There came that faint snapping sound from the deer stand, and Vanilla nailed him. He turned his head suddenly as if to look in our direction, then banged into the Hummer and slid down it slowly until he fell with his head under it. His ass humped a little, like he was fucking the dirt, and then he was still.
“That bitch can shoot,” I heard Booger yell out.
That’s when the Hummer roared and burned backwards, running right over the man who had been humping the dirt, squirting what passed for brains out of his head in all directions. The Hummer roared on through the gate, swung around, and turned its nose up the hill with the tires tossing gravel. All of us were firing at it, but nothing we hit on the Hummer caused a problem.
Up in the deer stand, Vanilla snapped off two shots, and I heard the Hummer windshield crack, but it kept going, climbing the hill. We all started running after it.
When it got to the top of the hill, the Hummer turned and ran off the road and went straight for the deer stand, hit it and sent it flying, breaking it apart, launching Vanilla out of it in a flash of black clothes and blond hair. The Hummer tried to run her down then, but she limped behind a tree and the Hummer hit it, backed off, spun around, and started out of there.
We ran up the hill, and by the time we got up there, Vanilla was limping up to us, and the Hummer was gone.
“Get me to the car,” she said, “and I will teach them to knock me out of a tree.”
“Deer stand,” Booger said.
“Whatever,” she said, throwing the rifle across her back by a strap she had fastened to it.
She got between Leonard and me, threw her arms over our shoulders, and with Jim Bob and Booger in the lead, we carried on. We made it to the brush gate, or where it used to be, but the Hummer had gone right through it.
“They just thought they were badasses,” Booger said, “and then they got a load of us.”
“We got lucky,” Jim Bob said.
We limped Vanilla along until we got to the end of the trail that led to the outer road. Booger leaned down with his light and said, “They went to the right. You can see where they dug in turning.”
Our problem was that the Buick was to the left, so we limped Vanilla along that way, finally got to the car. I thought the Hummer might at this point be all the way to the North Pole.
I was still closing my door when Vanilla got the Buick started. She put her good right foot on the gas and spun us out of there backwards, braked, hit the gas, changed the gears, and away we went. Every time Vanilla shifted gears the car roared louder and flew faster. Vanilla was down the road a piece before she turned on the lights, which was a good thing, because the road was growing narrow and there was a bar ditch on either side. The headlights caught standing water in the ditches and made it shimmer.
“We’ll never catch them,” Leonard said.
“Yes, we will,” Vanilla said, and she hit another gear. She wasn’t kidding about the car being souped up beyond reason. We tore along like that for what seemed like ten or fifteen minutes, and then we caught the taillights of the Hummer. Vanilla pushed her foot down, and the Buick’s engine sang like a siren; the tires clawed the road with a vengeance.
I hadn’t thought to put on my seat belt, but right then I remembered and snapped it into place and tried not to shit myself. We were going so fast the car was starting to wobble and the trees to either side of us looked like a solid wall. One thing about a Hummer is it doesn’t run that fast, and the Buick was a goddamn ground jet.
We were closing fast.
54
Let me tell you how I screamed. It was loud and long and it blended with Leonard’s and Jim Bob’s screams and it was almost loud enough to smother Booger’s cackling laughter. Vanilla made not a sound.
What caused the scream was that it appeared we were going to run right up that Hummer’s ass. We were so close, had the Hummer had a bumper sticker we would have collided. The Hummer had a modified door, so that the back end swung open, and as it did two men with automatic weapons, down on their knees, started firing.
Vanilla braked and drifted sideways into what I thought would surely be a bar ditch or a tree, but we were lucky. There was a wide spot there, and the next instant we were beside the Hummer. I saw that the windshield in our ride was punctured in several places and the punctures sprang fractures and then the fractures spread rapidly with a sound like thin ice cracking under a fat skater’s feet.
The glass blew back on us just as I ducked, and I heard Jim Bob yell, “Goddamn it.”
When I rose up the windshield was gone and there was blood running down my face. I glanced at Vanilla. She had cuts on her forehead and cheek, and there was a small piece of glass sticking out of the top of her hairline, but if she’d even blinked when the glass shattered, I didn’t notice it. Then again, I had just had my head between my legs and had been trying to crawl up my own asshole, so I might have missed something.
I looked back over the seat. Leonard raised a hand in a polite wave. His mouth made a wiggle that I was supposed to think was a smile. He didn’t even seem to be cut. Jim Bob was using a gloved hand to pull a bit of broken glass from his shoulder. Booger was on the right-hand passenger side. He rolled down his window and stuck his head and arms and the sawed-off out of it. Blood drops flew off the cuts on his face and blew back into the night like red drops of sweat. The back windshield was gone, too.
I turned back to the front, rolled my window down, and looked at Vanilla.
“I’m going to brake.”
“I know,” I said.
She downshifted and braked so fast it was like a single motion. The car’s hum lowered to a purr, and as we slowed that sent the Hummer flying in front of us again. When it did, I hung my head and arms out the window with my shotgun and hoped Booger wouldn’t shoot the back of my head off. Me and Booger fired close together, and the sound of those shotguns made my head feel as if a horde of crazed monkeys were beating on bongos inside my brain.
Booger yelled, “I was born for this!”
I pumped the shotgun, fired again at the open back door where the men stood, and one of them dropped down and rolled out even as the other man tried to grab him. The Buick went over his head with a bump and a loud squish.
Vanilla shifted gears, and we swung to the left side of the vehicle again, just as the other man tried to fire at us. He caught the tail end of the Buick, dancing shots across the trunk and into the woods before we pulled directly alongside the Hummer.
The Hummer driver tried to take the middle of the road and drive us off of it. We were coming up on a narrow bridge, and there wasn’t anywhere else for us to go but off of it or back behind the Hummer again. We eased back behind it.
Me and Booger opened fire. By this time Jim Bob had rolled down the window on his side and was sitting in the window with his shotgun swung over the top of the Buick’s roof, firing. I heard Leonard say, “I’ll just sit here quiet in the middle.”
The Hummer clumped its tires over the bridge, and the man in the back who was on his knees firing went backwards and dropped his gun, got himself together long enough to close the back door. No sooner was the Hummer over the bridge than Vanilla was riding the Hummer so close we were like a hemorrhoid on its ass.
The Hummer braked, and in that moment I thought we were all going to be sitting in the front seat with the driver, but Vanilla jerked the wheel left and went forward and alongside the Hummer so close it took the mirror off on my side and scraped the door handles front and back. Since me and Booger had just pulled heads and arms inside, the timing was perfect, even if it hadn’t been on purpose.
Vanilla started rolling her window down. She said, “Hap, take the wheel.”
“What?”
“Take the wheel and sit on my feet.”
I snapped off my seat belt and grabbed the wheel. Vanilla was out the window, drawing her big automatic as she did. I slid over, and she locked her feet under my ass. I put my foot on the gas and pulled us directly alongside th
e Hummer driver. His hand came out his open window, and it was full of pistol.
Vanilla, sitting on the window frame, twisted and fired over the roof of the car. The driver was close enough to our car I heard him make a sound like a gasket blowing, and then the Hummer went off the road and into a bar ditch and out of that and through some small trees, fetched up finally against a large sweet gum with a soul-breaking impact that scattered bark like confetti. A burst of white smoke rolled out of the back of it, and on the far side a door opened, and I caught a glimpse of a man making a run for it through the woods, carrying a long gun.
Vanilla swung back inside the car with such force she knocked me out from behind the wheel, and the Buick wavered. She caught the wheel and whirled it and hit the emergency brake even as she downshifted. The Buick swung around, facing back in the direction we had come from.
“Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “But let’s see you make it dance.”
Vanilla gunned us forward, came to a stop across from the place where the Hummer had left the road. We all got out of the car. Booger went about three feet and fell down. “Shit,” he said. “Took one through the leg. It’s broken.”
Me and Jim Bob and Leonard ran to the Hummer. Jim Bob jerked open the back door. There was the wounded man with a pistol in his hand and the barrel pressed up under his chin. “I just wanted you to know I made my own way,” he said and fired the pistol, launching the top of his skull with its greasy hair against the roof of the Hummer, spraying it and us with brains and blood. The skullcap hit the floor of the Hummer, spun around like a hubcap that had come loose, rattled against the flooring, then stopped moving.
There was no one else inside.
When I turned around Leonard was gone. I went the way I figured he had to go, where the trees and brush were thinnest. I had almost caught up with him when he came to a spot where the trees were sparse and the moon was bright. He went along quick-like—too quick-like, because the man he was hunting lifted up as he passed, pointing an automatic rifle. I fired quickly with the shotgun, and the blast tore through the brush, but if I hit him it wasn’t a killing blow. He turned toward me, his teeth flashing in the moonlight, his rifle swinging around, and when he did Leonard turned and shot him, knocking him down behind the brush where he had been hiding.
We were both on him now. We peeled back the brush. He had dropped his rifle on the ground. He was hit bad but not dead. He was reaching for the rifle. I kicked it aside. He lay on his back and looked up at us. He looked small and pale and like someone you wouldn’t notice twice. He looked like all the others that made up the Canceler, as if they had been cut from the same bolt of cloth. The moon floated in his eyes.
He turned his head toward me. His mouth opened and closed, trying to find air. I remembered when I was a kid and had a BB gun, thought I was a mighty hunter, and shot a bird. When I went to pick it up, its beak was open and it was trying to find the air it couldn’t put back into its small lungs. That was the end of killing birds for the hell of it. I still have that bird’s soul on my head, and a lot worse things now. Leonard raised his shotgun to shoot, but then hesitated.
The man quit gasping. The moon floated out of his eyes.
55
Me and Leonard have a veterinarian friend who sews us up in secret when we need it. He charges a lot. He has to. If he got caught he’d be sewing up shank wounds in Huntsville prison.
We went to him. He took care of us, Booger in particular. A fragment of a shell had found a place in his leg where it wanted to live. It was pretty deep, and maybe someone else would have died of shock, but Booger had him take it out without deadening the wound. I think he enjoyed showing us how much tougher than us he was. I thought it showed how much smarter we were.
The vet cut the piece of metal out of him, and Booger only grunted, but when the vet started sewing the wound up, he passed out.
“If he dies,” Jim Bob said, “we can call it a win-win.”
“That’s not very nice,” I said.
“Oh, but so true,” Leonard said and kind of laughed, or maybe it was a cough.
We all had some cuts and such to patch up, and we got that done. None of us had been cut badly by the glass, though Vanilla was going to have a small scar right in the middle of her part. I looked at her while the vet doctored her up. She was cut in places, and there was blood in her hair, and damn if she still didn’t look like a goddess.
When it was all done and Booger came awake and consented to some pain pills, we paid our vet friend with Jim Bob’s money and went back to the safe house. Soon as we were there, Booger, who found a place on the couch, said, “I counted seven, not eight.”
“I thought about that,” I said. “Maybe there were only seven to begin with.”
“And maybe,” Booger said, “the ones in the Hummer were coming back from some paid mission, and the guys we caught at the compound were holding down the fort. That means there could still be one more out there prowling around, on a job, and when he comes home, boy, is he going to be mad.”
“It’s possible,” Jim Bob said. “Problem is, it’s hard to figure out how much was real about those guys and how much was myth. One thing is for sure, they had a lot of balls in jars.”
Me and Leonard told them then about the shed and what we found there.
“Jesus,” Jim Bob said. “That’s a lot of killing these creeps have done.”
“I always heard there were eight,” Vanilla said. She had just come out of the bathroom, where she had changed into jeans and a loose T-shirt, slipped on white tennis shoes.
“But you don’t know it for a fact?” Leonard asked.
“No.”
Next morning I made a call to Marvin, and later in the day me and Leonard went to town to the Japanese restaurant, arriving at 12:15. Leonard waited in the car, and I went in. I promised to bring him an order of rice and hibachi beef.
I walked past the SUV parked out front, this time with two guys in it. They didn’t look like they were taking their bodyguard duties seriously. One was sitting behind the steering wheel with his head thrown back on the seat and his eyes closed. The other sat on the front passenger side reading something on his cell phone.
Inside I found the Barbecue King in his usual spot. I pointed at him when the waitress came over. I slid into the seat across from him.
He looked at my banged-up face, with its bruises and Band-Aids, observed my stiff movements.
“You look like you shaved with a brush hog.”
“I feel worse. Lunch is on you, and I want a takeout order.”
“I assume I’m paying because you have good news.”
“Your exile ends. Be here tomorrow, and a policeman named Marvin Hanson will be here to visit with you. You will go away with him. More policemen will show up at your place at the same time, and the guys outside, any others that might be around, will have their ass in a crack before they can ask, ‘Are those handcuffs new?’”
“I have to take your word for it that you killed the Cancelers?”
“You do,” I said. “Here’s the thing, pal. It’s best you have the meeting, set yourself up to have a chance at rolling over on the others. Maybe the feds will decide you’re more important and will find you a nice warm spot in Albuquerque with a new name and a retirement plan. They’ve been protecting those you say are worse than you, so now you get your chance.”
“I’m no angel, Collins, but yeah, they’re worse.”
“If you got some information you want to show Marvin, and it’s something you can have with you when you show up here, I would. That way nothing gets lost in the arrest and no one can say they just found it and you didn’t give it to them. Put you out of the deal altogether. You want Marvin first, not the feds.”
“I can put it all on a memory stick and have it in my pocket, close to my heart, but since I’m having to give it to the cops, I’ll put it in my front pants pocket, close to my cock.”
“You can put it up your ass for all I care, just have it. Or you
will go down, and in a lot less pleasant way.”
He leaned back and crossed his arms. “I’ve conned my way out of the police before.”
“I wasn’t talking about the police.”
He smiled at me.
“Waitress,” he called out, “we’re ready to order.”
56
Now, let me tell you, for a few days I worried about that eighth member of the Cancelers, but after a while I didn’t worry so much. I decided, as Leonard did, that there were only seven.
Booger went home, and so did Jim Bob, and Vanilla stayed at the safe house with us for a few days. She came to me one night while I was sleeping, limping a little still. She wore nothing. She crawled into bed.
“It’s not going to happen, Vanilla.”
She stretched out and put her arm over my chest.
“At least I hope not.”
“No?”
“Well, I mean I hope not. Jesus, Vanilla. Really?”
She giggled a little. It was the only time I had ever heard her sound less than reserved. She could talk about anything and sound reserved, but that giggle, it wasn’t like her. It was girlish.
“Nobody need know but us,” she said.
“I would know.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Sorry, Vanilla.”
“Let me put it like this, Hap. You called me. I came. This is the price.”
“And if I don’t pay?”
“Don’t ever call again.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have called in the first place.”
“Think about how it went down out there and tell me that again.”
I couldn’t tell her that again.