James Crumley - The Final Country

Hayden Lomax and his Aunt Alma followed them. Lomax was middle-aged but still as trim and with the same bouncing walk that he must have had on the courts of his youth. He had arrived in a polo shirt, chinos, and deck shoes. As if down for a party weekend. His curly hair was shot with gray, but his face was cherubic, pleasant, complete with a boyish grin that he couldn't seem to control. For all the world, I'll swear he looked like an innocent.

His Aunt Alma walking beside him was something else. She had the countenance of an axe murderer. She had to be in her seventies but she wasn't even slightly stooped with age. In fact, she looked as if she could still get right in your face and go to the basket. Or knock you to your knees and make you pray for forgiveness until they bled. Lomax obviously deferred to her, and not just because he had to look up to her. The old woman was at least six inches taller than he was, even with his bouncing, youthful gait. Another thing was obvious: The old woman despised Sylvie and the woman in the wheelchair. When she happened to glance their way, her lips pursed as if she had just eaten a persimmon. Or smelled something deeply corrupt. This verified the rumors Bob and I had picked up in the bars from people who had once worked for the Lomaxes.

The Lomax parade gathered at the two tables nearest the ramp. Travis Lee fawned over them as he provided drinks. I stayed where I was, scratching not so aimlessly at the inside of my cast.

"Mr. Lomax," Travis Lee boomed as he brought him over to my table, "I'd like you to meet my partner, Milo Milodragovitch."

Lomax acknowledged me with a nod and his involuntary grin. "Milodragovitch," he said.

"That's Mr. Milodragovitch," I said, suspecting that he had never heard my name in his life.

"Be nice," the bodyguard whispered behind me as he slapped me lightly on the head.

"I've never heard that name before," Lomax said in an oddly high, piping voice, a voice that went with his silly grin. "What is it, Russian?"

"Irish, I think," I said. I was right. He didn't know who I was.

Travis Lee said, "Let's get down to business."

"First things first," I said. "Mr. Lomax, for reasons I won't go into, but I'm sure you'll understand shortly, it's imperative that this conversation be private, unrecorded. Believe me, sir, you're not going to want a record of this meeting. So if everybody will throw any electronic devices they're wearing or carrying over the fence, we can proceed privately." When he hesitated, I said, "What are you worried about, sir? You're not running for office, are you?" Aunt Alma chimed in loudly, "Forgive me, young man, but my nephew doesn't run for office, he owns the fools who bother."

Lomax had the decency to be embarrassed, so he gave an irritated wave to his men, who dumped their walkie-talkies and recorders without complaint. Lomax himself wasn't wired, but Wallingford was. He grumbled the loudest but quickly complied after Lomax snapped at him. Then he snapped again. Wallingford and the bodyguard stepped just out of earshot.

I leaned across the table, the option in my hand, and said very softly, "Mr. Lomax, after you look at this option, I want you to think long and hard before you say a word, and whatever you say, it's very important that you say it quietly. Very important."

"This is a copy," Lomax said quietly, confused.

"Read the words at the bottom of the document," I said.

He glanced down, then he sighed so deeply I thought he was going to faint. He grabbed his face as if to catch his infernal grin before it bled at the corners. "I knew it would come out someday," he whispered as two tiny tears formed at the corners of his merry eyes. "How the hell did you find out?" he said softly.

"Pretty much a string of coincidences," I admitted. "Your damned mother-in-law kept trying to shoot me."

"She's like that," he said.

"That's what I thought. An old boy has to watch out for a woman scorned. She just threw a few rounds at me. She buried a stone in your heart."

Lomax just shook his head slowly.

"The trick now is for you to keep quiet," I said. "Your future depends on my silence, just as much as my future depends on your silence. I know you've used your offshore rigs to smuggle cocaine," I said, "and that you set Mandy Rae and Enos Walker up in business. You've probably got too much political clout for me to touch you with the cocaine thing. But I can fucking promise you, if you don't behave, I'll break your aunt's heart and shove the pieces up your ass."

"Yes, sir," he said, then shook my hand, a businessman all the way. He knew when he was beaten. His grin flashed on and off like a faulty neon sign. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you very much." The little bastard cared more about what his mad aunt thought of him than the chance that I could send him to prison. As if people like Lomax ever went to prison. "I didn't know," he said. "I swear to you I didn't know. I'll provide anything you want. Anything."

"Stop whining, put a cork in your greed, and whatever happens next, you clean it up. And you should get your aunt out of here because I can't control what happens next."

He nodded cheerfully, walked over to his aunt, escorted her to the driver, then bounced back to the table across from me, his grin wooden and lost. He sat down as if he was a very old man.

I stood up and said, "First, I want to report to Mrs. Lomax." Sylvie looked up startled, as if she had forgotten that she had hired me, then she turned to the old woman, who patted her on the arm. Sylvie didn't look comforted. She looked very young, confused, and afraid. "I don't know what the Molly McBride woman had of yours, ma'am, but whatever it was, it died with her in a fire at the Punky Creek Mine up in Montana, died with her and Enos Walker. So you don't have anything to worry about." I wasn't surprised that nobody was surprised. Except Lomax. He had heard about Punky Creek but not what it meant.

"And for public information, you people leave Tom Ben Wallingford's place alone," I said. "You don't need it." I had donated the ranch to the Texas A &M agricultural research center, designating its use, as Tom Ben had suggested, as a living laboratory to find more and better land-friendly ways to raise cattle. "Is it a deal?" Lomax held out his hand, but I ignored it this time.

He nodded slowly. He knew I had the mortal nuts on him, knew I wasn't bluffing.

"What happened?" Travis Lee wanted to know. "You boys make a deal?"

"Right," I said, "you old son of a bitch, we made a deal, but you're not part of it. By the way, your bald-headed prosecutor buddy is dead, locked in a freezer with the pieces of the women he and his brother killed." Travis Lee's face collapsed, hollow and aged. "And you might as well tell Sissy to come outside," I said. "She's part of this fucking mess, too." Travis Lee acted as if he hadn't heard me, but after a moment he walked stiffly over to the back door. A moment later the dark figure slipped silently out the back door. Sissy looked her age now and terribly frightened that she wouldn't get any older. "Hi," I said. "If I were you, Sissy, I'd run for my life. Tomorrow Eldora Grace's family will know how you used her to fake your death, so somebody will connect you to it somehow."

"They didn't tell me," she wailed, then slumped into a chair.

"And you, old bastard," I said to Travis Lee. "You better run, too. I've bought up every piece of bad paper you've signed. The only thing you own now is your boots and your bullfrog belt buckle. The two of you have blackmailed the last penny you're ever going to get out of Betty." It hadn't taken too long digging through bank records to discover that Betty was broke, her money, I assumed, shoveled into the failed deals that her uncle, even after looting her trusts, had funded with blackmail. He wasn't just broke, he was about to sink. The IRS wasn't looking at me but at him. I had already started the paperwork to take the Lodge away from him. "I figure you planned it this way, you old fucker," I continued. "You thought that because Betty and I were the beneficiaries of Tom Ben's will, if I was killed with her piece, she would be convicted and couldn't benefit, and it would all kick back to you. You just hired the wrong help." The silence was louder than the rising south wind. The only sound, Sissy Duval's sobbing. I dug under my cast for the wooden blade.