There was another dance troupe on stage, and a guy with some bowling pins he was going to juggle was next in line. Leonard and I glanced around, trying to take in the place. It didn’t look like a joint where a prostitute would be kept, or in this case made to go for free until she was used up. It didn’t look like a place where someone sold drugs. It looked like a place full of bad entertainment. That’s what made it a good hideout, of course, but I wasn’t convinced.
I noticed that the acts that finished were ushered along a certain path, and that there were two guys on either side of a dark stairway. They didn’t look like church deacons, but I decided to call them that in my mind. I left Leonard and walked over to the stairway, looked up it. I said, “What’s up there?”
One of the men stepped forward, said, “That’s private, sir.”
I went back to Leonard. I said, “There’s a whole nuther floor up there.”
“There’s a stairway on the other side of the stage too,” he said. “You can see it from here. It’s got bookends on either side of it too.”
I looked. Sure enough, two more guys. If the two near us were not church deacons, those two were not in the choir. Upstairs could have just been a storage place for hymn books, but I doubted it.
“Buster don’t work the brothers,” Leonard said. “All white thugs.”
“It may not seem that long ago to them that your kind couldn’t come in, and it may be they liked it like that.”
“That really isn’t true,” Leonard said. “They did come in here, and you know it.”
“They did janitor work,” I said, “and they used to come up the stairs at the back and sat up there in the balcony.”
“Nigger money was good as any,” Leonard said. “I know. I sat up there in the balcony once and spat on a white boy’s head.”
“You did not,” I said.
“No, but now and again I like to dream.”
We were whispering a game plan, when all of a sudden the little fellow that had signed us in came over. He said, “The Honey Girls are sick.”
“Who?” I said.
“The gospel singers I told you about,” said the old ventriloquist, who had come over. “Their adult diapers probably got bunched up and they couldn’t make it. Or they heard that young girl come on and sing and left. I know they were here. I seen them, the smug assholes.”
“That’ll be enough,” said the little man.
“Sorry,” said the ventriloquist, and he waddled back to his stool.
I had my mind on other things, and hadn’t even noticed the young girl, not really. But in the back of my mind I sort of remembered her doing a Patsy Cline number, and not badly at all.
“Honey Sisters say they got sick,” said the little man.
“Both of them?” Leonard said.
“It hit them sudden, so you two are on next.”
“Oh,” I said.
Leonard grabbed my elbow, “Come on, I still remember ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’”
“You’re yanking me,” I said. “We’re really going out there?”
“I sing in the shower,” Leonard said. “I do all right.”
“Oh, hell,” I said.
Well, we went out there, and I knew that old tune too. I am an atheist, but I like a good gospel tune now and again. We didn’t have any music, but there was the house band and they knew the tune, sort of, though I didn’t remember it with a tuba solo. We started out with it. Leonard was good, actually; he sounded way all right. I sort of chimed in when he lifted a hand to me, but after a few lines I forgot the words, so I started singing nonsense. An old lady in the front row in a wheelchair said, “Get the hook.”
Leonard finished out while I snapped my fingers and tried to look cool. I think had I had sunglasses, I could have pulled it off.
When we finished, or more or less quit, they were glad to see us go. Someone even threw a wadded-up paper cup at me. Fucker missed.
When we exited on the other side, Leonard said, “Damn, Hap. You fucked it up. We could have won that prize money. Or I could have.”
“I didn’t make us out as a duet, since we have never sang together even once. I never intended to go out there.”
“I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“You sounded all right,” I said, “but don’t be thinking of it as a second job.”
“As for you,” Leonard said, “you don’t be thinking of it at all. Now, let’s see if we can find Tillie.”
“If she’s alive,” I said.
“She’s alive, they are going to pay for it. If she’s dead, they’re going to pay for it, and then pay a dividend.”
I didn’t even like Tillie, but I sure liked Brett. Brett called her a bent twig. She’d say, “Hap, she’s a bent twig, but she’s not broken. She can weather the storm and come out on the other side.”
She was pretty much still in the storm as far as I was concerned, but if the information we had was right, she didn’t deserve this; this was even worse than what should happen to politicians. We headed toward the staircase on the side where we exited, near the choirboys. A man over there pointed us toward an exit. He was a chubby guy in a faded, purple leisure suit old enough to belong in a museum. He said, “That was bad, boys. Real bad.”
We ignored him and headed for the staircase.
“Not over there,” he said, and he grabbed my sleeve. I shook him loose and kept going. I had a feeling that most everyone here had no idea what was going on upstairs, no idea that the man who ran the Gospel Opry was about as reverent and kind as the business end of a hatchet.
“Those guys don’t kid,” said the man who had grabbed my sleeve. He was talking about the two boys at the stairs. They stepped out, one toward me, one toward Leonard.
The choirboy on my side said, “You don’t come this way.”
I kicked him in the balls and he bent a little and I hit him with a right hook. He went against the wall and came off of it mad. I hit him again, a straight right to the jaw. He went to one knee and tried to draw a pistol from under his coat. I pulled mine and hit him in the head with it. He went to his hands and knees, and I hit him again. He kind of bent his elbows like he had failed to do a push-up and lay on the floor. It was then that I noticed my leg where Kevin had hit me with the axe handle was really aching. I noticed this because I was going to kick him again and decided against it.
I looked over at Leonard. His man was already unconscious at the base of the stairs. I think he took him out with one good punch. I rolled my man over and took his gun. I had one in either hand, now. I went up the stairs behind Leonard. Back on stage I heard laughter. Someone had finally succeeded at something. A joke maybe.
When I got to the top of the stairs, Leonard had taken an automatic off of the man he had hit and he had it at the ready. I turned and looked down, wondering if the deacons across the way knew what we were up to. If they didn’t, they would soon. I figured the man who grabbed my sleeve would tell them. He might not know what really went on here, but he knew who he worked for.
Of course, if we were wrong, and what we expected was not at the top of the stairs, was really a bingo parlor, we would have a lot of explaining to do. For that matter, we could have a lot of explaining to do anyway.
The deacons figured it out. They came running across the stage in the middle of a dance number with a man and a woman in a horse suit. The man was the back end, the horse’s ass. I knew this because I came back down the stairs because I heard running. It gave me a view of the stage. The deacons knocked the horse over and the man and woman spilled out of it. The couple said some words you wouldn’t expect to hear at a Gospel Opry. God probably made a big black mark in their book right then.
The deacons didn’t have guns drawn, and they almost ran right over me they were coming so fast. When they saw my revolver, as well as the automatic I had taken off one of the choirboys, they stopped up short. They froze like ice cubes.
I said, “Do you really want to get dead?”
One man shook his head and started to run, across the stage again, past the horse, which had been put together again. A tinny trumpet was playing somewhere, and a piano. The horse was dancing. That goddamn tuba was hitting some random notes; that guy, he ought to be put down in the ground with that tuba.
The other deacon, the one that didn’t run, put his hands up. He said. “You got to at least take my gun, so I can say I was unarmed.”
“That’ll work,” I said. “But pull it easy.”
He did, squatted down and put it on the floor and backed up. “I got no beef,” he said.
“That’s good,” I said, “because I am in one shitty mood.”
He backed out and went across the stage walking fast. The couple in the horse suit just quit then. The woman pulled off the horse’s head and tossed it into the audience. I hoped she hit the old woman in the wheelchair that said to get the hook.
I picked up his gun, a little nine, and went up the stairs again. Leonard was waiting. “Stop to go to the bathroom?” he asked.
“I was disarming a gentleman.”
Leonard pointed with his handgun. “There’s one door. Shall we see what’s on the other side? Lady or the Tiger.”
“I think we might get both,” I said.
We moved quickly down the hall and Leonard kicked at the door and it swung back and came loose, hanging on one hinge, and then it came looser and fell. It was a toilet. It was empty.
“They were guarding a bathroom?” Leonard said. “Really?”
There was probably some way to get across, but we didn’t see it right away, and we were in a bit of a hurry. We put the guns in our waistbands, under our shirts, went down the stairs and behind the stage. The Gospel Opry folks were not deterred. The action, such as it was, was still going on. It was some kind of comedy act. When we got to the other side, we passed the man and the woman that had been wearing the horse outfit. They gave us the hard eye.
“Were you two part of the disruption?” said the woman.
“No, ma’am,” I said, and kept going. We went up the stairs where the deacons had been. We pulled out our guns. There were two doors along the hallway.
“I’ll take one, you take the other,” Leonard said.
We chose a door, nodded at one another, and stomp-kicked them. My door went back completely off the hinges, old as it was. I could hear Leonard still kicking as I went through.
There was a bed in the room, and a little light to the right, and there was a row of four chairs on that side, and I’m dying if I’m lying, there were four men in those chairs, and the one closest to the light was reading a newspaper. It was like they were in a barbershop waiting their turn. Tillie was on the bed, and a nude man was on her, his naked ass bobbing like a basketball. Tillie wasn’t there really. She was in some other zone. She had her eyes open, but they might as well have been closed. She looked skeletal. My guess is she hadn’t been fed in a while, outside of what was in a needle. She looked a lot like Brett, if Brett were a concentration camp survivor, and that disturbed me even more.
The four men stood up. They were all dressed, though one had taken off his shoes and placed them under his chair. One of them was wearing a police uniform and had his hand on the pistol in his belt. He was out for a little on-duty nookie and bit of blow it seemed.
By now Leonard had come through the door. The cop pulled his pistol and I shot him. I hit him in the arm and he fell down on the floor and started going around in circles like Curly of the Three Stooges. He was yelling, “Don’t shoot me no more, don’t shoot me no more.”
Blood was all over the place.
The other three men acted as if to run, but Leonard resorted to foul language that had to do with their mothers. One sat back down, as if still waiting his turn, his mother be damned.
I said, “Where’s dickhead? Buster?”
Nobody said anything.
“He asked you a question,” Leonard said. “You don’t say, and we find him, we’re going to shoot all your toes off. And then your dick.”
By this time the man in the bed had got off Tillie and was standing beside the bed with one hand over his pecker.
Leonard said, “I had a turkey neck like that, I’d keep it covered too. Fact is, I’m an expert on dicks, and that is an ugly one.”
“He does know dicks,” I said.
The man in the police uniform had quit spinning and had stuck his head up under a chair. He said, “I’m hit. I’m hit.”
“No shit,” I said.
I went over and saw that Tillie was breathing hard. I pulled the blanket at the end of the bed over her. I looked at the naked man with his hand over his privates and I just went berserk. I don’t know what happened to me, but I just couldn’t stand to think people like this existed, that they could sit in chairs and wait their turns to top some drugged girl. I kicked the naked man in the balls and hit him in the head with the pistol, and then I went after the other three, but not before I kicked the police officer on the floor once, and heeled his gun under the bed. I started hitting those three guys with the pistols, one in either hand. I was hitting so fast I looked like Shiva. They tried to run for it, but each time they did Leonard kicked them back into play, and I just went to work. I felt wrong. I felt savage. I felt awful, and yet, I felt right.
It didn’t take long before all of them were bleeding. Two were on the floor. One had fallen back into his chair. The naked man on the floor wasn’t moving. He was lying on his side and had thrown up all over the place, and the air was thick with the stench of vomit.
“Okay,” Leonard said. He walked over and put his gun against the shoeless man’s nose. He was the one that had sat back down. “Where is Buster?”
The man didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. A door opened at the far end and two men came in. One had a shotgun. He cut down with it, but we were already moving. I dropped to the floor behind the bed, and Leonard leaped through the door he had kicked down, landed out in the hallway. From under the bed I could see the man’s legs, and I shot at them, three times in rapid succession. I hit him somewhere because he yelped and fell down. I shot him again, this time in the top of the head, cracking it apart like a big walnut. The other man had a handgun and he had been firing it all this time. So far he had hit the bed, killed the barefoot man in the chair behind me, and had put some holes in the wall.
From under the bed I saw Leonard’s feet as he came through the other door, the one I had kicked down, and then he was on that bastard. I got to my feet and started around, tripped over the policeman who had, without me seeing him, started crawling toward the open doorway.
“Stay,” I said, as if speaking to a dog.
He stopped crawling.
By the time I got around to Leonard he had already taken the man down. Somehow the man had shot himself in the foot. I kicked him in the head, just to let him know I was in the game, and then Leonard reached down and took the man’s pistol. Considering this guy’s aim it was probably best to have left him with it. In time he would have shot himself again, maybe in the head.
“You stick,” I said to Leonard.
“All right, but I hear too much gunfire, I’m coming. Right after I kill the lot of them.”
I went through the door the two had come through, and by now I could hear yelling down below in the auditorium. The gunfire had roused things up, and was probably more exciting than anything they had seen tonight.
When I got into the room upstairs I saw that it was well tricked out for an old building. Lots of modern furniture, including a big couch. It was pushed back from the wall and I could see feet sticking out from behind it. I walked over there and laid my guns on the coffee table and grabbed the man by the ankles and pulled him out. He tried to hang onto the floor, but this only resulted in him dragging his nails across it. He was a long lean man in a plaid sports coat with hair the color of black shoe polish. I said, “You Buster Smith?”
He said, “No.”
I got his wallet out of his back pocket and
looked at his driver’s license. “Yes you are,” I said. “I bet you always got caught when you played hide and go seek as a kid.”
He got to one knee. “I did, actually.”
I went over and got my guns, said, “I wouldn’t try anything. I shoot you, then Leonard will shoot everyone else, and we’ll have a hard time explaining things. But you’ll be dead.”
We didn’t go to jail.
That’s the important part. Let me tell you why. So when it was done and everyone was hauled in, including me and Leonard, they waltzed us into the police chief. This is after interrogations, searches, a rubber glove up the asshole, just in case we were hiding hand grenades. He was a nice-looking guy with his black hair cut close to his head and one ear that stood out more than the other, as if it were signaling for a turn. He sat behind a big mahogany desk. There was a little sign on the desk that read POLICE CHIEF.
“Well now, Hap Collins.” he said.
I recognized him. A little older. Still fit. James Dell. We had gone to school together.
“It’s been awhile,” he said. “What I remember best about you is I don’t like you.”
“It’s a big club,” Leonard said. “Hap even has a newsletter.”
“Me and Jim dated the same girl,” I said.
“Not at the same time,” Jim said.
“He dated her last,” I said.
“That’s right. And I married her.”
“So, you won,” I said.
“Way I like to see it,” James said, “you boys raised some hell. And you shot people. And you hit people. And Hap, you killed a guy. I also got word there’s two boys with broken legs over in Bullock. They gave themselves up to the sheriff over there.”
“Nice guy,” I said.
“One of the men you shot was a police officer,” said James.
“I know. He was waiting in line to rape a young woman. How is she by the way?”
“Hospital. Touch and go for awhile. But she made it. Apparently she’s no stranger to drugs, so maybe she had some tolerance. Hadn’t eaten in days. Buster Smith, we talked to him. He came apart like a fresh biscuit. He was only tough when his money worked for him. That cop, by the way, he was the police chief.”