Devil Red Page 10

  “We’re stupid.”

  “Next answer.”

  I sighed. “We were trying to help someone, or we were trying to help ourselves, and at least once, we were trying to make some money.”

  Leonard turned a wicked eye toward me, and then put it back on the road.

  “That was my fault,” I said.

  “Just looking for an acknowledgment … Let me give you the bottom line, Hap. People we’ve chosen to help over the years, had we not helped them, it wouldn’t have turned out well. The people we killed, if we hadn’t, would have gone on doing what they were doing, which wasn’t good. You are who you are, and you are an avenging angel. You were born to it. For some years I’ve been trying to figure what my career ought to be. What can I make of myself? Then one night, while I was pulling my johnson, having to use both hands, of course, I had a epiphany. I’m following my calling as surely as those who grow up to be astronauts or firemen or doctors. So are you. Maybe it’s a kind of post-traumatic stress you’re suffering. But I don’t think the reason you had a nervous breakdown was about what you’ve done. It’s about you trying to find a way to stop being you, and you can’t.”

  32

  We went to my house and sat around because we weren’t exactly sure what in the hell we were doing or how to go about it.

  Brett was at work, wouldn’t be home until midnight, so we broke out the checkers and played for a while.

  Late afternoon my cell rang. It was Cason.

  “Mercury is on it, and he’ll have something for us day after tomorrow at the latest, maybe sooner.”

  “Us?”

  “Am I helping, or what?”

  “You are.”

  “Then it’s us. So long, Hap.”

  …

  We were too lazy to cook, so we drove into town and had dinner at a café. We digested awhile at a coffee shop, then went over to the gym to work out, kick the bag and punch the mitts, then we drove back. As we turned on my street, we saw a car stop three houses up from mine in the Apostle’s Baptist Church parking lot and turn off the lights. The car was one of those low-slung jobs that in the light from the street looked like an angry rodent crouched to attack.

  Leonard slowed, said, “Think maybe those are eager churchgoers who have come to wait until the church doors open on Sunday?”

  “Seems unlikely.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  We drove by. I turned in the seat and looked out the back. The car was still sitting there. A little red dot from a cigarette was visible. No one had got out.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “I think they’re bracing themselves to do something bad, and I got a feeling it isn’t the church they got a quarrel with.”

  “Couldn’t be us, could it?” I said.

  “It’s hard to believe anyone could be angry with us,” Leonard said, “but yes, I believe they have come to visit us. Call it instinct. Call it experience.”

  “Someone somewhere is always mad at us.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably more accurate.”

  Leonard turned the corner and we went around the block and on the back street. We parked at the curb next to an empty lot with high grass. I opened Leonard’s glove box and got out his automatic.

  “That’s my gun.”

  “Not today,” I said.

  Leonard pulled a short club out from under his car seat, lifted his deerstalker from the middle of the seat, and put it on. We got out and went across the field. At the end of the field we came to a backyard, and crossed that without any dogs barking. From there we could see mine and Brett’s house and the board fence around the backyard.

  We didn’t say anything to each other. Sliding across the yard, through the night, we came to the fence and climbed over it, and fell into the backyard. We went across the dead grass and I got my key and opened the back door and we slipped in.

  I went right, toward the kitchen, and Leonard turned to the left, toward the downstairs closet.

  I was at the corner of the kitchen and the living room, thinking maybe we were overreacting, and that the car we’d seen had been nothing more than the preacher of the church stopping by to pick up a Bible, when the front door was kicked open with a bang and two men with guns plunged inside along with the light from the street lamp.

  33

  It was as I feared and suspected. Our beatings hadn’t put the fear of the devil into them after all. They had found out who we were and where we were, but as luck would have it, they didn’t know what car we were driving or that we had passed them by on the street.

  The first one in the door was Thomas. He had a cast on his right hand. It was up in a sling. The other was Chunk, and he was limping, had a cast on his leg and some kind of heel on it to help him walk. They both had handguns.

  Without meaning to, I said aloud:

  “Really? You’ve got broken hands and legs, and … Shit, really?”

  Thomas and Chunk paused there in the light, as if for a dance number. Thomas saw my shape and lifted the gun, held it sideways like a movie thug, said, “You fucks broke my right hand, motherfucker. But I’m left-handed.”

  There was a ca-chunk sound, and then I heard Leonard in the shadows by the open closet say, “Yeah, and I got me a shotgun in the gauge of twelve from the closet, cocksucker.”

  The world seemed stuck in amber.

  Finally, Thomas said, “Well, okay.”

  That hung in the air like a popcorn fart for about thirty seconds.

  Thomas’s gun was still pointed in my direction. I had Leonard’s automatic held down by my side. I said, “Put the gun down, or Leonard will blow you both out the door like so much dust.”

  “Actually,” Leonard said, “what I’ve found, you shoot a guy with a shotgun, he don’t blow backwards so much as he drops like a curtain and it makes a mess you wouldn’t believe. There ain’t enough janitors in town to clean it up right, but then again, that’s just my personal experience.”

  As he said this, Leonard was moving forward, the shotgun at his shoulder.

  “You know, I got a gun too,” I said. “I could shoot somebody.”

  They ignored me. They were all about that shotgun.

  Besides, I had yet to lift the automatic from my side. My face was covered in sweat and my gun hand was trembling. I had tunnel vision. You get that when you’re scared. It’s a thing happens when you’re in a tight situation, especially one of potential violence. Me, I had gotten over it a long time ago. I could control it.

  Or could. But tonight, not so much.

  Leonard hit a light switch.

  Thomas, without lowering the gun he was pointing at me, glanced at Leonard, did a kind of double take at the hat.

  “You don’t worry about it,” Leonard said. “How’s it gonna be? A maybe shot you get to take at me and Hap, or a certain boom from the shotgun, and the both of you blood and rags. My aim don’t have to be as good as yours.”

  Thomas and Chunk let their handguns drift to their sides.

  “Ain’t nobody doin’ nothing,” Chunk said. “I told this fool we ought not mess with you two crazies.”

  Thomas turned his head slightly, looked at Chunk. Right then he knew his number one man had climbed out the window, so to speak.

  “Now, with your guns at your side,” I said, “dip your knees … Oh, sorry, Chunk. How about just drop them.”

  “You two,” Thomas said, “I hate you both. I hate you cocksuckers big-time.”

  “That comes up a lot,” Leonard said.

  34

  The cops came and took Thomas and Chunk. Drake, the chief of police, was with them. He was lean and black and his nose looked even flatter than when I had seen him last. He stayed after the other cops left. We had the lights on now. Very cheery.

  Leonard moved the shotgun so he could sit on the couch. Drake said, “Don’t handle the gun anymore.”

  I sat in a stuffed armchair and tried not to let anyone see that my hands were shaking. They had
been that way for days, and tonight, after the events, they were shaking even more. I shoved them down by my sides in the chair.

  “I’ll take that with me when I leave,” Drake said, nodding at the gun.

  “Okay,” Leonard said.

  They had already taken the automatic, which was registered to Leonard. I was a little uncertain how that would play out, but I didn’t point out it wasn’t mine or that I was the one that had held it. I also didn’t mention that we had a number of cold pieces hidden around the house, the best of them upstairs in the crawl space above the closet.

  Drake declined me fixing him a cup of coffee, giving him a soda, anything. No bribes were considered. He sat on the couch and shook his head a few times. It made me feel sort of sorry for him, and sad about the two of us.

  “They did break in,” I said.

  “Yes,” Drake said. “That’s why they are gone and you are still here. But, you know, what they told me was you two broke into their house and broke them up a few days ago, and they were paying you back.”

  “That’s some story,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “That’s some shit, that is.”

  “You did break them up, didn’t you?”

  “I’m trying to remember,” I said.

  “Never mind,” Drake said. “Not right now. I don’t want to hear the lies. It just makes me tired.”

  There was a knock on the door. Leonard answered. It wasn’t anyone else there to kill us. It was Marvin. Of course, considering the circumstances, maybe he wanted to kill us too.

  Drake, still sitting on the couch, looked up at Marvin, said, “You got to get you some better friends.”

  “Tell me about it,” Marvin said.

  He took a chair across the way and sat. He and Drake looked at each other like two parents who knew how bad their kids were and had both had just about enough of it. Reform school seemed to be in mine and Leonard’s offing.

  “We didn’t shoot anyone,” I said.

  “No,” Drake said. “You didn’t do that.”

  “I wanted to,” Leonard said, “real bad. But I held back. I fought against that bad side and done good. That ought to amount to something.”

  I was thinking that if it hadn’t been for Leonard I would have been dead. I had frozen. I had been unable to move. My brain went blank and my hands had felt like catcher’s mitts, too big and clumsy to use. The thought of aiming a gun at someone again, pulling the trigger, I hadn’t been able to do it. I wondered if I’d ever be able to do it. I was trying to decide if that was a good thing.

  If Leonard hadn’t been there, one thing was certain, at that moment in time, good it would not have been. Right now a crew with tweezers would be extracting my brain matter from the wall.

  Drake said, “So, you boys didn’t do anything to piss anyone off? I find that hard to believe. You always piss me off.”

  “Let me give you a scenario,” Marvin said. “Say there was this little old lady, and she was walking home from the grocery, and this guy, we’ll call him Thomas, assaulted her for the money in her change purse, and that money was less than a hundred dollars. And there were people in the neighborhood who saw this happen, and I know them, and they told me it happened, but they wouldn’t go on record, wouldn’t talk to the police, even though the little old lady, we’ll call her Mrs. Johnson, because that’s her name, talked to the police and told them, but there was no validation, no proof. At least not anything the cops could use.”

  “Let me finish this for you,” Drake said. “But the little old lady told you and you got these two guys to go over and politely ask them for the money.”

  “Very politely,” Marvin said.

  “And things got testy, and they decided to hurt your two boys, and your two boys hurt them instead. So the other boys had a grudge against your boys, found out where Hap lived. So Hap and Leonard, innocent and as pure as baby chicks, are attacked in Hap’s home.”

  “That’s pretty much it,” Marvin said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “That sounds about right.”

  “Is that mostly true?” Drake asked Marvin.

  “Yep,” Marvin said. “Mostly.”

  “Did the little old lady get her money back?”

  “Yep.”

  Drake nodded. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe I can play it some kind of way where the two numbnuts—the other two numbnuts—go down for breaking and entering. They’ll tell their story to a lawyer, but even if it’s a true story they tell, there’s still the part that involves guns and breaking into a home. But the story Marvin just told me, supported somewhat by our two friends trussed up in plaster casts, sort of supports you two breaking into their home.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Anyone see it happen?” Drake asked. “This event involving you two that didn’t happen, but might have.”

  “If it happened,” I said, “and I’m not saying it did. I don’t think so.”

  “And in this case,” Marvin said, “these two citizens called the police and asked for assistance. Those two goobers didn’t call anyone, so their story is well after the fact and could just be a goddamn lie. This could have been nothing more than home invasion. Possible robbery. Right?”

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “We could have killed them and buried them in the backyard and not mentioned it. Planted some flowers over them. But we called, because that’s just the kind of guys we are. Fucking law-abiding citizens.”

  “Satisfied?” Marvin asked.

  “No,” Drake said. “Not really. But I think I can live with it. I can’t promise they can’t stir enough shit that charges get brought against the stooges here, but maybe I can get the charges against them trimmed slightly, making them more jovial than they might be otherwise. And maybe part of the persuasion would be they leave you two alone legally.”

  “How trimmed will their charges be?” Leonard asked.

  “They’re going to go up for sure. Just can’t tell you how long. And you guys, well, if there are no witnesses to fit their story, it’s just a story. You two were smart and called the cops. They had guns, you were home, and you had a bigger gun, which is called home protection and self-defense, and nobody was killed.”

  “That’s the story I like,” Leonard said. “It has a nice ring to it. One more thing, if they are mad at us for something they think we did, then they might think the old lady who got robbed ought to get some mojo. She ought to be checked on.”

  “The two dumb-asses … The other two dumb-asses … told us you seemed to think you were avenging an old lady you claimed they hurt, and they gave us her name, and we called and checked on her, and she’s all right. Of course, if you didn’t do what they say you did, then you shouldn’t know Mrs. Johnson and what happened to her. Right?”

  “Oh, no,” Leonard said. “We could know. Word gets around. We heard rumors.”

  “Rumors?”

  “Yep,” Leonard said. “Rumors.”

  Drake kept looking at Leonard out of the corner of his eye. Finally he sat up straight on the couch, looked right at him, said, “Hey, Leonard. I’ve been trying to kind of let it go. But what in the living hell have you got on your head?”

  35

  Brett was sitting in the living room with me and Leonard and Marvin. Drake had gone away. It was after midnight and she was back from work. We told her what happened. My first thought was she’d finally decide it was time to ditch me. I was like a shit magnet. It always found me. No matter where I went, what I did, it came flying out of the air and landed on me.

  Well, maybe there were things I did that attracted it.

  Like breaking that guy’s knee, messing up his ribs.

  But it wouldn’t matter. I could stay home in front of the TV and trouble would arrive in the form of a singing telegram. And if it didn’t find me, it would find Leonard, and that was the same as finding me.

  “So, you were just minding your own business,” Brett said.

  “Really,” Leonard said. “We were.�
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  “I believe you,” she said. “I’m on your side.”

  “We’re the three musketeers,” I said. “Oh,” I said, looking at Marvin, “sorry to leave you out of the musketeer thing. In the book, there were actually four.”

  “I don’t want to be a musketeer,” Marvin said.

  “Now, come on,” Leonard said. “He didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. You can be a musketeer too.”

  “I’m fine,” Marvin said.

  “My sense of things,” Leonard said, “is that you really do want to be one, and just won’t admit it.”

  “Actually,” Brett said, “I always wanted to be a Mouseketeer.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said, “is there any way some night I can get you to wear a set of mouse ears when we, you know—”

  “Oh, hell yeah,” Brett said.

  Brett went into the kitchen, came back with some corn chips and sodas, said, “Enjoy, this may be as housewifey as I get.”

  We had at the chips and drinks. It was like a feeding frenzy at the zoo.

  “So, the deal is,” Brett said, “you’re trying to find the connection between the vampires and the man in the trailer, Mini’s stepdad? And you’re thinking Mini’s money is part of the deal?”

  “It makes sense,” Marvin said. “And I can tell Hap has kept our confidential rule and not mentioned any of this to you.”

  “Oh, he never shuts up,” Brett said.

  “Figured as much,” Marvin said.

  “Want to hear what I think?”

  “Might as well.”

  “Maybe I should wear Leonard’s deerstalker since I’m giving my valued investigative opinion based on nothing but a hunch.” Leonard handed it to her and she put it on.

  “Whoa,” Marvin said. “That looks good on you.”

  “Hell, yeah,” I said. “Forget the mouse ears.”

  “It looks all right,” Leonard said.

  “The money is all coincidence,” Brett said. “It’s clouding your judgment. The law got Godzilla for the murder of that frat boy, but Mini, she got off the hook, and so did the others. They got their wrists slapped. Somewhere, someone’s bound to be mad about that, and it doesn’t have to do with them being vampires, or there being money involved, or even Ted Christopher being killed. With me so far?”