Bad Country: A Novel (26 page)

I don’t think so, Richard.

And yet Sirena Rae, the love of your life, worked for me for many years.

Sirena Rae was never the love of my life, Rodeo said. She was a girlfriend. And you had lots of women working for you, on the pole and in front of the camera. I have never been sure why she took root so much with you.

Really? Did you never fuck the woman? The porn king laughed hoarsely and stared at Rodeo’s exposed and abraded wrists. She had a dance scholarship to the University of Arizona. Did you know that?

Her daddy says she had an academic scholarship for geniuses to Arizona State.

At which university a pole dancer who can read probably would be a genius. Richard Dick laughed until he coughed. Sirena does draw that allegiance from some of us deluded fools. But Egberto is correct in this. She does not deserve our beloved attentions. Brilliant and fuckable as she is, she’s a shooting star.

She’s just a woman, said Rodeo. The world is half full of them as you know better than me since you use women for your living.

Richard Dick coughed against the smoke escaping from him. Actually I use men’s desires for women to make my living, he said. But it remains that Sirena was one of my best “Dick’s Girls.” Sirena had a national following, as you know. She traveled the strip club circuit much as you used to travel the rodeo circuit.

I don’t see me riding saddle broncs for a living and Sirena riding poles for a living as equivalent, Richard, Rodeo said.

Probably because a good stripper or porn star always makes more money than a good rodeo cowboy. Though their careers probably end as sadly. As did yours.

Rodeo unfolded himself from the settee and moved to the terrace wall that faced the property line of Eryn Hage. He peered toward Eryn’s house but little could be seen through the thickness of mesquite tree branches from the Hage side but a glimmer of the swimming pool. Rodeo kept his back to his host.

Sirena’s father was just murdered, Rodeo said.

She probably killed Apache Ray herself, Richard Dick said. She certainly threatened to often enough when she lived with us.

I’m sure Sirena’s a suspect but I imagine the sheriff’s death was more likely a drug hit or maybe some unofficial payback for something the sheriff did or didn’t do in his official capacities, said Rodeo.

You don’t suspect Sirena?

Ray ran a pretty clean county and that can make a sheriff a lot of real enemies.

You didn’t answer my question, Rod.

The ones you love are usually the ones that kill you in the end, Richard. I do believe that.

And you know Ray was loaded. And you know as well as I do that Sirena hates, hated her father and loves money, said Richard Dick. And she’s too lazy to ever do any real work.

I don’t know much about the Molina finances, Rodeo said. I do know that Sirena Rae and her father had a complex relationship. And she is the laziest woman I ever met.

Sirena would hire somebody to brush her pretty teeth for her if she could afford to. Richard Dick smiled at his joke but then frowned at something else. During one of her confessional phases when she was living with us, Sirena told me Ray molested her when she was a kid. Do you believe that, Rod?

She did become a stripper, Rodeo said. But I’m not in any position to judge the relationship Ray and Sirena had, Richard. Ray always seemed pretty solid to me. Rodeo looked over his shoulder at his host then looked back into the trees.

Sirena told me once that Apache Ray wanted you to be his son-in-law, Rod. And that’s why she hooked up with you in the first place, to please her father. So maybe your “relationship” with her was part of her bad daddy complex?

Water under the bridge, Rodeo said. He turned toward his host. You spend a lot of time on this rooftop, Richard. You ever see anybody over there at Eryn’s rental place, in the northside apartment?

Ah, now we come to the real reason for your visit, said Richard Dick. He sounded disappointed. Information, the blood of your industry. You come to drink my blood.

Rodeo turned to look at his host and raised an eyebrow.

You know I seldom stir from my throne once I am ensconced, so there’s little I can tell you even if I cared to, Rod.

But you pay attention, Rodeo said.

Truly, I still do, Richard Dick said. I’m not sure why I persist in doing so, but I do.

So?

So at times I might have smelled a slight scent of White Shoulders, perhaps? Orange blossoms? And of cigarettes, foreign and domestic. And heard distant strains of Rachmaninoff, Brahms, Bach. And sounds of pleasure and of pain.

Rodeo steadied himself against the balustrade of the rooftop terrace.

When, Richard?

You know that in my opiate haze time and space and memory are often irrelevant, Rod. And if you or anyone else, official or otherwise, would expect me to testify to any of this recollection of mine in any court of law in America … The man waved a liver-speckled hand in the air to dismiss his testimony.

I’m not looking for a court appearance, Richard. Rodeo turned back to look at Tinley Burke’s apartment. But you think it was Sirena over there?

My sense of smell is still excellent. The man stared at the sky for a while and then sniffed his fingertips as if he had lost a memory in them and could recall it with enough focus. Richard Dick’s Sense of Smell … The man sniffed his fingertips again as a strange habit. I’m still good on this most primary sense. He nodded to himself. So I’m sure it was Sirena over there at least on several occasions during the last few weeks or months.

When?

I confuse my days, Rod. And even the hours of my days. I am an unreliable witness in extremis.

How long was she going over there, Richard? Rodeo turned back to look into the local treetops. How long was Sirena over at the Professor’s?

Only for several weeks, said the man. She always parked in the back. She was driving something large and rumbly.

You think Burke had other women while he was in residence at Eryn’s?

By scent I would say that there was at least one other woman who visited regularly, said Richard. Once or twice a month from the time he moved in. Always at night.

What was the other woman’s scent, Richard?

Jil Sander of some sort, I would say. And she smoked cigarettes, but not Sirena’s Marlboros.

Was this woman coming to see Tinley Burke when Sirena was over there too?

Not at the same hours, but during the same weeks, yes.

Rodeo turned to his host and leaned his hip on the low wall, crossed his arms on his chest.

Did you know Burke’s second woman?

Richard Dick shook his head. But both the unknown woman and Sirena parked in the back where they couldn’t be seen coming or going.

You think it was his sister that was the Professor’s other visitor?

You have such a prurient mind, Rod. I like that. When Richard Dick shook his head his long ringlets moved like fringe. I don’t know your Professor’s sister. I did not even know Tinley Burke except to recognize his voice.

Who was he talking to?

Eryn, usually about the garden or grounds. Occasionally himself. Sometimes I could hear him sobbing on his back porch when he was obviously in his cups or muttering as he rummaged through Eryn’s old mother-in-law shack in her backyard. The man on his rooftop sat contemplatively for a minute. But it may have been his sister. I do like that thought, I must admit.

His sister, Sisely is her name, is married, Rodeo said. To Randy Miller, the former judge.

Well … there’s married and there’s married. Richard Dick relit his pipe once again and waved a hand through thick smoke. Though currently a prominent member of the Tea Party I believe the good Judge Randy Miller used to be a rather circumspect member of the Tea Bag Party. I would consider that ironic but that it’s not. Richard Dick squinted toward the open trapdoor in the ceiling of his house. You could ask Egberto about Randy Miller, he said. I believe Egg might have … serviced Judge Junior back when Egg was still in the escort industry. Richard Dick paused. Though I would prefer that henceforward you not drag my consort and myself into any cesspool you might be currently trolling through. The days the Egg and the Dick have together are regrettably limited and we would prefer to spend these final days alone. Or entertaining real friends.

Thanks for the information, Richard, said Rodeo. I appreciate it.

We would truly welcome a real social call from you, Rod. Egg has become quite the chef lately. I believe his chicken enchiladas would compete favorably with Mi Nidito’s. Richard smiled slightly then grimaced. But if you mean to ever return for a real social call you should probably phone to make an appointment. Richard Dick inclined his head toward the ladder in the hole in the ceiling of his house, clearly dismissing his guest. Take care descending, my Hot Rod. It’s a desert down there.

*   *   *

The sun was tilting west fast as Rodeo’s old Ford 150 rattled over the ribs of the gutted dirt road named Elm Street. Even though Rodeo had only been gone a couple of days, his place felt more deserted without his dog in tow. He parked and went to the storage shed where he started his generator. Then he unloaded his gear into the casita, turned on his AC unit and the swamp cooler in the house and went back outside and crawled up the ladder onto his roof with binoculars and his rabbit rifle, a notch-scoped Savage rimfire .22.

This was the best time of the day to see bobcat and coyote and peccaries around his place and even an occasional coatimundi but Rodeo saw nothing this evening not even the hares and jackrabbits. A flash high on the nearby hillside caught his eye and he aimed the binoculars up into the Theatine Mountain range. He scanned the long trail up the side of the hill toward La Entrada but could identify nothing.

He slid down the aluminum ladder and reentered the house which had cooled by now to tolerable temperature. He took a short tepid shower, put clean sheets on his single-sized bed and locked his place down. He cleaned and reloaded his 9mm Glock and put it under his bed then spun the cylinder on the S&W .38 and put his father’s revolver atop his mother’s Bible before he crawled naked under the thin sheet and went to sleep.

*   *   *

Rodeo slept soundly until false dawn when he sat up in his narrow bed and read some passages from the Book of Luke. He left and made his bed, sponged his head and torso over the kitchen sink and then dressed in loose Wranglers and a long-sleeved khaki shirt. He swept his floors and dumped the dust outside then cooked a frittata with brown eggs and Spam and with a Hatch green chile pod cut over it as salsa. He made a fresh pot of cowboy coffee and ate and drank quickly.

Rodeo put two cans of ranch beans, a small sack of cracked Green Valley pecans, three snack-sized bags of Fritos and a plastic milk jug full of water in a thick plastic trash bag and stuffed the trash bag into the bottom of his father’s old GI rucksack. He set the pack on his shoulders and snugged the straps then checked the speed-load in his holstered snake gun, a Colt .357 Trooper. He clipped his father’s old Schrade Safety Push-button knife to his belt, slung his binoculars and canteen around his neck. He tried to call Summer Skye on his cell phone but couldn’t get any reception so he set a stained straw Stetson on his head and headed uphill toward La Entrada.

Since he was not slowed by his decrepit dog, Rodeo marched steadily up the small mountain and didn’t stop until he was within a hundred yards of the cave. There he announced his presence loudly in both English and Spanish and then waited for five minutes so that any Undocumented Aliens or others hiding or resting in La Entrada would have time to collect their gear and move off.

In all the time he had been supplying the cave, Rodeo had never seen a person in La Entrada though he had seen plenty of proof of human existence, including discarded clothing and sleeping bags, trash bags, blown-out boots, cigarette butts and even human excrement dumped on the floor of the shallow cave and piss stains on the walls.

So Rodeo was shocked to see the man with one hip resting on the metal footlocker and both feet firmly planted in the ground dirt of the cave, with the black graphite stock of a scoped rifle pressed to his shoulder and the side of his face and with the barrel of that sniper’s gun aimed directly at Rodeo’s chest.

In this beautiful weapon of destruction are handmade soft-point thirty-caliber two-hundred-gram bullets, said Ronald Rocha. Each bullet with a ballistic coefficiency of point four four eight.

Rodeo was so surprised he did not even reach for his sidearm.

You probably do not know what that means.

I don’t know ordnance too good, Rodeo said.

It means, friend, that when I squeeze this hair trigger with sufficient force your heart will be exploded beyond your spine and your spine will be dust and you will not even know you are dying you will be so dead already.

I believe you, Ronald.

Then extract that revolver from your rightside holster with two fingers of your left hand and toss the gun off the cliff with your left hand, Ronald said.

This is a vintage .357 Trooper with a custom grip, Ronald. This gun would cost fifteen hundred dollars at auction. Couldn’t we just unload it?

This situation you’re in right now is not about negotiation
for
you, friend, said the marksman. But it is rather about simple obedience
from
you.

Rodeo unholstered and then tossed his revolver. The big gun clattered down steep stones with a loud noise.

Now the knife.

This knife was my daddy’s and I cannot replace it.

I have got sentimental attachments to things I cannot replace too, friend, said Ronald Rocha. Some days I think these attachments are too numerous to name and remember and might overwhelm me until I am crushed by the weight of them. Yet I have seen these mementos, these physical artifacts of emotional connections, including physical bodies, tossed and gone to dust in an instant. And lost. Forever. But not forgotten.

So you know what I’m talking about then, Ronald, said Rodeo. You know the value that some things have.