The Big Book of Hap and Leonard Read online

  “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 check 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, 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 woodworkers. 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 sh
e 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.”

  “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.

  There were no students on the top floor. I went to one of the windows and looked out. I had gone to the university for awhile. I had been a good student. I enjoyed it. I still liked the atmosphere of a university, but I was too lazy to finish up my education, and most likely the classes I’d taken long ago in stalking the woolly mammoth and how to build a fire with flint and steel and a gust of wind were no longer valid.

  We looked around a while and found an open door and heard some clattering, went in there and discovered Kelly banging a garbage can against the inside of his cart so it would empty.

  Kelly looked up at us. The swelling around his eyes had gone down. He said, “You wouldn’t believe the stuff you find in these cans.”

  I leaned my ass into the desk up front, and Leonard took a seat at one of the standard desks in the front row. Kelly put the garbage can back in place by the teacher’s desk, said, “Well.”

  “We reckon you’re right,” Leonard said. “Those people Donny is running with, they’re not up to any good, and that means neither is Donny.”

  “Can you do something about it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But here’s the thing. We do what we’re talking about doing, you might not be safe. You might not want to go home for awhile.”

  “How long’s awhile?”

  I shook my head.

  “I see,” he said. “And you can get Donny out of this?”

  “You can’t make a man believe what he doesn’t want to believe,” I said. “But we can try and show Donny that things aren’t as good as he might think. In fact, they’re really worse than we thought.”

  “How?” Kelly asked.

  We told him about the dead man in the car, what we suspected. When we finished, Kelly found a desk and sat down. He said, “Shit, how does stuff like this happen?”

  “Humans,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said, “they can be pesky.”

  “So,” I said, “what we’re asking is, do we go ahead with things? ’Cause if we do, it might make it hot around the old hacienda. Meaning, you need to not be there. And the job here, I don’t know how safe it keeps you.”

  Kelly nodded slowly. “I got some place I can go for awhile. I mean, I can figure that out. But the job, I need this job. I need it bad. I can’t just walk away.”

  “We can’t guarantee your safety, you stay on the job,” I said. “We don’t recommend it. We didn’t have any trouble getting to you, and if they decide to find you, it won’t just be to talk.”

  “I’ll leave the house,” Kelly said. “But I’ll stay with the job. Go ahead and do what you need to do.”

  “We’ll need a photo of Donny,” I said.

  “I can do that, after work,” Kelly said. “But, you will try to save him, won’t you?”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Leonard said, “and more often than not, that’s a lot.”

  Marvin was out of it now, and we didn’t work in shifts after that. We just drove over together and parked down the street from where Kelly lived. Ever now and then we would move the car to a new position, so no one in a house nearby would call the law on us.

  Kelly had followed our advice and found a new place to stay. We told him not to tell us where. That way we didn’t have information we didn’t need and wouldn’t want to accidentally spill.

  We also had something else. A last gift from Marvin. Having been a former cop, he had good connections. He got us information on Smoke Stack. Once Marvin knew where he lived, and what his car license was, it wasn’t so hard. Marvin wasn’t sure about the other guys, but he was sure about Smoke Stack. The license led to the car, and that led to a description, and that led to a rap sheet. I had that with me. And a grainy photo that had been faxed to Marvin and that he gave to us. Smoke Stack’s real name was Trey Manton.

  Leonard had a small flashlight on and he was using it to look the photo over again and read the rap sheet. We had already done that, but it was a way to pass the time. Leonard spent a lot of time looking at the bad photo. He clicked off the light and closed the folder and put it on the seat between us, said, “Man, that guy looks like he tried to roller skate in a buffalo herd.”

  “I’m going to guess the buffalo may not have turned out so well. And he’s done time for drugs, and he is, shall we say, a violent person, as his prison time shows.”

  “We are violent ourselves,” Leonard said. “But we’re the good guys.”

  “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” I said.

  “Rather us as tough guys than people like Smoke Stack as tough guys.”

  “And yet another way of looking at it.”

  Leonard gave me Smoke Stack’s photo. I looked at it again just to have something to do. I gave it back, and took the photo of Donny and looked it over. He looked like the usual, pimple-faced, sassy ass kid. It was a full body shot, and it made me think of the photos I’d seen of Billy the Kid, only without the cowboy hat, the rifle, and the six-gun on his hip. But it had the same attitude about it. The rifle and six-gun had been replaced by sagging pants and tennis shoes that looked too big for his feet. The strings were untied. That’s showing them.

  As it got dark and they didn’t show up, we decided to go to their place and have a chat. Maybe Donny was already with them. With Kelly gone, maybe he no longer saw a need to go home. Next thing was they’d move into Kelly’s house and never let him come back. They were the type. I had seen it before.

  When we got over to the address Marvin had given us, we parked down from their house in the lot of an abandoned convenience store. It was about three blocks from their house, but seemed the best place to park. Everything there was as Marvin said. The houses and most of the convenience store were burned out and you could smell the dead fire still. Something had
set the whole block on fire. Where the burned buildings ended, the woods took over, and up on a hill with some logged-out acres behind it was the house.

  I opened the glove box and got out my automatic and gave Leonard his. They were both in black holsters, but the guns themselves did not match. Brett thought it would be cute if we got matching guns with our initials on them.

  We got out of the car and Leonard pulled out his shirt and lifted it up and clipped on his holster. He arranged his shirt around it. It was only hidden if you weren’t looking for it or you were blind in one eye and couldn’t see out the other. I clipped mine to my belt. I was wearing a loose T-shirt, so it didn’t cover much.

  “Ready?” I said.

  “I was born ready,” Leonard said.

  “Scared?”

  “I never get scared.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Okay, I’m a little scared. Let’s get it done before I get more scared.”

  We started walking.

  The house had a car out front, and we had to climb up the hill to get there. We stayed to the right side where there was still a line of trees just behind a barbed-wire fence, and then there was a pasture, and more trees, and then the house with the logged-out area behind it.

  The house was not well lit and there wasn’t much you could tell about it in the dark, but there seemed to be a sadness that came from it. All old uncared for houses seem that way to me. As if they are living things dying slowly from neglect. It’s like they’re old people no one will visit, or if they do, it’s out of obligation or even spite.

  There were a series of walking stones that led from a place near the road to the front porch, but grass had mostly covered them. There were a few shingles lying like scales in the yard; they had blown off the roof in a high wind. The rest of the yard had grass growing tall enough to hide a rhinoceros if he crouched a little. There was a washing machine in the yard, tipped on its side, and it looked to have been a popular model about the turn of the century. An old stone bird feeder was still standing. Grass seeds had gotten in it along with enough blown dirt and dust to make a bed, and blades of grass had grown up in a manner that made it look as if someone had used Butch Wax on them.