“I will,” she said.
“I’m gone,” I said. “And so is the phone.”
I turned off the phone. I rolled down the window and tossed the coffee from the cup and threw the cup on the floorboard and sat for a moment. My stomach was really churning now. I got out of the car quickly and walked around back of it and upchucked the sandwich and the coffee. It burned my throat.
“Leonard. Don’t you die,” I said out loud.
I got back in the car and got a Kleenex out of the glove box and wiped my lips. I tossed out the sandwich. I put a few of the breath mints in my mouth to kill the vomit taste. I pulled away from the rest stop onto the highway.
Devil Red, I’m coming.
64
There was a little logging road, and according to Vanilla it went down behind Kincaid and Clinton’s property. I took it, bumped along, almost got stuck a couple of times, made my way to where the road stopped amid what looked like the results of a nuclear strike but was in fact the end product of logging. In the moonlight, I could imagine the snow as nuclear ash, all the world dead and turned to powder.
Off to the south, that myth dissolved. The woods were thick there. Out there without lights, the moon behind cloud cover, all I could see were vague tree shapes, nature’s own palisades rising thick and wild against the dark sky.
I got out with the .38 Super and my flashlight and went crunching over the frozen leaves and pine needles to the trunk of the car and opened it up, removed the shotgun, and laid it on the roof. I opened the toolbox, got the snips, and removed a little strap-on headlight like the kind you use to read in bed so as not to wake up your partner. I turned it on and slipped it over the wool cap on my head. It wasn’t a big light, but it was a good enough light. I turned off the flashlight and put it in my coat pocket. I got a machete from the toolbox and the ammunition out of the trunk and stuffed my pockets with it. I made sure I had the Super’s spare ammo clips where I could get to them quickly. The shotgun had a strap, so I slung it over my shoulder.
I took a pee.
I picked up a wad of snow and made a snowball in my gloved hand and threw it at a stump of a tree. I missed.
I hoped that wasn’t an omen.
I was ready as I was going to be.
Way Vanilla had explained it, I had to go through the woods there, had to find my own trail, of which there were a few, and if I kept going south, I’d come to the high wall that led to the grounds of the estate. How to get over the wall was another matter, but Vanilla felt that since there were high woods on my side of the wall, on property other than their own, the logging company’s property, I could maybe find access that way.
I didn’t think that far ahead. If I did I’d turn around whimpering and head back to the car.
I tried several times to find a path but couldn’t. The woods were thick and dead winter vines were twisted up between the trees like ancient fencing. Worse, I was no longer exactly sure which way was south. It was too damn dark, and among the trees I couldn’t see anything but the whiteness of the snow and the occasional glare of moonlight on dangles of ice.
I made an attempt to follow my instincts, knowing full well that could get me in deep doo-doo, but I went ahead with it.
Hacking my way through the undergrowth, following the little beam of my head-strap light, I fought my way forward. At some point, I came upon a path through the trees and I followed that. It finally veered off to the right. I reluctantly abandoned it and started hacking again. I kept moving forward, inch by inch. I figured by the time I got through this mess and arrived, it would be two weeks from Tuesday.
Even in the cold weather, wearing all those clothes and hacking away, I was steamed and had to pause to cool it. I opened my coat and leaned against a tree. I was glad Leonard and I had been doing more workouts as of late. I had dropped a few pounds and my wind was better. Still, I was tired.
I reached up and turned off the head-strap lamp, leaned against the tree in darkness. I thought about Leonard. I thought about how long I had known him. I thought about all we had gone through. Here I was in the deep woods hacking through twisted dead winter vines and brush, and he was lying up in the hospital without me. That didn’t seem right.
For a moment I considered going back, driving to the hospital to be with him. But then I thought about what Devil Red had done. I thought about how I had been sympathetic toward their killing of those who hurt their loved ones. And then I thought about what they had done to Vanilla and so many others, made them Prostitutes of Death. I was better than they were. I was much better.
I reached up and turned the light on again, and started forward.
In a very short time I saw a glow ahead of me. It was faint and blurry in the misty night. As I neared, I realized it was not a small light, but a large light that spread to my left and right, and that it was shining between the trunks of the trees. I kept going, and finally came to a thinning of the pines and saw a wall ahead of me. It was at least twenty feet high. The light was seeping over it.
Okay.
Now we separate the men from the mice.
Squeak. Squeak.
65
I walked along the edge of the barricade, feeling like a Mongol considering how to make it over the Great Wall and into China. I finally found what Vanilla suggested. A tree that grew with limbs close to the wall.
But not that close.
Kincaid and Collins kept the limbs pretty well trimmed off their side. I’d have to climb the tree and jump to the wall, and then drop down on the other side. The trick then, according to Vanilla, was to move along a certain line of trees, and then onto a long open veranda. All of this was in a blind spot for the camera. Then I had to snip a certain wire in a certain hidden place just inside the foyer, and then I had to get in, all of this without the dogs or the guards or the camera seeing me. Then I had to kill two of what she said were the greatest assassins alive, and once that was done, all that was left was to sneak out and go over the wall without being shot by the guards or having being torn apart by the dogs. Piece of cake.
I turned off my headlight, slipped the machete in a scabbard on my belt, started up the tree, which was a kind of sickly pine coated in a light casing of ice that crackled as I went. Snow drifted down on me, both from the sky and from where it had gathered on limbs. With me in my heavy coat and with the shotgun strapped on my back, I kept getting hung up, and I kept slipping on the ice, but finally I made it without falling, nestled on a limb, and gathered myself.
I was high enough up I could see over the wall. There were lights there, most of them closer to the house. There was a huge brick estate with a long veranda and a sloping roof nestled in the center of some open land. There was a line of thick-limbed trees that ran from the wall toward the house, but ended some thirty or forty feet before they got there. Everything was covered in snow.
I began to think Vanilla was way right. I was in over my head. I was having a hard enough time getting over the wall, let alone going into the house and killing Devil Red—the both of them.
Finally, I felt rested enough to scoot out to the edge of the limb, and just as I was trying to get up on it to jump, it broke, and I fell.
I lay on the ground for a long time. I had landed with the shotgun strapped to my back, so that didn’t help matters either. I felt as if it had been driven into my back. The fall knocked the breath out of me and I lay there trying to get it back. I felt like the Oz Scarecrow with the stuffing pulled out. Only colder.
I was off to an excellent start, if I was a comedian.
Eventually, I felt strong enough to stand. I looked up at the tree. The limb had been my best access, and now it was gone. I went down the fence row again, this time in the direction closer to the shrubs, looking for a new way over, and finally came upon a sweet gum tree with a limb that projected just over the wall and hadn’t been recently trimmed.
The problem was there were few limbs until you got up about ten feet, so I had to climb using the pressure o
f my palms and the soles of my shoes. The tree was damp and it was no easy business. By the time I got to the first limb I could reach, I felt on the verge of a rupture. I got hold of the limb, swung up, and sat on it for a moment. I was much closer to the line of shrubs here. I could see them through the cluttered boughs of the leaf-stripped, snow-coated tree.
I had too much stuff on me, and that was making it hard to move along, so with reluctance, I removed the machete and dropped it on the ground. I crawled out on the limb. It dipped slightly, like a horse nodding for me to get off. The wall was festooned with barbed wire and sharp pieces of metal and broken glass that had been imbedded in the cement when it was drying. Vanilla said there was a camera, but the trees had grown large and bushy and would hide someone from sight if they came over the wall in line with them.
I was in line with them.
I eased out farther on the limb, near to its thinning tip, and that made me nervous. It was long enough that with my weight on it, it dipped over the wall. I grabbed hold of the limb and swung out, catching my pants on the glass in the wall, but only slightly. I dropped to the ground inside the compound and went down on one knee, giving things a look. The wet ice and snow came through my pants and made my knees numb.
I went at a crouch along the line of trees, and if Vanilla was right, out of camera shot. My back ached from the fall. I felt a little light-headed. Either not enough food. Too much activity. Being scared. Or a combination of all three. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go number two, so I had that going for me.
66
I had only gone a few feet when I found a dead Doberman. It lay just inside the shadow of the trees, right before they broke and there was that space between them and the house.
I bent down and touched it. It was warm, and it was bloody. Bending over, I clicked on my headlight and took a look. A bullet most likely. Right through the front right chest. From the way the ground looked, the snow creased and bloody, I knew the dog had dragged itself here and died.
I clicked off the light, sat there thinking.
A thought crossed my mind. One I couldn’t hold on to with any conviction, but it was there. I decided to let it go, and to move on. I hadn’t come this far to turn around and go back over the wall.
I moved to the end of the trees, stopped, and bent down and studied the gap between where I was and the veranda. As Vanilla had said, it was well lit, except right at the corner closest to me. Presumably, if what Vanilla knew about the place was the same, there wasn’t an angle there that accommodated a camera. All I had to do was make a straight run into the shadows, and then, if she was right, pull myself into an indention in the wall and gather my wits, which might take a lot more time than I had available. After that, I had to move quickly, and then it was assholes, elbows, and hot ammunition.
I was about to lunge forward, and then I saw him.
He was just to the front of the veranda. A big man. A very big man. Lying on the snow-covered lawn. A rifle of some sort lay on the snow beside him. I had an idea he hadn’t stopped to put his ear to the ground to hear the sweet vibrations of the earth. He was one of the bodyguards, and I was more than certain he was as dead as Abraham Lincoln; and if not, he was close enough to being dead to see Lincoln’s ghost. Like with the Doberman, the snow around him was coated red.
I went across the stretch and made the edge of the veranda, and slid up against the wall. The dark indention was there, as Vanilla said. I slipped into it and caught my breath. I didn’t know for a fact that the trees and that space between them to the veranda was in a camera blind, or even that I was in one now, but I had to play it that way.
I took the wire snips out of my coat pocket, and turned to where I was supposed to be able to reach through a gap and cut a wire that hooked to the camera, and another that hooked to the alarms. Snapping on my headlight, I saw there was indeed a gap, and that it was some sort of flaw in design. The concrete should have come together in that spot, but it didn’t. I could get my hand in there, inside a large storage room, and flip open the little metal door that held the alarm system without any trouble, but when I flicked it open with the tip of the wire snips, the wires were already cut. I snapped off the headlight. I pulled out Brett’s little revolver and moved along the veranda wall as far away from the lights as possible.
I came to the door lock Vanilla said I’d have to pick, and as I figured, the door was already cracked open.
I slipped in, held the revolver at the ready with two hands. I didn’t always shoot with two hands. I had learned to shoot the Wild West way when I was a kid, and I never dropped it completely. It’s not as accurate, but I can hit pretty much what I shoot at, provided it’s in range and not moving too damn fast.
It was dark inside the house and I couldn’t tell where I was going at first, so I just squatted down and let my eyes adjust to the shadows. I didn’t turn on the little head-beam light, knowing if I did, all I was doing was giving them a little spot target on my forehead. I squatted there with my back against a wall trying not to breathe too loud. After a few minutes I could see better in the dark, make out shapes. It was all furniture as far as I could tell. Rising up, I moved across the floor with the revolver at the ready.
I stopped when a voice said, “Don’t move.”
67
“Jesus Christ, Vanilla,” I said. “You damn near made me mess myself.”
“Better than a bullet in the head,” she said. “Be quiet.”
She took me by the sleeve and pulled me over to a space behind a stack of boxes.
“Why?” I said.
“Now’s not the time,” she said. “I decided to go in with you, and right now, that’s all you need to know. My take is if they have one dog outside, now dead, there might be one inside. They used to always have two. My other take is the guy in the yard isn’t the only one. He was making the perimeter as I arrived. He didn’t see me, but I decided it was best he go. It’s best they all go.”
“How many is all?” I said.
“We’ll determine that as we continue. This storage room leads into a large room. The training room. That’ll be our first stop. And good luck. You’ll need it.”
“Thanks for boosting my spirits.”
“Put the pistol in your pocket, and use the shotgun. Go for heavy firepower if that’s what you got.”
We went out from behind the boxes and across the room, Vanilla leading the way. She moved smooth and silent as a ghost, and when we came to the double-wide doors that led into the big room beyond, we could see light through the cracks and at the bottom of it.
Vanilla spoke so that I could hardly hear her: “Ready.”
“Yes,” I said.
She grabbed the door handle and turned it briskly and threw the door wide. There was a guy in there, a big guy, blond-headed, handsome like a movie star. But unlike a movie star he had a real gun and it was in a shoulder holster. He was sitting at a table with a deck of cards in his hands. When the door popped back, his head snapped around, and when he saw us standing there, he turned in his chair and went for his gun, and while I was still trying to lift mine, Vanilla shot him. Her gun coughed through the silencer, like a patient in a doctor’s office with a finger up his ass. The man in the chair fell back and his feet went up and a spray of blood went up with him. In that moment, a man, the dead man’s card-playing partner, came out of a small room off to the side, zipping up his pants. He saw us. Vanilla shot him through the chest while he still had hold of his zipper.
She stopped by the man who had been in the chair and looked at him. He wasn’t going to wake up and brush himself off. She went over to the other, and I followed after, like a puppy learning from a smarter dog. The man on the floor moaned once, opened one eye, and looked at her. She shot him through the head.
The rest of it was like a bad dream. We cruised quickly across the floor and to the double doors across the way, and Vanilla opened them without hesitation, not loudly, but not like she was still being sneaky. As she opened it,
the sounds of popping hit our ears briskly. A moment later, I knew the source of the sounds.
We had stepped into it up to our necks.
It was a large long room, and there were targets at the far end, and there were four shooters taking practice on them. Three men and a woman, all young. When we stepped into the room, they turned.
And so did their guns.
I moved left and Vanilla moved right. I cut down with the shotgun and blasted the girl in her middle. She went back and down and her gun went sliding across the floor. There were two coughs to my right and two men dropped, and I let loose with the twelve-gauge again, and the last man lost his face.
“We’ve made enough noise,” Vanilla said, “so from here on out, it has to happen fast.”
There was a hallway, and it oddly split left and right. She went right without saying a word to me, walking very fast in her sensible shoes. I went left, walking less fast in one of the two pairs of shoes I owned.
I walked with the gun before me. The hallway was narrow and the walls were drab olive, or appeared that way in the near dark. There was some light from little runners near the floor. The hall went on for a long time and then it curved ever so slightly. Eventually, the hall opened up into a circular room. The room was dimly lit and there were martial arts mats on the floor. There were more mats stacked to one side, about five feet high, and across the way was an open door.
A young woman, perhaps twenty, came through the door at a rapid walk. Her long hair was tied back and looked orange in the light. She had on a bulky sweatshirt and sweatpants. She had a gun by her side. She was obviously on a mission, and that mission was me. That shotgun of mine had made so much noise I might as well have been a one-man band.
She lifted her gun with calm deliberation and fired. I was already moving, but the hair on the left side of my head fanned a little. The bullet couldn’t have missed me by more than a micro fragment. It made a sound softer than Vanilla’s gun; it too was silenced. I fired twice, quickly, as I dodged, the reverberation of the shotgun loud in the room.