But she was moving too. She moved like Vanilla moved. Both my shots missed, and as she fired again, I rolled, hit the matted floor, and came up behind the high stack of mats, crouching. The stuffing inside them poofed out as the silencer sneezed again.
I scurried on hands and knees farther behind the mats and put my back against the wall, about middle ways, so I could see both ends of the stack and above. The way the light overhead was set, I could see her shadow fanning around on the floor. She was climbing at a crouch over the top of the mats and was going to be above me, shooting down.
I ducked to the left of the mats, so low I was almost duckwalking, moved as quietly and quickly as possible. I glanced back at her shadow as she rose out of her crouch and was near the edge of the mats, where she expected me to be.
I stepped out from the mats in a nice noiseless move that would have impressed a mouse, lifted the shotgun just as she realized she’d been snookered and was turning to find me. I shot up and hit her in the chest. She made a noise like I had punched her and went off the mat and hit the floor with a loud thump. I couldn’t see her, but I knew I had hit her good. I went around the edge of the mats and saw her lying on the floor on her back, her head propped against the wall. She still had the gun. Her face looked odd in the light. She way trying to figure who in the hell I was. Her brow was covered in sweat. Her lips were tightly clenched together. She was leaking blood all over the place. I could see where her sweatshirt had been ripped and riddled by the blast. She had her gun pointed at me. Her legs were spread out in front of her in a loose manner that made them seem as if they belonged to someone else, just borrowed for the occasion. She had a clear shot. I was about to cut down on her again, and then she lowered the gun. It lay across her lap. Her eyes were looking at me. It took me a moment before I realized she wasn’t seeing anything. I didn’t move for a brief moment, just stood there with my gun pointed at her. She had been an attractive kid.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s how it tumbles. That’s how it goes.”
I was startled to discover I was speaking out loud.
68
I went through the open doorway the woman had passed through and slinked along a wide corridor that was drop-dead dark at the end. I felt like I was walking into a gun barrel and someone was about to pull the trigger.
For a moment I thought about turning on my light, but figured I was outlined enough on my end without giving them a bull’s-eye. I went along nervous and listening. I wasn’t listening well enough, because there was movement to my right, and in that moment I realized there was an open doorway and someone was coming out of it. I turned and a shot flared the darkness, and in the flash of the gun, I saw a face.
It was Kincaid; in the brief flash of the gun he looked like a living mummy.
I swung the shotgun barrel around and caught him up alongside the head, heard his gun hit the floor and slide. But the next instant, he was twisting the barrel of the shotgun up, and it was coming out of my hands.
Moving in quick, I kicked him in the groin, and then we struggled over the shotgun. It came loose of both our hands and flew behind me and hit the wall and clattered to the floor.
Something winked in the dark and then I felt a smooth motion like the page of a book brushing across my hand, and then I felt the sting. I had been there before. A knife. I skipped backward, tried to get the pistol out of my pocket, but he was on me too fast. I made a kind of horseshoe bend as the knife passed in front of me. I felt it tug at my shirt and hit the edge of my coat as it flared wide. There was a noise as something hit the floor.
I was able to see better now, as my eyes had adjusted. I kicked the inside of his leg, and he went down on one knee. I gave him an uppercut to the chin, but he dodged it. The sonofabitch could see like an owl.
I reached in my coat pocket; it was wide open at the bottom. The knife had cut it at some point, and the damn revolver had fallen out, and that’s what I had heard hitting the floor. I was scuttling backward as he came, and finally I got the clasp knife out of my pocket and snapped it open.
Seeing well enough now, I slapped a stab aside by hitting his wrist, and cut down across his forearm. Or tried to. He slapped it down and brought his knife up, and I just moved in time to keep from catching it in the throat.
He sliced again, inward, and I parried it and cut down again, this time hitting him across the arm. He let out with a hissing sound, and kicked my feet out from under me. He leaped on top of me, and I caught his knife arm and locked my legs around him. I tried to stab him, but he had hold of my wrist.
I twisted so that my blade cut him. He let go and sprang off me and tried to cut my leg, but I avoided it and he kicked up at me. I felt the knife hit my shoe.
Now we were both on our feet again. He came slashing right and left, but keeping it tight. Filipino knife work was his game, and he was good at it. Better than me. I tried to take him with a straight stab, and he disarmed me, cutting the back of my hand in the process. Weaponless, I stepped back, and my foot came down on something, and I nearly slipped.
I knew what it was. The revolver. He lunged at me. I dropped down and his thrust went where I had been. I snatched up the revolver and tossed myself on my back and fired. The shot lit up the room, but it didn’t stop him. He came at me slashing. I scuttled backward. I fired again, and still he kept coming.
He leaped on me. I couldn’t get a shot off. His knife made a hard thunking noise, and then he quit moving. I crawled out from under him. His knife was stuck in the floor and he was lying facedown. I turned on my head beam and kicked him over on his back.
He had taken my shots, and I saw too that I had cut him more than I thought. He may have looked like a scarecrow, but he was tough. I kicked him in the ribs a couple of times to make sure he was dead.
He didn’t move. I turned to pick up the guns and the knife, and that’s when he jumped on my back.
His arm went around my throat and he started choking. It was a good choke. He was shutting off the arteries. I was about to go out. I pressed in on his elbow, pressing his arm tight to my neck, just the opposite of what you might think you should do. It opened enough space on the other side, though, that the blood started to flow and I started to regain my wits. I bent down and then sprang up, and he went over my hip. When he landed, I came down on top of him, straddling his chest, and I crashed my forearm into his throat.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
I could feel something give in his throat. He stopped struggling.
I still had my head beam on, and was still straddling him. He appeared to be a hundred years old, and at a glance skinny and weak. I knew better than that, though. He had been wiry and strong and skilled. I had been better. Or luckier.
I got up quickly and carefully. This time I wanted to be sure it was done. I found the revolver and put it in my belt, the knife in my pocket, picked up the shotgun without turning my back on Kincaid.
I went over and looked at him again.
In the light, I could see he was still breathing. He was alive still. He was a regular Rasputin.
I felt sorry for him for a moment, then I thought he was maybe the one who shot Leonard. Either him or his partner, the ex-wife.
I lifted up the shotgun and pointed it at his head, and let it go. You couldn’t have told much about how he had looked after that. The hallway stank of gunfire and blood.
I moved on through the dark toward the end of the hall, the headlight on, not worrying about it anymore. Whatever came, came.
69
There were lights now, and large rooms, and I turned off the pointless headlight and went through several of the rooms until I came to a half-open door with a man on his knees, his forehead pressed to the wall.
He had fallen there. He was a large man. There was blood all down his shirt and all over the floor in a fresh wet pool. He had never known what had hit him.
There was another hallway. I went down quickly, and when I came to th
e end of it, there was a door slightly cracked, and there was light coming out of it. I eased over and touched the door gently, moved it aside.
Looking in, I saw Vanilla Ride squatted on her haunches, the silenced automatic in her gloved hand. Across from her, lying on the floor, her head against a couch, a hand held to her blood-gurgling throat, was Clinton. Her eyes darted toward me. She coughed and blood squirted from between her fingers. There was a little automatic lying on the floor not far from her free hand. Her fingers curled toward it, like a dying spider, but nothing more. A Doberman lay on the floor nearby. Dead, of course.
Vanilla turned her head and looked at me. She said, “You can finish her if you want. If you think it’ll make you feel better.”
I shook my head.
I felt empty standing there watching that woman die. Right then, it didn’t matter to me what she had done. Had I come upon her first, I would have shot her myself, no doubt, but now, looking at the life ease out of her, I just felt confused.
Clinton glanced at Vanilla. She tried to say something. It sounded like “why.”
“Why not?” Vanilla said. Her gun hand flicked up and the silenced weapon made a tubercular noise. Clinton’s body jerked a little. A red spot appeared on her forehead, and whatever muscles were holding her head against the couch released and she rolled over on her face. The blood pooled beneath her. A pool of urine soaked out of her and its smell was rich with ammonia.
Vanilla stood. She looked at me. I can’t describe what I was seeing there, but in that moment she looked much older and stranger and dangerous, a visitor from someplace far beyond Mars.
She said, “Done, and done.”
70
We searched through the house, looked in all the rooms, all the nooks and crannies. There was no one left. We went out the way we had come in and stopped on the veranda in sight of the dead man in the yard. It had grown bitter cold and the snow was turning hard.
“You lied to me,” I said. “You said you wouldn’t get involved.”
Vanilla put her gun inside her coat and looked at me. “I didn’t know I was getting involved until I started drawing that map for you. Jimson, like I said, that was personal.”
“I presume the map you gave me isn’t really the easiest way for me to get here, is it?”
“I gave you quite a trial, didn’t I?”
“You think I’d give up and go home?”
“I thought if I gave you the long and hard way here, I’d get here first, in plenty of time. Still, I didn’t want you not to be a part of it. I wanted you to know it was done.”
A part of me wished I had been late. From what I could see, she hadn’t needed me at all.
“What made you do it?” I said.
She looked at me like that was a question that didn’t immediately compute. Finally, she said, “I don’t know. I learned a lot in that big room back there so long ago, the one with the mats. I learned how to fight and use a knife, ice pick, most anything I could lay my hands on. There’s also a gun range farther in. Everything nice and padded and silent. There’s also a bedroom that wasn’t my room and it wasn’t their room. You didn’t see it. It’s a large room, and it’s silent too. I learned a lot there from Mr. Kincaid.”
“I’m sorry, Vanilla.”
“All part of the drill, I suppose. The males got the same.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“I suppose I had to close things out. I believe that’s why I came, more than for you.”
“How do you feel?” I said.
“Just the same.”
“What now?”
“I’ll show you to my car, drive you around to yours, and we go our separate ways.”
“I mean what now for you?”
She shrugged and started walking across the yard. I slung the shotgun strap over my shoulder, followed, our feet crunching on the snow-covered grass. We went out through the open front gate and I swung the shotgun off my shoulder, and we got in her black Volkswagen Beetle. The one I had passed when I drove over to No Enterprise and found Jimson and his goons.
Vanilla had merely driven straight up the drive and gone inside. I don’t know how she had gotten through the gate. Maybe it was open. Maybe she knew a code. After that, it had been easy. Drop the guard and the dog, and then I showed up. I’m sure she had answers to those questions, but at that point in time, I didn’t really care.
As she started up the Volkswagen, I said, “I thought you were like James Bond till I saw this car. Does it have machine guns in the headlights?”
“It’s maneuverable and dependable,” she said. “Just like me. Did I ever tell you how maneuverable I am?”
“It’s best I don’t hear,” I said, and she wheeled us out of there.
71
When we stopped at my car, Vanilla turned slightly in the seat, said, “You could go with me.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“You can.”
“All right. I can. But I won’t.”
“The redhead?”
“That’s some of it, yes.”
“And Leonard.”
“Yep.”
Vanilla nodded. She smiled. “I don’t know, Hap. I don’t understand it. Why they mean so much to you.”
“I don’t think I can explain it.”
“There’s another thing I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Why am I attracted to you?”
“It’s the way I dress.”
“Hardly,” she said.
As I put a foot outside the door, Vanilla said, “You ever been to Europe?”
“No.”
“Italy is a wonderful country,” she said. “Beautiful people. The best food you can imagine. Scenery that has to be seen to be believed.”
“You go there often?”
“I’ve never been to Italy. But I’ve read about it.”
“You believe everything you read?”
“Only when I want to. The money I got, I don’t need to do anything anymore but lie on a beach in a bikini somewhere and soak up the sun. I might just retire there. Maybe you could come see me?”
“All I can say is I owe you one,” I said.
“Oh, that was a freebie. That wasn’t for anybody but myself. I didn’t feel good or bad about it before, but now, sitting here, I’m starting to get the warm fuzzies. I liked the way Ms. Clinton looked when I shot her. Lean over here.”
I did. She kissed me gently and quickly on the lips.
“Our secret,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say to that.
I got out of the car with my shotgun and she backed around and was gone.
72
Vanilla should have been everything I detested in a human being, a stone killer with the conscience of a fly, but there was no denying I felt something for her. I didn’t know exactly what it was. But I felt it. And she felt it back. But then again, who was I to hate someone for being a killer?
I drove back to LaBorde through a bad storm mixed with rain and snow and a vision of that young girl’s face, the one I had killed in the mat room. She was just a kid. I told myself if I hadn’t killed her she would have killed me. I told myself she was being trained to kill others for money. For all I knew she might have been the one who shot Leonard. There wasn’t any certainty Devil Red, the two of them, or either of them had done the shooting. And if it wasn’t that young woman, someday it would be, for someone.
I arrived drained and exhausted at the hospital. It was way past visiting hours, but when I got upstairs I found Brett and Marvin in the waiting room. Brett had found a blanket and was curled up in a chair asleep. Marvin sat beside her, wide awake. He nodded at me as I came in, put a finger to his lips. We went outside the waiting room to a few chairs along the wall. We sat down.
“How’s Leonard?” I said.
“Better.”
I sighed with relief.
“Not out of danger yet,” Marvin said. “But bette
r.”
“Good,” I said.
“Did you find them?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you take care of them?”
“Vanilla Ride took care of them mostly. I took care of some of it.”
“Vanilla Ride? Our Vanilla Ride?”
“How many of them could there be?” I said.
“I’ll be damned,” Marvin said.
I told him all about it, everything Vanilla had told me, how it had all gone down.
He sat for a while when I finished. “So it was like Brett thought, Devil Red killed all those people for revenge. Twilla too?”
“Maybe. And then Leonard and I fell into their line of fire.”
Marvin considered for a moment. “They most likely arranged the hit on Godzilla in prison, don’t you think?”
“It’s possible,” I said. “They decided to kill us all, symbolically salt the earth. They couldn’t get rid of their grief any other way. And I doubt that did it.”
“What amazes me is to think they actually cared that much for their children, considering what they were, what they did to Vanilla,” Marvin said.
“I think for them it wasn’t child molestation or abuse in the way we think of it. I mean it comes down to the same thing, but I think for them it was just business. They were sharpening the tools of their business by making them willing and moldable. When Kincaid was away from there he was an accountant, a husband to his airhead wife, and a father to his children, who he loved. One life had nothing to do with the other.”
“That’s what you call compartmentalization,” Marvin said.
“Yeah, I suppose it is.”