“There was a moment there when I would have invited it.”
She pushed my hair off my forehead and kissed my cheek.
Right then I loved her more than I had ever loved her.
I was sipping on my coffee when I had a flash as clear as daylight. I said, “Bert’s dead.”
“Bert?” Brett said.
“Mini’s stepfather,” Leonard said.
“He’s dead,” I said.
“You just have a psychic vision or something?” Leonard asked.
I put my cup of coffee on the tray. “No,” I said. “I saw him dead. Last night.”
I told them what I had seen.
Leonard said, “Maybe you never left the chair. Maybe you thought you saw what you saw. You told me vampires were after you.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
“It all seems like a dream. I think I remember thinking I’d call the police, then Marvin, then you, Leonard.”
“Was I on the list?” Brett asked.
“You were next.”
“But you didn’t call,” Leonard said.
“I guess not.”
“It was a kind of trigger, Hap, you seeing Bert’s body, or thinking you did, or dreaming you did. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And in case you’re not following my cliché, you’re the camel.”
“You really think you saw a dead man?” Brett said. “Or are you screwed in the head, honey?”
“Sympathy like that,” Leonard said, “is why you’re a nurse.”
“I’m just sayin’,” Brett said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t. I’d have a hard time trying to remember my shoe size right now. But it seemed real. I had this feeling that things weren’t right, and I went out there. He called, see, and I went to sleep, and I woke up feeling like it wasn’t right.”
“But you don’t know for a fact you went to see him?” Brett said.
I shook my head.
“You been kind of goofy lately,” Leonard said. “I saw this coming, but I wasn’t expecting it to be like this.”
“What were you expectin’?” I asked.
“It didn’t involve you shittin’ yourself while sittin’ in a big armchair,” Leonard said. “That much I can tell you.”
“Which, by the way,” Brett said, “I have disposed of the chair. I took it to the dump. You owe me a chair, Hap.”
“I’ll get right on that,” I said.
Leonard got up and started for the door.
I said, “Where are you goin’?”
“To get Bert’s Camp Rapture address from the folder, then I’m going to go see if you’re nuts.”
28
Sometime later, Leonard came through the bedroom door. Brett and I were snuggled up together under the covers.
“Glad I didn’t come back fifteen minutes later,” Leonard said. “Or was it fifteen minutes earlier?”
“Whatever time you came in, it would have been the same situation,” Brett said. “His little friend is as tired as he is.”
I said, “Do we need to get me sized for a straitjacket?”
“It was just like you said, including the devil drawing on the sheets. The place was thrown about, maybe just to look like a robbery. He was tortured good. His tongue was cut out. Air conditioner was running, which might have muffled screams and it would keep the body from going to rot too fast. That happened, you could smell that stink for a mile. And maybe Bert just liked it cold. Bottom line, though, is he’s dead.”
“Jesus,” Brett said.
“Good to know I’m not going to be spending Christmas in a rubber room. But, on the other hand, bad to know Bert really is dead.”
“Yeah, with his passing, the world has really lost a big bit of charm. As for you, you’re not off the nut hook yet. I think you need to stay where you are for a while. Get your marbles back together.”
“Yeah, you’re kind of fucked up,” Brett said. “You boys want more coffee?”
“That would be nice,” Leonard said.
“Well,” Brett said, “I want some too, so I’m going to do what any good domesticated woman does, I’m going to have Leonard make it.”
“Hell with that,” Leonard said. “I’m going to the coffee shop.”
“You know what?” Brett said. “I think I was just bitten by a ghost of women past. I’ll go down and make the coffee. You two visit.”
When Brett was downstairs, Leonard pulled his chair closer to me. “You feelin’ better, brother?”
“I think so. I’m just not entirely certain what’s real and what isn’t, but more and more things are coming back to me.”
“Do you remember that five hundred dollars you owe me?”
“Nope. That isn’t coming back.”
Leonard grinned and gave my hand a pat. He said, “Now, while you’re weak, I can smother you with a pillow.”
“Way I feel, you could smother me with a thought.”
We sat silent for a few moments.
“Sometimes in war,” Leonard said, “there are soldiers who killed too much and saw too much, and they have nervous collapses. Sometimes they have it right there, right after they killed someone, or lost a buddy, but mostly they come home and have it years later.”
“And you never had any of that?”
“Once I woke up in a sweat remembering that I had lost a harmonica in the war.”
“A harmonica?”
“My uncle gave it to me, and I had it over there. I never played it. He gave it to me when I was a kid. That and a cap gun and cowboy bandanna. I lost the cap gun, and once when I was in the woods, hunting, and had to shit, I wiped my ass on the bandanna and lost my sentimentality toward it. But I had that harmonica, and though I couldn’t play a lick, I took it to war with me. It was kind of like a charm.”
“So, you’re telling me I lost my harmonica and had a nervous breakdown? I don’t own a harmonica, Leonard.”
“In a way, I am telling you that you lost your harmonica. There were guys went over there to war and came back and went along fine for years. I was once told by an army buddy that anyone killed someone had some kind of hole in them, even if they felt the person killed needed to be killed. Because on some level, human beings identify with other human beings to such an extent they start to see themselves as the dead human. You may be okay for a while, but in time, those things you do, things you’ve seen, they come home to roost, like pterodactyls.”
“Do you have moments like that?” I asked.
“I don’t. Not if I thought what I did was the right thing to do. I’m pretty self-righteous. I mean, there are guys out there, sociopaths that end up in war, and for them it’s like a free hand job every day. They like it. They don’t feel. That’s different. I think it needs to be done, I don’t brood. You, you’re always digging into your feelings. You leave them raw, mess with them so much. You’ve seen plenty, but last night you saw one too many. And I think Vanilla Ride, meeting her, may have been a big trigger, not just poor old Bert. She was the gun. Bert was the bullet.”
Vanilla had been a while ago, but he was right, she was in the back of my mind all the time.
“Vanilla is a beautiful woman,” Leonard said, “charming, very feminine, and she can kill you with an ice pick or a gun, maybe her bare hands, and sleep like a baby. And I know you. In the back of your mind you’re thinking: Once she was a kid like me, and she grew up to kill, and she grew up do it for money and not care who she killed or why. You feel like you might be slipping over into her bit of darkness. I tell you, man, no way. You ain’t comin’ from, and ain’t never been comin’ from, the farm where she was raised.”
“Farm?”
“Figure of speech.”
“How bad was I?” I said.
“I’ve seen a lot worse. But, know what I think? I think you might have sat in that chair for days, maybe starved to death if Brett hadn’t come along, called me.” Leonard swallowed and his facial expression changed. “
You know what Brett said to me when you were in the chair? She said he’s your brother, he loves you, maybe more than me. Fix him.”
“And you did,” I said.
“I put a Band-Aid on it. You got to be your own doctor. A little bed rest perks you up. A little experience helps you deal with it. But it’s like a super staph infection. It gets better, but it doesn’t go away.”
29
In Marvin’s office, he said, “I thought you fuckers had retired.”
“No,” Leonard said. “We were on strike.”
“For what?”
“Better working conditions
Well, you’re shit out of luck.”
“What we figured,” Leonard said. “That’s why the strike is over.”
Marvin eyed me. “You’re awful quiet. Usually I can’t shut you up. No wisecracks?”
“Not today,” I said.
“Hap found a body. Bert, Mini’s stepdad. He’s been killed.”
“No shit,” Marvin said.
“I just missed the murderer,” I said, and I told him what we knew. About how Bert was scared, and claimed to have information, and then he was dead. I told him about the SUV, the phone call from Bert’s phone.
“You tell the police?” Marvin asked.
“Not yet.”
“That’s not smart,” Marvin said.
“I haven’t been feeling smart,” I said. “I have been, shall we say, under the weather.”
“I can work this out a bit,” Marvin said. “An anonymous tip. Let the cops know the body is there, but not who told them. Or I know a couple of them well enough they’ll pretend they don’t know who told them. You all right, Hap?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
Marvin picked up a pencil from his desk and tapped his teeth with it. “How does Bert’s murder tie in with the rest of it?”
“Therein lies the pickle,” Leonard said. “We don’t know.”
The pickle of it all hung in the air like a zeppelin.
“So we don’t know shit?” Marvin asked.
“If we do,” Leonard said, “we haven’t figured out that we do. Not yet. But no doubt in our minds, it’s all connected.”
“You said Bert thought someone was after him?” Marvin said. “Couldn’t it have been someone else did it? Someone not connected to all this? I mean some reason besides our case?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s all a little too sweet to be a coincidence. We talk to Bert. He wants to see us. He ends up dead. And I get a call on his phone, and a hang-up. I think that was a kind of threat. A warning at least.”
“All right, then,” Marvin said. “See if you can tie it all together.”
“We will go about detecting, then,” Leonard said, standing up.
“You mean you two will go about bumbling in the hopes that happens to lead to something.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “That’s pretty much it.”
30
Out in the parking lot, as we got in Leonard’s car, he said, “To Marvin, we are nothing more than a couple of minions. Carrier pigeons to carry messages and bring messages back. Slaves to his judgment. Faces in the crowd.”
“You’ve had way too much coffee,” I said.
“I do feel a little itchy, like my nerves could jerk a decorative knot in my dick. But, minions though we may be, it beats honest work.”
“Actually, we don’t seem to do much, just find out about dead people,” I said.
“And in your case, you even found one that’s fresher than the rest.”
“He wasn’t all that fresh.”
“Since the others, the vampires, are all in the ground,” Leonard said. “He was the lily of the bunch.”
“Ha! If they’re vampires, they may not be in the ground.”
“Oh, you are wise.”
When we were well situated in the car, seat-belted in and hoping it would start, Leonard said, “I’m confused.”
“About what?”
“Who do we annoy next? We have a list, but … who?”
“I vote Cason Statler,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because we can.”
“Now you’re startin’ to sound like yourself,” Leonard said.
But I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t even close.
The drive over to Camp Rapture was nice because it was a pretty day. The rain had cleared up and the sun was out, and the car was a little warm inside. We wheeled to the Camp Rapture Report, the newspaper Cason worked for, and went inside.
Cason was sitting at his desk in the middle of the newspaper office. There were other reporters around, but fewer than I had imagined. There was also an advertising department. One of the women who worked there was overweight and frumpy with pissblonde hair that looked to have been made by electricity and a sense of humor. She was wearing a too-short top that showed a lot of belly and a silver belly ring. She had on shorts that showed way too much ass and on the ass was a tattoo that looked like something an arthritic chicken had scratched in the dirt while dying.
My take is you can dress any way you want, but my amendment to that is that you have to have mirrors at your house, and you have to use them, and you must not lie to yourself about what they show.
“Damn,” I said. “I think my right eye just went dead.”
“Wishful thinking,” Leonard said.
“Oh, the humanity.”
Cason looked up from his work, saw us, stopped typing, and watched as we approached his desk. There was one spare chair, and I took it. Leonard put his hip against the side of Cason’s desk. All three of us looked at the woman in advertising with the too-little clothes and the too-much flesh.
“I try to forget she’s over there,” Cason said, “and then I get my mind off forgetting, and look up, and there she is, and I’m wounded all over again.”
I said, “Does she actually sell any advertising?”
“She threatens to take the shorts off if they don’t buy any,” Cason said.
“Ouch,” Leonard said.
“She’s the curse of the newspaper,” Cason said. “The editor is starting a dress code just to get some clothes on her. The flyer went out today from the boss saying we got to dress nicer, and a certain way. Normally I’m against dress codes. I think it violates our civil rights, but in Carrie’s case, I’m going to make an exception. You got to think of the children. Small animals. Our way of life. The planet earth.”
“If you’re through insulting the poor woman,” I said, “is there a place where we can talk private?” I said.
“The break room.”
Our trip to the break room was short. By the time we had gotten bad coffee in Styrofoam cups and told what we knew to Cason, we were being shuffled away. Cason followed us out to the car. He said, “There’s this guy works here, does research, Mercury is his last name, he can find something about anything. I’m gonna put him on this.”
“Really?” Leonard said. “His name is Mercury?”
“Really,” Cason said. “He lives for research, and anything to do with something odd, that’s his meat. Dumb-asses who think they’re vampires, that’s odd and he’ll like it, and he’ll research them until he falls over dead. I’ll talk to him and see if he can get on it.”
“You seem quick to shuffle us off.”
“Got a lunch date.”
“With a lady?” I said.
“None of your business,” he said, got in his car, and drove away.
31
As we were driving, Leonard said, “You think Cason’s too busy dropping the rope down the well to do us any good?”
“I think he’s the kind of guy that can screw and chew gum and do math problems all at the same time.”
“I doubt Cason’s date would appreciate his ability to do more than one thing at a time.”
“True,” I said, “but my guess is he’ll have lunch, knock him off a piece, get with this Mercury fella, and have something for us pretty damn quick. He’s pretty high-energy.”
/> “And if your description is right, he’s not particularly thoughtful,” Leonard said.
Leonard made a curve and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“How you feelin’, Hap?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It comes in waves. Sometimes I feel fine, other times I want to go back to that big armchair and not get up.”
“The chair’s at the dump, and since we’re not going to the dump to let you sit in it, that means you just got to live with things.”
“How do you do it, Leonard?”
“Because I have to.”
“That’s no kind of answer.”
“It’s my answer. I look at it this way. If what I choose to do seems right to me, I do it.”
“And what if,” I said, “what I choose to do seems right, but isn’t. Ku Klux Klan people think they’re right, but they aren’t.”
“I get your point. But you just made a point. You said they aren’t right, those KKK fucks, and being a black man, I have to agree. But saying they’re wrong means you have what you think is a clear-cut position, and you back it up with experience and facts. Like it or not, you believe you can tell right from wrong, and I trust your judgment and mine on those matters more than I trust the judgment of paranoid and inferior-feeling assholes who are all about making people’s lives miserable because they can. I’m simple enough about the matter to consider that if I’m doing something to protect someone or make their life better, and I have the ability to do it, and I’m going to feel good about myself afterward, that’s what I do.”
“Seems more complicated than that to me,” I said.
“Didn’t say it wasn’t complicated for some. What I said was it’s easy for me. Do you think if we hadn’t killed those who were trying to kill us in the past, they would have let us go with a pat on the butt? Do you really think there’s a god that sorts them out and punishes them if someone here in reality land doesn’t?”
“No. But we’re part of the problem.”
“Let me ask you why we put ourselves in those positions.”