James Crumley - The Final Country

"I never lived any place where you could work up a sweat in November," I said. "Just standing still."

"I've never lived any place where piss froze before it hit the ground," she said.

"Maybe I made that part up," I admitted.

"I thought so," she said.

"But no matter how cold it is," I said, "you can always put more clothes on." Then I paused. "But I've never figured out how to take enough clothes off when it's hot down here." Then I paused again, turned to face her, touched the dark stone on her chest. "What's this?"

"The only thing my mother left me," she said quietly. "It's called the Shark of the Moon."

I looked more closely. The golden band no longer looked irregular now that I could see the snouts, dorsal fins, and tails of the golden sharks circling the dark pool of the stone. And etched faintly in the center I could feel another.

"So what the hell do you want from me?"

"Believe me. I've tried everything. I can't get anybody to help. Not the cops. Not the most desperate and sleaziest PIs. Hell, I even tried to put an ad in Soldier of Fortune, but they wouldn't take it. So it's up to you, Milo. And as Mattie Ross said, 'I hear you have true grit.' "

Jesus, I thought as I tried to remember if John Wayne got laid in that movie, she's pulling out all the stops. "I'm guessing here, but I'll bet you want to put an ad in the paper about a lost dog in Blue Hole Park, right? And you hope the same bastard will answer it?"

"I'm meeting him at ten o'clock this morning," she said, "on the same overlook where he took my sister…"

"What makes you think it's the same guy?"

"I knew it in my bones," she said, "when I heard his voice over the telephone. I fucking knew it."

"You cut it pretty close."

She reached into the chest of drawers and pulled out a Glock 20.

"You know, I've yet to meet a woman in Texas who doesn't carry a piece," I said. "It doesn't have a safety, it doesn't have a blow back lock, and the FBI thinks it's perfect."

"They gave me a permit."

"Everybody's got a permit as far as I can tell," I said, wondering why all the major decisions of my life had to be made while I was slightly tipsy, mildly high, and stinking of bodily fluids. Or maybe it wasn't just the bad decisions, maybe it included the good ones, too. Whichever, I had no way to resist. "Okay. I've got a black cherry El Dorado. Meet me in the parking lot at nine. I've got to look over the ground."

She put her arms around my neck, saying, "How can I ever thank you?"

"Consider me thanked, and I'll give you the family rate for a bodyguard day."

"Family rate?"

"Three hundred instead of five," I said, smiling, "in cash, in advance."

"The fuck doesn't count?" she asked.

"Nothing solidifies a deal like folding money. It doesn't change its mind and doesn't whine about respect the next morning."

"That's for sure," she said as she dug into her purse and handed me the money with a quick burst of nervous laughter. "That's what I always tell my clients," she added. "The ones who are guilty, that is." Then we laughed, shook hands, and I left her standing in the hard moonlight, listening to the faint murmur of the creek.

The upper reaches of Blue Creek wandered weakly through Betty's ranch, then crossed another ranch, before it wound onto her other uncle's place – Tom Ben Wallingford owned several sections – before it dropped in a small stream off the Balcones Escarpment to join the gush of the huge artesian spring at the base of the hollow, where Blue Creek became a wide, beautiful stream, pellucid water slipping over limestone ledges, pausing occasionally to form perfect swimming holes. Travis Lee, who had his job at the law school and later his private practice, donated most of his part of the old family ranch to the county for a park, taking a huge tax write-off and keeping a narrow strip of land on the north side of the creek. Leaving his older brother with his sections of mostly worthless scrub, particularly after the government dropped the mohair subsidy, land good only for deer leases, which the old man wouldn't allow. And, as Austin expanded northwesterly, development, which the old man hated. Tom Ben's sections nearly were surrounded by upscale developments, but the stubborn and childless old cowboy was dickering with the Blue Creek Preservation Society, of which Betty Porterfield was president and probably the major financial angel, to put the land into a conservancy, but only if they could come up with a deal to keep it a working ranch. But nobody could come up with the deal he wanted, and it seemed that Tom Ben Wallingford was going to dicker until he died, and he seemed to think he was going to live forever.

The Overlord Land and Cattle Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Overlord Minerals, Inc., owned most of the land around the ranch – hell, most of Gatlin County – and the CEO, Hayden Lomax, insisted the old man had signed an option to sell the ranch, which Tom Ben Wallingford had denied completely. The whole thing had been simmering toward court for a couple of years before I came to stay in the Hill Country.

When Betty Porterfield asked me to move into her ranch house, I told myself that I had buried my Montana past and intended to finish out my life in the Hill Country. Betty and I had met over a gunshot dog and fallen in love over stories of loss and gunfire. And I loved Betty's ranch, a section of Hill Country heartland, and the crippled animals Betty brought home from the emergency veterinarian clinic where she worked nights, loved the bright glow of the plank floor and the homemade cedar furniture, the wood cookstove and the hissing Coleman lanterns, the reassuring scratch and peep of the chickens in the yard dust, the yawns of sleeping cats, throwing the tennis ball for the three-legged Lab, Sheba, until my arm hurt, watching the sweep of weather across the wide Texas sky as I sat on the front porch pointlessly whittling, turning cedar posts into cookstove shavings.

Until it went bad, I'd never been closer to a woman than Betty. She had healing hands; I'd seen her work, seen the undeniable hope in an animal's eyes when she put those hands on them. A look, I suspected, I had when she first put her hands on me. So I tried really hard. For the first time in my life I studied how to be home, studied every angle and plane of Betty's face, every freckle, every stray wisp of red hair, the faint trace of the bullet scar across her right cheek, the dark leaden dimple on her left jawline where she'd fallen on a pencil in the third grade, which only showed when she occasionally laughed, wild and free.

And I studied Texas, too, because it seemed important to Betty, important in some way I didn't understand, but extremely important nonetheless. "Texans are proud people," her Travis Lee explained to me, "and Betty is a Texan." As if that explained everything. So during the mornings while she slept, I wandered the ranch with books. Hell, I knew more about flora and fauna on her ranch than I knew about my grandfather's land, which I had finally managed to give back to the Benewah tribe, one of the few places in Montana I had ever called home. Not the moldering mansion where I was raised, not the log cabin the garbage company goons had burned down. Those places weren't home. Except sometimes in the log cabin back home when I'd be sitting on the porch watching the first snow, and my big black tomcat, Eldridge Carver, would curl in my lap. That was home, sometimes. But that was easy. Making myself at home on Betty's ranch was work.

Month after month I wandered the ranch on foot in all kinds of weather. I sometimes thought I knew it better than Betty did. She'd torn out all the pasture and cross fences except for a small plot down the hill from the house where she kept a couple of saddle horses and occasionally ran a calf or two. On the back side of the ranch, I discovered a tiny outcropping of flint, no bigger than a freight car, and at the base of it, covered with limestone dust, a midden of arrowhead flakes, probably Comanche, since it seemed they had owned everything from there to southern Colorado for two hundred years. And I studied the Indians, too, nothing but ghosts now.