Looking around, we saw there was a backyard fence. It was the neighbor’s fence, not one that belonged to Jackie’s rental, but it blocked easy sight of us at the rear of the house. To the left were shrubs and another house. On the other side was a grassy section, and beyond you could see a street, and beyond that the old red-brick Piggly Wiggly that had closed down when I was in high school. No other business had replaced it. An old car motored by on that street, coughed around a corner, and moved out of sight.
“How fast can you pick a lock?” I said.
“Fast enough,” Leonard said. He pulled his lock-picking kit out of his pocket but hesitated. He tried the door. It was unlocked.
“Fast enough for you?” Leonard said.
“Plenty fast,” I said, and we slipped inside and shut the door.
The air was thick and warm and a little sticky, had that musty odor a house gets that’s been closed up for a while with no one living there. There was furniture in the room, most of it of the bargain-basement variety.
We went past a kitchen table and some cheap kitchen chairs with plastic seats and backs with butterfly designs on the plastic. Very festive. We entered the bedroom, and because I am an ace detective, I noticed it was empty. No bed. No end tables. Nothing. The closet door was thrown open, and all that was in there was some dust.
Leonard said, “You hear that?”
“What?”
He put a finger to his mouth and became very still. When he spoke, it was softly. “Someone just came in the back door.”
Before we could move out of the bedroom, the doorway filled with a shape about the size of a grizzly bear in platform shoes. The bear had on a red-and-white knit cap with ears on it, bear ears, of course, and he was carrying one of the kitchen chairs. Bear or no bear, he had entered the house and the room with no more noise than a polite lady folding a Kleenex. Before I could say a word or do a thing, he hit me with the chair.
10
He hit me a good lick. Even cheap chairs are surprisingly sturdy. It knocked me down. I tried to get up, but the floor wouldn’t let me. It was holding me back. My shoulder, which had taken the brunt of the blow, felt as if it were missing, and my reflexes had taken a vacation. My forehead had intercepted a bit of the chair as well. It ached.
As Leonard charged him, the chair swung through the air again, but Leonard ducked low. The chair passed over him, and he rushed the bear, caught his legs near the ankles, and hit him in the groin with his head, which knocked him back on his ass, causing him to lose his bear-ear hat and his grip on the chair. The chair slid across the floor, hit the far wall with its legs, and bounced back toward us. That chair was aggressive.
The bear had enough savvy and experience, or had watched enough mixed martial arts, to wrap his legs around Leonard and squeeze him between them.
Before the bear could go for a move of some sort, Leonard snapped both of his elbows back and into the bear’s inner thighs, causing him to grunt and drop his legs. Leonard got a knee up and in the bear’s balls, grabbed the bear’s left leg, and passed it quickly over his head, rolling the beast onto his belly. Then Leonard was on the bear’s back, slamming a right and then a left hook into his head.
“That’s for Hap,” Leonard said.
I felt that was very thoughtful.
“Damn, that hurt,” the bear said.
“You ought to try being hit by a chair,” I said.
By that time the floor was nice enough to relinquish some gravity so I could sit with my legs crossed. The room was still moving a bit.
The bear had his hands over the back of his head, trying to protect himself.
“You done, shit-ass?” Leonard said.
“I’m done,” the bear said. “Done.” He sounded like a kid who had just been whipped by his mother for playing in the mud while wearing his Sunday go-to-meeting clothes.
I was considerably better by that point. My head hurt, but I was in control of my legs. The room wasn’t spinning anymore. I got up, went over, and squatted down near the bear. He couldn’t raise his head comfortably with Leonard on his back, but with me in my squatting position, he could hear me quite well.
“I got a question, Ace.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I’ll do the questions, you do the answers. Why the fuck did you hit me with a goddamn chair?”
“This ain’t your house,” Ace said.
“Isn’t yours either,” I said.
“You don’t know that,” Ace said.
“I’m a pretty good guesser. Were you looking for Jackie?”
“You know her?”
“We do,” I said. “Kind of. And we know who you are.”
“Yeah, calling me by my name sort of gave me the idea you might. But how do you know me?”
“You look as ugly as you did in the shitty photograph we saw,” Leonard said.
Ace said to me, “Can you get this gorilla off my back?”
“Is that racist?” I asked Leonard. “Calling you a gorilla?”
“No one would ever think a man as handsome as me might resemble a gorilla,” Leonard said. “But you know, sometimes that is an insult for black folk.”
“Why I’m asking,” I said.
“What the fuck?” Ace said. “I’m black too.”
“Damn, Leonard. He is black.”
“Then we got to say it wasn’t meant racist,” Leonard said.
“Shall you get off his back?” I said.
“Ace,” Leonard said. “I’m going to get up, and if you try to move and get frisky, I’m going to beat your ass flat as my line of credit.”
Leonard stood up, then bent and frisked Ace for weapons, didn’t find any. Ace remained on the floor.
Leonard stepped away from Ace, looked at me, said, “Hap, you all right?”
“Close enough to it,” I said.
“You want me to hit him with the chair?” Leonard said. “Would that make you feel better?”
“Naw, it’s cool,” I said.
Ace remained on his stomach. Leonard righted the chair, pulled it up close to Ace, and sat down on it.
“Now,” I said, “why-for-how-come did you hit me with a goddamn chair? And let’s keep our answers to the point, because I’m in a bad mood, and you put me there.”
“I thought y’all was thieves, coming up in here.”
“What are we going to steal?” I said. “Those nice kitchen chairs, the shitty table? Couple dust motes out of the closet?”
“I don’t know,” Ace said. “I was hoping it was Jackrabbit, then I seen you two.”
“You could have said howdy,” I said. “Where I come from, it’s a nicer greeting than hitting someone with a fucking chair.”
“All right, then, I’m sorry.”
“My head hurts anyway.”
Leonard hummed a few bars of Kasey Lansdale’s song “Sorry Ain’t Enough.”
“I hear that,” I said. “And agree.”
“What?” Ace said.
Leonard tapped Ace on the ribs with the toe of his boot. “I can tell you’re no music lover.”
“Hadn’t knocked me down,” Ace said, “I’d have whipped both your asses.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So you’re saying if Leonard hadn’t whipped your ass you’d have whipped his, and mine too? Well, hell, dumbass. If the world wasn’t turning we could all get off. You can sit up now.”
“But do it easy and don’t get cute,” Leonard said. “You might not be as big and able as you like to imagine.”
11
We ended up in the kitchen. I took the chair that had been used to whack me and placed it at the table and sat on it as a kind of vengeance. Leonard stood with his arms crossed and leaned against the wall near where Ace sat.
Ace had retrieved that ridiculous hat and it was resting on his knee. I knew from the way Leonard eyed it, he wanted one. It had a tie on either side that could be used to bind it under the chin.
“You hit me hard,” he said to Leonard.
br /> “Yep,” Leonard said. “And I can do it again.”
“I’m starting to think I should have let Leonard hit you with this chair,” I said.
“Look here, Ace,” Leonard said. “Let’s bury the hatchet. Door was open when we came. We’re here looking for Jackie—Jackrabbit—on account we were hired by her mother and brother to find her.”
“Well, that’s something,” Ace said, looking at Leonard. “Was you wearing whiteface when her family showed up?”
“They wanted me to,” Leonard said.
“What the fuck, then, man?” Ace said. “Why would you work for them fucking peckerwoods?”
“Money spends either way, no account for color,” Leonard said.
“And they wanted to know about their daughter,” I said. “I thought if she was missing and something was wrong, we ought to find out. Seemed like the right thing to do.”
“One of you works for money, and the other one is some kind of knight?”
“We both spend the money,” Leonard said. “You came here looking for her, so you expected her to be here.”
Ace shook his head gently. I figured it hurt too much for him to shake it hard.
“I came by here even though I knew she was gone, but then I seen your car at the curb. I tried the doors, and the back one was unlocked. I came in and found y’all, and I thought maybe you had something to do with her missing.”
“And your immediate solution was to hit me with a chair,” I said.
“I didn’t know if you had guns or not,” Ace said. “I didn’t know if you was all right or not.”
“You’ll have to take our word,” I said. “We’re all right. All we want to do is find Jackie.”
“Still don’t like the idea of that brother of hers seeing her again,” Ace said, “and neither does she. You ought to keep that in mind while you’re looking for her. He’s dangerous. Got some old ideas.”
“We find her, we won’t make her go home,” I said. “We’ll just make sure she’s okay and tell our clients she’s fine or she isn’t, and then Jackie can do what she wants. I think it’s fair enough that even a couple of racist assholes ought to know what happened to their loved one. And if you know something about where she is or what happened to her, and you don’t tell us, we might have to think you got something to do with her not being around. That could look bad for you. We got some friends in LaBorde who are cops, and they got friends all over the place. We tell some kind of story that includes you in a starring role, some people might believe it.”
“He means you might go to jail, you did something or not,” Leonard said. “No charge for the translation.”
“I ain’t done nothing with her, man. I been looking for her. I come by here just like I said. Seen your car, thought she might be with someone else. Don’t know exactly what I thought. I came in and heard y’all, picked up a chair, and hit Whitey with it.”
“And Whitey didn’t like it,” I said.
“When did you see her last?” Leonard said.
“I don’t mark it on the calendar. Me and her, we had a thing going, you know, and her mother and that fucked-up brother didn’t like it. He threatened me once and pulled a knife. I hit him with a chair.”
“Seriously,” I said.
“Yep.”
“You like chairs,” I said.
“Thomas never mentioned you two had a confrontation,” Leonard said. “That didn’t come up.”
“Still happened,” Ace said. “Bet he didn’t mention getting his ass handed to him.”
“But really,” I said, “a chair? You go around hitting everyone with a chair?”
“It was handy. Me and her, we done all right, even had a kid. I think that fucking preacher might have talked her out of staying with me.”
“That’s not his story,” Leonard said.
“He’s probably got a lot of stories,” Ace said.
“We heard about the kid and the miscarriage,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Shit, there wasn’t any miscarriage,” Ace said. “Kid got born. I didn’t see it much, and I don’t even know what she named it. She went back to Junkyard George for a while. Found out he was the same asshole he was when she left him the first time. She wouldn’t tell me nothing about the baby. Said that wasn’t my concern no more.”
None of this fit anything we had been told so far.
“Take it you weren’t hanging with the white folks when her dad was preaching at the old picture show,” Leonard said.
“I couldn’t get in that church then. Jackrabbit’s father would have shot my ass and told how a wild nigger come up in there to rob him, and he’d most likely been believed. Folks in this town ain’t entirely civilized, you know what I mean?”
“You knew Sebastian, though?” I said.
“Knew who he was,” Ace said. “I came to the church after he sold it to that other fellow, Jamesway. Listened to a couple of Jamesway’s sermons, but I wasn’t thinking Jesus. I was trying to get back with Jackrabbit. And they had free cookies on Wednesday, and some really bad coffee. I tell you this, and I’m serious, don’t drink the fucking coffee over there.”
“Too late,” Leonard said.
“Ain’t it bad?” Ace said.
“The worst,” Leonard said.
“Sebastian ever threaten you, say anything to you about being with Jackie?” I said.
“Like I said, didn’t go up in there when he was running the show. Went later, when Jamesway came in. Her father still lived in the back then but didn’t have no say about who came and went anymore. Spent his time drinking, until one day he’s gone. Then there’s stories about what happened to him, and then Jackie’s gone.”
“Stories?” Leonard said, knowing full well what Ace meant. But we wanted to hear him say it.
“Stories about how he was killed. Talk about how he had himself killed in a fucked-up kind of way. Never heard of nobody doing something like that. Don’t know I believe it. Course, he’d offered money to have it done, so a person might make an exception. Fucker wasn’t exactly lovable. Before it went down, when me and Jackrabbit was together, she told me how her father’s favorite part of the Bible was where Jesus got whipped, nailed on the cross, and stuck with a spear. He told her with Jesus on the cross like that, had to have pissed and shit himself, ’cause that’s what would happen. He liked all that pain and death, piss and shit. He wanted to have something like it, to die slow and in pain.”
“How’d Jackie take what happened to her dad?” I said.
“Pretty well, actually. By then, think she was glad he was gone. She tried to get this daughter-and-daddy thing going, but she might as well have been invisible. Her being pregnant didn’t move him off the dime either, it being a black baby. Never did find out what happened to my kid, but I will. Hell, I think I’d do better than Jackie raising a kid.”
“You don’t look like the dedicated-father type to me,” I said.
“Shit. You don’t know me none at all. Jackrabbit had some fucked-up ideas. All she thought about was numbers and diagrams and shit. She was always saying how numbers and diagrams could explain anything except emotions. That’s the way she put it. Something would come up now and again, and she’d say something about this or that, and I’d think, Damn, that gal has stripped a gear. She’d say how she could move between dimensions or some such shit and how in one of them she was happy as a pig in shit, and in this one, not so much. She’d go to the good one when she needed to be happy, but she came back to this one to be mad. Claimed you could do that ’cause it could be explained by numbers, but I don’t see it. How does that add up or subtract into living in dimensions and shit? Hell, I still have trouble with the times tables, so what do I know? Didn’t matter none. Just wrote it off as part of the bill I had to pay to get that pussy. Let me tell you, in the sack, that name of hers wasn’t just about teeth.”
“Possible you liked being with her so much,” I said, “that when she quit being with you and started skinning someone else’s ba
nana, you got jealous and did her in? That possible?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I loved that woman. Loved her like only an idiot could love her.”
“Bet that’s right,” Leonard said.
Ace looked wounded.
Leonard said, “Where’d you get that hat?”
“What?”
“The hat. Where’d you get it?”
Ace told him.
“How much did it cost?”
Ace told him.
“That ain’t bad,” Leonard said.
12
I figured we had out of him all we were going to get, at least under the circumstances. Combined with the fact that we were all guilty of breaking and entering a home that didn’t belong to any of us, even if the door was left unlocked, we decided to play it quiet and decamp.
We left out of the house, turning the inside lock behind us, so that when we closed the door it clicked solid shut. Ace stepped on ahead of us and was around the side of the house before we were.
As me and Leonard reached the walk, the black cat came out from between the shrubs, where perhaps it had still been shitting, and crossed in front of us.
“Oh, good, that’s par for the course,” Leonard said. “Black cat crosses our path.”
When we got in the car, I saw in the rearview mirror that Ace was climbing into a junky black truck parked across the street and back from us. Leonard turned and wrote its license plate down on a notepad for good measure.
No one seemed to be watching us besides Ace. There was no one out in the yards or peeking through house windows. No spy drones buzzed overhead, and there were no street cameras. Ace didn’t drive by us shooting a tommy gun.
As we cruised away from there, I said to Leonard, “What do you think?”
“I think everybody’s lying.”
“Maybe Ace was lying a little,” I said, “but I don’t think he was lying a lot.”
“You seem in the mood to believe everybody. Let me sell you a sack of shit, ’cause in the morning it’s going to turn into a bag of gold.”
We found a dollar store where I could get something for my chair-induced headache, and then we drove to the Mexican restaurant on the block next to the bookstore and ate. They served damn good chili there and I took my headache cure with a glass of iced tea.