Leather Maiden

  We talked for a while, and when that played out, we took turns nodding off. About ten-thirty we heard a noise behind us, and it occurred to me that our blackmailers would probably come up on the house the way we did, from the top of the hill, or to be more precise from the opposite side of the hill and through the woods. They weren’t on motorcycles, though, and they weren’t coming up the trail alongside the woods the way we had come. They were walking along a trail on the opposite side. We could hear them whispering, and we could hear limbs being pushed aside not too carefully, and then someone, a woman, cursed, and Jimmy and I looked at each other in the dark.

  We pushed the mosquito net up and eased out of the pup tent. We sat in front of it and were quiet.

  The two people were not quiet. They were louder, now, and we could see them as two human-shaped shadows walking between a crooked row of trees and scraggly brush. If they had looked to their left, and had they really been watching for us, they would have seen us.

  They fought the limbs some more, and I realized then that they hadn’t really scoped things out before coming out here. I was even more certain, now that I could see their shapes and hear their voices, that they were young. Not kids, but young.

  Finishing off the trail, coming out of the woods, they started down the hill, two shapes with the moon fully outlining them and the house below, the vines looking like some kind of strange dark ocean, the waves frozen, the house being the biggest, darkest frozen wave of all.

  They walked down to the gravel behind the house and stopped there for a moment. They were wearing light coats. It was way too hot for coats. The guy leaned over and kissed the girl on the cheek, then they slid in close and held each other for a while.

  After a moment, they broke apart and went on down to the house. They worked at the vine-covered door for a long time, and then it came open and they slipped inside.

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “It isn’t midnight yet. Just wait. Could just be a couple grabbing a quickie.”

  We lay there in the tent behind the skeeter net until about eleven-thirty. No one else had shown.

  “I can’t believe it,” Jimmy said. “That has got to be them.”

  I looked at my watch. “Still half an hour. Someone else could show. In the meantime, I think we ought to wire you up.”

  We got out of the tent, and while we fought mosquitoes, we put the receiver on his belt and pulled his shirt down over it. The way it was set was like a baby monitor. Whatever Jimmy heard, I’d be able to hear up here with a little piece that went in my ear, like one of those walking phones. And I could record it.

  When I had him fixed up, he turned on the receiver and said a few words, and I could hear them in my earpiece. I said, “It seems all right. I don’t know how it’ll work when you’re down the hill apiece, but it ought to be fine.”

  Jimmy went over to his motorcycle. There were saddlebags on it, like a horse. He reached in one of them and took out a pair of gloves and a little snubnosed revolver in a holster that was mostly just a strap with a little belt.

  “I thought we went over the gun business,” I said.

  He came over with another pair of gloves and tossed them at me. “We might end up leaving some print somewhere down there, and we don’t want to do that.”

  At the time, I thought Jimmy was being a little excessive, but later I was glad for the gloves. I pulled them on. When I was finished, I gave him a hard look.

  “I still don’t like the gun. You can keep ignoring me, but I’m going to keep saying it. The gun, it’s not a good idea.”

  “Don’t panic. I’m going to strap it to my ankle. It might be them that loses their cool. They do, I’d like to have a fighting chance.”

  “They’re a couple of kids.”

  “And maybe,” Jimmy said, “they’re the couple of kids who killed Caroline, as well as the ones blackmailing me.”

  “I don’t like the gun business.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going in blazing. But I don’t have any money either. They might take that personally.”

  “Thing is, you got to get them to come outside,” I said. “I can hear you in the house, but I can’t see you and I can’t film. I need to get their faces on the film. Tell them you left the money outside, hid it up the hill. Anything to get them out of the house. What I’m saying as plain as I can say it is don’t go in the house. Don’t get out of my sight.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  We climbed back in the tent and waited. Just after midnight, Jimmy and I got out of the tent and I got the camera and made sure my earpiece was in good, and we tested the equipment again. I adjusted the telescopic viewer on the camera and looked down the hill. The infrared view reminded me of the tools I had used in Iraq. Something about that made my skin crawl. I took a deep breath, looked at Jimmy.

  “Everything okay?” he said.

  “I think so. About that gun.”

  “I’m cool,” Jimmy said. He reached in his back pocket and pulled out a short cylindrical pipe, or at least it looked like a pipe. He flicked his wrist and a narrower, longer piece popped out. It was an asp, an expanding baton. “I also got this.”

  “Why don’t you pull a goddamn cannon down there with you,” I said.

  “Believe me, I thought about it.”

  Jimmy looked at the house below, took a deep breath, started walking.

  19

  I eased over to one of the pines and leaned against it, thinking I would look pretty much like part of it if the blackmailers glanced up the hill. Mosquitoes poked at me and flies attracted to the sweat on my face kept dive-bombing me. I felt like King Kong attacked by aircraft.

  I held the camera up and used it to watch Jimmy walk down. He got to the gravel behind the house and stopped. His voice came to me softly, filled my earpiece.

  “I’m going to call them out,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything back. It only worked one way. A moment later I heard him call.

  “Anyone in the house?”

  No answer. Time crawled by like it was dragging a cross up the hill.

  “Anyone in the house? Come on out.”

  I aimed the camera on the back door of the house and waited. After a while it budged open and someone stepped out. It was the guy. He had pulled a ski mask over his face. He walked a few steps toward Jimmy.

  “I got backup,” the blackmailer said. “I got someone in the house with a gun.”

  “What you got is a girl and yourself,” Jimmy said.

  I thought, Don’t play it too heavy, brother. Take it easy. A girl can shoot your ass dead good as anybody.

  “You got the money?” the male asked.

  “Not right on me.”

  “That’s not the deal.”

  “You got the DVD?” Jimmy asked.

  “I got it.”

  “How do I know it’s the only copy?”

  “You don’t. But I can tell you this much. You don’t give us the money, this is going to be sent to people you don’t want to see it. Like your wife. The dean at the university. The police department. Everybody. You’ll see this sucker on the Internet, YouTube. I promise. We only want the ten thousand. We get that, we’ll go away.”

  “I got to take your word for it?”

  “That’s the size of it,” the blackmailer said. “Now where is the money?”

  “You talk tough,” Jimmy said, “but you don’t look so tough to me.”

  “We’re tough enough. Now, once again, where’s the money?”

  “I must have left it in my other pants.”

  “I’m telling you, don’t fuck with me.”

  “Tell your partner to come outside,” Jimmy said.

  The man hesitated. “You got here early, didn’t you?”

  Jimmy snorted. “Earlier than you.”

  “Come out,” Ski Mask said. “Come on out. It’s all right.”

  The girl came out. She had on a ski mask too. She move
d tentatively up the hill until she was close to her partner.

  “You guys don’t look like heavyweight blackmailers,” Jimmy said. “What you look like are a couple of idiots about to rob their first filling station.”

  “That doesn’t change things,” the male voice said. “We got the goods, and we want the money.”

  “You sound familiar,” Jimmy said. “You’re disguising your voice, but I know it.”

  “You just think,” the male said, but he didn’t sound all that confident.

  “No. I know that voice.”

  “You don’t know shit, history teacher.”

  “How’d you get that DVD?”

  “That’s our business.”

  “Caroline. What happened to Caroline?”

  “That’s not the business we’re working right now,” the male voice said. Jimmy was right. He was trying to talk brusque. He sounded silly. The whole thing was silly. There didn’t seem to be much here that smacked of professionalism. They probably just needed a good spanking.

  “Show me the DVD,” Jimmy said.

  The male reached in his coat pocket and pulled out the DVD. He held it up.

  “Quit fucking around,” the male said. “Give us the money.”

  “Let me put this so you’ll understand it,” Jimmy said. “Give me the DVD, or I’m going to walk over to you and kick your ass up so high, when you need to shit you’ll have to move your teeth.”

  The girl came up the hill a little then. She had pulled a gun from her pocket when I wasn’t looking.

  “Give him the money, Mr. Statler,” she said.

  “I got a guy up the hill,” Jimmy said.

  “Ha!” said the guy in the ski mask.

  I pulled my little flashlight out of my pocket and poked it at them and turned it on, blinked it a couple of times.

  “He’s got a night-vision camera and a recorder taking in all of this,” Jimmy said. “He’s got a rifle too, and it’s trained on you. So girlie, I suggest you put that pistol down.”

  “Your brother?” said the guy. “He’s the one up the hill?”

  “That’s right. You know a lot about me.”

  The guy said, “I got this copy, but I got other copies.”

  “So now I know,” Jimmy said.

  “And we got a gun,” the girl said.

  “So you do,” Jimmy said.

  “We’re going to take that money,” the guy said.

  “You might if I had it with me. But you move toward me, even if you shoot me, my brother up there is going to put a bullet in your heads so fast you’ll never even hear the shot that gets you.”

  The two blackmailers stood their ground.

  Jimmy said, “You put that gun down, girlie. Then the two of you stretch out on the ground, or I’m going to start feeling unpleasant. My brother up there, he’s got an itchy finger. He’ll blow your fucking heads off.”

  The guy turned toward the girl. He let out with a yell. “Run, baby. Run.”

  Problem was, they broke in opposite directions. The guy went left, the girl went right. Jimmy leaped toward the girl. His hand flashed out and she screamed. Her gun went sliding across the gravel and she did a somersault and rolled down toward the house and nestled up in the vines like a fly in a web. The guy turned and started running back toward her. He raised his hand above his head, like he was going to strike Jimmy with his fist. Jimmy stepped right into the middle of him and hit him quick with the asp. Hit him right between the legs. The guy went down, his knees folding under him, and then he lay back with his head on the gravel and I could hear him moaning all the way up the hill, and not just through the monitor. Jimmy hit him again, this time in the forehead.

  I started down. Jimmy stood over the guy, raised the asp again. I could still hear him on the monitor. “You shit. You fucking shit. Give me the DVD or I’m going to crack your head wide open, then hers.”

  “Easy, Jimmy,” I said, as I came nearer. “Just take it easy.”

  We made them go inside the Siegel house. It was dark in there, of course, and the only light was from my flashlight. It smelled musty inside and there were lots of spiders on lots of webs and the dust was thick and it came up from the floor when you moved. When I flashed the light around I could see the walls were the color of unchewed snuff. The girl was crying, lying on her side, holding her leg where Jimmy had whacked it with the asp. The guy was sitting with his back against the wall, his knees pulled up, his arms wrapped around them. We had pulled the ski masks off, and where the asp had hit the guy he was bleeding; blood was in his dark hair and running down his face. I tossed him his ski mask back, said, “Wipe your face with that.”

  The girl had begun to whimper less. I put the flashlight on her. She was pretty, with short blond hair, and thin as a rail.

  Jimmy had her gun and he was pointing it at them. The gun business made me nervous. I had seen too many guns and I had seen what they could do, and I had seen how sometimes things happened that wouldn’t have happened just because of them.

  “Hold it by your side,” I said.

  Jimmy did that, but he walked back and forth, agitated.

  “Where’s the goddamn DVD?” he said. “All of them.”

  “I just got the one,” the guy said, and worked it out of his coat pocket. He tossed it to me and I caught it and held it. The guy said, “Can I take off this jacket? It’s hot.”

  “Why did you wear it?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  “To keep the DVD and for a disguise,” he said.

  “You try and pull something besides your arm from out of that coat, and my brother here will put a hole in your head,” I said, fearing he might do just that.

  “You didn’t have a rifle up there, did you?” the kid asked.

  “No,” I said. “But Jimmy’s got your girl’s gun now, and he’s got one of his own. Don’t push him.”

  “Girlie,” Jimmy said, “why don’t you take off that coat too, and be careful about it when you do.”

  She whimpered once, moved to a sitting position and worked the coat off. She was wearing a dark sports bra and she had dark tattoos on her stomach around her navel, all down her arms. I couldn’t tell what they were, flowers maybe. She tossed the coat across the floor toward us. She said to Jimmy, “You hurt my leg with that thing. You hurt it bad.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t give a shit,” Jimmy said. “Put the light on that boy.”

  I did.

  “Hold your face up,” Jimmy said.

  The kid did that. He had a red mark between his eyes where Jimmy had whacked him. It wouldn’t leave a permanent mark, but it would bruise up.

  “Hell, I knew I knew you,” Jimmy said. “You’re in the history department. I don’t know your name, but I know you. You can fucking figure on failing now, ’cause I’ll sure think of your name in time.”

  “I’m not in your classes,” the boy said.

  Jimmy let out with a laugh. “Well, that saves you, doesn’t it?”

  The girl bawled some more, paused to say: “I’m scared of spiders.”

  20

  They had come by car, and it was on the other side of the hill. We all walked up the hill and through the woods, the same way they had come, then down the other side to a little dirt road where their car was parked. It wasn’t much of a car and looked like the last time it had been washed someone had rubbed it down with sand and waxed it with a hammer.

  We made them get in the front seat, the guy behind the wheel. Jimmy and I slid into the back seat and Jimmy waved the gun around a little too much.

  “What are we doing?” the guy asked, and he was so scared his voice vibrated.

  “Going for a ride,” I said. “We want you to take us to your place, where you got the computer that copied the DVD.”

  “We made copies,” the girl said, “but we found the DVD.”

  I tucked that bit of information away. I said, “What about Caroline Allison?”

  “I knew her,” the guy said. “She was in the his
tory department with me. I knew her and that’s how I came up with this idea.”

  “Stupid idea,” the girl said. She had grown pouty, like a child whose birthday party had been ruined by bullies.

  “It was stupid,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah,” the guy said. “Stupid. But Tabitha needed the money for school.”

  “Jesus,” Jimmy said. “Whatever happened to a student loan?”

  “I couldn’t get one,” she said. “I failed too many classes goofing off.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “You needed tuition money, so what better way to get it than to kill some girl and take her DVD of her and the kindly professor here doing the bop and blackmail him with it? That sure beats a student loan, or heaven forbid, working for the money.”

  “We didn’t kill anyone,” the guy said. “You know we didn’t kill anyone.”

  He said that like he thought we really did know he didn’t do it. And I was pretty sure they hadn’t, even if I wasn’t sure they were telling the total truth. In fact, I was more than certain they weren’t.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the guy.

  “Ernie Smith.”

  “And you, kid,” I said to the girl. “You’re Tabitha? Tabitha what?”

  “Patrick,” she said. “Tabitha Patrick. We’re in big trouble, aren’t we?”

  “What do you think?” I said. “Start up the car and let’s go.”

  Their place was near the hill where Jimmy and I were camped. It was a gray rental house by the railroad tracks with an outside light that didn’t work. It was an ugly location and an ugly house. The neighboring houses were a little brighter and better looking, but there was nothing you could do about that location.

  Inside, the place was long and narrow like a boxcar and smelled like cat piss, and when Ernie turned on the light, roaches darted for cover but no cats made an appearance. In the front room there was a couch that looked as if it had taken on a few land mines. It was partially draped over with a blanket that had more holes in it than a dartboard. There were a couple of folding chairs, a desk with a computer on it, and the only good chair in the place was the chair at the desk. Tabitha sat on the couch, and after a few minutes so did Ernie. We told Ernie we would be taking the computer.