Vanilla Ride Read online

  Brett didn’t stir. She was snoring.

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

  23

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh,” Leonard said.

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

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

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

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

  “Yeah,” Leonard told them, “but you aren’t gonna find any bigger fuckups than us.”

  No one argued.

  We could leave the offer, of course, take our chances at trial, but Flat Top said, “Might not go so good you don’t help.”

  “Isn’t that blackmail?” I said.

  He said, “Uh-huh.”

  I looked at Drake. He looked toward the wall.

  And so that was how Leonard and I had come to unofficially work for the FBI so they wouldn’t have to get their hands dirty. They said if we wanted to, we could get help, but the help was in the same water we were. No one would know them and no one would protect them. It was us and our friends and whatever moxie we might have against the world, and that was it. Oh, and we did get their best wishes, and if w
e couldn’t get the duffel bag back, they’d let that go.

  24

  About four a.m. I heard a car pull in the drive. I had a good idea who it was, but I wasn’t taking any chances. In my pajamas and rabbit slippers, a gun in my hand, I left the bedroom. Brett was still snoring. I went downstairs with the rabbit ears flapping and found Leonard and Marvin in their shorts and T-shirts holding their shotguns.

  After a few moments there was a knock on the door, and a voice said, “Ya’ll about to shoot, don’t. It’s me, Jim Bob. I’d like to keep my good-lookin’ ass intact.”

  Leonard opened the door. “Hell, man, knowing it’s you is what gives me reason to shoot.”

  Jim Bob, tall and broad-shouldered, thin but not skinny, came into the house and Leonard shut the door. Jim Bob took off his gray Stetson. The hatband was a thick strip of cloth in a cheetah-skin pattern, and in the band were toothpicks and little feathers. The hat was stained in a lot of spots. Without the hat, Jim Bob looked a little off; it was like seeing a rooster remove his head. He was red-faced and his hair was short, wheat-textured and orange-colored. He had a scar on his face I didn’t remember from the time before. He had on a light green snap-pocket Western shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of brown boots that looked as if most of the world had worn them for a while and then given them back. He looked at me, studied my bunny slippers. “You look like an idiot.”

  “Don’t be jealous. I can hop real far.”

  Jim Bob grinned, said, “Ain’t there no coffee?”

  “There will be.” It was Brett, at the top of the stairs. She had pulled on some men’s boxer shorts under her T-shirt and she had on some flip-flops. “You loudmouthed guys don’t know how to let a girl get her beauty sleep.”

  “Well, now,” Jim Bob said, looking up as Brett came down, her red hair tousled around her shoulders, her braless breasts bouncing pleasantly, “it’s good to see there’s still women know how to make coffee.”

  “I didn’t say I was making it,” she said when she got to the bottom of the stairs. “I said there will be coffee. Right, Hap?”

  “I’m on it,” I said.

  “You look lovely,” Jim Bob said, flashing a grin at Brett that had probably charmed trailer-trash women from LaBorde to Memphis out of their panties and their Beanie Baby collections.

  “And you are still full of shit,” Brett said.

  “Yes, ma’am, I am. And you are still so lovely my back teeth hurt.”

  “Just your teeth ache?” Brett said. “If that’s the case, I’m losing my touch.”

  “Well,” Jim Bob said, “I was trying to be polite.”

  There was the sound of another car outside, so I put down the coffee makings and went to the living room window for a look.

  I peeled back the curtain and had to wipe the frosted pane clear with my arm to get a view. The rain had slacked and there was only a bit of the garage light to see by, but it was all I needed. A big black van was pulled up behind Jim Bob’s classic red Cadillac, the one he calls the Red Bitch, and when the driver got out, came around the back of Jim Bob’s ride, started for the house, it was as if the great shadow of Armageddon had fallen across the cold winter earth. He was at least six foot seven, with shoulders wide enough to make football players slash their wrists with envy. He had legs like trees and arms like smaller trees, a face that appeared to have been knocked into shape from granite and then beat on with a sledgehammer. His muscles moved under his clothes, like animals trying to escape a sack. He had long black hair tied back in a ponytail and he wore a black denim shirt, black leather jacket, black jeans, and black round-toed boots. He walked swiftly, like he was anxiously leaving a prayer meeting and was on his way to a whorehouse with a wallet full of money and a pack of rubbers.

  “I hope this is Tonto,” I said. “Otherwise, I’m heading out the back door at a run.”

  “That must be him,” Marvin said, “’cause that’s the usual response. Keep in mind he’s a little shy.”

  When we opened the door, I said, “Hello,” and Tonto nodded, stood where he was for a moment, wiped his feet in a slow, methodical manner, like a trained horse trying to count for its master.

  When he came in, he ducked a little to go through the door and stood in the center of the room, saw Brett, held that view for a while, then looked over at Marvin.

  “You needed me?” he said to Marvin, and it was as if this big man’s voice was on vacation and he had borrowed a voice from a child, soft and musical, almost feminine.

  “Yeah,” Marvin said.

  “I pay my debts.”

  “I know,” Marvin said.

  “I never thought you’d ask.”

  “Never planned to.”

  “Then it’s important.”

  “That’s right,” Marvin said. “It’s important. To me.”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s have some coffee and talk about things. I don’t think it’s been completely explained.”

  “I came because Marvin asked,” Tonto said. “I don’t know anything. There’s nothing been explained to me.”

  “And me,” Jim Bob said. “I’m here ’cause my plastic fuck doll ran out of air. Wasn’t nothing else to do.”

  “My guess,” Brett said, “is the doll pinpricked herself and committed suicide.”

  “Now, honey,” Jim Bob said, “that’s just an ugly thing to say.”

  25

  We pulled some kitchen chairs up and got some folding chairs out of the closet and congregated at the kitchen table with coffee and Leonard’s cookies, which from the look on his face I could tell he didn’t appreciate. Through the kitchen window I could see the rain had cleared and the almost pink sky with the bone-white clouds above it looked like some kind of strawberry brew topped by foam.

  “Curious? We got to kill somebody?” Tonto said. “Not that I mind, but I like to know. Well, sometimes I mind. I got scruples, they’re just flexible.”

  I thought, man, how did I arrive at this place, with a man with flexible scruples? It was bad enough I was suspicious of my own.

  He took off his jacket and he had a twin pearl-handled .45 in a shoulder holster under each armpit. He was wearing a crucifix on a chain, and he pulled it out from under his shirt and let it lie on the front of the cloth in line with the buttons. Nothing says I love Jesus like a crucifix and twin .45s. He was sitting in one of the folding chairs and I feared at any moment it would wrap around his big ass and drop him to the floor.

  “That’s something we want to avoid,” I said. “But one never knows. We’re not dealing with priests here.”

  “So,” Jim Bob said, “instead of an ass fucking from one of God’s finest, we’re talking about bullets.”

  “That would be yes,” Leonard said.

  I explained, mostly for Tonto, about the kids who had run off, about Hirem, how we were patsies, and how we could expect zip help from anyone outside of our little group. I told him we had no real idea where the kids were, but that we were supposed to talk to the FBI and Hirem one more time, and then the only time we were to see them or talk to them again was when the mission was over, provided we survived. All nonsurvivors could pretty much count on being buried beside the road in a shallow grave with nothing to mark their passing except a wild-flower or the droppings of the random dog or armadillo.

  “And what do we get out of this?” Jim Bob said.

  “Well,” I said, “me and Leonard get to not go to jail, or maybe just avoid some long, inconvenient court time. You get the pleasure of our company.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of a deal,” Jim Bob said.

  “It’s not,” I said.

  “Well,” Jim Bob said, “considering that we get nothing out of this, and I’m doing this just because I know you guys and sort of like you better than guys I don’t, count me in.”

  I looked at Tonto.

  He nodded, said in his almost sweet little voice, “I owe Marvin one.” He glanced at Marvin. “And after this, we’re through. Right?”
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  “Right,” Marvin said. “We’re even.”

  “Everyone in?” I said, and held my hand out over the table.

  “So we’re supposed to put our hand on top of yours?” Jim Bob said. “All for one, and one for all?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Too silly,” he said.

  Leonard put his hand on top of mine. “I’m in.”

  Brett put her hand on top of his. “Actually, I’m not going to be here, but hey, in spirit, okay?”

  Marvin got up carefully from his chair with his cane and edged over and put his hand on top. “I will do what I can, all things considered. Hell, I got all of you into this, so I got to show solidarity, right?”

  “Damn right,” Leonard said.

  “Oh, hell,” Jim Bob said, and put his hand on top. “I always was a sucker for that musketeer jive.”

  Tonto grinned. He even had big teeth. “Hell, why not.”

  He put his hand on top of Jim Bob’s.

  “Maybe we could have some kind of saying,” Leonard said. “You know, something that’s just for us. A slogan. A motto.”

  “No,” Tonto said, removing his hand. “Maybe we won’t have that.”

  “Yeah, that idea sucks,” Jim Bob said, pulling his hand back.

  “Even I don’t like that,” Brett said, and picked up her coffee cup.

  “Got to vote no,” Marvin said.

  “Yeah, I’m out on that one too,” I said.

  Leonard looked hurt. “Spoilsports.”

  26

  After finishing up the coffee and cookies, we had a real breakfast of eggs and toast and bacon, and Brett did the cooking; then I left with her and drove to the bus depot. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done, and I knew then—well, I had known before, but I knew all over again, down deep and tight to the bone, that I loved this woman dearly and that she was a part of me, like a heart or a liver. I had loved my first wife and she had been a shit and I had loved her anyway. Then she betrayed me, got herself killed, and nearly got me and my buddy Leonard killed. I still loved her for a year after that. But not the way I loved Brett. It’s only right that when you find the one you care about that you keep that part that’s you and not give it all away, but by the same token I’m old-fashioned in that I feel when you do find the right person you are part of a whole, and when the other leaves, a bit of you is no longer there. And when they leave and you think you might never see them again, it’s like more than a part of you is gone. It’s like being ripped in half and your half has been cast to the wind.