C.W. Sughrue has been gut-shot and left to die and is, for the first time in his life, actually scared—which makes him angry. Milo Milodragovitch has been robbed of his three-million dollar inheritance by a pipsqueak banker and a butch lady poet; he’s not scared at all, just pissed. In a spiffy suit and a red Cadillac, Milo trails his thieves to the Mexican border, where the community consists of “three kinds of drug smugglers, six different breeds of law dogs, and every kind of criminal ever dreamed up”—that is, bordersnakes. When Milo and Sughrue cross paths, they head off together on a dope-smoking, trash-talking, hard-drinking, blood-spattering roadtrip across the West. “Scares you breathless, turns you upside down and inside out, and makes you almost forget at times that your life isn’t really in danger.” — Los Angeles Times “Achingly good. . . . James Crumley is one of America's great undiscovered writers.”— The A. V. Club “Drawn with panache. . . . Like an overbudget western directed by an LSD-addled Raymond Chandler.” — Publishers Weekly “What Raymond Chandler did for the Los Angeles of the Thirties, James Crumley does for the roadside West of today.” — Harper’s “Crumley can write scenes that are unique to him. He’s is the rare writer who uses style, not tricks.”— San Jose Mercury News “If you like your detective fiction tough and tenacious you will love James Crumley. . . . No one does it better.”— The Houston Chronicle “Crumley is one of the finest additions to the private eye genre. . . . [He] brings to his books . . . a knowledge and understanding of the American psyche few writers in any genre have managed.” — Buffalo News “James Crumley is a first-rate American writer. . . . pyrotechnically entertaining, sexy, compassionate." — The Village Voice James Crumley was born in Three Rivers, Texas, and spent most of his childhood in South Texas. After serving three years in the U.S. Army and completing college degrees in history (BA, Texas College of Arts and Industries) and creative writing (MFA, University of Iowa), he joined the English faculty at the University of Montana at Missoula. He was also a visiting professor at a number of other institutions around the country, including the University of Texas at El Paso, Colorado State University, Reed College, and Carnegie-Mellon. His works include a novel of Vietnam,  One to Count Cadence,  and seven detective novels:  The Wrong Case ,  The Last Good Kiss , Dancing Bear , The Mexican Tree Duck , Bordersnakes, The Final Country , and The Right Madness . He died in Missoula in 2008. PART ONE: MILO   Maybe it was the goddamned suit. Tailor-made Italian silk, as light and flimsy as shed snakeskin. Or maybe my whole new clean and shiny wardrobe looked strange under my battered old face. A thin knit shirt under the suit coat, woven leather loafers—without socks, of course—and a soft Borsalino felt fedora that made me look like a Russian Black Sea summer pimp. Not bad, though, I thought. For a pimp.   But obviously I had violated more than the dress code in this run-down shithole called Duster’s Lounge, a code at surely included a rap sheet at least two pages long, five years’ hard time, and all the runny, jailhouse tattoos a man’s skin could carry.Or perhaps the ’roid monkey leaning beside me on the battered bar fancied himself a fashion critic. He sported winged dragons and skulls on the bulging arms hanging out of his muscle shirt, an oversized switchblade in his right hand, and the slobbery leer of a true critic. Whatever, he played with my left cuff until the switchblade pressed into the soft fabric. For the third time in the last two minutes.   “What the fuck you doing here, old man?” he muttered in a downer-freak’s growl. “What the fuck?”   I hadn’t even had a sip of my beer yet, my first beer in almost ten years. I tried to turn away peacefully again, smiling tensely without speaking, but the big jerk recaptured my cuff with the point of his knife. Goddamned Sughrue. He’d love this shit. But he wasn’t here. As far as I knew, he could be dead. But what the hell, I heard him think, nobody lives forever. Gently, I slipped my cuff free.   “Kid, you touch my suit with that blade again,” I said calmly, “I’m going to shove it up your ass and break it off.” Maybe he’d think it was a joke.   At least he laughed. His voice broke like an adolescent’s when he brayed. He honked so loud and long that the steroid acne across his shoulders threatened to erupt. Somewhere in the dim bar, this kid had an audience.   I checked a group of glassy-eyed young men of several races, sporting bloody new tattoos on their arms and military haircuts, who had surrounded two pitchers of thin, bitter beer and one professional woman old enough to be their grandmother. Fort Bliss, I guessed, and the first payday pass of basic training. A half-dozen Sneaky Pete day-drinkers occupied a couple of other tables in the decrepit joint at the desert en