The Mexican Tree Duck — James Crumley

For the crime of executing a jukebox on a lonesome Montana railbed, C. W. Sughrue ("Shoog as in sugar. And rue as in rue the goddamned day.") has been sentenced to do business with the hardest hard cases in the new American West--and to locate a missing woman who has eluded the FBI, her well-connected Republican husband, and a group of South American cocaine dealers. Now Sughrue is about to find out why.

With blood on his shoes and the highway, Sughrue takes off on a cross-Western odyssey of sex and gunplay in the company of a beautiful undercover deputy, a ragged band of Vietnam buddies, and a young mother and child. Caught in a war he doesn't understand, holding on to a hollowedout figurine that means more than he can imagine, Sughrue is looking for someone who doesn't want to be found-and finding penitence for more than one man's sins.