Free The Final Country by James Crumley Page B

a firearm without hesitation, and his only ambition was for more sunlight and fewer bosses shouting at him. So he hobbled across the Great Plains swabbing bar floors, slopping pigs, and shoveling horseshit and hay while he worked on his English. By the time he got to Montana, the Gold Rush was almost over, the war was long over, so the first Milodragovitch in Montana became a peace officer, and, as was the custom in those days, a saloon owner and a whoremaster.
    “Whores aren’t bad people,” Travis Lee said when I finished the story. “Let’s go have a drink with several, professional and political.”
    Then we proceeded to a round of visiting drinks with his old political cronies, cranky to a man, and ex-colleagues at the law school, plus cops, bartenders, and ex-hookers. Then a late lunch at a tiny barbecue shack above Blue Creek, the only commercial establishment on the strip of the old family ranch that Travis Lee still owned north of the creek, where we played dominoes, drank Shiner beer, and ate smoked brisket as tender as a fresh biscuit.
    “Milo,” he said in his best voice, his great shaggy head hanging over the table, “you’re too young to be retired. You’re chewin’ on your ass like a mangy hound, sittin’ out there at the ranch, doin’ nothin’. You need somethin’ to do.” Then he leaned his huge face across the table and whispered, “I understand you know something about the bar business…”
    “I certainly do,” I said.
    “… and that you’ve got a bundle of cash sittin’ fallow in the Caymans,” he said. “I can raise some money from friends, add yours to mine, funnel it in through an offshore loan, and boy we got a gold mine right here, clean and legal.”
    Which is how we became partners in the Blue Hollow Lodge. Once I was convinced of the “clean and legal” part. But I insisted on owning the bar outright, to which Travis Lee agreed without much fuss. Betty was against it at first, especially the part where I lent her uncle some of the start-up money, saying that I was just using it as an excuse to get out of the house. Then without explanation she changed her mind. I had more money than I could spend in two lifetimes, even if I lived as long as my great-grandfather, and it did sound like a good way to get out of the house occasionally. Or maybe I was just tired, as I once said during an argument with Betty, of being her fancy man.
    Of course, later, quickly bored with the bar business, I got my Texas PI ticket and six weeks after that moved out of Betty’s ranch house…
    …and into a large, anonymous motel suite on the ground floor, a place that, except for the heavy bag and free-weight set, could have been anywhere, belonged to anyone. Perhaps it should have seemed a sad place, but coming from Molly McBride’s bed and facing a day when something might actually happen to break the routine of my days, it didn’t seem so bad.
    I called Betty at the clinic to let her know that I wasn’t driving out to the ranch for breakfast. When she asked why, I answered, almost truthfully, “I’ve got a client.”
    “Christ on a crutch, Milo,” she said, “are you on drugs? Or just fucking drunk?”
    “Neither, particularly. Why?”
    “Oh, hell, I don’t know,” she sighed, and I could see her forearm brush the hair off her face, “between the bar and your fucking clients, we never seem to see each other anymore anyway —”
    “Lady,” I interrupted, “between your job and trying to save Blue Creek, we don’t see each other at all.”
    So she hung up on me. Not for the first time, either. I’d seen Montana, even with its terrible winters, destroyed by greed, miners and developers and logging companies — Christ, Hayden Lomax’s corporation even owned a leaking cyanide leach gold mine in eastern Montana that the state had been trying to shut down for years. Also an undeveloped shallow gas field on the edge of the Crazies — so I didn’t share Betty’s hope to save