Hap and Leonard Read online

  “Still a little lame,” I said. “But, if you think you got something, go to the police. We know the chief over there. I’m not sure he likes us, but he did get some humor out of the photos of your buddy with his head through the Sheetrock. So right this minute, he sees Leonard as a comedian.”

  “I go to the police, they’re going to run Donny in, and he’s a good kid, really. He was living at home, and our mom died. A heart attack. She was overweight, didn’t take care of herself. Went to hell after our dad ran off with another woman and went up North somewhere. She died, I moved back home. But I wasn’t able to do it right away. I had a job in Austin, and I had to find another one up this area. I work at the university, doing janitor work.”

  “What did you do before?” I asked.

  “I was a computer specialist, and I made half a mil a year. Now, I got just enough to buy gas for the car and bread for the table. I kind of thought Donny wasn’t doing so good and needed me here. Last time I saw him, before Mom died, I could tell he was making some bad decisions. But the bottom line is these friends of his, I don’t like them, and I’m sure they’re the guys.”

  “That’s your instinct?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” Leonard said, “instinct is all right, but it can be you telling yourself something and thinking you’re enlightened. Gut instinct tells people to believe lots of things, and most of them are wrong. And, Kelly, this isn’t our problem. It’s a police problem.”

  He shook his head. “No. The police pick up Donny, his life is ruined.”

  “He robs an armored car, a bank, he might get a bullet through his head,” Leonard said. “That ruins things too.”

  “Yeah, that can cut a career short,” I said.

  “Last night, I went to that bar looking for help. I didn’t tell the details to those guys, but I said I was looking for someone could do a little rough house work. Those guys were recommended to me by a fellow I know. And then there was that whole thing about one of them calling you a name, and it all getting started . . . I think they started it just to show me how tough they were. Next thing I knew, I was in it with them, you know, part of the pack, and then I’m down, and one guy’s got his head through the Sheetrock, and you’re chasing the other guy outside. And you’re older than them.”

  “Watch it,” Leonard said.

  “All I’m saying is, after I saw that, I decided maybe you were the guy instead of them.”

  “I don’t know,” Leonard said.

  “Donny, he really looks up to this Smoke Stack. He wants to impress him. The guy’s got muscles on muscles and he’s just mean. Just mean.”

  “The gut instinct again?” Leonard said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” Leonard said, “in cases like that, the gut is often right. We still know a shark when we see one. That’s why we crawled out of the water and became men in the first place. Only thing is, some of the sharks crawled out after us.”

  “That would be the lawyers,” I said.

  “I told Smoke Stack and his buddies not to come back, but it doesn’t matter,” Kelly said. “They come around anyway, and if they don’t, Donny goes to meet them. Him being twenty-one, I can’t legally tell him squat.”

  “You wouldn’t know where he goes to meet them, would you?” I asked.

  “No,” Kelly said. “And I’m embarrassed to tell you, I’m afraid to follow. I’m afraid they’ll catch me. I think Smoke Stack and those guys would do anything.”

  “What about the other guys, his pals?”

  “Three of them. They’re followers. It’s Smoke Stack runs the program, that’s easy to see. I don’t know their names, anything about them. Hell, I don’t really know anything about Smoke Stack.”

  “Say we looked into it, found Donny was just smoking dope, or maybe he was selling drugs. What then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you can discourage him. It’s such a mess. I wanted to be a big brother to him, but he doesn’t care what I think. This Smoke Stack, I think he’s like a tough father figure. And he looks like he could wad up a wrench. Again, I think he’s like a father for Donny.”

  “Fathers just need to be tough in will,” I said. “It don’t hurt if they can bend a tire tool over their knee, but it’s not part of the job description.”

  “Yeah,” Kelly said, “but Donny doesn’t know that. Look, really, he’s a good kid. He’s just got to get straight. He gets into this, his life is ruined. I got some money. It’s from my savings, saved up before I moved here. I’ll give you ten thousand apiece.”

  I looked at Leonard. He sighed.

  I said, “Look, for right now, hang onto your money. Let us think about it, maybe look things over, and then, if we think we can help, we’ll talk. If not, we’ll still talk. But you might not like the conversation.”

  “Sure,” Kelly said. “Sure, that’s all right. That’s good.”

  That afternoon, we went over to the gym to work out. Our gym sucks. It’s small and it’s hot and it has a small mat room. The mat is thin as paper and smells like sweaty feet. The owner isn’t someone who is much into gym work himself. He’s a guy with a physique akin to a rubber apple. He sits on a stool by the door so he can get some wind from outside, meaning there’s no air conditioning. The door’s always open, except dead of winter. Flies are always fluttering about.

  He sits there to check memberships. The only advantage his gym has is his memberships are cheap, and he’s not that far from the house. The only conversation I remember having with him was him saying, “That’ll be thirty dollars a month, apiece.”

  But, it’s all right. We bring our own gloves when we spar. When we spar we use fists a lot, but in real situations I like to use an open hand along with fists. You can use open hands with the gloves we have, but we’re friends, and that kind of business can sometimes be worse than fists. Nothing says, “Oh, shit,” like sticking a finger in your buddy’s eye.

  We moved around a little, flicking punches, throwing kicks. We were gym fighting, not really fighting. The two should never be confused. The first is like a swim in a heated pool, the other is like being dropped into a stormy, shark-infested ocean.

  So, we were moving around, getting a workout, popping each other a little, and I said, “You believe him?”

  “I don’t know,” Leonard said, pausing a little, putting his hands on his hips, taking a deep breath. “Maybe. A story like that, it’s so stupid it’s bound to have some reality about it. I mean, a guy has a problem with his younger brother hanging with thugs that might be bank robbers, so he goes into a bar to get someone to beat the robbers up.”

  “You think that’s all he wanted?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he wants us to do something more permanent with these guys.”

  “That, I don’t want to do.”

  “We may not need to. Here’s the thing, Hap. I think the guy is serious about being worried about his brother, but maybe we can look into it and solve it better than him. We don’t, he’s going to hire someone like that guy I left in the parking lot. Then things will turn messy, and before it’s over Kelly and his brother both might go to prison.”

  “Usually, you’re talking me out of stupid shit like this.”

  “Does it ever work?”

  “Not so much. This guy got to you a little, didn’t he?”

  “A little.”

  We moved around some more. Leonard hit me a good snap on the forehead. I hooked low, then switched to an overhand right and caught him on the cheek.

  He said, “Ouch, I’ve had enough for the day. That was right on my wound.”

  “That was your cheek,” I said.

  “I don’t mean the taped part of my head, I mean the bruise. I am so wonderfully black you just can’t see it.”

  “If you say so.”

  There was no place to take a shower, and as part of our workout, we had jogged from my house, into town and to the gym.

  As we jogged back to my place, I said, “We can ch
eck into things, see the lay of the land. If it’s not lying right, and we don’t like it, we can step out. Call the law if we choose.”

  “Then we’ll have some explaining to do.”

  “We say we thought the guy was full of it, and just wanted us to straighten his brother out.”

  “You think these guys really are bank robbers?” Leonard said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Anything is possible. Say they are robbers. Kid comes along, they see a new recruit. Someone to drive the car is my guess. They start buttering him up with all their King Robber stories, tell him how he’ll be rich and his own man, that kind of stuff. The kid, not having a father around and his mother dead, his brother not being around before, maybe not having the relationship they could have had, Donny’s ripe for bad business.”

  “Sure, it could be like that.”

  We jogged along, silent for awhile. I could tell Leonard was thinking things over, and I let him.

  Finally, I said, “So, are we going to check it out?”

  “Say we take it easy. We determine if the kid really is in trouble. If these guys really are robbers, and if there’s anything we can do about it without getting locked up. I reckon we ought to do that much.”

  “That’s how it is then,” I said, and we bumped fists.

  We got our friend Marvin Hanson to come in with us. He runs a private investigation agency, and he was once a cop. Sometimes we work for him. Last job we did was simple and we didn’t get paid because the client didn’t like the outcome. He didn’t pay Marvin, so Marvin couldn’t pay us.

  Because of that, Marvin owed us a favor.

  We had him meet Kelly. We had him watch Kelly and Donny’s house, see where the kid went, and when he went, and if he went with some guys that looked tough.

  When he finished a shift, I took over, and then Leonard took over. We had been at this for a couple of days. We were posted down from the house twenty-four seven, near an empty soccer field with grown-up grass and missing goal nets.

  So, it was Marvin’s watch, and I’m home with Brett, and we’re upstairs in bed reading, and Leonard is snoozing on the couch downstairs, having finished his shift watching Kelly’s place not too long back. I put the Western I was reading down, glanced at the clock. Twelve midnight.

  I was about to turn in, get some sleep before I went on at eight a.m., and the doorbell dinged. I don’t like it when the doorbell dings that late.

  I got my automatic out of the drawer by the nightstand, and Brett got her revolver.

  “I’ll check,” I said. “Leonard’s down there, and if it’s anything nasty, you call the cops.”

  I went downstairs, but the door was already open. Leonard was letting in Marvin.

  I said, “Man, that was a short shift.”

  “Yeah,” Marvin said.

  Marvin has a limp and a cane. He was quick to find a chair. He took off his hat, which had once belonged to a friend of ours, and rested it on his knee. He said, “Things went a way I thought maybe you ought to know about.”

  “So, about nine-thirty I’m sitting in the car, thinking I’d like to be home in bed with the wife, when I see a car pull up at the curb. Four guys get out. One of them looks like he lifts weights. Lots of weights, big weights, heavy weights.”

  “That would be the loveable Smoke Stack.”

  “Yeah, for all that muscle business, he’s smoking like the proverbial smoke stack.”

  “Oh, Marvin,” I said. “That is good. Him smoking like a smoke stack and having the name Smoke Stack. You are so clever.”

  “Yep. They go around back, and then coming back from around the house I see all of them again, and this younger guy that I figure is Donny. They got in the car, tight as coins in a miser’s wallet, and drive away. I followed. They went out to the warehouse district, and I went with them, but sneaky like. They never saw me. They went down where the rentals are. It’s one of those cheap places. No cameras, no security gate. You just drive in and take your padlock off your shed. I couldn’t follow them in, so I drove across the street and looked. I could see through the fence and I could see them park, and I could see which storage building they opened. I could see a car in there. An older car, a muscle car. Something that could run like a spotted-ass ape if needed.”

  “Ah, the old spotted-ass ape,” Leonard said. “How fast do they run?”

  “They are very fast,” Marvin said. “So, they’re there awhile with the door pulled shut, and I could see they had a light on because it was shining under a crack at the bottom of the door.”

  “That is some of that ace detective work you’re famous for,” I said.

  “My guess is, if they’re planning a robbery, and that storage shed is their villains’ lair.”

  “Probably has a basement in there, test tubes and shit,” Leonard said. “It’s like the evil Fortress of Solitude.”

  “I got another guess too,” Marvin said. “When the other robbery went down, the one with the guards, about a month later they found a guy in a car out in the woods with a bullet through his head. He’d been dead for awhile. At the time it was unexplained. Just a random murder. But, I been thinking maybe the dead guy was their getaway man. And when he got them away, they put him away. My guess is Donny is next on the list. They get some young guy doesn’t know squat, they use him for the robbery, for the driving, then they pop him and the cut is bigger. Next time they got plans, they recruit again. Each new driver doesn’t know about the other. It works until the word gets out they’re finding lots of dead people in stolen cars with false license plates.”

  “So Donny is just a tool for them to use and then destroy,” I said.

  “That’s my guess. Another thing, I followed them after they left the warehouse. They didn’t take Donny home. They drove him to a house on the edge of town. Most of the block there is burned out, and beyond it the town quits and the woods starts. It’s a run-down place where the back acres have been sawed over by pulp wood workers. I parked there for a little while, then drove to the warehouse and got closer to the building they were in. It’s number fifteen. Then I came here. I could go back and finish my shift, but I don’t know I need to now.”

  “Probably not,” I said. “We know where they keep the getaway car, and we know where they live. And that they may have sold pulp wood.”

  “That pulp wood money could be the way they financed the first robbery,” Marvin said. “Bought the getaway car. Now they got money from the first robbery to pull another. They aren’t living high on the hog out there, so they’re keeping what loot they got tamped down for now, which is smart.”

  “Marvin,” I said, “your work is done.”

  “So we’re even on what I owe you two?” he said.

  “We are,” I said.

  “Good luck to you,” Marvin said, got up, and picked up his hat and cane. “If you need me for anything, even or not, give me a call.”

  Marvin went out and closed the door.

  I looked up and saw Brett was sitting on the top stair looking down, listening. I smiled at her and she waved. She was wearing those oversized pajamas and my bunny slippers with the ears on them.

  She said, “How about we have some milk and cookies?”

  “Hell, yeah,” Leonard said.

  We sat at the kitchen table and had our milk and vanilla cookies and thought on the matter. Way we saw it, if we waited until they decided to rob an armored car, it would be too late.

  First off, we didn’t know when they had their little heist planned, and we didn’t know if they might tire of Donny and pop him. We didn’t even know if they were actually the robbers, but it sure seemed likely, and we were going to play it that way.

  We thought about a number of cool ways to go at it, and we explained them to Brett, and she said, “Why don’t you just go over and confront them, tell Donny how things went with their past driver. Otherwise, while you’re making your plans, he could already be the wheel man and dead and under some log in a creek somewhere.”
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  “There’s a logic to that,” I said.

  “And it fits what you’ve done in the past,” Brett said.

  “You mean strong-armed our way through?” Leonard said.

  “Yeah,” Brett said. “You guys are smart enough, but you don’t have the patience to be masterminds.”

  “Yeah,” Leonard said, “and it’s boring, and yucky, and I don’t want to do it.”

  “So there,” I said. “If we go over, confront them, and if we convince and save Donny, they could still commit the crime and they could kill another idiot driver. I know that’s not supposed to be our problem. Our problem is supposed to be just Donny, but I don’t like it.”

  “If you convince Donny to leave,” Brett said, “then you can give an anonymous tip about the car, say it’s stolen or something, because most likely it is, and put the cops on it.”

  “They’ll need more proof than that to go take a look,” Leonard said.

  Brett crossed a pajama-clothed leg, dangled a rabbit shoe from her foot, picked up her glass of milk, and sipped. When she sat the glass down, she had a thick, beaded, white milk mustache that made me smile.

  “That’s right,” Brett said, “they will need more proof, but that tip could start movement in the right direction. After that, you get stuck on what to do, just come to me and I’ll figure it out from there.”

  Next day we went over to the university and drove around for awhile before we could find a visitor’s parking spot that wasn’t filled, and walked over to the building where Kelly worked as a janitor. On the bottom floor students moved about, and an older woman in a janitor’s uniform was pushing a trash cart. She looked about as excited as a corpse.

  We asked her about Kelly, and what she told us sent us by elevator to the fourth floor. Leonard wanted to push the button, and I had to let him, or I would never hear the end of it. He likes pushing buttons on elevators. I can’t explain it. But every time he gets to do it, for several minutes afterward, I must admit, I feel slightly deprived.