Vanilla Ride

I sat for a moment not saying anything. Drake gnawed at a doughnut like he was biting my throat out.

“Well,” I said, “I’m glad we had this time together, and thanks for nothing.” I got up and went out.

27

Tonto’s black van was nicer inside than it looked on the outside and it was very large and souped up under the hood and had big wide tires with tread deep enough to lose a quarter in. I wasn’t one of those guys who could talk about cars or fix them up or identify everything on the road. I had always been practical about cars. I wanted them to start and drive me around, get me where I was going and start up when I left. It was considered a Southern failing not to know this kind of thing, the insides of cars, all their clicks and sparks and little growls. All the men I knew who were car buffs, and that was most, looked at me as if not knowing about cars was the equal to not knowing about sunrise and sunset. So when Tonto told me about his van and what it had under the hood and what it could do, I forgot it faster than I forgot the combination to my old high school locker. But I remember this: Tonto claimed his van could run a Corvette down and bitch-slap it, which seemed a little much to me, but it did hum down the road with a sound like a hive of bees. The scenery tossed past us in a blur and we zipped past cars like they were nailed down. I had to admit it was some machine. In that van I felt like one of the Scooby Doo gang. I was probably Scooby himself. A big dumb dog without a dick.

The van had three rows of really comfortable seats and a place in the back to put some luggage and gear, and under the floor carpets and beneath sliding floorboards were secret compartments where we put our weapons, except for the ones we were carrying, which in my and Leonard’s case was nothing more than a pocketknife (me) and a pack of gum (Leonard) and we both had combs. Mine was green, Leonard’s was black. Tonto still had his good-buddy .45s under his armpits, and Jim Bob had a snub-nosed .38 holstered at the small of his back and a clasp knife clipped inside his front pocket and a nut sack packed tight with testosterone.

Marvin had stayed at my house with a shotgun and a cup of coffee. His job was to watch the home front, keep close to the phone in case we needed something he could provide. We gave him directions to where we were going to meet up with the FBI and Hirem, and from there our plan was to keep him informed as we went, because we didn’t know what our plan really was, not yet. With Marvin at the house, we always had a home base. It was a good idea, I thought, and a way to keep him a part of things since he couldn’t do much else with that bum leg.

The day was clear and cold and the sky had turned a bright polished blue and the sun was a yellow blaze hanging at the ten o’clock position. I was sitting in the passenger seat, Tonto drove, behind me was Jim Bob, and next to him was Leonard. Tonto had a CD cranked up, and we listened to Jerry Lee Lewis’s greatest hits as he tooled us along, nodding his head to the music like a bobblehead doll.

When the CD played out, and before he could put in another, I said to Tonto, “That your real name?”

He didn’t turn to look at me, said, “Nope.”

“Guess you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Nope.”

“Hokeydoke.”

I leaned back in the seat and Jim Bob said, “Hap, I had a woman like the one you got, I’d just go to court and take the jail time. You could get your ass killed, and what for?”

“I could ask you a similar question. You could get your ass killed and your hog farm would go to hell,” I said.

“Sold all the hogs, and they wouldn’t hold a candle to Brett.”

“Okay, we agree on that. Brett is better than hogs, and you could get yourself killed easy as any of us.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that, though I always assume I’m going to come out on top and it’s the other guy who’ll wind up with the stick in his ass. But you know, lately I’m starting to think maybe it could go the other way. It’s a new kind of feeling and I’m not too fond of it. I never feel like I really belong anywhere. I think a lot about a line in a Frank O’Hara poem that goes ‘I’m always tying up and then deciding to depart.’ Story of my life.”

“You read poetry?” Leonard said.

“Just when I’m tired of masturbating,” Jim Bob said. “My reading poetry shock you?”

“That you can read shocks me,” Leonard said.

“So, if you can read and have a way to while away the hours, why are you doing this?” I asked.

“We got a kind of connection,” Jim Bob said. “We’re part of a rare kind of club.”

“That right?”

“Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “It’s made up of guys who think the world ought to work smooth and people ought to treat each other right, and when they don’t we go out there and try and fix things and every time we do, we change us into them, and yet we keep hoping and we keep trying and maybe one day we’ll realize we’ll never get it right and we’ll just give in. I don’t know. I sound like a tired philosopher.”

“You sound like I feel,” Tonto said.

“I think you’re reading your books backwards,” Leonard said.

“Again, why are you doing it then?” I asked.

“There aren’t many of us left, Hap, and I’m trying to keep you from becoming totally one of us by taking in the slack I don’t want you to handle. It’s not my job and it shouldn’t matter, but Leonard here, he can’t do it alone. You aren’t a delicate flower, my man, but there’s still something of the hopeful in you and I’d hate to see all of that get sucked out. Probably too late for the rest of us.”

“You don’t know me,” Tonto said.

“Oh, yes I do,” Jim Bob said.

Tonto didn’t argue back. Jim Bob said, “Hap, you ought to be a social worker, not a tough guy. You’re tough enough, but your heart isn’t in it. Soiled as you are, underneath the dirt there’s pretty good linen.”

“I keep telling him that,” Leonard said. “That he’s soiled, I mean. I don’t know about the linen part.”

“And you,” Jim Bob said to Leonard. “Shouldn’t you be home too? Ain’t you got you a boyfriend? You’re a little farther gone on the scale, but at least you’ve got some sense of normalcy going on, got a relationship going.”

Leonard sighed. “Actually, it’s on the fence.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Why do you really do it?” I said to Jim Bob. “I think you’re dodging the question.”

“Man, this is like getting in touch with our feelings, isn’t it?” Jim Bob said. “I told you why.”

“It isn’t about me, and you know it,” I said. “I see you only now and then. What about the rest of the time? Why do you damn near get yourself killed on a regular basis? Private gun for hire, that kind of thing. Let’s expand that question beyond you, my good man. What the fuck is wrong with all of us? And it’s got to be more than just wanting to set the world right.”

“Too many cowboy movies,” Leonard said.

“All right,” Jim Bob said. “Here it is. I do it because if I don’t I’ve got nothing but myself, and though I dearly love myself, I’m a little tired of being me right now. Sometimes I feel like I’m laughing in the dark all by my goddamn self, because I am, and what I got to show for it is a paid-off house with no one in it, not even a dog, because I’m gone too much and when I’m gone I can’t see a whole lot of reason to race back. I had a woman like you got, Hap, I’d hold on to her until the crack of goddamn doom. Can you understand that?”

“I wish life was that simple,” I said.

“I’d just like to come home and have John there,” Leonard said. The words sprang from his mouth like an escaped prisoner.

“You’ve talked to him?” Jim Bob said, pushing his hat back on his head.

“I’ve tried.”

“Leonard’s idea of talking,” I said, “is telling people how it is. Not the same thing as a true discussion. The signal of his love for John was that he climbed up in the bed and shit in it.”

“Yuck,” Jim Bob said. “I wouldn’t like that.”

“Yeah, he took it hard,” Leonard said. “I’m just not a talker about some things, you know. Not like you share-your-feelings guys.”

“So you go straight to shitting in the bed?” Jim Bob said.

“It’s a statement,” Leonard said. “And I’ll have you know, at the bottom of it all I’m a sensitive motherfucker.”

Tonto, who had been listening quietly, watching the road, said, “Hey, Leonard, were you saying you’re queer?”

“The queerest,” Leonard said. “You got a problem with that?”

“Where’s the dick go?”

“Anywhere I can put it.”

“Oh,” Tonto said. “No problem. Just curious. Hap, you’re pussy-whipped.”

“I know.”

“That’s all right,” Tonto said, his voice growing higher than before. “I wish I was pussy-whipped. What about you, Jim Bob?”

“Well, currently, I don’t have a pussy in this fight.”

“You know,” Tonto said, “I think we are bonding like some righteous cocksuckers, don’t you?”

“I assume,” said Leonard, “that you are speaking symbolically because to the best of my knowledge I am the only cocksucker present.”

“Righteous sonsabitches then,” Tonto said.

28

We bonded righteous sonsabitches stopped at a McDonald’s on the other side of Tyler about two hours later. We went in and got some drinks and Tonto got a couple of burgers and then he gave me the keys to the van.

“Something happens to us,” I said, “you may be a long time with Ronald McDonald.”

“This one still has a playground,” Jim Bob said, as he and Tonto took a seat in one of the plastic booths.

“Well, in that case,” I said, “you boys play pretty.”

I drove Leonard and myself over to our meeting place with the FBI. They didn’t know about Jim Bob and Tonto, which was all right. We had agreed to do what they wanted, try to find those kids and get the money back so Hirem would tell all he knew about the Dixie Mafia organization, but we hadn’t said how we were going to do what we had agreed to do and we hadn’t said with whom.

The FBI guys gave us directions to a house at Lake Tyler where they said they were keeping Hirem secluded like a rare animal on the endangered species list. Before we went out there we drove to a place nearby and stopped and used a screwdriver Tonto had given us to take off the plates and put on some others that I think he had had made special. It was a precaution. We didn’t want them to know where we got the van or who it belonged to, so if they ran the plates, they’d come up belonging to someone Tonto made up.

Finished with the plates, we got in and drove. It had turned windy and the blue had gone out of the sky because gray clouds had come in, hiding the sun. The lake house wasn’t on the good side of the lake where there were fine homes and the grass was always freshly mown and there were nice boats docked up close to shore. It was down a precarious red clay road with ruts deeper than the ass crack of time, and the road just kept winding around the evergreens and barren oaks until it died out near the lake. Then you had to park and get out and walk across a messy clay clearing toward a cabin nestled near some pines and beneath a couple of massive cyprus trees from which moss draped like feather boas. The wind whipped the boas and it whipped at us.

It wasn’t much of a cabin. Pretty small and made of logs. The logs had been treated poorly and they were starting to rot, and the cabin leaned downhill toward the lake, which was visible like a blue patch through the boughs of the trees and the mossy boas. The porch was caved in near the steps and there was a window missing and a slab of Sheetrock had been nailed over it from the inside and the Sheetrock was obviously damp and all it would take to knock it loose was a strong cough or foul language.

When we were close up on the cabin I stopped and hollered out, “Hello, the house.”

Some time passed and then the door cracked and I heard Tenson’s voice call out, “Come on up, but you got guns, you need to lose them.”

We had already left them in the van, under the floorboards, so we walked straight to the cabin, wiped the caked clay off our shoes on a stone near the steps, and went inside. Soon as we did I saw Hirem sitting in a rickety chair at a card table, and then I saw Tenson standing in the corner with his gun drawn, dangling by his side. Hirem had lost the suit. He had on casual clothes and a light jacket. Tenson was wearing a dark shirt and jeans and sneakers.

The Mummy was still well wrapped and he stood in a spot on the other side of the room without his gun drawn. There was a humming sound in the room, and it came from small rectangular plug-in heaters on either side of the place. The coils in the heaters glowed red and there was just enough heat to make you glad you were inside instead of out.

The Mummy came over and told us to turn around and put our hands on the wall and spread our legs. We did. Leonard turned his head and looked at the Mummy, said, “You are so butch.”

“Fuck you,” the Mummy said.

“See,” Leonard said. “Told you.”

The Mummy patted us down and took away our combs and my pocketknife and Leonard’s gum.

Tenson said, “All right, relax.”

“We want our combs and I want my pocketknife back,” I said.

“Don’t forget the gum,” Leonard said.

The Mummy gave them back. There were only three chairs. Hirem was in one and the Mummy and Tenson occupied the other two. That left us leaning our backs against the wall. Tenson never put his gun up. He sat with it on his knee.

Leonard looked at the Mummy, said, “How long you got to wear that getup?”

“Too long,” the Mummy said. “I wasn’t even one of them, you dumb ass.”

“How was I to know?” Leonard said. “Wrong place, wrong time, both of us.”

The Mummy didn’t look appeased, or so I thought. Actually, you couldn’t tell much about how he looked. You mostly got what you got from him in the way he moved his eyes or his busted mouth, the way he shrugged his shoulders.

“Hirem here,” Tenson said, waving the gun like a pointer, “he’s got something to tell you, maybe will lead to his boy, but he’s not telling us. He tells you, you take the lead and go after the boy and his poke and bring the money back. FBI gets the drug money, Hirem gets his kid back, the girl doesn’t get shot, and Hirem tells us what he knows and we make all kinds of arrests and you guys go free, no trial, and everyone’s happy, or mostly. You following this scenario?”

“A few dance numbers might liven it up,” I said, “but for the most part, we’re following.”

“Now,” Tenson said, “here’s what we do. You two go outside with Hirem, and we’re gonna stand on the porch so we can see you, and you’re going to walk out a ways and Hirem is going to tell you something he won’t tell us, and that’s okay. That’s how he wants it and we can live with that. We’ll get our results. You hear what I’m saying?”

We nodded, Hirem pulled a heavy coat over his lighter one, and we went outside, across the porch and down a little trail that led into the woods. The wind was picking up and it was carrying a lot more cold with it now, and it hit us like ice picks. I tugged the collar up on my coat and put my hands in my pockets as I walked.

After we were out a ways, Hirem said, “I got to see you guys are wearing a wire or not.”

“You saw him pat us down,” I said.

“Wearing a wire for them,” he said. “They could pat you down all they liked and not find it.”

“All right,” I said and we stopped walking and I held up my arms. Hirem patted me down, then did the same to Leonard.

“Good,” he said. “Now, let’s walk a bit more.”

29

As we started to walk, Tenson yelled from the porch, “Don’t go too far. We start to worry you aren’t so we can see you, Hirem. And you don’t want us worried, do you?”

Hirem didn’t answer, but he turned to us, said, “They know I’m not going anywhere. I want my boy back and I’ll do what I got to do until that’s done. They just like to harass me. Hell, I came to them, wasn’t like they brought me in. They been trying to nail my ass for years. I finally had to hold the nail for them.”

“You got some idea how to find your son,” I said, “but you’re telling us, not the FBI?”

“That’s right,” Hirem said. “I don’t trust those guys. I don’t trust the law. I don’t trust my mother-in-law all that much, and she’s dead some ten years now.”

“But you trust us?” Leonard said. “Didn’t you send those bozos to kill us?”

“It was business, but I can tell about you guys, and I can trust you.”

“Say you can?” I said.

“I think I can. You’re like the old guys in the organization, you got a sense of honor.”

I didn’t believe the organization, as Hirem referred to it, ever had a sense of honor, but I listened.

“Bottom line is I like you better than them,” he said. “Let’s put it that way and call it close enough. What I think is I’m gonna get a better shot with you than them.”

“You’re the one gonna sing to them,” Leonard said. “You’re gonna tell them everything, so why not tell them this?”

“Get my kid back safe, I’ll tell them whatever they want to know. After that, it don’t matter for me. I should’ve been a barber. My daddy was a barber and he offered me into the business, but I didn’t take it.”

“There’s still time to hone up your skills,” I said. “But you do, you’ll be giving prison haircuts.”

“Listen now,” Hirem said. “I’m gonna tell you guys some things I need you to know, so you got some idea who might get in your way.”

“Sort of figured this might not just be a bring the kid home kind of thing,” Leonard said. “It never is.”

“What I know some others can figure out,” Hirem said, “and the people I worked for, they can figure better sometimes than the FBI. These feds may have our phones tapped, and they may have all kinds of law on their side, but these guys I work for, they been around awhile now, and they got people more expendable than the feds got. You hear me?”

“We’re all ears,” I said.

“First and foremost, get my boy back.”

“And the girl?” I said.

“She ain’t nothing to me,” Hirem said. “But it makes Tim feel all right to have her around, I can get over her being coated in chocolate.”

“So that’s what this is,” Leonard said, holding out his hands, looking astonished. “I just thought I was dirty, and it’s been chocolate all the while.”

“Not now, Leonard,” I said.

“Ain’t got nothing against your people,” Hirem said, looking at Leonard. “Just never figured I’d have a boy fuckin’ one of them.”

“Now that makes me really feel tight with you,” Leonard said.

“I’m not used to all the changes in things,” Hirem said.

“Civil rights happened … let me see,” Leonard said, “about mid-sixties, right? And the Civil War, it was over some one hundred years before that. Good to see you’re catching up.”

“My boy never did cotton to what I do, the way I think. And maybe that’s good. I’m not so sure about things I was sure about just a few months ago.”

“Death threats and prison terms can change a man’s perspective,” I said. “We know.”

Hirem nodded. “Thing is, I don’t really know where my boy is, but I have a maybe. He was a little kid, we were close. His mother was dead and it was just me and some hired help. We had a place we went to, rented a cabin by the lake and fished. He mentioned it from time to time, though we quit going there some years ago. It had good memories for him, back when he thought I was just a businessman and his daddy. We went there and fished and talked, and from the way he talked, I knew then he wasn’t like me, that there was something different about him. I’d had any sense I’d have gotten out of the business and gone into the barbering.”

“Shoulda, coulda, woulda,” Leonard said. “Ain’t nothing in that story matter to me except where you think he is. I want to get this done and go home.”

“You’ll keep him from being hurt?” Hirem said. “He’s only nineteen.”

“That’s the plan,” I said. “We’ll do everything in our power to make sure he is protected. We’ll protect the girl too.”

“She’s your choice,” Hirem said. “Something happens to him, you got to make sure whoever did it gets theirs.”

“That’s not our business,” I said. “Not part of our agreement.”

“All right,” Hirem said. “Just protect him if you find him. Place we used to go, place I think he may have went because I noticed a couple of his rods and reels were gone—I don’t think he understands the deep doo-doo he’s in. Him and that girl, they don’t got a clue. They’ve run off with dirty money and they took some fishing poles with them.”

“I’m sure they don’t know what they’re into,” I said. “I’m beginning to suspect that neither do we. Where’s the place, Hirem?”

“Lake O’ the Pines. There’s a series of cabins up there, fella named Bill Jordan rents them, or used to. They’re on the east side of the lake. Ain’t much. And there’s no guarantee my boy’s there, but he might be. He’s not there, maybe I can think of something else. But right now that’s all I got.”

“That’s it?” Leonard said. “Man, you got a con on these feds, don’t you?”

“Not if he’s there,” Hirem said. “He is, it’s no con.”

“Guess that’ll have to do,” I said.

“Let me give you a word to the wise,” Hirem said. “The organization has done had me try and hit you guys, and you’re harder to kill than anyone would have thought. But they got other people. They may send some of the regular toughs one more time, some tougher and smarter than Tanedrue. Couple of those boys with Tanedrue, they were real professionals, and you handed them their asses, so they’ll be more careful next time. They might just pass GO and jump to the big time.”

“Big time?” Leonard said.

Hirem nodded. “That’s right. They got people don’t work for them directly. Freelancers. Hitters. And they’re a whole ’nuther ball game, fellas. These people they hire, one or two in particular, bad sonsabitches. There’s no one quite like them. They’re like those, whatchacallits, the Jap guys in black.”

“Ninjas,” I said.

“I know, sounds like some kind of movie, but they’re for real. I know their work, but I don’t know them, and I don’t know anyone that’s ever seen them. They get a call through some kind of contact, the job gets done, and they get paid. So keep your eyes peeled and your ears open.”

“I got a question,” I said. “Conners, the cop. He have anything to do with the hit?”

“Conners helped put it together,” Hirem said. “He didn’t like the way you talked to him, Hap. He thought he’d go over there and show his big ass and that would be enough. You’d start some kind of payment plan on the dope you flushed. Or go to work for them, something like that. When you didn’t, well, he came to me. And I’ve told you how it is these days with the upper management. They ain’t much on compromise or negotiation. It’s all about respect. They learned that in prison. You don’t get respect there, you either wind up with a shank in your gut or a dick in your ass. They come out of prison, they’re still the same. And you two, you disrespected them big-time by beating up their hired help. But Conners—he has to get permission, but he’s the contact for the hits. He knows all the hitters, and the management likes it that way. Something comes to him direct instead of them, that’s all right with them. It’s more distance from the deed, and as long as things get done, they’re happy. And now you’ve killed off some of their help. It’s not that they care about them, it’s that they don’t like that disrespect part, the loss of that dope money, and they can’t have you two dropping their soldiers like cigarette butts.”

That must have reminded him, because he reached inside his coat pocket and found a pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth. He patted around on his pockets for a moment, said, “Goddamn it, they took away my lighter. You guys got anything?”

We shook our heads.

I said, “Your kid. What was he driving?”

“He took my Escalade. It’s black.”

“Anything else?” Leonard said.

“Guess not,” Hirem said.

Hirem put the cigarette pack back in his pocket but kept the cigarette in his mouth. He wagged it in his lips when he said, “I just got one thing for you. A bit of fatherly advice from a fella tried to have you killed. You guys are pretty confident guys. You think you got the world by the tail, even if you’re just day laborers with an attitude. And you may be tough as you think you are, hard to kill. Like a cockroach you can’t step on right, keeps running out from under your shoe. But remember, now and again even cockroaches get crunched.”

30

After we walked Hirem up to the cabin, the Mummy came out with us. He walked us to our van. I kept expecting a scarab beetle to come out from under his bandages. He said, “It would be a lot easier you just told us what he had to say right now.”

“It would be for you,” I said.

“For you too. Your job would be done. We’d go get the boy and the girl and the money, and everyone would be happy.”

“We kind of gave our word,” I said.

“To him?”

“That’s who we were talking to,” Leonard said.

“You’re yankin’ me?”

“I don’t think so,” Leonard said.

“You gave your word to a guy tried to kill you, and you won’t tell the FBI what he said?”

“That’s pretty much it,” Leonard said. “Hey, remember back at the cop shop? He said it wasn’t personal, so why should we be mad?”

The Mummy shook his head. “I don’t get you guys. We’re doing you the favor. We could call this whole thing off right now, have you locked up. Might even take Hirem out back and see what he thinks about having his ass kicked until he talks.”

“He won’t talk and you know it,” I said. “Otherwise, you’d have already done it. And you do that, find the kid, you won’t get all the other information you want to get out of him. All the inner clock workings of the Dixie Mafia.”

The Mummy looked at us. His eyes peeking out of the mask were dark and narrow, his lips had turned beet red from the cold. It made him look pretty damn creepy. “You go get that boy and girl and that goddamn money and you go get it quick.”

“Gee,” Leonard said, “can we stop for dinner, take a pee?”

“You do what you got to do,” the Mummy said. “But you make it quick as you can. Today would be good.”

“It might take a few days,” I said. “I don’t know exactly. Things may not fall in line just the way we like it.”

“I can tell you this,” the Mummy said. “We’re tired of hanging out in this shit hole. We want to go home, be warm, not have to hang around with Hirem. You hear me?”

“If you’ll reinforce your words with sign language,” Leonard said, “we might get a clear message.”

The Mummy shot Leonard the finger.

“There,” Leonard said. “I understand that. See, I get you now.”

“Make it quick,” the Mummy said and walked back toward the cabin.

In the van, driving away, I said, “From one cockroach to another, I don’t think the Mummy likes you very much.”

“I think it’s because I beat his ass.”

“Think?” I said.

“Uh-huh. You know, odd how the Mummy and his buddy think we ought to believe them just because they’re from the government.”

“It’s like religion,” I said. “You accept it on faith.”

“Well, that’s stupid.”

“I said it was like religion, didn’t I?”

“Oh yeah, so you did. What you think about that Conners guy?”

“I think he doesn’t get out of this business unscathed,” I said.

Leonard nodded. “I was thinking pretty much the same thing, and I’ve put him on the list.”

“Okay, but put a couple of stars by his name,” I said.

31

Hadn’t gone far before we stopped and switched the license plates, hid the ones we had used under the floorboards again, then drove back to McDonald’s. When we came in, the table where Jim Bob and Tonto were sitting was piled high with food bags and drink cups.

“So,” Jim Bob said, “you’re back and hopefully without bullet holes or the clap.”

“Yep,” I said.

We ordered some food for ourselves, then slid into the booth and told them what we had been told.

Tonto said, “That’s pretty thin, that the kid went fishing some spot where he went when he was little. That’s damn thin.”

“He took fishing rods,” I said.

“That makes it absolute,” Tonto said. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place? You know, he could be jackin’ with the old man, ’cause he thought Dad would come after him because of the girl, and of course the money, and maybe he’s just wanting the old man to show him how much he cares.”

“He’s nineteen,” I said, “and I don’t think he’s that smart. Anyone who would steal that much money from a bunch of cutthroats and know they’re cutthroats can’t be all that bright.”

“Naive, anyway,” Leonard said.

“My goodness,” Jim Bob said. “Was that a positive comment on a member of the human race? What in the world have you been drinking, Leonard?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Leonard said. “That was oddly optimistic. I’m giving up Dr Pep … I’m giving up Diet Coke as of this moment.”

“You don’t drink Diet Coke,” I said.

“See how it’s working?” Leonard said.

I said, “Thing is, it’s what we got, and the way I figure it, Hirem knows his son, or at least thinks he does. Most sons in one way or another want to please their fathers, or at least capture some good moment in time they had with them.”

“Speaking from experience?” Jim Bob said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

“I don’t have those feelings,” Tonto said. “If I went somewhere and was waiting on my father to find me, waiting on him to care or even miss me, I’d have been waiting one long goddamn time.”

“You’re the one said that might be what he’s doing,” Jim Bob said. “So maybe you know more about this kind of thing than you think.”

“Maybe,” Tonto said. “Guess I’m not all that big on parents of any stripe.”

“It’s not always that way,” Jim Bob said. “There are even parents who like their kids. Mine liked me, in spite of myself.”

“Way I look at it, between the pussy and the asshole is no-man’ s-land,” Tonto said. “You either come out a baby or a turd, and I think I came out of the wrong hole. Nobody much cared I was around.”

“Who lives in No Man’s Land?” Leonard said.

“I’m uncertain,” Tonto said. “It wasn’t a very good example.”

“All right,” I said, “all turds aside, here it is again. It’s what we got, and that’s why we check it out. They’re there, we bring them home if we have to tie them up and toss them in the back of the van. Or at least the boy, and more importantly, the money. I think they get the money back, lots of feelings are gonna be less hurt.”

“I been thinking about that,” Tonto said, sipping a soft drink through a straw, then pausing as if he were seeing something far away. “What say we find the money and split it and go home?”

“That wouldn’t help mine and Leonard’s situation any.”

“No,” Tonto said, “it wouldn’t. But it would help our billfolds big-time. Split four ways, that’s not so bad. And there’s also this: the boy and the girl, they could end up dead. They end up that way and no one knows me and Jim Bob was in with you, we can just say, hey, the bad guys, they got there first and all the money was gone. They must have got it back.”

“That still wouldn’t help us,” I said, “and I wouldn’t do that. You don’t know me, Tonto, but I wouldn’t do that. Neither would Leonard.”

“Absolutely not,” Leonard said.

“I know that,” Tonto said. “Hell, I know that, but it’s something I could do, and I had to try it out, see how it fit.”

“It doesn’t fit,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that either,” Jim Bob said. “Maybe we aren’t exactly on the same team after all, and we are not self-righteous cocksuckers together.”

“That was changed to sonsabitches,” Leonard said. “Remember, we established that.”

“In fact we did,” Jim Bob said.

“I’m not as pure as you guys,” Tonto said. “I’m here because I owe Marvin Hanson a favor.”

“Doing it that way wouldn’t be much of a favor,” I said.

“No,” Tonto said, “it wouldn’t. Forget I brought it up.”

32

Doing something like we were doing can make a man paranoid. I thought I saw the same car two or three times that day, and wondered if it had followed us out of LaBorde, wondered if it had followed us to the McDonald’s, and then followed Leonard and me on out to the cabin in the woods and back again. I thought about that a lot, then decided I was starting to see things. The car was an old brown Ford, and I had seen a lot of them that day, and when I finally started noticing the drivers, I realized they were all different, and the Fords were all over the place, and that was a popular color that year for that make and model.

When I told the boys about it, Tonto said, “I been followed by the best, and I always knew they were there. I been watchin’ too, and I’ve seen some brown Fords. I’ve also seen some green Chevys and all manner of cars, but I haven’t seen anyone I thought was following us.”

“You ever been wrong about being followed?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Tonto said.

“Could there be a first time?”

“Unlikely,” he said.

“I ain’t someone easily followed either,” Jim Bob said, “but then again, I haven’t been paying any attention.”

“Then you can be easily followed,” I said.

“Not when I don’t want to be. Being followed wasn’t something I expected or was looking out for. I was too busy daydreaming about what I’m gonna be when I grow up, and I was countin’ on your guys. If we’re being followed, then you sonofabitches have let me down.”

“Whatever it is you’re gonna be when you grow up,” Leonard said, “I hope it pays better than this.”

“Me too,” Jim Bob said.

When we neared Lake O’ the Pines, I convinced the others we ought to pull in somewhere for the night and get some rest and make sure we weren’t being followed, make sure it was just my paranoia, and that tomorrow we could check out the cabins by the lake.

Just outside Lake O’ the Pines the woods grew thicker and we could see dark water between the trees and on the water were spots that looked like blue oil slicks and the sun made parts of it shine like a mirror. In the woods were lots of vines and moss, and they were twisted up thick as Brer Rabbit’s briar patch, and in some spots the water had run out of the woods and onto the road and we had to splash our tires through it. We found some old-fashioned cabins not far from a dark patch of deep woods and a big worn-out peeling sign with a fat preacher on it holding a Bible and pointing his finger in the air. The sign said: JESUS IS COMING. I thought he ought to hurry some, because it had already been over two thousand years.

The place we came to is called a motel these days, but once upon a time they were called tourist courts, and the original ones, of which this was a survivor, were small and simple and close together. This one was a row of brown-red buildings that were starting to strip paint and shed shingles.

Leonard and I rented a room from a guy that seemed surprised to see us, or most anyone for that matter. He was a bald little guy seated on a tall stool behind a counter, and there was a little brown and white dog sitting on the floor by the stool. The bald guy looked us in the eye and the dog looked up at us, its mouth wadded up, as if it was angry or missing teeth.

Tonto and Jim Bob rented a room too, all of it paid for with Marvin’s money. He had given us a thousand dollars, and anything over that Leonard and I had vowed to pay, which meant we were trying to keep it cheap and keep it real.

The tourist court was cheap and the rooms were small. There were two narrow beds with worn bedcovers and a desk with a mirror and two chairs and a little TV on a wall mount. It didn’t have a remote so you had to change channels by hand and all it got was three stations and some static. There was dust on the windowsills and the tub in the bathroom had a creaky-looking shower; there was a rim around the drain in the tub that was either rust or dried blood from when the last depressed occupant had slashed their wrists. Home Sweet Home.

The room Tonto and Jim Bob got was next door to us and it was the same as ours, except they had a microwave that didn’t work and the inside of it housed the remains of an exploded burrito. We visited with them briefly and left.

In our room I peeled back the dusty curtains and looked out the window to see if I saw a brown Ford, but I didn’t see one. I watched the old cracked highway from the window for a while. A lot of cars went by. Some were Fords, but none of them were brown.

“Hap,” Leonard called from the bathroom, “will you come hold my dick while I pee?”

“Go to hell, Leonard.”

“Will you wipe my ass? I’m tired.”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m gonna shower. Will you come wash my back?”

“Die,” I said.

I kept looking out the window all the while the shower was running, and I kept getting the same non-results. I gave it up and sat on the bed and got the paperback Western novel out of my bag and put one of my guns next to me and read for a while. When Leonard finished his shower, I took one. There was no soap and no shampoo and the water was almost hot.

We dressed and joined up with our pals next door, and with directions from the bald guy behind the tourist court counter, we drove a few miles to a small town and a little cafe that was doing brisk business. The waitress was slightly overweight but cute. She walked like she had just had horseshoes removed. She gave us a booth with a table that was still sticky from having just been wiped. We sat with our hands in our laps while it dried, waiting on the menus she forgot to give us.

When the menus came we studied them and got coffee first. I said, “Way I figure it, instead of a whole pack of us going to look at the cabins where Hirem said his son was, me and Leonard will go, and call you when we need you.”

“You need us,” Tonto said, “you won’t have time to call.”

“If you’re right,” I said, “and no one’s following us, we’ll be fine because we’re not up against anything but two kids and some fishing rods and about three hundred thousand dollars, minus pay for some gas and a meal or two.”

“I could be wrong, though,” Tonto said. “Been having a feeling things aren’t right.”

“What’s it based on?” Jim Bob said.

“My gut,” Tonto said.

“I don’t believe in that sort of thing,” Jim Bob said. “I believe you feel that way, it’s because you’ve noticed something, something that hasn’t registered consciously but it’s there. Something has struck you. Seen something, thought someone didn’t look right. It may have been on some deeper level, but you know something because there’s something to know—or you’re just fucking paranoid.”

“That’s a lot of somethings,” Tonto said.

“Doing this kind of work can make you paranoid,” I said.

“I believe in premonitions,” Tonto said, “and I believe in my gut. My gut’s telling me this isn’t going to be a cakewalk, and that it’s going to turn ugly, and that we’re already into it and we don’t know it yet.”

“My brown Ford,” I said.

“Haven’t seen any brown Ford,” Tonto said. “I tell you simple, it’s my gut telling me things.”

“Right now,” Leonard said, “my gut is telling me I’m going to order some fried chicken and some mashed potatoes with gravy, and maybe afterward, a slice of some kind of pie. And then, if I’m feeling really rowdy, I might wipe my hands on my pants.”

“You are such a tough guy,” I said.

“And don’t you forget it.”

33

On the way back to the tourist courts, Tonto stopped and got a six-pack of beer and Jim Bob bought some Jack Daniel’s. Leonard bought a bottle of malt liquor, to keep up stereotypes, he said, and I bought a six-pack of Diet Coke and a peanut pattie, also to keep up stereotypes. I almost got an RC to go with it. That would have been even more perfect. Maybe a couple of MoonPies too.

In Tonto and Jim Bob’s room, we all drank our poison and talked. After three beers, Tonto began to talk. It just sort of flowed out of him like sweet maple sap in the springtime.

“You know, I grew up in Louisiana, not really all that far from here,” he said.

“No shit?” Jim Bob said.

“No shit,” Tonto said. “My dad, he worked offshore on an oil rig, and one time there was a big storm. They say it was so big the waves climbed up high enough to look like the walls of the world. That’s what the survivors said. See, they were supposed to have a helicopter fly them out, ’cause they got word of the storm, but the helicopter got delayed, and then when it finally got out to the rig, the storm was swirling up the sea and swallowing up that big rig like it was made of pipe cleaners and a whore’s best wishes. My dad, he went down with all that steel. They never found his body, so I guess it’s still down there, or is all ate up from the fishes and such. I think about him nonetheless, and here’s the thing. I didn’t even like him.

“When he wasn’t beating me he was calling me stupid, and this went along with what they called me at school, and that’s where they started calling me Tonto, on account of I look like I’m an Indian.”

“You’re not?” Leonard said.

“Nope. Greek. Full-blood. But they called me that so much I started going by it. Got so it didn’t hurt if it was my name. See what I’m saying? You can’t call me a thing and make it bad if that’s the name I got. So, in time, that’s what everyone knew me by, and soon enough my real name was forgotten. I even almost forgot. My dad was dead, that left me with my stepmom and some nuns at school, and I want to tell you now, I got the Lord beat into me and he’s in my skin and in my blood and down in my bones. I love the Lord and I disobey him every day. My stepmother, she was lonely like, and I was a pretty big boy, and pretty soon she’s greasing my weasel, and my little brother finds out, and then it gets around to the nuns at school, because my brother, Jimmy, he’s jealous, ’cause my stepmom, Trish, she’s a looker, and he’s wanting to get him some of that too. She was that kind of woman, went around the house half naked. She was askin’ for it, and I gave her what she was askin’, and at the time it seemed like pretty good stuff. Now, all these years later, I feel dirty about the whole thing, but you see, it was like I was fucking what my father fucked, and I was showing him, even if the old bastard was turning round and round at the bottom of the sea. Showing him I could take his piece of tail and be as good or better than him. That fucking asshole beat me with a big leather belt that he kept hung on a nail by the door. He hit us, me and my little brother, with it so much that when it was laid across the nail it hung flat. It was damn near worn out from slapping ass.

“When I got into Trish I told myself I was a man from then on and wasn’t nobody going to use a belt on me. No one was going to lay a hand on me. And then one morning I got up and she was gone and I never saw her again. I took to doing push-ups, by the hours. I got so I could do hundreds, and I got stronger and I grew bigger, able to bend a tire iron over my thigh. You don’t believe that, I can show you.”

“I’ll take you at your word,” Jim Bob said.

“Not me,” Leonard said. “I want to see it.”

“Later,” Tonto said, and took a deep drink of beer and crushed the can. “One day my brother, Jimmy, he run off because the nuns were rapping his knuckles and a whole bunch of people at school were calling him names, and like I said, it was known at school about me and Trish, and I was getting called stuff too. Guess Jimmy couldn’t take it no more. I never did see Jimmy again, at least I don’t know for a fact if I did, though one time in the Houston airport I saw a fellow I thought was Jimmy. He was with a woman and a baby. I studied him for a long time, and he looked over at me a time or two, and I got this feeling he knew me and that it was Jimmy. But I just walked on by and never knew for sure, and didn’t want to. Not really. I had gotten used to him being gone and not having a brother. I liked it that way.

“But after Jimmy run off, the meanness that was divided on me and Jimmy all turned on me. Even the nuns got worse. I think maybe they thought they could beat the evil out of me, and one of the worst was a younger nun who I always thought was looking me up, trying to think if she could figure some way to get her a little of what I was toting between the legs. It could have just been my thinking, ’cause I always did want to fuck a nun. Anyway, I don’t know that for a fact, but it could have been true, and she maybe thought about it so much and got so much a feeling of being a sinner that she took it out on me with that ruler. One day I took it away from her and broke it and threatened to stick it up her ass and break it off again. I was a pretty big boy then, even if I was young, and it scared her. I got sent home for a few days, but when I went back she never did hit me with that ruler no more. But it didn’t change the way the kids talked, especially this one fella, Danny Sonier. He wouldn’t let it go, and he went around saying I was fucking my mother. Well, she wasn’t my mother. She was my stepmother, and I don’t even think she and Daddy were married. I think she was just some whore he brought home from Shreveport.

“Anyway, one day this Sonier boy followed me home with a couple of his buddies, and as they got closer to my house, walking behind me, calling me names, saying things, I finally got fed up and stopped in the middle of the road, grabbed up some rocks and threw them. They bolted. But when I got to the house, which wasn’t much of a house, by the way, I was going up on the porch and turned around and there was Danny Sonier, standing in the yard. His buddies were gone. It was just him.

“He was calling me names and acting all tough, and I came off that porch like a rocket. We went together hard at it, fists flying, and all I remember was everything turned red, and when it wasn’t red anymore, I was looking down at Danny and his head was like a big squash that had dried out and been broken open, only it was leaking blood, and I had a big stone in my hand. I had pulled it out of the ground and beat him like a snake, and I didn’t even remember it. He was dead. I dragged his body off out to the swamp, where I knew there were alligators, and I dropped him in. I sat there on the bank the rest of the day and the body floated. It didn’t sink like I thought it would. It floated. And it was just about night when a big old gator came up and grabbed the body by its mashed head and took it down. Happened so sudden it made me jump to my feet. And when I did, I heard a scuttling, and behind me was two more gators. I made a run for it, but they went straight into the water. I saw this when I got to a tree and went up in it. Those gators went in the water where the other gator had taken Danny down and there was all kind of rolling around in the water, a flashing of gator tails, a glimpse of big teeth, and it went on like that for some time. And then just when I was fixin’ to come down from that tree, I see that an old bull gator had crawled up under it, this old cypress, and he was just waiting there, his head lifted, and his mouth open, like he was expectin’ me to drop into it.

“Well, I stayed up there in the tree, and fell asleep between two limbs. When I woke up and looked down the next mornin’, the gator was gone. I climbed down and went home. When I was able to go back to school, I did, but with Jimmy gone they sent out some social workers and discovered the stepmom was gone too, and I got put in foster care for a while, but I didn’t get along with nobody, so ended up in an orphanage until I run off at sixteen.

“Course, before that, Danny was missed and he was looked for, and his buddies said he followed me home. I told the nuns and the cops I had thrown rocks at them, and they had run off, and that was the last I had seen of Danny. They didn’t believe me, but that was my story and I stuck the fuck to it. In time they gave up on me, and that’s when I went to those foster homes, and then the orphanage, and then I run off. They brought me back twice, but finally I was old enough to get emancipated, and that’s what I did. Then, one night, in Houston, in a bar, I was sitting on a stool, minding my own business, which was drinking a beer and chattin’ up a good-looking brunette with a set of titties you could use as a water float, when in comes this fellow all pissed off. I had just put my hand on her thigh, and she was wearing a dress so short, when she moved, her skimpy underpants looked like something crawling. This fellow, he had a knife and he meant to use it, and did. He cut my arm with a slash, and then I took it away from him, and in the commotion the girl ran off and the guy ended up with the blade in his throat, and when it was over, I looked up and the bar was empty except for the bartender and four guys in Hawaiian shirts, and one of them, a big guy with a nose that spread over his face like it was some kind of animal, says to me: ‘That was pretty nifty, Injun. You want a job?’

“And so they cleaned up the place and threw away that dead guy like he was trash, and when the cops came I was gone and no one left there remembered a thing, ’cause they all worked for the big man who had spoken to me and this made their memories bad. Well, there was the bartender. But he said he hadn’t seen a thing either, and all them other people had run off, including the good-looking brunette with the good tits and the crawling undies. I found out all this from the flat-nosed guy, ’cause I made a deal to meet him somewhere and go to work for him, and the work was to my liking. I killed people for money.”

Tonto paused and opened a can of beer and drank a big sip. “And I been at it ever since, except for a time when I was an investment banker.”

“That’s a joke, right?” I said.

“Big-time,” he said.

“You don’t mind my asking,” I said, “how come you owe Marvin a favor? Why are you here?”

“Simple thing,” he said. “I ended up with this gal who was better for me than I was for her, and she didn’t have any idea the job I had. She thought I was an insurance salesman. We had this boy. Good-lookin’ kid, and I loved him, and I thought I might go straight. Planned on it. Just couldn’t quite get out of the business. Like a drunk looking for the next drink, you know. Wantin’ to quit, but getting too much out of it.

“So when my boy, Kevin, was twelve a guy talked him into a car and did things to him, and my boy, he didn’t live. They found his body beside the road, and my wife, she cut her wrists, and if there was any chance of me being the Christian I thought I’d grow up to be, be anything like the nuns said I ought to be, that was it, it was over. I was already fucked, but this was the big fuck. I believe, and I’m loyal to the faith in my heart, but in my hands and in my mind and in my deeds I’m not. But the guy did it, he got caught and he was tried, and they couldn’t prove it. And when he got loose he got drunk and admitted he did it, and the guy he told at a bar, he told the papers, and then it was all over the place, and this guy, he said, ‘Yeah, I did it, but there’s no second bite at the apple.’

“Even child molesters usually have enough sense to know what they do shouldn’t be admitted to, but not this guy. He was proud, and it was his philosophy, the whole man/boy love bit. This guy lived for little pink boy butt holes. So I wait a few months, and I go over to his house and I kick in the back door and I find him in bed with a bunch of lit candles and some child pornography, and he’s naked and probably pulling his rope, but he won’t never pull it again, ’cause I get hold of him and twisted his neck so far around ain’t nobody could sneak up on him from behind, provided he hadn’t died from it.

“So, Marvin Hanson, he’s a cop in Houston, and he figures it’s me right away. He didn’t have nothing on me, but he knew who I was and what I did, and he had a pretty good idea I’d do just what I done. So they found some fingerprints there, and though I had been careful, I was so mad, when I got hold of that fucker’s head and twisted it, the gloves I was wearing ripped, and I left a fingerprint on his neck. Can you believe that? On his fuckin’ neck?

“Lieutenant Hanson, he came to me at my house, and he has the evidence with him, and he says something like, ‘I don’t cotton to what you’re doin’, Tonto, and if this was some other thing, some other murder, I’d crawl so far up your ass every time you took a shit my life would play before your eyes instead of yours.’ And he took a match and he lit the evidence and he tossed it in the kitchen sink and leaned his back against it and looked at me. He said, ‘Got nothing for child molesters. Especially proud ones.’ And he started out, and I said, ‘Look here, man. You ever need anything, anything I can do, all you got to do is call and it’s done.’ And he said, ‘Not likely’ But the other day, I got the call. And here I am. I owe him. Got to tell you, it was a joy to twist that cocksucker’s head in my hands and hear his neck snap like a goddamn chicken bone. I liked the way he looked at me and the way he tried to yell when I twisted his goozle. Liked the way the light went out of his eyes. I’ve seen a fish on the dock do that. You catch him and he flops and he flops, and then slowly the eyes slick over. Only with this chicken fucker, it was quick. Real quick. I just wish he had been there to feel that rolled magazine I shoved up his ass. I couldn’t help myself. And I didn’t grease him none. Had he been alive, the paper cuts alone would have made him bleed out. Or so I like to think. Anyway, that’s who I am, and I ought not to have told any of that. Haven’t ever told anybody about it, and didn’t intend to ever, and it’s probably a mistake. But there it is, on my sixth beer and having sucked down four or five shots of Jack Daniel’s, and I’m with guys I like, and because there ain’t many guys I like, I’ve talked my ass off, and that’s the whole thing downloaded like a fuckin’ movie off the Internet.”

We all sat silently for a while.

Jim Bob said, “So, Tonto, you’ve had a fairly uneventful life, have you not?”

Tonto slowly grinned.

34

I was in my bed and Leonard was coming out of the bathroom buttoning up his pajama top. It was an ugly set of pajamas. White cloth with anchors on it; matching shirt and pants. No footsies.

“So,” I said, “where did the pajamas come from?”

“John.”

“Were they a gag gift?”

“No.”

“He think you’re a sailor?”

“No. He thought they were cute.”

“Trust me,” I said. “They aren’t cute.”

“I have a little red teddy I could wear, you prefer.”

“Most definitely not… you don’t, do you?”

“Now what do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think about much of anything anymore. I was actually thinking about Brett. And I was thinking about that story Tonto told us.”

“You believe it?”

“I do.”

“Me too. Do you think he can bend a tire iron?”

“I do.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“He scares you a little, doesn’t he, Leonard?”

“Me? Hell no.”

“He scares me.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“Well, all right. He scares me a little. I think he made me pee-pee some in my pants.”

“Is that fear or sexuality?”

“I do kind of find him attractive,” Leonard said, “but, alas, he’s not my type. He’s heterosexual. That always puts a damper on things. And another thing—he’s a killer.”

“So are we.”

“Not for money. Not for any reason that isn’t self-defense or the defense of someone else.”

“So we’re noble?”

“Nope,” Leonard said. “We’re two guys trying to be like heroes, and the problem is, we’re just two guys. Though I, of course, am highly attractive and hung like an elephant and have nifty pajamas and smooth black skin.”

“I have bunny shoes.”

“Yep, but you didn’t bring them.”

“There is that…. How about John? How’s things? Have you called home since we been on the road?”

“I have. He told me to eat shit.”

“Not good.”

“Nope. Not good. These days he doesn’t find me that attractive, which is something I can’t quite wrap my mind around. I look in the mirror, I’m pretty satisfied.”

“So what did he say?”

“He said don’t call anymore, he has things to work out.”

“That stinks.”

“He thinks Jesus is pulling his ear, trying to get him over there on the good side with the straights. Thinks suddenly he’s gonna lose interest in the rod and go to the hole punch.”

“Maybe it’s the devil pulling his ear.”

“Whatever it is, I don’t like it. We had a good thing going.”

“Sucks.”

“He used to suck, and I liked it. Now he doesn’t suck. I don’t like being without him, Hap. I don’t like someone’s mythology getting in the way of my romance.”

“I know.”

“It’s like you being without Brett.”

“I know that too. And I miss her.”

“We should really give up on the adventures and stay home.”

“Yep. But we didn’t really have a choice here.”

“We could have gone to trial. I think we’d have been no-billed. It was self-defense.”

“But it was nasty self-defense.”

“This is Texas,” Leonard said.

“There is that. Let’s go to sleep.”

“Hap?”

“Yep.”

“Will you tell me a story?”

“All right. There were four bears.”

“Four?”

“This is my story. There were four bears. Two of them were not as smart as the other two because they were really at heart nicer bears, and they kept getting themselves into rotten situations, and eventually two of the bears, the ones that weren’t so smart but were nicer, they got themselves killed.”

“Those two dead bears? That us?”

“Yep,” I said.

“I don’t like that story.”

“Me either. You want to hear a joke?”

“Hell no. Not one of your jokes. Go to sleep.”

“Spoilsport. … There was this dog—”

“I said I didn’t want to hear it.”

“—and he came limping into this Western town—”

“You’ve told this one.”

“And he held up his injured foot, said, ‘I’m here to get the man who shot my paw’ … get it?”

“I get it. You tell this to me at least once a month.”

“You see, paw and pa, like the old Westerns. Guy comes into town—”

“Hap. I get it. It stinks. It stunk the first time and it stinks this time.”

“Brett laughed.”

“I don’t believe that. You’re lying. You made that up. I’ll call her.”

“There’s no need to call her.”

“Aha.”

“Well. She smiled.”

“She was embarrassed.”

“Maybe.”

“Good night, Hap.”

“Good night, Leonard.”

35

Lake O’ the Pines is a big lake, man-made, like all the lakes in Texas except Caddo Lake. It was made a long time ago and on this cold morning the water was looking blue as a Patsy Cline song. I thought that by midday, we didn’t get any cloud cover, the cold could burn off a little and it might be a fairly warm day. But if the clouds came in, it could turn damn cold damn quick because a wind was starting up, and as we drove by the lake, I could see through the trees along the bank that the water was rippling the way coffee will ripple when you blow on it to cool it.

We drove around, trying to follow the directions Hirem gave us, but there were a lot of little cabins. Finally, about lunchtime we came out from around the lake and stopped at a gas station and mini-mart and got some gas. There was a couple there with a break-down cage that you could put up easy and dismantle easy and haul away, and in the cage was a bear. It was a pretty good-sized bear. They had a deal where you could get your picture taken with the bear, Cindy. Of course, Leonard had to do it and I had to do it with him. When we went inside the cage and were introduced to Cindy, she was sitting on a stool like a human being, as if on break. I half expected her to be smoking a cigarette. She saw us, got up, waddled over, and stretched out her arms and put them over our shoulders. She had done this before and it was a livin’. The muscles in her arms felt like steel cables.

Jim Bob and Tonto, being smarter, didn’t have their picture taken. They stood outside the cage and looked at us as if they soon expected to see us eaten. When the photo was taken, Cindy moved her arms and went back and sat on her stool. It was a double cage, two rooms if you will, and part of it had photographs of Cindy the Bear swimming in her pond on her owner’s property. They told us all about it. The bear was a Russian bear.

“Is she a vodka-drinking commie?” Leonard asked.

“The Soviet Union is no more,” said the lady owner. She was a blond woman with a nice build and the attitude of someone who had never met a sense of humor. Her old man was skinny and he grinned. I don’t know if he thought what Leonard said was funny. I think he just grinned a lot.

We got our photograph of us with the bear, which they put between two pieces of cardboard, and then we went inside the station. As we did, Jim Bob said, “You guys are pretty weird, you know.”

The station had a little stove and grill, and there was a glass cover where you could see what they had cooked. There was some fried chicken on greasy white paper and hot links and there was a place where you could get some slices of bread and put mustard and relish on it if you wanted, make a sandwich with the links. There were also a few sides, like some suspicious-looking baked potatoes and a Crock-Pot of red beans in a congealed soup that looked as if you might need a pickax to crack the surface.

We got a little of this and a little of that, picking potato chips and some candy bars and sodas to go with the chicken and links, and went to the back of the place, where there were a few tables, and had our lunch. There was enough grease in the chicken to lube up a whorehouse on a sailor’s Saturday night, but it tasted really good and so did the links. We ate not only because we were hungry but because we were bored. Where I was sitting I could look out the big window at the pumps, and I could see the van parked up front near the door. And I could also see something else. A brown Ford. It slowed out on the highway, and as it did, I stuck an elbow in Leonard and he turned to look.

“Brown Ford,” I said.

“Yep,” he said.

Jim Bob and Tonto looked too. The Ford pulled up at a pump and a guy about the size of Tonto, and then Tonto again, got out. It wasn’t just that he was tall. He was no taller than Tonto, but he was wide as a truck and had a chest big enough to store a winter’s worth of corn in it. His legs were bigger around than my waist and his head looked like someone had anchored a medicine ball to his neck. He had blond hair and a little goatee and the kind of tan that comes from solar lamps. I figured he had fallen off Jack’s beanstalk and was learning to make his way in our world.

There was another guy in the front of the Ford, and two in the back, and they just sat. After a while, when the gas was done, the others got out and they all came in.

We watched them carefully. The big guy who had been driving and who put in the gas looked back at us and nodded. Just a regular guy, bigger than most regular guys, seeing some other regular guys, acknowledging us. We nodded back.

We kind of huddled over our food and whispered.

“They might not be anything,” Leonard said.

“Maybe not,” I said.

“Lots of brown Fords,” Jim Bob said.

“Yep,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Tonto said. “They’re somebody. They got guns. I can see the bulges under their shirts.”

“Maybe those are cell phone cases,” Jim Bob said.

Tonto looked at Jim Bob. They both smiled.

“But,” Jim Bob said, “probably not.”

“If they’ve been following us without me seeing them,” Tonto said, “they’re good. And Hap, you’re good. You spotted them and I didn’t.”

“They want us to know they’re following now,” Jim Bob said. “They want us to know they’re tired of playing.”

“I didn’t know we were playing,” Tonto said, “but now that I do, I’m ready to get out the toys. Ah, here they come.”

They came back and sat at the table next to us. My side of the bench was closer to the big guy, and on the other side of our table was Tonto, and he shifted a little so that one of his hands was under the table and the other was lying on top of it next to a gnawed chicken leg.

They were all big guys. Only the driver, the guy on my side, was as big as Tonto, but the others were easily bigger than the rest of us. I got to thinking we weren’t nearly as nifty as we thought. These guys had been on us for a while, and though I had gotten glimpses of them, they were good, damn good, at least as far as sneaking went. Thing I was wondering was when exactly did they get on us, and were they FBI guys or guys from the Dixie Mafia. I was voting pretty heavily on the latter.

The big guy had some chicken and was about to eat it. I said, “That chicken isn’t nearly as nasty as it looks.”

The big guy paused with the chicken close to his mouth. “Yeah. That’s good to hear. I was worried.”

“The links, they’re not bad either. You guys, you don’t look like fishermen.”

“Neither do you,” said the big guy.

“We’re just riding around,” I said.

“That’s a coincidence,” the big guy said. “So are we.” He bit into the chicken and chewed, then looked at me and nodded. “You’re right. That’s pretty damn good.”

He paused and wiped his hands on some paper towels that were on a roller in the center of the table. He shifted on the bench and turned toward me, said, “We’re more the hunter type.”

“Now that,” Jim Bob said, “is one big goddamn fucking coincidence. So are we.”

“Really?” said the big guy.

“Oh, yeah,” Jim Bob said. “Big fucking time.”

“What do you hunt?”

“Skunks mostly,” Jim Bob said.

“Oh,” the big guy said. “I don’t believe there’s a season for that.”

“What makes it thrilling,” Jim Bob said. “Ain’t nothing better than sneaking up on a skunk, or a weasel, and blowing them right out from over their ass.”

“I can see that,” said the big man, and he pushed the paper plate with the chicken on it away from him. “It sure was good to chat with you boys. You know, the weather looks as if it’s going to turn bad.”

“Yeah?” Leonard said.

“Oh yeah, big-time. I think I heard it on the radio. Thing is, I wanted to share that because you don’t want to get caught up in a big old storm that might blow you away. That would suck.”

“Yeah, and it would mess up our hair,” I said.

He gave me a smile thin as the edge of a razor blade. “You got any information for us? You might know where we can find a good place to stop for the day, and get some things we need, and then maybe the storm won’t come.”

“And what kind of place is that?” I said.

“Someplace with a couple of dumb kids with lots of money who aren’t any of your business.”

“Shit,” I said, “you know what another big coincidence is?”

“What’s that?” the big guy said.

“We’re in the same business,” I said.

“Are we?” he said.

“Sounds like it. We too are looking for two sweet kids with lots of money that could be a port in the storm, and we think of them as our business, all the way.”

“Huh,” he said. “Well, we wouldn’t want to cross up, would we?”

“It could happen, though, couldn’t it?” Jim Bob said. “I mean, us both looking for two sweet kids and some money and a nice place to ride out the storm.”

“Storm like the one that’s coming,” the big guy said, “it could blow your little port flat out of existence.”

“We’ve ridden a lot of storms,” Jim Bob said.

“Hell,” Leonard said, “we’re like storm chasers. We’re like the storm chasers.”

“I think you’re a bunch of amateurs,” the big guy said. “I think a good wind comes along, might just blow you completely out of the ball game.”

“You know,” Jim Bob said, “you were going pretty good there with the storm analogies, and then you got to go and screw it up with the ball game thing. That doesn’t scan.”

The big guy looked at Tonto, said, “What about the Indian? He talk?”

“Just smoke signals,” Jim Bob said. “And you know what, none of your buddies are talking, so I don’t think that’s fair to ask.”

“My buddies aren’t my buddies, and they say what I tell them to say and when I say it,” the big guy said. “And before I go, just so we stay with the storm analogy, you best not go out without your slickers and your hip boots, and maybe an umbrella.”

“We got umbrellas out the ass,” Jim Bob said.

Big Guy studied us for a moment, said to his boys, “Wrap this shit up, and let’s go.”

The big guy and his bunch wrapped their chicken and links, put them back in the sacks, and carried them out.

I watched them through the glass as they walked toward the Ford. I said, “Just so I’m certain, when he said slickers, boots, and umbrellas, he was talking about guns, right?”

“Yep,” Leonard said. “That was my take.”

“And they’re the storm?”

“Bingo.”

Tonto, who had just taken a bite of a link wrapped in bread, said, “This would be a lot better with hot sauce, some of that fancy mustard that’s got a tang.”

36

Full as ticks, we drove to another store near the lake where they sold fishing supplies and rented boats, and parked in front of it and sat in the van. Out front was a rack with T-shirts on it with Lake O’ the Pines logos. The wind moved them about.

The place was doing pretty brisk business for the time of the year. There were cars parked to the left and the right of us and people got out and went in and came out carrying fishing supplies, coolers, snacks, and items like caps and bait. One of the people who parked and got out was a blond woman in jogging pants with a tight top and a baseball cap with her long hair tied up in a ponytail hanging over the stretch band at the back of her cap. The jogging pants were tight and I worried a little about her circulation and watched her out of biological interest until she went into the store. I didn’t see her face, but she had the kind of body, hair, and walk that assured you she looked good and knew it.

Over the top of the joint the sky was losing its blue and turning the color of polished silver and there were starting to be dark puffs of clouds. The lake could be seen on either side of the building and the water was growing choppy; little white waves like nightcaps rose up and fell down. Jim Bob opened up the flooring and got out some handguns. I took a .38 automatic with a clip holster and put it on under my coat. I preferred revolvers—more dependable—but, alas, the times were a-changin’ and nearly everyone these days carried an automatic for more firepower. Leonard took a nine with clip holster and Jim Bob clipped on a .38 automatic similar to mine under his coat. Tonto had never stopped being armed. He still had his twin .45s.

“What makes me nervous,” I said, “is the fact we weren’t armed back there, unless you count a chicken leg and a link sausage.”

“I was,” Tonto said.

“Yeah, but what about the rest of us?” I said.

“You had my best wishes,” Tonto said.

Leonard said, “Here’s my question. They’re so goddamn sneaky, how come they decided to come to us like that?”

“Way we were wandering around,” Jim Bob said, “my figure is they thought we knew they were following us. They didn’t know we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, so they thought we were giving them a hard time, being clever. And I think they thought they’d be all scary and we’d tell them what they wanted to know, then they’d run us off and they’d find the boy and the girl and all that money.”

“They obviously didn’t know me and Hap had our picture taken with a bear,” Leonard said. “They ain’t so tough. You see me give that bear a bad look, Hap?”

“No.”

“I haven’t been followed like that in a long time,” Tonto said. “Thought I was being careful, and I’m pretty damn careful, and still, they were following. That takes some chops. I mean, I haven’t never been followed before where I didn’t know.”

“You said it couldn’t happen,” I said.

“I was wrong,” Tonto said. “Those guys are good.”

“The big guy,” Jim Bob said, “he knows what he’s doing, all right.”

“You think they’ll take a run at us?” I said.

“I think they still hope we’ll lead them to something,” Jim Bob said.

“How did they get onto us so quick?” Leonard said.

“Someone somewhere told them something,” Tonto said. “You got to wonder who and when, but the thing that matters is, time comes they’ll stop fucking around and come for us. They’ll maybe think they can make us talk by pulling out fingernails or cutting off eyelids or some such thing, sticking a stick up our dicks.”

“That eyelid part,” I said. “I want to be up front and go on record right now. I’ll talk like you haven’t never heard anyone talk before if that’s done to me. I’ll be like a whole flock of canaries. They won’t have enough paper to write down what I got to say. And they start threatening my dick, I’ll start making stuff up to go along with it.”

We had tried to do it the easy way, which was drive over to the side of the lake where Hirem said the cabins were, but the easy way turned out hard, so we were going to cut to the chase and ask directions. We waited until the traffic at the store played out, then I went inside and found the owner behind a counter that contained whoopee cushions, fake dog shit, and all manner of redneck yuks. An older woman with gray hair and a face only a blind, prideless mother could love was behind the counter arranging a stack of little Texas flags on sticks in a large decorative coffee cup.

She said, “What can I do you for, honey?”

I gave her my winning smile, though I couldn’t remember the last time it had won me anything. “Me and some buddies, we were supposed to meet a friend here on the lake, but we’re kind of confused.”

“Lake’s out back of here. How confusing is that?”

I grinned like that was the best I had heard since my joke about the dog with the shot-up paw. Come to think of it, Leonard was right. That joke sucked.

“This buddy of ours said he was gonna meet us at a cabin on the east side of the lake—”

She pointed. “That’s east.”

“Yes, ma’am, we been over there. But the problem is, we can’t find where we’re supposed to meet him. He said a fellow named Bill Jordan had some cabins—”

“Bill Jordan. That old fart is in the ground, some three years now. He don’t own them anymore.”

“Oh, well, that puts a damper on things.”

“A crippled fella with a funny haircut owns them now, but he don’t rent out much. Got a pension.”

“I see. Well, I’m pretty sure my friend is meeting us there. That’s what he said anyway. He hasn’t been here in a while, so he probably rented from the other fella.”

“It’s kind of hard to get to actually,” she said. “Road is near washed out and it winds up in the pines. Good hunting up there, though. I know a fellow killed a wild hog there big enough to tussle with an elephant.”

“That a fact?”

“Of course not. Ain’t no hogs big as elephants. But it was big.”

“I see. So, you go around on the east side, but where do you turn? We were all over that place, and we couldn’t find what we were looking for.”

She got a piece of paper and a pencil and drew me a map, explaining as she did. Pushing it across the counter, she said, “Now, you got to watch all the ruts and potholes, and it’s narrow and there’s limbs all grown up around it. I was up there last year taking the crippled fella with a funny haircut some supplies. He calls up and I deliver. For a little extra fee, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Anyway, it’s like the goddamn Amazon up there.”

“Well, thanks.”

I started to go out. She said, “You know, you wanted to, there’s an easier way. It’ll take a little longer, but it’s still easier, and you’d have to get going before the storm comes up, ’cause one is coming.”

“So we were told.”

“You could rent one of my boats, take it straight across the lake, and you could just dock at the place.”

“How long would that take?”

“About an hour, maybe two if you get some tough wind and you ain’t no hand with a boat. You go now, you got to rent the boat for overnight. Or you can rent if for a few days if you’d rather be over there awhile.”

“How much is the boat?” I asked.

37

In the van I explained about the map and the boat. I said, “Me and Leonard can take the boat across, and you guys can follow the map. Thing is, I think you don’t want to go over there right away, because you do, they might follow.”

“They won’t fool me again,” Tonto said.

“Just in case they do, however,” I said, “we could go across by boat, which they may not expect, see if we can find Hirem’s boy, the girl, and the money. It might even be a sneakier way to come up on them if they’re there. We can maybe call you when we get there and you can come around.”

“Checked my phone a little while ago,” Jim Bob said. “No signal out here.”

“All right,” I said. “Go do something that will give us two hours before you arrive, and we’ll take the boat across. We get there early we’ll hold our own until you show up. I think we can handle two kids and a pile of money.”

“But if that big fellow and his pals show up before we do,” Jim Bob said, “you might have your hands full.”

“They been full before,” Leonard said.

We spent some of our money on fishing poles and a bucket of minnows for show, a can of gas, bought a couple of sandwiches and a bag of vanilla wafers and a six-pack of Dr Pepper. The owner of the store, who told us her name was Annie, took us down to the boat and gave us instructions, and we set out.

It was really choppy and the boat rode high and dropped low. It was making my stomach queasy. The motor churned the water behind us and I pointed the bow due east, like Annie had suggested. There was a big stump in the middle of the lake she had directed us to, and when we got to that, she said we ought to start following a line of orange buoys and then those would go away and we had to hold due east until we saw a strip of land. She said it would be a lot farther away than we thought it was. Thing then was, when we got closer, we’d see a rise of pine trees and a dock out front of them, and there was a little trail that led up from the dock to the cabins.

For the moment, that stump in the distance was my bearing.

When we were out a ways, we overturned the minnow bucket into the lake and let all our guys go. Leonard said, “Swim, little fishes. Go, make your way in this big wet world. Make us proud.”

The stump showed up and then the orange buoys. We followed those until they played out, but we couldn’t see a strip of land. Not yet. It was a big lake. All we could see was water, and the sky had darkened and it had started to rain, and we didn’t so much as have an umbrella.

The rain grew thick, and then I got nervous because the boat was holding water. Leonard took the minnow bucket and started bailing. I kept hold of the motor throttle and thought maybe I might regain some religion, because the water was jumping now and the rain had gotten so wild I could hardly see my hand in front of my face, let alone a distant strip of land sporting pine trees.

I decided keeping my hand on the throttle and using my wits would probably do me better than religion, and I kept at it. The rain kept at it too. We bounced up and down, and at one point the boat listed to port and water splashed in heavily, and Leonard was really working that bucket.

“That damn rain is cold,” he said.

“What, you think I haven’t noticed?”

We went on like that for a while, and I feared we had gone off point and were traveling in the wrong direction, maybe even boating in circles. But then the rain slacked and I saw a strip of land and some pines rising up. I glanced at my watch, putting it close to my face. We had been at it for an hour and a half.

The wind was really whistling now and the boat was struggling. Leonard was bailing like a maniac.

“Almost there,” I said.

The engine sputtered and died. We were out of gas.

“Now,” Leonard said, “if a goddamn whale will swallow us, it will be a perfect day.”

38

The gas can was under one of the seats, and I pulled it out and went about trying to pour some of it in the outboard tank. Way the water made the boat hump up and down it was hard work, and some of the gas went into the lake.

I finally finished with the can, but by that time we had drifted a considerable distance. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter to me right then if we got to where we were going or if we just made land, any land, and because of that, when I saw a glimpse of shoreline, I took the boat in that direction. I hoped we wouldn’t bring the boat up against a stump, ’cause at the speed we were going if we hit one, we’d be flung into the cold deep churning water, and that wouldn’t be good. Still, I couldn’t seem to slow the throttle down. The rain was slamming us and it was cold and I wanted off the lake.

Something went wrong, and we went into the water, the grateful minnows we had released would save us. Like Aquaman, we would call to them and they would come and lift us out of the water on their shiny backs and carry us ashore.

But I wasn’t counting on it.

Most likely, we’d drown like rats.

I saw it just before we hit it. I thought it was a log, but it was an alligator, and when we struck it the boat jumped and I went out of it as if shot from a catapult. I caught a glimpse of Leonard, still clinging to the handle of the minnow bucket, go up and over and make a nice little flip into the water and disappear under the waves.

I swam and my arm hit the gator and I screamed like a little girl. The rest of the gator sailed on past me and I could smell a rotten odor, realized the big bastard was dead, and had been awhile. He might have died up in the reeds along the bank and the storm had stirred him loose. He sailed past and the waves rolled over him and took him under and then I went under. When I came up the minnow bucket was floating past me. I grabbed at it like it was a life raft.

Holding on to it, I kicked toward shore, but shore had moved away. Or so it seemed. The water had carried me out farther and quicker than I could imagine. The lake was so cold I could hardly get a breath. I looked around for Leonard and didn’t see him. I looked around for the boat, didn’t see it either. Annie was going to be pissed.

I kicked toward what looked like shore and hoped a live alligator didn’t find me, hoped in this weather they would be somewhere cozy. Then again, I wasn’t sure if alligators liked it cozy. Maybe they liked the rain.

I called out for Leonard, but the wind took my voice and carried it away and all I got out of my yelling was a hoarse throat.

And then my feet were touching ground. Not well, but they were touching. I pushed on toward some reeds, and after what seemed like enough time for the Big Bang to have happened and all the species on the planet to have developed and moved on out to the stars, I made it to some waving grass and reeds and stumbled into that, went down a few times, came up with a mouthful of muddy water. As I tromped through, barely able to stand, hardly able to see, I came across a long four-foot-wide fragment of our boat. On his back in the water, hanging on to the fragment, was a big black guy.

“Leonard,” I said.

He let go of the board and sat up in the water and said, “Well, Ahab, that boat trip was sure a good idea.”

I checked for my .38. I still had it.

Leonard checked for his automatic. Still there. Well, at least we had that going for us. We were in a position to add to the worst nature of man and the final downfall of the world. By God, we had our guns.

Leonard stood up slowly and looked around. The minnow bucket had floated up into the tall grass and was hung there. He focused on it, said, “I guess the cookies and the Dr Pepper didn’t make it.”

“Missing in action,” I said.

“Now that’s a blow,” Leonard said.

Slogging along the shoreline through the rain, we saw a boathouse and made our way over there. It was wide open and we went inside. There was a boat floating in a stall and there was fishing tackle in the boat, and on one wall were some croaker sacks for hunting and some nasty-looking towels that were probably used to wipe the boat down after fishing. There were four rain slickers on nails. A fairly large dead fish floated belly-up near the boat and the waves washed at it until it went under the flooring, out of sight.

We used the towels to dry off and to dry our weapons, hoping they’d still shoot. The towels made us dry enough, but they left us smelling like fish. We sat on the edge of the boathouse dock with the heavy damp towels over our shoulders and looked out at the boat that was docked there. There were paddles in the bottom of the boat and no motor. The boat was bouncing up and down and we could see the lake from where we sat, and the rain was furious. Everything was gray. It was as if the sky and the lake had joined together.

I pulled my cell phone out of my pants pocket, shook the water out of it. It was still working, but there wasn’t any signal, like Jim Bob had said. I put it away.

“I saw a dead alligator,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I think I saw him too,” Leonard said.

“Was he big and dark?”

“Yep.”

“That was him, all right.”

“Say he was dead?”

“Very.”

“Thank goodness for small favors.”

We waited for the downpour to slack off, but it didn’t. Freezing, we toweled off again and took a couple of slickers off the wall and put them on and went to where we had come in and stood in the open doorway and looked out at the rain.

“I don’t want to,” Leonard said.

“Me neither,” I said.

“But, alas …” Leonard said, and we went out into the rain.

39

I had no idea where we had ended up, but my guess was near where we wanted to be. But that didn’t change the fact that near was not the same as being there, and every tree looked pretty much like the other, and I didn’t see any trails. We wandered around in the rain, damp inside our slickers but better off now with the hoods pulled up and the cold rain not coming right down on us.

Ending up again where the boat had come apart, or at least where part of it had been in the tall grass with Leonard, we again saw the foam minnow bucket caught up in the grass, and floating in the water where it hadn’t been before, pushed up in the shallows, was our six-pack of Dr Pepper.

Leonard waded out in the water and got the six-pack, carried it by its plastic holder onto the shore. He set it down on the ground and pulled one of the Dr Peppers off one of the plastic rings, pulled the tab, and nearly drank the whole thing with one big gulp.

He peeled off another and handed it to me, and then got another for himself. We both drank. When he was finished he dropped the can on the ground with the other one and said, “I’m tough enough today to litter.”

Even under the circumstances, anal as I am about such things, I wanted to find a trash can but figured it might be best in this situation to be able to draw the .38 more than be an environmentalist and tote an empty can around. Reluctantly, we left the three remaining Dr Peppers there and wandered around like a couple of geese.

I saw a narrow trail and pointed it out, and Leonard said, “Who the hell knows? Let’s try it.”

The trail went up a steep hill, through some pines. The pines were close together and the soil there was sandy and had turned the color of milk-and-flour gravy. The rain ran down the hill and into ruts that tires had made, and the whole thing was just wide enough for a car. After we had walked halfway up the hill, the trees got thick enough to cut the rain a bit, and finally we broke out at the top of a hill into a clearing, and there was a line of little cabins that made our tourist court digs look like the Taj Mahal. There was one cabin that wasn’t in a row, and it was a little off to the side. I presumed that would belong to the owner, the fellow Annie had called The Crippled Fellow With A Funny Haircut.

There was a car in front of one of the cabins. It was the only car present. It was a black Escalade.

“Dat dere, Brer Bear,” Leonard said, “be duh goddamn car we be lookin’ for, and in dat dere cabin—”

“Leonard. That’s enough.”

“Okay. I figure they’re inside, with the money. Or what’s left of it.”

“So what do we do?”

“Well, I don’t see any brown Fords, and I don’t see our guys yet, so my suggestion is we waltz ourselves over to yon cabin and knock on the door and stick guns in their faces.”

“That’ll work,” I said. “And if it doesn’t, we’ll improvise.”

Observing the cabin briefly, we decided Leonard would go around front and I’d go around back. I ducked under a low window and looked toward the big cabin to see if anyone was watching me from there. If they were, they were very clever. I wondered too if anyone was in any of the other cabins. I thought not. No cars. But they could be gone for a bowl of chili. Perhaps they were all over at Annie’s, chatting and laughing it up about some plastic dog shit and a whoopee cushion.

Around back, I pulled the .38 and pressed up against the door, pushing my ear tight. I listened. The rain was so loud I couldn’t hear myself think. I pushed against the door to see how sturdy it was, decided it wasn’t that sturdy.

I heard the front door budge, and I knew Leonard was in. I hit the back door with my shoulder and was in, stumbling. There really wasn’t anywhere to go. The back door led through a little kitchen and right into the bedroom/living room, where our two lovebirds were sacked out in a bedraggled bed. The boy reached for an automatic lying at the bedside, but Leonard was already there and he grabbed it and pulled it back. He now had a gun in either hand.

The boy sat up in bed, and when he did the sheet fell back from the young lady. She was wearing a thin white bra. It was cold in the room, and the tips of her breasts punched at it like ice picks. Leonard said, “Don’t panic, kid. We don’t want to hurt you.”

“We’ll give the money back,” the boy, Tim, said. “We don’t want it.”

“You wanted it when you took it,” I said.

“I didn’t think it would matter then,” the boy said.

“So why does it matter now?” I said, pushing back the hood on the rain slicker.

“I guess I knew better, but we been thinking it over. We want to give it back. Just let us go and take the money.”

“Looks like to me,” Leonard said, “you been doing more than thinking.”

“Please don’t hurt us,” Tim said.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” Leonard said, closing the front door he had knocked open, cutting back the cold wind. “We’re on a mission from your dad … sort of. We’re also working for the law and for ourselves.”

“You’re not… with the organization?” Tim asked.

“Organization?” I said. “You mean the Dixie Mafia?”

Tim nodded.

“Nope. We are freelancers.”

The girl, who had not spoken, said, “You want the money for yourselves?”

“That would be nice,” I said, “but no. That isn’t the deal.”

I studied her closely. She was worth running off with. Her hair was cut short, almost man style, but she was a fine-looking girl with a long, sleek neck and deep eyes you’d like to fall into, especially if you were a young man, and from what I could see of her body she wasn’t going to make anyone turn their eyes away in disgust.

We lowered our guns. Leonard pushed back his rain hood and sat on the windowsill. I went and shut the back door to the kitchen, came back and found a chair. I said, “You two just stay there for a minute. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna wait for some friends of ours, and then we’re going to load you, along with the money—where is it, by the way?”

“Under the bed,” Tim said.

“Under the bed?” Leonard said. “That’s as sneaky as you get? You put it under the bed? They put it under the bed, Hap.”

“You’re not very good criminals,” I said. “But you’re lucky we’re the ones found you, and we found you for your dad, and we’re taking you and the money back and things are maybe going to be okay, except for the part where your dad squeals about his business and you all have to go into witness protection. Maybe your dad does some prison. Up in the air right now.”

“Oh hell,” Tim said.

“Yep,” I said. “Oh hell.”

I looked at Leonard. He was turned slightly so he could see out the window. Rivulets of rain ran down the window and it was clouded over. Leonard used the palm of his hand to wipe the inside a bit, and then he said, “It just keeps on coming.” He looked at me, said, “Brown Ford.”

40

“Drop your cock and grab your socks,” I said, looking at Tim. “In fact, forget the socks. Nab some drawers pronto, ’cause it’s about to get interesting in here.”

“Oh hell,” Tim said, threw back the covers, and scrambled out naked, grabbing some pants off the floor. The girl, whose name I had yet to know, came out of the bed on the other side, pulling on jeans.

Leonard said, “You know what’s really swell, both the goddamn doors are already broken in.”

I went over to the window and looked out. The big guy we had met over chicken and links was wearing a raincoat with a hood and he was standing by the Escalade, looking it over like a prospective buyer. He had an automatic with a silencer in his right hand. The other three guys were out of the car now and one of them had a double-barrel shotgun and the other two had handguns. I felt my asshole pucker, and in that instant every good meal, hot fuck, blue sky I had ever experienced jumped through my head.

I didn’t know how they had found us—hit or miss, or maybe they had talked to Annie, bought some whoopee cushions and a box of fake dog shit in exchange for information about what it was some guys might be asking her about.

It didn’t really matter now.

Big Guy looked up at the house, and Leonard and I moved away from the window.

“There’s nothing left but for you two to get under the bed with the money,” I said. “And hope things go better than I think they will.”

They did as I suggested. When Leonard and I were dead, it would be easy pickings for Big Guy and his posse. Pop these two and take the dough, stop off for photos with the bear and a couple of hot links, then home.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Leonard said. “The cavalry has arrived. Sort of.”

I looked.

Tonto’s van had pulled up and he and Jim Bob were out of the car. They weren’t wearing rain gear. Tonto had his coat pushed back and the .45 holsters were empty; the guns were in his hands. Jim Bob was carrying a pump twelve-gauge with a shortened barrel. They were walking toward the Ford and the four guys as if they were meeting for tea.

Big Guy said something, and then two of his guys, one with the shotgun, the other with a pistol, went back toward where they had parked the Ford. Big Guy eased toward us slowly, and one of the other guys started around the cabin, toward the back.

“Who you want?” I said.

“The big motherfucker,” Leonard said.

“Good.”

I hurried into the kitchen and stepped up on the counter that was near the door and pointed my weapon, waited. There was a slight sound at the back door, and then it was pushed back gently. I saw a hand with an automatic poke in, and then I heard a shot from the front of the cabin, Leonard’s or Big Guy’s weapon. I didn’t know for sure. And then the guy at the kitchen door, perhaps smelling blood in the water, charged in and I shot him above the ear and he fell back against the wall and his head stayed propped against it while the rest of him spread out in that relaxed manner only the dead have. There was blood on the wall.

I jumped down and charged into the other room. Big Guy had Leonard by the neck and was lifting him off the floor with both hands. Leonard’s gun was on the floor between Big Guy’s legs, and Big Guy’s weapon was thrown up against the wall. I wasn’t sure how things had got that way, who had fired and who was hit, but before I could blow Big Guy’s brains out, I heard a shotgun blast outside, and then another, and then Leonard went sailing across the room, slammed onto the bed hard enough for the slats to break and the girl to scream from under there, and then Leonard was up and the kids were crawling out from under the bed, cowering in the corner.

I lifted up my .38 and shot Big Guy directly in the chest. He stepped across the room quickly and grabbed my gun hand, and slapped the hell out of me with the back of his other hand. I did a nice backwards roll, and when I got it together, Big Guy was firing at me with my .38.

Leonard leaped like a panther and hit Big Guy above the knees with the side of his body, trying to clip him. Didn’t work. He bounced off.

I got the gun from the dead guy in the kitchen, a nine-mil, and went back to help Leonard. Leonard was grabbed again, and Big Guy was slinging him around like wet laundry. I couldn’t get a good aim.

All of this was going on at the same time there was a lot of racket outside. Gunfire, cursing, screams.

Finally Big Guy tired enough, that Leonard, still hanging high while this guy choked him, was able to slap his hands over Big Guy’s ears. Big Guy dropped him. I tried to shoot Big Guy as he came rushing toward me, but the gun jammed.

Typical.

He grabbed me around the waist and pushed me backwards and slammed me into the wall so that the back of my neck hit a bookshelf and the shelf came loose and fell and the one above it fell too, hitting me on top of the head dead center. At least the owner wasn’t a reader; no books fell on my head.

Next thing I knew I was pitched against the far wall next to the open front door. I got up and saw Leonard throw a right hook into Big Guy’s body and jerk back his hand with a sour look on his face.

I knew then why my bullet hadn’t hurt Big Guy. He was wearing a bulletproof vest.

The kids, both barefoot and Tim bare-chested, yanked a duffel bag out from under the ruins of the bed. They headed out the door before I could get off my ass, and when I did, the cabin felt as if it was moving.

I started to go after them, but when I looked back, Leonard was being slammed by a punch that might have killed a steer. My head was mostly back together, so I rushed Big Guy and threw a hard round kick into his thigh. It was a perfect kick, hitting right on the nerve in the outer thigh, and I had used it before, dropping the leg right out from under strong men, but if it bothered Big Guy his expression didn’t show it. He came rushing at me, and without really knowing I was going to do it, I started backpedaling and went right out the front door.

A gun barked to my left and I saw one of Big Guy’s team on the ground and Jim Bob walking over. I got a glimpse of Tonto, but I didn’t see the other bad guy. The two kids and their duffel bag had disappeared.

Big Guy came charging out into the open, practically foaming at the mouth.

I’m a little ashamed to say I turned and bolted. I thought I was running like a goddamn deer on steroids, but Big Guy was tight on my ass as a dingleberry, and the next thing I knew he had me and we’re tumbling down the trail, rolling like a couple of doodlebugs. When we came to the bottom of the hill, I got hold of his ear with my teeth and bit it as hard as I could, taking off a chunk big enough for a small sandwich.

He jerked his head up and came to his knees and let out a bellow. I tried to make a quick exit, stage right, spitting out the chunk of ear as I went, but he got hold of my rain slicker with one hand and hit me so hard with the other I thought I had accidentally stepped onto train tracks and been hit by a locomotive.

He was about to hit me again when I heard a grunt, and Leonard, doing a Superman, flew down the hill and hit Big Guy. The two of them went tumbling down some more, covered in mud, and ended up near the water’s edge. Big Guy came up on top and he was giving Leonard a pounding.

I ran down there and kicked Big Guy in the head. It was a pretty good shot, and it did more damage than the kick to the thigh. He was knocked over and into the water. He tried to get up and I kicked him again, but because I had to step out into the water to do it, it wasn’t as good a kick, and it only knocked him back. And then Leonard got hold of the minnow bucket and slammed it over Big Guy’s head. It was a tight fit. Leonard chopped Big Guy across the throat, twice in rapid succession. Big Guy stood up. Leonard slipped behind him with one smooth motion and tried to choke him with his forearm. The guy’s neck was like a tree, and Leonard might as well have been squeezing one. The guy shook like a dog and Leonard went into the water, scrambled up and out of it and onto the shore to meet me. We both stood there looking at the monster with the minnow bucket on his head. Big Guy clawed at the bucket, started pulling it loose. Leonard said, “Run like a motherfucker.”

And we did. We ran. We were like little children being chased by the Big Bad Wolf.

Leonard said as we ran, “Where the fuck is that guy from?”

“Hell,” I said.

We were coming up on the boathouse. I said, “Goddamn it. Let’s take the boat and get away from that sonofabitch.”

Looking back, I saw Big Guy minus his bucket, and he was really coming. When we got in the boathouse the kids were there with the bag of money. They had the other rain slickers on and the towels over their shoulders. They were just standing on the platform looking at the boat as if they thought they might be magically transported into it. The rain was really coming down outside the boathouse, and it could be seen through the big opening at the back where the boats went out and came in, peppering the water like buckshot.

“What the hell are you waiting on?” Leonard said to the couple. “Get in the boat.”

“I’m scared of water,” the girl said.

“Something comin’ through that door you’re gonna be a lot more scared of,” Leonard said, and at that moment Big Guy came in, flinging the door back so hard it slammed against the wall.

The girl was in the boat faster than a jackrabbit. Tim just froze. Leonard and I crouched. Leonard said, “This time, we got to get him.”

Big Guy, who seemed to have lost his wits, came charging along the planks and Leonard and I, as if through some mind-meld of knowledge, went for his legs, went low and lifted high. It wasn’t quite perfect. Big Guy went a little to the right, out over the platform and hit headfirst in the boat. The boat cracked, rolled, sent the girl into the water with a scream. Tim, who was standing behind us and had caught some of Big Guy’s body as it was thrown, was knocked the length of the platform.

The boat righted itself, and there was Big Guy, hanging on to the side of it. The girl, who was crying loudly, was clinging to the bow. I got down on my belly on the platform and grabbed one of the paddles floating in the water and stood up and cracked Big Guy over the head with it. It took about three licks before he went under.

There was movement at the door. I turned my head. Tonto came through, followed by Jim Bob. Somehow, Tonto had ended up with the double-barrel shotgun.

Big Guy was back, clinging to the side of the boat, trying to climb inside. Tonto came over quick and stepped off the platform and onto the boat. It was a graceful move and the boat only rocked a little. He got Big Guy by the hair and stuck the double barrel in his open mouth and pulled the trigger. The back of Big Guy’s head jumped out onto the water, and something, pellets, skull shrapnel, rattled against the clapboard wall across the way.

Big Guy, missing most of his head, went under, except for one hand that clung to the side of the boat. Tonto squatted and took hold of the fingers and peeled one of them off and then they all came loose.

Leonard said, “You better find that sonofabitch and drive a stake through his heart. I don’t want him coming back.”

Tonto made his way to the bow of the little boat and pulled the girl out of the water, then handed her up to me. I set her on the platform. She was shivering with the cold, just like me and Leonard and Tim. Tonto climbed up on the platform and took a deep breath. He smelled like the shotgun blast.

“The others?” I asked.

“They’re napping,” Tonto said. “Deep napping.”

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s one in the cabin, and he’s kind of sleepy too.”

41

At the top of the hill, with me carrying the bag of money, and it was a big bag and pretty damn heavy, we discovered that the two thugs were indeed napping by the Ford. While they were napping some red stuff had run out of them and onto the ground and had been mixed up and thinned by the rain so that it looked like spilled strawberry Kool-Aid. They were lying on their backs and they had some holes in them and their open mouths were filling with rain.

We grabbed the stuff from the cabin that belonged to the kids, got the guns, and wiped the place down of blood and fingerprints as best we could, hauling the dead guy out of the kitchen, putting him and the other two in the Ford. Jim Bob drove the Ford, Tonto drove his van, and Leonard took the keys of the Escalade from Tim and drove the rest of us out of there, me in the back with the boy, the girl beside Leonard. The windshield wipers beat methodically as he drove and the heater made it cozy. It was hard to believe that a moment before we had been in a gunfight, a fistfight, a wrestling match, and the like. It seemed surreal, though my ears were still ringing from the gunfire in the small cabin and I hurt all over.

We followed Jim Bob down a narrow clay road with trash thrown out on both sides. He parked the Ford and left it and joined Tonto in the van. Tonto and Leonard found places to turn around and got us back on the main road, which was a strip of aging blacktop.

We followed along behind the van. No one in our car had said a word. And then: “That man,” the girl said. “He … he was so strong.”

“Tell me about it,” Leonard said. “And he had a bulletproof vest on to boot.”

“You noticed that too,” I said.

“I did,” Leonard said. “For a moment I thought Superman had gone bad, and it was a real relief to discover he was just a man.”

“He was just plenty of man,” I said.

“I hurt all over,” Leonard said. “I feel like I been chewed up by a wolf and shit off a cliff and my pile got stepped on by an elephant.”

“I hear you,” I said. “I’m dizzy and I got a headache and I want my teddy bear. Bastard must have taken something. Some kind of drug. Damned if I know. But I’m going to dream about him, and I’m not going to like it.”

“I used to have a teddy bear,” the girl said out of nowhere. “His name was Lew. I think my momma still has him.”

We let that sail around the car for a moment, then, “Figure guy owns the cabins has already called the law,” Leonard said.

“No,” Tim said. “He said he would be gone a few days. Went off somewhere with his brother. We paid in advance.”

“I hope you left a dead body deposit,” I said.

“We didn’t give our real names. He wrote down our plates, but they’re false. I switched them.”

“Normally, I wouldn’t want to encourage such criminal enterprise as license-plate switching in the young, but let me, at this moment in time, give to you a symbolic high five.”

It was entirely symbolic. Neither of us moved.

Tim said, “So … are you going to hurt us?”

“Nope,” I said. “We already would have if we were. But you got to go back.”

“My dad … he turned himself in.”

“For you. And he’s going to talk to the feds. Putting himself in danger from the Dixie Mafia for one reason and one reason only. You.”

Tim was quiet for a moment, then said, “He’s done some bad things.”

“He has, and I suppose he’s actually going to get away with having done a lot of them if he tells the feds the right things, things they want to know. But there is this. He loves you pretty damn strong to do what he’s doing. Putting himself in danger, maybe going to jail, or having to be in the witness protection program. Something you may have to do too. Thing is, he’s doing what he’s doing for you so you can maybe do something a lot better than he’s done with his life.”

“You think so?”

“I think so.”

“What about me?” the girl said.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “We’ll figure something out.”

“He just couldn’t stand we were together, her being black.”

“He got over it,” I said. “He only wants you happy.”

“He said that?”

“Yep.”

“Are you friends of his?”

“Nope,” I said. “Not even close.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

“We sort of have our asses over a barrel and we got picked because we were expendable.”

Leonard said, “Girl, what’s your name?”

“Katie,” she said.

“All right,” Leonard said. “That’s good to know in case I want to call you to supper. Hap, are you okay back there?”

“A little traumatized. Not every day you meet Dracula and live.”

“Ain’t that the truth? We owe Tonto one.”

“We owe that shotgun one. Maybe we can take it to lunch.”

42

Leonard wheeled us away from the lake, and Tonto, who was driving in front of us, pulled the van to the side of the road and parked. We pulled up beside him, real close, lowered the window on the girl’s side. Tonto lowered his window, said, “Now what?”

“I think we ought to think this over before we do anything,” Leonard said.

“What’s that mean?” Tonto asked.

Leonard looked back at me. I leaned forward in the seat and spoke loud enough for them to hear. “I’m with Leonard. I think now we’ve done the deed, we should regroup a little. Gonna hand these kids off, I want to make sure I’m not dropping them in the lion’s den. We maybe hole them up somewhere, then me and Leonard see how the lay of the land is, figure what to do next.”

“I’m just along for the ride,” Tonto said.

“Me too,” Jim Bob said.

“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s drive over to Shreveport, put the kids in a hotel, and we stay there with them. Maybe we’ll take a day or two and consider what we ought to do next.”

Leonard turned, looked at Tim in the backseat, then at Katie. “You’re not going to give us shit, are you?”

“I just want to go home,” she said. She turned and looked at Tim. “I just want to go home, baby.”

Tim reached over the seat and patted her shoulder. “I know. It was a dumb idea. I don’t know why I had to take the money. That was stupid.”

“Thing is,” Leonard said, “we want to make sure it’s okay you two go home, that you’re safe. So we’ll do it the way we’re talkin’ about, and we’ll use some of the money you stole to pay for it. We’ll tell the feds we had to use some to get the bulk of it back. Expenses. I think they’ll go for that.”

“Got a feeling,” I said, “Dixie Mafia might hold a grudge, we spend their money.”

“Not like we’re giving it back to them,” Leonard said. “Once we give it to the feds, we’re out of this deal and the organization is still out the money.”

“I don’t think we’ll be out of hot water that easy,” I said.

“Me neither,” Jim Bob said from across the way. “It’s not just about the money with these guys. For them, they get it back or they don’t, they aren’t going to like us much either way. Especially you guys. They know who you two are. Me and Tonto, maybe we can just go home, put our feet up.”

“But you won’t,” Leonard said.

“Of course not,” Jim Bob said. “Well, speaking for me, anyway.”

“My favor isn’t done till the job is done,” Tonto said. “And it’s not like I got kids waiting at the house. So count me in too.”

The Louisiana border wasn’t far, and neither was Shreveport, so that’s the way we went after we found a quiet place to switch license plates on the Escalade and the van again, doing it out in the rain.

I thought about what would happen if we were pulled over and for some reason a cop wanted to take a look and found the stuff under the flooring; the van was packed with enough weapons and license plates that the four of us could go up for about three thousand years wearing thumbscrews and without possibility of parole.

We drove into Louisiana, and not much longer after that, made Shreveport. Stopping at a filling station we got some gas, then we went to a nice hotel and spent some of the Dixie Mafia’s money to put us in a connecting room with the kids, and to put Jim Bob and Tonto in a room together.

We had our clothes in overnight bags that we had left in the van, and we carried those into the elevator, and the kids carried their two suitcases, one of which, the girl’s, was on rollers. Leonard carried the heavy duffel bag of money over his shoulder. When we got to the room, which was on a high floor in the hotel, Leonard and I pulled off our slickers, and then the four of us took turns taking showers in the two bathrooms and dressing in clean clothes. The way the suite was set up, there was a bedroom on either end with a bathroom in it, and in the middle was a big room with a couch and television set and chairs, and there was a kitchenette. Through sliding doors was a covered deck surrounded by Plexiglas. It gave us a good view of the city and the casinos and hotels.

After looking at a menu, we ordered up some bowls of chili and a pot of coffee, which seemed like a pretty damn good idea after the cold and the rain, and we went out on the protected deck to sit at the table there while we waited. A short time later, a waiter arrived pushing a wheeled table and we had him take it out on the deck, where the four of us sat and ate and drank our coffee with very little to say.

The day was dark and the lights turning on inside and outside the hotels and casinos on the strip made everything look surreal and strange through the rain. As we sat and ate, and gathered our thoughts, and let the food seep into us and renew us, night dropped down over the city and the multicolored lights appeared brighter than before and almost Christmas-like through the deluge.

I guess we sat there for nearly a half hour before I felt like I was actually going to live. Still, my back hurt where I had been slammed into the wall, and my head hurt where the shelf had cracked me, and when I had taken a shower and looked in the mirror, I was no longer surprised at the way people had looked at me in the lobby, the way the little guy behind the hotel desk had stared at me. I thought it was the old rain slicker that smelled like fish, and that most certainly was part of it, but my face looked like it had been through a buzz saw. Leonard, being darker of skin, didn’t look so wounded if you didn’t look right at him, but by the time we finished our meal one of his eyes had swollen near shut, and he was starting to look like an ebony Cabbage Patch doll with an attitude. I had found some aspirin in my shaving kit and took four of them, shaved while I was in there, and it was a tender job. When I looked at my hand, I noticed it was trembling slightly. I managed to cut myself only a little, brushed my teeth and went out and got a look at everyone else.

Spruced up, Tim was a pretty good-looking kid, and Katie was the sort of girl that if she told you she was a model for a clean-cut catalog like JCPenney’s, you’d believe her. Even with her hair cut close like that, she was a knockout. Coltish in white shorts, with long legs and that long neck and a way of moving that made you wish you were young and single and cool and had a pocketful of money. Maybe enough to steal money and a car from your dad.

Out on the deck, I sat down and said, “We can tie you two up, or you can act like you got some sense and get a good night’s sleep. Thing is, you’ll be better off with us than out there on your own.”

“We’ll do what you say,” Katie said, and looked at Tim. He nodded.

“It’s for your own good,” I said. “We don’t want anything to happen to you. You’re kind of our calling card for better treatment concerning a problem we have. You and the money. Just listen to us and do what we say, and everything will be all right.”

“You won’t let anything happen to us?” Katie asked.

“No, we won’t.”

“You promise?” she said.

“Yep,” I said. “I promise.”

She looked at Leonard. He smiled. “When he promises, or I promise, baby girl, we’re promising together.”

43

The kids got one bedroom, and Leonard won the other due to a coin toss. I got the couch. It was a good way to make sure the kids didn’t get a wild hair up their asses and want to sneak out in the middle of the night. I doubted that would be the case, but insurance seemed like a good idea.

Leonard helped me move the couch close to the front door, which was the only way out of the room, and then I picked up the phone and called over to Jim Bob and Tonto’s room to see how they were doing. Jim Bob was watching TV and he said Tonto had gone over to one of the casinos.

We bantered a little, but neither of us was really up for it. After I hung up the phone, Leonard and I took some time to clean and oil the guns we had with a little kit I carried in my overnight bag.

After that, Leonard went to bed and I got a pillow and blanket and turned out the lights and lay on the couch and went to sleep immediately. It was a deep sleep, but there were bad things down there in the deep with me, and so I came awake about three a.m. I lay there for a while, then finally sat up, and saw that Tim was out on the deck, sitting at the table looking at all the lights, which were clearer now, because the rain had stopped at last.

Pulling on my pants, not bothering to turn on the light, I went out there barefoot, and when I pulled the sliding door back, he turned in a kind of panic.

“It’s me,” I said.

“I don’t know who I was expecting.”

“Probably the guy you saw killed today. I keep thinking he’s going to come back from the dead.”

“Tough guy like you thinks that, I don’t feel so bad.”

“Don’t fool yourself, kid. I’m not that tough.”

“You look tough.”

“I look tired, that’s what I look.”

I sat down at the table, and Tim said, “I couldn’t sleep. Katie, she can sleep anytime. No matter what’s happened, she can sleep. I wonder why that is?”

“I’m like you,” I said. “Brett, my girlfriend, she’s like Katie. We can have an argument, or something can go wrong that will stress me out and I won’t be able to sleep, but she can lay down and hibernate like a bear.”

Tim nodded. He said, “I really didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

“You know what your father does for a living.”

“You know I do. For some time now.”

“You know he has people to answer to.”

“Sure. I just didn’t think it would amount to this. I thought they’d be mad and he’d be mad at me, and what I did was a kind of vengeance.”

“For the work he does?”

“It’s not work. It’s drugs and whores.”

“I agree with you. It’s not work and it’s not good. You should have just run off with the girl. That said, my bet is her parents are worried sick about her.”

“I’m sure they got the cops out after her,” he said.

“The cops, the FBI, and us.”

“What happens to the money?”

“The FBI gets it.”

“And what do they do with it?”

“Good question. Three hundred thousand dollars is lot to do with.”

“Three hundred thousand?” Tim said. “It’s more than that.”

I went into the living room with Tim trailing along behind me. I got the duffel bag with the money out of the closet and dragged it out and opened it up and poured the money on the floor. It was a mixture of hundred-dollar bills and twenties, some tens and fives.

I said, “Get down on the floor there with me, and let’s count it.”

We did that, and when we had it counted and in stacks, I said, “Just short of five hundred thousand dollars. That the way you had it figured?”

“Sure. I’ve counted it a few times. It was five hundred thousand when we started. We been living on some of it.”

“But your dad is saying three hundred thousand is missing.”

Tim shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know either, but I tell you what. Let’s put it back in the bag and put it away and go to sleep. Tomorrow we’ll see if something comes to us.”

Lying on the couch I thought about the money, and I thought about what we had been asked to do, and I thought about Hirem. Something was niggling at the back of my mind, but I wasn’t able to grasp what it was. I’d feel as if I almost had hold of it, and then it would move away from my grasp. I fell asleep dreaming of Big Guy coming out of the water with most of his head missing, climbing into the boat and onto the platform and chasing Leonard and me along the lake shore, and when I’d look back at him, he’d be wearing that minnow bucket over his head.

44

Next morning, Jim Bob joined us in our room for breakfast. Tonto was still out on the town. He hadn’t come in last night. We ate out on the deck. It was fun spending someone else’s money.

The lights were no longer on and the rain had gone, but the day was gray and the air was misty. Everything that had looked bright and amazing the night before now looked grim and sad, sort of sordid, like a used condom tossed in the gutter. Tim and Katie finished up eating and went back to the bedroom. They looked as glum as a couple of coffin carriers.

“Dumb kids,” Jim Bob said.

“Love is dumb,” I said, “and sometimes that’s what I like about it.”

Leonard tossed a thumb at me. “He’s so cute.”

“So Tonto’s out on the town?”

Jim Bob grinned, said, “Funny guy, that Tonto.”

“Yeah, ha, ha,” I said.

“He kills people and then goes gambling,” Jim Bob said. “Of course, I haven’t lost my appetite.”

“None of us have,” I said, and then I told everyone about the money.

“That’s a lot more money than your man said was missing,” Jim Bob said.

“Yep,” I said, “and I smell a rat about the size of a possum covered in slime.”

Jim Bob poured himself some coffee and looked out at the misty morning. “You know, I got a kind of idea about what’s going on here.”

“There’s a little something coming to me too,” Leonard said. “A guy tells us there’s three hundred thousand dollars and there’s more than that, you got to wonder if it’s that big of a miscount on his part—about what’s missing, I mean—or he’s just a goddamn liar.”

“Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “I think the thing is your man, Hirem, he made a special side deal with two FBI agents that doesn’t involve the agency. You two go out and do the dirty work, bring the money back, not having counted it, and they slice them off a nice piece, turn in the three hundred thousand Hirem said was missing, and they get as good a deal as they can find for him in the system, witness protection, and they promise to protect the kid, and you two get out from under your charges. If you two decide to keep the money, then you’re fugitives and you got this charge hanging over your head they could manipulate out of being self-defense and into being murder. You could go up for a long time.”

“They could pull that trick anyway,” Leonard said.

“Yeah,” Jim Bob said, “but the way they see it is it’d be better for everyone all around if they got their money and Hirem got his deal and you two went back to being you two, which is kind of a full-time job.”

Leonard and I touched fists. “Yeah, baby,” Leonard said.

About an hour later there was a knock at the door, and being paranoid, I carried my pistol with me and looked out the peephole. It was Tonto.

When I let him in he looked as fresh as he had the day before, and he was carrying a newspaper under his arm. He followed me out to the deck and sat in a chair and put the paper on the table, and poured himself a cup of coffee. He said, “You know that woman you rented the boat from?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You won’t have to pay for that boat sinking. She’s dead.”

He reached over and flipped the paper open, scanned it briefly, put his finger on an article. I picked it up and read it. It said the woman had been found dead in her store, shot through the forehead. One of her fingers had been amputated.

I read this aloud, and when I finished, Leonard said, “Damn. I think somehow this is our fault.”

“I think someone wanted to know where we went,” I said, “and she didn’t want to tell, and whoever wanted to know cut off a finger to show they were serious, and then when they got the information, they shot her as a cleanup procedure.”

“What I don’t understand,” Leonard said, “is why didn’t she just tell them? She didn’t owe us a thing.”

“Her own ethics, I suppose,” I said. “You can’t just let anyone come into a novelty shop and push you around. Next thing you know, you’ll be giving the plastic dog crap away because bullies want you to.”

“Damn,” Leonard said.

“I guess our friends in the brown Ford were watching us when we rented the boat,” I said.

“Hell,” Tonto said, “I’m glad those guys are dead. They were kind of spooky. I thought I was kind of spooky, but those guys—”

“You are spooky,” I said.

“But sweet around the eyes,” Leonard said.

“Thing is, boys, there might be another player,” Jim Bob said. “Reason we didn’t see a brown Ford all the time was because it wasn’t just a brown Ford following us.”

“You mean we were being double-teamed,” Leonard said. “That’s why they could keep up with us, why they could watch us and we didn’t see them. They decided to let us know about the Ford, put all our thinking there, but there was someone else watching.”

“Why didn’t they join with the Ford at the cabin?” I asked.

“Maybe they got their wires crossed, something as simple as that. Whatever, it didn’t go according to plan.”

“So whoever was the backup is on our tail now,” Leonard said. “Maybe the ninja Hirem warned us about.”

“There will be someone else,” Tonto said, “and maybe someone beyond that, but it won’t be quite so James Bond as all that. I’m going to get some sleep. I suggest we take another night to get it together, maybe go out and get a steak and have a little entertainment, find some poontang that don’t cost more than an arm and a leg and won’t give us the ball rot, then we head back.”

“Since the poontang isn’t USDA-inspected, I’ll pass on that,” Jim Bob said. “Come to think of it, these days, not so sure that inspection would mean much.”

“Brett doesn’t let me date,” I said.

“Battin’ for a different team,” Leonard said.

“Whatever,” Tonto said. “Me, I’m going to get some sleep.”

Tonto finished off his coffee and went out.

“He’s even more confident than me,” Jim Bob said, “and that’s a scary thing. I’ve been around, and I’ve seen some things too, just like you boys, and what I’ve learned the hard way is confidence is a lovely thing, but too much of it will get you cut a new asshole.”

45

It wasn’t that hard to convince Leonard and me to stay another day. We weren’t the type that got to spend nights in good hotels and eat hotel food on murdering scumbags’ money. I was also stiff and sore from our encounter with Big Guy and not exactly in the mood to deal with much.

That next night Tonto talked us into going to a karaoke bar he had found, and it wasn’t far from the strip and it was pretty nice, and purposely ill lit, except for the stage where karaoke took place. We all went: Tonto, Jim Bob, Tim and Katie, and Leonard and I. They had alcoholic drinks, and I had one Diet Coke after another. I had long ago given up liquor, at least for the most part, and felt better having done so. Still, on this night I was thinking maybe I might have a whiskey, but the closest I got to one was thinking about it.

We were in the front row near the stage and the karaoke was as painful as it usually is.

And then one fine-looking blond woman came up and set her little white purse on the stage in front of her. She wasn’t very big, looked to weigh about one-twenty, but was probably a little heavier because she was muscled in a lean sort of way that certainly gave her more weight, but it was weight carried in all the right places. She was young-looking, mid-twenties maybe, wearing white pedal pushers with white shoes with thick elevated heels, and she had on a white top. Her hair was gold as fresh wheat and she had a very fine face, and even from where we sat, we could see that her eyes were bright blue and she had a killer smile, and in the lights from the stage she looked as if all she needed was wings on her back and a message from Zeus.

Way it worked was the singers picked their tunes, and they were supposed to get two songs if they wanted it, and she got up and sang, and the thing was, she was good, very good. The first song was “Driving Wheel,” and she did it justice. Her voice was strong and it kind of surprised some of the drinkers, who actually shut up and listened. A few couples began to dance, including Tim and Katie. When the song ended there was a lot of applause, and we, out there in the front row, were giving up a lot of it ourselves. While she had been singing, she had been looking at Tonto, and I glanced to see if he had noticed, and he had. He looked like a little kid that had just gotten attention from the best-looking girl in class.

The second song was Dion’s “The Wanderer,” and she knocked it out of the park, changing certain words to fit a woman’s point of view, which made it clear to me she had done the song before and had given it thought. She moved a little as she sang, not much but a little, and with this girl not much was plenty. There was a seductive quality to her moves without them being overdone, and she had her eyes locked on Tonto.

Jim Bob leaned over to me, said, “Lucky sonofabitch.”

“What’s he got that I haven’t got?” I said.

“No girlfriend that will kill him, and from the size of him, about two extra inches on his dick.”

“Oh yeah, there’s that,” I said.

When the song was over there was applause again, and she ended up doing a third song, “Jim Dandy,” and then she stepped down and a guy about half in the bag got up and sang a bad version of some tune I didn’t recognize. The girl walked by Tonto and smiled at him. He said, “Buy you a drink?”

“Come to my table?” she said.

He did just that, and though I was happy for him, and wouldn’t have bothered with her had she been interested in me because I loved Brett, I was also a little jealous. A woman like that could make a Baptist preacher kill his wife and set fire to his church. I glanced over and saw Tonto with her. He was helping her into a brown leather coat, and the way she stood she was out of the light and cloaked in shadow, and the light from the back door was on Tonto, and his dark face seemed oddly cherubic. I turned away and looked out at the dance floor.

Tim and Katie were still dancing, and the way they looked at each other, held each other tight, made me miss Brett something terrible. I was thinking about this when Leonard said, “I’m thinking of getting up there and singing.”

“Now or never,” I said.

Leonard caught a turn and got up and sang Charley Pride’s “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone,” and he was good. He got some applause, and when he climbed down, we exchanged a few words, and then I looked where Tonto and the girl had been. Gone.

I said to Leonard and Jim Bob, “I think Tonto is trying to round up the cattle, and here we sit. If he goes off all night and drags in tomorrow about noon, I’m going to be pissed. He said we were leaving in the morning.”

“Women will make you do crazy things,” Jim Bob said, pushing his hat back on his head. “You got a sane guy, goes about his business, and then that gets wagged in his face, sanity and business go out the window. And for all his professionalism, I get the feeling Tonto can be pulled around by his ying-yang.”

“But not us,” I said.

“No sir, not us,” Jim Bob said.

“Ha!” Leonard said.

“You know,” Jim Bob said, “maybe it’s a small thing, but the money, it’s hidden under the floorboard of the van, and Tonto decides he’s going to go off with missy, I don’t like the idea of it being there. No biggie, but I’m going to see if I can catch him. I’ll pretend it’s laundry or something so the gal won’t know.”

“Let’s all see if we can catch him,” I said. “I’m ready to go back to the hotel.”

Leonard went out on the floor and got the dancing kids, and as we were starting out, Jim Bob said, “You know, Tonto would probably have said something to us, he was leaving.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But we got two vehicles. He’s probably thinking we could ride tight we had to. In fact, he’s probably not thinking that much. Not with the good head.”

“Point,” Jim Bob said.

We were parked out back, so we went out the back way. The Escalade was next to the van in the lot, and when I looked at the van, I saw the interior light was on, but I didn’t see Tonto or the girl. The air was chilly, and our breath came out in clouds.

Jim Bob said, “This whole deal smells funny all of a sudden.”

We looked around the lot and didn’t see anybody, just cars. Pulling our guns, we put them by our sides and walked out to the van. Jim Bob went around the front and I stayed on the right-hand side, and Leonard went around back. I told the kids, “Stand back.”

They went over and stood on the other side of the Escalade.

I looked in the side window and saw Tonto lying facedown across the backseat. He looked as if he had just stretched out. His pants were down and his ass was like a big moon. I took a deep breath. Leonard opened the door on the other side the rest of the way—that’s why the interior light was on, the door was partially open.

Jim Bob and I went around and joined Leonard and we looked down at Tonto. His face was turned to one side and his ear was full of blood. Jim Bob leaned in and looked and said, “Ah, goddamn it to hell. The woman.”

Leonard leaned in and looked. “Something sharp, right in the ear. Ice pick maybe.”

“Where the hell did she keep it?” I said.

“Purse,” Jim Bob said.

Leonard checked Tonto’s pulse, looked at us, shook his head. Blood was now running out of Tonto’s ear and down his cheek, collecting on the seat.

“Just happened,” Jim Bob said, turning to look around the parking lot. “Seconds ago. Damn.”

We had put the duffel bag with the money in the back under one of the traps in the floor. We went around and looked. The trap was open. The money was gone.

“Knew where to look,” Jim Bob said. “Guesswork, maybe, but good guesswork.”

We closed the door, cutting the interior light, put our guns away, and all of us went over and got in the Escalade, Leonard behind the wheel. Jim Bob, sitting next to him, said, “I was just starting to like that asshole.”

“He lived this long,” Leonard said, “and then he decided to throw in with me and Hap. That was his mistake.”

“I can’t disagree with that,” Jim Bob said. “Look, you guys, you go back to the hotel and get the bags, and I’ll meet up with you later. Don’t worry about me. I’m going to drive the van and take Tonto somewhere.”

“And where will that be?” I said.

“I don’t know. But I’m not just leaving him. He’s part of the team. He’s got someplace, or I’ll find someplace. Marvin will know something. He was our connection to Tonto.”

“We should have gone home,” Leonard said.

“We should have done a lot of things,” Jim Bob said. “You guys, you take the kids back, the money. Don’t go back to your place, Hap. Call me at some point. I’ll meet up with you.”

“We—we have a blanket in the back,” Tim said, “you want to cover him.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s a good idea.”

“We ought to look for her,” I said.

“No point in that,” Jim Bob said. “She’s a pro. That little darling is cool as an ice tray. She let him think he was about to throw the spear in the bull’ s-eye, and then she got him. Had to have practice at it. One good shot with something sharp in the ear, and he never knew what hit him.”

Me and Leonard and Jim Bob got out and I had the blanket. Leonard gave the car keys to Tim, said, “We’re going to cover him up, you hear? Stay in the car.”

Tim nodded. Katie took Tim’s arm. “Cold,” she said. “I feel so cold.”

“You want,” Leonard said, “warm the car up.”

We went back to the van, and when we were sure no one was in the lot, we opened the door and pulled Tonto’s pants up, got the van keys out of his pocket, and left him facedown with the blanket over him. Jim Bob shook the keys, said, “I’m going to take him now.”

Jim Bob got in behind the wheel and pulled away. We watched him go.

When he was out of the lot, Leonard turned to me, said, “Hey, I didn’t unlock the Escalade. It was already unlocked.”

A chill went over me that wasn’t due to the weather. We had been so distracted by Tonto, we hadn’t really noticed, not then, and that meant she had jacked the car open, and then got out of there fast. Maybe when we came out the back we surprised her, came out and didn’t give her time to lock things back

I turned toward the Escalade. Tim had climbed behind the wheel and Katie was sitting up front with him. We started walking that way quickly, and then I saw Tim move slightly, and though I couldn’t see what he was doing, I knew he was about to start the car, get some warmth from the heater.

I started to run, but then the car came apart in what seemed like slow motion and the parking lot turned red and there was a hot wind that picked me up and carried me away.

I was lying on my stomach, had the feeling I had been out for a moment. I rose up on my hands. My ears were ringing. I looked at where the Escalade had been sitting. It was a gutted wreck and flames were licking at it and I could see two dark shapes in what had been the front seat, burning. There was nothing to be done there.

Glancing around, I saw Leonard. He was lying on his face and he wasn’t moving, not making a sound. The back of his coat was feeding a little blaze. I tried to get up, but didn’t have the ability. Crawling toward him, I got there and slapped at his back with my hands, putting out the flames on his coat. Reaching out, I touched his pulse. He had one. Grateful for that, I put my face down on the cold parking lot cement and passed out.

46

The air was a little chill and my ears were ringing and throbbing and I didn’t feel so good. I turned my head. It was a chore equal to the labors of Hercules. It was a hospital bed. I tried to call out, but my mouth was so dry I could only croak. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

When I awoke this time there was a man in a chair by my bed, and I knew him. Drake. He looked at me like he really wanted to be somewhere else. He said, “When you two boys fuck up, you like to compound it, don’t you?”

I didn’t answer. I thought about nodding, but was afraid my head would fall off. Overall, I felt as if I had been rode hard and put up wet, and then shot for having bad ankles.

Drake got up and poured some water from a pitcher into a plastic glass with a straw. He brought it over and took hold of a little control on a cable and touched it. The head of the bed raised up, and when it was positioned, he stopped it and held the water for me to sip.

It was the best water I had ever had. I was convinced it was the best water anyone ever had. When my throat was wet enough, I managed to say, “Leonard?”

“They have to dig some more car shrapnel out of his thighs, but he’s pretty much in the same condition you are, which is burned a little and banged up a lot.”

“How bad?” I said.

“Not that bad. Not so bad the two of you won’t recover and retain your native good looks.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m asking myself that,” Drake said. “Thing is, they found you boys in the parking lot, and whoever was in the car. That would be Hirem’s boy and the girlfriend, right?”

I nodded.

“That’s all I know about the deal,” Drake said. “You were supposed to find them and find some money.”

“Batting zero,” I said.

“I figured.”

“Again, how come you’re here?”

“Your license, Leonard’s. Had your address on it. My town. So they called me, see if I could find out who you were, what you were doing here. I knew both of you, of course.”

“And you bothered to come?”

“I’m trying to figure why. I was thinking you two got off easy, and then they call, tell me what happened, and I’m thinking maybe not so easy. So I call a contact I got in the FBI, and he says you two are off their charts, officially anyway. But some things have changed, and they’re feeling kindly.”

“What’s changed?” I said.

“Someone popped those two FBI agents, and that same someone didn’t do Hirem any good. Tortured him.”

“They wanted to know where we were searching.”

“That’s right, and it looks like they found out. And any information he would have given the FBI, any money might have been recovered from illicit business, they aren’t getting that now. But the main thing was the names Hirem would have named didn’t get named, and now there’s nothing but his corpse. Done deal.”

“I think the bad guys killed a lady named Annie too,” I said, and told Drake about it.

He said, “The FBI has decided not to forget you. They’ve decided your heart was in the right place. They’re going to make sure there are no charges.”

“If there were charges,” I said, “what would they be for?”

“They have no idea, and neither do I, but we figure you did something. And they figure the something you did was to their benefit. And they figure it was a good thing they found these four guys in a Ford over near Lake O’ the Pines, and they were good and dead and they all had records, and somehow, they think it just might be possible they are connected to problems they have, and it just might be possible you and Leonard solved those problems. As for the explosion, and the guns they found on you, you guys are getting a clean slate soon as you’re able to get out of here. There’s local cops watching your rooms. FBI is sponsoring that indirectly. Directly, they aren’t doing squat, and everything I told you they would deny. They found out you had a room in a hotel, that there were two rooms. One for the kids?”

I lied. “Yep.”

“They had your bags sent over, after they went through them. Oh, by the way. The local newspaper, it read that four people had died in that blast. That would include you and Leonard. So there are some bad people think you’re dead. At least for the moment. Best just to take this as a freebie and not ask any questions.”

“How long have we been here?”

“Three days.”

“Damn,” I said.

“What about Brett?” Drake said.

“She doesn’t know what happened,” I said. “I’d like to keep it that way for now. She’s out of sight and maybe out of mind of these tin-pot gangsters. She knew I was hurt, or Leonard, she’d be here. I don’t want that. Not now.”

“I can understand that.”

“This isn’t exactly your jurisdiction,” I said.

“Yeah, I got no authority, but I got concern for my citizens, and that includes you two jackasses. And my friend in the FBI, I’m sort of his and the agency’s unofficial mouthpiece. What they want you to do is be finished.”

“All right,” I said.

“And mean it.”

“You know, the person who blew up the car, they got the money.”

“It wouldn’t be stashed away somewhere, would it?” Drake said.

“Not by us.”

“That person blew up the car, you know who it is?”

“No,” I said, and I didn’t mention Jim Bob or Tonto. I was hoping he didn’t know about them, and I was hoping the FBI didn’t either. I didn’t mention the woman who had killed Tonto. She was mine. I didn’t mention the money had been in the van, figured Drake would logically think it had been taken from the Escalade, maybe our hotel room.

“These cops watching you, they’re only going to be here one more day. So you got to get well quick or hope nobody from the bad side of life is hunting you two down.”

“I’m feeling perky already,” I said, and this was true.

“Another thing, no charge for the hospital stay. FBI, they’re giving you a gift out of some funds they don’t have and didn’t give you. Understand?”

I agreed that I did. I said, “I’m surprised the FBI even cared.”

“Covering their ass is all,” Drake said, standing up. “Well, I’ve had it with you two. I’m going home. And next time I see you, if it’s just a parking ticket, I’m going to see there’s some way to throw you under the jail.”

He was almost to the door when I said, “Drake.”

He turned.

“Thanks, man.”

He nodded and went out.

I lay there and tried to put it together. Jim Bob had been right. There had been someone else in on the deal. Maybe an accomplice to our Dracula, Big Guy, or maybe as hired backup. Could have even been someone Big Guy didn’t know about. Someone to watch the watchers. Did that watcher do the torturing of Annie and Hirem and the FBI folks, or was it Big Guy and his pals? Probably never figure that one out.

Bottom line, the she devil was on our ass when we left Lake O’ the Pines, and Tonto was not quite the super ace he thought. Or he’d just gotten tired and, in the end, horny. She lured him out there and killed him and took the money. She had seen the kids and me and Leonard in the Escalade, and we were the hired hits. Anyone else got in the way like Tonto, they had to go. But she figured one bomb would take Tim and Katie and me and Leonard out. And if she was lucky, it would take the van too, Jim Bob, or anyone else in that wrong place at the wrong time.

She had made one error. Leaving the door on the Escalade unlocked. Probably because we came out more quickly than she expected and she had to get away, forgot the door. Had seen us come out and was gone like a ghost before we knew it. Bottom line was she had succeeded with the bomb. Set it so when the engine cranked, or when the heater was turned on, it would blow. It was just luck Leonard and I had survived.

I really hated that bitch.

Good-looking as all get-out, but still a bitch.

47

A little over two weeks later and out of the hospital we joined Marvin, and we all went out to Arizona. Leonard had tried to patch things up with John again, but John had got religion, and when that happens, common sense, logic, and the obvious fly out the window of the brain like a horde of bees.

Jim Bob we had talked to, and he had taken care of the van and Tonto. Turned out there was no real home where Tonto lived, just a cell phone number that wouldn’t be answered again and a post office box where any mail he might get would pile up. Marvin told Jim Bob all of this, and Jim Bob took Tonto in his van and drove the van off to a place run by people he knew who owned an auto farm, old cars with a car crusher that made them flat. They used the crusher with Tonto in the van and then they put the cube of metal in the back of a truck and it was dumped in a deep wet place not far from Houston. Jim Bob said the people did it for him were longtime friends and that there were other crushed cars with crushed people in them in the deep waters nearby. He said he was on call if we needed him again, and we might, but I didn’t want him now; didn’t want to put anyone else into what we had created. It was our mess to fix.

There was one other thing. He said he had found the photograph of me and Leonard and Cindy the Bear in the van before he had it crushed with Tonto in it, and he mailed the photo to us.

Leonard and I, and Brett, we were all in Arizona now, but we weren’t all in the same place. Marvin and his family were together with relatives, and we had been there to visit but the atmosphere was not warm. Gadget couldn’t look us in the eye, and her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother made us feel as though we were only begrudgingly welcome. We didn’t stay long. Brett, who had been there, was glad to leave; her ass whipping of Gadget hung over the household like a little dark cloud. We were given a rental the family owned that was empty. It was a condo with a little backyard next to other little backyards. There was limited furniture in the joint, just a bed, a couch, a table, and some chairs, and Leonard slept on the couch. On this day we were all sitting outside and the weather was cool but not too cold. We were wearing coats and sitting at a table, Brett and I close together holding hands. On the table were some empty plates that had recently held tuna fish sandwiches with apple cut up in them, heavy on mayonnaise, and there had been potato chips and coffee. I was sitting there enjoying the thought of what I had eaten, simple but good, and thinking about some of the vanilla wafers we had in the house.

“So, this hit person, she thinks you’re dead?” Brett said.

“For now. But before word gets out, we thought we might go see her in person.”

“You think you could hurt a woman, Hap … on purpose?”

“Hey, he punched Gadget,” Leonard said.

“You’re talking about killing her, though,” Brett said.

“Woman, man, shemale, they come after me with a gun, a knife, a pointed stick, I don’t like it. And I don’t want her coming around again. Thing is, she’s the best they’ve sent after us, and it’s only luck I’m here to hold your lovely hand.”

“And you didn’t get your dick blown off,” Brett said.

“That too,” I said.

“I consider that an important part of our relationship,” she said.

“As do I,” I said.

“You got it blown off,” Leonard said, “you’d be holding hands with a plastic love doll. Brett would be out of here.”

“Not true,” Brett said. “He’s still got a tongue.”

“That’s a little too much from the instructional manual,” Leonard said.

“Yeah, since when are you grossed out by anything?” I said.

“Since I’ve had a tragic near-death experience. Did you know, when I was knocked out on the ground out there, shrapnel in my shapely loins and lower stomach, I saw a white light, and I wanted to go to it, because when I got there, and if God was there, I was gonna whip his ass for what he’d let happen to us.”

Me and Leonard touched fists.

Brett leaned over and kissed me. Her eyes were misty. I said, “I’m fine.”

“We could stay here,” she said. “I could get a nurse job, you could find work. Arizona is nice.”

“Need those East Texas trees,” I said. “And besides, I couldn’t live with myself I didn’t find that bitch and put a bullet in her head. And yeah, I can do it, woman or no woman. I don’t want to live under the umbrella of her coming back. She thinks she’s safe and we’re dead, but I’m going to find her.”

“Ditto to that,” Leonard said.

“Can I go back with you?” Brett said.

“You do whatever you want to do, as always, but I’d rather you not. I think it’ll be easier you don’t. Leonard and I have been in this kind of thing before.”

“Maybe not just like this,” Leonard said.

“All right,” I said. “Not just like this, but we can handle ourselves, now that we know what we’re up against.”

“That didn’t sound all that convincing,” Brett said.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’m not all that convinced. But I’d prefer you stay here, let us go after her.”

“What was she like?” Brett asked.

“We don’t know. All we know is what we told you, but when it comes to getting the job done, she’s something. The whole thing with Tonto, that probably happened so quick he was still getting his hard-on. And the way she wired that bomb up, she’s experienced.”

“Didn’t look that old, either,” Leonard said.

“No, she didn’t.”

“You have some idea how to find her?” Brett said.

“Yep,” I said, “I do. Let me ask you something—how’s Gadget?”

“You could feel the cold air back at their place, couldn’t you?”

“Yep.”

“Marvin, he tried to make me feel welcome, but it got so I expected the women of the household to jump me. Except for Gadget. She had had her butt whipped soundly. I tell you, I was ready to take them all on, do a little head knocking.”

“You’re just the woman to do it,” I said.

“Damn right,” she said.

“You can stay here, alone?”

“Better than at their place. The atmosphere there is poisonous.”

“Good. And now, Leonard and I, and because you are one of us by proxy, should celebrate our survival from a big car bomb with some vanilla wafers.”

“Nope,” Leonard said. “Ain’t gonna happen. I got hungry last night, and I felt I needed a personal celebration.”

“You ate them all?” Brett said.

“Everything but the sack, and I licked that.”

“You turd,” Brett said.

“And there are no more Dr Peppers. I had a kind of festival of life.”

48

Marvin wanted to go back with us, but we made him feel bad about his leg and told him what a burden he would be and it was best he stayed out of action; it was true, of course. We did get some information we needed from him, though, and then we were in Leonard’s car and he drove us back to East Texas in a two-and-a-half-day run, except for a four-hour stop in Cross Plains, Texas, where we slept a couple hours in a motel, and then we had to go over and see the Robert E. Howard house because Leonard liked his Conan stories and wouldn’t hear of passing it up. I tried to explain to him that we were in a hurry because we had to find and shoot someone, but he wasn’t moved, so we did a tour there and then got back on the road.

In the car Leonard said, “I get killed, I know I’ve seen where one of my favorite authors lived and shot himself to death.”

“You get killed, what you saw isn’t going to matter.”

“Good point,” Leonard said.

With the information we had gotten from Marvin, we drove to my place briefly to get a few things, including a sawed-off shotgun, handguns, and a deer rifle. Then we drove over to No Enterprise in the dead of night, on out to where Marvin told us Conners lived. As Marvin had explained, it was out in the country some, and you could take a road that went up a hill, and you could look down on Conners’ place, which was on a few acres with a little pond and a lot of junked cars that in the night looked like huge insects. We drove up there behind a little clutch of pines and some gnarly persimmon trees and sat. There were no lights in the house, which meant Conners could be asleep, but there wasn’t a cop car in the yard, so we figured he wasn’t home yet. Probably out doing something corrupt.

Being true professionals, and having driven really far, we both fell asleep.

When we awoke the day was bright and the sun was high. I looked out the windshield between the trees and saw the house looked the same. Still no cop car. We got out and crapped in the bushes and wiped on napkins we had in the car, and a little later on we took pee breaks and drank some bottled water and peed some more. That’s the trouble when you’re an over-forty tough guy. You have to pee a lot.

We got out of the car and washed our hands with some of the bottled water, and washed our faces, and tried to figure if we were well hid up on the hill, and decided as long as no one came up the little hunting road, we were snug as bugs in a rug. From down there, Conners’ house, the only way we could be seen was if someone was looking for us.

We had some vanilla cookies with us, and a couple of cold burritos, and we ate those for lunch and drank some more of the water. If our guy didn’t show soon, we’d be out of food, water, and napkins on which to wipe our asses.

A hawk flew into a tree above us, and we looked up at it and it looked down at us. We didn’t worry it any. It was a large hawk and it cast a big shadow in the cold, bright day. Bored with us, it flew off.

We took turns taking walks along the hunting road to keep our circulation up, and then we took turns sleeping in the backseat of the car while the other watched the house below.

After a couple of hour naps, I felt pretty good, and got a paperback of an Andrew Vachss novel Leonard had in the car and read from that, and then it was his turn, and he read from it, losing my place in the process.

The sun dipped down and the night soaked in, and it got cold. I had slipped out of my jacket during the day, but now I was in it again, and we climbed out of the car and eased down among the trees, closer to the edge of the hill, and looked at the house and waited for some kind of revelation.

Leonard pulled his jacket around him and hunched his shoulders. He reached into his coat pocket and took out a blackjack and gave it to me. He said, “I got one, now you got one.”

“We are same alike,” I said.

“Only I am a handsome black color, and you are white of skin and small of dick.”

“Except for that, we’re same alike.”

Another hour or so passed, and then we saw headlights on the road below, coming toward the house. The road ran past the house, but it didn’t go far before it dead-ended, so we figured this had to be our man.

Sure enough, the car was a cop car and it pulled in the drive, and two men got out, dressed in cop clothes and holstered guns. One of them was Conners. He had looked big to me before, but recently I had seen Big Guy and he made everyone look small, even Conners. The guy with him was short and fat, but he had broad shoulders and carried himself in a manner that gave the impression he might be a load if you messed with him.

We, of course, were going to mess with both of them.

The fat guy was carrying a six-pack. They went inside the house.

Leonard said, “Ain’t that a shame. Man of the law buying beer, carrying it around in his patrol car.”

“Let’s go down and see can we have a little talk with them, maybe set them right on their civic duty.”

“All right.”

“But we don’t shoot anybody. I’m all worn out on shooting. At least until we get to our gal.”

“I will do my best,” Leonard said.

Lights came on in the house as we walked down the hill and the lights were all concentrated in one place, and there was a thin white curtain at the window in the lighted room. We could see their shadows moving across the back of the curtain and eased up close to the house with our guns in hand.

I crept up to the window and looked. I could see through a crack in the curtain. They were sitting at a table and Conners was saying something that was making the fat man laugh.

Leonard slipped away from the window and went around back. I ducked under the window and slid over to the front porch and went up on it and nudged back the screen door and touched the knob, seeing if it was locked. It wasn’t.

I took a deep breath, carefully turned the knob, and gently pressed the door back and edged in and then closed it without really pushing it all the way shut. Now I could hear them talking and I could see a slit of light that let me know there was a doorway and hallway and that the hallway led into the kitchen. I looked across the room, letting my eyes adjust, then made my approach through the opening across the way and down the hall. When I got to the lighted door I saw that the back door was at the far end of the hall, and that’s where Leonard was. If it had been unlocked, he would have already been in.

With the gun held ready, I peeked around the corner and saw the fat man had his back to me and Conners was crossing to the refrigerator. I walked across the open doorway with my eyes on them, but made it all the way across without being seen. I tiptoed to the back door and figured out the lock by touch, and was able to twist it so that the sound it made was hardly noticeable. Then I opened the door and Leonard came in.

We went down the hall, and then with me in front, we stepped into the kitchen. When we did, Conners, who was coming back from the fridge, saw us and started to draw his gun. I said, “I wouldn’t, unless you want a hole in your belly.”

The fat man with his back to us dropped his hand to his holster. Leonard said, “That goes for you too, fat boy.”

49

Leonard switched his gun to his other hand and reached in his pocket and pulled out the little blackjack and hit fat boy across the back of the neck hard enough to make him fall out of his chair and land on one knee.

“Goddamn,” the fat man said, holding the back of his neck. “That hurt.”

“No joke,” Leonard said. “That’s to show we mean business. We been shot at, beat on, nearly drowned, and had the shit scared out of us by some guns and Big Guy and a dead alligator, so we’re in no mood to screw around.”

Conners was still standing. I had my gun pointed at him. Leonard reached from behind and took Fat Boy’s pistol away.

I said to Conners, “Unfasten your gun belt and let it drop.”

While he did that, I kept my pistol pointed at him. When the belt hit the floor, I said, “Kick it my way.”

He did and I picked it up and slung the belt over my shoulder, his gun at my back.

“Sit down, Conners,” I said.

“Get up, fat man,” Leonard said. “Find the chair.”

When they were both seated, I went over and leaned on the refrigerator, said, “You know we heard you kind of set things up for shooters for the Dixie Mafia.”

“They don’t call themselves that,” Conners said.

“I don’t care if they call themselves the Dixie Bowling League. You know what I mean.”

“You say,” Conners said.

“Don’t he love to talk?” Leonard said. “Hey, fat boy, ain’t you got nothin’ to say?”

“I don’t know a thing,” the fat man said. “I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“I think you would,” Leonard said, and swung the blackjack again, hitting Fat Boy on the neck, knocking him out of the chair.

“You just stay on the floor,” Leonard said. “It’ll save you the trouble of getting up.”

“You’re tough with that sap in your hand,” Conners said. “You wouldn’t be so tough without it.”

Leonard put the sap in his coat pocket and took off his coat. “We can see.”

“Nope,” I said. “I know you can whip him.”

“Yeah, but he don’t,” Leonard said.

The fat man on the ground said, “Conners would tie you in a knot.”

“See,” Leonard said. “He don’t know it either. Get up, Conners. Let’s you and me dance.”

“Not a good idea,” I said. “Having a macho queer moment. Don’t do it.”

Conners got up and I decided I wouldn’t shoot him. I pointed the gun at the fat man on the ground. “You crawl over this way a piece.”

Conners came around the table. Leonard moved a little to the side of the table, and then they were facing each other, six feet apart. Conners hulked over Leonard, though Leonard’s shoulders were easily as broad as his.

Conners had his hands up. So did Leonard. They stood that way for a long moment. Leonard said, “You waitin’ on an engraved invitation?”

Conners moved then, swung. Leonard ducked under it and hit Conners in the nuts with a right uppercut, then he swiveled and kicked at the inside of Conners’ leg, catching him just above the ankle. It brought him down.

Conners did a push-up and Leonard let him. When Conners was up, he said, “Them chink tricks ain’t gonna help you none.”

“They seem to be working all right,” Leonard said.

Conners came again, throwing a right cross that was so slow you could have gone out and bought a paper and been back in time to dodge it. It went over Leonard’s right shoulder, and Leonard kicked out and caught Conners on the side of the leg, mid-thigh. The nerve cluster there lit up and Conners went down with a yelp. When he hit the floor, Leonard kicked him in the jaw. Conners fell on his back and groaned.

“You can get up if you want to,” Leonard said.

I will say this, Conners could have just lain there, but he didn’t. He got up and came again, and this time Leonard moved to the right and jabbed right-handed and caught Conners over the eye enough to make him step back, and then it was like a wolf at the slaughter. Leonard hooked Conners in the belly with a left, and then it was a double right jab to the face, and finally Leonard kicked out with his front leg and caught Conners in the lower abdomen and sent him flailing back against the table, which crashed underneath his weight, causing the fat man to slide on the floor and out of the way.

Conners lay in the wreckage of the table, bleeding from the mouth.

Leonard looked at Fat Boy. “Now, how about you?”

The fat man shook his head.

“Damn skippy,” Leonard said, then looked at me. “That’s what I meant to do to that big guy.”

“Me too,” I said, “but it didn’t work out.”

“Yeah, I just couldn’t get warmed up.”

“Was that it?”

Leonard toed the fat man a little, making him roll over on the floor so he could get to the refrigerator. He found a can of beer in there and brought it out and popped the top and took a foam-dripping swig. “There, assholes. I drink your beer. I kick your ass. And you will give us some information.”

When Conners and the fat boy were back in their chairs, Leonard took the sap out of his pocket, said, “Just so you know, I’m ready to warm you up again.”

“Tell us about the hit folk,” I said. “We’re tired of getting shot at. Tell us about who you sent after us, and just to make it easy on you, don’t say you don’t know what we’re talking about. Just talk or I’m going to give you to Leonard again.”

“We just do as we’re told,” Conners said.

“And why is that?” I said.

“Why do you think?”

“Money” I said, “and now that you’re in, you don’t want someone coming after you, am I right?”

“Something like that.”

“But you’re a bigger dog in all this than you’ve let on. You, and probably your fat friend here—certainly your fat friend—you pick the hitters, so you’re pretty well connected. What the fuck is your name, fat friend?”

“Sykes,” he said.

“I prefer Fat Boy,” I said. “Now, how goes it, Conners? How’s it work?”

“I’ve made some connections over the years,” Conners said. “I’m a cop. You meet people that know people, and you find you can make deals.”

“Sweet deals.”

Conners nodded.

“So, to get right to the fuckin’, no foreplay where is the woman you hired to kill us?”

“Woman?”

“Yep. She hit one of our pards, and blew up Hirem’s kid and girlfriend, and put me and Leonard in a hospital for a while, and just so you know, we’re mad.”

Conners smiled. “Vanilla Ride. I didn’t even know it was a woman. I got her contact a couple years back. She’s made ten hits for what you call the Dixie Mafia. She’s made hits for others. Made them through me. Sometimes those hits are more than one person. You two are supposed to be dead.”

“It wasn’t from want of trying,” I said.

“I’ve never even seen her, or a lot of the hitters. I got contacts, I told you.”

“Tell us how to contact Vanilla Ride. Me and Leonard thought we’d drop in, say hello.”

“I contact her by mail. No e-mail. No phone number. I drop her a letter from a false address to a P.O. box, and the letter has names on it, some general information, where these people are. Then we get a FedEx from her with the names we gave her and she’s got a line drawn through them when the job is done, and then the big dogs pay her at that P.O. box. She, huh? A woman. Now that’s something. I thought Vanilla Ride was some big guy with a shotgun. And you guys, you were on her list with lines drawn through your names, drawing flies somewhere. That’s what I was thinking, what I was hoping.”

“She speculated a bit too much,” Leonard said. “We’re still here. Tired and pissed off, but here. She was on our tail, but she got cocky.”

“Got a question,” I said. “Did Vanilla Ride return the money?”

“No, not yet,” Conners said. “Someday it’ll just turn up on the right doorstep. No one will see who dropped it, it’ll just show up. She knows everyone in the business, where they live, what they do. That’s what makes her so deadly. Damn, a woman. Sounds like my kind of broad.”

“What’s the address?” I said.

“I give it to you, you’ll kill us,” Conners said.

“You don’t give it to us I’ll kill you,” I said. “I’m in no mood to play games, man. Give me the address.”

“You’ll let us go?” Conners said.

“I don’t want any more blood on my hands than I already have.”

Leonard looked at me. I said, “I mean that, Leonard.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said. “I know you do.”

“He wants us dead,” Sykes said.

“Yep,” Leonard said. “I do.”

“So how’s it gonna be?” Conners said.

“It’s gonna be nice enough, you give us that address.”

“It’s a post office box in Arkansas.”

“All right. Give it to us, and let me just say this. If we go on a wild-goose chase, or anyone gets on our tail, we will come right back to you and kill your asses dead, and then shoot you daily for a week just to make ourselves happy. Tell us what we want to know, this is a way you get out of it scot-free, but you screw with us, we hold a grudge.”

“Hell, I hope you find her,” Conners said. “No idea she was a woman, but you find her, from what I know of her work, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

“You tell us how to find her, you get to live,” I said. “Hell, man, it’s your choice.”

Leonard looked at me like a puzzled dog, said, “They hired Vanilla Ride for the Dixie Mafia. She tried to kill us. What makes these assholes so special?”

“I want who hit our man and those kids and took the money and tried to blow us up, so I’m willing to trade.”

“How do we know your word is good?” Conners said.

“You know as much as we know yours is good,” I said. “Make a choice. Now.”

50

Stopping by the all-night station/store in No Enterprise, we bought some traveling goods and filled up the gas tank and I looked for the guy in the garage, but he and his fuck book were not present and the door was locked. It was too late to work and too late to read. Maybe he was home doing what he had been reading about. Most likely he had the book in his left hand and himself in his right.

One of the things we bought was some bright blue stationery and envelopes. I wrote down the address Conners had given us on it, put it to Vanilla Ride, and then I wrote Conners’ address, which he had been so kind to give us, in the left-hand corner as the sender. Since they couldn’t phone her or find her any quicker than we could, I wanted to get things started. I wrote “Hi” on a piece of the blue stationery and folded it up and put it in the bright blue envelope and laid it on the dash of the car, waiting until we could buy a stamp.

We started for Arkansas, cruising along not listening to music, just quiet for a long time. We had left Conners and Sykes tied up in their kitchen with lamp cords and stripped sheets. I figured they’d work themselves loose in a couple hours or so.

Leonard finally broke the silence, said, “You know that was stupid, letting them live?”

“I do. But I think I have to draw the line somewhere.”

“You draw the line on them but you’re traveling all the way to Arkansas to kill Vanilla Ride.”

“It seems a little more personal.”

“I see them all as one big nest.”

“I’m sure you’re right, but I guess I’ve decided to focus my anger all on one, the one put the bomb under the car and killed Tonto and those kids and gave us a stay in the hospital.”

“All right,” Leonard said. “But you know those guys aren’t through with us.”

“Yep.”

“We’ll deal with them again.”

“Yep.”

“I thought Conners was at the top of our list. You said to put stars by his name.”

“Yep.”

“So why didn’t we just nip it in the bud?”

“I’ve tried my best to explain.”

“And your explanation sucks.”

“I just couldn’t shoot them out of their chairs like that, in cold blood.”

“What if Vanilla Ride is sitting in a chair?”

“I’ll ask her to stand up.”

“You’ll be killing a woman.”

“She may be of that gender, but she’s no woman to me. I’m not even sure she’s human. Conners and Sykes do it for money, and Vanilla Ride gets paid, but, man, I got a feeling she loves that stuff. She liked baiting Tonto along like that, getting him to the point where he thought he was gonna get him a piece, and then, wham, he’s out of there. That’s cold, brother. And those kids.”

“I still don’t see a difference. She took the money. In the end, it’s all about money and they all want the money.”

“Maybe, Leonard, truth is, in the end, there’s no difference at all. Them. Us. We’re all killers, and in the end, the worms sort us out.”

There was no real address for Vanilla Ride, just the P.O. box Conners had told us about, and the rest of the address was a town called Sylvester, Arkansas. What I had in mind was staking out the post office, waiting till she came to collect her mail. It wasn’t exactly a plan up there with Robert E. Lee, but then again, it was me and Leonard. We’re not dumb, but strategy is not our long suit.

It was about three hours to Arkansas, and it was still night when we got there, and we stopped at a station and put more gas in the car and checked our map to make sure we were heading the right way, then pushed on, like Mounties after our man, or in this case, our woman.

Daylight was breaking as we drove into the mountains amongst the trees, and there was a light frost on our windshield. The roads grew narrow, the trees thickened. Leonard rolled down the window to get some air, to keep himself alert, so as not to drive off a cliff. He let it blow cold on his face for a while, then touched the electric window button and sent it up. I looked ahead at the sun-stained road and the countryside and listened to the hum of the heater.

51

Sylvester looks almost unreal, a kind of holdout from frontier days, but the truth is it isn’t all that old. It was founded some fifty years ago and built to resemble a frontier town, and they’ve kept it that way. Traffic was pretty intense for a place that claimed twenty thousand people, but the traffic would be the tourists, because there’s a nice lake nearby with plenty of fish and the scenery is beautiful. It’s the kind of place people come to rest and not Jet-Ski or mountain-climb or party all night. There are a few restaurant clubs, and from what I could see they catered to the older set as well. We parked and headed toward the post office. I read on a sign for a place called the Buckin’ Horse Saloon that it opened at four for dinner, had entertainment, and closed at ten. If the horse bucked, it did it quietly and at reasonable hours.

At the post office, which was one open window commanded by an old man in a plaid shirt with a postal name tag (Jake), I bought a stamp for our bright blue envelope and mailed it. We walked around the post office and saw there were rows and rows of mailboxes with thick glass windows in them so you could see when you got mail, and finally we located the one that went with our envelope.

“All right,” Leonard said. “She has to come here.”

“Except she won’t,” I said.

“Surrogate?”

“Of course. She’d be too easy to find otherwise. Why do you think I got that bright blue envelope?”

“Ah, but what if she gets lots of mail and whoever picks it up mixes it with other envelopes, and we’re watching from a distance. What if it’s night?”

“Oh. Well, I didn’t think about that.”

Leonard sighed. “Guess we got what we got.”

We walked across the street to a hotel and Leonard stayed outside to watch the post office while I went inside. At the desk I talked the clerk into giving us a window facing the street, so we could enjoy the view, and then I took Leonard’s spot on the sidewalk and he walked back to the car for our little bit of supplies.

For the next week we hung out in that hotel room, looking at the post office out the window, hoping we’d be able to spot the blue envelope come out in someone’s hot little hands. From time to time one of us would walk over to the post office and look through the little window of her mailbox, and we could see the blue envelope was there, waiting, and no one had been in to get it.

We took shifts so one or the other could go out and buy food. We also bought underwear and we didn’t shave, under the odd notion that maybe if Vanilla Ride saw us she wouldn’t recognize us unshaved. It was lame, but again, it was what we had.

First day we were there we started seeing some interesting-looking guys showing up at the post office, watching for what we were watching for, I guess. But had they been smart enough to send her a brightly colored envelope? I thought not.

They couldn’t hang around the place any more than us, but they did get a room in, you guessed it, our hotel. I passed one of them, a lean, greasy-haired fellow, on my way out to pick up some sandwiches. He was sitting in the lobby, and when he saw me, he watched me go out, and I didn’t let him know I was watching him. Across the street, in front of the post office, another guy sat in a car, getting out now and then to feed quarters into the parking meter. He was tall and fat, with very little hair on his head. Sometimes he moved the car and parked elsewhere, but he was always parked so he could see the post office. I guess the other two were out buying sandwiches and underwear, same as us. But they all swapped out from time to time, and it was my guess they weren’t lawmen and they weren’t from the IRS and I doubted they were the men in black since their wardrobes were varied. All I was certain of was I had seen four of them over a period of time.

Back in the room with our sandwiches, Leonard said, “You know, this sucks. Those guys were sent here from Conners, and had we put a hole in his head, him and his fat friend, we’d be sitting here without contention, except for Vanilla Ride herself. But now, thanks to you, we got her and them.”

“I know.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Hell, yeah, I mind,” I said. “But I did what I could do, Leonard. That’s it. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s my flawed nature.”

Leonard shook his head and patted me on the shoulder. “I love my little idealist. In a gay sort of manly way, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Look at it this way: if we’d killed those two, you wouldn’t have to kill these four. Or, worse yet, get killed by them.”

“You are a goddamn sage, Leonard.”

52

One day we’re in the hotel room, looking out the window, having sucked down too much coffee, my personal plumbing backed up to where my insides felt like a brick factory, and I’m thinking a little fruit juice might be good, when Leonard, who is nibbling around the edges of a vanilla cookie, said, “These guys, they here for us or Vanilla Ride?”

“Maybe both,” I said. “Could be they’ve decided she needs to go too. Maybe because she hasn’t returned the money.”

“You think she’ll keep it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s her plan. I think she’s a professional. But I also think the people she’s dealing with are falling apart. The talent they’ve sent out has cost them big-time, and it would probably be nice to get the money back, but they want us because we’re a couple of amateurs who have survived everything they’ve got, including Vanilla Ride. My guess is they haven’t paid her because she didn’t finish the job, because we didn’t die, and now she’s got their money on top of having not wiped us out.”

“She’s got more money than they think,” Leonard said.

“That too.”

“So, Hirem lied about the amount of money, which was probably because there was extra he was going to give the Mummy and his friend to make sure his son got a good deal with the FBI, and then they got whacked, and then we got the money, and then Vanilla Ride got the money, and she’s thinking, well, they don’t pay me, I got a little windfall. They do pay me, I keep the rest.”

“That’s the way I figure,” I said. “And the Dixie Mafia is thinking they’re running low on guys, and they aren’t considered such bad dudes if they can’t stop a couple of yokels from East Texas, and if they just quit, that looks bad too, so they got to keep them coming. And now, since Vanilla didn’t finish the job, and we’re on her tail, they’re starting to see her as expendable. That way they don’t pay her and she’s dead and they’re rid of her. I bet on top of all that, finding out she was a woman chapped their ass.”

“If only she had been black,” Leonard said.

“Yep, that would have been aces.”

“And gay.”

“Better yet. And we may have it all wrong,” I said. “Guys following us could be just very persistent insurance salesmen.”

53

One night I’m at the window, and the brilliance of the streetlights is all there is in the way of action, and what do my wandering eyes see but a lemon-colored Volkswagen pulling up at the curb in what might be called a sprightly manner, or what I might call in my East Texas vernacular, pretty goddamn fast. A young man, gangly as a puppet, with a dark mustache and a cap from under which shoulder-length black hair hung, got out and went into the post office, walking heavy.

I looked at my nifty Warner Bros. Looney Tunes watch with all the great cartoon characters on it with my flashlight and saw the time was three a.m. The post office lobby was always open. You could go in at any time. Just an old-fashioned town with an old-fashioned mailbox connected to an old-fashioned killer who liked to live quietly in Arkansas. I figured not a lot of folk were out and about at three a.m. in a town like this, and if they were, how many just decided it was necessary to check the mail at this time of night?

It could happen, but it made me curious.

He came out quickly and got in the Volkswagen and started up the hill. I yelled Leonard awake, and since he was already dressed, he only had to roll into his shoes, and then the two of us were on our way downstairs, pulling our coats over our holstered handguns and our manly buttocks.

The fat guy had his turn in the lobby chairs, and when he saw us he stood up and a magazine fell out of his lap and flapped to the ground. Leonard gave him a little wave. We went out and got in our car, Leonard driving, and he cranked it up and started up the hill in the direction the Volkswagen had gone. I looked back and saw the fat man was on the curb with a cell phone to his ear. They weren’t any niftier than we were, which in real life is often the case. There just aren’t that many James Bonds or Mike Hammers outside of the pages of books or the brightness of film.

Of course, Vanilla Ride, now she was another matter altogether. That woman was spooky like Tonto was spooky, only more so, because she had killed Tonto right when he thought he was about to visit the fun house.

That’s just mean.

The road wound up through the mountains, and at one point, going around a curve, I could look back through a split in the trees and see car lights moving along the road behind us. I said, “I figure that’s them.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said, “that is some good deduction there, Sherlock.”

We hadn’t caught up with the Volkswagen, which had to be hauling some serious ass, and we weren’t all that far ahead of our friends the ugly thugs. I said, “When we get around this corner coming up, let me out.”

“Are you nuts?”

“If it goes well, I’ll catch up with you at the bottom of the hill. If you look back and see it isn’t me running down the hill to leap into your arms, and instead it’s them in their car, or even on foot, then I suggest you drive like you’re in a stock-car race.”

I climbed over the seat and pulled the backseat down and got the sawed-off shotgun out of the trunk and a box of shells. When we climbed up the hill and got to where it curved, Leonard stopped and let me out, said, “Nice knowing you, dumb ass.”

“You just watch for me.”

He motored away and I got back in the woods a bit and hunkered down and waited. More time went by than I expected, or so it seemed. Out here there were no streetlights and the moonlight wasn’t much, and it took me a while to start to adjust to being able to see in the dark. My mouth was dry, and hunkering down like that was starting to hurt my calves, and I was about to switch positions when I saw headlights coming and then I heard the roar of a car.

When I could see the car well enough to determine that it was the car I had seen our trackers in, I braced the shotgun against me and waited until the car was almost even with me, and fired a little in advance, the blast lighting up the night and knocking the right front tire to shreds. The car swerved and twisted and threw up dirt as it went over the other side of the road and down a hill and out of sight. I heard a crash, trotted across the road and looked down. It was about a thirty-foot drop, but they had most likely rolled most of the way, and the slant was just enough so there weren’t a lot of hard falls on the trip down, at least not as hard as I would have liked. The car was lying on the driver’s side, and the right-side passenger doors were heaved open, and out came the four dark figures. No, seven. They had been stuffed in that car tight as impacted turds in a colon. One of them fell out on the ground, then got up to one knee and stayed there a moment. I could see the car was near a little deer path down there that dipped into the woods and ran back in the other direction, up toward the road where they had been driving. It wasn’t much of a path, but if they could get the car upright, and if it still ran, they might be able to drive out of there.

I turned and started running up the road as fast my legs would carry me. I could tell when I was about halfway up the hill that I needed to get back to road work because my heart was pounding against my ribs hard enough to break them and my vision was a little blurry. I looked back and saw one of the thugs coming up over the edge of the hill, carrying a long gun of some kind. I took to the woods and went along there, getting whacked in the face with limbs for a while, and then when I was sure the road was sloping down, I stumbled out of the woods and went down the hill where I saw Leonard’s car, and Leonard outside of it, standing by the passenger side with the deer rifle.

I huffed out some cold air and waved the shotgun above my head and started down at a speed I didn’t know I had in me. Leonard got in the car and cranked it up, and when I made the passenger side, I was nearly out of wind. Climbing in, closing the door, I looked over at Leonard, said, “There are seven of them.”

He said, “You dumb ass.”

54

“Now where’s the Volkswagen?” Leonard said. “You’ve caused us to lose it.”

“But I managed to knock the bad guys off a hill and now they’re on foot.”

“Okay I guess that’s something. You get a pass. Seven, huh?”

“It was like a goddamn clown car.”

We continued driving and where there hadn’t been roads going off the main road there were now plenty. Leonard said, “He took one of these, or we would have caught up to him by now. I’m driving this thing like it’s got a real engine in it.”

Pausing at a dirt road that turned to the right, I got out of the car and bent down and tried to check the ground in what little light there was. Finally, Leonard backed the car so that the lights shone on the ground, and then I could see there were recent tire marks.