James Crumley - The Final Country

"Don't you have any questions?" she asked, a bit nervously.

"What's to know? The guy makes a move on you, I stop him, then let the cops deal with him. He doesn't, I follow him back to his car and check him out. It should be simple."

"I wish you'd just kill the bastard," she said, then patted her fanny pack.

"You didn't hire me for that," I said. "And if you start letting off rounds from that cannon, you'll probably shoot me or some poor software engineer across the hollow. Why don't you put it back in the car?"

"Why don't you put yours back?"

I shook my head, patted her shoulder, she smiled nervously again, then I searched the broken rocks of the slope above the overlook until I found a shadowed nook between two scrub cedars ten feet above the overlook as Molly stretched her legs against the low stone wall below. And we waited.

The guy had picked a good time. Mid-morning the park was usually empty, the dawn joggers off their offices, the lunchtime joggers still tied to their desks. Not much foot traffic at all: an older couple walking their ragged mop dog; a college couple more interested in grabbing each other than running; and three singleton joggers in expensive Lycra suits.

Then a fourth, a tall, gawky bald-headed man, shuffled up the switchback from the creek bottom. He ran like a duck, feet splayed, elbows flapping like his oversize shorts and belly pack. A classic nerd, even to the thick horn-rims he wore. But he paused as if to catch his breath as the trail opened into the overlook, so I rose on my haunches. Molly hadn't even turned. With a quickness I couldn't believe, the jogger was behind her, his bony forearm around her neck in a choke hold, hissing something I couldn't hear in her ear.

I didn't even consider the.38, just rushed down the rocky slope and slammed a right hook into the nerd's kidney. The duck-footed guy grunted like a man hit with an axe handle and dropped to one knee as Molly spun away. I caught a glimpse of her red, frightened face as she dumped her fanny pack and fled. But even as he dropped to his knee, the guy caught me in the right thigh with a hard back-thrust blow from his bony elbow. For a moment I thought I'd been shot but managed to roll away and scramble to my feet, my right leg no more use than a boneless tube of flesh. I reached for the Airweight now, but the skinny guy front-kicked me in the chest so hard I left my feet and landed on my butt against a clutter of limestone shards on the side of the trail. Once again I felt as if I'd been shot, in the heart this time, mortally wounded, nailed to the ground, my hands dangling uselessly in my lap. The skinny guy moved toward me in some sort of martial arts shuffle and he had death in his angry eyes. Mine. I had no doubt that the kick aimed at my chin meant to snap my neck like a match stick.

With trembling hands, I managed to lift a large, flat limestone rock from between my knees and raised it in front of my face. When the skinny guy kicked, he broke the large rock in half with his lower leg, and the sole of his running shoe clipped the skin at the edge of my chin. He stumbled backward. In the bright sun his shinbone gleamed as yellow as pus before the blood covered it. But he didn't go down. He lifted his face to the sky, growling with pain, then he looked down, stared at me, confused for a moment as if things hadn't gone as planned. Then his hand darted to the belly pack with the hidden holster. The holster's Velcro opening sounded like ripping flesh. I did the only thing I could, threw the piece of rock in my right hand. The bastard must have had the hammer cocked and his finger on the trigger as he started to draw the pistol out of the belly holster, because when the rock hit his wrist, he jerked the trigger, releasing a muffled explosion at his groin.

He went down this time, castrated or emasculated or both by the muzzle blast and the round, a froth of dark blood foaming from his crotch, mixing with the bright red gush pumping from the femoral artery in his left thigh. He sat there leaning against the low stone wall, tendrils of smoke from the melted nylon of the pack drifting around his face, his hands on his knees, the pistol forgotten between his legs, opening and closing his mouth as if his teeth hurt, as he bled out almost peacefully.

I just sat there, too. I couldn't have helped if I wanted to. The skinny guy's eyes frosted over before I managed to get a full breath into my lungs, and even that one was full of tiny knives. My chest hurt so badly, I could just manage to raise my arm high enough to touch the bloody scrape dripping from the point of my chin. And, hell, even if I could have gotten up, I probably would have put a round right between the bastard's eyes for good measure. I didn't know who this guy was, but he sure as hell took a lot of killing.

When I could finally get up, I hobbled carefully around the massive puddle of blood curdling in the dust, and I couldn't help but notice that his hand was wrapped around a S &W Ladysmith.357. Just like the one I'd given Betty for her birthday, so she could stop carrying the huge.40 Ruger semi-automatic in her purse. Then a cell phone rang from Molly's pack dumped on the edge of the bloody pool. But it seemed too much trouble and pain to pick it up, so I trudged up to the Caddy for my cell phone, trying not to think about it. Just as I refused to think what the sudden disappearance of Molly McBride and her car must mean.

The first deputy on the scene, a young man named Culbertson, took one look at the body sitting in a lake of crusted blood, ignored the ringing cell phone, then put me on my knees, my fingers laced behind my head while he patted me down and recited my rights, even while reminding me that I wasn't under arrest. Yet.

"Where's the piece?" he asked when he found the empty holster at the small of my back.

"In the front seat of my car, officer," I said, "unloaded and sitting on my carry permit and my PI license."

The deputy jerked me to my feet by the cuffs, and marched me up to his unit in the parking lot, leaving the crime scene unsecured. Frankly, in spite of the pain, I was already thinking like a lawyer. Not soon enough, though, as it turned out. When the kid held my head down to ease me into the back seat of the unit, I thanked him. Suddenly, the kid shoved me into the back seat.

"Thanks, kid," I said.

The deputy stepped back, his hand trembling on the handle of his service revolver. "If I were you, you old son of a bitch," he spat, "I'd keep my smart mouth shut. Ty Rooke had a lot of -" Then he shut up as another unit howled into the parking lot. He slammed the door so quickly, I just had time to get my feet inside.

Where I sat for a long sweaty time, watching the passage of a lot of cops. Gannon was first on the scene, walked stiffly past Culbertson's unit without looking at me, then sent the deputy to watch over me. Then came the crime scene crew burdened with useless gear; the medical examiner with his team, loaded with false smiles; and several plainclothes detectives, teetering on cowboy boots, hip-shot by heavy revolvers on tooled leather belts, their eyes sullen with the code of the west, squinting as if they were John Wayne and I already swinging from a live oak.

Finally, Gannon returned after twenty minutes down at the crime scene, his suit coat soaked at the neck and armpits, his shoes dusty. He dismissed the young deputy, opened the unit's door, rubbed his sweaty face, then bagged my hands after he helped me out of the unit.

"A little late to be bagging…"

"Don't say another word," he grunted, interrupting me. "Not one fucking word."

"What the hell is going on?"

"Milodragovitch," Gannon hissed from the corner of his mouth as he led me to his unit, "either shut up, or I'll have you gagged."

Which made me quite glad that after I called 911 on my cell phone, I left messages on the answering machines that picked up instead of Betty, Travis Lee, and Phil Thursby.