I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
“He’s up to the house,” Herman said.
“Someone comes out of the house, points him out, we got to start shooting right then,” I said. “Maybe we should trade guns, Brett. Modesty aside, I can shoot the ass off a fly at a hundred yards.”
“I’m a good shot myself,” Brett said.
“Yeah, but I’m going to venture I’m better,” I said. “Leonard says I’m the best there is.”
“Like he knows everything,” Brett said.
“Don’t let him hear you say I said it, but about some things he knows more than anyone has a right to. Like how well I shoot. You get inside, maybe you should have the shotgun. Easy to handle, spreads people all over the place. It’s alternately loaded with buckshot and slugs.”
Brett thought a moment, traded weapons with me.
“You start getting heated up,” Herman said to Brett, “mind where you’re firing that thing.”
I eased up slightly on the rise, lay the dark-barreled Winchester on the dirt mound, and pointed it down there. I saw a man come outside lighting a cigarette. Behind him, through the open door, came the sound of music and laughing. I saw a woman in a red dress walk by. She was long and lean with big breasts and reddish hair. I couldn’t see her face.
Tillie?
I drew a bead on the man. He closed the door, clung close to the wall, finally fell away from it, staggered into the foliage, shook his head, slapped the back of his neck as if to wake himself. He opened his fly and started pissing while he smoked.
A shadow came off the ground and fell down on him and the cigarette shot out of the man’s mouth and the man went down. A moment later he was dragged into the foliage.
“Leonard must have knifed him,” Herman said.
“Strangled him,” I said. “Leonard can constrict those arteries, crush your windpipe while you’re still trying to decide what’s happening. That’s one down.”
“But the question is,” Brett said, “one of how many?”
“I don’t think there’s a lot,” Herman said. “You can’t judge by the transportation, ’cause a lot of people get dropped off here. They hang out two or three days, then back to work. Kind of like a company picnic. Except for the whores. A lot of them get on the wrong side of these guys while they’re drinking and boozing. Throw in sex and the fact these people don’t have to pay for anything they do … Bad combination.”
“These people?” Brett said.
“Yeah,” Herman said. “I was one of them. But not now.”
I saw Leonard move out of the brush and over to a window, then away from it. He peeked in another, went around the side of the house and past the corral. The horses and mules rumbled about, then he was behind the house and out of sight.
We waited and watched a long time.
No Leonard.
I was beginning to get worried when I heard him speak softly behind us. “It’s me,” he said. “Don’t anybody shoot.”
“Goddamn, Leonard!” Brett said. “I damn near threw a turd.”
“Sorry,” Leonard said, squatting on the ground.
“You’re good,” Herman said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “I know.”
“What’s it like?” I said.
“Bad,” Leonard said. “In the front room I counted ten. It’s a big house. I went all around it. The windows at the back are covered. I could hear activity in the back room. Sex.”
“Did you see Tillie?” Brett asked.
“I think so,” Leonard said. “I saw three women. There’s one looks something like Tillie’s picture, but I think maybe she’s had some work done.”
“Work?” Brett said.
“I think she … or they … had her lips filled with collagen, or whatever that stuff is makes women look like they just got punched in the mouth. She’s got red hair. A red dress on.”
“I saw her pass the doorway,” I said.
Leonard nodded. “I think maybe she’s had something done to her nose and cheeks too. Sort of Barbie-dolled up. But I’m pretty sure it’s her.”
“Maybe we wait awhile till everyone’s good and drunk or drugged,” I said.
“You never know when a new group comes in,” Herman said. “The girls down there, they don’t get much rest. Truth is, they keep ’em so hyped on pills, they lose a lot of ’em. They keep ’em fired up because the traffic is constant. But one of ’em keels over, there’s plenty of sand to put them under out there, and there’s always a new one to bring in.”
“I don’t need to hear any more,” Brett said.
“I take the front,” I said. “Leonard, you take the back. I assume there’s a back door?”
“Yeah, but the hot action is up front,” Leonard said. “You and me ought to go in together. It’ll take both of us. We maybe can surprise them and take Tillie out without having to get too active. In the meantime, Herman has to put one of the vehicles out of whack, and hot-wire the other. Unless you can do that, Brett.”
Brett shook her head.
“Then you got to go in the back, Brett,” Leonard said. “You got to go in there meaner than a junkyard dog with a hot poker up its ass. What you see that ain’t Tillie, ain’t one of the working girls, you may have to shoot.”
“And you have to watch the working girls,” Herman said. “They have odd loyalties sometimes.”
“You got to grab Tillie if you see her and take her out whichever way is out,” Leonard said. “You got to try and grab the ride Herman’s wiring. And Herman, you got to protect that ride and cover our asses when we come out.”
“Done,” Herman said. “I’ll go down now. When I wave, one jeep’s dead and the other is hot-wired. Get the woman, and we’re out of here.”
“When Herman waves,” I said, “you go first, Brett. Go wide and around back. You don’t enter. You don’t do shit until you hear us up front. When we let loose, you count to three. Slowly. Then you go in the back. If it’s locked, blow off the lock and kick your way in. Remember, when you crank down on that baby the first shot will cover half the room. The second, the slug, will knock a hole in someone about the size of your fist.”
Leonard gave Herman his lock-blade knife.
“Luck to us all,” Herman said, and he went over the rise and down.
25
Herman made it, poked a knife in the tire. We could hear the air go out of it all the way up the hill. But no one came out of the house. The music was loud and no one was on guard. It wasn’t a place they thought they had to be on guard.
Herman cut the rest of the tires. We could hear the air from them as well. Herman waved at us. Brett took a deep breath. I said, “Remember, it gets down to brass tacks, hon, you cover your ass.”
“I will,” she said, and kissed me.
“Go wide,” Leonard said. “No hurry. Take it easy. We’ll watch till you get behind the house before we make a move. Find some place to lay down back there and wait for our noise. When you hear it, let it be a starting gun. Don’t think about it. You come through that back door like you’re ten feet tall and bulletproof.”
“I think I can do this,” Brett said.
“You can’t,” I said, “just hold your position out there somewhere. We’ll do what we can.”
“I can do it,” Brett said. She turned and ran wide along the low ridge, went over it stooping, making a wide circle toward the back of the house.
Leonard rolled over on his back and stuck out his hand and I shook it. He said, “Good luck, brother.”
“Ditto,” I said.
“When this is over, Hap, what you say we make something of our lives?”
“I’d like that.”
“I mean it this time.”
“I mean it every time.”
“But it don’t change.”
“I mean for it to.”
“We got to do more than mean it this time. It’s got to happen.”
“Maybe I don’t know how to change.
”
“We’re going to learn how. Got me?”
I saw that Brett had gone wide and was now behind the house. Herman was out of sight. Most likely in the jeep. I said, “Watch your ass, Leonard.”
“You too,” he said, and grinned at me. The moonlight made his teeth seem magnificently white, as if they were lit by blacklight. I gave him a pat on the arm and we eased over the rise on our bellies, made a Y. Me to the left, Leonard to the right. We were about thirty feet apart, crawling toward the thick clusters of brush in front of the house. It was slow go and hard on the body, especially since I was toting a few more pounds than I needed. The air seemed clean and sharp as a knife inside my lungs. My mouth was dry. My body seemed disconnected from my mind. As if I were standing up on the hill watching myself ease down toward the house. I tried not to think beyond the moment. The moment was all that mattered now. I had to be alert. I had to be ready.
Quit thinking about the moment, goddammit, about being ready. Just be ready. Keep crawling. An inch at a time. Eyes open, ears alert. Reach down inside yourself and find that primal part of yourself. The old reptilian brain. The part of the mind that is nothing more than motor response; the part that’s pure survival. Don’t think, just do.
The brush was sharp with thorns and bristles and it tore at my light jacket. I slipped out of the jacket, took the Winchester shells from it, and put them in my right back pocket. I took the pistol out of the jacket and slipped it in my left back pocket. I crawled on.
A sidewinder rattlesnake slithered in front of me and went into the brush. It was all I could do not to leap up and start running. All I could do not to open fire on it.
I thought, you’re going to run like hell from a snake, but you think you’re going to kick open the front door of a house full of bad-asses and go in there shooting?
Reptilian brain, my ass.
You are one crazy sonofabitch, Hap Collins.
Finally I bellied within twenty feet of the cabin. Around the door the vegetation was cleared. I could smell food coming from under the crack of the door. Steak maybe. My stomach rolled over. It was loud and rambunctious in there. They were playing ZZ Top’s “Legs.” Just a bunch of guys having a party. Drinking and doping and dancing and banging whores. Who was I to interrupt them? I didn’t make Tillie a whore. I didn’t ask her to run with the wrong crowd. I didn’t even know her.
I turned my head. I couldn’t see Leonard, just brush. After a moment he raised his hand above the brush. We both rose and darted toward the door. I stopped on the left side of the entryway, Leonard on the right. He looked at me. I took a deep breath and nodded.
Leonard turned the knob, swung the door open, stepped in and I went in behind him. He fanned right, I fanned left. At a glance I saw eight men. One of them, a black man, was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Another black man was sitting in a chair beside him holding the dead man’s head, saying over and over, “That nigger’s dead. I killed that nigger.”
As everyone turned to look at us, the black man kept repeating himself. “That nigger’s dead. I killed that nigger.” Apparently he and his buddy had had an altercation, and now his buddy was gradually assuming room temperature. No one else seemed in the least bothered by this.
There were two women in the room, and one of them, a pretty black girl, naked except for a T-shirt that almost covered her breasts and none of her bottom, wobbled over to the wall, stepped in the dead man’s blood and sat her naked ass in it. “Wow,” she said. The other woman, whose hair was so bleached it looked like cotton candy, was completely naked and being held up by a man so small his head was just under her left breast. As she wobbled, his greasy hair kept lifting it as if it might be trying to wave.
“Who the fuck are you?” said one of the men. He wore leather pants and work boots and was shirtless. He was balding and bearded and had a big belly. Tattooed on his belly was a blue and red eagle with a stick of lit dynamite clutched in its beak. On his chest was tattooed I LICK PUSSY LIKE A DOG. In green letters. Very festive. I didn’t worry about what was tattooed on the knuckles of both hands. Too far away. But I figured it was easily on the intellectual level of the chest tattoo.
“Everybody shut up,” I yelled over the music. “We’re here for Tillie.”
“Tillie?” said another man. “Who the fuck’s Tillie?”
“It got to be one of the whores,” said the black man.
“Man, y’all ain’t none of us?” said another.
“No shit,” Leonard said. “All you got to do is give us Tillie, and we will be on our way.”
“You can get right back to cutting one another, fuckin’, and dancing,” I said. “Just as soon as we take Tillie out that door. By the way, you need to bury that motherfucker on the floor. That stuff running out of him isn’t prune juice.”
The guy with the tit on his head said to the woman he was holding up, “You Tillie?”
The stoned woman shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
That was when one of the men in the back, either less stoned than the others or more so, produced a handgun quick as a bunny fucks and fired it. The shot hit me in the shoulder, and without really knowing how, I was on the floor. Then I heard Leonard cut down with the shotgun and the middle of the room went away. Lick Pussy Man had a hole in his eagle and a couple guys were lying on the floor in his blood, moaning. The gun roared again and the guy with the handgun spun around and landed face first. What was left of his head flowed across the floor.
Time stood still. I got hold of the Winchester and used it to help myself up. Now I felt pain. There was a roar at the back of the place, followed by a yell, then another roar. The door at the rear flew open and there was Brett, followed by the stench of gunpowder. A wreath of smoke circled around her head, blood was sprinkled on her face, blood was on the wall behind her. One hand was clamped on Tillie’s elbow, the other held the shotgun pushed up against her hip. Tillie was zonked and completely naked. Like her mother she was a real redhead. Leonard had been right, there had been some work done on her face, but it was her.
“Out of the way!” Brett said. “Fuck out of the way. I’ll shoot any fucker in my way.”
Those still standing parted. Brett and Tillie went between us and out the door. Brett’s face looked demonic. Tillie looked as if she might be trying to add up a hard math problem.
A couple of men, half dressed, but holding heat, rushed out of the back room. A woman peeked out between them, then turned and went away. The men were in the room now, both zonked as lords, but trying to sober. “What the fuck?” one of them said. “What the fuck?”
“Avon,” Leonard said. “And we mean business.”
Then I suppose it all came together for everyone, what was really happening. Pistols snapped out of back pockets and ankle holsters. I cut down the Winchester, cocking and firing. Metal bees buzzed by me, and I kept firing. People seemed to leap away from me, and I saw the girl who had been using her tit for a hat go back in a blaze of flesh and bone as one of my wild shots hit her in the chest. I pivoted to look at the woman sitting on the floor. She was pulling a pistol out from under the dead black man’s shirt and pointing it at me. I turned and fired and the shot drove her head back into the wall and the other black man yelled something at me and I saw he had a gun and I fired. I had gone prehistoric, sniffing that swamp gas and tar. I think I shot him three times. All I know was a moment later I was cocking and pulling the trigger on an empty rifle. I heard Leonard letting fly again, realized he’d been blasting all the time, then through the back door, out of other rooms more men began to pour. They had shotguns and pistols and no sense of personal safety.
I cut down with the shotgun barrel and it was as if a great and invisible wave tore through the fresh recruits, then I was yelling to Leonard to back out of there, and out he went, and me after him, the wall splintering behind us, the men from the back rooms falling over the bodies of their comrades, slipping in their blood.
I said we backed out of there.
Hell, we ran out of there. The jeep came whipping up to the door. We jumped in and Herman lifted his rifle with one hand and fired at the doorway, then he dropped it, grabbed the steering wheel, and away we went.
Just as I was easing myself to a sitting position, there was a blast and I felt stings all over my lower left side. Leonard cut down on those behind us and Herman stabbed the accelerator through the floor. We bolted up and over the ridge where we had hidden earlier, and turned south. Behind us more bullets popped and hissed, but now we were running on the other side of the ridge and they couldn’t see us and their shots were striking the dirt.
“Holy shit!” Brett said. “Holy fucking shit!”
“Shit,” I said. “We killed a bunch of people, Leonard. We killed a bunch of people.”
“Of course we did,” Leonard said, putting a hand on my shoulder, pulling it back as he felt the blood. “Of course we did.”
“Oh, God,” Brett said. “They weren’t so tough, were they? Were they?”
My thigh began to ache. I looked down. It was bleeding, turning my pants wet. My side hurt. I reached over and felt it. Small wounds. Pellets under the skin. I felt limp.
Behind us I saw a blur of white. Leonard saw it about the same time.
A horse.
A man riding bareback.
One of the men had bridled a horse and was trying to chase us down.
“Fuckin’ Lone Ranger,” Leonard said.
The Lone Ranger was unsteady on the horse, but he was firing at us with a handgun. A bullet whizzed between us, just missed Herman’s back and webbed the windshield.
I reached in the front seat and picked up Herman’s Winchester, cocked it, aimed and shot. The horse went down and rolled over, throwing the man. The man stumbled to his feet. The horse didn’t move.