There was a shed out there, and it was locked. I got out my key and unlocked it and got a crowbar off the workbench. So far the only work I had done on that bench was lay the crowbar there. I had arranged some tools on the wall, none of which, except for the hammer, I knew how to use. If I couldn’t fix it with a hammer, it would remain unfixed.
I felt the heft of the crowbar in my hand. It slipped against my sweaty palm.
Gently as possible, I unlocked the back door and cracked it open. I could hear someone jacking with the front door, picking the lock, most likely.
“I’ll surprise the folks at the door,” Leonard said. “You want to check out the garage?”
“Try not to shoot anyone if you don’t have to.”
“You’re no fun,” Leonard said. He slipped inside and gently closed the door. I went back through the gate and along the grassy path between our house and the neighbors, came up alongside the garage. I guess it’s more of a carport than a garage. It’s open in the front, and there’s no garage door.
I crept and sweated along past the neighbor’s window with the glow and the television sounds coming out of it. I got out of the path of that light as quick as I could manage. I slipped forward until I got to the front edge of the garage.
I took a deep breath. There was a time when I kind of looked forward to this sort of thing. These days I just wanted dinner, a comfy bed, and Brett. I could hear someone in the garage, trying to walk softly but not managing too well. I heard someone say, “Shall we jimmy the door?”
That would be the door from the carport into the house. It led directly into a hallway that led to Leonard’s room. Chance’s room now.
I took another deep breath and let it out slow and easy and quiet. I thought about hitting someone with the crowbar and didn’t like that idea, unless they had a gun. If they had a gun a crowbar might not be enough.
Soon the one who was picking the front door lock would be in, and when he came in, there would be Leonard. It would be like expecting the lady and getting the tiger.
I heard a loud noise, like someone slapping water with their palm. It came from the front of the house, and I knew that would be Leonard. He hadn’t shot anyone, but he certainly had hit someone. Maybe they hit him, but I didn’t think so. I knew in that instant, the same instant I thought all these thoughts, that my time wouldn’t get any better than right then.
I rounded the corner and stepped into the garage as two men ran out of it and headed toward the sound. They didn’t see me, as their backs were to me. They had heavy flashlights, and they were big men. That’s all I could tell from the glow of their lights. The streetlight out front of the house was out and there was no moon and they were mostly just shapes with a light going before them.
I heard another sound, scuffling, then that smacking sound again. I saw someone fall backwards off the porch. His flashlight went flying, and I saw a beam from one of the flashlights gleam against a shaved head of one of the men in the yard. I could make out Leonard standing on the porch.
I was right behind the two men with flashlights. One of them raised the light onto Leonard, who was leaping off the porch. The man had a gun in his hand, and he was lifting it when I came up beside him and struck his gun hand with the crowbar as hard as I could swing it.
I knew from the way the crowbar felt in my hand I had broken bones. The gun dropped, the man went to his knees, sick with pain, and now the other man was turning toward me. I stepped right into the middle of him and twisted my body and hit him alongside the knee with the crowbar. He let out a scream, staggered back on an uncertain leg. I dropped the crowbar and stepped in so close we were almost in the same pair of pants. I hit him with a straight right that I knew was a good shot because I hardly felt it. He went down and tried to get up. I kicked him in the head, and he rolled over like a doodlebug, the flashlight flying from his hand and rolling across the grass where it came to rest on the concrete driveway.
I picked up the crowbar and gave it to Leonard, searched for guns, found a very large automatic on the unconscious man by the porch. The guy I had hit on the knee was unarmed except for a blackjack. I gave it to Leonard. He stepped forward and hit the man holding his knee with the blackjack, a short, sharp blow to the back of the head.
“Goddamn,” said the man, shifting his hands to his head. “My leg is done broke; wasn’t no need for that.”
“I felt there was,” Leonard said.
“You broke my arm,” said the man I had hit on the arm with the crowbar.
“I would be disappointed if I hadn’t,” I said. “And you, asshole. How’s your leg?”
“Broke, I done told you,” said the man.
“Good,” I said.
I went over and collected his gun from the driveway while the man with the broken arm bent over and threw up in the grass.
That’s when a car glided up at the curb.
23
Jim Bob parked near a big tree and got out. I could see someone else was in the Caddy, but couldn’t make them out. Just a shadowy shape. Jim Bob came strolling up with a big revolver dangling from one hand and a flashlight in the other.
“Y’all having a yard party?” he said.
“You could call it that,” Leonard said. “Though I think me and Hap had the party and they mostly just rolled around on the yard.”
“You got you quite a few little souvenirs there, don’t you?” Jim Bob said, looking at the guns in my hands.
“They weren’t offering T-shirts,” I said.
Jim Bob walked around, looked at all three on the ground, one completely out, two others moaning. He put his flashlight on them. One of them, the unconscious one, wore leather pants and a jean vest, was bare-chested under it. He had a belly like a hairy boulder. The other two wore jeans and dark T-shirts. White guys, all three. All with shaved heads and scraggly beards, faces that looked to have been boiled before they were arranged over the skull.
“Man, they are indeed the warehouse for ugly,” Jim Bob said. “Might want to drag these fuckers inside or somewhere before the neighbors wonder what you’re doing.”
We didn’t ask who was in Jim Bob’s car. We knew he would tell us in good time, and we didn’t want to share any knowledge with whoever it was lying on our lawn.
Leonard turned off the flashlights in the yard except the one that I took to use. He tossed the crowbar and the blackjack in the grass by the driveway and dragged the unconscious man into the carport, the man’s boot heels scraped along the concrete.
I put two pistols away in my waistband and one in my front pocket. Me and Jim Bob took hold of the other two guys. I clutched the one with the injured leg under the shoulders and slid him along on his ass, managing to stick the flashlight under my arm and clutch it there while I did. Jim Bob pulled the other one to his feet, and we got them inside the carport.
They were too weak to fight. We got them in there easy. It was dark inside the carport, and we didn’t turn on the light. What light there was came from Jim Bob’s flashlight and the light I had. There were steps leading from inside the carport into the house. We sat our catch on the top steps, except for the unconscious guy. Leonard left him lying in front of the steps.
I said, “Who the hell sent you and why?”
“Fuck you,” said the one with the broken arm.
Jim Bob strolled over and slapped the man twice, grabbed his injured arm, and cranked it. The man squealed, and I winced.
Jim Bob slapped him again. “That’s for yelling.”
“This is brutality,” said the man.
“I know,” said Jim Bob.
“Easy, man,” I said.
Jim Bob looked at me. “You talking to me?”
“Yeah.”
Jim Bob waved the revolver at the thugs, said, “All my life, doing what I do, I have dealt with the scum of the earth, the shit on the bottom of my boots, boots into which I stick my highly attractive feet, and tonight I’m fed up with it. Got no pity left for creeps. I don’t know why
they’re here, who they are, if God or genetics made them ugly, but I know you guys are not the problem without even knowing how this got started. They are the problem. I know a place when we’re done here we can bury them. Only way they’ll be found is if the earth cracks open on the Day of Judgment.”
“There’s a shovel in the storage shed,” Leonard said. “I don’t believe in God, so I’m not expecting that big Day of Judgment other than what we dole out. So I reckon they’ll stay hidden for good.”
“Guys,” I said. “Let’s don’t let this get out of hand.”
I couldn’t clearly see the expressions of the two that were sitting on the steps, but their body language told me they were scared. The man lying on the floor of the carport I was starting to wonder about. He hadn’t so much as groaned. Leonard can hit pretty damn hard when he wants to.
“Who are you?” I said. “And understand that in this carport, I’m as close as you got to a friend, and I don’t like you at all.”
“That don’t give me any confidence,” said the man with the broken arm.
“Nor should it,” Leonard said. “Come to my brother’s house carrying guns and badly shaved heads, you got to understand how much I’d like to just blow a hole in your meat and dump you in a ditch and piss on you.”
“I wasn’t even here when it came down,” Jim Bob said to the man, “and I don’t like you.”
“You’ve made that clear,” said the man with the broken arm.
“I can make it clearer,” Jim Bob said.
“It’s now or never,” I said to the men, hoping Leonard and Jim Bob were just playing roles, but with those two, you could never be sure. I knew Leonard better than anyone in the world, but there was a place he could go I couldn’t. Jim Bob was even more unpredictable. We could be standing there one moment, next moment all three of those men could be dead and in the trunk of a car on their way to someplace dark and wet.
The man with the broken arm looked so much like the other two, the only way I could tell the difference was in tattoos. He had a tattoo at the center of his throat, like a wishbone. It was not attractive. It looked to be made with a ballpoint pen. Jailhouse tattoo was my guess. I thought of him as Wishbone. I moved the light off of him and pooled it at the base of the steps.
“We was sent by the boss,” said Wishbone.
“Narrows it right down,” Jim Bob said. “Shall I come over and yank on your arm some more?”
“The Big Dog.”
“Who’s the Big Dog?” Leonard said.
“Boss we don’t never see. We just been told Big Dog has money to pay for certain things being done, and one of those things was you guys, and the ones was told to do it was us. Big Dog ain’t really our boss all the time, but he hires us from time to time. You might call us freelance.”
“I might call you stupid,” Jim Bob said.
“I think you ought to consider a career in macramé if your arm heals,” Leonard said. “You damn sure aren’t any good at this business.”
“So you guys are some kind of crew?” I said.
“Bike club,” he said. “Apocalypse on Wheels.”
“I heard of them,” Jim Bob said. “I think they ride tricycles.”
“You ought not talk too mean,” said the man with the banged knee. “You might write a check with your mouth your ass can’t cash.”
“You boys are any example of the badass Apocalypse on Wheels,” I said, “then you ain’t so much. We can write as many checks as we want.”
“We got taken by surprise,” Wishbone said.
“Yes,” I said. “You did.”
Wishbone wanted to say something mean, but instead he was wise enough to sit and smolder. There was an air about him like the school bully who had been beaten up by the ninety-eight-pound math nerd.
Apocalypse on Wheels were known to be dangerous. Drug dealers, primarily meth. They were also known for dog-fighting rings, which in my view should have been punishable by a death sentence.
“Where’s your bikes?” Leonard said. “You boys come by stick horse instead?”
“I said tricycles,” Jim Bob said.
“Yes,” Leonard said, “you did. But I just graded them down another notch. Next Hap can say roller skates.”
“Oh, I got you,” Jim Bob said. “But wouldn’t skates be better than a stick horse?”
“You have a point there,” Leonard said.
“Car,” said Wishbone. “We parked on a backstreet and walked over.”
“Car?” Leonard said. “What kind of self-respecting biker gang comes by car?”
“Easier,” Wishbone said.
“Yeah, well, let’s get back to what you were saying,” I said. “Hired by Big Dog, who you claim you don’t know, to come over here and do what? Sort my shit?”
Wishbone held his arm, winced a little, said, “Pretty much. Supposed to be a warning. Give you a good ass-whipping.”
“You know where I live,” I said, “so you know who lives here with me, don’t you?”
“A woman.”
“You come here in the middle of the night with guns and flashlights, and you were just going to sort me out? What about her?”
“I guess we would have put some smoke on her, too.”
“All right,” I said. “Officially, I’m no longer even a faint resemblance to a friend.”
“Nothing happened,” he said. “We got hurt. You didn’t.”
“And man, that saddens us,” Leonard said.
“You were going to whip my ass for what?” I said.
“You know,” he said.
“Why don’t you define it for me?” I said.
“Well, we don’t get no details much, just the job and some street cred. We was told you was meddling where you shouldn’t be meddling, and that we was to whack you around a little, say stay out of business where you don’t belong.”
“But they didn’t tell you the business?” Jim Bob asked.
“No. Didn’t matter. It was a job.”
“What were you getting paid?” I asked.
“It was to kind of go on our credit.”
“Credit.”
“We’re acolytes,” he said.
“Goddamn, that’s a strange word to come out of your mouth,” Jim Bob said. “I think you even pronounced it right. What you mean is you’re trying to get into the gang as a full member and not just a wannabe. Right?”
“I suppose you could say that,” Wishbone said. “I like acolyte better.”
“So who came to you and said Big Dog wanted me worked over a bit?” I asked.
“They wanted the nigger popped around, too,” Wishbone said, avoiding my question. “We thought we’d catch him at his place. He, like you, was easy to find. They gave us your names, and we went straight to the Internet. Wonderful thing that is.”
“Ain’t it?” Jim Bob said.
“Who is this cowboy fuck?” Wishbone said, nodding at Jim Bob.
“Hell in a cowboy hat,” I said. “That’s all you need to know.”
“No,” Jim Bob said. “I want you to know who I am, so you can maybe take a run at me if you survive, and I can fuck you up. I’m Jim Bob Luke. I live in Houston. I love a good enchilada and a medium-rare steak, a good-looking woman with a free spirit, and you couldn’t hurt me if you was three people apiece and had three friends just like you. Fuck, you couldn’t roll me over with a pry bar if I was dead.”
“You just fucked up,” said the one with the injured leg. “We’ll damn sure remember you.”
Jim Bob said, “Most people do.” He stepped forward and popped the man with the bad leg in the nose with a sharp left jab. “That’s for talking out of turn.” Then Jim Bob hit him again. “That’s for flinching.” Jim Bob slapped him once across the cheek. “And that’s for calling Midnight a nigger.”
“Oh, thanks,” Leonard said.
“My pleasure,” Jim Bob said.
“Midnight?” Leonard said.
“I thought it made me seem less politically
correct,” Jim Bob said. “I got to keep up an image to work with the people I work with.”
Bad Leg held his hand to his nose. In the beam of my flashlight I could see blood running between his fingers and down his face.
I said, “You haven’t given us a lot of information.”
“It’s all we got,” said Bad Leg.
I thought it might well be.
“You said you were hired by Big Dog and someone else,” I said. “Who is this someone else?”
“Our club chairman. Samson House.”
“Ah, hell,” Jim Bob said. “I know that son of a bitch.”
“You do?” I said.
“Nice guy, ain’t he?” said Wishbone.
“A peach,” Jim Bob said. “Same as his brother, Moses.”
“Moses is dead,” Wishbone said.
“I know,” Jim Bob said. “Why don’t you boys take us to Samson? I’d love to see him. I’m only pretending to ask, by the way.”
“You know,” said Bad Leg. “My leg ain’t broke like I thought. I think it’s going to be okay.”
“You’ll never know how that has made our day,” Jim Bob said.
“Still hurts, though,” Bad Leg said.
24
I soon found out who was in Jim Bob’s car. To say I was baffled is to put it mildly.
It was Frank. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and red running shoes. She had her hair tied back in a ponytail and wasn’t wearing makeup. She looked good. That she had once been a man was hard to figure on my end. I guess it shouldn’t matter, but the idea of her being male before she was female didn’t exactly evaporate from my mind.
I walked out to the car with Jim Bob to see her while Leonard kept the three in the garage occupied by pointing one of the guns at them. Sleeping Beauty had finally stirred and was sitting on the steps with the other two.
Frank nodded at me as she got out of the car, but nothing was said. Jim Bob guided her into the house, and when he came back out, we got the bad guys out of the carport. None of them had seen Frank. Jim Bob made it clear we didn’t want her seen and took Leonard aside to explain that she was in the house.