Brett told him everything we knew, even her thoughts about Vanilla Ride, whom he knew. He knew damn near everyone who had ever done an illicit deed, and he had done a few himself here and there, but in his mind, and my own, it was for the greater good. Still, knowing that, and sometimes being a part of such myself, didn’t help me sleep all that well at night. I think Jim Bob, like Leonard and Brett, snoozed just fine.
Jim Bob listened quietly, looking like he always does, like he’s already got the answers before you get through explaining.
“Weasel tells a good story,” Jim Bob said. “Some of it might have the whiff of bullshit about it, but I’m thinking it isn’t all fairy tale. I’ve heard word of this Canceler. He supposedly wiped out an entire Mexican drug gang that was bringing dope into Houston, not because he was trying to do a humanitarian thing but because he got hired to whack them. And he kept on whacking them until what was left of them decided to stay down below the Rio Grande and sell tacos. They were bumping into the drug business in Houston, hurting some of the local boys’ revenue. This Mexican gang, the Canceler took them out one by one, and though he didn’t use a wire on all of them, it was mostly that. He isolated the ones he could, wired them, cut off their balls, and in the end I think there were four left, and like I said, they ran back to Mexico. Canceler followed them somehow, broke into their stronghold in Mexico, and killed all four. Took their nut sacks and left.”
“That part sounds like some of Weasel’s rumors,” Leonard said.
“Wouldn’t sound like that if you knew better,” Jim Bob said. “Some of that gang was seriously bad and mean as a snake in a latrine. I knew folks dealt with them. Bought drugs. Not saying they’re friends of mine, saying through my underworld contacts I came up against them, and one of them was an American beaner who did enough business with them he thought he might be next on the list.”
“Beaner,” I said. “Nice.”
“Oh, hell, Hap. I got friends that are beaners, real friends.”
This was the kind of stuff that made Jim Bob confusing, but I didn’t say anything else. I had long ago given up on trying to sort out who was who by what they said. It was as Leonard said, “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.”
Jim Bob continued.
“So, as I was saying, this beaner named Miguel, who is not a friend but comes to me for protection, wants to hire me for it. Tells me this Canceler is real, and Miguel knows he’s on the list, cause he’s been doing drug business in a heavy way with the boys from Mexico, and now those boys are missing their balls, not to mention their lives, and he wants to hire me. I don’t have nothing for that shithead, so I tell him no, and a week later they find him in a storage container out by the docks with his pants off and his balls gone, his throat cut. Maybe with a wire. No one knows what’s true and what’s myth about the guy, but this Canceler fella is real. My bet is he doesn’t take the balls to prove he’s done his job but takes them as a souvenir.”
“I guess they don’t give out awards for best serial killer,” I said. “So he has to provide his own trophies.”
“Unless you count the prize the press gives him. And this guy, he doesn’t get treated like a serial killer. He’s a hit man. He gets paid. For him, those men’s nuts, it’s like a little boy stealing girls’ panties. He likes to take them out, look at them from time to time, maybe sniff them and bat them around with a tennis racket or some such, no telling what all, but he gets more respect than the dime-store serial killer, least among those who pay for his services.”
“Does the Canceler kill women?” Brett asked. “I’m thinking I might get a pass if he comes after us.”
“I think he’d kill anyone,” Jim Bob said. “Maybe he’s got some vaginas in his collection, too. I don’t know. Stretches them over his head like a horse collar. How this all fits in with the car business and the blackmail I don’t know. That’s a lot of working parts, and some of those parts grind together a little. Think what we ought to do, since you two took a run at this Frank, and then your friend Cason did the same, is I take a run at her. I am one charming motherfucker when I want to be.”
“Really?” Brett said.
“Really,” he said. “Girl with a dick or no dick, I can make them smile.”
“Or feel ill,” Brett said.
“You good-looking little darling, you are so right. I can do that, too. But sometimes you got to play a different card in a different situation. I can smooth out when I want to.”
“Cason is as charming as they come,” Leonard said. “He kind of charms me. But you, charming? I don’t know, man.”
“All right, let’s talk straight,” Jim Bob said. “Am I good-looking?”
“Oh, hell, man,” I said.
“Really,” Jim Bob said. “Brett? What do you think?”
“You are a handsome man,” she said. “And to tell you true, if I didn’t already have my man, you’d butter my biscuit, no doubt. I mean I’d probably kill you in a week, but as much as you’re arrogant, you are somehow appealing, like whipped cream, which also makes me sick. I think calling people beaners and such would wear on me, and that toothpick annoys me, and I don’t like the hat, unless it’s to shit in, but as long as we didn’t talk all that much, I can see you being appealing enough. I’d think of you as someone who could hit the high spots.”
“I think I’m wounded to the bone,” I said. And I was a little.
“All is well,” Brett said. “I’m just giving my honest opinion as a beautiful and highly appealing woman.”
“There you have it,” Jim Bob said and winked at Brett. “Thank you, you fine-looking honeypot, cause your opinion really matters to me. Hell, Leonard there, even he’s thinking—and tell me if I’m wrong, Lenny—you’re thinking: that is one fine-looking man, and I’d like to do him. Aren’t you, Leonard?”
“Hardly,” Leonard said, but I thought there was a bit of a catch in his voice.
“Well, we need not worry about that. I don’t throw the saddle on homos, just women.”
“You are going to get hurt,” Leonard said.
Jim Bob laughed. Unlike most people, Leonard didn’t faze Jim Bob in the least. He liked messing with people, pulling their strings. Life was his oyster, and you were living outside the shell as far as he was concerned.
“Here’s the thing,” Jim Bob said. “I got me a date with a barrel racer tonight, a twenty-nine-year-old big-tittied blond home wrecker if you ever saw one. Fortunately for me I don’t have a wife, so there’s nothing to wreck. I don’t even have a hog farm anymore. Sold it. But I do have that date.”
“This might be a little more important than dating a barrel racer,” I said.
“You haven’t seen the barrel racer, Hap. She’s got legs so long you want to climb her like a tree. Least up to where it forks. I mean, yeah, she’s younger than me by some years, but shit, way I see it, if she dies she dies. But here’s the other thing. I don’t want to go into this car place looking to buy a car close to when all you numb nuts went in. I say we give it a week or so, let this Frank get your visit off her mind. She’s bound to have her flag up and ready to tussle. So I don’t want to make her think I’m part of the problem. I want her to see me as a mark.”
“Makes sense,” Leonard said.
“Also, I got to tell you, since you went in there and pulled on Frank’s string pretty hard, I figure she went to her boss and pulled on his string. People like that, they don’t like their strings pulled. If they’re connected like this Weasel says, they may not like it so much you might even get a visit from them, and they won’t be bringing flowers and a bottle of wine. On the other hand, they may just figure you guys aren’t really on to shit and are no threat.”
“Good,” Leonard said. “Then we get to meet the Canceler sooner than later.”
“I don’t think so. Guy like the Canceler, they don’t pull him out for just any old hit on a peckerwood and bop-a-nigger job.”
“Hey,” Leonard said.
“I’m tel
ling you how they think, Leonard. First rule of becoming a good detective—not something I think is in your immediate future—is you got to think like they do, and sometimes you got to be them, at least in spirit.”
“Call me a nigger again and you’ll have my spirit up your ass.”
“Trying to say watch your backs, cause they might send problem solvers, one of those that’s on the low end of the totem pole. Not some hot-dog professional but a crowd of dick draggers that come cheap. Eyes and ears open, and keep your left up. And by the way, since you didn’t mention pay, I suppose this is one of them jobs where I’m doing this for you to have the pleasure of my company.”
“Looks that way,” I said. “Maybe something comes along later that we can’t do, don’t want to do, we can throw it your way, something has money in it, I mean.”
“Thoughtful. I figure it’s most things you three can’t do when it comes to real detective work, so I might have a long line of referrals coming my way. No offense, Brett, you can learn, these two, I’m not so sure. They are blunderers. How they have lived as long as they have and managed to have all their legs and arms is beyond me. Deal is, I’m going back to Houston.”
Jim Bob looked at his watch.
“I got time to get there and shower up, put on some smell-good, buy a couple packs of rubbers, and meet my barrel racer.”
“Couple packs of rubbers,” Brett said. “Very romantic.”
“Ah, honey, I’m taking her to dinner first, and I always let the woman put the rubber on, and I think two packs is enough. And don’t worry. I need an extra pack, I can send her to the drugstore. I got a bicycle in the garage.”
“You can leave now,” Brett said. “Wouldn’t want you to miss your barrel racer.”
“And she wouldn’t want me to miss, either, in more ways than one. But as you know, I’m a straight shooter.”
He stood up, put on his hat, and went out.
As we listened to him going down the stairs, I said, “He can rub a dildo wrong when he wants to.”
19
I won’t lie to you, next few days I was jumpy. I had a snub-nosed .38 revolver that I gave to Brett to keep in her purse, and I kept the same kind of gun in my glove box, and in the house I had a twelve-gauge Remington handy. I had another stashed in the attic. There were shotguns tucked into the closet at the office. Leonard was armed as well. I always felt like a hypocrite with all those guns, and I was. I hated them, but once you felt their power, they owned you to some extent. I disliked being owned by machinery.
Frank, if she had checked the car I rented as a decoy, and had a few contacts, it wouldn’t have taken her long to figure out who rented it and connect me to it, which connected Brett to it, if just peripherally. And Frank probably figured out who Leonard was, too, being as how there was no winter petunia tour, and the Internet probably revealed everything but our shoe sizes. If the car lot people were as sneaky at business as they seemed to be, as wealthy as they appeared, they could get things done, not only in finding us, but hurting us, if they were willing to go that far. When it came to bad criminal business, a few dollars and a hard piece of wood upside the head or a loaded gun works a lot better than a smile and a kind word most any day.
Few early mornings later, a weekend, I was in the kitchen reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee. Our local paper was now about the size of a grocery pamphlet. It had an online presence as well, but I missed holding a heft of news sheets in my hand. I loved newspapers, and they seemed to be a near-lost business. News had become primarily a bunch of folks quarreling on TV and giving opinions about the news even before it happened. The actual news itself was hard to seek out.
I was thinking on all this because I was reading the newspaper for my entertainment, but the last few mornings Cason let me come over to his newspaper office and see the papers in the morgue—those that had been copied to their computer. Camp Rapture, where he worked, had as much news about LaBorde as LaBorde did, and I thought it might be wise to get their take on our news.
Leonard had taken the mission to look through the records at our local newspaper, telling them he was doing some research for something or other, which in a way he was. But we thought saying we were looking for clues of a prostitution-and-blackmail ring and a serial killer who cuts off balls might not be something to spread around. He did this while I was at Camp Rapture. What we were specifically looking for were articles, bits and pieces here and there about certain murders, that would substantiate what Weasel told us. Other murders of a similar nature, that sort of thing.
So far Leonard hadn’t found anything in our local papers that I hadn’t seen, and none of what I had seen seemed to matter. I had burned out looking through the Camp Rapture records and was, as I said, home that day, having my coffee and contemplating if driving over to Camp Rapture again was even worth it. Seemed to me I would have heard of those murders Weasel told us about, and if I hadn’t, there would at least be some reference to them in the newspapers five years back.
Nada.
Could something like that be kept secret?
I called Marvin and left him a message, was waiting for him to call back. I was trying to keep him and the police out of it as much as possible, at least at this point, but I figured desperate as we were, it might be time to drag him in, if only for information he might have available to him that we didn’t.
I called Cason next. He told me where Weasel lived, and after I had finished the paper and was sipping another cup of coffee, I decided not to go to Camp Rapture. I called Leonard, and he came over.
Me and him drove over to Weasel’s joint for a closer talk. He was most likely long gone, but if he wasn’t, Leonard suggested we start breaking his fingers off in his ass until we got some real answers. Leonard had the frame of mind now that Weasel wasn’t giving us rumors but was in fact shining our ass a little. Giving us some real information but holding back things we needed, things he knew but wasn’t saying. I didn’t have an opinion on the matter. Truth was, going to see where Weasel lived, hoping he might not have gone north yet, was something to do other than look futilely through old newspapers. I liked my fresh morning paper, but those made my nose itch.
Weasel’s place was a duplex. There were some standard box houses on both sides of the street. His apartment was upstairs. The bottom apartment seemed uninhabited. Windows were knocked out of that one, and there were no curtains and no sign of occupation. The duplex was the only one on the short block divided from the box houses by tall untrimmed hedges on either side, and there was a car parked out front. It was an old Ford that looked to have been bullied by other cars on the highway. There were dents, and the windshield was cracked in a spiderweb pattern, and it was plastered green and yellow with bugs that had chosen the wrong flight pattern. The tires were a little low. The trunk had been closed poorly, and a black rag dangled out of it.
We climbed to the top floor of the duplex and knocked on the door. No one answered. We gave it a good banging with our fists and worked the doorbell, which didn’t work at all. That brought us back to more door banging with the same lack of results.
As we came down the stairs a black cat came out of one of the lower duplex’s missing windows, jumped to the ground, then eyed us like we might be trespassing on his property.
Leonard said to the cat, “Get your goddamn windows fixed.”
It was late morning by then, but no one seemed around in the yards or looking out windows. The area struck me as the sort where people minded their own business in case your business might be bad business they didn’t want to know about.
Driving away, I called Cason and described the car we saw. He was the one who introduced us to Weasel, so I hoped he knew a little about him and the wreck he drove. When I described the car, he said it indeed was Weasel’s wreck, but he thought it might have been something he’d leave behind. It was about twenty years old, and besides needing an oil change, probably had a lot of miles on it.
We went back to my pl
ace. Leonard dropped me off and headed for the LaBorde newspaper. He figured he had to take advantage while they were still friendly enough to let him sit in a chair in their morgue room and read the papers on computer and microfiche.
I went straight back to the kitchen table and resumed drinking coffee, decaf now, because I had swigged so much pure black coffee over the last few days I was almost dancing everywhere I went.
Sitting there at the table, thinking on these matters again, I came up with nothing. Brett, who had been sleeping in while Leonard and I had been out, came into the kitchen. She was wearing one of my long shirts, an old paint-stained one that she sometimes slept in. It wasn’t pretty, but she made it look good, way her legs showed.
Pouring herself a cup of coffee, she said, “What you thinking?”
“Weasel’s full of shit.”
“Jim Bob verified some of what Weasel said.”
“I know. But still, though there may have been some truth in there, nothing he told us shakes out. Not in the papers; no word of it anywhere.”
“You may not be thinking this through,” Brett said.
“How’s that?”
“He said one body was down at the Sabine, or the Trinity, and one near a railroad track. He wasn’t specific, didn’t seem sure about any of it, not even sure which river was involved. I got the idea he knew the stories, but none of it first-or even secondhand. That could be the rumor part he was referring to.”
I let that sink in.
“Could be,” I said. “But I’d have thought something as bold as a killer taking someone’s balls and cutting their throat and leaving them out to be found would have shown up in the papers, even if it didn’t happen right around here.”