57
I drove over to No Enterprise. I drove carefully. There was a little park by the side of the road just outside of the city limits. I pulled over there and opened the trunk and took out the golf bag and dug in there until I found the shotgun. It was in two pieces. There was a little bag with tools in it. I put the shotgun together swiftly. There were shells in a plastic bag. I loaded the gun.
I looked up as a black Volkswagen drove by, heading back the way I had come. I hoped they weren’t pulling into the park.
They drove on.
I put the bag back in the trunk and took the shotgun and laid it on the front passenger’s seat and drove on into No Enterprise. There was no reason to expect Jimson to be where I hoped he was, but Shit Fingers or someone there would know. I’d get him to come there if I had to beat the information out of an innocent bystander. I might even make them drink the coffee.
When I got to No Enterprise, I saw the service station/convenience store. It occurred to me as I arrived that it might not be open. But it was. It was all night. It was the swinging spot in No Enterprise.
The lights were on, but right then it wasn’t swinging.
I cruised into the lot and parked. There was a dark SUV parked in front of the store, near the door. I tried to determine if it was the one in the Wal-Mart lot, came to the conclusion it was not.
I got the shotgun off the seat and opened the door. My legs felt like lead, but I made them move anyway. I held the gun down by my side, and used my other hand to tap the revolver beneath my coat.
I walked straight to the door and went in.
No one was there. That was alive.
I saw Jimson on the floor, his head turned funny and his mouth open. So were his eyes. His blood was all over the floor. He had one hand inside his coat. Probably reaching for a gun.
Sitting in a chair at the table was Muscles. He had his head thrown back, and his mouth was open, like something you were supposed to toss a ball into.
The thin man lay on the floor. He was on his back. He had his hand on his gun, but it wasn’t drawn. He had a hole in the center of his forehead, nice and neat, like it was painted there with a paint pen. The back of his head was oozing blood. The place smelled of blood, gunfire, and feces from evacuated bowels.
I took a breath and looked around. No one. I walked over to the counter and looked behind it. Like I expected. Shit Fingers. He was dead too, crumpled on his side with his knees drawn up. His mouth was leaking blood. Blood was splattered on the cigarettes in a rack behind him.
For some reason the only thing I could think was a dedicated smoker could buy those cheap.
Blood. All of it fresh. This had just happened.
I felt the hair on the back of my neck crawl around. I took another deep breath and backed out of there.
58
I went home to get a bigger gun.
I went home to get more than one.
I went home to break into the stash upstairs. A twelve-gauge pump better than the sawed-off, and a .45 automatic pistol. I kept them inside the closet there, behind the opening in the ceiling, up in what served as an attic. Both were cold pieces. There was plenty of plastic-wrapped ammunition up there too.
Sometimes when I thought of those things up there, I felt as if a sleeping dragon were just waiting for me to call it out and use it wrong.
But this time, I was happy. Whoever had wiped out Jimson and his men, and Shit Fingers, they had been the one who shot Leonard. Had to be. Too big of a conincidence otherwise. And I had no reason to doubt that I was next on the list.
This time I couldn’t wait to get my hands on those guns, to let the dragon loose.
I was thinking about all that as I drove into my drive, got out carefully, and looked around, Brett’s revolver hanging loose in my hand. I thought I heard the icy grass crunch once, but I went still and waited and didn’t hear it again. It could have been anything. Ice shifting. A cat or a dog running across the backyard. Anything.
Or nothing.
When I was on the porch I kept Brett’s revolver in my right hand and held my keys in the left.
As I was pushing the key in, a voice said, “I wouldn’t do that.” I dropped and wheeled.
Standing in the yard, wearing a long heavy duster-style coat, was a young woman with long blonde hair. In the glow of the single streetlight at the end of the drive her hair appeared to fall over her shoulders and down the front of her coat like a waterfall of butter. She had a gun in her right hand, and the hand was leveled at me, and I knew before I could even get a shot off, I’d be dead.
It was Vanilla Ride.
59
Once upon a time, Vanilla Ride had been hired to kill me and Leonard. But her employer, one Cletus Jimson, got greedy on the money he owed her for other hits, and decided to hit her together with us instead. It was a cost-cutting plan.
As it worked out, Leonard and I helped her fight them off. There was a lot of gunfire, a lot of blood, and the hit on the hitter failed.
That gave us a connection with Vanilla.
It gave me and her another kind of connection that I can’t explain. Not romantic. Brett wouldn’t like that, and in the long run, neither would I. But it bonded us. Still, I never really expected to see her again.
Or hoped I wouldn’t.
“Hi, Hap,” she said, as cheery as if we were meeting for coffee. “So, it was you who shot Leonard.”
“Don’t be silly. He’d be dead. I’m not here to shoot you. I’m here with a warning.”
“What do you mean a warning?”
“I’m not going to shoot you. Not unless I have to. I don’t even have a silencer on my gun. I’m not here for business.”
I knew she was right. She walked like a ninja and had the aim of Annie Oakley. Had she wanted, she could have killed me and I would never have known she was there. I lowered the revolver by my side, but I didn’t put it away.
I said, “I’m not in the mood, Vanilla. You could kill me, maybe. But I might not die so easy.”
“Yeah, you would. This is a twenty-two. Not a big caliber. But I can put a bullet where I want to standing this close. I can write my name in bullet fire on your forehead before you hit the ground.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I bet you’d have to leave out one of the l’s.” She smiled.
“What’s the warning?” I said.
“Let’s start with don’t open your door, because if you do, you’ll get blown out into the street.”
I looked at the door.
“How do you know?”
“I know. I’ve already checked. But I didn’t disarm it. Wanted you to see me do it. I wanted you to know I’m not here to kill you.”
“I was here not long ago,” I said.
“And they must have been here a few minutes ago,” she said. “While you were in No Enterprise looking up Jimson. Don’t look so surprised. I passed you as you were going in, stopped by the road getting something out of the trunk. A gun would be my guess.”
“Sawed-off. I left it on the seat. Now I wish I hadn’t.”
Vanilla put her gun away, came up on the porch, turned the key, and unlocked the door. I stepped back off the porch. Way back.
I saw her push the door open ever so slightly. She reached in her coat and took out a little leather parcel. She pulled a small flashlight from it and turned it on and put it in her teeth. She knelt down on one knee and removed something else from the parcel. She used it on something near the bottom of the door. A trip wire I figured. I heard a slight snip, and then another snip.
“Disarmed,” she said, and pushed the door open.
Inside, just for safety measures, we turned on the lights and looked through the house. There was a bomb at the back door too.
Vanilla cut some wires like before. She said, “This would have blown you in half. Either one of them. You pushed the door open, it would have pulled the wires, and that would have pulled a trigger. You go boom, baby.”
She picked the bomb
up and carried it inside and placed it on the kitchen table, which is where she had put the other one. She walked into the living room, looked around. Her coat fell open and one long, black, panted leg poked out. Just for the record, she was wearing what Brett calls sensible shoes, low slung and soft and easy to move in. Even under the circumstances, I couldn’t help but note she was breathtakingly beautiful—an evil wet dream with vanilla crème skin, sea blue eyes, and bloodred lipstick.
“Cozy,” she said.
We stood across from each other. I still had the revolver in my hand. She said, “You really ought to put your rod away.”
I put the revolver in my coat pocket.
“We never seem to meet just to say hi,” she said.
“This is only the second time we’ve met,” I said.
“But it was such an exciting meeting.”
“Truth is, I don’t feel like a lot of chitchat right now.”
“Because of Leonard,” she said.
I hesitated before I answered. “That’s right. How would you know about that? How would you know to check my house for a bomb?”
“I’ve been watching you. I wasn’t watching Leonard. I wasn’t sure I was going to warn you. I was here to do it, but I wasn’t sure I’d go through with it. I was down the street, parked in a car at the curb when Leonard left. I saw it was him, I stayed. I’m here to protect you, not him. Later, I followed you to the hospital. I figured things out. I know how to ask the right questions at a hospital desk without seeming nosy. I told them I was your sister. They told me whatever I asked.”
“How clever of you.”
“You and me, we need to sit down on the couch and talk.”
“I don’t feel all that chatty. Thanks for not letting me get blown up, but I got things to do.”
She looked back at the kitchen. “You have anything to drink?”
“Vanilla …”
“No. Really. We need to talk.”
60
“So,” I said, when we were seated on the couch, “you were just in the neighborhood.”
“You don’t have any vodka?”
“No. You already asked.”
“A beer?”
“Nope.”
I had given her a diet soda, and she was sipping it. I was so nervous I was about to vibrate out of the room. She seemed very casual. We had turned off the main lights. She thought it a good idea, in case anyone was watching the house, waiting for it to blow.
The only light on now was the little plastic fish-shaped light plugged into the kitchen outlet over the counter. The light from it stretched into the living room, but it was faint and soft.
“You didn’t get blown up, so they’ll come back,” Vanilla said.
“Are you Devil Red as well as Vanilla Ride?”
“Devil Red,” she said. “That’s a funny name.”
“So is Vanilla Ride.”
“That’s the name I was given,” she said. “Devil Red, that’s made up.”
“But you know who I’m talking about?”
“I do. And we can use that term if you like.”
“Considering you tried to kill me before, you’re awfully pleasant.”
“I’m always pleasant.”
“I’ve seen you less pleasant.”
“Oh, come on, Hap. Let bygones be bygones. We made up, remember.”
“We never quarreled. And still, you tried to kill me.”
“Killing people for money. It’s what I do.”
“Look, Vanilla, my brother may be dying. Someone shot him. Someone is gonna die if I have my way. If that’s you, or whoever—”
“It’s not me. But it is …” She hesitated as she worked the words around in her mouth. “Devil Red.”
“All right, now I know. I just have to find him.”
She looked at me and smiled faintly. “You’re not up to it, Hap. You’re not up to me.”
“So, why are you here? Tell me where I can find Devil Red, and let me get about my business, up to it or not.”
“Don’t you wonder how I knew you were in trouble?”
“It’s not high on my priority list right now.”
“Let’s put it there. Jimson called me.”
By then, of course, I knew that if she had seen me beside the road, that it was her who had given Jimson a visit. But I didn’t let on. I wanted to hear it from her.
“I thought he was afraid of you,” I said.
“He wanted me and him to be friends. He wanted me to know the whole thing about deciding to have me killed was just business.”
“How’d you take that?” I said.
“I understood his position. I understand business. I would probably have just taken the job he was offering me if it hadn’t been you.”
“Why are you so concerned about my welfare?”
She studied me for a moment. “I seem to be infatuated with you.”
“Me?”
“Go figure.”
“I’m just a middle-aged guy going to seed. What’s the attraction?”
“The same your girlfriend Brett has, I suppose. She’s some looker, Hap.”
“You know about her too?”
“I know all kinds of things about you. I’ve made it a point to know. Once I was supposed to kill you, remember? I did my research.”
“Nothing like research,” I said.
“Jimson, he wanted me to kill you and Leonard. I told him I didn’t want to. But not before I went to see him. I was in Shreveport when I got the message through contacts. I was finishing up a little job there. Nicely done, I might add. I told him I’d come see him pretty soon.”
“You got close to Jimson pretty easy. I’d have thought he was nervous about that, considering your past.”
“He had never seen me before. He just contacted me. He knew how to do that through certain parties. I’ve known about his habits for over a year. I keep tabs on my old connections, just in case they decide to be trouble. Anyway, I went there, this little station where he spends time. He didn’t know me. He saw me. He wanted to know me. That happens to me a lot.”
“I bet.”
“Why thank you. He had his two bodyguards with him. I sat down. He bought me a cup of coffee, started his hustle. Thought he might get some tail. And then I told him who I was.”
“How’d he take it?”
“Surprised. I think he expected me to be huskier. He knew Vanilla Ride was a woman, but he had me pegged different.”
“Yeah, you don’t look the part. You look more like a James Bond villain.”
“That’s so sweet. He immediately started saying how trying to have me killed was all business, and could I take care of you and Leonard, since it didn’t work out last time. He offered me double. Do you realize how many pounds of dope and how many whores he’d have to run to pay me as much as he offered me?”
“I don’t know how much he offered.”
Vanilla smiled. When she did, she almost looked like a cherub. “Let’s just say it was a lot.”
“All right, let’s say that,” I said. “So how’s this story end?”
“Quit pulling my leg, Hap. I said I passed you. You were there. You know how it ends. I told them no, and then I shot them all.”
“All of them?”
“You know that too. But, just in case you like to hear it. All of them.”
“You shot the thin man first, didn’t you?” I said.
“I did. He’s the one that actually looked like trouble. But no. He wasn’t any trouble at all. He was quick, but I was quicker. Then I shot Jimson, and then I shot the big man with all the muscles. For the hell of it, I shot the guy behind the counter. The coffee he brought me sucked.”
“Yeah, coffee there isn’t too good,” I said. “Didn’t that cause a stir, all that shooting?”
“No one else was in the place. Lucky for them. A twenty-two is pretty quiet compared to a larger gun. I didn’t have a silencer. I’ve used them for some guns, but not this one. Doesn’t work well o
n it. Four shots. Four dead, and I was out of there.” She sat up straight when she told me that, like a proud girl in class who had just answered a hard question.
“You did that for me?”
“I did it for me. I didn’t like him. And I didn’t want to shoot you and Leonard. Leonard, maybe. But you, no.”
“So you were supposed to come after us for Jimson. And Devil Red is after us because we’ve been snooping.”
“That’s pretty much it,” she said. “But you got this figured. I can tell the way your eyes light up.”
“I know some of it,” I said, “but a lot of it is guesswork.”
She nodded. “Jimson put Devil Red on you two as well. He wanted me for backup. The whole thing is he wanted me and Devil Red on you guys because you were so hard to kill last time.”
“For that I refuse to apologize.”
“This time Leonard was easy for Devil Red.”
“He dropped his guard,” I said. “He had shopping for cookies on his mind.”
“He’s tough, and so are you, but this isn’t his profession, and it’s not yours. Me, it’s what I do.”
“I bet your mother is proud.”
“I wouldn’t know. Way I think Jimson had it planned is he also hired Devil Red to take me out. I don’t think he forgave as easy as he said, business or not. He was scared of me.”
“And for good reason.”
“He told me to take out Devil Red. So I think he thought he’d get rid of one connection one way or another. If it left Devil Red, not so bad. He didn’t have an ugly history there. If it left me, well, he paid me off and he probably thought that would soothe things over between us and he wouldn’t be worried about looking over his shoulder for me. He probably thought if Devil Red was out of the picture, that would just be one less connection to him. In time, maybe he thought he’d get me.”
“So, I’m not worth as much as you led me to believe. It was a combination job.”