Vanilla Ride

Joe R. Lansdale Vanilla Ride

ALSO BY JOE R. LANSDALE

In the Hap and Leonard Series

Savage Season

Mucho Mojo

The Two-Bear Mambo

Bad Chili

Rumble Tumble

Captains Outrageous

Other Novels

Freezer Burn

A Fine Dark Line

The Bottoms

Sunset and Sawdust

Lost Echoes

Leather Maiden

For all you Hap and Leonard fans. Bless your little weird hearts.

The pistol is the devil’s red right hand.

—Steve Earle

Man turns everything into a weapon. Even his tongue.

—Hap Collins

1

I hadn’t been shot at in a while, and no one had hit me in the head for a whole month or two. It was kind of a record, and I was starting to feel special.

Brett and I were upstairs in our little rented house, lying in bed, breathing hard, having just arrived at the finish line of a slow, sweet race that at times can seem like a competitive sport, but when played right, even when you’re the last to arrive, can make you feel like a winner.

In that moment, life was good.

Brett sat up and fluffed her pillow behind her back and pushed her long bloodred hair to the side with one hand, shoved her chest forward in a way that made me feel mighty lucky, said, “I haven’t had that much fun since I pistol-whipped a redheaded midget.”

“You don’t know how romantic that makes me feel,” I said. “I think Little Hap just went looking for a place to hide.”

“I thought he just came out of hiding,” she said, and winked at me.

Thing was, she actually had pistol-whipped a midget. I was there. She was trying to find her daughter and save her life, but still, it was ugly, and I was a party to it. I will say this, however, in favor of the midget: he took his beating with stoic pride and refused to take it while wearing his cowboy hat, an expensive Stetson. He wanted it right on the skull and that’s where he got it.

“You know, I think they prefer being called dwarf instead of midget, or little people,” I said.

“No kidding. I don’t know about the rest of them, but the one I worked over, I just call him Pistol-Whipped.”

“Do you ever feel bad about it?”

“Nope.”

“He died, you know.”

“Not from the pistol whipping.”

This was also true. He ended up dead another way, but, man, that had been some pistol whipping. She had also set her ex-husband’s head on fire and put it out with a shovel, which is a far cry from a water hose. My sweet baby, at times, could make a man nervous.

She said, “Speaking of little guys,” and took hold of my crotch.

“Little guys?” I said. “That’s supposed to fire me up?”

“No. I’ll fire you up.”

She chuckled and slid over close and I took her in my arms and we snuggled. Things were looking operational when there was a knock on the door.

Typical.

I looked at the clock on the nightstand. Eleven p.m.

The knock came again, louder.

I got up and pulled on my robe and bunny slippers, and cursed. “Keep that thought. I’m going down to kill a late-night Bible salesman.”

“Will you bring me back his head, please?”

“On a platter.”

2

Downstairs, I went to the window, eased back the curtain and took a peek. Two big black guys, one supported on a stick, were standing on the steps. My best friend, Leonard Pine, and an ex-cop buddy, Marvin Hanson.

I opened the door.

“Sure isn’t good to see you,” I said to Leonard.

Leonard pushed on in. He was decked out in cowboy boots, jeans, a faded snap-pocket shirt that was a little stretched across his broad shoulders, and a shit-eating grin. “Now that’s no way to be,” he said.

“Your timing as usual is impeccable, brother,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“Leave your horse and hat at the corral?”

“The horse is wearing the hat,” Leonard said. “After the fun me and him had, I thought he deserved a little token of my appreciation. You can bet he’ll call tomorrow.”

“You’re funnier earlier in the day,” I said.

Marvin came in more slowly, using the cane.

“Like them foot rabbits,” he said, nodding at my shoes.

“Yeah, me and them are buds,” I said. “You’re getting around good.”

“You should have seen me before we went dancing. Those hip-hop steps have a way of making you weak.”

“We went for tacos,” Leonard said. “This guy, you can’t get him to do nothing fun. His idea of a good time is chewing gum with a fruity flavor.”

“Where’s the love of your life?” I asked Leonard.

“John?”

“No. Winston Churchill.”

“He’s mad at me.”

“Imagine that.”

“It’s nothing much. I think we called each other bitches and then I got mad enough to take a dump in the middle of the bed, and did.”

“Overshare,” I said.

“We both forget what started it, and we’re both holding out for an apology. I will, of course, cave, and then we’ll be back to normal. You got anything to eat?”

“I thought you ate tacos?”

“Two, maybe three hours ago.”

“I’m not feeling all that friendly right now,” I said. “Why would I want to feed you?”

“Interrupt something?” Leonard said, sliding into the kitchen to open the refrigerator.

“Yeah, me and Brett were just setting up the checkerboard. Marvin, why do you hang with this riffraff?”

Marvin found a soft chair and was sitting there, stretching out his leg, rubbing his knee. “I hang with him because I pity him.”

“So why let him bother me?”

“Leonard said you love late-night company.”

“He’s a lying sonofabitch.”

“Hey, boys,” Brett said.

I turned and saw her coming down the stairs. She had on a white shorty robe and her hair was bed fluffed and her legs were long enough to make a giraffe drown himself. Her eyes were half closed and she was beautiful.

Leonard came back into the living room, empty-handed.

Brett finished off the stairs, said, “Hi, Leonard.”

“Hi, Brett. You got anything to eat?”

“John lets you out to play this late?” she said.

“I’ll make it up to him tomorrow,” Leonard said. “I’ve got some moves, honey. If you like, I could show Hap some of my tricks, though it would be purely theoretical, of course.”

“Your biology sucks,” I said. “John. Brett. Different plumbing. Wouldn’t work.”

“Hi, Marvin,” she said.

Marvin smiled, gave her a little wave.

“I’m having milk and cookies,” she said. “Anyone else?”

“Me. Me,” Leonard said. “Are the cookies by any chance … vanilla?”

“They are,” Brett said. “Hap keeps them just for you, baby. There’s also your favorite. Dr Peppers. These are from the only plant where the original formula is used. We drove over there special to get them.”

“We were passing by the plant,” I said, “so I thought, why not.”

Leonard looked at me and batted his eyes. “You are the sweetest bastard ever squatted to crap over a pair of shoes.”

“Cookies aren’t just for you,” I said. “I like them too. And Dr Pepper.”

“He’s a liar,” Brett said. “He keeps them for you. He drinks that diet crap. Go sit down. Milk or Dr Pepper with your cookies?”

“Need you ask?” Leonard said.

“Marvin?” Brett said. “How about you?”

“Milk and cookies sounds fine.”

“Great,” she said. “Hap, get your ass in there and get the cookies. Some for me too. Chop-chop.”

I started toward the kitchen. As I passed her, she grabbed my arm. “Just kidding,” she said. “I’ll get them. I was just evaluating your training. You get an A. Later I’ll give you a treat, and it won’t be a dog biscuit.”

She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.

As I started back into the living room area Leonard said, “Good dog. Next you’ll be off the newspapers and using the yard.”

“That’s my goal.”

I sat down on the couch, the far end from Leonard, who had kicked off his shoes and was stretching his legs out.

“I can’t see what Brett sees in you, Hap,” Leonard said.

“It’s the parts you don’t see,” I said.

“Nor do I want to.”

“I’m thinking, maybe,” I said, “you didn’t really come over here to interrupt my sex life and have milk and cookies.”

“I’m having Dr Pepper,” Leonard said. “Dr Pepper that you got special just for me.”

“Go to hell, Leonard.”

“You’re right, Hap,” Marvin said. “We didn’t come over to have milk and cookies. It’s a little more complicated than that.”

3

We finished up our milk and cookies, Leonard his Dr Pepper and cookies, then Brett went upstairs to bed. The treat she offered me would have to be held in abeyance. I considered the delay Leonard’s fault, and gave him a black mark on my mental chalkboard. No star for you, asshole. Next time I’d get RC instead of Dr Pepper, see how that pulled his chain, maybe get some of those nasty coconut cookies he hated. I hated them too, but the punishment was worth consideration.

We went out in the yard to talk so Brett wouldn’t be bothered by our big mouths. She had bought some metal lawn chairs and put them out there, and I kept expecting to come out some morning and find they’d been chair-napped, as our part of the neighborhood was getting bad. Used to, you could leave your wallet on the porch swing and no one would bother it. These days, you left a cheese grater out, someone would steal the holes.

It was a nice night and there weren’t too many lights on our street, and the sky was clear so you could look up through the limbs of the elm tree at the edge of the yard and see stars. It was too cool for crickets and there wasn’t any traffic on the road out front. The air smelled fresh and a little sweet, like a baby’s breath, and in that moment I was glad we lived there in that house with that yard and that big elm, in what the old books about the South used to call genteel poverty.

After seating ourselves in the lawn chairs, I crossed my legs and dangled a bunny shoe.

Leonard said, “Man, you could have at least put on pants. That robe is a little too peekaboo.”

“My motto,” I said, “is if you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

“What you’re flauntin’ is enough to make a man turn a gun on himself,” Leonard said.

Marvin said, “I got a job proposition to discuss.”

“You’re gonna love this, Hap,” Leonard said.

I looked at Marvin. “Am I?”

“I don’t think you’re going to throw a parade, but here it is,” Marvin said. “My daughter’s daughter, her boyfriend, he’s been beating on her.”

This fit in with the theme Brett and I had been discussing. Maybe I should just send her over there with a shovel. If there was a dwarf, I could send her with a pistol.

I said, “Boyfriend? Your granddaughter? What is she, like twelve?”

“Eighteen.”

“Get out,” I said.

“They grow fast,” he said.

“And she’s a cutie,” Leonard said. “You should see her. A dirty old hetero man like you, you’d love her.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“Photograph,” Leonard said.

I turned to Marvin. “So what exactly is the deal?”

“Well, he whipped up on her and I went over and caught him pulling into his place and he got out and I beat him a little bit with my cane. It wore me out and it didn’t do my cane any good and I scuffed up a good pair of shoes. I had to get a new cane and have the shoes shined. That ain’t a quarter no more. White boys are doing it now, by the way. They like at least five dollars.”

“Inflation,” Leonard said.

“How old is the boyfriend?” I asked.

“Twenty-five or so,” Marvin said. “I don’t know exactly. Old enough to be a better person than he is. Old enough for me to kill him and drop his body in a hole somewhere.”

“So you beat him with your cane, and now you want… what?” I said. “Sounds like to me you took care of the problem, gave him an attitude adjustment. Did you leave the old cane up his ass and you want us to fetch it?”

“Deal is,” Marvin said, “he didn’t like it much, that beating, and he has friends he can go to. And my leg, it’s just getting good, but it’s not that good. I can whip one ass easy enough, but multiple asses, not so sure. And I’m only up for one ass at a time, maybe once a week during certain hours after lunch and well before sunset when the stars are aligned just right… I was lucky I caught him alone, without his posse.”

“Call me foolish,” I said, “but since you used to be a cop, did it occur to you that you might want to call the law and maybe have them go over there and do the domestic violence thing?”

“Therein lays the Shakespearean rub,” Marvin said.

“That sounds like something I’d like on my middle leg,” Leonard said.

“You see, my granddaughter, Julia, we call her Gadget, this guy she’s with, he’s kind of a drug dealer.”

“Kind of?” I asked.

“Okay,” Marvin said. “Absolutely he is. And if the law gets involved, well, she could get involved.”

“I’m not loving this at all, Leonard.”

“I was being facetious.”

I turned to Marvin. Fearing I already knew the answer, I asked, “Why would she get involved if the law got involved?”

“Because she is selling grass out of their trailer, and they, as I said, are drug dealers. As for the law, they are in the drug dealer’s pocket, in there with the lint and the pocket change. So it could really turn out bad.”

“I probably should know this already,” I said, “but what about Gadget’s father? Maybe he can do something.”

Marvin shook his head. “No reason you should know. I don’t make a point of talking about him much. He ran off when she was a fetus, and now her mother is at her wits’ end.”

“So what you need from us is…?” I asked.

“I need someone to do some serious ass whipping, and bring her home. If you can get by without the ass whipping and just bring her home, that’ll do. But I’d like to think there will be an ass whipping. Not meaning her ass, of course.”

“What if she doesn’t want to come home?”

“I think she will. I think she would have the other day, but at the last minute she didn’t. I’m not up to snuff. I burned myself out and didn’t have any energy left, so I had to let her go. There wasn’t anything I could do. I bluffed my way out to the car and got out of there. But you two, you can do it. You can bring her home.”

I studied on this a moment, looked at Leonard. He gave me a small nod. I said, “We’ll do it, but she doesn’t want to come home, I don’t know what to tell you. That’s the case, we bring her back, she’ll just run off again.”

“I understand that,” Marvin said. “But I saw something in her eyes before she got pulled away. She wanted to come home. I’m not sure she knows it outright, but I could tell.”

“I don’t trust things you see in people’s eyes,” I said. “You might be seeing your own reflection.”

“Me neither,” Leonard said, “but I’d sure like to whip that guy’s ass. We could make it a weekly tradition.”

“You mentioned that he has a posse,” I said.

“He does. My catching him alone … I understand that’s rare.”

“How many?”

“From my sources, I hear four, sometimes less, sometimes more. But generally, four. They stay in a trailer out in the woods. That’s where I caught him. I wasn’t using my head. Had they been there with him, my picture would probably be on a milk carton, people out beating the bushes, digging up anything looked like a grave. I don’t think they’re all that rough-and-tumble, but I don’t want you to think they can’t be dangerous they catch you just right.”

“Who are your sources, far as the size of his posse goes?”

“Formerly bad people gone straight. Or so they say. They may still be bad people. But I trust them on their head count.”

“Four is a lot,” I said.

“Hey,” Marvin said, “you two against a trailer full of scum, that’s not fair to the scum.”

“Don’t blow me, Marvin,” I said.

“I wouldn’t think of it. But you show up in that robe and bunny slippers, you’re bound to have them licked. They’ll laugh themselves to death.”

“You’re kind of nasty for a man wanting a favor,” I said.

Marvin grinned at me, then his face let loose of the smile and his eyes narrowed. “Look. I need your help. I’m asking … Hell, I’m begging a little, just not so that you can tell, all right?”

“This guy, what’s his name?”

“Oddly enough, I don’t know. I know where he lives. He has one of those sixties-style Afros, maybe not as big as the really big ones, but you know, out there, Jimi Hendrix like. But I can put you right at his trailer.”

I looked at Leonard. He gave me a nod.

I said, “We’ll scope it out. See what we can do.”

4

The place where Gadget was selling grass and her boyfriend was selling meaner drugs when he wasn’t using Gadget for a racquetball was not in LaBorde but just outside a nearby town called No Enterprise, where the law was two fat guys in a used cop car with so-so tires. They took the town’s cop checks, but they didn’t do much for it, except maybe catch a speeder now and then, maybe talk some gal into a blow job to get a pass on a ticket. The real money was in crooked enterprise. Or so Marvin told us. And Marvin isn’t often wrong about stuff like that. He was a cop for years. First in Houston, then in LaBorde. He said he knew about those guys and told us about them, and I took his word to be as true as the turning of the earth.

We drove over to No Enterprise in my pickup. The truck is one of those Dodges with a backseat and four doors and a short bed. I had recently traded for it and it ran good.

It was raining and it was a cool day, especially for early fall. Just the night before we had been sitting in my yard in shirtsleeves, and now it was cool enough to wish for excess hair on your chest. As for women, I don’t know exactly what they’d wish for. Probably a nice coat and a pair of shoes. I know Brett liked coats and shoes, especially shoes. She had enough in the closet to shoe a couple of monster-size centipedes, as long as they liked their footwear to come from Payless, Wal-Mart or Target. Equating women with shoes might be an old sexist cliché, but it didn’t change the fact Brett had a lot of shoes.

What Leonard and I had were some windbreakers. Mine was blue. Leonard’s was beige. We made a point of making sure we weren’t wearing the same colors. It’s hard to be convincing as tough guys when you’re wearing matching outfits.

We had the address from Marvin, and of course the thing to do was not to just drive right up on the place, as that would be foolish and dangerous, but, since the two of us together sometimes can only manage the IQ level of a ground squirrel, that’s exactly what we were going to do. We tried to come up with some nifty sophisticated plan on the way over, but we kept getting distracted and singing along with the CD player. We had to listen to Leonard’s music. If I didn’t want to, he pouted. He can pout big-time. Since we were in my truck and it was my CD player, I should have chosen some of the music. I wanted to play Amy Winehouse. He didn’t.

Anyway, we drove over there singing to Kasey Lansdale’s Back of My Smile CD, some Hank Williams, and a bit of Ernest Tubb. All good stuff. Then we listened to Patsy Cline. Neither of us had the balls to sing along with Patsy. That just isn’t done. By the time we were five miles outside of No Enterprise it occurred to us that we had yet to concoct some kind of strategy, so we stopped off in town at Big Burger, a local place that served food and was also a filling station with an open garage. Inside the garage was a lube rack and a lonely-looking guy in blue khakis sitting on an old-fashioned Coke crate turned on edge. He was reading without fear of insult a sex book titled in bold letters Poontang Palace. The book was probably older than the reader, and considering the size of the town he probably read more books than he lubed transmissions.

Inside, they took our order and a lanky guy in an apron brought it to the little table where we sat, placed the hamburger plates on the plastic checkered tablecloth, and went away. They made a good hamburger and some French fries that tasted as if they had been put out on the drainboard and pissed on the night before and left to dry. We both bought potato chips as a replacement and pondered how a place could make such good hamburgers and such shitty fries. What kind of cook could fry a burger and couldn’t dip some French fries in a deep fryer without screwing them up?

At that moment it seemed like a question equal to “why are we here?” We came closer to solving the French fry enigma than coming up with any kind of plan to deal with our problem concerning Gadget and her keepers.

“We’re just going to rough him up, aren’t we?” I said.

“He hit Gadget.”

“We don’t really know Gadget.”

“She’s Marvin’s granddaughter, isn’t she?”

“She is.”

“All I need to know, Hap, ole buddy.”

“So, we punch him in the head a little and we take Gadget with us.”

“We can punch him lots of places. He’s got friends, we got to punch them too.”

“Okay, so we punch him and anyone else gets in our way, and we punch them all kinds of places, and then we take Gadget.”

“Always been the plan, far as I’m concerned.”

“And if she doesn’t want to go?” I asked.

“We could take her.”

“That wouldn’t be smart, and it wouldn’t be any good. You know that. We told Marvin that.”

“You told him,” Leonard said, sipped his coffee and looked out the window at cars going by on the highway.

“But you know it’s true,” I said.

“Yeah, I know it. But I don’t like bastards like this guy and I don’t like what he’s done to the granddaughter…. Ever notice how many cars are red these days? That used to be bad luck, a red car.”

“No. I haven’t noticed. We don’t know this guy has done anything. She might be making him do it.”

“Making him do it? Sayin’, ‘How’s about hittin’ me upside the head’? That what she’s doin’?”

“I don’t mean she deserves it. I mean it may be some kind of sexual ritual. He punches her in the eye, then she sucks his dick. Then she punches him in the eye, and he goes for the taco. Then they start all over again.”

“That what you think?”

“No.”

“Just like to hear yourself talk, don’t you, Hap?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“So we’re back to roughing his ass up and seeing she wants to go with us.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it,” I said. “That is the plan. I mean, why do something smart and safe and well coordinated, when we can just drive up on them and start throwing knuckles.”

“Sometimes it works.”

“Sometimes it does. And sometimes we get our asses kicked around.”

“I know,” Leonard said. “I’ve seen it happen. But that ain’t often, is it?”

“Once is too goddamn often.”

“Point taken. Chocolate pie?”

5

We finished off our lunch with chocolate pie and more coffee, considered having another slice and another cup but talked ourselves out of it, reminded by the fact that we had a job to do, a promise to keep, and we didn’t want to do it toting too much weight in our bellies.

Outside I took a peek in the garage. The reader was still sitting on the upturned Coke crate, engrossed in his book. I sort of hoped no one would want a tire changed or a manifold replaced. I’d hate to think such intense concentration might be broken. A car backfired out on the highway. The dedicated reader didn’t move. He didn’t bat an eye. I guess he was at the good part, where someone was about to put the arrow in the target.

Leonard came over and stood by me, said, “Come on, doofus. I been standing out by the truck waiting. Let’s roll.”

Following Marvin’s directions over to the place, we listened to some more music and sang along some more, this time with Willie Nelson. I thought I did a pretty good “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” Leonard didn’t think so. We sang “In the Jailhouse Now,” which I thought might be a form of prophecy, considering what we were about to do.

Where we were going was kind of a peckerwood suburb, which was pretty much a clutch of fall-defoliated trees, some evergreen pines, a listing mobile home, and a dog hunched to drop a load in what passed for a yard. The dog was medium-sized, dirty yellow, and looked like the last meal he’d eaten was what he was dropping. He was working so hard at dropping those turds, his eyes were damn near crossed, had the kind of concentration that made you consider he might be close to figuring out the problems of string theory. He didn’t look owned. Had the look of a freelance dog. Maybe there was something to be said for that.

The yard wasn’t much. The rain had stopped and windblown leaves had bunched up all over the place. There were some cars parked there, and there were some people standing next to the cars. Eight guys, to be exact. They looked pretty young. There was a fellow standing in the doorway of the trailer in Scooby Doo shorts scratching his nuts like a squirrel sorting acorns. He was young too. I didn’t see anyone I thought was Gadget, unless she had been disguised as the stray yellow dog or was in that fellow’s shorts hiding next to his nut sack.

We parked and Leonard got my .38 snub-nosed revolver out of the glove box and stuck it in his pants and pulled his shirt and windbreaker over it. I have a gun permit, as does Leonard, but that gun wasn’t on it. It wasn’t even registered. It was for nefarious deeds.

I said, “Don’t use that.”

“Hey, better to have and not need than not have and need.”

“What about me?”

“You didn’t want me to use it, but now you want to carry it? I don’t think so.”

“It’s my gun.”

“Tough shit. Use your suave and debonair fucking charm.”

We got out and started walking toward the trailer. The people in the yard rapidly divided into two camps: the scared and the nervous. Some of them got in their cars and drove away quickly. They would be the buyers. The rest started inside the trailer. They would be the drug-selling posse. The guy in the shorts let them pass, then took his position again, hand in his drawers. He looked at us like he thought he was tough enough to chew the edge off a Buck knife. I didn’t think he looked as tough as he thought. However, sometimes looks can be deceiving.

There was what passed for music coming out of the trailer. Rap, I guess, but it sounded like someone beating an active washing machine with a log chain.

I said to Leonard as we walked up, “Take it easy, play it cool.”

“Cool is my middle name,” Leonard said.

“No,” I said. “No, it isn’t.”

We were close to the front door when the man holding his balls, a black guy with pale skin and a longish Afro that made him look like a time traveler from the late sixties, early seventies, said, “Man, you two are fuckin’ my game. You didn’t come here for what we sell, I can tell.”

“Ain’t this where they’re having the revival?” Leonard said. “I been wanting Jesus in my heart, or up my ass or somethin’. Way you’re digging, is he in them Scooby shorts with you?”

“You a funny nigger,” the black man said. “You don’t know shit. Scooby is cool. What the fuck you want?”

The idea that our bad guy guarding the door was worried about our dissing Scooby amused me a bit. We had stopped about four feet from the door. The trailer was up on concrete blocks, so the guy in the doorway was standing above us. He was still playing pocket pool. By this point, my nuts would have been chafed and my hand would have been tired enough I would have had to call in re inforcements. His legs had bruises on them. I figured that would be from Marvin’s cane. Behind him, in the slight darkness, I could see movement, and the sound of the music was loud enough and bad enough that the idea of kicking someone’s ass was beginning to appeal, if for no other reason than their lack of taste.

“I don’t like being called a nigger even when a nigger calls me that,” Leonard said.

“That some kind of joke too?”

“You see me laughin’?” Leonard said.

Another man, a lanky but muscled white guy with a close-shaved scalp, appeared at the Afro guy’s shoulder, looked out, said, “You want I should take care of them?”

“I ask you shit?” the Afro man said. “You hear me ask some shit from you? Go on in there and sit your white ass down. Pet the fuckin’ dog or pat my old lady’s ass, but don’t be gettin’ in my game unless I call on you.”

“Have it your fuckin’ way,” the white guy said, and disappeared back inside the trailer.

“I’m pettin’ your gal’s ass,” the white guy called from somewhere inside.

“That was like just a fuckin’ thing to say. Don’t you do it, asshole,” the Afro guy said, glancing inside the trailer. Then he looked back at us.

I said, “Could you ask him to turn down the music? I think I saw a bird fall out of a tree.”

He ignored me. “You cops?”

“We look like cops?” Leonard said.

“He does,” he said, pointing a finger at me.

“He’s white,” Leonard said. “All white guys look like cops.”

“I resent that,” I said.

“We ain’t cops,” Leonard said. “Now, get your hand off your bulbs, we maybe can do a little business. But you and me. No matter what the business. We ain’t shakin’ hands.”

The Afro guy didn’t pull his hand out of his shorts. His eyes narrowed. “All right, you buyin’ somethin’ or not?”

Leonard said, “You’re right. I fess up. We don’t want to buy anything. To be precise, we’re here to take somethin’. It’s Gadget we want.”

“Gadget?”

“Yep,” I said.

“You guys are nuts. Ain’t nobody around but you two, and there’s four of us and a badass dog, and you’re tellin’ me you’re takin’ my woman?”

“If you had two dogs,” Leonard said, “now that would be different.”

“There’s a dog?” I said.

The guy in the doorway shifted his nuts to the other side of his shorts and looked exasperated. “Gadget ain’t goin’ nowhere, man. She’s my hole.”

“Damn, that’s a romantic reference,” I said. “You say you got a dog in there?”

“She ain’t goin’,” the man said.

“Only if she wants to go,” I said. “And maybe even if she doesn’t want to. We’re kind of up in the air on that part… What kind of dog is it?”

“Ah,” he said, “I get it. You two from that old nigger. Her granddaddy That fuckin’ cripple.”

“Whipped your ass with a cane, didn’t he?” Leonard said. “That was some lively old cripple, wouldn’t you say? Your legs look like a fuckin’ zebra with them bruises.”

“He caught me off guard.”

“He hit you with that stick like he was dustin’ a rug, Tanedrue,” the white guy said from somewhere inside.

“You shut the fuck up,” Tanedrue said.

He turned back to us.

Leonard laughed a little. “Tanedrue? That’s your name? Your mama made that name up, didn’t she?”

“It’s African.”

“Naw it ain’t,” Leonard said. “If that don’t scream ignorant backwoods nigger, I don’t know what does. That was my name, I’d stick a sharp stick up my ass and impale myself.”

“That’s it,” Tanedrue said, and reached back into the trailer with his right hand. For a slight moment he was distracted, which of course was what we were waiting for.

Leonard moved quickly, caught Tanedrue by the feet, jerked them up and out. Tanedrue’s head smacked on the bottom of the trailer doorway and then Leonard dragged him down the metal stairs so that his head bounced on each and every one of them. I saw a bit of blood fly out from Tanedrue’s skull, then he went limp and tumbled off the stairs, his hand still in his shorts. No doubt about it, he was one tenacious ball handler.

We kept moving, straight into the trailer.

6

The white guy with the shaved head was the first one at the door. Leonard hit him between the eyes with a swinging elbow so hard I’m sure a distant relative in bad health in the old country crossed his eyes and died. The blow made the goon spin around and away from us. He went down on one knee and held his head, just to make sure it was still attached. While he was on his knees, his legs slightly spread, Leonard kicked him in the balls like he was making a soccer goal.

I was in right behind Leonard. As I entered, the music smacked me like a fist and the stink of the place draped over me like a blanket. Then a dog jumped at me from the shadows. It was a big, dark, growling dog and it was part of the stench. It went for my throat. I moved to the side slightly and caught the dog by the collar with one hand as its teeth snapped in the air, and saliva from the snap popped across my forehead. With the other hand, I caught its hind leg and picked it up high as I could manage. It was a heavy dog. I saw a window out of the corner of my eye, just over a stained kitchen sink. I tossed the dog at it, hard as I could. The window cracked and the dog went through it in a shower of black and tan fur and a tinkling of glass, its body doing a kind of horseshoe maneuver from the impact. The dog let out a whelp and a yip and then I heard nothing but the sound of its body striking the earth outside. There was blood and fur on the jagged glass. I suspected fleas had pulled parachute cords.

I heard Leonard say, “Come to papa,” and when I turned my head, I caught sight of Leonard holding a big bushy-headed white guy by the back of the neck, slamming his head into the wall so hard a mirror fell off and shattered.

As I turned, a thin black guy came down the hall at a rush, clubbed me in the ribs with a right hook that nearly caused me to piss myself. I tried to kick him, but there wasn’t any room. In a reflex action he shoved out with both hands, hit me in the chest and knocked me down on top of the guy Leonard had kicked in the balls. The ball-kicked dude was resting politely on the floor whimpering like a little girl who had lost her dolly, hands between his legs.

“You hurt my dog,” said the guy who shoved me.

I rolled up and he kicked at me and I scooped my hand under his leg and grabbed his face with my other hand and used my closest leg to sweep his standing leg out from under him. He hit his head on a counter, his teeth snapped together on his tongue, and he went down, blood foaming out of his mouth. I smelled something that made me think he’d bent a biscuit in his skivvies.

I heard a shriek from the back, looked down the hall. A young, long-legged woman was running at me. She was a dark-skinned girl with a lot of processed hair, maybe some extensions, and for all I knew a recent manicure and a toe ring. She jumped on me with her legs spread and straddled me, her ankles locked around my back; she had hold of my hair with one hand and was clawing my face with the other, still shrieking.

I hit her with a right cross between the eyes and she let go, though her legs stayed hooked. She fell back on her head, then her legs came undone and they sort of melted toward the floor with the rest of her.

Leonard was still working on the big hairy guy, had him by the mane and was smashing his head into the wall, cracking the paneling. All I could tell for sure was the guy now had a very flat nose and his lips looked like fat fishing worms that were coming apart. One of his teeth was embedded in the paneling and there was blood on the wall. One more slam and a big crucifix fell and bounced on the couch and then bounced on top of the ball-kicked guy and then onto the floor.

The ball-kicked guy had gotten some juice back. Maybe the crucifix revived him. He tried to get up, made it to his hands and knees. Leonard, without letting go of the guy whose head he was bouncing, kneed the other dude in the face, knocking him back down. He winced, did a kind of push-up, tried to come up. I got him from behind, right in the snickerdoodles again. He farted and went down and didn’t get up, either knocked out, dead, or hoping to God we thought he was. Right then he was probably wishing he had been thrown out the window with the dog. I was too. That was quite a fart.

I took a breath and put a hand on my side, then my face. I was bleeding from where the girl had scratched me.

I did a quick reconnoiter. It looked as if the trailer occupants were all pretty much Nap City. Leonard whirled the guy whose nose he had flattened around and hit him with a hard strike to the neck with the side of his hand. The guy went down. Not that he really needed that neck strike. He was going to fall anyway. Leonard kicked him once just to keep himself flexible.

I picked up the CD player on a shelf over the couch and slammed it against the wall. The CD flew out of it and I stepped on it. It felt good to have the air filled with emptiness.

That’s when the now awake Tanedrue came wobbling through the door, his hand no longer in his shorts. He reached for what he had been reaching for before, something just inside the door on top of the refrigerator. A little automatic. He got hold of it. As he brought it around, Leonard pulled my .38 and shot Tanedrue in the right thigh, just below the shorts. Tanedrue dropped the automatic, grabbed his leg, let out a yell that made my asshole pinch tight, then went down shrieking, holding his thigh, blood squirting everywhere.

“Goddamn, Leonard!”

Leonard gave me an exasperated look. “I started to let him shoot you, but I thought Brett would be mad.”

“Goddamn, Leonard.”

The guy who had bitten his tongue was closest at hand, so I grabbed his shirt by the front and pulled hard. It ripped off of his unconscious body, and I stuck it in Tanedrue’s wound. Tanedrue cussed me and struck out at me, so I hit him in the head a couple of times. “Lay down, you stupid fuck, before you bleed to death.”

“You shot me!” he said.

“Technically, he shot you,” I said, jerking my head at Leonard.

Leonard tossed my .38 on the couch, grabbed Tanedrue by the Afro and lifted him off the ground a little, slid behind him, and slipped his forearm around his neck, pushing in tight on the arteries there. He slid his choking hand into the bend of his other elbow and locked the other hand behind Tanedrue’s head, compressed while he expanded his chest.

Tanedrue passed out quicker than an asthmatic octogenarian fucking a sheep in a stuffy hayloft.

“Now fix him,” Leonard said, letting Tanedrue drop.

“I don’t know he can be fixed.”

“It ain’t through an artery. I’m a better shot than that.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yeah. Okay, I was lucky.”

Leonard was right. Tanedrue was hit through the meaty part of the thigh and he was losing blood from the hole in his leg, but the main artery had been missed. I tore some more of the shirt off the guy on the floor and wrapped Tanedrue’s leg as best I could, put my ear to his chest to make sure he was breathing. Leonard had used a blood choke, but sometimes they don’t come back.

“I guess that’s Gadget passed out over there,” I said.

“She wasn’t as glad to see us as I had hoped,” Leonard said. “I saw you hit her. You hit her hard. If she was wearing a Tampax, I bet you knocked it out of her ass.”

“She rearranged my looks a little,” I said, touching the scratches on my face.

“You look like an old-fashioned German duelist.”

I picked up Tanedrue’s automatic and went to the back of the trailer, just in case someone was hiding back there with a shotgun and a machete. There was no one else left. On a chest of drawers in front of a mirror there were some bags of white powder that I didn’t mistake for self-rising flour. There were some boxes of baby laxative there too, for cutting the stuff. On the floor were empty cheese cracker boxes, lots of wrappers for sweets and empty soft drink cans and bottles and a near-empty jar of peanut butter with the lid off. There was a box of half-eaten Cracker Jack. That would be the property of the health nut of the bunch. What remained of the peanut butter had turned dark as dried dog shit. And there was plenty of that to go around too. Dog shit in the corner, on the floor by the bed, at the edge of the dresser. There was a footprint in that pile. Not mine. This footprint was bare. There were some other piles that someone had thoughtfully covered with paper towels. Whoever did that was probably considered prissy. A fat roach crawled out of the peanut butter jar and scuttled under the bed.

Taped to the mirror on the dresser were birthday cards, an old Christmas card. They said “To Tanedrue” and were signed “Mom.” I felt a little sick looking at those, had to wonder how his mom felt about how her boy had turned out. For that matter, if my mother was alive, how would she have felt about me, hitting people and throwing dogs out windows? It wasn’t a line of thought I wanted to linger on.

When I looked up, I noticed the walls of the trailer were moving. I had seen it before in white trash housing and poor black folk shacks. Cockroaches. They were so thick in the walls they made the paneling flex like it was breathing. Yuck.

I went back to where Leonard was slapping Tanedrue briskly on the cheeks to either bring him awake or give his cheeks a touch of color.

“Wake up, nigger,” Leonard said.

“They got some real bad stuff back there,” I said. “And perhaps, as a nod to political correctness, I should note, for your own good, that you’re using the N word.”

“I’ve been busy with words and slapping in here,” Leonard said. “I’ve done run out on the cocksucker word, and I wore out motherfucker, and sonofabitch seems so lame, so I’m going for the gold … Ah, Sleeping Beauty awakes.”

7

Tanedrue woke up. We were squatting down beside him. Leonard said, “Every time I think of Gadget’s grandpa beating your ass with a cane, I get a kind of warm feeling all over. In fact, my dick gets hard.”

Tanedrue said, “I’m bleeding to death.”

“You ain’t bleeding to death, dumb ass,” Leonard said. “Not yet, anyway. It got the fat part of your leg, went all the way through. Bleeding has mostly stopped because Hap, who is like goddamn Florence Nightingale with a pecker, stuck your buddy’s shirt in the bullet hole and stopped the bleeding. Course, you might want to worry about blood poisoning from the dye in the shirt, that would be my concern. Oh yeah, and the bullet.”

“You could have shot my balls off.”

“You’d have to have some first,” I said.

Tanedrue was sitting on the floor with his legs stuck out, his back against the refrigerator, looking around. “You fucked everybody up, you done killed them.”

“No,” Leonard said, “nobody’s dead. The fucked-up part is right, probably a concussion here and there, so I’d wake them up pretty quick. Word is on concussions… you shouldn’t sleep. Do that, sometimes you don’t wake up, and what a shame that would be. Think of the loss to art, science, and literature. Oh, and the big guy there, with all the hair. He may not have a real profile anymore, so photo shots of him might be best from the front, him wearing a bag over his head, standing somewhat at a distance.”

“They could die,” Tanedrue said. “You might have hurt them real bad. And me, I don’t feel so good either.”

“Boy, that’s a shame,” Leonard said. “Considering you were going to shoot us, you fuckin’ asshole! Pour some monkey blood on it and shut up. Now listen here: Leave Gadget alone. Stay away from her. And if you have a day where you think maybe we’ve forgotten about you and you decide to bother her again, that’s the day we kneecap you, asshole, and then I’m gonna put your ass in an ant bed after I stuff it full of Gummi Bears, and then I’m gonna set your head on fire, and then I’m gonna get mad. Savvy?”

“Gummi Bears?” I said.

Tanedrue was almost crying, but he was still defiant. “You don’t know what you’re up against, nigger.”

About that time the guy whose shirt I had torn off woke and tried to sit up. I said, “Lay back down, ball sweat.”

He lay down and closed his eyes and stretched his arms out at his sides with the palms down and was quiet as a dead mouse.

“Now,” Leonard said, standing, “we’ll be taking Gadget with us, and before I go, I want to leave you with one more piece of wisdom.”

Leonard kicked Tanedrue in the head, hard, knocking his noggin back against the refrigerator. Without knowing it was going to come out of my mouth, I said, “Ouch.”

“You get my drift, dick cheese?” Leonard said.

Tanedrue nodded, blood dripping from his mouth, his hand held to the side of his head.

“Say it,” Leonard said.

“I got you,” Tanedrue said.

“That’s good. And you know, this place … you ought to get some nice curtains, a little better lighting, one of those de-stinkers that plug into the ’lectric socket, a friendlier goddamn dog. This joint is fuckin’ depressin’.”

“You ought to see the dog shit in the back room,” I said. “It’s not a pretty sight.”

“Clean that up too,” Leonard said. “Goddamn dog don’t want to see that, wonder he hasn’t committed dog-acide. Better yet, set fire to this whole place and start over.”

“Your little white powder in the back,” I said. “I’m gonna have to get rid of it.”

I put Tanedrue’s automatic in my waistband without blowing my dick off, went back to the bedroom. I could hear Tanedrue calling out, “Don’t do it, man. There’s people gonna be mad and they’re so bad they make you two look like weenies. I ain’t jerkin’ you. Come on, man. We can work some kind of deal.”

I heard Leonard give Tanedrue a whack and then the guy went silent.

I got the bags one at a time and took them to the bathroom and used my pocketknife to cut them open and flush the contents down the toilet, which was a nasty little number with a dark ring inside the bowl that wasn’t some kind of design.

I could hear Tanedrue groan every time he heard the toilet flush. I kept at it until I was finished. I took a leak and washed my hands and came back and stood over him. Leonard was squatting beside him.

I said, “All down the crapper. Thousands of dollars’ worth of blow.”

“You’re gonna wish you hadn’t done that,” Tanedrue said. “Them guys we work for, they ain’t got no sense of humor.”

“That may be,” Leonard said. “But a fashion tip. Them Scooby shorts, on a grown man, they aren’t that cool. Trust me.” Leonard sniffed at the air, looked at the guy on the floor without a shirt, wrinkled up his nose. “And maybe you ought to wipe that fucker’s ass.”

I looked down at Gadget. She was lying on her back, breathing deeply. She was wearing a tank top that barely kept her unfettered breasts in check and a pair of shorts that were cut so high and were so tight, if she yawned the damn things would have sucked up her ass. She was not bad to look at, though her eyes had dark circles like a raccoon’s around them. I had only hit her once, so I figured Tanedrue or one of his brethren had done the bulk of the knocking. My shot had given her a knot in the center of her forehead about the size of a turnip, so I too could be proud.

I got the .38, leaned over, and picked her up and threw her over my shoulder. She was very light, maybe a hundred and ten pounds. That’s great, Hap, you just punched out a little girl about half your weight.

I carried Gadget out to the truck and we looked around for their dog, just in case he was vengeful. But he was either on the other side of the trailer in a heap or had run off to join the circus. I hoped the latter. I liked dogs. I put Gadget in the backseat and Leonard got in the front and I drove us out of there. As we went, I saw the other dog, the yellow one, sitting beside the road. He turned his head to watch as we drove by.

Leonard turned to me, said, “Now, see. That worked out fine.”

“I hate you,” I said.

8

Leonard leaned back and looked over the seat at Gadget. He said, “She looks like some kind of angel got caught up in a fan.”

“I hit her,” I said.

“And boy did she have it coming.”

“I feel like a bully.”

“You had to do it.”

“I still don’t like it.”

“Had she been wearing a nose ring, would you have felt better?”

“Just a bit,” I said. “I really hate those things. Seriously tattooed arms would have helped too.”

Leonard grinned and shook his head. “You worry too much about things that are done, my brother. She’s taken beatings for no reason and you punched her because you wanted to keep your eyes in your head and get her away from those boneheads. Give yourself some slack.”

“Hitting women is not on my list of gentlemanly activities.”

“Well, whipping people’s asses and throwing their dog out the window might not be on the list either.”

“Yeah … well… At least I didn’t shoot anyone.”

“That’s right, point that out, put it all on me. But unlike you, I don’t feel guilty… Listen, man. You did what you had to do. And now we got to do something else. The .38 and dickhead’s automatic.”

We drove down some back trails and stopped by a little run of water that was just off the road and flowed out into the woods. The road was pretty messy and I figured if it rained harder it would be difficult to get down it, and even more difficult to get back out.

Climbing out of the truck, Leonard got some gloves from the toolbox fastened to the bed and wiped the .38 clean and threw it into the woods, into the shallow water there. He took the automatic and did the same.

We got back in the truck and I got back on the main road. “They find that stuff,” Leonard said, “it don’t mean a thing. We didn’t own the automatic. And your .38 was as cold as the cunt between a dead nun’s legs … Hey, Gadget. She’s coming to.”

Gadget sat up in the back and I watched her in the rearview mirror. She had a hand to her head. Right where I had hit her. “You hit me,” she said.

“Right between the eyes,” I said.

“He feels bad about it,” Leonard said.

“That don’t mean a damn thing to me. My head hurts.”

“He did it with love,” Leonard said.

“Who the fuck are you?” Then it struck her. “Ah, I know … My grandpa’s friends. Hank and Larry.”

“Hap and Leonard,” Leonard said. “I’m Leonard, and he’s Hap. You can remember the names because he’s a white guy and I’m a black guy.”

“I can see that… I know who you are.”

“Yeah, but can you remember which of us is which,” Leonard said. “Black guy, Leonard. White guy, Hap.”

“Why did you do it?” she said.

“Your grandpa asked us to,” I said. “And he’s a friend, and we remember when you were a baby and everyone thought you were going to grow up to be worth something.”

“That don’t mean nothin’,” she said. “I don’t even remember you guys.”

“In truth, you may not mean all that much to us,” Leonard said, “but Marvin, he means a lot. Come on, gal. What the hell you doin’? We know you got raised better than that.”

“You don’t know nothin’.”

“We know that,” I said. “We know you weren’t raised to bang drug dealers in a trailer with roaches in the walls and dog shit and a near empty jar of cheap peanut butter on the floor.”

“Don’t forget the cocaine,” Leonard said.

“That too,” I said.

“And a criminal dog,” Leonard said. “That pup y’all got, he has done gone over to the dark side.”

Gadget took a deep breath, narrowed her eyes. “I remember Grandpa said you two thought you were funny.”

9

As we arrived in No Enterprise it started to rain heavy and the sky took on a hazy green look like nature had vomited into the heavens. The wind hit the truck hard enough to move it. Looking at the town through wet swaths made by the wipers, it was even more depressing, a weak hope thrown together with brick and glass. Someone thought the railroad would come through there many years ago, and it didn’t. What was left now was nothing more than a hope and a dream.

The rain was running deep in the streets and in the gutters. My gas gauge pinged. We drove back to the place where we had eaten and parked under the overhang where the fuel pumps were. Leonard got out and began putting gas in the truck. The rain pounded on the overhang. The water splashed all around us. It was pretty dark for the time of day. I glanced at Leonard standing by the pump working the gas nozzle. He gave me a weak salute. I shot him the finger. He shot me the finger back. I never said we were mature.

I looked back at Gadget.

“How’d you get that name, Gadget?” I said. “I used to know, but I forgot.”

She was slow with the answer. “I liked fixing things when I was a girl. I had a knack … Look, Grandpa shouldn’t have asked you to do this. This isn’t good for me or anyone. Other day, when he hit Tanedrue with the cane—”

“Hold up,” I said. “How many times did he hit him? I just got to know.”

“A lot. He did it quick. I thought Tanedrue was going to shoot him. I begged him not to.”

“Your boyfriend sounds like aces. Goddamn, I bet you’re proud.”

“You got to take me back, Leonard—”

“I’m Hap.”

“Whatever. Or let me out here, and I can call someone.”

“We’re someone.”

“I mean someone Tanedrue knows. I can’t call him. Cell phones don’t work out there, and that’s all they got. Cell phones. They like it that way. Hell, I don’t even have a phone. Just let me have yours, so I can call someone in town they know, and then you can go on. I see them, I can tell them something, whatever you want, make it some kind of misunderstanding, and I can say you apologized—”

“Not likely,” I said.

“You don’t want to get into this any deeper and drag me down too. You do, and hell will be coming.”

“Too late,” I said. “Did you really like it out there, Gadget?”

Again, hesitation. “I don’t know.”

“That means no,” I said.

“I loved Tanedrue.”

“Loved?”

“Love. I love him.”

“You want to go back because you’re using. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“I think it is.”

“I said it isn’t.”

“It isn’t Tanedrue you want, it’s the monkey.”

“I just like it. I’m not hooked.”

“That’s what they all say.”

She held her stomach.

I said, “You hungry?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s start with the idea that you are.”

“Sometimes, I try to eat, I throw up.”

“That’s the drugs, or …”

“I’m not pregnant. I been careful about that.”

“So, you do have some common sense. Damn, girl. You don’t have to do this, live like trash.”

“You a social worker?”

“No. Unlike social workers, I really care.”

She took a long time to respond again. That was okay. I was getting used to it.

“Tanedrue, he said he was gonna quit dealing, soon as he got us a nest egg.”

“A rotten egg.”

“He meant it. He loves me.”

“You are young, aren’t you?”

“You don’t know everything.”

“I don’t know anything. Older I get, less I think I know. But I know this, and I’m going to be crude to make my point. What Tanedrue has is a dumb bitch he can screw and lie to and feed drugs to, and when he’s through with you, when you get so fucked up you can’t tell the difference between a fat mouse and a full-grown elephant, he’ll get rid of you, kid. You won’t be fresh meat to him no more. You won’t be pretty, and you won’t be nothing but a whining whore with a habit. Maybe just some dumb dead bitch in a ditch somewhere.”

“I ain’t no whore.”

“You will be. That’s how it’ll work. He’ll turn you out, baby. So he can make a few more bucks off his horse before it dies. He’ll tell you how you’re doin’ it for the two of you, and it don’t mean nothin’, not really—”

“Shut up! You don’t know everything.”

“You said that already, and I even agreed with you.”

Leonard opened the door, said, “Give me some gas money.”

“You pay”

“I haven’t got any money.”

I gave him some money, hesitated, said, “Let’s get some coffee. Gadget here, she might could eat something.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Then watch us drink coffee,” I said. “And if you run off, we’ll just chase you down. We don’t care how it looks or what anyone thinks. We are wild and crazy guys.”

“What if Tanedrue and the rest of them come and find you?” she said.

“That would be bad for them,” Leonard said. “Didn’t you just hear Hap say we were wild and crazy?”

10

I parked us near the garage between some yellow lines and under the overhang. The rain plunked on the aluminum above us like buckshot. The guy who had been reading Poontang Palace was still inside the garage, but now he was digging around in a toolbox, probably trying to find a big enough hammer to beat some sort of automotive problem into submission.

Inside the joint we got the same table as before and the guy who waited on us before came over, said, “You must like it here, back in the same day, and now with a friend.”

“We don’t like the fries, just want to go on record with that,” Leonard said. “But the hamburgers do the alligator rock. And she’s not a friend.”

“What?” the waiter said.

“He likes the hamburgers,” I said. “He doesn’t like the fries. The girl is not a friend. She’s a friend of a friend.”

The waiter didn’t look at me. He studied Leonard for a moment. Leonard smiled. There was always something about that smile. It was less like a smile and more like a snake trying to grin up a frog right before it struck and ate it.

The waiter looked away from Leonard, looked at me. “What happened to your face?”

I reached up and touched the scratches on my cheeks. “Briars.”

“You ought to see his ass,” Leonard said. “That’s where the real work was done.”

“That right?” the waiter said. “Sorry I asked. Here’s menus.”

When the waiter went away, I said, “What you going to have, Gadget?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“That crummy way you feel, that’s because you’re so hungry your belly thinks your throat’s cut. Have some soup. They got soup here. I don’t know how it is, but stay away from the French fries. Soup, any kind of soup, if it’s fresh, it’s pretty hard to mess up.”

She didn’t order anything, but when the waiter came back I ordered a cup of coffee and a bowl of chicken soup and Leonard ordered another hamburger, minus the fries, potato chips instead.

When the waiter was gone, I looked at Leonard, said, “You just ate couple hours ago. Maybe less. You want another hamburger?”

“Whipping the pure-dee-dog-doodie out of people makes me hungry. Don’t it you?”

“A little.”

The food came and I drank the coffee and pushed the soup over close to Gadget. I said, “I don’t want the soup after all. Why don’t you give it a taste? It smells pretty good.”

She shook her head. “I know what you’re doing.”

I nodded. “Suit yourself.”

Leonard dug into his hamburger. “Oh, Jesus, this is so good it makes you want to hold down a wild hog and fuck it in the ass.”

“That passes for manners at his house,” I said to Gadget.

“I’ve heard worse.”

I noticed she had picked up the spoon and was starting to stir the soup. I pushed the crackers over close to her. She opened one of the cracker packages and bit a corner off the cracker. She crumbled the rest in her soup. I turned at an angle so I wasn’t watching her. I got up and went over and ordered some pie and a glass of milk. When my pie and milk came, Leonard had to have the same, and now Gadget, finished with her soup, wanted some pie and milk too.

By this time she was starting to look better. I had a feeling it had been a long time since she’d eaten anything besides cheese crackers, potato chips, peanut butter and Cracker Jack. My guess was she was the neatnik who put the paper towels over the dog piles.

I paid the bill because Leonard didn’t have any money, or said he didn’t, and we drove out of there. The rain had died out and everything, even the crummy little town, looked better than before, spit-cleaned by nature. We hadn’t gone a mile before we looked back and saw Gadget had gone to sleep in the backseat, her belly full, and maybe, for a moment, satiated.

Of course, there was that hairy old cocaine monkey, and when she woke up, it was sure to chatter and show its ass.

I tried to tell myself we had done all we could do. What Marvin had asked. But somehow I didn’t feel satisfied that we could say “job well done.” I kept thinking about what Tanedrue had said, about what Gadget had said. About how we didn’t know what we had done and that hell was coming.

11

When we got back to LaBorde, Gadget was still sleeping. We drove through the wet town on out into the country where Marvin Hanson stayed. He lived there with his daughter and his wife. They had once been a very close family then Marvin’s pecker had gotten excited about a young woman; the same young woman I had liked. She was dead now, and Marvin had gone back to his family and I had gotten over my feelings of wanting to skin him and nail his hide to the side of a barn and throw knives at it. Got over it long ago. Me and him and Leonard had gone through a lot, and we were bonded, as they like to say.

Marvin and his wife, Rachel, had gotten back together, and they were doing all right. But during that time, their daughter, JoAnna, had gone through some stuff, and then she had a daughter of her own, Julie, aka Gadget, by the guy who had run off. I didn’t know that until Marvin told me. I knew I had never met him, but then again, much as Leonard and I liked Marvin, his family didn’t hang with us, didn’t even send us a Christmas card. They could have had three more kids, and close as the three of us were, we might not have known.

Now they all lived in a small two-bedroom house out in the country, trying to pull everything together and live happily ever after.

The house was off a rain-slick red clay road, and we started down it just as Gadget awakened and sat up in the backseat.

“If you hadn’t had such a bad day,” I said, “I’d have made you wear your seat belt, and I should have anyway.”

“You’re not my daddy,” she said.

“No,” Leonard said, “and from what I’ve heard, your daddy, whoever he is, isn’t claiming you either. You weren’t nothin’ to him but a hump and a squirt.”

Gadget crossed her arms and sat back in her seat and looked mad. I gave Leonard a look that could have paralyzed a chicken at twenty paces. If it bothered him, struck a nerve anywhere inside that hard black hide, I didn’t notice it.

We drove up to Marvin’s house and I got out and opened the back door of the truck. Gadget got out with her arms still crossed and walked briskly toward the house. I tried very hard not to notice that from the rear in those very short shorts she had what might be a championship butt. If not, it was certainly a top contender.

Marvin came out on the porch with his cane, and Gadget walked by him like he wasn’t there, went inside and slammed the door. Marvin looked back at her through the screen. I could see his shoulders slouch. JoAnna, Gadget’s mother, came out on the porch. She looked at us and tried to smile, then went back inside. I heard her call out for her daughter.

We hadn’t moved away from the truck. We leaned against it and waited. Marvin came out and nodded at me. “Thanks.” He looked at Leonard. “Thanks.”

“We didn’t have anything else to do,” Leonard said. “Me and him, we usually save this day for a little Bible study, but all the dirty parts we’ve read so much they don’t do anything for us anymore.”

Marvin ignored Leonard, as was often his custom, looked at me, said, “You got her back, but other than that, how did it go?”

“Let me see,” I said. “We went to the trailer, and the guy you beat with the cane was playing with his balls, which he kept in a somewhat overly snug pair of Scooby Doo boxer shorts. Leonard jerked him out of the trailer and bounced his head, and then we went inside and some guy got kicked in the balls a few times. A guy got his face flattened on a wall. The guy who was playing with his balls pulled a gun and Leonard shot him and I stuffed the bullet hole with a shirt.”

“Bullet hole?” Marvin said.

“Yeah,” Leonard said. “I shot the guy you beat with a cane.”

“You shot him?”

“In the fat part of the thigh.”

“He was shooting to kill,” I said. “But he missed and only wounded him.”

“He was going to shoot us,” Leonard said.

Marvin shook his head. “Damn, I’d have gone myself, guys. You know that, hadn’t been for this bum leg.”

“You think we don’t know that?” Leonard said.

“You could catch some shit for shooting someone, even if it wasn’t life-threatening,” Marvin said.

“Yeah, maybe,” Leonard said. “Hap, he threw a dog out the window.”

“It was trying to bite me … We got rid of the guns and Leonard lectured them on fixing the place up a bit. Gave out a fashion tip … Oh, and there was dog crap all over the place. Oh yeah, I broke their CD player and stomped the shit out of a really bad rap CD.”

“That’s an oxymoron,” Marvin said.

“They had drugs,” Leonard said.

“And not just a little,” I said. “Not some baggie of grass. Gadget… she’s got some juice in her moose, man. She’s hooked on the snort. She’s not just smokin’ weed.”

“No,” Marvin said.

“I’d recommend some kind of clinic, and quick,” I said. “You give her any slack, she’ll be back out there snorting some of what I flushed down the toilet. She thinks she’s in love with numb nuts, Tanedrue, but down deep I think she knows he’s what nature wipes its ass on. Just isn’t ready to face it. Not yet. Way I figure, Tanedrue has got her hooked on drugs so he can use her until he doesn’t want to use her. Hell, man, I don’t need to tell you that. You know how it works. Sorry we got to lay it on you like this.”

“Yeah,” Marvin said.

“It ain’t good news,” Leonard said, “but it’s the news.”

“I think we’re home free, far as those yo-yos are concerned,” I said. “All done.”

Marvin thought for a moment, then said, “Cops over there are dirty as a wino’s drawers. Drug dealers own them, so don’t be so sure they won’t try and screw you over, bring in some artillery, a mechanic to go with it, and it’ll be my fault. I shouldn’t have asked you.”

“No one else to ask,” Leonard said. “No one else would be so stupid.”

“You have a point,” Marvin said.

“My take is the dirty cops might not like we fucked with their guys,” I said, “but I can’t see them doing anything about it. They don’t really know who we are. Gadget didn’t tell them, ’cause she didn’t even get our names right. They know we’re connected to you, though. That I’m sure of.”

“I sort of let slip how much I enjoyed you beating Tanedrue’s ass with the walking stick,” Leonard said. “But then again, I wasn’t really trying to hide. We didn’t do no sneakin’. I did want to mention, however, that Gadget said you said we thought we were funny, as if it weren’t confirmed.”

Marvin ignored that.

“It was pretty much our usual plan,” I said. “We just went in there and beat the hell out of ’em, tossed a dog out a window, shot one of ’em in the leg, and messed up the paneling. It got a little wilder than we thought. I know that’s a synopsis of a synopsis I already gave you, but that part about us not being really funny, that really hurt, man, and I didn’t want to revisit that territory.”

“I see scratches,” Marvin said, nodding at my face.

“He tried to fuck a cat,” Leonard said, “and the cat didn’t like it.”

“Those look like some pretty good claws,” Marvin said. “Like maybe Gadget did it.”

“Now I remember why you were a good policeman,” I said. “I had to hit her. I’m not proud of it.”

“You did what you had to do, I’m sure,” he said.

“We got to go,” I said. “Gadget, she’s got to have some serious detox, buddy.”

“That costs serious money,” Marvin said.

“Maybe so,” I said, “but unless you’re going to lock her in a room and feed her soup through a straw while she’s tied down to a bed wearing a strait jacket, you got to find a way, man.”

“I know,” he said. “And I will. But I am worried about you guys. When I asked for help I was thinking about Gadget, and not much else. I should have known better. I did know better. All I could think about was her, and the only people I knew to ask were you. I knew it could have consequences for you, for all of us. But I had to get her out of there. Listen, I know two, three guys we could get for protection. There’s Jim Bob, and maybe that friend of yours, Veil.”

“I hope Veil doesn’t hear you address us as friends,” Leonard said. “He might shoot us all. As for Jim Bob, no need to stir him up.”

“And there’s another guy that owes me. He could help.”

We shook our heads.

“You fellas sure?”

“We been over this,” Leonard said. “We don’t need anyone, and you don’t owe us a thing. Besides, those guys today, they don’t want to mess with me and Hap again because we are two badass motherfuckers. Didn’t I tell you Hap threw a dog out a window?”

As I drove us away, I said, “Two badass motherfuckers?”

“Sound convincing?”

“It sounds like you have been watching too much Shaft or Superfly.”

“Marvin has enough to worry about. We knew what we were getting into when we took the job.”

I nodded. “Absolutely.”

We chatted a bit about how we actually thought things would be okay. About how they were small-time goobers and they wouldn’t mess with Marvin either, ’cause there was no mileage in that.

By the time we got back to LaBorde, we had almost convinced ourselves that we were in fact badass motherfuckers. Had we felt any tougher, we’d have stopped by the side of the road to shit in plain sight and wipe our asses on dried grass with sticker burs in it.

12

By the next day things seemed to have gone back to normal. You know, the basics: killing another perfectly good day and knowing you weren’t going to get it back.

Brett was working at her nurse job, and I at a typically shabby day job at a construction site. Actually, it was a crummy two-day job picking up lumber and nails and all the stuff the major workers dropped. When I was hired, my boss, a black guy, told me, “You’re just one of the niggers, or wetbacks. Used to be they did what you’re doin’. I did what you’re doin’. Now you got to do it. That’s the job, take it or leave it. You’re late, I hire a beaner at half your price.”

I took it. I got paid by the day, and that was good. I still had a little money from another job I’d done that had to do with the sort of stuff Leonard and I excelled at. Intellectual work, like kicking someone’s ass up under their ears and convincing ourselves it was for the greater good. It was rough on the knuckles, bad on the shoes, and tough on the conscience, or at least it was on mine.

Anyway, in the money department, Brett and I weren’t rich, but we had most everything paid off and weren’t hurting. And, as always, another job would pop up. Also, Marvin was starting a private investigations company and Leonard and I had been promised work from him once he got that up and running. I couldn’t wait to peep in windows and take pictures of the wrong couples coming out of cheap motels.

I got off work and went home and showered the sweat off and read a little from a book by an author who didn’t use quotation marks and was scared to death his work might be entertaining. I gave up on the book and put it in the to-be-swapped pile for the used bookstore, went upstairs, and watched TV

There was some good History Channel stuff, and some Discovery Channel stuff on, but I watched a show about some dumb blondes who had access to a lot of money and didn’t do much of anything all day but plan ways to spend that money. I couldn’t take my eyes off the program. I told myself down deep they couldn’t be as dumb as they seemed and that there was something spiritual about them. I think their most spiritual aspect was their lack of clothing. Their benefactor was an eighty-year-old gray guy who walked around in a house robe and took Viagra so he could bang all three and sleep in the bed with them all at the same time. He was my hero.

When I heard the front door slam, I switched the channel. Brett was home. I found a history program about Genghis Khan. I had seen the program before and had enjoyed it. Seen it twice even, but by this go-round I knew Genghis was dead and he wasn’t coming back.

Brett came upstairs. She looked cute in her nurse’s uniform. Her flame-red hair had slipped out from under her cap and was hanging over one eye. She took off the cap and sighed and threw the cap on a chair. She came over and turned her back to me. I sat up on the bed and unzipped her dress. She wiggled out of it.

“I want to order pizza,” she said, “and then fuck like a couple of greased weasels.”

“My lucky day.”

“And don’t you forget it.”

She sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the phone and called the pizza place. I unsnapped her bra and played with her breasts while she called.

When she hung up, I said, “Bet we could do it before the pizza delivery gets here.”

“He’s ten minutes away,” she said. “What fun is there in that?”

“About ten minutes’ worth.”

“You are correct, sir,” she said. She rolled onto the bed and I took her in my arms and we kissed. “Will you wear the bunny slippers, baby?”

“Oh, hell yes,” I said.

But I didn’t. The rest of it just happened naturally.

13

We ate the pizza downstairs and Brett read the newspaper and I read part of a Western novel and thought it was pretty good, even if the author did talk about starting his herd with two steers; that didn’t exactly endear me to his Western lore or his grasp of basic biology, but the story was all right. Then there was a knock at the door. I went to the curtain and pulled it back and looked out. The glass was fogged over from the cold outside. I had to wipe it a bit, and then I could see Leonard standing by the door, looking toward the curtain. When he saw me he lifted a hand.

I let him in, and felt the air blow past. It had really turned chilly.

“Winter’s here,” Leonard said. “My nuts have frozen up to the size of raisins.”

“Now, don’t brag,” I said.

Brett got up from her chair and came over and hugged Leonard, said, “We still got some pizza, baby, you want it.”

“No thanks,” Leonard said. “Well… how much pizza?”

“Couple of pieces?” Brett said.

“I can do that. And then I could maybe have some of those cookies Hap got for me and some of the Dr Pepper he got me special too.”

“I like that stuff myself,” I said.

Leonard winked at me. “You are so cute,” he said.

I sat at the kitchen table with Leonard while he ate and Brett went back in the living room to finish reading the paper. When Leonard finished eating the pizza and was ready to start on the cookies, I put a pot of decaf on, said, “Okay, what’s going on?”

“What?” Leonard said.

“Why are you here?”

“Because you’re my bestest goddamn buddy in the whole damn world. My brother. My doppelganger. My—”

“Yeah, but why are you here?”

“I always come over.”

“And you’re always welcome. But where’s John? Why haven’t you mentioned him? You know better than to jack with me, Leonard. I know you better than anyone in the world. Better than you know you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Leonard pushed a vanilla cookie around on his plate. “John and I aren’t doing so good.”

“Could it have anything to do with you crappin’ in the bed?”

“I was mad.”

“You? Oh, say thee not such foul lies about your own sweet self.”

“I said some things.”

“Another surprise.”

“I’ve sort of been staying somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Motels. I get off the security job, I been picking a different one each night. Quite the thrilling experience. One of them, it has one of those old-time beds where you put a quarter in a machine and the bed vibrates. … Course, it doesn’t work. But the mechanism is still there, and you can’t imagine how the nostalgia comforts me. Hey, and there’s this one cheap motel, the sheets, they got shit stains on them. I stayed there twice, two different rooms, shit stains on blue sheets. I guess it saves on laundry soap, leavin’ them like that.”

I got up and poured us some coffee and got some sweetener and cream. We fixed our coffee. I stirred mine longer than was necessary. I said, “Have you tried to talk to John?”

“I have.”

“And what’s the sticking point?”

“He doesn’t like me.”

“Bullshit. What’s going on?”

“The queer stuff.”

“You’re both queer, Leonard.”

“Really? Well, that puts some things in perspective.”

“So, John feels guilty about being gay?”

“John’s brother hates him because he’s gay. He tells him he doesn’t have to be gay. He’s telling him God doesn’t want him gay.”

“Even if God made him that way?” I said. “Provided there was a God.”

“If there was one, and he made someone gay wouldn’t God his own goddamn self be responsible?” Leonard said.

“In my book, yes. But in the Christians’ book, that rascal can do no wrong. Someone survives a hurricane, it was God’s mercy. Someone drowns, it was God’s will. I don’t like him. He’s a bully.”

We touched fists. It’s a manly bonding thing.

“Or maybe,” Leonard said, “God is gay and it’s the rest of you people who are messed up and going to hell. You ever think about that? Maybe there’s another Bible out there that tells us to stone you guys and not to lie with women because it’s strange. It is, you know.”

“Brett and I like it.”

Leonard sipped some coffee. “You see, John is starting to feel he’s not supposed to be gay, and unlike us, on some level he believes that God stuff. He thinks he’s violated God’s law, so he’s going to church counseling to get straight.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“That’s what he thinks. For heaven’s sake.”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“I’ve tried to tell him that even if there is a God, the New Testament is the one to go by, and it’s not tough on us queers. It’s just the old mean version of God that gives us a hard time. Motherfucker in the Old Testament won’t even let us have a pork chop.”

“God must have finally got laid between the Old and the New Testament,” I said. “’Cause between those two books, he sure mellowed out.”

“Who’d he lay, male or female?”

“Either … Look, Leonard, I’m sorry about John.”

“Not half as sorry as I am. I’ve called him, I wrote him a letter. I even did an e-mail from one of the hotels on my laptop.”

“You got a laptop?”

“John bought it for me. At home I even got a printer and some paper to print out on.”

“You are so cosmopolitan.”

“Tell me about it. But the thing is, he’s going to take these classes so he can tell his brain and his dick that he’s been confused and he likes women. I can’t think of anything yuckier than learning to like that old pink snapper.… No disrespect to you and Brett.”

“I get your point. You want me to talk to him?”

“I don’t know. I thought about that, thought about asking you. But it won’t matter. He thinks he’s on the road to hell and wang and butt hole are no longer on the smorgasbord.”

“Leonard, thy middle name is romance. You and Tanedrue, you should get together, write a book on courting. Look here, you’re not staying in any motel. You’ll park your happy ass on the couch tonight.”

“Thanks, Hap.”

“I’m just afraid you keep trying to hook up those motel Internet connections to your laptop you’ll put your eye out. So I want you here, safe and sound.”

“Thanks, brother. Can I have the last cookie?”

“No.”

We sat there and looked at the cookie. I said, “You haven’t given up on John yet, have you?”

“No. But I got a rule. If you’re ashamed of being gay, I’m ashamed of you. I say, Queer up. I take into account John’s getting some shit and was raised in such a way as to not think he’s on the right path, but I was raised that way myself. I got over it by the time there was hair on my balls. Actually, John shaves them for me, but you know what I mean.”

“Too much information, partner. Besides, I think a man ought to have hair on his balls.”

“Now that John won’t be doing that for me anymore, are you interested in doing the shaving?” Leonard said, and smiled.

“I’d just cut them off, problem solved. Actually, several problems solved. Your relationships would be less strenuous and that pesky hair problem would be over with. You could just hang out with Bob and be happy.”

Leonard sighed. “And if things aren’t bad enough, Bob died.”

“Oh, man. Sorry.”

Bob was Leonard’s pet armadillo. They had been close. Well, Leonard had been close to Bob. It was hard to tell how Bob felt. But he did hang around and would sniff Leonard’s hand and eat out of it. He lived in Leonard’s closet a lot of the time. Went outside to do his business, like a dog. Had a bowl with his name on it.

“It was like his little clock ran down,” Leonard said. “I buried him out back near a little wallow he had made. You know how he liked to dig.”

“He was an armadillo, Leonard. It’s what they do.”

“I know. But he was kind of cool. I liked him.… Hell, Hap, I don’t know. Short time back, life was good, felt like I was fartin’ perfume and crappin’ chocolate candy. Now things suck the big ole donkey dick. John, the way he’s actin’, and now my ’dilla goin’ down. It sucks the oxygen right out of you.”

I couldn’t tell if Leonard was more upset about John or Bob. I studied his face, decided it was a draw.

“Sorry, man,” I said. “Really.”

“Thanks. It don’t help worth a damn, but I’m glad you said it,” and his voice wavered a little. “Actually, I’m thinking of trying to write a soap opera, call it Lives of the Homos.”

“Leonard?”

“Yeah.”

“You can have the last cookie.”

14

Leonard stayed with us about three days. After work we played chess, talked nasty, read books and discussed them; we talked about which was cooler, Marvel Comics or DC. Leonard thought Marvel. I thought DC. Brett liked Archie Comics. That immediately excluded her from the discussion and a bit of respect was lost. We listened to music. We rented movies and played Monopoly. Brett proved to be adamant about having the silver dog as her token, and she won a lot. I saw her steal some money from my pile once, but let it go. I called her on it when we went to bed and she made it up to me and the authorities were not called, though Archie Comics was not entirely forgiven.

It was fun having Leonard around for a while, and we hated to see him go, but he finally rented a little apartment on the other side of town, said he was calling John daily, that they were talking and he was guardedly optimistic, hoping things would resolve quickly because the hair on his balls had grown back.

I came home from work one day, sweaty and dirty and feeling like something the dogs had dragged under the porch and gnawed on, and there was a police car parked out front of the house at the curb. There was a big black guy with a cop’s uniform and a cowboy hat about the size of a life raft sitting in one of my lawn chairs smoking a cigar big as an erect horse dong. When I parked in the driveway and got out, the stench of that damn cigar wafted over to me and damn near curled the hair on my eyebrows.

I went over, said, “Let me guess. No Enterprise Police Department.”

“Ah, hell, man, you ain’t that smart,” he said, turning his head as if he wanted to pin me with just one eye. “You read that off the side of my car.”

“You’re right.” I sat down in a lawn chair and looked at him. I said, “So, you took a wrong turn or what?”

“No. I’m in the right place. They said you were a smart-ass, both of you were, and I figure you’re the white guy.”

“That’s observant.”

“Yep. I had a whole month of cop college and I read a book on fingerprinting once. I took a couple of courses in identification too.”

“Wow!”

He grinned at me around his cigar. He had strong creases around his mouth when he grinned and his eyes were slightly bloodshot. One ear floated out from the side of his head as if signaling for a turn. He didn’t strike me as over fifty. He had a hard body with a bit of a gut and arms that could twist a full-grown pig like wet wash. I remembered that Marvin had told me he was one of two fat guys. Boy, was he full of it. This John Law was big enough and mean enough looking to use an elephant’s ass to store his shoes and make the elephant like it.

“You already talk to my buddy?” I asked.

“No. Thought I’d talk to you. Hear you’re more reasonable and you don’t have lace on your panties.”

“You’re right. I am. And that lace remark, not smart. Leonard heard you talk bad about him like that, he might stick you in your hat and piss in it after you.”

“Doubt that.”

“A man with confidence,” I said. “I like that. I know a lot of confident men Leonard has handed their teeth.”

“Yeah, I hear you two think you’re tough guys. Be that as it may, what I know about you and him and me, I’d say I’m doing some better than either of you.”

“Probably. Less graft in the jobs we have.”

For the first time he didn’t look amused. “All right, let’s get formal. My name is Budd Conners. I’m half the law out of No Enterprise.”

“Do the two of you count as one lawman?”

He thumped ash from his cigar on the ground. “Let me tell you why I’m here.”

“Let me guess. I stuck my dick in your territory.”

“Something like that. You can wise off all you want, but I’m here to do you a favor.”

“I could use some yard work done.”

He leaned forward. “Listen, asshole. Listen good, and tell your partner what I’m going to tell you.”

“Should I take notes?”

“You can take notes, or you can just let it whistle through your ears. This way, I came to you and told you and I’m giving you a chance. Those guys you fucked over, shot one in the leg, took that girl from, flushed their dope down the shitter, they didn’t like it.”

“Well, I hope not.”

“They’re mad at you, and the more connected guys who work the dope through them, guess what? They’re pissed too.”

“Get in line. Me and Leonard piss a lot of people off.”

“I can believe that. I can believe you two are not going to listen and you’re going to wind up with your body parts in separate trash bags in different parts of the county.”

“This isn’t the first time we’ve been threatened.”

“I don’t doubt that, peckerwood. But this has put a little pressure on me. The organization that runs those turds you slapped around, they got folks that run them, and they are bad folks. The Dixie Mafia.”

“Do they have Dixie flags and still whine over the South being unionized into the rest of the country? Do they talk about cotton a lot? Get weepy about the Old South? I don’t know about you, but nothing—absolutely nothing—touches me less or bores me more than those assholes. I was you, a black man, I’d throw my rag in with someone else.”

“It’s bigger than any of that. Some of them, they come out of the Aryan Nations, out of the prisons. But they aren’t so down on the brothers anymore. They just don’t want them to fuck their sisters. They feel they can do business with them, anyone else for that matter. These guys, they don’t care about any war but their own little money war. They’re all about commerce and respect, ass-wipe.”

“Watch your language. I’m sensitive, and I just might go sensitive all over you.”

He leaned back in the chair and grinned. “I’m twice your size.”

“And I’m twice your mean.”

“So you say. Do you want to hear me out or not?”

I looked at my watch. “Might as well. It’s still a couple hours till dinner.”

“They aren’t getting their dope back, so maybe they’ll think to make some kind of example out of you. That would be their way. The low guys on the turd totem pole can’t take care of you, then they’ll bring in the middle guys. That don’t work, then the middle guys will bring in the top guys, and those guys will hire someone that’ll be meaner than a bucket of rattlesnakes. They won’t dirty their hands. They’ll bring in real talent. But they probably won’t have to go that far. Enough guys with no real talent is still a lot of fuckin’ guys.”

“So how do they know it’s us done all this? Could be two other guys of equal handsomeness and anger management issues.”

“You’ve already admitted it was you.”

“I was just playing.”

“Sure. Tanedrue figured you were friends of Marvin Hanson, the grandfather, and all he had to do was ask around. You weren’t that hard to figure. You could maybe pay back the money they lost.”

“Oh yeah, that’s gonna happen. If it cost a dollar to fart I’d have to sweat instead. Don’t be an idiot. We aren’t paying anybody anything, and mostly because we don’t want to. And, by the way, how do you, a fine law-abiding police officer, know all this? Could it be because you’re in cahoots with them? My God, say it ain’t so. Aren’t policemen here to protect us? If that isn’t true, my world has been turned upside down.”

“You know what I make in salary?”

“I could care less.”

“Not a lot. Drugs are all over. You think I stop some drug traffic I stop drugs? That I stop people from wanting to use them?”

“No. But it is your job.”

“Look, I’m gonna tell you something, ’cause it’s just you and me in your crappy yard. Drugs go on. Money is being made. It’s like pussy. Someone is always gonna sell it and someone is always gonna buy it, and sometimes, that pussy, it’s got a disease and it kills people. You takes your chances. No one makes you buy it, use it. So what if me and my partner, who is a nice fat white guy named Reggie who is like a brother to me and will hate your guts if I hate your guts… what if we get a little piece of the action? They’re gonna buy from someone. So who the hell does it hurt if they’re getting what they want?”

“The people who are paying you not to take a piece of the action. And you might toss in the ones it kills or the ones get addicted. Until it’s legalized and they got that stuff in a vending machine, your job is to not make money off of it.”

Conners took a big suck on his cigar, blew the smoke toward me. I was so manly I didn’t wave it away, just squinted my eyes, trying to look like Clint Eastwood. I probably looked like a guy with smoke in his eyes.

“I’ve heard some things about you and your boy,” Conners said, “and you sound a little self-righteous, considering what I’ve heard you’ve done.”

“Don’t believe everything you’ve heard, lawman. And let me give you another line, right out of Billy Jack. Ever see that movie?”

“No.”

“There’s a line where he says: ‘When policemen break the law there is no law.’ After that he beats the crap out of some guys, but that’s not the point. It’s corny and it’s movie crap, but it’s right. I don’t owe you a fucking thing. You come to warn me and you think I’m supposed to thank you for it, but mostly you want me to stay out of your business, because you are the scum at the bottom of this big old pond and what you’re afraid of is that me and Leonard are going to ripple the surface so much that the big frog on the big lily pad is going to hop on your head. You aren’t doing me any kind of favor. Now get out of my yard before I take that cigar out of your mouth and shove it up your ass.”

He stood up so fast he knocked over the lawn chair. “I ought to kick you into next week.”

I stood up carefully. “Start kicking. You’re out of your jurisdiction.”

He stood there with his fists clenched. A vein vibrated in his neck like the string on a stand-up bass. Provided the string was really big.

I didn’t want any part of him, but I didn’t want him to know it. I managed not to piss myself, tried to look like I was thinking about something pleasant, like a politician waiting for a free blow job.

He took a deep breath. “All right. I tried. You warn that fart, Hanson, warn him that he’s in this too. I was him, I’d take that split-tail you two rescued, pack all of you in a bus and head for the high country, or just some goddamn rabbit hole. Change your names. Change your sex. ’Cause they’re comin’, smart-mouth. And when they do, you ain’t gonna like it. It might be the little fucks first, but they ain’t nothin’. You might take care of them. But then it’s the others, and I tell you again, you ain’t gonna like it.”

“Neither are they,” I said.

Conners tossed his cigar on the lawn, gave me a last look that told me there was nothing he’d like better than to reach up my asshole and jerk me inside out. “When it comes down,” he said, “remember your old Uncle Conners tried to tell you how it was going to go.”

“That’ll certainly cheer me,” I said. “But I wouldn’t count me and Leonard out just yet, Uncle Tom … Oh, sorry, that was Conners, wasn’t it?”

“You don’t know a thing. Ain’t no Uncle Toms no more, just a fella trying to do business.”

“One way of looking at it, I suppose.”

“It’ll be a clean sweep,” he said. “Not just you and Leonard, but those around you. You have a woman, don’t you? That’s what I’ve heard. And Hanson, his family. I don’t want to see that, something happening. Truly, I don’t.”

“Here’s a feather for your cap. I ever think you have anything to do with screwing around with me and mine, some morning you just might find yourself dead.”

“You threatening a law officer?”

“I don’t consider you much of an officer. Besides, you couldn’t arrest a fly here. You’re nothing but one of a two-man operation in a little town that has its presidential elections in a filling station. You two are so small-time you probably share a dick. So don’t come in here and act like the FBI. You are nothing to me. And yeah, that is a goddamn threat, with bells and whistles on it.”

“Have it your way, pal. But next time you see me comin’, man, you better run.”

Conners went out to his car and drove away.

15

“He came here to the house?” Brett said.

I nodded.

We were sitting at the kitchen table, she still in her nurse uniform, me still in my sweaty, filthy work clothes. She was sitting out from the table, had her legs crossed, and the nurse dress was hiked up pretty far. I liked that, and she knew it. I liked the little hat she was wearing too. I’d have liked her without the hat. I’d have liked her without the dress. She could lose those nurse shoes too. I don’t have a fetish for stuff like that, but I do have a fetish for her.

I was laying out what had happened with Conners, and I was drinking a cup of coffee. I had fixed some for both of us, and Brett was stirring creamer into hers. She even made me horny doing that. I know. I’m a bad dog.

“He threatened you here in our yard?” she said.

“He threatened that other people were going to do something to me that probably wouldn’t pass for a manicure and a haircut. And maybe those same people would do something similar to those around me. He also said next time I saw him I better run.”

“And he’s a policeman?”

“A big goddamn policeman. One of the two of No Enterprise’s finest on-the-take assholes. Actually, don’t tell Leonard, but between me and you, he was kind of scary.”

“It’s okay, pumpkin,” she said and patted my hand. “If we’re going to be killed, it might as well be together.”

“Sorry, hon.”

“Don’t be. You’re my man and you do things others wish they could. I like you just the way you are. Most of the time. Though I do wish you could remember to change the toilet paper, and on top of the hamper is not where your underwear belong. They go inside, dear.”

“But you have to lift the lid on the hamper.”

“I know. It is a bother.”

I gave her a look that I hoped made me look like a big-eyed puppy instead of a startled marmoset. It didn’t have the effect I hoped for—deep sympathy and a desire to pat my head. She drank more of her coffee.

I said, “I’m a middle-aged man with a crummy job that’s over as of today and you may be a little less thrilled with me if this turns bad.”

“It’s been bad before. And besides, you’re cute and well hung.”

Now that was the response I wanted. I said, “That’s the first I’ve heard of that.”

“Considering the circumstances, it seemed like a kind thing to say.”

“Oh.”

“Now don’t get pissy. Remember what Bessie Smith sang. It’s not the meat, it’s the motion.”

“Okay. I can live with that. Brett… this policeman, I got to tell you, he had a loud voice and a big hat and an ugly cigar and his face was all wrinkled and he had a funny ear and he talked kind of loud and I don’t think he’s very nice. He uses bad words.”

Brett smiled, looked me in the eyes. “Do you think this is really serious, baby? I mean, really?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“What do you think will happen?”

“No way to know for sure, but my guess is the little guys, the ones me and Leonard gave a bad time, might think they got to get back at us to save face, so they can point to us and tell their bosses they got those nasty boys who destroyed the dope and made them lose all that money and insulted a perfectly nice pair of Scooby Doo shorts.

“Course, we can flip that and say maybe the guys in the middle don’t believe the guys at the bottom. Not all of it anyway. The head dudes might just decide to take it out on the bottom-feeders because they might think they’re lying, that they took the dope, made up a story, and are settling other scores with us. All the middle guys know is they didn’t get a piece of the profit. And the guys at the top, what they know is they didn’t get their slice of it. So instead of them solving the problem, they could want the two layers in the cake below them to solve the problem. Most likely, the top layer gets involved, they’ll bring in someone special and skilled. That’s the way it usually works. But I wouldn’t bet on any one scenario. We might be dealing with all of them.”

“So what do we do?” Brett asked.

“First, I’ll have Leonard move back in.”

“That means more cookies and Dr Peppers and probably a box of shotgun shells.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “You have some time off coming, don’t you?”

She nodded. “Two weeks. Three if I really need it.”

“You pack your highly attractive ass up and you and Marvin and his family head for the hills. Go someplace where no one knows you. Stay there until I tell you to come back.”

Brett reached out and took my hand. “I don’t really have family anymore. My daughter isn’t exactly one to keep in touch. You know, the whoring business is so time-consuming, and her plans for college didn’t work out, she said.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Something about having to get up early.”

“That’s right. I love her, but she’s grown and made her own way, and I’m here if she needs me. But she doesn’t have a family bond, and maybe that’s my fault, but it’s the way it is. Except for you and Leonard, I’m about tapped out in the family department. I don’t want to leave you. I can use a gun, and I’m not afraid.”

“Yeah, but I am. Even if I wasn’t, I’d want you to go. Someone has to keep telling Marvin he has to stay with his family. He’s a great guy, but frankly, he’s not at his best right now. Bum leg and all.”

“You actually think Marvin will run? That doesn’t sound like him to me. Does it to you?”

I waved it aside with my hand. “When I explain things to him he’ll be happy to stay out of it,” I said.

16

“Absolutely not,” Marvin said.

I had Leonard and Brett with me and we had gone over to explain how things were. We were sitting in his living room and Rachel was there, and so were Gadget and JoAnna. The three women looked so much alike it was amazing. All dark and beautiful and soft, T-shirt-and jean-clad. Well, actually, Gadget didn’t look so soft. She scratched at her arms constantly and her eyes darted. The dope was calling collect and she wanted to answer. She was still attractive, just itchy and a little hard-looking around the mouth and eyes.

“I got you two in this trouble,” Marvin said. “I’m not about to bail on you.”

“You’re not bailing,” Leonard said. “You’re running like a spotted-ass ape.”

“Oh,” I said, turning in my chair to look at Leonard. “That helps. He’ll feel better now. You are like one of those, what do they call them … diplomats.”

“Figure of speech,” Leonard said.

“So far,” Brett said to me, “your powers of persuasion are not quite up to the standard you presumed.”

“Hap should know me better than that,” Marvin said.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” I said. “And let’s cut the crap. You did get Leonard and me into this. You didn’t tell us the whole gig, about how connected these guys were.”

“I didn’t know. Completely. I mean, I had an idea. But I didn’t know.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You didn’t stop to consider. Me and my brother just thought this was a trailer trash episode. We whipped some ass, threw a dog out of a window, shot a guy, took Gadget and brought her home. We went, we saw, we conquered, we came back. And now our asses are in the soup. We want you and yours, and Brett, out of here. And, no offense to Gadget, but you don’t tell her where you’re going till you get there. And you have the only cell phone between you. Not that I don’t trust mother and daughter,” I said, smiling at them. “But one cell phone can be controlled more easily, and you don’t want a lot of people calling you anyway. Any little thing might leak out and you might then involve someone else. And I don’t trust you, Gadget. The monkey on your back howls the loudest at midnight, when everyone else is sleeping. You might decide to decamp.”

“Just let me go back to Tanedrue,” Gadget said. “He’s not going to bother me.”

“Except when he’s making a field goal with your head,” Leonard said. “There’s that, and, oh yeah, about a ton of drugs you can suck up your nose.”

“You don’t know how it is,” Gadget said. “I’m … I’m in pain. And Hap hit me too.”

“Yes,” Leonard said, “but it was swift and beautiful and full of the power of love.”

“Ha!” Gadget said. “He still hit me.”

“You had it coming,” Marvin said. “Never thought I’d say such a thing, but you did.”

Gadget’s lip went pouty. She said, “You still don’t know how it is.”

“I don’t know how it is,” I said. “But I’ve seen it before.”

“Just let me go back,” she said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Leonard said. “These guys suck rat bag. And you’re on your way to being just like them.”

“At this point,” I said, “I’m not even sure Tanedrue might not blame you for their situation. There’s no future there for you, Gadget.”

“There’s no future for me anywhere,” Gadget said. “Just let them do what they want.”

“That’s the drug willies talking,” I said.

“We’re going to get her help,” JoAnna said, and she reached out and touched Gadget’s shoulder.

Gadget shook her head. “No use, Mama. I’m lost.”

“No, you’re not, honey,” Rachel said, and I saw the fire in her eyes. She had it, always did. I knew what Marvin saw in her first time I met her, and right now I was seeing it again.

“Don’t talk that way, baby,” JoAnna said. “You’re not the first one to make a mistake. I’ve made a few.”

“Yeah, but I made more than a few in less time,” Gadget said.

That floated for a moment, then I said, “This business boils down to this: Marvin, you and your family need to pack up some things and hit the road.”

“You act like these guys are fucking CIA,” Marvin said. “They’re a bunch of goobers.”

“It’s not the original goobers I’m worried about,” I said. “It’s all them other goobers.”

“With me and Hap here, the rest of you gone,” Leonard said, “it makes for a smaller target. And we’re not an easy target.”

“I can vouch for that,” Marvin said. “I thought you two would be dead years ago.”

“Gee, thanks,” Leonard said.

“Actually, that was a kind of a compliment,” Brett said.

“Oh,” Leonard said. “My bad.”

“But this is my mess,” Marvin said.

I nodded, said, “Now I’m really going to pour on the juice. You’re a cripple and you’ll just get in our way. We need you to whip someone’s ass with your cane again, we’ll call you up. But we’re past that. Maybe way past. Way I see it, Tanedrue may just let us out of the picture. He’s got nothing to gain. He’s not getting his drugs back, and I bet he can figure pretty quick we don’t have that kind of money to pay back what it was worth. So he could let us go.”

“That’s what I think,” Marvin said. “That’s what I always thought.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “he lets us go, then he can’t even tell his bosses that he avenged the loss, and I think he’s the kind of guy that thinks he’s some kind of player, wants to look good in front of his posse. Last time he tried that, he got his ass kicked. So he could feel vengeful. Power, control, being in charge, that’s all very important to these little sucks, and it’s even more important to the middlemen and the men at the top. The other thing”—and I looked at Gadget when I said this—“they may come for Gadget. Not because Tanedrue loves her—”

“He does, you know,” Gadget said. “He does.”

“Sure he does,” Leonard said. “That’s why he beats on your ass.”

“I get out of line,” Gadget said.

“Honey,” Brett said, “that is pure-dee ole bullshit. Unless you’re trying to kill him and he’s fighting back, you aren’t out of line enough to warrant any kind of physical beating. You think we’re in fucking Afghanistan. Pardon my French.”

Gadget put her head on the table. JoAnna put her hand on Gadget’s back and looked hard at Brett. Brett looked back equally hard. JoAnna averted her gaze. I could sympathize. When Brett put “that look” on you, you didn’t want to mess with her. In her eyes you could see the next world war.

“What Hap was saying,” Leonard said, “guy like this, he might come and try and get Gadget. He might even come to kill her.”

Gadget lifted her head. “He wouldn’t. He loves me.”

“There’s no way to argue with that,” I said. “She believes it and you can’t talk her out of it. Not until the drugs are out of her system. And even then, not easily.”

“You don’t know nothin’,” Gadget said, jumping up from the table, running to the back of the house, disappearing into a bedroom, slamming the door.

JoAnna looked at me, said, “No use being hard on her. It doesn’t help.”

“She shouldn’t get off scot-free,” Marvin said. “Problem with this world is we’ve lost the idea of shame and guilt. We need a little of that. No one thinks they ever do bad anymore. They just do different.”

“I’m sorry we’ve disrupted things this morning,” I said to Rachel. “I didn’t mean to scare you or your family, but this is how it is.”

“I’m not so scared,” Rachel said. “I once fought a serial killer with a hammer. JoAnna was with me. We aren’t shrinking violets.”

Marvin nodded. “She did. When I was on the job in Houston.”

I had heard the story before, but I didn’t let on. Every now and then Marvin brought it up and told it over. About the Houston Hacker. It had been his biggest case as a big-city cop.

“My granddaughter, my family,” Rachel said. “I got to do what’s right for them. I’ll tell you honestly, I don’t like you two, never have. And Brett, I just don’t like you on sight. You act like you’re better than everyone else.”

“Well, duh.”

“And you’re a smart-ass.”

“That’s all right,” Brett said, looking prim and beautiful. “I’m not selling happiness, and when I go to bed at night I have my witty repartee to keep me company. And Hap. And since we’re expressing ourselves, you aren’t exactly at the top of my love list either.”

They locked eyes for a moment, then Rachel looked at me and Leonard. “But I’ll say this about you two—you’re straight with things. You know how to do what you do. I don’t even want to know what it is you do, even if I have a pretty good idea. So me and JoAnna and Gadget, and yes, you, Marvin, we’re leaving here tomorrow.”

Brett raised her hand. “Don’t forget me.”

Rachel looked at Brett with those hard eyes of hers. Brett looked back. Neither broke gaze. “And yes,” Rachel said. “You too, Brett. We can hate each other politely.”

“I ought to stay,” Marvin said.

Rachel stuck her finger in Marvin’s face. “I’ve been through a lot of shit with you, baby, and I’ve held it together. I been through you mess-in’ with another woman. I’ve been through your cop days in the city and in LaBorde. I’ve dealt with your accident, your leg, and all manner of hell. I’ve set by your bedside watching them feed you through a tube, and I’ve fed you like a baby when you didn’t have the strength to lift a finger. You are going, or we’re going without you, and don’t look for us to come back if you don’t go.”

Marvin nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’m going. We’ll pack some things tonight, go to the bank tomorrow morning for some money, then we’re gone.”

17

Way we figured it, Leonard was going to keep working his security job, which had switched from days to nights. Brett was going to put in for her two weeks the next day, and since my job had played out, I wasn’t going to look for anything right away. Truth is, if it wasn’t for the money I’d just hang out and not work. I should be ashamed, but I’m not. I’m so lazy Leonard has to call me and remind me to work out, threaten me a little. I actually like the workouts soon as I start them, but it’s easy for me to get sidetracked and want to read a book or see a movie or eat a sandwich, or do the bump with Brett.

I drove Brett to the hospital the next morning, very early while it was still dark, and they let her have the two weeks. She said it was an emergency, that she might be back early, before the two weeks were up, but right now her daughter was sick and she had to go check on her.

They grumbled a bit, but they allowed her the time. Brett was a hell of a nurse.

Brett had her suitcase in the pickup, ready to go. I started driving us through town, on my way to drop her off at Marvin’s place. It was a very still morning, no traffic except for a beige Cadillac that was going our way. The moon was still up, a silver scimitar in the sky, and we had the heater on low because it was chilly out, though not exactly cold.

Brett was armed, had the little .38 automatic she sometimes wore strapped to the inside of her thigh. That was when she had on a dress. Today she had on jeans and a T-shirt and she had an ankle holster. I was armed too, with the gun that was registered to me and the one I had the conceal/carry papers on. A nine-mil automatic in a clip holster snapped to the back of my belt under my open windbreaker. I had a twelve-gauge pump shotgun in the backseat under a blanket, and of course, a pocketknife for whittling and a clear throat in case I had to resort to vulgar language.

We didn’t go around armed normally, so for us the guns weren’t fashion accessories. I hated the damn things, but, alas, I ran with a rough crowd from time to time, and of consequence, so did Brett. Way things had been going lately, I thought it best we be prepared.

She sat close to me that morning, like a teenager on a date. She kissed me on the cheek, and when she did, I felt wetness. She had tears.

I turned and looked at her, said, “Come on, baby. It’ll be okay.”

“I’m not scared,” she said, as I turned to look back at the road, check the mirror to make sure the Cadillac behind us wasn’t about to run up our asses. “I just don’t want to leave you to it by yourself.”

“I have Leonard.”

“I know. And I’m glad. But that’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant.”

“I could stay, Hap.”

“I need you with them. Rachel might need an ass whippin’, and you’re just the gal to do it.”

“She’s okay,” Brett said. “She’s just protecting her family, but you know what?”

“What?”

“There’s a part of me that would like to throw down with her, just to see how it would come out.”

“I know how it would come out. You’d lose a bit of that beautiful red hair and she’d be in the hospital.”

“You’re just saying that to make a girl feel sexy.”

I laughed.

The Cadillac passed us. I gave it a glance. Four guys were in it. No one from Tanedrue’s trailer was inside the car. Not even the dog. The car went on ahead, got about three car lengths in front of us. The driver was, as so many drivers are, on the cell phone. Who the hell do you call at this time of the morning? I thought

We crossed Gibbon Street, and as we did, a shiny black crew cab pickup with a big sunroof and tires about the size of a small planet came burning out and swung in behind us. I glanced in my rearview mirror. I recognized the truck’s driver. Tanedrue. Beside him I could see the ball-kicked guy and in the backseat the guy who was mad about me tossing his dog, and beside him some red-faced guy I had never seen before. Between them was Gadget.

“It’s them,” I said. “And Gadget’s with them.”

Brett turned to look. “That bitch.”

“I’m going to try and outrace them,” I said. “Call Leonard.”

As Brett popped open her cell phone, I hit the gas and started around the Cadillac. The Caddy weaved in front of me.

“Get off the phone, asshole,” I yelled at the Cadillac just like the driver could hear me.

I heard Brett say, “Leonard, we got trouble. We’re on Main, just crossed Gibbon, about three blocks from our street. Yeah.”

Brett clapped the phone shut. “He’s on his way.”

“This goddamn Cadillac,” I said, and weaved the other direction. It weaved with me. I glanced in the rearview mirror. The red-faced guy in the truck had a cell phone to his ear. I glanced at the Caddy. The driver was still on the phone.

“They’re in cahoots,” I said.

Brett was looking back, she said, “Oh hell.”

I looked in the rearview. Red Face was lifting up through the sunroof with a shotgun. It looked as big as a howitzer to me.

I tried to get around the Caddy. No luck. They had us between a patch of houses and trees, no side streets.

I turned quick, bumped over a curb, went through a lawn, bashed a couple of lawn gnomes and a pink flamingo, which might be considered a public service, then bounced through a driveway and clipped the tail of a parked car just enough to knock it out of our way. I weaved between an oak and an elm and took out a yard swing, a birdbath, and a Vote-for-Some-Republican sign. I gave myself an extra two points for that.

The Caddy and the truck ran along beside us on the street. Red Face’s shotgun banged and a back side window went out on my truck. Brett let out a yip like a surprised dog.

“You hit?” I asked.

“Just my pride.”

I saw an alley between two houses up the way, took a sharp right, and saw it was a screwup immediately. There was a wooden fence at the end of it. I yelled to Brett to hang on and put my foot to the floor. The pickup jumped and I hit the fence and lumber went out in all directions and we roared on through and down a little hill. There was a clump of trees in front of us and a low area I knew was a creek, so I hung a hard left and took out another wooden fence and went through a backyard and made a cocker spaniel jump for cover. I took out a matching fence, whipped hard left through a side yard in time to see our pursuers whisk by on the street, make several car lengths ahead of us.

I started back in the direction we had come, saw people in the yards now, out rubbernecking. I don’t know what possessed me, but I waved at a couple of them. In the rearview I saw the truck had turned and so had the Caddy. They were coming down on my ass pretty snappy-damn-quick. I had my foot all the way to the floor when I tried to make a turn, and that’s when I lost it. My truck skidded, fishtailed, then got itself together and looked like it was going to be all right. Another shot banged behind us, and this time the back glass of the pickup shattered. I caught some sting in the back of my neck. Brett yelled, “Goddamn it,” and flipped over the seat and got the twelve-gauge and brought it up and started pumping. She poked it out the busted window in the back, got off three rounds faster than a buck rabbit can fuck, and their truck spun to the right, went into a yard, right into a house with a sound like a cannon going off. Steam rose up from their hood.

I checked the rearview, saw the Caddy was still behind us. I turned my head and saw the truck rammed up in the house, bricks in the yard. Red Face and Tanedrue were out of the truck, guns in hand. Red Face was moving quickly. Tanedrue was limping toward us, due to his gunshot, but he looked lively enough and dangerous enough to me.

I said, “Put your seat belt back on, baby.”

Brett climbed over the seat like a monkey, snapped the belt around her waist, clutched the shotgun like a life raft.

I hit the brakes. The truck spun almost completely around. I gave it some gas and turned the wheel and we were heading right at the Caddy. I got the nine out from the small of my back and sent my driver’s window down with a touch of a button, stuck out my arm and fired left-handed. I starred the glass of the Caddy and it whipped to our right and passed us and swerved and hit the back end of my truck and made us spin like a Tilt-A-Whirl. Then we were rolling over and over. Next thing I knew, we were upside down, hanging by our seat belts. A curious weenie dog was looking in my open window, possibly hoping for blood.

I unsnapped my seat belt and fell in a heap, found my nine on the roof of the truck, reached for it. I could hear Brett cussing like a longshoreman. “Goddamn it, sonsofagoddamndogshittin’bitches.”

And then she was loose from her belt. She got hold of the shotgun as I crawled out ahead of her, my head hazy, my vision blurred. The damn weenie dog bit me. I slapped at him with the back of my hand, got on my feet and leaned back against the upside-down truck. The yard and the sky kept jumping around. The dog grabbed my pants leg and tugged and growled and I had to kick him loose.

Brett came out on her hands and knees, dragging the shotgun after her.

“Goddamn it,” she said. “Motherfuckin’cocksuckin’dicklickin’ball-suckin’sonsagoddamnshitsuckin’monkeylickin’sonsabitches.”

Even I was a little embarrassed.

18

My head cleared enough to see the Caddy had veered off and hit a tree. The ass end of the car was sticking out in the street leaking gasoline and some other fluids; tree bark floated in the liquid. I started walking that way limping. After a few steps I was walking straight, but my stomach was twisted and sour and my balls had tried to shrink up and hide and had almost succeeded.

I could see that air bags had popped and the driver wasn’t moving. Same for the passenger in the front. The back door opened and a guy fell out with a gun in his hand. He crawled on the ground a bit, then stood up. I shot him in the head and he fell down in the pool of gas and a swirl of blood. The sunlight caught the blood and gas and the color they made was not something I could identify. When the shot went off the weenie dog took to his dog paws and tore a path around the back end of my overturned truck, across a lawn and out of view, went away from there so fast he damn near left a vapor trail.

There was another guy moving in the back passenger seat of the Caddy. He opened the door and stepped out. I shot and missed. I grabbed at Brett, who was standing out in the street with the shotgun, her legs spread wide, cussing—“Shiteatin’assholelickin’”—and pulled her around to the side of the truck as a blast peppered the opposite side of it and a shot whistled by my ear like a rocket-propelled bee. Just as we got around to the other side, I heard a sound like someone scalding a cat to my right, glanced that way, saw a dark Chevy flash down the street like something out of Buck Rogers.

It was Leonard.

I peeked around the end of the truck and the guy at the Caddy had moved to the front of it so he could see us. He steadied his gun hand on the hood and fired, and the shot took out my upturned back tire. I opened up on him with three shots, but none of them hit him. I heard the shotgun pump beside me, and then I heard a blast and heard Brett say, “Fuck you.”

I fired a shot at the Caddy and broke and ran for it just as the guy raised up for another shot. I fired and he ducked down behind the car. I jumped, planted a foot on the hood, nearly lost my balance, came down on top of him with both feet, knocking his gun flying and losing mine in the process.

We came together like a couple of wild sheep, actually butted heads and knocked each other down. Across the street, moving out of the yard, taking position behind trees, I saw Tanedrue and his posse trying to cross over to us. I saw Gadget lying facedown in the yard beside the pickup, her hands over her head, crying loudly.

I bit the guy I was fighting so hard I took part of his nose away. He let out a bellow and I leaped forward and poked a finger in one of his eyes. As he staggered back, I kicked and caught the inside of his kneecap and it made a pleasant sound like a drover cracking a whip. He fell with one hand on his face, the other clutching at his knee. I picked up my gun and walked over to him and shot him in the head.

I started crossing the street. I had lost my brains. I was crazy. I saw Leonard. He was walking up the street, on my right. Tanedrue was firing at him, and so were the other three, and I knew Leonard was as good as dead.

But he wasn’t. I heard his Colt .45 revolver bark and I saw the top of the ball-kicked guy’s head tear off and sail across the curb and roll down a ways and spin like a furry hubcap. I shot at Tanedrue and missed and hit the house behind him. He yelled and started firing at me with an automatic pistol, fast as he could. The bullets plucked at my hair and the sleeve of my shirt, and I shot him dead center of his chest. His right leg jumped back behind him and he crumpled back with an expression on his face like he’d just found a kidney stone in his oatmeal. He went to one knee, dropped his gun, said, “Don’t shoot.”

I walked right up to him and shot him in the face; he’d dug in his shorts for the last time. Another bullet whizzed by me. I should have been dead ten times over. But now I was emboldened by luck and success, and that’s the kind of thinking that gets you killed. Leonard, still wearing his security guard uniform, walked up beside me. The two remaining gunmen, including Red Face, fled back to their truck and were trying to get inside of it, maybe start it up and drive out.

My adrenaline rush fell off, and I let out with a deep breath. I felt light-headed. My knees were shaking. I heard Brett behind me.

“Yeahbuddythat’srightyoubunchofpussyassmotherfuckersaren’tso hotnowareyoupigsuckin’goatfuckin’ …”

The truck’s engine was going now, but the truck didn’t move. It was hung up good. Gadget didn’t move. She was still facedown with her hands over her head, crying. The two came out of the truck firing. I felt something tear at my neck. I fired and missed. Brett cut down with the shotgun. I caught a glimpse of what looked like a splash of red paint and then I saw Brett’s shot had torn Red Face almost in half. Leonard walked toward the other guy firing. It took a few shots bouncing off the truck and the brick house, but with bullets whizzing around his head, Leonard finally hit the shooter.

The guy flipped backwards, turned completely over like he was doing a tumbling act. He was lying on his stomach. He raised his head. There was a sound coming from him like a busted manifold.

“Dirtyfuckin’ratshiteatin’dickcheesesuckin’,” Brett said, deep into her French.

“What she said,” Leonard said and fired, hitting the man on the ground in the mouth, making it the size of a manhole cover, knocking his head so hard on the neck it snapped sideways and teeth tumbled out on the grass.

“Hey,” Leonard said, looking over at me, his eyes bright, his mouth in a kind of rictus grin. “How’s it hanging?”

I didn’t have an answer. I got weak and went to one knee. I turned away from the carnage we had just made. I saw the ball-kicked guy’s skull down by the curb. The weenie dog appeared, grabbed it, headed off between a couple of houses, running like he had just caught a touchdown pass.

Leonard and I walked over to the Caddy and looked in at the guys in the front seat, ones pushed back by the air bags. One of them was moving.

“Should I shoot him?” Brett asked. “I want to shoot him. Other one’s alive, I’ll shoot him too.”

“No,” I said, pushing the shotgun down. “We’re done.”

I could hear sirens wailing, coming closer and closer.

“Glad you could make it,” I said to Leonard.

“Me too,” he said. “Your neck’s bleeding.”

I put a hand to my neck. I had been grazed. I couldn’t believe it. That was the worse I had got, except for a stray shotgun pellet and some broken glass.

Brett handed me the shotgun. “Wait right here. I’m fixin’ to slap the shit out of Gadget.”

I didn’t stop her. She went across the street, jerked Gadget to her feet, and slapped her so hard it knocked her down again. “Get up, bitch,” I heard Brett say.

Gadget didn’t move.

Brett kicked her in the ribs. “Get up, bitch, or I’ll stomp your head in.”

Gadget reluctantly got up, and Brett slapped her down again.

People were starting to poke their heads out of their houses, move out into their yards. Four police cars and a medical unit arrived. We dumped our guns on the Caddy’s hood, walked out into the street slowly with our hands up.

Brett didn’t move. She stood in the yard looking down at Gadget, who was crying louder than before.

“Get up, bitch,” I heard Brett say, “and I’ll give you something to cry about.”

19

They separated us and put me in a poorly lit cell with a burly tattooed guy with greasy hair and a lot of muscles and a way of looking at me that made me feel like a pork chop with a butt hole. At least he had all his teeth and no pustules on his face. We would at worst make healthy if not overly attractive children.

He was sitting on his bunk and I was sitting on mine. My hands were shaking a little bit; they still tingled from all the shooting and I could smell cordite on my clothes, and there was another smell inside my head, a cloud of death and doom.

The cell’s walls were as pink as a baboon’s ass and we were both wearing pink jumpsuits to match. It was a new jail philosophy. Tough guys didn’t want to go back to jail because they’d have to wear pink and sit in pink jail cells. Some thought it was an idea that worked. I didn’t believe it. Some redneck decides to shoot his wife over the fact she burned his squirrel potpie, I could hardly believe he’d be considering before the deed: Well, damn. I better hold up on this killing. I stick a broom handle up Bessie’s nose, set her on fire and shoot her eye out, I’ll have to wear pink and sit in a pink room, and them’s girl colors. What if the fellas see me?

I wondered how the fella across from me felt about wearing pink. Maybe he didn’t like it, but it certainly hadn’t been enough to keep him out of jail, and from the looks of him, he’d been here before, maybe had a pillow with his name stitched on it.

Fuck rehabilitation. Go for the pink to embarrass them.

My partner put an Elvis smile on his face, eyed me for a while, said, “You don’t get much pussy in jail.”

“That’s a natural fact,” I said.

“It ain’t available.”

“You, my man, are like an oracle. You see things the rest of us don’t. You are Nostradamus in pink. You are a ripe cherry blossom in an orchard of dullards.”

He eyed me for a moment, trying to figure out if what I said was an insult or a compliment. Then he picked up where he’d left off. “Not real pussy.”

I was already tired of this guy.

“Sometimes, you got to make your own nookie,” he said.

“You got you a theme, don’t you, buddy?”

“You hear what I’m sayin’?”

“Are you suggestin’ that I’m pretty in pink?”

“Poontang is where you find it, boy.”

I saw where this was going, and it was where I’d figured all along. I jumped off my bunk and was across our little gap before he could open his mouth again. I hit him as hard as I could, right across the cheek; it was like I dropped a fucking anvil on him. He fell backwards on his bunk, but his ass was hanging off and the weight of it pulled him onto the floor. He lay beside the bunk twitching like a Pentecostal having a Jesus rigor. There wasn’t any blood, but he was going to have a bruise and a headache and his pink jumpsuit was going to have floor nasty on it.

I backed to my bunk and sat down and watched until he quit twitching. Then I turned my attention to how many years I would be behind bars before they put me to death by lethal injection for the shoot-out we had just been in. Maybe they could put me and Brett and Leonard in a room together. We could hold hands from our cots while they put the needles in our arms. I looked at the guy on the floor, the man without pussy.

I sat there and thought on things and tried to figure how I had come to this. Mama always told me to stay away from guns, and though I could use one and I was a good shot, I had never been comfortable with them. Though I agreed that guns didn’t kill people, people killed people, guns sure made it a lot easier and far more successful than hunting down victims with a pointed stick.

If I hadn’t been armed today, I’d have been deep napping inside my truck amidst broken glass and a bloody car seat with a hole in my head, Brett dead beside me, a yard gnome and a Vote Republican sign still standing. So there had to be something good said for guns, and maybe we could even throw in a few kind words for erratic driving, but if we had all been carrying those pointed sticks it might have been less of a massacre. When you really think about it, humans are a scary branch of evolution, especially the male division. Man can turn anything into a weapon, even his tongue.

Perhaps living in Texas was my problem.

Maybe if I had been born in Connecticut.

Nah. They talked funny and it was cold up there.

I thought about Gadget and Tanedrue and the trailer, and how me and Leonard had whipped those guys’ asses. I thought about those birthday and Christmas cards on Tanedrue’s mirror; his mother had meant something to him, and he to her, and now she’d have him to grieve over. I thought about the shooting, the way I had acted and felt, about how something had clicked inside of me and turned me hot as the core of the sun, about how the bloodlust had taken me over and wrapped me up tight until I exploded. I thought about how Leonard was, and Brett. I had seen something close to joy on their faces. I figured mine had probably looked the same. Maybe we all deserved execution just because we could do what we did and not blink an eye. It wasn’t just self-defense. When it all came down and I felt that click inside of me, I had been scared but exhilarated too, and in the moments of the happening I had felt born to kill. Now I just felt small and sick to my stomach and a little weird. Like it had all happened to someone else and I had watched it from a distant rooftop.

My life had been too full of quick punches, blood, and gun smoke. I wanted to go with Brett to some island and live off coconuts and screw until it killed us. I wanted to never throw a punch again. Never see a gun again, not even from a distance, not even a picture in a magazine. I wanted to never be mad again. I wanted to not have to worry about my code of honor. I wanted it not to matter. I even wanted to get away from Leonard.

I was tired of the whole dirty, bloody thing that was my life. I was beginning to consider heavily that old saying about being careful when you fight monsters so that you do not become one. In that moment, I was feeling pretty monstrous. It was as if I had been born under a violent star.

I wondered what Leonard was thinking about.

He was probably in his cell sleeping on his bunk, dreaming of vanilla cookies and Dr Pepper. Happy in pink. He was alive and had helped keep me and Brett alive. For him, that was enough, and for me it should have been.

The guy on the floor stirred and started to sit up. I thought: Fuck it. In for the snout, in for the tail. I stood up and kicked him in the head as hard as I could under the jaw. He went down again and didn’t get up. This time he bled. I sat down on my bunk and watched the blood run out of his mouth.

Hap Collins, you are one walking, talking contradiction. I also decided I didn’t deserve execution after all. I probably just needed a spanking. Maybe someone could call me some names and send me home without my supper. I felt myself tremble as if something cold had crawled up my spine.

I watched some shadows advance down the hall. I heard some prisoners yelling and talking. Somewhere someone was watching a television. There was no television in my cell. Not even a deck of cards. Just the man without nookie, lying unconscious on the jailhouse floor.

After a while a big shadow came down the hall. It fell into the cell, and pretty soon there was a guy following it. He was one of the cops who had arrested us. He was a big guy with a belly that was teasing the buttons on his shirt. He was bareheaded and he didn’t have much hair. He stood at the door to my cell, looking through the bars. He stared down at my pal on the floor, said, “What happened to him?”

“Faintin’ spell,” I said. “Saw a mouse.”

“A mouse, huh?”

“It was a big mouse.”

20

They brought the three of us, wearing handcuffs, into an interrogation room that smelled strongly of Pine-Sol and too much mop soap and more than a sprinkle of urine. The floor was a little slick. A roach lay legs up in the corner.

There was a mirror on the wall, long and narrow, and I figured it was one of those see-through jobs where they could watch into the room from the other side. They couldn’t fool me. I had seen TV and movies. The mirror was smeared in places with fingerprints and nose prints, and some stains that were probably not worth knowing about. There was a single fat bulb hanging down from a frayed, dust-covered wire and the dust was so thick and dark it looked like fungus. I half expected the wire to snap and spray the room with sparks and set the place on fire. I saw a video camera in the top corner of the room on metal struts. Boogers were smeared on the wall, and some of them were big enough to use as bricks in construction. I had the uncomfortable feeling that one of the larger ones was looking at me.

They put us on one side of a long table with initials and fuck-you messages carved into it. I looked up. The camera was pointing right at us. I gave it a smile.

They had already talked to us separately, right before tossing us into our individual cells. Now they had us as a trio, the three of us sitting there in all our jail-suited glory, pink roses in a light green booger-dotted room. They brought us there and went away, and we sat alone for a moment, and then the door opened and two men came in. They were not in uniform.

I knew one of them. His name was Drake and he was a detective and we got along all right. We had had reason to meet before. I hadn’t shot anyone that time, and he knew Marvin, so he had been nice to me. I got off easy. I hit a man at a Dairy Queen because he hit his wife when she dropped his DQ Dude on the way to their table. I thought this was a bit excessive, even though Dudes are good and inexpensive if you go with the basket, French fries, and a drink. The wife got mad at me and I was the one that went to jail. As the old saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.

Drake was whip-lean, black as straight coffee, with a soft-looking face and a boxer’s flat nose. His shirt was lime-colored. It matched the paint on the walls. He didn’t have on a tie. His top button was unbuttoned and his shirttail was pulled out. If he was trying to look any more casual he’d have come in his underwear carrying a teddy bear and a pacifier.

Drake knew Leonard too. Who didn’t? Brett he also knew of. I could understand that. A lot of men knew of her and wished they knew more of her.

I had no idea where Gadget was, or the two who had been in the front seat of the Caddy. I wondered if my cell mate was still napping. I wondered if the weenie dog was somewhere hidden, nibbling on his prize.

Drake had another cop with him. A pink-skinned, redheaded guy with freckles and fat lips. Kelso was his name. He was leaning in the corner of the room acting like he couldn’t believe what the human condition had come to.

Drake sat on one side of the table and we sat on the other. Brett in the middle. The chairs were shorter on our side of the table. It’s an old trick the cops use to make you feel less significant than the interrogator. We didn’t give a damn, though. We were tough enough to tear doughnuts in half.

Kelso kept his corner, turning his head to take us in with those disappointed eyes. Drake lit a cigarette and asked if we wanted cigarettes or coffee.

“Have you got those little flavored creamers?” Leonard asked.

“No,” Drake said.

“Any cookies?”

“Nothing like that,” Drake said. “Some coffee. Standard shitty creamer with some sugar packs. Or Sweet’N Low. But maybe we can bring in some caviar and nice crackers.”

“Could you?” Leonard said. “That would be damn nice.”

Drake made a point of ignoring Leonard. He looked at me and Brett. We asked for coffee. Drake nodded, turned to Kelso, said, “Is the camera on?”

He knew we knew how it worked, so he wasn’t trying to be cagey.

“Nope,” Kelso said.

“Good,” Drake said. “Leonard, you can go fuck yourself.”

“From your lips to God’s ear,” Leonard said.

“Go on, man,” Drake said to Kelso. “Get the coffee.”

Kelso left. I guess it was his day to be fetch bitch.

Drake looked us over. “So, you people have had quite a day. Enough dead to put a dent in the population. If only you could have set fire to downtown and shot a busload of orphans, it would have been perfect.”

“Hap ran over a yard gnome,” Brett said. “That damn sure ought to count for something.”

“Yep,” Leonard said. “It was a big day, and frankly, I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m a little tuckered, and this pink outfit makes me feel like I’m in my jammies. But, just to let you know, I really feel humiliated. This suit, it’s got to be the right cure for evil. Wearing this, no one would ever stray again from the straight and narrow. You wouldn’t even catch me jackin’ off in the men’s room if I thought I’d have to wear this fucker again.”

“That’s a relief,” Drake said.

“Thought you’d want to know,” Leonard said.

Drake tapped his fingers on the desk, said, “You’re going to call it self-defense?”

“Our lawyer will,” I said. Of course, we didn’t have a lawyer yet, but I wanted to sound like a big-time experienced criminal.

I turned to Leonard, said, “I met a guy in my cell who wanted to fuck me. I knocked him out. Was that anti-gay?”

“Did you write any anti-gay graffiti on him or the wall?”

I shook my head.

“I think it’ll be all right,” he said.

“No talking amongst yourselves,” Drake said. “You know you did a bad thing, you three?”

“Yep,” Leonard said.

“What about those guys in the Caddy?” Brett asked.

“They’ll live,” Drake said.

“Gadget?” I asked.

“She’s under arrest.”

Kelso came back in, but he didn’t have our coffee. He leaned over and whispered in Drake’s ear.

“What?” Drake said.

Kelso nodded.

“Goddamn it,” Drake said.

Drake got up and went out. Leonard said, “What about that coffee?”

“Fuck the coffee,” Kelso said.

“That’s some kind of goddamn way for a public servant to talk,” Leonard said. “And you with the camera running.”

I kicked Leonard gently under the table.

“I saw that,” Kelso said. “And that’s good policy. You should shut the hell up. And the camera is still off, dick cheese. That way, I wanted to kick your ass it wouldn’t get recorded.”

Leonard just smiled. Even with handcuffs on, Leonard would be a load and he knew it, and I could tell Kelso knew it too.

Kelso glared at me, said, “The jailer said you hit your cell mate.”

“He didn’t buy the mouse story?”

“Drake said you two think you’re funny.”

“There’s that insult again,” Leonard said. “It could take the edge off our comic timing.”

“I think you’re funny,” Brett said, reached her handcuffs over and patted Leonard’s hand.

“Thank you, dear,” Leonard said.

“Laugh it up,” Kelso said. “We’ll see what the jury says.”

We were the sort that when we were nervous we couldn’t help but run our mouths to show we weren’t nervous. It’s not a good habit, but it’s ours. That comment shut us up, though. We sat there in silence, brooding in our pink jumpsuits, until the door opened and Drake came in and looked at us and sighed. He stood there for a long moment, just studying us, like we were a species formerly thought extinct. I thought any moment the rubber hose would appear, maybe a blowtorch and some pliers and a couple of angry German shepherds. He turned to Kelso. “Take their handcuffs off.”

21

After our handcuffs were off, Drake and Kelso went out, leaving us alone. We sat and waited, looking in the mirror that most likely had someone on the other side. At first I counted smears on the glass, boogers on the wall, anything to keep me busy. But that grew boring.

We turned and looked at one another, as if one of us might offer some sort of solution. No great answers unfolded. The nature of the universe was still safe. Stephen Hawking still had the inside track.

We sat there for a long time, then finally began to talk. Brett said, “What’s the point of this?”

“They want whoever is on the other side of the glass to take a good look at us,” Leonard said.

“Why?” Brett asked.

I patted her knee. “Because you are so pretty.”

“Oh. Well, of course,” she said, “duh, there is that.”

“I got a joke,” I said.

“Not now,” Leonard said.

“It’s pretty good.”

“Not now,” Brett said, and I knew that was the end of that.

“I don’t know about you two,” I said, “but I miss Kelso already. He had such sweet, if electrified, eyes.”

“You’d think they’d wipe these boogers down,” Brett said. “I don’t know who they think that intimidates. It’s just nasty.”

“I hear that,” Leonard said.

“And that piss smell,” she said. “It could hold your coat.”

“It could wear it,” Leonard said.

The door opened and Drake came in, and there was a guy with him that had a head like a concrete block. His haircut had something to do with that, gold as an Aryan dream, waxed up in front, flared out on the sides. He had a big hooked nose and thin lips and seemed to have more teeth than a human ought to, something a crocodile might envy, only straighter. His eyes were big and dark brown, like two unwiped butt holes. He reminded me of a villain out of those old Dick Tracy comics.

Drake went over and leaned against the wall, got a whiff of the piss, moved to another corner. The guy with the square head leaned back against the mirror. He said, “There’s nobody on the other side.”

“You say,” Leonard said.

Drake said, “No. He’s right.”

“Damn, glad we got your word on that,” Leonard said. “That makes it all right, then.”

“I locked the door leads into the investigation room,” Drake said.

“You got the only key?” I asked.

“No.”

“Ah,” I said. “No one else would of course use their key and go in there and look at us. … But frankly, we don’t care. Ask what you want. It was self-defense.”

“I know,” Drake said.

That sort of stunned us, but lawmen are tricky.

The door opened and two guys came in. One of them was the guy who had been in Tanedrue’s trailer, the one who wasn’t with the batch we shot up today, the guy whose profile was gone, whose nose was splinted now and taped over good with tape so thick he looked like the Mummy. His forehead looked as if someone had broken in his ball bat on it. A shock of thick hair poked up from the top of the bandages like a rooster’s comb. He went over and leaned against the wall and looked at Leonard. It wasn’t a look of adoration.

I thought, What the hell?

The other guy was a short fat guy in a black suit with a black tie and some black shoes that needed a shine. He looked like an undertaker in a pet cemetery. He blew some breath out between his fat lips, went over and leaned on the wall next to our friend with the tape and the bruises.

The room was starting to get tight. If one more person came in we’d all be wearing the same suit of clothes, and I was sure I needed to change my underwear.

Brett looked at the two leaning on the mirror, said, “There’s boogers on the wall and there’s something on the mirror I don’t think will pass for mayonnaise. Just a word to the wise.”

They stopped leaning.

Leonard glared at the taped-up man, said, “What the hell is the Phantom of the Opera doing here?”

Drake said, “We’ll come to that. But first, we got a little deal for you guys.”

“A deal?” I said. “Think we’re going to rat each other out? There’s people saw what happened. We didn’t go looking to be shot at. I might run over that yard gnome again I got the chance, but getting shot at like that, trust me, I’d rather pass. And you said it yourself, self-defense.”

“You’re going to get the charges dropped, or rather they’re going to definitely turn into self-defense,” Drake said. “No court. No problem.”

“No shirt. No shoes. No problem,” Leonard said. “What kind of bull is this? There’s always court. What’s the catch?”

Drake didn’t say anything. He crossed his arms.

I said, “There is a catch, isn’t there?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Square Head said. “It’s more like we got your dick in the zipper and we’re pulling it up tight. In your case, ma’am, I guess it’s your tit we got caught up.”

“Then you better have a lot of zipper,” Brett said, “’cause I’m serious in the tit department.”

No one opposed this opinion.

“Agent Tenson here,” Drake said, nodding at the Dick Tracy villain, “he’s with the FBI, and he and his buddy here, Captain Bandage—”

“Man, that’s some funny shit,” Captain Bandage, aka the Mummy aka the Phantom, said.

“They want to talk to you,” Drake said. “Me, I’m just a lowly fucking public servant who’s always got the raw ass from these fed guys sticking their dicks in it, and I hate them.”

“Come on,” Tenson said. “There’s no need to turn this ugly. You and me, I’m sure we got things in common, Drake.”

“Yeah,” Drake said. “These guys, that’s what we got in common. May have been self-defense, but it didn’t just come out of nowhere, these folks wanting to kill them. There has to be a backstory. I don’t like lettin’ them off. They shot a lot of people. They ought to at least have a paddling, a night in jail, noses in the corner. This isn’t right, man.”

“What I want to know,” Leonard said, “is why is the fucking Mummy in on this?”

The Mummy’s voice sounded snotty, which isn’t unusual when your snout is packed with cotton. “It’s Milhouse. I was working undercover. Thanks a lot, asshole, you fucked up a real sting operation just to take some whore home.”

“Her granddaddy doesn’t see her that way,” Leonard said.

“Yeah, but me, I’ve had surgery, and I got to have some more. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Leonard said, and the Mummy came off the wall and Drake stepped over and put a hand against the Mummy’s chest.

“After what he done to you,” Drake said, “I wouldn’t push it. I think he can do it again. And we took the handcuffs off.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said, still sitting, holding his hands up. “They took the handcuffs off.”

“We ought to all just beat him down,” the Mummy, aka the Phantom of the Opera, aka Captain Bandage, said.

“We ought to,” Drake said, “but we won’t.”

“You were undercover,” Leonard said. “Might have been nice had you warned us Tanedrue and his mutts were going to take a run at us.”

“I didn’t know,” Milhouse said. “Had no idea. I told them I had some family concerns, got out. My figuring was some higher-ups were gonna come down on them, and I didn’t want to be there when it happened.”

The fat guy said, “Way it was gonna work was we was gonna let Tanedrue and his dopes take care of you guys, then we were gonna come down on them, spread their asses all over Kingdom Come. Guys like them are too stupid to deal dope, and let me tell you from experience, that’s putting them in a real stupid place. We got guys working for us that are damn near retards and they do better. One guy in Dallas hasn’t got any legs and goes around in the streets on a wheeled board selling dope and peddling ass for us, and he does a better job than those fucks.”

“And who are you?” I asked. “My first guess is since you got people selling dope and ass for you, you’re not a cop, though these days, hard to say. And though you could be a priest on vacation, I’m doubtful.”

“I’m the guy that wanted you two killed,” the fat man said.

Leonard shifted in his chair. Drake said, “I got a gun, Leonard.”

“I don’t like people want to kill me or Hap,” Leonard said. “Fact is, it seriously chaps my ass. I don’t like you bringing him, whoever he is, in here to lord over us like he’s somethin’. What the hell is going on here? Tell us or arrest us or shoot us or do some goddamn thing or another. I’m fed up.”

“Hold it a minute,” I said. “Didn’t someone say something about a deal? I mean, there’s some kind of deal, I want to hear it.”

“Oh yeah,” Drake said. “These guys got deals out the ass.”

22

A day after they let us go, after they offered us the deal, Marvin gave us a short-lived holiday. He owned a boat and he took me and Leonard and Brett out to a lake near LaBorde to go fishing. It was a nice lake with a big dam. Marvin had some kind of membership there, and you could only get in with a key to a gate that had a sign on it that said BEWARE OF ALLIGATORS. It was an open boat and had plenty of seats and a lot of room, a place to lay your rods and clamp them down. There was a container in the floor of the boat and we had some cold drinks in there, but it was too cold to want them. We also had a couple thermoses of coffee, some bologna-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, some bags of potato chips that were more inviting.

Marvin steered the boat out to the middle of the calm water, making it less calm as we went. Small, dark birds were in the willow trees across the way and the grass near the trees was tall and still green even in the brisk beginnings of winter; it grew out from beneath the trees, ran across the bank and into the lake like a green tattoo. Once we got settled and the wake of the boat had subsided, the water around us looked like a huge sheet of tin. There was the faint smell of dead fish in the air and there were a number of old logs floating on the lake’s surface. After a while one of the logs swam away.

It was an alligator, probably sneaking up on a frog. It had fooled me. I cast my line away from that direction, but watched the alligator, the way it split the water and gave the lake a darker color wherever it swam.

“I certainly got you guys in a mess,” Marvin said.

“You did,” Brett said, frowning at the little green rubber lizard she had on the end of her line for bait.

“I know, and I regret it. Thanks for having them cut Gadget loose, Hap.”

“I didn’t have them do anything special,” I said. “I just told them they wanted a deal from us she had to be cut loose.”

“It’s the only way they would have let her go,” he said.

“No problem,” I said. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s in rehab, out in Arizona. Rachel and JoAnna are with her. I convinced them, after what you two did, I couldn’t go. Had to be here to help you. But Gadget, I guess she’s doing all right. Rachel said she’s still in a kind of shock. She feels guilty going back to Tanedrue, didn’t know they would come after you and take her with them, didn’t know it was going to be like that. She doesn’t love that dead fuck anymore, sees him for what he is and what he was doing to her. Now, after all that garbage she finally sees. She’s as naive as a fresh-born baby sometimes. Said to tell you, Brett, she deserved every slap you gave her, and then some.”

“Hell, I know that,” Brett said, and cast her line. She looked cute today, in a heavy coat with a tan cap with earflaps and big cream-colored puffy boots full of warm stuffing. Her long hair was tied back in a ponytail, and it was bloodred against her back because of the way the sun was falling on it.

“The FBI sort of got us over a barrel,” I said. “That had something to do with us telling them yes, trying to better our situation. We’re not all that noble, Marvin.”

“Speak for yourself,” Leonard said. “I am one noble sonofabitch, and way special. If I weren’t so tired I’d walk on water and kick that alligator’s ass.”

“You’d have got off anyway,” Marvin said. “There would have been a trial, and a lot of time taken up, but in the end, they’d have let you three off and fined you for the shotgun. I don’t know, might have been some jail time. Witnesses, though, they were on your side. There was one fellow upset about some yard gnomes, another about some pink flamingos, but other than that it came out all right.”

“Death to gnomes and flamingos,” I said.

“Bottom line,” Marvin said, “is I know why you did it, and you can downplay it all you want, but I know why you did it, and I won’t ever forget. Already owed you guys, now I really owe you.”

“We owed you some too,” Leonard said. “For something or another, though I kind of forget what. But after this we’ll be even. We can start running tabs on each other again.”

We fished all day in the cold, dry weather on the flat gray lake beneath the pearl-colored sky, eating the sandwiches and chips, drinking the coffee and talking a little, but not too much. I cast my line without purpose, and with no real hope of catching anything. I was fishing a wish and nothing more. I reeled my line in time after time, watching it cut the water like the thin edge of a knife. I cast and recast until the sun was falling down behind us and the sky that had been clear and pearl-colored at my back turned red as a whore’s lipstick, then was stained with purple like the insides of a plum stretched out. I reeled in my line and turned to take a good look at the sky. I thought it might be the last time I saw a sky like that, or went fishing. Might be the last day and night I saw Brett, because in the morning I was sending her away. It had been a battle, but I had convinced her. She was going out to Arizona too, to join Gadget and Rachel and JoAnna. Secretly, I think events had unnerved her. Not that she was fearful of what might happen to her—well, no more than someone should be reasonably fearful—but because she had enjoyed it all too much; there was something inside of her that had snapped. It was the same thing that had allowed her to set her ex-husband on fire and beat him with a shovel, and pistol-whip a midget. It hadn’t frightened her before, but now it had. She had seen its full face and it was gruesome. This time people had died. I didn’t question that they needed to die, but they had, and by our hands, in an explosion of blood and urine and feces, a whiff of gun smoke on the air.

I knew how she felt. Problem was, that thing inside of me had clicked loose so many times it was starting to feel normal, like the necessary lancing of a wound. I had looked into the abyss so much it was no longer just looking back at me, it had its arms around me and was puckering to kiss.

I wanted to just let it all go, do the jail time, forget about the FBI deal. But then I thought some more about that jail time, and since I had already done prison some years back and I could remember it as if it were yesterday I didn’t want any more of that.

I cast my line toward the setting sun and the stained sky, and when I started reeling it in a fish hit. I reeled it until it was close enough for me to reach out and take hold of the line just above the fish. It was a moderate-sized perch. I loosened the hook from its mouth and gently tossed it back in the water.

We started ashore then, my fish having been the only one caught. Marvin hadn’t driven the boat far toward shore before the night overtook us, collapsed over the water and made it dark as the River Styx. When we got to the boat ramp there was no more light except a thin ray of rising moonlight that was slowly being bagged by some fast-moving clouds. The wind picked up and really turned cold. The weather had changed in a flash. Welcome to East Texas.

We used flashlights and got out at the front of the boat without stepping in the water and fastened the crank line to Marvin’s trailer, then used the automatic crank and put it in place. We drove away, along with a rumble of thunder, and soon after, out on the highway, there were thin streaks of lightning, like bright varicose veins cutting across the black sky. We drove to Marvin’s place and put the boat in the carport and closed it up, then he drove us home in his big Ford truck, and he and Leonard spent the night at our place.

We put Leonard on the couch and we got a blow-up bed for Marvin, some extra pillows for them from the closet. We weren’t supposed to have guns, but Marvin had brought a shotgun for himself and one for Leonard and he gave me and Brett handguns. We talked for a long time in the dark, sitting in the living room, then finally Brett and I went up to bed, placing the handguns on the nightstand.

Brett and I were fiery that night and at first I feared they would hear us downstairs, then after a while I didn’t care at all. When we finished, we hugged for a while, then she said, “You’re sure Jim Bob’s coming?”

“Oh yeah, he said so, so he’ll be here. Marvin arranged it. I just wish we could have found Veil. But you know how he is. Locating him is like trying to find a virgin in a whorehouse.”

“Jim Bob, he’s good.”

“Real good,” I said. “After Leonard, he’s who I would want at my back. Veil, I’d kind of like him there too.”

“He’s like that character the Shadow.”

“He is. Kind of gives me the creeps, but he’s a good one to have on your side. Wish we could have found him.”

“What about this guy Marvin knows that’s comin’? Tonto?”

“Marvin says he’s good, so I reckon he is. He’s one more, and that’s good.”

“Yeah,” she said, “that’s good.”

“Marvin said Tonto owes him a big favor. He won’t say what the favor is, but he says he’ll pay him back.”

“Not everyone pays favors back,” she said.

“Marvin said Tonto does, so I got to believe him.”

We were hugging close and I could feel Brett’s warm tears on my cheek. I said, “It’ll be all right, baby.”

“I feel bad leaving you.”

“I don’t feel bad you’re going,” I said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

“All right, then,” she said. “There’s nothing else to say, is there?”

I shook my head. “Nothing else.”

She pulled her big T-shirt that said SHEN CHAUN, MARTIAL SCIENCE over her head, kissed me, and rolled over and went to sleep with my hand on her hip. She could do that a lot of the time, just go down into dreamland no matter what was on her mind. Wasn’t that easy for me, not when I had plans for the next day, especially the kind of plans we had to set in motion.

The rain outside picked up. I sat up and put my pillow behind my head, against the wall, listened to the rain grow savage. Thunder shook the upstairs windows with a sound like dice being rattled in a cup. Lightning was jumping around outside. The rain made a sound like a giant snake hissing, and the roof was taking some serious shots from drops that were hitting like artillery fire.

Brett didn’t stir. She was snoring.

I looked at her for a while, taking in everything I could about her, and then I thought about what it was we had agreed to do, me and Leonard. When it was all done, it wouldn’t surprise me if what was left of my soul wouldn’t fill a thimble.

23

In that booger-lined room with the greasy mirror, the deal they offered us sounded easy but with all things that sound easy there is often something at the bottom of it all that makes it stink. It’s always something that begins with “All you got to do,” or “This won’t take much of your time.” That should be enough of a cue to make you throw your hands over your head and run the other way. But not us; no one ever said we learned from our mistakes, not me and Leonard. Besides, we sort of had our asses in a crack over this killing a whole bunch of people deal, and our options were thin.

The fat guy in the black suit was from the Dixie Mafia, whatever that was exactly. His name was Hirem Burnett and he was turning state’s evidence. In a nutshell he was one of the middle boys in the organization. You had your water carriers like Tanedrue and his buddies, then you had Hirem, and above his fat ass were Satan’s Angels.

That’s what Hirem called them, Satan’s Angels. They sounded like a motorcycle gang, and thing was, there was a connection to some biker gangs in Houston. Some of the guys at the top had been bikers, then prisoners in one or several of our fine institutions, mostly for drug deals and violent acts. Bunch of guys tattooing themselves in cells and doing shank hits in the rec yard, running some dirty work from prison via messengers, a few of them getting out and turning into businessmen, their tattoos hidden under long-sleeve shirts, their formerly greasy hair trimmed and spruced up; sometimes they went as far as to wear a suit and tie and not scratch their nuts in public.

Lot of them were still Aryan Nations guys at heart, worrying that a strain of black blood would make soiled whites want to throw spears and run with watermelons, piss on the Dixie flag, maybe vote Democrat and wish for socialized medicine. Still, as Conners said, they were businessmen and green was their true color, and as time had gone on, they had lost some of their interest in racial purity but none of their interest in crisp folding money

It was Hirem who told Tanedrue and his posse to hit us. And to bring in a whole bucketload of irony, now me and Leonard were going to have to do him a favor, and all because of Gadget. I rewound the bitch slapping Brett had given her in my head and enjoyed all the details I could remember. I might even have gussied up my memory some. I even quit feeling bad about punching her.

Hirem’s son, one Tim Burnett, had bucked Daddy’s ideas and had gone to college to be an environmental engineer. He didn’t want to grow up to sell dope and run pussy. He ran off with a black girl and about three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of drug money in a duffel bag. The guys at the top wanted the money back and they wanted the son to pay. The girl had to go down and not get up. They couldn’t let word get around a colored gal had taken up with one of their mid-management fellows’ sons and helped swipe a chunk of their money. Just wouldn’t do.

She had to be whacked and they had to get all the money back, and the son, well, he had to take it and like it. That way Hirem wouldn’t find him in a damp cardboard box inside his garage next to the garbage can. Those were Hirem’s words, said it was the exact threat he had gotten from one Cletus Jimson, the upper-level man with a plan.

Hirem knew everyone in the business. He had been there when it was run by old fat guys in Hawaiian shirts wearing needle-nose Italian shoes. Back then, families were left alone. You didn’t bother them no matter what a member might do, not unless their family was part of the business. Cops were also left out of the mix. Killing a cop was considered bad form. Business was between those in the group and no one else.

These days they were a lot more freewheeling. They’d kill anyone or do anything to maintain business. That included Hirem’s son and girlfriend, and now that he had come forward to help the cops, it included Hirem himself.

The bad guys were also unhappy that a good chunk of their potential earnings had been flushed down the crapper by me, and Leonard had helped me do it. Couple of goons from a nearby town coming in and slapping their lower-level errand boys around, that didn’t look good. That’s why there had been a hit on us.

In that booger-dotted room Hirem said, “Wasn’t nothing personal, you two. It was business.”

“What about her?” I said, nodding at Brett. “What did she do to you?”

“Not a thing. And in the old days, she wouldn’t have been part of it. But these ain’t the old days, and I’m not in command. New guys at the top, they’re younger and meaner and more demanding, and they keep me on a tight leash. Most likely, ten years ago this would have just been a business loss and we’d have taken care of Tanedrue and his morons and that would have been the end of it. But that’s not the way they play these days.”

“Just for the record,” the Mummy said, “I wasn’t really one of their morons.”

“Informer, double agent, whatever you are or were,” Hirem said. “In the old days, we figured you were a cop, we might have let you go. And a thing like this, my son getting jungle fever, wanting to ride a porch monkey, taking off with a bag of money, it would have been handled differently. I could have paid it back, made him apologize, sent the shine girl packin’, maybe she would have caught a bullet, but no one else. Not like that anymore.”

“Shine?” Leonard said. “That word is still in the vocabulary?”

“It’s right next to colored,” I said. “Just south of porch monkey.”

“Oh,” Leonard said.

Bottom line was, Hirem was under the gun, literally, and instead of following through with what the Dixie Mafia wanted him to do, he decided he’d had enough and it was time to pull the train out of the station. He had come to the FBI to tell them about the hit on us, that he had been behind it. Came to tell them lots of things, some of those things not yet spoken, and the reason for that was he had to have a deal before he let out all the juice he knew.

But the thing was, he needed some patsies to find his son and the money. Some muscle. And since we had our asses in a crack, self-defense or not, and considering the cops figured they could probably find two more just like us to do Hirem’s work if we refused, we got picked and we accepted.

So the FBI, represented by the Mummy and the Dick Tracy villain, they said to us, and I paraphrase: You scratch our back, and we’ll scratch yours. You help Hirem get his son back in one piece, save that girl, and get us the money, since it isn’t exactly earned legal and it could be used by the United States government to continue the war on crime, we will wipe your slate clean. They could do that, they said. No trial, nothing. We would be helping the FBI, ’cause when Hirem got his son back, he was going to sing like a goddamn canary and we would be the recipients of all kinds of goodwill.

Course, on the record, we weren’t working for anyone. If the Dixie Mafia punched our tickets, the FBI wouldn’t know anything about it. If we said at any point we were working for the FBI, they would deny it. They could always find replacements for us in the wings, other fuckups they could take advantage of. They said just that.

“Yeah,” Leonard told them, “but you aren’t gonna find any bigger fuckups than us.”

No one argued.

We could leave the offer, of course, take our chances at trial, but Flat Top said, “Might not go so good you don’t help.”

“Isn’t that blackmail?” I said.

He said, “Uh-huh.”

I looked at Drake. He looked toward the wall.

And so that was how Leonard and I had come to unofficially work for the FBI so they wouldn’t have to get their hands dirty. They said if we wanted to, we could get help, but the help was in the same water we were. No one would know them and no one would protect them. It was us and our friends and whatever moxie we might have against the world, and that was it. Oh, and we did get their best wishes, and if we couldn’t get the duffel bag back, they’d let that go.

24

About four a.m. I heard a car pull in the drive. I had a good idea who it was, but I wasn’t taking any chances. In my pajamas and rabbit slippers, a gun in my hand, I left the bedroom. Brett was still snoring. I went downstairs with the rabbit ears flapping and found Leonard and Marvin in their shorts and T-shirts holding their shotguns.

After a few moments there was a knock on the door, and a voice said, “Ya’ll about to shoot, don’t. It’s me, Jim Bob. I’d like to keep my good-lookin’ ass intact.”

Leonard opened the door. “Hell, man, knowing it’s you is what gives me reason to shoot.”

Jim Bob, tall and broad-shouldered, thin but not skinny, came into the house and Leonard shut the door. Jim Bob took off his gray Stetson. The hatband was a thick strip of cloth in a cheetah-skin pattern, and in the band were toothpicks and little feathers. The hat was stained in a lot of spots. Without the hat, Jim Bob looked a little off; it was like seeing a rooster remove his head. He was red-faced and his hair was short, wheat-textured and orange-colored. He had a scar on his face I didn’t remember from the time before. He had on a light green snap-pocket Western shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of brown boots that looked as if most of the world had worn them for a while and then given them back. He looked at me, studied my bunny slippers. “You look like an idiot.”

“Don’t be jealous. I can hop real far.”

Jim Bob grinned, said, “Ain’t there no coffee?”

“There will be.” It was Brett, at the top of the stairs. She had pulled on some men’s boxer shorts under her T-shirt and she had on some flip-flops. “You loudmouthed guys don’t know how to let a girl get her beauty sleep.”

“Well, now,” Jim Bob said, looking up as Brett came down, her red hair tousled around her shoulders, her braless breasts bouncing pleasantly, “it’s good to see there’s still women know how to make coffee.”

“I didn’t say I was making it,” she said when she got to the bottom of the stairs. “I said there will be coffee. Right, Hap?”

“I’m on it,” I said.

“You look lovely,” Jim Bob said, flashing a grin at Brett that had probably charmed trailer-trash women from LaBorde to Memphis out of their panties and their Beanie Baby collections.

“And you are still full of shit,” Brett said.

“Yes, ma’am, I am. And you are still so lovely my back teeth hurt.”

“Just your teeth ache?” Brett said. “If that’s the case, I’m losing my touch.”

“Well,” Jim Bob said, “I was trying to be polite.”

There was the sound of another car outside, so I put down the coffee makings and went to the living room window for a look.

I peeled back the curtain and had to wipe the frosted pane clear with my arm to get a view. The rain had slacked and there was only a bit of the garage light to see by, but it was all I needed. A big black van was pulled up behind Jim Bob’s classic red Cadillac, the one he calls the Red Bitch, and when the driver got out, came around the back of Jim Bob’s ride, started for the house, it was as if the great shadow of Armageddon had fallen across the cold winter earth. He was at least six foot seven, with shoulders wide enough to make football players slash their wrists with envy. He had legs like trees and arms like smaller trees, a face that appeared to have been knocked into shape from granite and then beat on with a sledgehammer. His muscles moved under his clothes, like animals trying to escape a sack. He had long black hair tied back in a ponytail and he wore a black denim shirt, black leather jacket, black jeans, and black round-toed boots. He walked swiftly, like he was anxiously leaving a prayer meeting and was on his way to a whorehouse with a wallet full of money and a pack of rubbers.

“I hope this is Tonto,” I said. “Otherwise, I’m heading out the back door at a run.”

“That must be him,” Marvin said, “’cause that’s the usual response. Keep in mind he’s a little shy.”

When we opened the door, I said, “Hello,” and Tonto nodded, stood where he was for a moment, wiped his feet in a slow, methodical manner, like a trained horse trying to count for its master.

When he came in, he ducked a little to go through the door and stood in the center of the room, saw Brett, held that view for a while, then looked over at Marvin.

“You needed me?” he said to Marvin, and it was as if this big man’s voice was on vacation and he had borrowed a voice from a child, soft and musical, almost feminine.

“Yeah,” Marvin said.

“I pay my debts.”

“I know,” Marvin said.

“I never thought you’d ask.”

“Never planned to.”

“Then it’s important.”

“That’s right,” Marvin said. “It’s important. To me.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s have some coffee and talk about things. I don’t think it’s been completely explained.”

“I came because Marvin asked,” Tonto said. “I don’t know anything. There’s nothing been explained to me.”

“And me,” Jim Bob said. “I’m here ’cause my plastic fuck doll ran out of air. Wasn’t nothing else to do.”

“My guess,” Brett said, “is the doll pinpricked herself and committed suicide.”

“Now, honey,” Jim Bob said, “that’s just an ugly thing to say.”

25

We pulled some kitchen chairs up and got some folding chairs out of the closet and congregated at the kitchen table with coffee and Leonard’s cookies, which from the look on his face I could tell he didn’t appreciate. Through the kitchen window I could see the rain had cleared and the almost pink sky with the bone-white clouds above it looked like some kind of strawberry brew topped by foam.

“Curious? We got to kill somebody?” Tonto said. “Not that I mind, but I like to know. Well, sometimes I mind. I got scruples, they’re just flexible.”

I thought, man, how did I arrive at this place, with a man with flexible scruples? It was bad enough I was suspicious of my own.

He took off his jacket and he had a twin pearl-handled .45 in a shoulder holster under each armpit. He was wearing a crucifix on a chain, and he pulled it out from under his shirt and let it lie on the front of the cloth in line with the buttons. Nothing says I love Jesus like a crucifix and twin .45s. He was sitting in one of the folding chairs and I feared at any moment it would wrap around his big ass and drop him to the floor.

“That’s something we want to avoid,” I said. “But one never knows. We’re not dealing with priests here.”

“So,” Jim Bob said, “instead of an ass fucking from one of God’s finest, we’re talking about bullets.”

“That would be yes,” Leonard said.

I explained, mostly for Tonto, about the kids who had run off, about Hirem, how we were patsies, and how we could expect zip help from anyone outside of our little group. I told him we had no real idea where the kids were, but that we were supposed to talk to the FBI and Hirem one more time, and then the only time we were to see them or talk to them again was when the mission was over, provided we survived. All nonsurvivors could pretty much count on being buried beside the road in a shallow grave with nothing to mark their passing except a wild-flower or the droppings of the random dog or armadillo.

“And what do we get out of this?” Jim Bob said.

“Well,” I said, “me and Leonard get to not go to jail, or maybe just avoid some long, inconvenient court time. You get the pleasure of our company.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a deal,” Jim Bob said.

“It’s not,” I said.

“Well,” Jim Bob said, “considering that we get nothing out of this, and I’m doing this just because I know you guys and sort of like you better than guys I don’t, count me in.”

I looked at Tonto.

He nodded, said in his almost sweet little voice, “I owe Marvin one.” He glanced at Marvin. “And after this, we’re through. Right?”

“Right,” Marvin said. “We’re even.”

“Everyone in?” I said, and held my hand out over the table.

“So we’re supposed to put our hand on top of yours?” Jim Bob said. “All for one, and one for all?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Too silly,” he said.

Leonard put his hand on top of mine. “I’m in.”

Brett put her hand on top of his. “Actually, I’m not going to be here, but hey, in spirit, okay?”

Marvin got up carefully from his chair with his cane and edged over and put his hand on top. “I will do what I can, all things considered. Hell, I got all of you into this, so I got to show solidarity, right?”

“Damn right,” Leonard said.

“Oh, hell,” Jim Bob said, and put his hand on top. “I always was a sucker for that musketeer jive.”

Tonto grinned. He even had big teeth. “Hell, why not.”

He put his hand on top of Jim Bob’s.

“Maybe we could have some kind of saying,” Leonard said. “You know, something that’s just for us. A slogan. A motto.”

“No,” Tonto said, removing his hand. “Maybe we won’t have that.”

“Yeah, that idea sucks,” Jim Bob said, pulling his hand back.

“Even I don’t like that,” Brett said, and picked up her coffee cup.

“Got to vote no,” Marvin said.

“Yeah, I’m out on that one too,” I said.

Leonard looked hurt. “Spoilsports.”

26

After finishing up the coffee and cookies, we had a real breakfast of eggs and toast and bacon, and Brett did the cooking; then I left with her and drove to the bus depot. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done, and I knew then—well, I had known before, but I knew all over again, down deep and tight to the bone, that I loved this woman dearly and that she was a part of me, like a heart or a liver. I had loved my first wife and she had been a shit and I had loved her anyway. Then she betrayed me, got herself killed, and nearly got me and my buddy Leonard killed. I still loved her for a year after that. But not the way I loved Brett. It’s only right that when you find the one you care about that you keep that part that’s you and not give it all away, but by the same token I’m old-fashioned in that I feel when you do find the right person you are part of a whole, and when the other leaves, a bit of you is no longer there. And when they leave and you think you might never see them again, it’s like more than a part of you is gone. It’s like being ripped in half and your half has been cast to the wind.

She was dressed in jeans and sneakers and had on a big sweater and a sweater cap that her hair stuck out from under like a flaming waterfall. The bus depot had very few people in it, and we sat down on a bench. A bus depot is one of the loneliest places in the world, and it doesn’t help when the bench you’re perched on is near the restrooms and they stink of recent trips, and when people walk out, the tile, dampened by urine and bad flushes, makes a sound like someone pulling duct tape off a hairy dog’s ass.

We sat for a while, the sun rising higher and eating away at what was left of the darkness, and then we heard a bus come and they called it over the speaker. It was Brett’s ride. I walked her out. There were others getting on, and we stepped back and let them. She had a small bag with her. It had a few clothes and her toiletries in it, a book and some magazines. She set it down by her feet like a trained pet.

“Well,” she said, “don’t get yourself killed.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise? For me?”

“Hell, I promise for me and you.”

“Cross your heart?”

“Big-time,” I said, and crossed my heart.

“Make sure Leonard doesn’t get killed either.”

“You got it.”

“I guess you can kind of watch out for Jim Bob and Tonto.”

“All right.”

“It’s hard to know about Tonto, isn’t it?”

“So far,” I said.

“He’ll always be hard to know. I can promise you that. You all have screws missing, all of you, but he’s like an empty parts house. It’s not just the screws that are gone, but all manner of stuff.”

“I think you’re right,” I said.

“Marvin, he’ll be all right at home, won’t he?”

“Sure. Wherever he ends up, he’ll be okay.”

I wasn’t sure of that, and she knew I wasn’t sure, but it was a little game we were playing. I saw a tear in her eye and I took hold of her and we held each other, and finally we kissed, and she took up her bag and gave me a smile and started to get on the bus. I patted her butt. She said, “Why, thank you.”

I laughed and she got on the bus.

I stood there until I saw her take her seat, and then I still couldn’t go, so I stood there until she turned to smile at me. She looked as if she was about to bust out crying, which was exactly how I felt. I watched until the bus started to move and she lifted a hand, and I waved back. Then with a turn of the corner and a fart of exhaust, the bus and Brett were gone, on their way out to Arizona.

It was solid daylight when I drove over to the cop shop and went inside and asked for Drake. I was lucky. He was in. The dispatcher picked up a line and Drake appeared and gave me a not-so-friendly drag of the hand, indicating I should follow him.

We went along the hall and passed the booger-lined room with the greasy mirror, turned into another room with a long table and some chairs and a counter with a pot of coffee brewing and a couple boxes of doughnuts holding court next to them.

Drake went over and picked up the pot of coffee and poured some into a Styrofoam cup, asked if I wanted any. I looked at the coffee. It was thick and very dark, like sewer sludge.

“No thanks,” I said.

Drake got a couple of doughnuts out of one of the boxes and put them on a napkin. He didn’t ask me if I wanted a doughnut. He went over to the table and set the doughnut-laden napkin on the table and set the coffee beside it, then put his ass in a chair and crossed his legs. I sat across from him.

“You know,” he said, “I’m the unluckiest man in the world. I wasn’t supposed to be working this shift. I wasn’t working it, I wouldn’t have you.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought you and me, there was a kind of spark, you know.”

“No spark,” he said. “What do you want?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “These FBI guys, this all on the up-and-up?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, they gonna keep their part of the bargain if we help them out?”

“I assume the ‘we’ you refer to is you and Leonard, ’cause it sure isn’t me and it definitely isn’t the department. We got nothing to do with this.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

“I have no idea what they’ll do,” he said, sipping coffee, pausing to bite into a doughnut. “The FBI, they do their thing and we do ours. Unfortunately, sometimes the things clash.”

“Just like sex.”

“No. There’s no fun in it. Not even a little bit. All I can say is Hirem knows all manner of stuff the FBI would love to know, and it’s stuff worth them knowing, but I got no love for them FBI boys. They come in here like we’re dog mess on the bottom of their shoes, like they’re the goddamn ghosts of J. Edgar Hoover hisself.”

“If they were the ghosts of Hoover,” I said, “they’d be wearing dresses.”

“What?”

“He was supposed to be a transvestite. You know, transvestites put on dresses. I think he was gay too.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“Oh yeah. Big-time.”

“Huh? I’ll be damned.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“You’re sure about that dresses thing?”

“That’s the story. I’m not sure about anything.”

“I’ll be damned. Hadn’t heard that.”

I let him contemplate. He said, “You know, considering how Hoover was, the way these guys act, that’s kind of funny.”

“Yep. But about the FBI guys …”

Drake shrugged. “What I can tell you is, if they’re wanting you to do something like this, it’s more than an ask. It’s a kind of push, and it might be a lot nastier than you think. It might be worse than a trial and a jury. But if you’ve come to me to know more about them, more about what they want, you’re in the wrong place. I understand you defended yourself, you and Leonard and Brett. But I can’t feel good about citizens doing what you done and all you get is a slap on the wrist. I don’t buy you were just driving around armed to the teeth and they came out of nowhere and decided to kill you.”

“It was still self-defense.”

“I guess it was, but some of them were shot in the back of the head.”

“They were shooting at me, and I didn’t want them to get up again,” I said. “Shooting them in the back of the head was a way to assure that.”

“I still don’t like it, and I don’t like the idea of Hirem getting a light sentence by getting you guys to do something I’m pretty sure is against the law but is done in the name of the law. I know that’s the game, but it’s a game that stinks and I don’t have to like it.”

I sat there for a moment and said nothing.

“I don’t know what you thought I could tell you,” Drake said.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I guess I was looking for some reassurance.”

Drake shook his head. “Can’t offer you any. You might call your mother, you want that.”

“She’s dead,” I said.

“There you go, shit out of luck. All I know is these guys want to help Hirem’s son out and get some money back, and I got no idea what you’ll have to do to make that happen. I don’t know what they’re asking, and I don’t want to know. I’m just a simple cop, one level above working parking tickets and jaywalkers. I come in here and do my job and see some nasty stuff I’d rather not see, then I got to go home to the family and act like it don’t bother me and that I didn’t bring it home with me. Like there’s nothing more I’d like to do than have a picnic or go to a movie. But all the time I’m thinking about murders and dope deals and some penny-ante shit too, and I can’t ever let it go. Not really. I’m making love to the wife, I remember having to deal with some rape, or a rape and murder, and that doesn’t exactly make me hard as the Rock of Gibraltar, and then I got to fake an orgasm and act like things are cool. ’Cause I tell her what’s on my mind, that’s worse. We aren’t exactly Houston here, but we got our crime and it’s a lot more consistent than you think, and there’s plenty for me to handle without having to think about you and the FBI. So, again, for you, I got nothing. Not even a doughnut, so quit eyeing them. About all I can give you, and I do it reluctantly, is my most sincere heartfelt go fuck yourself. I got absolutely no sympathy for you or Leonard. You’re always into something, and I’m sick of it. Around here, they call you the Disaster Twins, and the way I look at it, you keep coming up with crap on your shoes it’s because you keep steppin’ where you ought to not be steppin’. I don’t care if down deep in your hearts you have good intentions and you’re after the same bad guys I’m after. It is not your job, and I don’t give a damn if you and Leonard are fucking Francis of Assisi in your souls, I am goddamn sick of all of it.”