We tied up and gagged all but Wishbone, put the gagged ones in the trunk of Jim Bob’s Caddy. Bad Leg was right. His leg wasn’t broken. He managed to limp out to the car without assistance, moving the way you might if someone had taped your dick to one leg.
After they were tucked nicely inside the trunk, I noted there was plenty of room for them and the spare and maybe we could stuff Wishbone in there, too, if we needed to. But he was our pathfinder, so we placed him in the front passenger seat. Leonard sat behind him with a pistol. I stayed at the house.
Jim Bob drove away slowly. I drove Frank to our office, arriving well ahead of him. He was taking the long way around so Wishbone wouldn’t get a chance to see her.
I put Frank inside the office, made the bed for her, showed her where the bottled water was, the coffee and such. We didn’t discuss anything, nor did she offer any explanation for why she was with Jim Bob. I got three twelve-gauge pump shotguns out of the closet and a box of shells, told her to make herself comfortable, that I wasn’t sure when we’d be back, and to stay inside and not answer the desk phone, then I left out of there.
In the parking lot Jim Bob was standing outside the Red Bitch, as his Cadillac was known, and Leonard was sitting in the backseat with the revolver. Wishbone was in the front seat, being very cooperative. Jim Bob walked over and helped me with the shotguns, taking two of them off my hands, leaving me holding one in one hand, the box of shells in the other.
Jim Bob said, “Got her set?”
“Yep. But I don’t get it.”
“You will.”
“What if she runs away?”
“She won’t.”
“She might.”
“She’ll stay until we get back.”
I looked at the biker dude in the Red Bitch.
“Considering where I think we’re going, what happens if we don’t make it back?” I asked.
“I always come back.”
“But if we don’t?”
Jim Bob shrugged. “Eventually she’ll get bored and leave.”
I could tell Jim Bob wasn’t going to explain shit, least not right then.
“Was it like we thought?” I asked him.
“You mean the cars and the women and the blackmail?”
“No. I wanted to know if without her original elongated wee-wee can she piss up a rope. Of course I’m asking about the cars and such.”
Jim Bob was unfazed.
“More to it than we thought. Not exactly like you figured. Think you and your buddy have opened up one big-ass can of worms, and these worms have some serious teeth. But we’ll start with these assholes. We finish that, I’ll explain about Frank. She can help explain. We don’t get these honky tonk samurai sorted out, we might not need an explanation. What we’re going to do is nip them in the bud.”
“Frankly, I don’t see how three of us can sort out a biker gang.”
“No doubt it will be precarious,” Jim Bob said and raised an eyebrow at me. “You scared?”
“Yeah.”
“Not me.”
“Liar.”
“Okay,” Jim Bob said. “I’m slightly nervous. I’ll own up to that much. But I got a plan. I’m not sure it’s a plan makes any sense until we get where we’re going. It doesn’t, well, we change plans. We shoot these three in the head and leave them in the woods.”
“I don’t like that plan,” I said.
“Then you better hope plan A works,” Jim Bob said. “Look. I know something about these bike-club sucks. They are part of the Dixie Mafia. You might even say they are actually a wing of it. They are connected to just about everything that smells bad in Texas except a little roadkill. Not just East Texas but the whole goddamn state. These biker fucks are mostly muscle for people with more brains and bigger plans then these guys got. Guys in your yard tonight, they are the lowest of the low. They were probably going to get their bones for putting you and Leonard and Brett out of the way. They were there to kill all three of you, not sort you out, but it didn’t work out for them. Their boss figured you guys weren’t much, so he sent some hitters who weren’t much, but don’t think there isn’t some serious trouble with these boys, and you want to nip it in the bud, and quick, or they will keep on coming until one of them gets lucky. Bottom line is, instead of talking to these three lame-ass soldiers, I say we talk to their main man. That doesn’t work out, then we shoot everybody.”
“How many is everybody?”
“How would I know? More than ten, twelve? Enough to make a biblical epic? I don’t know.”
“Not comforting.”
“True, but I think it’s best to confront them. You want them to at least think they got to consider twice they throw down on you. You can’t show weakness with them. Some of the Dixie Mafia head guys, you might even reason with them they see a profit in it. But these biker goobers, not so much.”
“And I’m saying you don’t crawl down a hole full of rattlers and expect to come out unbit.”
Jim Bob nodded slightly. “I hear you. Like I said, I’ve dealt with them before. They kind of lump up together like dog turds out Etoile way. We were in Houston, thereabouts, I’d know exactly where they are. Here, I just know the general location.”
“You know a lot of shit, Jim Bob.”
“That’s because I walk through it every day. Someday soon I’m thinking I’m going to throw in the rope and take up pig farming again full-time.”
“I didn’t even know there was a biker gang around here.”
“Did you know there are some Amish here in East Texas, north of town? The men use power tools and have cell phones and drive cars, but the women live on the farm, wear bonnets pulled down around their faces, and, unlike the men, only use hand tools.”
“I don’t know from Amish,” I said. “How did we get on the Amish?”
“It seemed like a natural segue. Bottom line is we need someone knows more than the bikers’ general whereabouts.”
“Meaning the young gentleman with the fucked-up tattoo in your front seat is going to be our guide?”
“Bingo.”
“You know, one thing we ought to take into serious fucking consideration is we got shotguns and revolvers and everyone else has automatics and rifles that can spray bullets faster than we can.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jim Bob said. “But I do so hate change. I haven’t got over that whole business about Pluto. I think Pluto got fucked, you know. One day it’s a planet, and the next day it’s not. I hate change, Hap. I’m the same with guns. Like to keep it old-school.”
“Well, when we get back, if we get back, we’ll draft a stiff note to Congress about that business with Pluto.”
25
Inside the Caddy I laid a shotgun across my lap. Leonard placed one across his, the other I put on the floorboard at my feet. Leonard was still holding the pistol pointed at the back of Wishbone’s head. I hoped we didn’t hit a bump.
“Well,” Leonard said. “You guys certainly took long enough. I hope you got some shit sorted out and it’s nothing I need to know.”
“We had some serious things to discuss,” Jim Bob said. “We didn’t need you for it. It would have been over your head.”
“Nice,” Leonard said.
“The guys, they do that to me all the time,” Wishbone said. “I always feel like they’re talking behind my back, like maybe the ass is ripped out of my pants and I don’t know it.”
“You shut up,” Leonard said.
Outside of LaBorde, the trees grew thick and even thicker as we headed eastward.
I sent Brett a text that said I might be home late, maybe even tomorrow morning, and I’d explain later, and not to be surprised if she found a strange woman sleeping on the sleeper sofa at the office. I didn’t tell her it was Frank. I thought about it some more and sent another text. RENT A MOTEL TONIGHT FOR YOU AND CHANCE. DO THIS. TRUST ME. DON’T GO HOME TONIGHT. NO EXCEPTIONS. NO EXCUSES. IN FACT, NOW THAT I THINK ABOUT IT, DON’T GO TO THE OFFICE UNTIL I SAY IT’S OKAY. LOVE, HAP.
r /> I wondered what Brett would think if I didn’t come back. Where is he? What the hell is he doing? What the hell was that text about? Will there be coupons this Sunday in the newspaper for granola bars and panty liners?
And then there was Chance. If she was my daughter I damn sure hadn’t gotten to know her very well. She didn’t know me well enough to miss me when I was gone. I really should just try to get a regular day job that didn’t involve getting hit or shot at and that maybe came with health benefits and a retirement plan.
I glanced at Leonard. He was just a dark shape in the car, but he turned his face toward me. He sensed what I was thinking. He often knew what I was thinking. He said softly, “It’s cool, man.”
He’d say that with the hot wind of hell blowing in his face.
We passed very few cars, and in fact the presence of their headlights out there in that lonesome country was almost alien, like spaceships cruising close to the ground, zipping by so fast even the big Cadillac vibrated.
Wishbone sat stiff, giving directions, mostly saying, “Keep going.”
Finally we came to what had once, in the 1950s, been a prominent highway. Now it seemed narrow, and the old yellow stripe down the center of it was worn so dim you could hardly see it in the headlights.
It was two lanes, and we didn’t pass a single car as we went along. We traveled down it for a goodly stretch. The trees closed in on both sides and limbs came together overhead and made a kind of canopy. We had to dodge some rotten limbs that had fallen in the road, and once we had to stop so I could get out and drag a big limb away so we could continue. Finally we came to an asphalt road, the sides of which bled off into deep bar ditches on either side. Wishbone had us turn down it. In the woods I saw fireflies glowing in spots, winking out, then winking back into view. The headlights caught the glint of standing water in scattered spots. A mosquito paradise.
“All right, fuckhead,” Jim Bob said to Wishbone. “You better not be leading me on a wild goose chase, or you will be a cooked goose.”
“We’re down here on purpose,” he said. “It keeps prying eyes out, and the club owns the land.”
“How close are we?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Wishbone said. “A mile. Maybe two.”
“Tell me well before we get there, and don’t be cute about it,” Jim Bob said. “We show up in the midst of your comrades before we know it, you get it first. Comprende?”
We came to what was nothing more than a deer trail. Wishbone told us to turn down it. Jim Bob pulled off the road and onto the trail and stopped, turned off the headlights. He turned in his seat and looked at Wishbone.
“What?” Wishbone said.
“How close now?”
“Real close. You go down here a piece, then it widens out. It’s been logged down there. You’ll see a patch of trees beyond the bare spots, though, and on the other side of them is another bare spot, and you can see some mobile homes we got there, a big shed. That’s where they cook the meth. And there are a bunch of dog pens where they keep the fighting dogs, though there ain’t none there now.”
“Tell you what we’re going to do,” Jim Bob said to Wishbone. “I’m going to get out of the car, and then you are going to get out. You are going to walk around to the rear of the car. My boys here will follow out after you.”
That was just like Jim Bob. My boys. He had taken over. Thing was, right then, that was fine with me.
“Are you going to shoot me when I get out?” Wishbone asked.
“That’s up to you,” Jim Bob said.
Wishbone and Jim Bob went to the back, and me and Leonard followed. The air outside of the air-conditioned car was as stiff as wire and uncomfortably warm. Jim Bob opened the trunk and shined his flashlight into it. The two thugs hadn’t evaporated or died of a carbon monoxide leak. They had been trying to work the ropes loose, you could tell that much. They were both still gagged.
“All right,” Jim Bob said, and without being asked, Leonard readjusted the wrist and ankle ties on the two in the trunk. There was more nylon cord back there, and Jim Bob got that out and tossed it to Leonard, nodded at Wishbone, said, “You don’t mind, tie his ass up and gag him and put him on the back seat floorboard. I just wanted to see how these guys were riding back here.”
He reached down and pulled the gag from Bad Leg. “How’s the ride?”
“Bumpy. And my leg hurts.”
“I can live with that,” Jim Bob said and readjusted the gag.
When Wishbone was well tied up by Leonard and lying on the ground, Jim Bob stood with his hand on the trunk lid, looked down at Bad Leg and Sleeping Beauty, and said, “Good night, sweet assholes. Better hope we don’t get killed. It’s going to be real hot tomorrow, and then you’re going to get thirsty, and then, well, it’s not a nice way to go.”
There was mumbling behind the gags and a lot of squirming. Jim Bob closed the trunk. I got hold of Wishbone’s head, and Leonard got his feet. We lugged him around and put him on the floorboard in the back of the Caddy.
Jim Bob said, “Let’s go.”
Leonard got in the front passenger seat, and I sat in the back with all the shotguns in my lap and my feet on Wishbone’s head. I found it was a little uncomfortable. I don’t know how Wishbone felt.
Jim Bob backed us out of the narrow trail and drove the Cadillac slowly and without lights down to where there was an indention in the woods. He pulled in there. There was a small trail off that. He drove down it a few yards, stopped at a dead end, and me and him and Leonard got out. Wishbone was thrashing around on the floorboard like a beached whale, but I had seen how Leonard had tied those knots that held him; he wasn’t coming out of that without assistance.
I sorted the shotguns out. We walked away from the car and then stopped underneath a black willow tree that was growing near a little runoff of water that trickled down through the brush and trees.
“Thing we don’t want to do is get surprised,” Jim Bob said. “We’ll do the surprising.”
“How surprising are we going to be?” Leonard asked.
“The surprise is they’ll never know we were here. But we’ll get a lay of the land this way. This Samson fellow, like I said, I kind of know him. We find Samson, he can give us a more direct note on who hired him to hire the numb-nut squad, and that can lead us more directly to the problem you boys got. That and Frank. She had plenty to say, and I think she’s got more.”
“And you know Samson on sight?” I asked.
“You might say I knew his brother, Moses, better, but yeah, I know Samson on sight. Probably can smell him.”
“What about Moses?” I said.
“He met with an unfortunate accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“Well, I had some run-ins with the Apocalypse bunch in Houston,” Jim Bob said. “It don’t matter what for, as it was a complicated mixture of events that involved a variety of nasty happenings. It ended with me getting outsmarted, which is a goddamn rarity in this universe. But it happened. I think I’d been a little sick that week.”
“You mess up, you always say that?” Leonard said.
“I wouldn’t want you thinking it’s my fault. Thing was, it was a temporary lapse, but at the moment I’m telling about, they had me by the nut sack. I was caught up in something that got me taken out to their compound outside of Houston. Kind of like what’s out here. They moved here not long after that. I didn’t know exactly where, but knew it was in this area. You can bet I’ve kept an ear to the ground. They made a few runs at me afterward, but it didn’t turn out well for them, and in time they quit. At least for a while. So knowing this location, and if Samson’s here, I can also make sure I don’t get run at again. They aren’t known to be smart, but they aren’t known to give up.
“Thing is, I killed a few of them, and that was their main point of contention. They were mad at me over some things I had done for a client that didn’t do them any good, so they started sending these guys to hit me. I ha
d three runs at me and was successful each time. But this time I’m talking about, I turned left when I should have turned right. To put it in a nutshell, they nabbed me, kicked me around a little, but didn’t kill me. They had other plans, had me dead to rights, and they hauled me out to their compound so I could meet their head asshole, and he’s talking about chopping off my head and doing some nasty things to it. I says to the brother, Moses, I says, ‘You’re pretty tough with me handcuffed, but for all your tough-ass talk, you couldn’t pull a cotton wad out of a dead man’s ass. What you got is muscle all around you. Those men of yours I killed, they came for me, and I took them on face-to-face and killed them.’
“Anyway, they’ve got me. I’m handcuffed, and I got some knots they knocked on my head growing larger by the moment, and one of my eyes is starting to close a little. Moses is going on about how he’s going to cut my head off, pull out my intestines, stick a hot poker up my ass, pull my dick off with pliers—none of this laid out in any particular order—and it all sounded quite convincing. You can bet my asshole was puckering wind about then.
“I says to him again: ‘You talk big with all these swinging dicks around you. How about it’s just me and you, and that decides it?’
“Let me tell you, conditions I was under, I was throwing some serious pecker around. They wanted me to grovel, but I wasn’t going to give them that. I was playing with pure shit talk and ball sweat out there, let me tell you. Had it been some of the other criminals I know, they would have just laughed and shot me in the head. But I knew how those suckers thought. Moses says, ‘All right. Let’s do it. How about a duel, pistols with two loads at thirty feet?’
“Now, that is my meat, boys, and I thought, I could do that and have as good a chance as most anybody. No use lying. I knew I’d win that way. Course, I did win, I wasn’t certain they’d actually let me go. But right then the choices were shoot it out or have my dick pulled off with pliers. Dick like mine ought to be bronzed, not mistreated. But then Samson, he says, ‘Do it the old bowie fight way.’ He says he’s done that and come out on top, and he lifted up his shirt and showed us some scars that looked like he’d been caught up in a very large electric fan. Samson says his brother, Moses, ought to do that, show me and anyone that would find my corpse that you don’t mess with the Apocalypse fuckers, and so on and so on. He went on for some time. Another few minutes and I would have died from boredom.”