Honky Tonk Samurai (Hap and Leonard)

  “Which I’m still guessing at,” Marvin said. “And this guy creates false identities. Going to need to know more about him. Sounds big-time illegal.”

  “Here’s something cute,” Jim Bob said. “He is better known as Weasel.”

  “Oh, shit,” Leonard said.

  “Yep,” Jim Bob said, pulling a toothpick from the band of his hat, sticking it in his mouth. “He is in fact a weasel. I didn’t know he was your man until Frank told me. That makes some things fit together, don’t it?”

  “Like fingers in a glove,” I said.

  “There’s a lot of lawbreaking going on among friends here,” Marvin said. “I can’t like that too much, you know. And I’m a cop. Not a game-show participant. I’m not here to guess what the fuck is going on. Tell me straight out and avoid taking the long path to the rabbit hole.”

  “I’ll get there,” Frank said.

  “Yes, but will you arrive by Shetland pony?” Marvin said.

  “When I saw that site, I called Weasel and asked him about it, about Jim Bob’s connection. He didn’t know Jim Bob was connected, but he figured it all pretty quick, told me he had to lay some bad words down about me to you boys, but nothing that really got me in trouble, just some smoke-screen stuff.”

  “Was any of what he told us true?” Leonard asked. “Like that stuff about the Canceler?”

  “The Canceler is true, though I haven’t heard anything about the company using him in a while. I never had anything to do with that. I’ve never seen him, only heard of him. I was a figurehead at the dealership. I do the front-end work. When a deal is set, others take it from there. I know cars and peddling ass, but the blackmail stuff, that came from on high. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “But you knew what was going on.”

  “Got set up by someone else. Not me.”

  “Who?” Marvin asked.

  “Never met them. Didn’t want to. Car company is just one head of the hydra. It’s hard to know which head is in charge. I went with the blackmail because I was getting paid extra, but to tell the truth, I didn’t see any harm in it. Men they blackmailed were mostly entitled shits cheating on their wives, talking false about family values at community meetings and political rallies. They had money. Plenty of it. It wouldn’t hurt them to let go of some of it, but then things started changing. They got tougher. A mark didn’t go for the blackmail, or someone got too far out of line in some way or another, they brought in the Canceler. It wasn’t like that when I started; that kind of too-tough business wasn’t the way then. Things shifted. First a little, then a lot. It got grittier. Not just the blackmail but money laundering. They’d go to one of the rich guys, one of the girls would, or one of the men who was servicing some rich woman, and say, ‘Hey, I got this money, couple hundred thousand, and I need it to sort of find its way into the system without going through normal banking channels.’ Rich folks always knew someone who knew someone, and they’d get the deed done. Next thing you knew, FBI was on them.”

  “FBI?” Marvin said. “Damn, call me a fart and paint me green.”

  “Top of the game, someone giving information to the FBI as confidential informers. That made them paid informants, and it gave them a lot of liberty as well as a lot of money when it was a high-profile case. FBI wanted to close cases more than they wanted someone running a prostitution ring. They wanted it bad enough to turn their backs on the prostitution, blackmail, and even a lot of the thug work. That included the Canceler. They just greased the CI with olive oil and let him slip through the cracks. The feds were protecting the Canceler and the rest of the car-lot owners as government informants, and they were getting paid serious money, too. Way the feds saw it, the Canceler’s killings weren’t nearly as important as the info they were getting, and it was an easy way to solve cases. Saved legwork and having to deal with killers that might kill them.”

  “Law enforcement isn’t quite like I thought it was when I was a kid watching The FBI Story,” Leonard said.

  “I been here before,” Jim Bob said.

  “What’s that mean?” Marvin asked.

  “Means I’ve been in on a bad deal once where the FBI were protecting someone they shouldn’t have been protecting.”

  “How’d that turn out?” Marvin asked.

  “Messy,” Jim Bob said. “Thing is, FBI gets concentrated on one thing, they can’t see the forest for the trees. They focus on what they’re trying to accomplish, and if they are using people, so be it. Sometimes guys they got as informants are doing just as bad or worse than the ones the FBI is concentrating on. FBI gets focused, they’re willing to give themselves a hand job and call it pussy if it meets their needs.”

  “Not much justice in that,” I said.

  “That’s where we come in,” Leonard said.

  “I didn’t hear that,” Marvin said.

  “Just because you’re a cop doesn’t mean you’re out of it clear and free,” Jim Bob said. “You show up too big and tall, they might want a big ole piece out of your ass.”

  “Puts me where it puts me,” Marvin said. “But I don’t need to be supporting you guys on vigilante missions.”

  “What about Sandy?” I asked Frank. “That’s what we’re really after, though it has sort of morphed into something else.”

  “I don’t know any more about her than I’ve told you. I’m being honest with you. I just want out of this mess.”

  “Want a deal,” Marvin said, “got to tell this to the DA, and it’s got to pan out. Though I’m going to tell you, I think you might have had your finger in the pie a little more than you’re letting on.”

  “If I can give you most of the pie and most of the fingers in it, that would help me, wouldn’t it?”

  Marvin creased his brows. “Might. Time you and me went to the station, Frank.”

  “Can I have a private cell?” Frank asked.

  “We have one cell we call the suite. Just like all the other cells but only has one bed. We’ll start there. In the morning the DA will take your statement. Got to tell you, though, I still don’t think you grew a conscience, and I want you to know where I stand. I think you’d feed shit to children and tell them it’s chocolate.”

  Frank looked hurt, but when Marvin’s expression didn’t change, she said, “I had a feeling they wanted to replace me. I had been borrowing a bit of money from the dealership, and I hadn’t been paying it back. They take things like that seriously, and their severance package doesn’t contain a golden parachute, just a hole in the ground, or maybe they grind you up for sausage. I don’t know. But it wouldn’t have been good.”

  “Why tease the tiger?” Marvin asked.

  Frank gave that beautiful smile. “Once a con, pretty much always a con. Doing it the wrong way always seems right to me.”

  “And you ended up in the woods with a bunch of bikers how?” Leonard asked.

  “Started having second thoughts,” she said. “Thought maybe it wouldn’t be so smart to go to the police after all. Decided since the FBI was in on this, they and my employers might find a way to seriously get me messed up or killed. I called a friend in the business with me. I thought she and I were close. Thought for sure she would be sympathetic. I decided I’d get out altogether and not tell the police anything. That I’d run for it. You know, got cold feet. It was stupid. She told someone at the top, and they sent someone at the bottom to collect me. By the way, I think you’ll have to replace your door. It got kicked in and is still standing wide open, far as I know.”

  34

  When we came out of the motel it was cool for a change, and there was the smell of rain in the air. A pink glow rose in the east and expanded and turned gold. Some dark clouds floated overhead.

  As we stood there by Jim Bob’s busted Chevy with Marvin’s unmarked car parked next to it, Marvin said, “I’m going to make some calls, and then maybe you can go by your house just for a moment, because I’m going to have a few cops there, though it’ll take me a bit to line them up.
I can’t afford to post a long-term guard. Go there and get some things you need, and then leave. I’ll have a place for you to go. We have a couple of safe houses that the city owns, and we can put you up in one of those for a while.”

  “How safe is a safe house the city owns?” I said.

  “Safer than being home,” Marvin said. “In the meantime, I’m raising a posse and we’re going to try and go out to where you said the bikers are. They are bound to have given up on you guys by now. And if not, we can toss their place because we have cause. The dead dogs you told us about. A suspicion of dogfighting is a good way in. Now draw me a map to the place.”

  “Shit,” Leonard said. “We’ll just go with you. We might as well.”

  Marvin thought on that awhile. We all stood there while he considered, watching the morning grow older. Frank was leaning against Marvin’s car. In the light she looked older and more tired and considerably less full of beans than when we first met her.

  “All right,” Marvin said. “Here’s the thing. I’m not going out there with just us. We got our own little SWAT team here, and since mostly they don’t do much, and the equipment they use is going to waste, I’ll rally them, and off we’ll go. I got to get Frank squared away first. Meet me at the station in, say…oh, how about two hours? That will give the bikers time to drift back. And they will. We’re not talking brain surgeons here. They won’t figure you guys going to the cops, not after what you’ve done, Jim Bob. From what I’m understanding, you killed a man, and that is eventually going to at least bring you downtown for a cup of our bad coffee.”

  “I’ll pick up some creamer,” Jim Bob said.

  “Tell me he was armed.”

  “He might have been, but he was threatening me, and there were a lot of folks around him that had guns, and he was their leader, so to speak.”

  “Not as good as I had hoped for,” Marvin said. “And Hap, if there are others dead, and one of them is missing a kneecap, like you told me, you might have to have that cup of coffee, too. Right now, do what I’ve told you, and we maybe can get things to shake out how we want them. Even Frank might end up with the FBI giving her a nice little retirement fund. They’re on the other side now, but this is going to put their reputation in a blender we let it out. They may be willing to make a lot of concessions for all you guys. Frank, too, though that irks me a bit.”

  “I haven’t hurt anyone,” Frank said.

  “That’s a matter of angle,” Marvin said. “I want you to get in my car and sit and close the door and be quiet.”

  Frank got in Marvin’s unmarked car and sat quietly.

  Marvin said, “Hap, you asked me about the stuff Weasel told you. Why it’s not in local papers.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s because it didn’t happen here. It happened on the outskirts of Houston.”

  “You’re saying he had the murders right, not the location?” I said.

  “Exactly. Why he didn’t tell you the exact spot I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t really have as much contact with what went on as he wanted you to think, and maybe he didn’t want to be too specific. Figured you didn’t find mention of it locally, places he said, you’d give up, figure he was bullshitting. He’d have your money and be on his way up north. Want more, check the Houston Chronicle. I’ll send you some special links you can check out. It fits with what he said happened.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “See you in a couple hours at the cop shop,” Marvin said.

  * * *

  Jim Bob drove us to Walmart in the Bitch. It was just then solid daylight, and when we parked and got out, he looked at his car and moaned. “Goddamn them,” he said.

  “Man, there are lot of holes,” Leonard said.

  “Good thing is, none of them is in us,” I said.

  As Walmart was open all hours, we went in, and I bought a hammer and nails, and Jim Bob drove us over to the office. Upstairs we found the door kicked in, as Frank said. We closed it and used the hammer and nails to sort of jury-rig it shut until we could call someone to fix it.

  After that we went straight to my house. The cops hadn’t been put on duty yet. No motorcycles were in the yard. No bikers had built a bonfire with our furniture. No machine-gun nest. No meanies had soaped our windows.

  We drove past. Jim Bob wheeled us to Leonard’s ride on the backstreet where we had left it, and Leonard drove me and him around to the house. Jim Bob followed.

  Leonard parked in the driveway, Jim Bob at the curb. We got out with shotguns and stalked over to the front door. I hoped no neighbors were up early to see us carrying heat. I went through the carport, unlocked the door, went inside. Leonard came through the back door, Jim Bob through the front.

  We looked through the house. Leonard went to check on the cookies. They were intact. No one appeared to have been there beyond the three we had nabbed, and they had never made it beyond the front porch, the yard, and the carport. So far so good.

  I relaxed and gathered up a few clothes and toiletries, simple stuff, and put them in a suitcase. I went into the closet and stepped up on the stool there and opened up the little trap to the attic, reached around until I found the two revolvers I had there. I always had a scattering of guns around due to the fact that Leonard and I had made a few enemies over the years. The ones in the attic were clean guns, not traceable, and if we used them, they would be tossed. There was ammunition up there, too.

  I pulled a pillowcase off a pillow and slipped the guns inside of it. They would leave an oil stain on the pillowcase, and Brett would give me hell, but right then I couldn’t worry about that. I gathered a couple books off my nightstand, a Bill Crider Sheriff Rhodes mystery I was halfway through and a book by Lewis Shiner I had been meaning to read. I went to Brett’s side of the bed, and out of the nightstand I got her Kindle and charger. I gathered up some DVDs and stuck those in the bag. I could just have gotten the porch swing in my suitcase I could have a home away from home.

  Downstairs I found Leonard brewing coffee. I sat the suitcase and the pillowcase full of guns by the couch. Jim Bob was helping himself to eggs and bacon in the refrigerator. I showed him where the frying pan was, and he went about frying us up breakfast.

  I tossed some bread in the toaster, then went upstairs again, sat on the bed, and called Brett on my cell.

  When she answered she sounded like a sleepy bear. I realized then just how early it was. “Sorry to wake you,” I said. I gave her a quick rundown on things, asked that she and Chance hang tight where they were, because we’d all be moving to a safer place late morning or early afternoon. I told her she might as well tell Chance what was going on but to keep details down to a minimum. She deserved to know what kind of mud she was in just by possibly being my daughter. That alone might send her packing. If she was my daughter I didn’t want that to happen, though it might actually be a hell of a good choice, blood kin or not.

  “I might wait awhile on that,” she said.

  “You be the judge, hon.”

  “Being in love with you certainly never gets boring,” Brett said.

  “I could actually use a little boring,” I said. “Chance?”

  “I think I love her and wish she was my daughter,” Brett said. “Though she knows more than I ever wanted to know about James Joyce.”

  “I’ll have a stern talk with her and give her some Steinbeck.”

  Finished with the call, I went downstairs and ate breakfast with the guys. Every now and then I got up and looked out the window. Still no bikers. It was beginning to rain lightly.

  Jim Bob said, “If they come, my thought is they’ll show up in the dead of night. They like to do that. Cover of darkness; unsuspecting, sleeping prey. I once heard there’s an hour of night when even watchdogs aren’t very alert. I think it’s something like three or four in the morning. I doubt that’s true, but I’ve heard that.”

  “Me and Leonard won’t be here for them to sneak up on.”

  “Thing to do is let them
sneak, but be prepared,” Leonard said.

  “Too many of them,” Jim Bob said.

  After eating, I wanted to sleep, but that wasn’t in the cards right away. I had two cups of coffee, went upstairs, showered, and put on clean clothes while Leonard did the same in the downstairs bathroom. Jim Bob was sitting with his revolver on the table when I came back down.

  “No ninjas showed up?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  I looked out the kitchen window. Still raining. It was a light and simple rain, but steady. I liked a rain like that. I liked to sleep to the sound of it. No thunder and lightning, just rain. Right then I so badly wanted to go upstairs and go to bed.

  “I’m heading home now,” Jim Bob said. “Putting the Red Bitch in the shop. Then I’m going to nap and find that barrel racer and show her a few tricks that don’t involve barrels. I’m a phone call away.”

  “You’ve already done a lot,” I said.

  “I have, haven’t I?”

  Leonard came around the corner then. He wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes. Just blue jeans. He may have gained a few pounds, but he still looked like he could turn over a truck, fuck it in the gas tank, and make it raise his gassy children.