I let the pry bar dangle under my shirt sleeve. Betty and I chatted aimlessly as we walked back up the roadside until we found the van pulled into the shallow ditch. The short-haired woman behind the wheel still had earphones on her head.

“Hello, darling,” I shouted into my hand.

Betty walked to the back of the van to cut the valve stems off the rear tires with the wire cutters. The woman swept the earphones off her head. I knocked on the window, but she wouldn’t roll it down.

“I believe this belongs to you,” I said, holding up the bug. When she still didn’t roll the window down, I set the bug on the thin, rough pavement and raised my boot heel. “No?” She wasn’t impressed, so I slipped the pry bar into my hand, popped the door, then reached in to stick the pistol under her nose.

“All right, you son of a bitch,” she said as she climbed out of the van, her hands not raised very high or very convincingly.

When I frisked her, I didn’t find a weapon of any kind, so I holstered the Browning, backed up a step, and dangled the bug in front of her face, asking, “Does this belong to you?” She didn’t want to answer, but when she reached for it, I snapped one cuff around her wrist, then the other to the door handle.

“Shit,” she said, then tried to kick me in the shins.

“Lady,” I said, “you can either behave or you can take a little nap. At this point I don’t give a damn which.”

“He means it,” Betty said as she handed the wire cutters to me.

The woman decided she wanted to behave so she remained silent as I disabled the van — popped the hood to cut the cable to the oversized battery and the fuel line — and disrupted her communications. I tore the mobile telephone out of its cradle, dumped the batteries out of the cell phone, then snipped every wire I could find in the back of the van. “That’s criminal vandalism, buddy,” she said when I finished.

“You want to call the sheriff, lady?” I said, more angry than I intended to be. “He knows you’re conducting illegal electronic surveillance in his county, right? I’m going to call him as soon as we find a telephone. I’ll just bet he’ll be happy as a pig in shit when he sees all this stuff. Probably ‘ hasn’t got a bit of it in his office.”

The woman just looked at the ground, scuffling the gravel with her jogging shoe. “Please,” she whispered.

“You an ex-cop?” I asked.

“Ex-Army,” she admitted.

“Who hired you?”

“I work for a firm,” she said. “They don’t tell us who the client is.”

“Must be cheap bastards to make you work this gig alone,” I said. “You are alone, aren’t you.” She didn’t glance over her shoulder. “You got a card?”

“I just send the tapes in, man,” she said, then the woman dug her wallet out of her jeans pocket and handed me a card.

“Doris Fairchild, Poulis Investigations, Dallas,” I read aloud. “How long have you been on me?”

“Since the night after you were arrested.”

“Shit,” I said. “Tell your fucking boss that I’m a cranky old bastard and I’m really pissed. I’ll be standing in front of his desk one of these days. Soon. You got off easy, lady,” I said. “Given my attitude, I’m likely to gutshoot the next one of you assholes I run into.”

“Lucky?” she said, glancing at the van.

“Lady, if you’d been a man, I would’ve broken both your arms and burned your van,” I said. “I’ll call a tow truck when we get back to civilization.”

“Thanks a lot,” she said, sarcasm thick in her voice. “You can shove your fucking chivalry up your ass.”

“Listen,” I said, “I hate you lazy electronic sneaks. So don’t push your luck.”

I threw Ms. Fairchild’s cell phone into a patch of prickly pear the size of a small house, tossed her the key to the cuffs, then Betty and I walked silently back to the Caddy.

“You’re really angry, aren’t you?” Betty asked as we climbed into the car. When I didn’t answer, she said, “I guess so.”

“Last straw, I guess,” I said and punched the Caddy hard back up the potholed road. I passed the van so fast that it rocked with the draft. Doris Fairchild shot us the finger.

“I don’t think that’s happened to me since junior high,” Betty said quietly.

I sighed, chuckled, then slowed down. “And how long’s it been since you’ve done it?”

Betty paused, then answered, “I don’t think I’ve ever done it.”

“Cathy said you were kind of stuffy.”

“Well, fuck her,” Betty said, then punched me on the shoulder.

“You gotta stop pounding on me, love. Remember my back.”

“Your back was all right last night.”

“I was faking it.”

We laughed all the way to a small country store at a crossroads. I stopped, used the pay telephone while Betty grabbed us some coffee and doughnuts.

“You call a tow truck?” Betty asked as we drove away.

“Actually, I called the Bastrop County sheriff’s office,” I said. “I don’t know who’s fucking with me, but I’m tired of it.”

“What’d he have to say?” Betty asked.

“Well, he didn’t say thanks,” I said. “At least now I know how the shooter followed Renfro and me to the golf course the other night. And that’s probably also how the Lomax party knew to meet me back at the Lodge yesterday. But I still don’t have the vaguest notion why the Lomax family or the county would want Sissy dead. Or me. Or Renfro.”

“Maybe it’s his wife,” she suggested.

“If she wanted me dead, why did she send me after the McBride woman? I don’t know. Hell, I saw her up close. She’s way too young to be involved in the Duval shooting,” I said, “and too rich to bother with dealing cocaine. Besides rich people don’t bother killing people in public places. They just disappear them. It’s not worth the trouble or the risk. Shit, love, I don’t know. Where’s the nearest big town in the other direction?”

“Probably San Marcos. Why?”

“I need to look a little different.”

* * *

After our purchases in San Marcos, we checked into a motel to prepare me for my visit to the Caldwell County courthouse in Lockhart. It took longer than it should have at the plat office because the old woman helping me was full of chatter. She had grown up when there was still a bit of town left in Stairtown. I was glad I had taken the time to buy a cheap suit and a theatrical quality fake beard and wig. She was bound to remember me.

So the sun was still high in the western sky, pale behind a thin haze, when we reached the turnoff to Stairtown between Lockhart and Luling. The sharp stink of sulfur and crude oil filled the air. I checked the county map again, then eased up a small, crooked country road. At first, it was just a pleasant rural drive — small farms, a church, a creek — but as the road rose up a shallow rise, we saw the first pump jacks of the small oil field with its maze of lease roads. It took a while, but finally I found a wide spot to park high enough to give me a view through the spotting scope of Homer Logan’s lease.

The shack sat among abandoned oil field equipment — rusted tank batteries, draw-works engines that hadn’t run in years, wooden pipe racks filled with tubing and rods, and a slush pit. Sissy Duval’s BMW was parked beside the shack. Nothing moved behind the thin curtains, or on the surrounding land. I drove down to the turnoff, left the Caddy idling on the road while I checked the tire prints on the dirt track to the shack. The foreign treads of the Beemer had been in and out a few times. A larger tire, from a pickup or a van, had been in and out once.

“We’re not going in?” Betty asked as I drove away.

“I’m going in alone,” I said. “Later tonight. I gotta get some stuff first.”

“You’re not going in there without me,” she said.

“You can either stay in the motel room,” I said, “Or I’ll lock you in the trunk.”

“You would, wouldn’t you, you son of a bitch?”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

“I’ve seen enough,” she said, flaring. “I’ll just call a cab and follow you.”

“Listen to me. Please,” I said. She nodded slightly. “The only thing that scene lacks is a flock of buzzards circling overhead,” I said. “It’s going to be hard enough for me to make sure that I don’t leave any trace evidence. I don’t have time to worry about you, too.”

This time she nodded as if she understood.

So I dropped her at the motel, rented another car for cash from a lot just down the block from the motel on the outskirts of San Marcos, bought dark blue coveralls, a large and a small flashlight, surgical gloves, an extra roll of duct tape, a roll of electric tape, and two pairs of huge socks.

* * *

At three A.M., dressed in coveralls, my running shoes covered by the socks, I crept out of the rented junker and slowly up the side of the dirt road by the thin flashlight beam. The shack was dark and silent, the door unlocked. I sat in the doorway, slipped the other pair of socks over the dusty ones, then began a careful search. Except for Sissy’s traveling mess, the small cabin was empty. Sissy had found some cocaine. About half a quarter-ounce bindle remained among the clutter of cut straws, smudged glass surfaces, and glasses of unfinished vodka. Also, a hypo and some used works.

Then I searched outside among the machinery and empty tool sheds until I found the outline of a body mostly buried in an old slush pit, at the edge of the crumbling dirt bank. A light brown crust covered the darker mud below, and it was unmarked except for long scratches beyond the arms and two pieces of discarded water pipe, which I assumed they had used to hold the body down in the mud. I risked the big flashlight long enough to spot a stand of streaked hair waving above the sun-blackened neck. The lighter mud had been in the sun long enough to dry and crack. There didn’t seem much point in checking the body. Whoever had killed her had killed her in broad daylight, gotten her toasted on the coke, and held her face in the mud until she stopped struggling.

I went back to the shack and spent another hour cleaning up the cocaine traces with a bottle of bleach I found under the sink. Then’ I shoved the rest of the cocaine into my pocket, and the works into a trash bag that I carried away. Whatever happened, this wouldn’t go down as an accidental overdose or a psychotic episode, so they would ‘ have to mount a full-scale investigation. Just in case I never found out what was going on, or if I got killed before I did.

The search of the Beemer didn’t take long and only yielded a telephone number without an area code on a piece of paper crumpled around a hunk of chewing gum in the ashtray, which I shoved into the same pocket with the cocaine. I drove the Beemer into one of the empty sheds, then left.

Sissy Duval had lied to me and she probably was, as Cathy said, a frivolous woman, but she deserved a better death than this. Another chore on my tool belt.

* * *

Back in the motel room, I hesitated to tell Betty what had happened, but she quickly asked, “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“I think two guys came in a truck,” I said quietly, “and knocked her out — probably in some way only a forensic pathologist can discover, if they’re lucky — then filled her with coke, tossed her into the slush pit and held her face in the mud until she smothered. They’ll probably write it off as just another cocaine accident.”

“Why? How? What for?” she stammered. “Nobody knew we were looking for her. Except Cathy.”

“Don’t start doubting your friends,” I said. “But Sissy damn sure knew something somebody didn’t want me to know,” I added calmly. “Maybe about Mandy Rae. Maybe Enos Walker. Maybe something entirely different.”

“What now? We can’t call the Sheriff’s Department, can we?”

“They’re going to have to figure it out without my help. Another day in the sun, maybe the buzzards will find her,” I said.

She wailed again, her teeth chattering as she hovered near shock. I wrapped her in all the blankets in the room, got a little Scotch down her throat, and held her until she stopped trembling, then started the long drift into an exhausted sleep.

“What now?” she muttered sleepily.

“Houston,” I said. “Then on to Lake Charles.”

“What?” she asked, waking briefly.

“Molly McBride went to a great deal of trouble to convince you that she was from San Francisco,” I pointed out, “and to convince me she was from New Orleans. But I remember the Houston address on her phony lawyer card, and she let something slip about Lake Charles. I’d bet a dollar to a doughnut that I can pick up her trail one place or the other.”

“I don’t want a fucking doughnut,” Betty said, wiping at her eyes. “I want ham and eggs and redeye gravy on my grits.”

“I’ll buy you a boxcarful if you’ll just smile again.”

She did. For a second before she plunged into sleep like a woman leaping off a bridge.

* * *

Driving toward Houston on I-10 after a breakfast stop to eat and dump my garbage bag, as Betty napped curled in the back seat, I called Hangas to ask him to keep an eye on Eldora Grace in the hope that he might be around when she got the bad news. He told me that she hadn’t been home the last two times he stopped at her house. I suggested she might be staying at Sissy’s place. Hangas said he would try there.

As I drove, I found myself in another world of shallow rolling hills broken by thick, dark broadleaf forests, which after a few hours gave way to industrial chaos, nothing like the open spaces of the Hill Country. I’d never been in East Texas but I suspected that it was going to be different from anything I knew anything about, more like the South than the West.

Houston seemed to be the world’s largest construction site combined with the world’s worst traffic jam, all of it plopped down with neither rhyme nor reason among as many shacks as tall shining buildings, all buried in an uncommon grave under a humid, shallow sea. Even the Caddy’s air conditioner couldn’t keep the hot, heavy, stinking moisture out of the car.

When I pulled off the freeway, I parked in a residential area, then opened the Houston street map. Betty climbed over the seat, rubbing her eyes.

“What’s up?”

“I told you. The McBride woman swiped her phony calling card out of my shirt pocket when she snagged a cigarette.”