The guy studied me. The guy with him, Cement Head, studied me too. “No,” he said. “There used to be a Tillie here, but she’s not here anymore.”
“Where’d she go?”
Cement Head said, “She ain’t anywhere close. If you want loving tonight, Tillie’s out.”
Blue Suit turned his head and looked at Cement Head. There didn’t seem to be any expression on his face, but there was certainly an expression on Cement Head’s face. Fear.
Blue Suit turned back to me and gave me a smile. His face didn’t go along with the jock build. It was very suave and assured. Here was a man who didn’t have to pay for pussy and knew you did.
“There’s plenty of girls here can do it for you,” Blue Suit said.
A log shifted in the fireplace, crackled. I jumped a little.
“Nervous, aren’t you?” said Blue Suit.
“My first time in a whorehouse,” I said.
He smiled, “Well, we sure wouldn’t have figured that.”
Cement Head laughed on cue, but didn’t overdo it.
Blue Suit said, “That little redhead you were talking to can do more tricks with your dick than a monkey on a jungle gym. My advice is you latch on to her. Though it looks like she’ll be occupied for a while.”
I looked to see her going upstairs with a man on her arm. He was feeling her ass and she was smiling like there wasn’t anything better in the world to her than a strange man’s hand up her crack.
“She’s good,” Blue Suit said. “I promise you that. And they don’t come any cleaner.”
“She’s got that new car smell, then,” I said.
He smiled at me. “That’s right. She may not be new, but she smells new.”
I gave a good leer and went back into the crowd. I wasn’t sure what to do next, but the next moment, a lot of decisions were made for me.
Through the half-open door came someone I knew.
He was wearing an expensive-cut gray Western suit, little gray boots with red jalapeños stitched onto them, and he had on a white ten gallon hat big enough to cook chili in.
It was Red, the midget. Beside him was Wilber, wearing a neck brace. First thing they saw as they entered was me.
13
A lot of things went through my head right then, but none of them told me why the midget and Wilber were here. From what they’d said their lives were on the line and this would be the last place they should be.
But there they were, standing just inside the door, looking at me as if they had just sighted the Virgin Mary in see-through panties and high heels.
I think it took the midget a moment to put it together, but I could tell Wilber knew who I was right away. His mouth fell open and his eyes widened. I believe he and I were mirror images at that moment.
Wilber reached down and got hold of the shoulder of the midget’s suit, trying to alert him, but there was no need. Red had figured it out. Wilber bent down and Red said something in his ear, then smiled at me. Red walked behind one of the couches and over toward the fireplace.
I stood there a moment, trying to decide what to do. One thing was certain. The pickle was out of the jar.
I started walking slowly toward the door, hoping Wilber would let me pass, and knowing he wouldn’t. I tried to go wide to his right, but he said, “I don’t think so.”
I didn’t hesitate. I kicked out hard and caught Wilber in the thigh with the toe of my shoe. It was a good shot, right where the muscles group, and he let out a grunt and bent over. I shifted slightly away from him and snapped my foot up in a back hook and caught him with my heel in the face as he was bent. I made a run for it then, but one of the big guys in the hand-tailored suits appeared. He was so large that when he stood in front of the door it disappeared.
I faked by raising my hand, and he looked up, and I kicked him in the balls, trying to make a field goal somewhere in Central Texas.
It was a good ball shot, but either this guy had nuts of steel or had used so many steroids his ’nads had gone to seed, because all he did was make with a grunt and come at me.
I couldn’t deal with his size and strength, so I tried to sidestep, but I bumped up against somebody, one of the girls, a customer, whatever, and he hit me with a glancing right that jolted me so hard the coins in my pants pocket changed denomination.
I tried to hit him back, but found it hard to do from the floor. And besides, the ceiling was falling on me.
Or so it seemed. It was No Balls coming down on me, and he had hold of my coat and was lifting me. He drew back his fist. At that moment I was so stunned, I sort of welcomed any blow he might give me, but there was still enough reflex in me, still enough of the fighter, that I responded by poking my fingers into his eyes.
He barked, dropped me. I rolled against someone, tried to get up. But the someone was Wilber. He hooked his arm over the back of my head, under my neck, had me in a guillotine choke. I stomped his foot and grabbed one of his legs behind the knee and broke his balance while I swatted his balls with my free hand hard enough for them to replace his Adam’s apple.
He let me go and I squatted and struggled for the revolver in my ankle holster. About that time the door swung wide and there was an explosion and plaster rained down from the ceiling like snow.
I glanced up, and there was Leonard holding the double-barrel, one barrel displaying smoke and sending out a gunpowder stench that temporarily masked the incense in the room.
No Balls had recovered again, and he wasn’t afraid of a shotgun. Or was too stupid to know what it was. He charged Leonard. Leonard sidestepped, swung the double-barrel and hit the big bastard so hard that guy’s distant relatives must have jumped in their chairs.
The big man struck the door behind Leonard, slamming it closed, knocking out the bottom panel with his head. He tried to pull his head back through and Leonard banged him with the barrel again, this time across the ribs, then pointed the shotgun at the other muscle guys who had stupidly made a knot over on the left side of the room. All except the guy in the blue suit and Cement Head, that is. Cement Head was standing in front of Blue Suit, ready to take whatever might come, and Blue Suit was calmly looking over his guard’s shoulder.
Red, wearing his stupid ten gallon hat, was standing next to him, close to his hip, watching the events.
I shouldn’t have, but I looked at Wilber on his hands and knees, trying to get up, and was overcome with rage. I swung my foot in an arc and brought it down on the back of his neck brace with a snapping motion. Wilber screamed, hit the floor and lay there holding his neck. “That hurt! That hurt! Oh, God, that hurt!”—like maybe it was supposed to feel good.
“Well, Hap,” Leonard said. “Looks like you’ve shit in the porridge again.”
“I’ll say.”
I pulled my ankle gun and backed toward Leonard. The big guy with his head through the door was trying to pull it out again. Leonard let him this time, then rapped the barrel over his head harder than ever. The big guy decided to lie down and rest for a moment, but I could see he was twitching already, working to get up.
Leonard opened the door and we backed through it. I heard the sound just a little too late. It was the man I had encountered on the porch. He was rushing our backs like a missile.
Leonard wheeled, cracked the bastard’s head with the barrel of the shotgun, then kicked out and knocked him down. The man came up with a gun in his hand, and Leonard, casual as an angler casting a fly rod, jerked the shotgun down from where it lay over his shoulder, and fired. The man’s left foot went away and he fell to the floor and thrashed like a chicken. Blood went everywhere. Leonard leaned over and casually picked up the man’s pistol and dropped it in his coat pocket. He said, “From now on it’s all left shoes for you, Bubba.”
Leonard broke open the shotgun, put the discarded cartridges in his pocket, and reloaded. He might have been doing nothing more than looking at a splinter in his hand, he was so blasé.
The door in front of us was wide open now, and gradually the bodygu
ards were sliding into the room. They had guns. No more tackle and punch shit. They were going to kill us.
Red pushed in between their legs, for all the world acting like a kid who was about to see something neat in a peep show. Leonard snapped the shotgun shut. We all jumped, then froze.
There was a sound behind us. I glanced carefully over my left shoulder and saw Brett enter the room. She was carrying a pistol by her side. The old lady who had invited me to have a good time came after her, as if to claw her. Brett turned and swung the pistol against the old woman’s head like she was burying an ax in a log. The old woman went down on her knees and dropped her dentures on the floor and held her blood-spurting forehead, said, “You stinkin’ cunt.” Or so I believe. It was hard to tell without her teeth.
Whatever it was, Brett didn’t like it. She bent down and struck her again, this time behind the ear, not hard, but solid enough. The old woman hit the floor, rolled and cussed and bled all over the carpet.
Brett walked up between us. I said, “Let’s back out.”
I thought all the guns in the room would go off then, but they didn’t.
Leonard shouted, “I pull this trigger, half the room disappears.”
That got everyone’s attention. Maybe that’s what they’d been thinking all along and that’s why no one had done anything. There’s nothing like a shotgun with barrels big as subway tunnels to make you take time to consider.
“All guns go away now, or I pull the trigger,” Leonard said. “Do it!”
A couple of beats as everyone looked at the guy rolling around on the floor, screaming, clutching his ankle, his foot spitting blood. The guns went back inside suit coats.
“You,” Brett said to the midget. I turned my attention to the front of the room.
Red pointed at himself.
“Yeah, you,” Brett said. “Shit pile in a hat. Get over here, you little cocksucker.”
Red looked around for help. No one was offering any.
Leonard said, “Do as the lady says, or you’re gonna be even shorter.”
Red wandered toward us, like an amnesiac man who had just walked free of a plane crash somewhere in the Yucatan. In the doorway I saw Wilber appear, one hand on the neck brace. He looked at me with fire in his eyes.
“How’s the neck?” I said.
The fire in his eyes turned to lava.
I gave Red a quick pat-down, found a revolver under his coat. I put it in my coat pocket. I put one hand on Red’s shoulder, and we started backing. Brett deliberately stepped on the old woman’s hand as we went. The woman bellowed and her teeth, which she had recovered and replaced, flew out again. Brett kicked them across the room, and we kept backing. We backed like that all the way out to the car. The entire gang, bodyguards, whores, and johns, and the old woman who was constantly gumming cuss words, came out on the porch and stood under the porch light looking at us.
Leonard opened the trunk, told Red to get inside.
“You’ve got to be kiddin’,” Red said.
“I look like I’m in a humorous mood?”
“I can’t stand tight places.”
“You think the grave ain’t tight?”
Brett grabbed the brim of Red’s hat and jerked it down over his eyes. She whapped him a good one on the top of the head with the pistol. “Do what he says, dick-lick!”
Red hesitated almost as long as it takes to skin the wrapper off a stick of gum, then, the hat still over his eyes, he got hold of the car, climbed inside the trunk, and Leonard closed it.
Leonard gave me the shotgun, went around, got behind the wheel and started the engine. Brett slipped into the back seat. I slid in on the front passenger side, closed the door, and stuck the shotgun out the window.
We roared out of there so fast Leonard fishtailed and banged Brett’s car into the side of a pickup truck. But that didn’t stop us. With the moon at our backs, we went up and over the hill and away, rattling the midget and the guns in the trunk.
14
“I don’t like it,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter what you like,” Brett said.
“Leonard?”
“It’s rough, Hap, but far as I’m concerned, it’s the way to go. Little shit nearly got us all killed. We got to profit from him.”
We had found a road out in the boonies and Leonard had pulled off, hoping to lose any pursuers we might have gained. If anyone had followed, we hadn’t seen sight of them yet. Maybe they were thinking about the shotgun. Then again, Leonard had been driving almost seventy miles an hour on roads that were designed for thirty, so there was a good chance he lost them before they could find their car keys. His driving had been almost as scary as our time in the whorehouse.
We were standing outside the car, beside the road in the bright moonlight, about to open the car trunk. Brett wanted to pistol-whip the dwarf into talking, and Leonard was for it too. He and Brett were just trying to decide on the best pistol for the job. Brett favored a long-barrel, and Leonard thought a short one was better because you could use it up close, requiring no more effort than the snap of a wrist. I didn’t know we had a long-barrel, but somehow Leonard had come up with one of those too, a cold piece from his closet.
I didn’t like the idea, short barrel or long. I was trying to talk them out of it. It’s one thing to hit a guy in self-defense, another to deliberately pistol-whip him.
“Just enough so he talks,” Brett said. “Then maybe a little for entertainment.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“We came all the way up here because he said my daughter was in trouble. Then we see him here. What he told us, it could mean anything, Hap. We could wine and dine him and give him a cigar, but I figure a pistol-whipping is a lot quicker and it would certainly make me feel better.”
“That’s the part worries me,” I said.
“We didn’t come here to be nice,” Brett said. “You’re the one told me it might not be pretty, and now you’re trying to make it pretty.”
“I’m trying to be human. Revenge isn’t the way.”
“People say that just ain’t never had call for any revenge,” Brett said. “Besides, I just want to loosen his tongue some.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Till it falls out of his mouth.”
Leonard rapped on the trunk with the shotgun, which I had returned to him. “Hey, turd. I’m gonna open this trunk, and if you’ve got one of those guns in there, I want you to know, all the ammunition is in the suitcases in the back seat, so don’t waste your time. Besides, I fire in there with this shotgun, we’ll be puttin’ what’s left of you in your hat and still have room for your clothes and a pound of shit. Hear me?”
“Yeah,” said a mumbled voice. “But I don’t want to be pistol-whipped.”
“Been listenin’ have you?” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” Red said. “This guy, Hap, you call him. He’s right. You ought not take your anger out on me.”
“Who says I’m angry?” Leonard said. “I just like to watch a midget take a beatin’.”
“You and everyone else,” Red said.
“I’m gonna open the trunk now,” Leonard said, “and when I do you better roll out of there pretty. You don’t, I’m gonna cut down on you.”
Leonard twisted the key in the trunk and hopped back. The trunk lid flew up and Red’s hands appeared over the edge. “Don’t shoot,” he said, and came out of there with his cowboy hat crunched down on his head, his eyes barely showing beneath the brim.
“Come over here,” Leonard said.
Red sighed, sauntered over to him.
“You want it with the hat on, or off?” Leonard said.
“What a choice,” Red said.
“The hat would cushion it some, but it’ll get all bloody.”
“This is a Stetson,” Red said, “they’re expensive.” He took it off and straightened it out and lay it on the ground, sighed, stood in front of Leonard. “Maybe we could talk before you start hittin’?”
“I ain
’t hittin’ shit,” Leonard said. “Least not yet. She’s doin’ the work.”
Red studied Brett. She was walking toward him with the long-barrel revolver held by her side. Walking like a woman with a mission.
Red looked at me. “You don’t want her to do this. Stop her.”
“I don’t like it,” I said, “but you talk, you won’t have to have it.”
“Talk about what?” Red said, and suddenly Brett was there. The pistol went out and caught him alongside the head and dropped him. When he went to his knees, Brett whipped the pistol back, got some skull with it, whipped it again, like she was trying to cut a Zorro Z.
Red fell face forward and groaned and tried to rise up on his hands, but he wobbled and went down again. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “I didn’t think it would hurt that bad.”
“Hell,” Brett said, “I haven’t even got my swing yet.”
“Hold it, for Christ’s sakes,” I said.
I went over and got hold of Red and tried to pick him up. He said, “I think I like it better on the ground. I’m gonna take a beatin’, least I won’t have to keep gettin’ up.”
I let him go. Brett said, “You told me my daughter was here.”
Red shook his head, and I saw a moonlit glob of blood fall out of his bright hair onto the ground. “I said she had been here and might still be. I didn’t say she was definitely still here. I never said that. You, Hap, you were there. I didn’t say that, did I?”
“Reckon you didn’t,” I said.
“What I want to know is where she is now,” Brett said, “and if you’re smart, you’ll tell me while you’ve still got teeth to talk around.”
“Maybe I ought to sit up,” Red said.
I got hold of him and helped him to his feet. I walked him over to the car and opened the front passenger door. He sat down, his feet hanging outside the car.
“Damn, Hap,” Leonard said. “Why don’t you give him a pillow and a soft drink?”
Brett said, “Maybe I should hit him some more, just for grins.”
“That’s enough,” I said.
“It’s only enough when I say it’s enough,” Brett said.