I got in the car, and Leonard said, “Well, Hawkeye?”
“There are tire tracks that look fresh,” I said. “It could be him. It could be someone else, but it could be him.”
“It’s what we got,” Leonard said, and started down the road. It was dark down there and the trees ate up the sides of the road until there was only room for the car, and then we came to a bridge that looked as if the headless horseman ought to be on the other side of it. We rattled over it and went around a curve that climbed through some trees with winter-dried moss hanging down. When we broke over the hill there was a clearing and an A-frame house, not too big, sitting at the peak of the hill and we could see the Volkswagen parked in the yard. There was a little road that went into the trees on the right and there was one on the left. Leonard took the one on the right and we drove down it a piece and found a place where the road was a little wide and parked on the right-hand side and got out, me with the shotgun and him with the rifle. We were carrying our handguns and we each had a nifty blackjack and a jaunty stride.
When I loaded up the shotgun, Leonard said, “Here, you’re a better shot. I should have the shotgun.”
We swapped, and I gave him the shells. I took the box of shells for the deer rifle and put the whole box in my coat pocket.
“How long will it take them to get up here on foot?” Leonard said.
“A lot longer yet,” I said, “and then they have to be smart like us and look at the tracks.”
“I’m going to give them that much smarts,” Leonard said. “Let’s get this over with. Maybe we can be in and out and in our car and down the hill before they realize it’s us coming back and they’ll be so startled they won’t shoot at us.”
We started crawling up the hill, down close to the earth, in line with the Volkswagen. It took about a century for us to make it that way, but we thought it might be preferable to being spotted and shot. When we got to the Volkswagen, I stood up behind it and glanced in. My blue envelope was on the seat next to the stationery I had written “Hi” on, and beside it was a black mustache and a cap with a headful of black hair.
I hunkered back down behind the Volkswagen, said, “Unless the driver has some kind of skin disease and his mustache fell off in the altogether along with all the hair in his hat, the guy who picked up Vanilla Ride’s mail was Vanilla Ride.”
“A master of disguise.”
“Well, I think maybe for us she doesn’t have to be all that masterful.”
“That’s certainly true. Now what?”
“I think the now what is I get my wind back.”
“Too many late dinners and not enough exercise, Hap. I’ve been telling you that.”
“Yes, you have. Now shut up.”
“So, in a couple hours when you get your wind back, what do we do?”
“We split up. You go right and I go left.”
“That’s it?” Leonard said. “You complained to me that we didn’t have a plan last time, and now your plan is you go one way and I go another.”
“Okay, what’s your plan?”
Leonard was quiet for a moment. “I go left and you go right.”
55
We were about to start our plan when we heard boots on gravel, looked up into the smiling face of Vanilla Ride, standing by the Volkswagen pointing an automatic pistol at us. It certainly seemed to be a big automatic. She had come up like a ghost while we were putting our war room together. She had her golden hair tied back in a ponytail, and she looked like some kind of female goddess of war.
“I have systems on top of systems,” she said. “I knew you were here the moment you entered my perimeter.”
“Damn,” Leonard said. She got a determined look on her face, like she was about to pass an anvil through her bowels, extended the automatic, ready to pop us, and then a shot rang out and the window on the Volkswagen above me splintered and some of the glass rained down. Vanilla took a turn around the Volkswagen on one end, and Leonard and I scrambled around to the other side. We ended up behind a tire, close as lovers, and Vanilla was behind the other tire. When I looked at her, she jerked the automatic at us.
“Truce,” I said. “They want us too.”
She studied me for a long moment.
“You’re wondering if you can trust us,” I said, “and I know this isn’t much right now, but we keep our word. Truce. For now, anyway.”
After a moment, Vanilla Ride nodded, said, “I can kill you anytime I want.”
There was an explosion as a low bullet caught the tire we were behind and rang off the rim and the pressure of the exploding tire blew us back about three feet. Vanilla darted for the A-frame, and Leonard grabbed me by the coat collar and started dragging me. I let him, clinging to my deer rifle like a child with a teddy bear.
When we were inside and the door was slammed, glass began to come out of the windows as shots rained down. It was a two-story house with a short stairway up to what was more a loft than a room. The middle floor had a low section and some standard couches around it. Except for some exercise equipment off to the side of the living room, the place looked as impersonal as a cheap motel room.
I got off my belly and on my knees and looked at Vanilla Ride. She was crawling across the floor toward the corner. She popped the flooring up there with remarkable deftness, took out a long, sleek black weapon with a very large banana clip, and she pulled a spare clip out of there too. She crawled back to where the glass was still dropping from the big window. The glass splattered around her like falling stars and she stood up and let the spare clip drop to the floor and cut loose with the gun. Down below, where their shots were coming from, the dirt leaped up in heaps and the trees whipped and then she went down again, behind the high windowsill where Leonard and I were lurking, but on the opposite end. We were bookends. Same alike. Except we were guys and she was a girl and she had a big gun that would shoot faster than ours.
“They got their car out of the ditch,” Leonard said.
“It was more of a drop-off than a ditch,” I said. “I didn’t think they could turn it off its side and drive it out. Not that easily.”
“You were wrong,” Leonard said.
“Yep,” I said.
“You didn’t do as good as you thought.”
“Nope.”
“Kind of typical, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said.
“You see, they got it running, and now they are after our ass, and here we are with”—Leonard turned and looked at Vanilla Ride—“her.”
Vanilla looked at us and smiled. Damn, she was a beauty. “How have you two lived this long?” she said.
“Our sterling personalities,” Leonard said. “We charm just about everyone.”
I eased over so I was near the corner of the windowsill and the wall, and then I raised up. I could taste the cold air coming in through the shattered window and smell the pines down the hill, and I could see one of the men coming along where the hill spread up toward the house, and though there wasn’t much light, I could see him well enough. He was the greasy-haired guy and he was stooped slightly, his head down, running for the Volkswagen, the only real cover he had.
I rose up and beaded in and shot and hit him in the top of the head and knocked him rolling down the rise.
I sat down behind the wall and looked at Leonard. He said, “Haven’t lost your touch.”
Vanilla Ride smiled at me.
Leonard said, “You wait until there’s some real light, he can shoot the balls off a dog tick.”
“My guess is they won’t wait until it’s light,” I said. “They like it better this way. Daylight comes we can see them better from here than they can see us, and we got cover. In the light, they got dick, so they’ll either cash in now or come soon. I vote that they come ahead.”
Leonard looked at Vanilla Ride, said, “They may not even be after you, though I’d say that shot hit the Volkswagen was close to all of us.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Vanilla Ride said. “They’ve
invaded my home. So have you.”
“But we have a truce, right?” I said.
“You came to kill me, didn’t you?”
“That’s right, we did.”
“You’re not too good.”
“We’re tougher and smarter than you think,” I said. “Except for getting sneaked up on. That part, well, we’re not so good.”
“You want the money?”
“It’s not about money,” I said. “It doesn’t even belong to us. You killed a couple of kids and a friend of ours.”
“Business,” she said.
“It didn’t seem like business to us,” I said.
She shifted slightly to a kneeling position, behind the wall. The gun she held shifted too. She said, “I don’t have any reason to believe you two about anything.”
“No, you don’t,” Leonard said. “But I will say this: I just saw one of those bozos cutting low across the bottom of the hill, moving to the left of the house. They’re trying to circle us. They got six and we got three, and we got the house, so in one way we’re better off. In another, they know where we are and we don’t know where they are, and there are more of them than there are of us. So that’s the situation. How’s it gonna be?”
Vanilla Ride was quiet for a few moments. She said, “I keep my word.”
“We keep ours,” Leonard said.
“Then we have to trust one another, don’t we?” she said.
“So we’re going to maintain the truce?” I said.
“Certainly,” she said.
It wasn’t like I expected. They were brave. Either that or stupid. They came at us hard and they came at us quick. What they did was they opened up with automatic weapons that made the walls jump apart and a splinter from the wall popped into my cheek and it felt like fire. Without really thinking about it, Leonard and I crawled toward the center of the house, toward where the floor was lowered and the couches circled it. We crawled down in there and kept our heads ducked while the stuffings leaped out of the couch and things came off the walls and glass broke.
I looked up once, and there was Vanilla Ride, standing up, bullets buzzing around her like hornets, and she was letting down on that automatic weapon, and it didn’t even seem to jump in her hands, and I could see through the big open window where she was shooting that the ground was churning up, and I could see one body there where she had caught one of the guys, and then everything went silent. She hit the floor and the clip went away, and she pulled the other clip out and slipped it on the weapon smooth as a gigolo sliding on a condom.
The back door burst open with a kick and we raised up, saw a tough-looking guy with a shotgun. Leonard raised up and shot at him and missed. I lifted the rifle as the intruder’s shotgun wheeled toward us, and just before I fired, I knew he had me beat, so I jumped and covered Leonard. The shot tore at the couch and I felt pellets hit my ass so hard one butt cheek slammed against the other. I came up scrambling and firing the rifle twice, and both shots hit the shotgunner as he pumped another load and I saw one of his eyes go big and red and then he was down and two were coming through the front window.
Vanilla Ride was no longer at the window. I wheeled around to shoot, but by this time Leonard was up, and he fired, caught one of them in the kneecap and he dropped with a yelp. Then a shot came from upstairs, and the other one took it through the right side of his head as he was stepping over the spot where the window had been. He seemed to lean against the sill, and then he turned his head slightly, like someone had called his name, sat down hard on the sill, dropping his weapon, his head falling forward in his lap. The guy Leonard had hit in the knee was screaming loudly. It was so loud and strange it made my skin knot up. He quit screaming when Vanilla Ride leaned over the stair railing and shot him through the head. He just lay quietly then, bleeding out.
“That leaves two,” Vanilla Ride said.
56
“Someone’s got to die!” a voice called from outside.
“That would be you,” Leonard called out.
“Why don’t you chicken farts just come out and face us?” the voice said. “What’s stopping you?”
“Bullets,” Leonard yelled out.
“Chickenshits,” the voice called.
“Absolutely,” Leonard said. “Why don’t you just come and get us? We’ll put the coffee on.”
“We got two, you got three,” the voice said.
“You started with seven,” I said.
“Vanilla Ride,” the voice said, “we ain’t got nothing against you. We want them.”
“You fucked up my house,” she called out. “You nearly shot me trying to shoot them. You pick this moment to come after them. No. I think you’re ready to retire me because I know too much. Me and you, we aren’t friends.”
“I don’t have any friends,” the voice said.
“That makes us even,” Vanilla Ride said.
They went silent out there and time slipped by slowly and the beginnings of light seeped in under the trees and rose up between them like a gentle flame. The back door was wide open, and it made me nervous, that and the big front window open as well. I moved once, just to see if I could make it to the back door, and a bullet plowed into the couch about a quarter inch from my face, so I got down and played it close to the floor, my ears perked.
This went on for a long time, and Leonard said, “Fuck it. Let’s you and me go get them.”
“You can’t hit the ass end of an elephant with a shotgun at two paces. That would be some shoot-out.”
“I can hit most anything,” Vanilla Ride said. “And you seem to be a good shot.”
I looked up at her on the landing, in the shadows.
“With a long gun,” I said.
“What about a short one?”
“Nowhere as good.”
“But he can hit stuff,” Leonard said. “His bad is someone else’s good. He’s got an instinct.”
“My instinct is to stay right here,” I said. “I don’t like where this is going.”
“I’m tired of waiting,” Vanilla Ride said. “You can go, or you can stay.” Then she turned her attention away from me and yelled outside. “Hey, you still out there, loudmouth?”
“I’m out here,” came the voice.
“You two, you show yourself, handguns only,” she said. “I’ll meet you outside, guns by our sides.”
“You mean that?”
“Hell yeah, I got better things to do with the morning.”
“Oh, you aren’t going to end up doing all that much today, Vanilla.”
“I guess we can find out, swizzle dick.”
There was a long moment of silence. Then the voice yelled back. “Deal.”
“Damn,” I said to Leonard. “You know I got to do it now.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ll do it, you know that, but—”
“You can’t shoot for shit.”
“Bingo,” Leonard said.
I took a deep breath and put the rifle on the floor and pulled the automatic from my belt. Leonard said, “If you get killed, I’m running out that back door like a goddamn rabbit.”
“No you won’t.”
“Yes I will.”
“No. You’re a macho queer.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. Maybe. Christ, Hap, let them come for us.”
“Either way scares the hell out of me,” I said. “I’m always scared. I’m not like you.”
“Hey, I’m scared. You get killed, John doesn’t take me back, where am I to stay?”
Vanilla Ride came down the stairs carrying her automatic pistol in her hand. I eased away from the couch and along the wall near the window. I said to her, “Think they’ll keep their word?”
“Of course not,” she said.
Easing over to the edge of the window on her side, she called out: “There will be two of us, and two of you.”
“That sounds good,” came the voice from the dark.
“One of us will step out, and you’ll show one of you, with a h
andgun only.”
“High noon,” the voice yelled out.
“High morning,” Vanilla Ride said. She stepped through the gap where the window had been. A tall man with dark hair came up over the rise. He had his hand down by his side. I could see a handgun in it. I stepped out, but kept close to the edge of the windowsill.
The other man came up over the rise. I could see his handgun. He held it in such a way that it was in front of him and resting against his thigh. The sun was still coming up, and though the sun in our eyes should have been a hazard, this early in the morning and coming through the trees it wasn’t so bright and all it did was outline our targets neatly.
“Let’s walk out a ways,” said the tall dark-haired man.
“They’re going to fuck with us,” Vanilla Ride said so only I could hear.
“But we’re going to go on out a ways in spite of that, aren’t we?” I said.
“We are,” she said. “I got to tell you, I always wanted to do this.”
“Not me,” I said, and I could feel my hands shaking. It was all I could do not to break and run.
“What happens we get killed?” she said. “What about your friend?”
“They’ll have hell coming in and getting him,” I said. “It won’t be any cakewalk, that you can depend on.”
“Good,” she said.
“Do we have to do this?” I said.
“No.”
“Then what the fuck are we doing?”
By now the two had spread out. One was going wide, in the direction of the Volkswagen, and I knew he was my guy, as he was on my side. The other guy going the other way, I decided not to think about him. He belonged to Vanilla Ride.
My guy brought his gun up and a shot went by my head so close I felt the heat from it. I jerked my automatic up and fired. If I hit him, he didn’t show it. He started running low along the ground, and I fired again. He did a kind of bunny hop and went down. I heard shots to my right, but I didn’t turn my head. I could still see out of the corner of my eye that Vanilla Ride was standing.
She said, “Goddamn,” and then my guy leaped forward from where he lay, grabbed at an automatic rifle he had planted earlier, in the dark, hid it there waiting to grab it and cheat. I stepped forward and took my time, aiming one-handed, the way I had been taught, not with two hands, and when he lifted up I shot him somewhere along the jawline. It took part of his face off and he rolled on his side and lost the rifle, but he came up then, as if the pain had given him a jolt of power. He stumbled forward. He had another handgun, drawn from under his coat, and he was coming toward me fast, his face seeming to drip. He fired a shot and I found myself standing sideways all of a sudden, looking in the wrong direction. And by the time I had turned, having realized I had been hit, he was firing again, and this time one of his shots punched my coat but missed me, and I took careful aim and fired, hitting him in the center of the chest, but he kept coming. I fired again, and he must have been firing too, because there seemed to be shots popping all over, and I’m thinking I missed, but he went down, propped on a knee. I shot him another time and his body jerked and he went to his right side and lay there, his ruined face in my direction, his body kind of horseshoed behind him.