James Crumley - The Final Country

"Maybe not," I said. "Not if I've got the mortal nuts on him."

"Good luck," he said. "You'll need it."

"Thanks."

As I left, I heard Walker order a double Wild Turkey rocks from the bartender. I hoped he stopped after one. A man carrying that sort of guilt shouldn't be drinking hard. It could kill him.

I sent the kids off to Vegas with a bundle of cash for Fresno and to get them out of town. I had a couple of days to waste until Friday night, so I spent it reloading some.22 hollow point shorts and sitting on the porch carving seasoned cedar sticks into thin, sharp strips that would fit under my cast.

Late one afternoon as stately storm cells drifted up from the Gulf, trailing rain like silver skirts, Carver D and Hangas showed up without calling. I didn't even bother to ask how they had gotten through the gates. Hangas climbed out of the driver's seat, then walked slowly around to open the back door of the old Lincoln, his grin bright in the spring sunshine.

"My man looks good, doesn't he?" Hangas said as Carver D slipped out of the limo.

Carver D had dropped thirty or forty pounds. His eyes were clear, his voice resonant, and although he wasn't exactly nimble on two canes, he was moving. And smiling as he eased into the rocker beside me.

"What the hell are you guys doing out here?" I said.

"If you'd answer your telephone or return your calls," he said, "we wouldn't have to break into your solitude."

"I've been busy," I said.

"Busy," he said, sweeping his cane through the pile of shavings between my feet. "Busy as a beaver, I see." When I just kept running the blade of the Old Timer down a length of cedar, Carver D continued. "You're planning something awful, aren't you? Some kind of terrible revenge?"

"I'm retired."

"You're a base liar," he said. "You need Hangas to help?"

I glanced at Hangas resplendent in his tailored suit, smiling as calmly as a cobra might smile. "He's the most dangerous man I know," I said, "and I appreciate the offer. But nothing's happening."

"Milo, you shouldn't lie to your friends."

I had no answer for that. So we left it there, chatted until one of the thundershowers rattled the tin roof, then they left.

Tom Ben was never able to talk about the Rooke family without including the phrase "carpet-bagging goat-fucking white trash." The family had moved down after the Civil War, had scammed a section of land in the hills behind the Bad Corner, but as far as I could find out, they never had been charged with sexual congress with farm animals. Over the years the family had sold off pieces of the land, drifted off to California, or various institutions, penal or otherwise, leaving the twins sole owners of a five-acre plot right in the center of the unzoned tangle of the old home place, a jungle of variously sized lots, crooked roads, and Hill Country scrub land, and a gravel pit. Shortly after Tobin finished law school and Ty had been promoted to plainclothes, with financing that should have raised IRS flags, the boys had built a rambling brick home. They dated enough to forestall rumors of homosexuality, but never married. And except for a reputation left over from their college years for being particularly vicious bar fighters, their characters were beyond reproach in Gatlin County. Or as a retired deputy had said to me one night in a beer joint out on Lake Travis, "The best reputations money can buy."

Every Friday after he finished at the courthouse, Tobin Rooke stopped for a couple of glasses of white wine at the only upscale bar in Gatlinsburg, then drove down to Austin for a stop at the Whole Foods Market, then home for whatever he did on his lonely Friday nights. We had followed him for weeks, and his pattern never changed. But I followed him in the repainted van this Friday night just to be sure.

I let him put his car in the garage, watched the lights come on, then pulled the van in front, and went up to the door. He opened the door when I rang the bell. He had no reason not to open the door: a telephone company van in front of his house, an old man in a telephone company uniform and carrying a telephone company tool kit at his door. He couldn't see the stun gun in my hand, the latex gloves, or the hand with the sap glove on it. I let him say, "Yes?" before I hit him in the chest with the stun gun.

Maybe I missed with one of the electrodes. Maybe his suit coat got in the way. Or maybe these Rookes were impossible to get down. Whatever, he got enough charge to fling him backward off his feet, knock his glasses off, and scatter health food across the carpet. But he didn't pause, just rolled up to his feet ready to kill as I stepped through the door.

He was on me like a spider, sweeping the stun gun aside as if I wasn't there, then had me in a choke hold a moment later. We crashed around the living room for a few seconds as I tried to buck him off. Unsuccessfully. I was a dead man until I finally managed to dig the derringer out of my pocket and fire the two rounds over my shoulder. I missed him, but the powder burns and percussion cone got him off my back long enough for me to slap him with the sap glove, cracking the skin over his cheekbone. He still didn't go down, but at least he paused, his hands protecting his face. I hit him in the liver hard enough to lift him off his feet. He finally went down.

When Rooke came back, after the third or fourth glass of ice water in his face, he found himself stripped to his shorts, his hands and legs cuffed to the legs of a metal kitchen chair leaning against the refrigerator door. I didn't trust duct tape to hold him any more than I trusted myself not to shoot the crazy bastard in the eye. He came back to consciousness as if he had never been away.

"Do you know who I am, old man?" he said. "You're in a shit-load of trouble."

"Do you know who I am, asshole?" I said. "You're probably in more trouble than I am."

"What do you want?" he asked, not missing a beat. He knew who I was now. "We can work something out, Mr. Milodragovitch."

"I'd really like to know who hired your brother to kill me."

"That's going to be a problem -" he started to say.

I interrupted by placing the derringer against the fold of his armpit and pulling the trigger. It was a light load, but the powder burn seared the skin and the notched hollow point carved a deep groove through his flesh, a painful red, white, and black furrow. I had some idea of how much this must have hurt, but Rooke seemed totally surprised. Before he got his breath back, I sloshed a bit of organic habanero salsa onto a dish towel. He looked as if he couldn't believe what was happening. Then I snuggled the cloth into the wound, and taped the towel over his shoulder.

Rooke didn't have much to say. He seemed to have fainted. He just sprawled in the chair and drooled while I cleaned him up and started my search of the house.

"Well," I said half an hour later – the bastard hadn't even bothered to lock the entrance to the basement -"since you know who I am, asshole, and if I don't care that you know who I am, then you probably realize that when I leave here, you don't have much of a chance of being alive. It's simply a matter of how much pain you can stand."

"Bring it on, you son of a bitch."

"Since you threatened to ruin my life, and as far as I can tell you're still trying – rumor has it that you're planning to convince the grand jury to indict me for Billy Long's death – there's some other stuff you should consider," I said. "Credit card records put either you, your brother, or both of you in six cities across the country in the past six years where young women have been raped, tortured, mutilated, and killed. You never came to the FBI's attention because you bastards are law enforcement. You covered your tracks perfectly, cleaned the crime scenes professionally. You used different setups and took different parts of the body each time. Was Annette McBride the first? Or just another one? What the fuck were you doing? And how stupid was it to keep your souvenirs in a freezer in the basement?