Rogues

BENT TWIG

A Hap and Leonard Adventure

Joe R. Lansdale

When I got in from work that night, Brett, my redhead, was sitting at the kitchen table. She didn’t have a shift that week at the hospital, so I was surprised to see her up and about. It was 2:00 A.M. I had finished up being a night watchman at the dog-food plant, hoping my buddy Leonard would be back soon from Michigan, where he had gone after someone in some case he had hired out to do for our friend Marvin and the detective agency Marvin owned. We did freelance work like that from time to time.

There was no job for me in this one, and since Leonard was without a job at all and needed the money more than I did, he hired on. I had a temporary at the dog-food plant. It was okay, but mostly boring. The most exciting thing I had done was chase some rats I had caught in the feed-storage room, nibbling on some bags of dog food, stealing chow out of some hound’s mouth, so to speak. Those rats knew not to mess with me.

I kept hoping Marvin would have something for me so I could quit, but so far, nothing. I did have that week’s paycheck from the dog-food plant in my wallet, though.

“What are you doing up?” I asked.

“Worrying,” she said.

I sat down at the table with her.

“We have enough money, right?”

“We got plenty for a change. It’s Tillie.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“It’s not like before,” Brett said. What she meant was a little of column A, a little of column B.

Column A was where she got in with a biker club at the local poke and got hauled off to be a prostitute, partly on purpose, as it was her profession, and partly against her will because they didn’t plan to pay her. We had rescued her from that, me, Brett, and Leonard. She had then gone off and gotten into a series of domestic problems over in Tyler, but those were the sort of things Brett got her out of, or at least managed to avert catastrophe for a while. Every time Brett mentioned Tillie it meant she would be packing a bag, putting her job on hold, and going off for a few days to straighten some stupid thing out that never should have happened in the first place. Since she was Brett’s daughter, I tried to care about her. But she didn’t like me and I didn’t like her. But I did love Brett, so I tried to be as supportive as possible, but Brett knew how I felt.

“You have to go for a few days?” I asked.

“May be more to it.”

“How’s that?”

“She’s missing.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time she took a powder for a while. You know how she is. Goes off without a word, comes back without one, unless she needs money or a tornado got the double-wide.”

“It’s not all her fault.”

“Brett, baby. Don’t give me the stuff about how you weren’t a good mother.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were young yourself, and I don’t think you did all that bad. You had some circumstances, and you did what you could for her. She’s mostly a mess of her choosing.”

“Maybe.”

“But you’re not convinced.”

“It doesn’t matter. She’s my daughter.”

“You got me there,” I said.

“I got a call from a friend of hers. You don’t know her. Her name is Monica, and she’s all right. I think she’s got a better head on her shoulders than Tillie. I met her when I was there last. I think she’s been a pretty good guide for my girl. Fact is, I sort of thought Tillie was getting it together, and I’ve been keeping in touch with Monica about it. She called to say they were supposed to go to a movie, a girl’s night out. Only Tillie didn’t show. Didn’t call. And now it’s three days later. Monica said when she got over being mad, she got into being worried. Says the guy Tillie lives with, that he could be the problem. He used to run whores, and Tillie could easily fall back into that life. I mean … Well, there’s a bit of a drug problem with the guy, and Tillie, sometimes. He could have gotten tough with Tillie. He might be trying to make some money off of her, or he might have gotten into something bad and Tillie got dragged with him.”

“Monica think he’s holding her at home?”

“Maybe worse.”

“I thought he was supposed to be all right.”

“Me too,” she said. “But lately, not so much. At first, he was a kind of Prince Charming, an ex-druggie who was doing good, then all of a sudden he didn’t want her out of the house, didn’t want her contacting anyone. Didn’t want her seeing Monica. But Monica thinks it’s because he was choosing who he wanted Tillie to see.”

“Prostitution,” I said.

Brett nodded. “Yeah, it’s how those kind of guys play. Like they care about you, or they got some of the same problems they’re kicking, and the next thing Tillie knows she’s on the nose candy again and is selling her ass, and then pretty soon she’s not getting any money from the sell. He gets it all.”

“The pimp gets it all, keeps her drugged, and keeps the money flowing in.”

“Yeah,” Brett said. “Exactly. It’s happened to her before, and you know that, so—”

“You’re thinking it could happen again.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I am.”

“ ’Course it doesn’t matter, and it may not have been planned. He may have just fallen off the wagon and grabbed her as he fell. After he got the prize he wanted, he didn’t want to share it or show it around.”

“He liked showing her around at first, all right,” Brett said. “He liked her to dress sexy, and then if anyone looked, he was mad. She was for him, and yet he wanted to parade her and not have anyone look at the parade. Later on, he wanted to bring people to the parade. Maybe when his drug habit got bad. I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want to know she’s safe.”

“And you want me to check it out?”

“I want us to check it out.”

“Let me drive back to the dog-food plant and quit with prejudice first.”

“Short notice,” Brett said.

“I know,” I said. “But then so was this.”

It felt odd going off to see about something like this without Leonard. I liked having him around in these kinds of circumstances. He helped strengthen my backbone. I liked to think I was already pretty firm in that area, but it never hurt to have your brother from another mother there to keep you feeling confident.

Tillie lived just outside of Tyler, between there and Bullock, a little burg outside of the city. Tyler wasn’t up there with Dallas and Houston, but it was a big town, or small city, depending on how you liked your labels. A hundred thousand or so, with lots of traffic, illegal immigrants, and college students. The immigrants they liked to hire to get work done cheap, then use them for every scapegoat situation possible, forgetting they wouldn’t even be there to blame for what they did and for what they didn’t do, if they weren’t offered the jobs in the first place.

When we got to Tillie’s house we found two cars in the carport. Brett said, “That’s Tillie’s and Robert’s cars. Both cars are here.”

I went over and knocked on the front door, but no one answered. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes you knock, you know someone’s inside, and other times it has a hollow feel, like you’re tapping on a sun-bleached skull, thinking a brain that isn’t inside of it anymore is going to wake up. And sometimes you’re just full of shit and whoever is inside is hiding. I remember my mother doing that from time to time when a bill collector came around. I always wondered if they knew we were inside, hiding out on paying the rent we hadn’t earned yet but would pay, hiding out from paying a car payment, hoping they wouldn’t haul the car away.

I went around back and knocked but got the same lack of response. I walked around the house with Brett and we looked in windows when there was a window to look in. Most were covered with blinds or curtains, but the kitchen window at the back had the curtains pulled back, and we could see inside by cupping our hands around our faces and pressing them against the glass. There was nothing to see, though.

Finally we went back out to my car. We leaned on the hood.

I said, “You want me to get inside?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I called the police yesterday, well, it was the sheriff’s department, but they wouldn’t do anything.”

“Not twenty-four hours?” I said.

“Actually, it has been. Over. But the thing is, they’ve dealt with her before.” I didn’t know all the details on that, but I figured as much. Tillie tended to get in trouble, run off from time to time, so they weren’t quick on using manpower to chase a sometime prostitute and drug user and full-time pain in the ass.

“Okay,” I said. “Going to make an executive decision. I’m going to break in.”

There were houses around, but no activity, and I didn’t see anyone parting the curtains for a peek, so I got a lock-picking kit out of the glove box that I use with the agency from time to time, went around back, and got to it. I’m not that good a lock picker, and to tell the truth, it’s seldom like on TV, least for me. It always takes a while. This door was easy though, so it only took me about five minutes, and then me and Brett were inside.

Brett called out. “Tillie. Robert. It’s Mom.”

No one answered. Her words bounced off the wall.

“Hang by the door,” I said.

I went through the house, looked in all the rooms. There was no one handy, but in the living room a chair and a coffee table were turned over, some drink of some kind spilled on the floor and gone sticky, a broken glass nearby. I went back and told Brett what I had seen.

“Maybe now we can get the law interested,” I said.

Outside, out back, I saw there was a thin trail of blood drops. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now, coming out of the house and with the sun just right, I could see it. It looked like someone had dropped rubies of assorted size in the grass. I said, “Brett, honey. Go out to the car and sit behind the wheel. Here are the keys in case you need to leave. And if you do, leave. Don’t worry about me.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “We’ll get the gun out of the glove box.”

I have a conceal carry permit, but I seldom carry the gun. Fact is, I don’t like the idea of one, but in my line of work—and I don’t just mean watchman at the dog-food plant—stuff sometimes requires one.

We went and got the pistol out of the glove box, an old-style revolver, and walked after the blood drops.

It trailed into the woods, and then we didn’t see much of it anymore. We went along the trail a bit more, and I saw where something had been pulled into the bushes, mashing them down. We went up in there and found a body lying on the ground. It was lying facedown. I shouldn’t have moved the body, but I nudged it with my foot so as to turn it over. The face looking up at me was that of a young man and it had eyes full of ants and the victim’s nose was flattened and scraped where it had been dragged along the ground. There was a bullet hole in the chest, or so I assumed. I had seen a few of them, and it had been delivered right through the shirt pocket. I could see there was another one in his right side. I figured one shot had wounded him, he had made a break for it, and whoever shot him caught up with him and shot him again, then dragged him in the bushes. I also noted the man had tattoos up and down both arms, and not very good ones. They looked as if they had been put there by a drunk trying to write in Sanskrit and hieroglyphics. Either that or a cellmate.

Brett was standing right there with me. She said, “That’s him.”

“Meaning Robert, Tillie’s boyfriend.”

“Yeah,” she said, and started looking around. Me too. I sort of expected to find her daughter’s body, but we didn’t. We even went back to the house and walked through it without handling anything but the doorknob, just in case we had missed Tillie on first pass, stuffed under a bed, in a closet, or a freezer. They didn’t have a freezer and she wasn’t under the bed or in a closet.

I put my pistol back in the glove box of the car and called 911.

What they sent out was a young guy wearing an oversized pair of pants and a badge as shiny as a child’s Christmas dreams. He had a gun on his hip that was large enough to make me think he might have been expecting elephants to give him trouble. He had on a cowboy hat that seemed too tall, the brim too wide. He looked like someone playing shoot-’em-up. He told me he was a deputy.

There was another guy with him, older, sitting on the passenger side of the car. The young guy got out and the old guy didn’t. He just opened the door and sat there. He looked like a man waiting for retirement and not sure he’d make it. He might have been forty, but there was something in his face that made him seem older. He had a smaller gun on his hip. I could see that clearly, and he had a cowboy hat on his knee.

The younger man listened to us make our statement. He looked interested and wrote some stuff down on a notepad. I told him I had a gun in my glove box and I had a permit, just so things wouldn’t get dicey in case they found it later. After a time, the older man got out of the car and came over. He said, “You get it all down, Olford?”

“Yes, sir,” said the deputy.

I saw then that the guy in front of us had a badge that said SHERIFF on it. It looked very much like those kind of badges we used to buy as kids, ones that came with a cap gun and no caps. You had to buy those separate.

He asked us some of the same questions, just to see if we’d trip up, I figure. He didn’t look at me much when I answered. He studied Brett constantly. I didn’t blame him. She looked fine, as always. Long red hair tumbling over her shoulders, great body kept firm through exercise, and the kind of face that would make Wonder Woman beat herself in the head with a hammer.

“Walk with me,” said the sheriff to me.

“I’m coming too,” Brett said. “I’m no shrinking violet.”

“I bet you aren’t,” said the sheriff. “Olford, you go sit in the car and get your notes straight.”

“They’re straight, Sheriff,” Olford said.

“Go sit in the car anyway,” he said.

We walked along a ways. The sheriff, who we learned was named Nathan Hews, said, “Olford is the mayor’s boy. Whatcha gonna do?”

“Did he get his uniform from Goodwill?” I asked.

“Don’t be disrespectful,” the sheriff said. “He stole that off a wash line.”

We came to the body. I said, “I turned him over.”

“Not supposed to do that,” Sheriff Hews said.

“I know. But I checked to see if he was alive.”

“When they look like this, facedown or faceup, you got to know they’re dead.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“You know something,” the sheriff said. “You called things in, said who you two were, so I made some calls, checked some things out. The chief over in LaBorde, he said you’re a real pain in the ass. That you usually run with a black guy named Leonard.”

“Yep, that’s me,” I said. “I mean, I run with a black guy named Leonard. I don’t know about the pain-in-the-ass part.”

“I think you do,” he said. “Chief told me some things.”

“Blabbermouth,” I said.

When we finished looking at the body, we walked back to the car. The sheriff had Olford get a camera out of their car and go out and take some pictures.

“We don’t have a real team,” he said. “There’s me, Olford, one other deputy, and a dispatcher. Sometimes we get free doughnuts, though.”

“That’s keeping in form,” I said.

“You betcha,” he said. He looked at Brett. “You seem to be holding up well, considering your daughter is missing and a man is dead.”

He was still playing us, trying to see if we had anything to do with the business that had gone down.

“Trust me,” Brett said. “I’m worried sick.”

We had to stay at a motel for a couple of hours before the sheriff showed up with a lack of information. “We didn’t find your daughter,” he said to Brett. “That could be good news.”

“Could be,” Brett said. What the sheriff had missed in his absence was Brett’s breaking down and crying, but he could probably notice the red in her eyes. She listened to what he had to say and went into the bathroom and closed the door.

He said to me, “Listen, I’m going to square with you. Going to tell you what you probably have already figured. I’m a one-horse sheriff in a one-horse town with two deputies who are working their first murder case. They’re more suited to chasing down renegade cats and dogs and figuring out who stole whose graham crackers at the nursery school. If we had one. I’m not telling you to go off on your own, and there’s bigger law can be brought into this. But if I was you, from what I know about you, I’d tell you on the sly, which is what I’m doing now, just in case you don’t get it, to do some looking on your own.”

I nodded, said, “You got any idea where I should start?”

“I said I was a one-horse sheriff, but I once upon a time did some city work. I came here so I’d see fewer bodies. So far, I’ve seen fewer. This is the first murder that isn’t a suicide I’ve seen in five years. The dead man is Robert Austin, he was wanted for some shit. The girl, your woman’s daughter, word was she did some business, if you know what I mean.”

“That word is probably good,” I said.

“This guy, Robert, sold drugs and sold her. Town like this, people who used her services … Well, everyone knows. Everyone here knows the size of their neighbor’s turds and can tell one’s stink from the other. Thing is, Robert, he was most likely selling drugs for Buster Smith. Buster runs a Gospel Opry show over in Marvel Creek.”

“I was born there,” I said.

“Then you know the place. Used to be tough as a doorstop and sharp as a razor. All that booze out there on Hell’s half mile. Now it’s a town known for antiques and all the tonks are gone. The Gospel Opry, well, they say that’s a cover for old Buster. Marvel Creek sees him as a pious businessman. Me, I see him as a man gives real Christians like me a bad name.”

“All right,” I said.

“He’s about fifty, with slicked-back hair and a very cool manner. Wears awful plaid sports jackets all the time. I’ve met him a time or two, when I was over that way. I even went to the Opry once. Good entertainment. But the word kept drifting back about him, and though it’s rumor, I’ve come to believe it. He’s an operator living a simple life on the surface, putting himself in a squeaky-clean front while he does the bad stuff out the back door. He’s got everyone that matters over there in his pocket.

“Another thing, there’s a guy named Kevin Crisper hangs out at the Go-Mart here, sits on a bench out front. It’s his bench. He works his drug deals there, and rumor is, though we can’t prove it, he works for Buster. I keep a watch on him, but so far I haven’t caught him doing what he shouldn’t be doing. He has a guy or two to help him out. They all got a few snags on their arrest sheet, but nothing that keeps them anywhere behind bars. I mean, I know what they’re doing, and I can’t prove it. I can’t do to them what needs to be done. Thing is, though, Kevin Crisper does sales of drugs and gets a percentage. Buster gets the lion’s share because he provides the goods. At least the dope. Tillie, and I want to say this before your girlfriend comes back, she was a self-operator, but word was she was getting pretty deep in the drugs and that maybe she didn’t know if she was about to shit or go blind. She was down in the dead zone with one brain cell or two for a life preserver, and that was it. Robert, he might have been farming her out through this Kevin. Probably was. And Tillie, like I said, she might as well have been a blow-up sex doll, way her mind was messed up.”

“And you know all this and couldn’t do nothing?” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Isn’t that nice? Listen here, chief in LaBorde said you were smarter than you looked, so I’m thinking what I said before. There’s stuff you can do I can’t. Law and all. But, you get caught doing it, I didn’t tell you to do it, and you say I did, I’ll call you a big fat liar. I’ll even arrest you. How’s that for modern law enforcement?”

“I can live with it,” I said.

It took some doing, but I finally talked Brett into letting me take her home. I called Leonard on my cell, but he didn’t answer his. I left him a message. I drove over to downtown Bullock, which was a cross street, and went over to the Go-Mart and found Kevin Crisper. He was a man in his forties trying to look thirty. He had similar tattoos to Robert. Kevin looked like a man who had been soaked down wet and overheated in a microwave. Skin like that was last seen on Tutankhamen’s mummy. That said, he had muscular arms, the kind of muscles some people are born with, long and stringy and deceptively strong.

I walked over to him, said, “I hear you can sell me some things.”

“Some things?” he said. “What kind of things? I look like I got something to sell? Pots and pans. Maybe gloves or shoes?”

“I was told you had some entertainments. Guy named Robert told me. You are Kevin, right?”

“Yeah, that’s me.” Kevin lifted his head, said, “When did Robert tell you that?”

I backdated the time, just in case Kevin had some idea when Robert bit the big one. I added, “He said there’s a girl that could do me some favors, you know. For some money.”

“You heard all that, huh?”

“I did.”

“He didn’t offer just to take care of you himself?”

“He said he worked for you and that I should talk to you.”

“That’s funny he should say that,” he said.

“Look, you got the goods or you don’t. I got money. I want some services. I’d like to party with a girl and I’d like to make myself right. You know where I’m coming from.”

He nodded. “Say I know how to get this girl, the stuff you want to get right, you think I’d have it on me? Think I got that girl’s pussy in my back pocket along with a sack of blow?”

“That would be handy if you did.”

“Listen here, tell you what. I like Robert, and since he sent you, I got a place where you can come for the stuff and the girl. We don’t use a motel. There ain’t but one and everyone knows everyone.”

“So where is this place?”

“You going to be around tonight?”

“Could be.”

“You want some leg and some head-twister, then you got to be around.”

“Head-twister?”

“Stuff I’m selling. It’s a mixture. You take this stuff your dick gets hard, your head gets high, and you’ll have so much fun you’ll drive over and slap your mama.”

“That right?”

“Way I hear. ’Course, I don’t sample that shit myself.”

“That’s not much of a selling point,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not that. I sample the girl, of course, but the rest of it, that’s product, man. You dip into your own product, especially with it being available, you can get in Dutch pretty quick.”

He gave me a time and an address. I thanked him and tried to look excited. I drove over to the one café and parked out front and sat behind the wheel and called Leonard again. I had some idea that the Michigan thing was near wrapped up, that he ought to be driving back down and in Texas by now, but it appeared it had taken more time than expected because I got the same thing. No answer. I left him a detailed message, even told him where I was supposed to be and at what time. I gave him the same directions Kevin had given me. I went in the café and had some coffee and a sandwich. I figured I might want to be fortified. I bought a sack lunch and an axe handle at the feed store and put it in the car, and then I drove out to where I was supposed to meet Kevin. Only thing was I was four hours early.

* * *

I tried Leonard a few more times, leaving the same directions, but whatever he was up to, it didn’t involve having his phone on. The location Kevin gave me was not deep in the woods, but it was out of town, which would of course suit his kind of services. But since I didn’t think Tillie, possibly the only lady working the grid, so to speak, was truly available, and since I knew Robert was dead as a pair of posthole diggers, and had a suspicion Kevin knew it as well, I thought I wouldn’t rely on his hospitality to bring Tillie straight to me. Me and Brett and Leonard had rescued her once before, a few years back, from something stupid she had gotten herself into that sounded a lot like this, and frankly, there was a part of me that wanted to leave her to it. I couldn’t do that because she was Brett’s daughter. That was the big part. The other part was I was me. I seem to be one of those guys who would help a rabid dog across the street if I thought it were confused on directions.

I thought over the directions I had been given, then varied from them. I found a little road to go down, a hunting trail, and then a little path off of it. I parked there and hoped no one found my car and decided they’d like to hot-wire it and drive it off, or for that matter, just vandalize it. I got my pistol out of the glove box and stuck it in the pants at the base of my spine, and pulled my shirt over it. I got the food I had bought extra at the café, a hamburger and fries and a canned Diet Coke, tucked the axe handle under my arm, and walked to where I understood the meeting place to be.

When I could see the house, which seemed pretty rickety and set off partly in the woods, I was pretty sure my suspicions were confirmed. Anyone coming here expecting pussy and drugs was a dumb-ass. I wasn’t actually expecting either, but I was a dumb-ass, because here I was. I went to the house and checked the door. It was locked. I went around back. The door there was locked too, but it was thin. I thought that would be my surprise entrance, kicking the door down. I could do it now, and wait on him, but if he came around back, or that was his preferred way of entering, the joke could be on me.

I walked off in the woods to the left of the place and found a tumbled-down tree to sit on. I had my supper, which was all right if you had no taste buds and your stomach was made of cast iron. I only ate a few of the french fries, being as how they were greasy enough to give a garden statue the shits. I drank the Diet Coke and ate the burger. The meat seemed suspicious, but I was already hungry. I always got hungry when I thought I might kill someone or get killed myself.

As it grew dark, mosquitoes came out and buzzed around, and a few bit me. I wondered if they were carrying the West Nile virus, or maybe something worse. I slapped at them. I caught a chigger on its way up my pant leg, heading for my balls; I felt proud to have rescued them.

After a while I saw Kevin drive up and park and go inside the house. I saw a light go on. He didn’t have Tillie with him. He didn’t seem to have anything with him. He was early too. I thought I would wait a few minutes then surprise him. I looked at my watch. I’d give him a few minutes to feel secure, then I’d surprise him. ’Course, if he had a gun, which he would have, the surprise would be on me. ’Course, I had one too, but when guns come into play, anything can happen.

I thought about this, and I thought about that, and then I thought I felt something cold at the base of my skull, and since this was the dead of summer, even if it was just now dark, I knew it wasn’t a cold breeze.

It was a gun barrel.

I can’t explain how much like a dick I felt. Here I was putting the sneak on them, and they had put the sneak on me. I turned around slowly. A short fat man with a face that looked like it had been used for missile targeting, it had so many pocks, was smiling about $15,000 of much-needed dental work at me.

“I could shoot you, you know,” he said.

“Yep,” I said.

“What we’re gonna do, is we’re gonna walk up there and see Kevin. Stand up first.”

I stood up, leaving the axe handle on the log. He patted me down with one hand and found my pistol and stuck it in one of his baggy pants pockets. He picked up the axe handle with his free hand and tapped my shoulder with it.

“Walk on up to the house,” he said.

I was getting old, I figured. Any other time I would have been prepared. Or so I told myself. I had thought I was being smart getting there early, but they had put the sneak on me, putting moon-crater face in the woods to wait, and Kevin to come up like a staked goat.

“There’s a road behind the woods here, dickhead,” said Moon Crater. “I come up on that, then through the woods. I hid out and waited. I thought I might have to do some serious sneaking, but you picked a spot not that far from me. It was easy, man. Kevin said he thought you thought you were a smart guy, but you’re not really so smart, are you?”

“I have to agree with that,” I said.

In the house Kevin was waiting. He said, “No snatch or juice for you, huh? ’Course, that isn’t what you were coming for, were you? I didn’t like your looks from the start.”

“You ain’t got no mirrors at your house?”

Moon Crater whacked me across the back of the legs with the axe handle hard enough I went to my knees.

“I got a suspicion you got some other reason to see me. I got a suspicion you might be looking for Tillie or Robert. I got to tell you, I think you know Robert’s dead.”

“You got me,” I said. “I know he’s dead. What about Tillie?”

“She’s all right, but she won’t be long,” Kevin said. “Mr. Smith likes to get all the juice out of a product before he lets it go. He gets her hot-wired enough on something or another, he can sell her out until there’s nothing to sell, you know. She then gets a hot shot, looks like an accident. They find her in a ditch somewhere with toadstools growing out of her ass.”

“Robert didn’t look like an accident.”

“He proved more of a problem. Things got out of hand. You see, he was dipping, him and the cunt. We don’t like dippers, unless maybe it’s with chips and dip.”

Kevin and Moon Crater liked that. Both of them laughed. I figured they didn’t get out much.

“Get him in the chair,” Kevin said.

They were ready for me. The chair was arranged in the middle of the floor. I did have a nice view through a window when Kevin moved out from in front of it, which he did from time to time. I could tell he lied about sampling his product. He had some of it in him right then, and it was giving him a nervous twitch. They put me in the chair and Moon Crater tied my legs and arms to it with rope while Kevin held Moon Crater’s gun on me. When I was good and tied, Kevin said, “Now you got to tell me what you’re up to.”

“You can take a running leap up a donkey’s ass,” I said.

“Oh, that’s not nice,” Kevin said. “Jubil, hold this gun.”

Jubil, aka Moon Crater, took the pistol. Kevin picked up my axe handle. I knew I was going to regret having brought that. He swung it hard against my shins. The pain jumped from my leg to my spine to the base of my brain. For a moment I thought I was going to be sick to my stomach and black out.

“That’s got to hurt,” Kevin said.

“You think,” I said. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t good, but it was something, even if it sounded as if it were coming from a very small man under a pillow in the corner.

Kevin went over and put the axe handle by the front door. He reached in his pocket and took out a long pocketknife. He flipped it open.

“This house was left to me by my old grandma. It’s not much, but I come here now and then for things. And I got a sentimental spot for it, even if it is starting to go bad. That being the case, what I want to say is, I don’t want to bloody it up, I don’t have to. So, for your sake and mine, you should talk.”

“I talk, you’re just going to let me go?” I said.

“Sure,” Kevin said.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Okay, you’re right. I’m gonna kill you. But I can make it quick, a cut throat. Nasty to think about, but it gets over quick. Bleeds out good. Robert, I ended up having to shoot him a couple of times. Not so good. He was in pain right up until that last bullet. You, I can make you last a long time with this here knife.”

“So my choice is I talk and you cut my throat, or I don’t talk and you cut on me a while till I do?”

“That’s it,” he said.

Right then, by the window, I saw Leonard’s head go by. I stalled. I said, “So what would you like to know? I might have some answers, long as it doesn’t involve math problems.”

“Okay. First, who the fuck are you?”

I said, “I’m a census collector.”

“That’s going to get you cut,” Kevin said. “I’m going to have to take an ear.”

“Before you do,” I said, “I really need to tell you something.”

“What would that be?” Kevin said.

“Hell is coming,” I said.

At that moment the door burst open, propelled forward by Leonard’s foot. Leonard spied the axe handle, and he had it in his free hand before you could say, “My, is that an axe handle?”

Leonard said, striding forward, “Queer, roughhouse nigger, coming through.”

He stepped forward quick and caught Moon Crater in the teeth with a left-handed swing of the handle. It knocked Moon Crater to the floor, sending the gun spinning away from him.

The light caught the black gleam of Leonard’s close-shaved head, and it danced in his eyes, it danced along the length of the brand-new axe handle. The axe handle cut through the air like a hot knife through butter. When Kevin met the wood there was a sound like someone’s slapping a belt on a leather couch, and then there were teeth and there was enough blood flying out of Kevin’s mouth I was sure Grandma’s house was ruined. It splattered on the wall and on the window, teeth clattered on the floor.

Kevin hit the floor on his belly, dropped the knife. He tried to crawl for it, but Leonard stomped his hand and the axe handle came down again. This time it was a sound more like someone chopping the neck off a turkey with a meat cleaver.

Kevin didn’t move after that lick, but just for good measure, Leonard hit him again. He went over then to Moon Crater, who was trying to get up, and kicked him in the mouth. That dental work Moon Crater already needed was going to cost a lot more now.

When Kevin came awake, he was strapped to the chair where I had been. Leonard was nearby, leaning on the axe handle. I was squatted down in front of Kevin. Moon Crater was still stretched out on the floor. If he wasn’t dead or in a coma, he probably down deep in some part of his being wished he was.

“Howdy,” I said.

“Fuck you,” Kevin said, but it was hard to be sure if that was actually what he said. He was spitting up blood.

“If you leave here,” I said, “and it’s possible, you might want to pick up your teeth, not confusing them with the gems that were in Jubil’s mouth. You might want to put them in a glass of water and freeze them. I hear they can do wonders with knocked-out teeth now.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Hap, and this is my brother, Leonard. But you two have already met.”

“Glad to make your fucking acquaintance,” he said.

I stood up, turned to Leonard. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

“I was on my way home when you called. Started driving back two days ago, but I was in a blind spot for the phone. Bottomland. I got your message a little late.”

“Not too late, though.”

I turned back to Kevin. “Kevin,” I said, “you and me, we got to talk, and I got to get some answers, and if I like them, I’m not even going to cut your throat.”

They told us Tillie had been taken by the Gospel Opry guy, Buster Smith, and that Kevin and Moon Crater had helped him take her. She was in an old theater. I knew the theater. I was from Marvel Creek, and when I was growing up I went to many movies there. They had a stage at that theater, a movie screen behind it. They had kid shows and they brought out clowns and jugglers and special entertainment. It was awful and I was always glad when they got off the stage and turned off the light, leaving me with the roaches and a movie.

Leonard didn’t want to leave them with their car, and he decided he didn’t want to fuck it up. He wanted to fuck them up. I don’t like that sort of thing, but, hey, what you gonna do? They started it.

Leonard put them in the trunk of his car, and I followed in mine after he dropped me off. We took them into the river bottoms. Leonard let them out of the trunk. They got out, though neither felt well. Leonard had really laid that axe handle on them. He said, “Thing I’m going to do is break both your legs. One apiece.”

“No need in that, Leonard,” I said.

“I know. I just want to do it.”

“Look now,” said Kevin. “Listen to your friend. We just work for that dickhead. We’re out of it. We hope you get the girl back.”

“Oh, we’ll get her back if she’s to be gotten back,” Leonard said. “But here’s the thing. You were going to kill my friend. Had I not showed up, you would have. So which leg?”

Kevin and Moon Crater looked at me.

“He’s sort of got his mind made up,” I said. “And you were going to kill me.”

“But we’ll die out here if our legs are broke,” Moon Crater said.

“Don’t be so goddamn dramatic,” Leonard said. “You’ll still be able to crawl, maybe find a stick to support yourself or something. Really, it’s not our problem.”

“Which leg?” Leonard said. “Or I choose.”

“Left,” Kevin said. Moon Crater didn’t choose. “But—”

Before Kevin could protest again, Leonard swung that axe handle. It whistled and caught the man on the side of the knee, which is where it’s the weakest. I heard a sound like someone’s breaking a rack of pool balls. Kevin screamed and went down holding his knee.

“One,” Leonard said.

Moon Crater made a break for it. I owed Leonard one, so I chased Moon Crater down and grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around and threw a right cross into his face, and his face took it. He fell down. Before he could get up Leonard was there with the axe handle. I think it took about three whacks for Leonard to catch him good; I don’t really remember. I looked away. But I think it was the right leg.

We drove Leonard’s car to a church lot, which struck us as ironic, and I drove us in mine over to Marvel Creek. I said, “What if those guys get out of the woods and call? Warn Buster.”

“It’s miles to their car,” Leonard said. “It’s miles to No Enterprise. They got broke legs. Besides, it was you didn’t want me to kill them. Up to me, they’d be in the Sabine River somewhere with fish nibbling on them.”

“You are cold, man,” I said.

“Absolutely,” Leonard said.

We thought we’d stake out the Gospel Opry, but when we drove by, there was action there. A big crowd. Leonard said, “They’re loading them inside. What is it? Nine? Ten o’clock? I didn’t know Jesus stayed up this late.”

“True. He’s usually early to bed and early to rise.”

I got my gun and put it under my shirt in the small of my back. We left the axe handle in the backseat with its memories. As we walked up, we saw the crowd was growing.

I said to an old man on a cane, “What’s up?”

“The Gospel Opry usually. Talent show tonight, though. Y’all don’t know about it?”

“No,” I said. “We don’t.”

“It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. There’s people who sing and dance and do comedy. Good clean fun.” He looked at Leonard. “You’ll be able to get in, son. I remember when your color couldn’t.”

“My, how times have changed,” Leonard said.

I glanced around and saw a line going through another door, off to the side. I said to the old man, “Who are they?”

“The talent. They signed up to perform.”

Leonard said, “Come on, Hap.”

We got in line at the talent door.

“More fun than a barrel of monkeys,” I said, “and they let your kind in, Leonard.”

“Well, suh, I sho’ is beholding to some peckerwoods for that. Sho’ is.”

Inside there was a little man at a desk. He wore a bad wig. He asked us our name. We gave him our first names. Leonard said we were a singing act.

The little man couldn’t find us on the roster, of course.

“We were set,” I said. “We called ahead and everything. They think we’re the bee’s knees over in Overton.”

“Overton is so small you can throw a rock across it,” the man said.

“Yep, but we’re still big there,” I said.

He thought about it a moment, said, “Look here. There’s a couple of guys who play bagpipes that canceled. Laundry lost their kilts or some such something. I’ll give you their spot. You didn’t get registered, but it’ll work out. So you sing?”

“Like fucking birds,” Leonard said.

The man looked at him, grinned slowly. Jesus didn’t seem to always be at his house. He waved us inside, and we went.

“A singing group?” I said.

“The bee’s knees,” Leonard said.

Way it worked is we were guided backstage. There were a lot of acts there. One old man had on what looked like a sergeant’s uniform. He was potbellied, bald, and looked as if he should have been on oxygen. He had a ventriloquist dummy with him. It was dressed up like a private, with a field cap and everything. I got to tell you, I seriously hate me some ventriloquist dummies. When I was a kid, late at night, I caught an old movie titled Dead of Night, an anthology film. One of the sections was about a man and a ventriloquist dummy that takes over his life. It scared the living dog shit out of me. I see a block of wood that might be carved into a ventriloquist dummy I get nervous. And this dummy looked as if the rats and someone with an ice pick had been at him.

“How long you been doing this?” I said.

He wheezed a moment before answering. “I used to make real money at it. No one will have me now, except these talent shows, some kids’ parties. I don’t do as well as I once did. They got the goddamn Internet now. Oh, you boys won’t tell on me, will you? They like us to watch our language.”

“We won’t say a fucking word,” Leonard said.

The old man laughed. He leaned in close. “Neither of you boys got a drink, do you?”

We admitted that we didn’t.

“That’s all right, then. Just wondering.” He shook the doll a little, causing dust to stir up. “Private Johnson is getting worn-out. My wife took a knife to him once, and used him to beat me over the head. It did some damage to him and me. I fart, it blacks me out and I wake up wearing a tutu.”

He barked then at his joke, and then he carried on. “I haven’t had the money to get him fixed. I act like the one eyelid he’s got that droops is just part of the act. It adds character.”

“Sure it does,” I said. “You’ll knock them dead.”

I hoped he didn’t knock himself dead. He was red-faced and breathing heavy and looked as if he might blow a major hose at any moment. Maybe his talk about farting and blacking out wasn’t just a joke.

We all stood there in line, looking out at the stage. There were some dance acts going on out there. The band sounded like cows dying. The dancers moved like they had wooden legs. Next a young, beak-nosed man who played a fiddle so bad it sounded like he was sawing on a log did his act. It was the kind of noise that made your asshole pucker.

“The sisters will win this thing,” said the old man. “I ain’t seen them yet, but they’ll probably show soon. Those dried-up-cunt bitches. They enter ever’ week and win the five hundred dollars. It’s those damn hymns. It gets the Jesus going in folks, and they feel like they got to vote for them. Shit, I’m up.”

The old man waddled out with that horrible doll, picked up a stool on the way out. His act was so painful I thought I might use a curtain rope to hang myself, but at the same time I admired the old bastard. He wasn’t a quitter. He wheezed and tried to throw his voice, but by the end of his act the dummy looked healthier than he did.

He came back with his doll and stool. He sat on the stool. “I tried to hit a high note there, when Private sang ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,’ and I damn near shit on myself. I think one of my rib bones moved.”

“You did fine,” I said.

“I did fine about fifty years ago and it was a spring morning and I had just knocked off a piece of ass. I did fine then. Least that’s how I like to remember it. Might have been a hot afternoon in the dead of summer and it might have been a stump-broke cow.”

“Just sit there and rest,” I said.

“You’re all right,” he said to me. “Sure you haven’t a drink?”

“Sure,” I said.

There was another dance troupe onstage, and a guy with some bowling pins he was going to juggle was next in line. Leonard and I glanced around, trying to take in the place. It didn’t look like a joint where a prostitute would be kept, or in this case made to go for free until she was used up. It didn’t look like a place where someone sold drugs. It looked like a place full of bad entertainment. That’s what made it a good hideout, of course, but I wasn’t convinced.

I noticed that the acts that finished were ushered along a certain path, and that there were two guys on either side of a dark stairway. They didn’t look like church deacons, but I decided to call them that in my mind. I left Leonard and walked over to the stairway, looked up it. I said, “What’s up there?”

One of the men stepped forward, said, “That’s private, sir.”

I went back to Leonard. I said, “There’s a whole nuther floor up there.”

“There’s a stairway on the other side of the stage too,” he said. “You can see it from here. It’s got bookends on either side of it too.”

I looked. Sure enough. Two more guys. If the two near us were not church deacons, those two were not in the choir. Upstairs could have just been a storage place for hymn books, but I doubted it.

“Buster don’t work the brothers,” Leonard said. “All white thugs.”

“It may not seem that long ago to them that your kind couldn’t come in, and it may be they liked it like that.”

“That really isn’t true,” Leonard said. “They did come in here, and you know it.”

“They did janitor work,” I said, “and they used to come up the stairs at the back and sat up there in the balcony.”

“Nigger money was good as any,” Leonard said. “I know. I sat up there in the balcony once and spat on a white boy’s head.”

“You did not,” I said.

“No, but now and again I like to dream.”

We were whispering a game plan when all of a sudden the little fellow that had signed us in came over. He said, “The Honey Girls are sick.”

“Who?” I said.

“The gospel singers I told you about,” said the old ventriloquist, who had come over. “Their adult diapers probably got bunched up and they couldn’t make it. Or they heard that young girl come on and sing and left. I know they were here. I seen them, the smug assholes.”

“That’ll be enough,” said the little man.

“Sorry,” said the ventriloquist, and he waddled back to his stool.

I had my mind on other things, and hadn’t even noticed the young girl, not really. But in the back of my mind I sort of remembered her doing a Patsy Cline number, and not badly at all.

“Honey Sisters say they got sick,” said the little man.

“Both of them?” Leonard said.

“It hit them sudden, so you two are on next.”

“Oh,” I said.

Leonard grabbed my elbow. “Come on, I still remember ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’ ”

“You’re yanking me,” I said. “We’re really going out there?”

“I sing in the shower,” Leonard said. “I do all right.”

“Oh, hell,” I said.

Well, we went out there, and I knew that old tune too. I am an atheist, but I like a good gospel tune now and again. We didn’t have any music, but there was the house band and they knew the tune, sort of, though I didn’t remember it with a tuba solo. We started out with it. Leonard was good, actually; he sounded way all right. I sort of chimed in when he lifted a hand to me, but after a few lines I forgot the words, so I started singing nonsense. An old lady in the front row in a wheelchair said, “Get the hook.”

Leonard finished out while I snapped my fingers and tried to look cool. I think had I had sunglasses I could have pulled it off.

When we finished, or more less quit, they were glad to see us go. Someone even threw a wadded-up paper cup at me. Fuckers missed.

When we exited on the other side, Leonard said, “Damn, Hap. You fucked it up. We could have won that prize money. Or I could have.”

“I didn’t make us out as a duet, since we have never sung together even once. I never intended to go out there.”

“I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“You sounded all right,” I said, “but don’t be thinking of it as a second job.”

“As for you,” Leonard said, “you don’t be thinking of it at all. Now, let’s see if we can find Tillie.”

“If she’s alive,” I said.

“She’s alive, they are going to pay for it. If she’s dead, they’re going to pay for it, and then pay a dividend.”

I didn’t even like Tillie, but I sure liked Brett. Brett called her a bent twig. She’d say, “Hap, she’s a bent twig, but she’s not broken. She can weather the storm and come out on the other side.”

She was pretty much still in the storm as far as I was concerned, but if the information we had was right, she didn’t deserve this; this was even worse than what should happen to politicians. We headed toward the staircase on the side where we exited, near the choirboys. A man over there pointed us toward an exit. He was a chubby guy in a faded, purple leisure suit old enough to belong in a museum. He said, “That was bad, boys. Real bad.”

We ignored him and headed for the staircase.

“Not over there,” he said, and he grabbed my sleeve. I shook him loose and kept going. I had a feeling that most everyone here had no idea what was going on upstairs, no idea that the man who ran the Gospel Opry was about as reverent and kind as the business end of a hatchet.

“Those guys don’t kid,” said the man who had grabbed my sleeve. He was talking about the two boys at the stairs. They stepped out, one toward me, one toward Leonard.

The choirboy on my side said, “You don’t come this way.”

I kicked him in the balls and he bent a little and I hit him with a right hook. He went against the wall and came off of it mad. I hit him again, a straight right to the jaw. He went to one knee and tried to draw a pistol from under his coat. I pulled mine and hit him in the head with it. He went to his hands and knees, and I hit him again. He kind of bent his elbows like he had failed to do a push-up and lay on the floor. It was then that I noticed my leg where Kevin had hit me with the axe handle was really aching. I noticed this because I was going to kick him again and decided against it.

I looked over at Leonard. His man was already unconscious at the base of the stairs. I think he took him out with one good punch. I rolled my man over and took his gun. I had one in either hand now. I went up the stairs behind Leonard. Back onstage I heard laughter. Someone had finally succeeded at something. A joke maybe.

When I got to the top of the stairs, Leonard had taken an automatic off of the man he had hit and he had it at the ready. I turned and looked down, wondering if the deacons across the way knew what we were up to. If they didn’t, they would soon. I figured the man who grabbed my sleeve would tell them. He might not know what really went on here, but he knew who he worked for.

Of course, if we were wrong, and what we expected was not at the top of the stairs, was really a bingo parlor, we would have a lot of explaining to do. For that matter, we could have a lot of explaining to do anyway.

The deacons figured it out. They came running across the stage in the middle of a dance number with a man and a woman in a horse suit. The man was the back end, the horse’s ass. I knew this because I came back down the stairs when I heard running. It gave me a view of the stage. The deacons knocked the horse over and the man and woman spilled out of it. The couple said some words you wouldn’t expect to hear at a Gospel Opry. God probably made a big black mark in their book right then.

The deacons didn’t have guns drawn, and they almost ran right over me they were coming so fast. When they saw my revolver, as well as the automatic I had taken off one of the choirboys, they stopped up short. They froze like ice cubes.

I said, “Do you really want to get dead?”

One man shook his head and started to run across the stage again, past the horse that had been put together again. A tinny trumpet was playing somewhere and a piano. The horse was dancing. That goddamn tuba was hitting some random notes; that guy, he ought to be put down in the ground with that tuba.

The other deacon, the one that didn’t run, put his hands up. He said, “You got to at least take my gun, so I can say I was unarmed.”

“That’ll work,” I said. “But pull it easy.”

He did, squatted down and put it on the floor and backed up. “I got no beef,” he said.

“That’s good,” I said, “because I am in one shitty mood.”

He backed out and went across the stage, walking fast. The couple in the horse suit just quit then. The woman pulled off the horse’s head and tossed it into the audience. I hoped she hit the old woman in the wheelchair who said to get the hook.

I picked up his gun, a little nine, and went up the stairs again. Leonard was waiting.

“Stop to go to the bathroom?” he asked.

“I was disarming a gentleman.”

Leonard pointed with his handgun. “There’s one door. Shall we see what’s on the other side? Lady or the tiger.”

“I think we might get both,” I said.

We moved quickly down the hall and Leonard kicked at the door and it swung back and came loose, hanging on one hinge, and then it came loose and fell. It was a toilet. It was empty.

“They were guarding a bathroom?” Leonard said. “Really.”

There was probably some way to get across, but we didn’t see it right away, and we were in a bit of a hurry. We put the guns in our waistbands, under our shirts, went down the stairs and behind the stage. The Gospel Opry folks were not deterred. The action, such as it was, was still going on. It was some kind of comedy act. When we got to the other side, we passed the man and the woman who had been wearing the horse outfit. They gave us the hard eye.

“Were you two part of the disruption?” said the woman.

“No, ma’am,” I said, and kept going. We went up the stairs where the deacons had been. We pulled out our guns. There were two doors along the hallway.

“I’ll take one, you take the other,” Leonard said.

We chose a door, nodded at each other, and stomp-kicked them. My door went back completely off the hinges, old as it was. I could hear Leonard still kicking as I went through.

There was a bed in the room and a little light to the right, and there was a row of four chairs on that side, and I’m dying if I’m lying, there were four men in those chairs, and the one closest to the light was reading a newspaper. It was like they were in a barbershop waiting their turn. Tillie was on the bed, and a nude man was on her, his naked ass bobbing like a basketball. Tillie wasn’t there, really. She was in some other zone. She had her eyes open, but they might as well have been closed. She looked skeletal. My guess is she hadn’t been fed in a while, outside of what was in a needle. She looked a lot like Brett, if Brett were a concentration-camp survivor, and that disturbed me even more.

The four men stood up. They were all dressed, though one had taken off his shoes and placed them under his chair. One of them was wearing a police uniform and had his hand on the pistol in his belt. He was out for a little on-duty nookie and a bit of blow it seemed.

By then, Leonard had come through the door. The cop pulled his pistol and I shot him. I hit him in the arm and he fell down on the floor and started going around in circles like Curly of the Three Stooges. He was yelling, “Don’t shoot me no more, don’t shoot me no more.”

Blood was all over the place.

The other three men acted as if to run, but Leonard resorted to foul language that had to do with their mothers. They sat back down, as if still waiting their turn. Their mothers be damned.

I said, “Where’s dickhead? Buster?”

Nobody said anything.

“He asked you a question,” Leonard said. “You don’t say, and we find him, we’re going to shoot all your toes off. And then your dick.”

By this time the man in the bed had got off Tillie and was standing beside the bed with one hand over his pecker.

Leonard said, “I had a turkey neck like that, I’d keep it covered too. Fact is, I’m an expert on dicks, and that is an ugly one.”

“He does know dicks,” I said.

The man in the police uniform had quit spinning and had stuck his head up under a chair. He said, “I’m hit. I’m hit.”

“No shit,” I said.

I went over and saw that Tillie was breathing hard. I pulled the blanket at the end of the bed over her. I looked at the naked man with his hand over his privates and I just went berserk. I don’t know what happened to me, but I just couldn’t stand to think people like this existed, that they could sit in chairs and wait their turns to top some drugged girl. I kicked the naked man in the balls and hit him in the head with the pistol, and then I went after the other three, but not before I kicked the police officer on the floor once and heeled his gun under the bed. I started hitting those three guys with the pistols, one in either hand. I was hitting so fast I looked like Shiva. They tried to run for it, but each time they did Leonard kicked them back into play, and I just went to work. I felt wrong. I felt savage. I felt awful, and yet, I felt right.

It didn’t take long before all of them were bleeding. Two were on the floor. One had fallen back into his chair. The naked man on the floor wasn’t moving. He was lying on his side and had thrown up all over the place, and the air was thick with the stench of vomit.

“Okay,” Leonard said. He walked over and put his gun against the shoeless man’s nose. He was the one who had sat back down. “Where is Buster?”

The man didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. A door opened at the far end and two men came in. One had a shotgun. He cut down with it, but we were already moving. I dropped to the floor behind the bed, and Leonard leaped through the door he had kicked down, landed out in the hallway. From under the bed I could see the man’s legs, and I shot at them, three times in rapid succession. I hit him somewhere because he yelped and fell down. I shot him again, this time in the top of the head, cracking it apart like a big walnut. The other man had a handgun and he had been firing it all this time. So far he had hit the bed, killed the barefoot man in the chair behind me, and had put some holes in the wall.

From under the bed I saw Leonard’s feet as he came through the other door, the one I had kicked down, and then he was on that bastard. I got to my feet and started around, tripped over the policeman who had, without me seeing him, started crawling toward the open doorway.

“Stay,” I said, as if speaking to a dog.

He stopped crawling.

By the time I got around to Leonard he had already taken the man down. Somehow the man had shot himself in the foot. I kicked him in the head, just to let him know I was in the game, and then Leonard reached down and took the man’s pistol. Considering this guy’s aim it was probably best to have left him with it. In time he would have shot himself again, maybe in the head.

“You stick,” I said to Leonard.

“All right, but I hear too much gunfire, I’m coming. Right after I kill the lot of them.”

I went through the door the two had come through, and by now I could hear yelling down below in the auditorium. The gunfire had roused things up, and was probably more exciting than anything they had seen tonight.

When I got into the room upstairs I saw that it was well tricked out for an old building. Lots of modern furniture, including a big couch. It was pushed back from the wall and I could see feet sticking out from behind it. I walked over there and laid my guns on the coffee table and grabbed the man by the ankles and pulled him out face-first. He tried to hang on to the floor, but this only resulted in his dragging his nails across it. He was a long lean man in a plaid sports coat with hair the color of black shoe polish. I said, “You Buster Smith?”

He said, “No.”

I got his wallet out of his back pocket and looked at his driver’s license. “Yes, you are,” I said. “I bet you always got caught when you played hide-and-go-seek as a kid.”

He got to one knee. “I did, actually.”

I went over and got my guns, said, “I wouldn’t try anything. I shoot you, then Leonard will shoot everyone else, and we’ll have a hard time explaining things. But you’ll be dead.”

We didn’t go to jail.

That’s the important part. Let me tell you why. So when it was done and everyone was hauled in, including me and Leonard, they waltzed us into the police chief. This is after interrogations, searches, a rubber glove up the asshole, just in case we were hiding hand grenades. He was a nice-looking guy with his black hair cut close to his head and one ear that stood out more than the other, as if it were signaling for a turn. He sat behind a big mahogany desk. There was a little sign on the desk that read: POLICE CHIEF.

“Well now, Hap Collins,” he said.

I recognized him. A little older. Still fit. James Dell. We had gone to school together.

“It’s been a while,” he said. “What I remember best about you is I don’t like you.”

“It’s a big club,” Leonard said. “Hap even has a newsletter.”

“Me and Jim dated the same girl,” I said.

“Not at the same time,” Jim said.

“He dated her last,” I said.

“That’s right. And I married her.”

“So, you won,” I said.

“Way I like to see it,” James said. “You boys raised some hell. And you shot people. And you hit people. And Hap, you killed a guy. I also got word there’s two boys with broken legs over in No Enterprise. They gave themselves up to the sheriff over there.”

“Nice guy,” I said.

“One of the men you shot was a police officer,” said James.

“I know. He was waiting in line to rape a young woman. How is she, by the way?”

“Hospital. Touch-and-go for a while. But she made it. Apparently she’s no stranger to drugs, so maybe she had some tolerance. Hadn’t eaten in days. Buster Smith, we talked to him. He came apart like a fresh biscuit. He was only tough when his money worked for him. That cop, by the way, he was the police chief.”

“Oh,” Leonard said. “Then, what are you?”

“The new police chief. I should also mention that the mayor is the one that caught a stray bullet and is as dead as an old bean can.”

“Mayor. Police chief. We had quite a night,” I said.

To make this part of the story short, we had to stay in the jail till our friend Marvin Hanson could get us a lawyer, and then we got out, and then we got no-billed, in spite of the fact we had hunted the bastard down and caused quite a ruckus. The former police chief was dead, by our hand, and the mayor was on the deceased list as well, by a stray slug, and the others who had been in the row of chairs were all prominent citizens. It was best to take it easy on us, let them cover their own dirt in their own way.

Thing was simply this: the crime being done to Tillie was so bad they let us pretty much skate on self-defense. Hell, after all, it is Texas.

Brett and I climbed into bed and she lay in the crook of my arm.

“Tillie is going to be out of the hospital tomorrow,” Brett said.

She had spent about three months in there. She had been in a bad way. I had to say this for the kid, she was tough as yesterday’s fajita meat.

“I have to go get her, then,” Brett said.

“All right,” I said.

“I know you don’t like her.”

“Correct.”

“You didn’t have to do what you did.”

“Yes, I did.”

“For me?”

“You and her.”

“But you don’t like her.”

“I don’t like a lot of things,” I said, “but you love her. You think she’s a bent twig, and maybe you’re right. No one deserves that.”

“But she sets herself up for it, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She does. I don’t think she’ll ever change. Sometime soon, she doesn’t, she’s going to be dead. She picks men like ducks pick June bugs. At random.”

“I know. I tried to be a good mother.”

“I know that too, so don’t start on how you failed. You did what you could.”

“I did set her father’s head on fire,” Brett said.

“Yes, you did,” I said. “But by all accounts, he had it coming.”

“He did, you know.”

“Never doubted it.”

“I love you, Hap.”

“And I love you, Brett.”

“Want to lose five minutes out of your life the hard way?” she said.

I laughed. “Now, that’s not nice.”

She laughed, rolled over, and turned off the light. And then she was very nice.