I was sitting on the bed in a motel room talking to Marvin on my cell phone. We were all in that room, us and the biker shits.
We were lucky that night. Lucky to have pulled through and lucky the motel was mostly empty. The only gun we decided to take with us inside the motel was Jim Bob’s pistol. Jim Bob had plunked down in a chair by a desk that was under a TV screen mounted on the wall and laid his gun hand across his knee. Leonard stretched out on the bed, his back against the headboard. There was a table with chairs, and Frank sat there. I found myself checking her out. I felt funny about that. An old East Texas boy studying her curves, trying to imagine what she had looked like as a man. We sat all three thugs on the floor with their backs against the wall. Wishbone and Bad Leg complained, the third man had still yet to say a word.
When I finished up with Marvin, he said, “I hate you guys. See you in thirty. Hey, you aren’t going to shoot anyone else or burn anything down in the next thirty minutes, are you?”
“We have plans for a time of solitude,” I said.
“Good. I need to shower and have some coffee and eat a bite. Make it forty-five minutes to an hour. Again, can you stay out of trouble that long?”
“I think so,” I said.
When we were through talking, I told them Marvin was on his way.
“Oh, good,” Jim Bob said. “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see us and get more details.”
“Who the fuck is Marvin?” Wishbone said. We had removed their gags but left their hands tied, though we had only fastened down Wishbone’s unbroken arm by tying it to his belt. The broken one we put in a sling we made with a bath towel. They were all three at a point where they couldn’t have outwrestled a dying frog in a best two out of three, but we kept their hands tied anyway.
“Someone you won’t like,” Leonard said.
I said, “I was pretty thorough with Marvin, don’t you think? I didn’t tell him about the dead dogs because I didn’t want him to be really mad. He thinks we should just take these dudes off in the woods somewhere and shoot them in the head and let the buzzards sort them out. Oh, yeah, he said if we decide to do that, we got to get rid of the gun.”
The thugs sitting against the wall gave me a look and shifted on their asses.
“Nah, he didn’t say that,” I said. “Just fucking with you.”
“It’s an idea, though,” Leonard said.
“Oh, man,” Frank said. “I really messed up.”
“Hold that thought,” Jim Bob said. “We’ll come back to it in short order. Right now I’m still as mad as I want to be.”
We allowed them to go to the toilet one at a time with the door open and Jim Bob standing there with the revolver. “Jesus,” Jim Bob said to Wishbone. “Do you have to shit now? I don’t want to see that.”
“Think I like doing this? I’m modest.”
“Just get it done,” Jim Bob said. “Oh, man. I’m going to have to light some matches for sure. Maybe get a fucking blowtorch. Have you been eating something dead off the highway?”
“How am I going to wipe my ass with my hand tied and one arm broke?” Wishbone said. “You doing it for me?”
“Not likely,” Jim Bob said.
He ended up untying Wishbone’s hand. Wishbone took his time in there. He had really been saving up. The other two, thank goodness, were quite content with number ones.
When everyone had their bathroom trip finished, and all had washed their hands, using soap, as Jim Bob instructed, and when Wishbone was tied up again, we lined them up against the wall and had them sit as before. We let them keep the gags off. They promised to be good boys.
The one with the injured leg was starting to look bad. He had beads of sweat on his forehead, and his lips had grown pale. His leg was outstretched and had swollen bad enough Jim Bob had to cut the fellow’s pants open to accommodate the swelling.
“Can we order a pizza?” Wishbone said. “I’m hungry enough to suck shit out a pig’s ass.”
“Eeew,” Frank said.
“Would you like us to rent you a movie, too?” I said.
“That would be nice,” Wishbone said. “But nothing violent.”
“You’re showing your spine, ain’t you?” Jim Bob said.
Wishbone shrugged. You’d have thought we were all old buddies, way he acted.
“Can I bum a cigarette, then?” he said.
“Nobody here smokes,” I said. “Jim Bob just carries matches.”
“I wouldn’t mind taking you outside and setting you on fire, though,” Leonard said.
We ended up ordering a couple of large pizzas anyway. Hold the pig shit.
Forty-five minutes passed, then an hour, and still no Marvin.
About an hour later there was a light knock at the door. It could have been Marvin, the pizza, or the bikers having figured out where we were.
I glanced through the peephole.
Marvin.
I let him in. He looked around the room, settled his eyes on Frank for a moment, trying to figure who she was and what the hell she was doing there. He looked at the three men sitting on the floor. He grinned at Wishbone, said, “Jared Fonteneau. My man. How’s the old hammer dangling?”
“It’s waiting in the toolbox until needed,” Wishbone, a.k.a. Jared, said.
“And Thomas Peers. Or should I call you Hopalong Dumbass? Man, you don’t look so good.”
“Leg’s fucked up,” Thomas said. “I could walk a little an hour ago, now I can’t.”
“I can see that.”
“I need a fucking doctor. A nurse. A goddamn big-ass dog with a barrel of brandy hung under its neck. Something, man. I’m in pain here. I’m starting to get way past not feeling so good.”
“You do in fact look as if you might be moving past your expiration date,” Marvin said.
Marvin moved his gaze to the man who was yet to speak. “And Mute Boy Gavin. Tongue hasn’t grown back, has it?” Then to us: “Mute Boy there. He don’t say much because he can’t. He was five his mother decided he talked too much, and it was screwing up her crack high, so she used a pair of pliers and some pruning shears and took to his tongue.”
Mute Boy gave Marvin the finger.
“He has, however,” Marvin said, “acquired some ability with sign language.”
32
The pizza came. The pizza boy looked like he just got his driver’s license.
Leonard gave the pizza boy money, said, “You took long enough. You have to go to Italy to get it?”
“It’s a busy night,” the pizza boy said.
“I’m so busy you’re not getting a tip,” Leonard said, taking the pizza and closing the door with his foot.
I got up and went out and gave the pizza boy a tip. I said, “It’s all right. He found out today that his penile implant isn’t going to work.”
“Oh,” the pizza boy said and went away.
Wishbone said, “I told you no onions.”
“Shut up,” Leonard said.
Everyone ate, onions or no onions, though Bad Leg was good for only one piece. He really was starting to fade. Wishbone was actually starting to be jovial, even cracked a few jokes. I think he was a little delirious from the injured arm and all that had happened to him. He told us a limerick—not that we asked for it:
There was an old hermit named Dave
Who kept a dead whore in a cave.
He said, I’ll admit
She does smell a bit,
But look at the money I save.
On that note, me and Marvin went out of the motel and took a ride in his car. I got picked because Leonard didn’t want to do it, and that was that. As we cruised, I told Marvin what I had already told him. I explained about Frank. At least all the stuff I knew, which was pretty much that she had showed up with Jim Bob, been nabbed, been rescued, had enjoyed pizza with us in the room, and had said little to nothing since we pulled her away from the bikers and the party in her honor.
“Frank was a man?” he said. “That’s hard t
o believe.”
“I try to be cool about it,” I said. “You know, moving with the times, but the whole thing jacks me around some. Odd thing is she looks damn good. I mean, now that he’s a she she does. Am I saying that right? Shit. You know what I mean.”
“She’s got good legs, and I like the way that shirt hung on her, minidress-style. I saw her, I felt my dick wiggle. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Lips are sealed. By the way, you took long enough to show up.”
“The missus felt friendly. She doesn’t always feel friendly. I thought I ought to take what was offered.”
“That explains a couple of minutes,” I said. “What about the rest?”
“You are not nice,” Marvin said.
“I will say this, you don’t need any outside dick wiggling if there’s wiggling at home.”
“I agree,” he said.
No use denying it. Men, even honorable ones, can think like dogs. There’s an old joke about a guy that’s been without loving so long, a friend takes him into the woods and suggests he fuck a knothole in a tree. The other guy says, “Does it have to be just that tree?”
I told Marvin how those motorcycle shits were most likely out there looking for us and that if they found us it wouldn’t be good, us no longer having the elephant of surprise on them.
“Don’t know how you two do it,” Marvin said. “You could start trouble at a kid’s birthday party. And Jim Bob, too. You two and him, that’s a disaster in the making. It’s the Hindenburg and the Titanic and the Great Hurricane of 1900 on Galveston Island all rolled into one big mess. Look here, Hap. Seems to me this is some bad poo-poo. Getting you out of it, I’m not sure it’s worth anything to me.”
“I can understand that. New job and all.”
“Guys came and attacked you in your yard, that’s easy to make self-defense. But you put them in the trunk of a car, took them for a ride while you went out there after the others, shot and killed one, at least. Blew a kneecap off another and knocked some folks around with the car. That shit there, that’s hard to explain.”
“Knowing their location was a self-defense move, way we saw it.”
“Making that play so anyone believes it, that’ll take some work, buddy.”
“I know. But that’s all we intended. The other, rescuing Frank—that just happened. We had to do it. No red-blooded American would have done any less. I think we could ride the hero horse with a jury, it came to it.”
“We might have to dress it up a little, buy it some new shoes, but it might work.”
We rode up North Street and on out of town, along the highway, where the trees were thicker. Marvin turned around in the driveway of a liquor store that was oddly placed out in the middle of nowhere, then we started back south, driving slow. We didn’t talk for a while. Marvin was considering.
“Tell you what,” Marvin said. “I can go in and talk around things a little, see how things hang, so to speak. But if it doesn’t hang so well, I got to throw you boys to the dogs. Maybe I can do it so you only spend most of the rest of your life in prison, and I’ll have them put you in with some nice man won’t hurt you too much if you call him Mama.”
“That’s not much relief.”
“What the fuck you expect? Jesus, Hap. Look here, what we’ll do is we’ll take those three in, get that one with the messed-up leg to the hospital, get a cast for the one with the broken arm. In the meantime, I’m going to call the sheriff, see if he can get his men out there in the county. I can probably have a few of our local cops go out there, too, without there being some big jurisdiction battle. Thing is, we’ll check the place out. We’ll check your house and Leonard’s place. Where the hell is he staying now?”
I told him.
“Shit,” Marvin said. “Brett. Where is she?”
“A motel somewhere,” I said.
“Good.”
I decided to tell him about Chance.
“Man, that would be something. A grown daughter. Think of all the money on formula and diapers you saved. And there’s that prom-dress thing.”
“Leonard said pretty much the same thing.”
“That’s because he’s a thinker, Hap. He’s the thinker of you two. That prom-dress thing, by the way. Wouldn’t believe what something like that costs, and for one night. There’s also weddings and such, and you have to deal with son-in-laws, and ex-son-in-laws if they divorce, and they got kids, it’s a real fucking stinker. Worse, you get other in-laws, and some of them are no treat. I know. I been through it.”
“If she is my daughter, maybe I can still catch the marriage part, the grandkids, the angry ex-son-in-laws, and the shitty in-laws.”
“Being a father is very rewarding, except when it isn’t. And then there’s being a grandparent—same thing. That can be great, and it can suck. But then you remember Gadget and how that went?”
I did. She was Marvin’s granddaughter. Real name Julia. Nickname Gadget. Me and Leonard had once rescued her from some drug dealers. As well as from herself. She seemed to be doing much better these days. Had married to what I understood was a pretty good guy with a handful of college degrees and some family money. They had moved off to Wyoming, where they both ended up working in real estate.
Marvin drove us back to the motel, having called some law on our way back. When we got there a city cop had already arrived, and right behind him came an ambulance. People were poking out of doors and standing on the landing watching Jared and Mute Boy being loaded in the cop car. Bad Leg was fading, so he got placed in an ambulance and driven away fast with lights and sirens.
When the cops and ambulance had gone away, Marvin stood out in the lot by his car talking to me and Leonard and Jim Bob. Frank was in the room.
“You could have had the cops come without lights and sirens,” I said. “It makes us stand out like sore thumbs.”
“Truth is, I wanted for it to be a big to-do. That way it looks like we mean business and that we’ve brought in some real desperadoes. That part could be good for you, being involved with bringing in these three. Truth is, these guys aren’t so tough, and I think if I put the screws to them a little, they’ll speak in tongues I ask them to.”
“You sound a bit more optimistic about our chances than you did earlier,” I said.
“I’ve been thinking on it,” Marvin said. “And I got an idea or two. I’ll put a couple of cops at your place for a few days, Hap, until I can sort things out. You might want to stay away from the office, and Leonard, you shouldn’t go home. I hate to bring it up, don’t know how things are between you and John, but he shouldn’t show up there, either.”
“Don’t worry about John,” Leonard said. “I changed the locks with extreme prejudice. May that motherfucker go with Jesus and Mary and the Holy Ghost and the young Casper.”
“Just stick with Hap,” Marvin said. “And Jim Bob, no use talking to you, as you’ll do what you want. In the long run, so will these two. I could have made friends with quieter, more agreeable people, I guess.”
“But you wouldn’t have all the excitement we bring to your life,” Jim Bob said.
“That’s sort of what I meant,” Marvin said.
“I can tell you this,” Jim Bob said. “I leave here, I’m going to take my now wreck of a car back to Houston and have it fixed up so that it shines like a newborn fawn. You need me for something else, I’ll come back. Give me a call. Hell, I got my sneak-around cars and my old wrecks at home, so I’ll come back a little quieter and a little less shiny.”
“All right, we got one last thing before we call it a night and I find out if you boys are going to jail. Explain to me about Frank. Got the general business already, but I got a feeling there has been a new portfolio added. Hap only knew so much.”
“Tell you what,” Jim Bob said. “Let’s the four of us retire to the fine living arrangements of this cheap-ass motel, sit with Frank, and me and her will sort you out on that new portfolio. It’s a doozy.”
33
I do
n’t have a comb, makeup, or anything,” Frank said.
We were all in the motel room. I was starting to come down off my action buzz, beginning to feel tired. The pizza had not settled well with me. I needed an antacid. It felt like a dogfight was going on in my belly.
“You look fine,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Yeah, you’re all right,” Marvin said. “Way you look isn’t what I’m concerned with here.”
He looked at me, remembering full well his comment about the shirt she was wearing.
I smiled at him.
Marvin cleared his throat. “I got some of the story, what Hap and Leonard know, not what you and Jim Bob know. What I want to know is why Apocalypse on Wheels put the nab on you. How do you figure in this story, front to back? Tell it straight. It might mean the difference in you having to wear an orange jumpsuit and share a cell with Big Bertha, or spending lazy weekends at home with a beer and a vibrator.”
“That’s just vulgar,” Frank said.
“I’m up when I should be sleeping, and I’m going to guess you are involved in what I like to refer to as nefarious fucking shit, so don’t get holy on me.”
Frank nodded. “Jim Bob came to see me, lying about wanting to buy a car. Almost fooled me. But I have a kind of radar, like with you two and Cason, who, though a dreamy piece of meat, I figured was in with you guys, me being able to radar things, which is why I have the job. Though I got to tell you, that stuff about the petunias and screwing the old folks sort of had me going for a moment, and I almost thought Hap here might have patents on sex toys. Bigger the lie, easier it is to believe. Well, truth is, that was too big a lie.”
“Get to the backbone of it,” Marvin said.
“Jim Bob came to the dealership, told me his name was something or other—”
“Tommy Jasons,” Jim Bob said. “It’s a name I use now and again, even have an identity established online, a past, whole shooting match, right down to my shoe size.”
“Jim Bob was very convincing, but I had some small doubts, an itch at the back of my mind, and after he left, after I told him I could put him in a car and a vagina, I looked him up—or, rather, I looked up Tommy Jasons—on the Internet. Did that, I knew I was being scammed. Never scam a scammer. Guy Jim Bob hired to build his past has a certain method for building those sites, a certain look. He changed them up, of course, and he was good. But I saw plenty of things he did for our own business. Pasts he had built. I recognized his style. No matter how differently he approached those sites, constructed those pasts for certain people, he had signatures that I recognized, same as a fingerprint. I knew him personally, too. Called him up, got it confirmed, found out Tommy Jasons was Jim Bob Luke. That’s when I looked up Jim Bob, read about him and his agency. He didn’t have a photo there, but as I said, I knew it was him. Saw what he did, private investigator. I did a bit more research, decided he was exactly what I needed to get my ass out of a crack. I called him on the Tommy Jasons number, told him my situation.”