I finally convinced Leonard to let me drive back to Tom’s place, just to make sure he wasn’t collecting vultures.
“He might shoot at us this time,” Leonard said.
I drove back there anyway, and as we came up the drive, I could see that he was no longer lying where we left him. Fragments of the bench had been gathered up and stacked by the porch steps.
“All right,” I said. “He lives.”
We backed out, and I drove us back to LaBorde. There wasn’t anything else left for us to do. I dropped Leonard off at his place, and then I called Brett. She was at the office, finishing up some paperwork on a divorce case she had been working. I hated that kind of stuff, but frankly it was the sort of business they kept us in biscuits.
When I arrived at our office and parked in the lot, the bicycle shop lady downstairs was wearing her shorts, as usual. I noticed, as usual, because I’m biologically driven to do so, then I went upstairs and saw the only woman that really matters to me in that kind of way.
Brett said, “So, find out anything?”
“Found out we don’t know anything.”
Brett was sitting behind the desk with her hair pulled back into a ponytail. She was working on some papers with a pen. She was dressed in jeans and an oversized tee-shirt, had on slip-on, white, tennis shoes.
“I got a little bit of paperwork left, then we can get something to eat. Nothing fancy, obviously. I want to stay sloppy.”
“LaBorde doesn’t have much that’s fancy,” I said.
“True,” she said, and got busy on her paperwork.
I picked up the newspaper on the edge of the desk, started reading. The bookmobile and the murder of James Clifton weren’t even on the second page. Third page, at the bottom. The article was thin. James had been driving, he ran off the road, hit a truck (occupants unnamed, but unhurt), and there was an investigation into his death and into the mystery of where the bookmobile had been all these years. Some bodies had been found.
By the time I had finished reading the rest of the paper, which didn’t take long, Brett was up and we were out. We traveled in my car. After dinner, I would drop her back at the office to pick up hers.
We went to a small joint that served Ecuadorian food. It was off Universal Street, and it was good. After I dropped Brett back at her car, we met up at the house. It seemed a little empty when we first came in. My daughter Chance had been living with us, along with a rescue mutt we named Buffy. Actually, Leonard had rescued her, but I had ended up with the dog. Now Buffy was with Chance. Until last year, I didn’t know I had a daughter. I missed her. I missed Buffy.
We watched a couple TV shows, then we went to bed. I fell asleep quickly. I didn’t sleep long. When I awoke it was still solid dark. I had dreamed I was reaching for a butterfly that kept flittering out of the way. I had an uncomfortable feeling that butterfly was representative of me having knowledge I didn’t understand. A common problem. Then again, I might have merely been dreaming about butterflies. Thing was, now, I was wide awake.
To keep from tossing and turning, I slipped out of bed, went downstairs and made an early breakfast. After I finished my oatmeal, I sat and sipped coffee, glancing out the kitchen window at the darkness. I tried to collect my thoughts, tried to catch my butterfly. I thought about all of the people we had talked to, thought back on that poor kid’s face as the bookmobile barreled down on us. I thought back to finding those oily bodies in the container in the bookmobile. And then I thought, wait a minute.
I called Leonard on my cell. He was none too happy to hear from me.
“It’s dark outside,” he said.
“All the better for clandestine activity,” I said. “Get dressed. I’m coming to pick you up.”
“You don’t dare come this way for an hour,” he said. “I’m going to eat and shower, but right before that, me, and the extra-nice Officer Carroll, are going to play rodeo.”
Officer Carroll, as we both called him, was Leonard’s new love interest. Nice guy and a nice cop, one of Marvin’s people.
“Don’t get any rope burns,” I said. “But an hour is too late. It still needs to be dark when we get where we’re going.”
“Twenty minutes, then,” Leonard said.
“Bring protection.”
“We use protection.”
“No. Bring it, and I don’t mean the kind you’re talking about. You show up with a Trojan and I’ll beat you to death.”
“I use one of those big garbage bags, you know, something that’ll hold the meat.”
“Yeah, right.”
I had another cup of coffee, took a quick shower, wrote Brett a note, dressed and drove over to Leonard’s apartment. Officer Carroll was coming out as I arrived. He’s constructed like a large artillery shell.
“I hope you boys aren’t going to get in trouble,” he said.
“Us? Heaven forbid.”
“Don’t tell me anything. I know it’s best I don’t know.”
After I got Leonard hustling along, a granola bar in one fist, a cup of coffee in the other, I told him what had come to me, and then I drove us back to Nesbit.
eleven
It was still dark, and in East Texas, wandering about near people’s homes and places of business during the night is the sort of thing that could get you shot. Growing up I had been able to walk to people’s houses if the need came about and ask to borrow their phone, or some such, without expecting to be shot into Swiss cheese by some fearful and angry home owner. The days of close neighbors had almost passed, and in its place was a cloud of anger and suspicion and a lot of hardware of the killing kind.
Still, we parked to the side of the General store and chanced it, walked between the store and the tire shop, wandered out to the big building at the back of Donnie James’ place. There was a night light in front and back of the building, and we stood out like bugs in a porch light. I took out my handy little lock pick kit, and easily defeated the padlock. Once we pulled the door aside, there was yet another door, and its locks were a little more difficult.
“Hold it,” Leonard said. “Alarm system.”
Leonard had discovered a little black panel on the inside of the second door fastened to the wall. He took out his pocket knife and popped the cover, used the blade to cut a wire.
“Might as well have been on the honor system,” he said.
We got that door slid aside as well, then closed it behind us. I took out my penlight and flashed it around. There was a big tractor in the center of the building, some farm equipment attachments, and not much else.
We walked around for awhile, but no clues jumped at us.
“Okay,” Leonard said. “What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know exactly, but I have a strong feeling it’s here.”
Leonard pulled out his own penlight, and we split up and went around the building looking for whatever might look like a clue.
Reason we were there was I had thought about Donnie James. He had mentioned the boy’s and the woman’s body in the bookmobile, but then reading the paper, where he said he got his news, I realized that the bodies in the bookmobile had not been mentioned. Marvin had most likely not revealed those things on purpose, to have one up on the killer, so how had Donnie James known about it?
It was possible someone leaked the information, but if they had, I doubted it went all the way to Nesbit and to the owner of a tire shop. Again, possible, but not likely. Marvin ran a tight ship.
We met up by the tractor, turned off our penlights and stood there a moment.
“Nothing,” Leonard said.
“Same.”
After a brief moment, Leonard turned back on his penlight, said, “Place looks bigger on the outside.”
“Yeah.”
“Because it is,” he said.
&nb
sp; I turned on my light again, flashed it around. On the right there were windows in the wall, and on the left there were not. That could have merely been a builder’s choice, but something didn’t seem right.
I started over to that wall, and Leonard went along with me. When we got there he tapped on it with his fist.
“Okay,” he said. “Pretty sure it’s hollow.”
“No doors. No windows, but a hollow wall means another room.”
“Uh-huh. And this aluminum looks fresh, like it’s been added lately. Maybe after the kid stole the bus and ran off with it.”
That got me excited.
We walked along the length of the wall, and near the front of the building I thought it looked a little odd. I pressed against it. The wall moved a little. There was a separate piece of aluminum that had been used to fill out the wall; it looked all of one piece if you weren’t paying attention. I worked with it some more and it slid aside on rollers. It left a gap big enough to walk through, but there was a chain and lock through it and the main wall. We could have slipped under the chain, but I decided to make it easier.
I took out my lock-pick kit and snapped the padlock open. Once that was done, we were able to push it wider. We slipped in behind it.
Using my penlight, I found a switch and flipped it. Lights came on along the stretch of hidden chamber. It was a full twelve feet wide, and maybe forty feet long. On the concrete floor was a dark oil stain, and at the far end of the room was a metal chair bolted to the floor. There were leather straps on the arm rest and at the base of the chair. There was a freezer behind the chair, and off to the side a metal box with air holes in it.
It was pretty obvious then. Recently the wall had been put up to hide what had formerly been in the open. Unlikely anyone was ever let in, but after James escaped, paranoia set in, and the wall was built to hide where the bookmobile had been parked, where the kidnapped boys were kept, and obviously tortured. I felt sick to my stomach.
Leonard walked over to the freezer and looked inside.
“Empty,” he said. That caused me to let out a sigh of relief.
I went over to the box and lifted the lid. It too was empty. At least there weren’t any others.
The bookmobile had been setting here for years, part of Donnie’s murderous ritual, that and the oiled bodies that he had eventually put in the tank in the bookmobile, along with Harriet Hoodalay.
“Fits,” Leonard said. “Donnie has a bad thing for boys, somehow Harry must have delivered the bookmobile here one night, night she was supposed to drop it off at Will‘s place, got her wires crossed about where, and in the process of leaving it at the tire shop she must have seen something that got her killed. Donnie hid her body and the bookmobile in here. Must have dug up those early bodies, oiled them all down and put them in the bookmobile with Harry’s corpse.”
“Sounds right,” I said.
“Kept the bookmobile running and in good shape, checked on the bodies from time to time, see how they were marinating.”
“Jesus,” I said. I could visualize Donnie sitting in the bookmobile, starting it up, listening to the motor hum, feeling the thrill of being in control of the machine that brought children to it; that struck me as something the sick bastard might enjoy thinking about.
Leonard was still piecing it out. “He grabbed James, had him here awhile, but somehow James got loose while they were out, opened the door, stole the bookmobile and got away. Or tried to. Goddam. Donnie is one sick fuck.”
“Not sick, just different,” a voice said.
We turned, and there was Donnie standing near the open section of the wall. He had slipped in quietly. He was holding a flat, black automatic.
“I thought I was pretty clever,” he said, “way I built this room after the kid escaped. Lucked out he killed himself. If only you two had been killed, that would have ended my problems.”
“You almost had me convinced it was Tom,” I said.
“What was it, the newspaper?”
“Yep,” I said.
“I thought about it later, hoped you wouldn’t think about it too hard. You know, I don’t mean to do the things I do, but I can’t help myself.”
“Yeah you can,” Leonard said. “You don’t want to.”
“You could be right,” Donnie said.
“There’s another alarm, ain’t there?” Leonard said.
“Yeah. You killed the obvious one, but there’s another. You tamper with one, it sets off the spare. Goes off at the house. Somehow, I figured it was you two. That newspaper slip I made.”
Will glided in through the gap in the wall and came up behind Donnie. For a brief moment I thought we had lucked out, but he walked up and stood by his partner.
“Took you long enough,” Donnie said to him.
“Came fast as I could,” he said.
And then I got the rest of it. Will had worked for Donnie for years, been groomed, and then he became part of the operation. Donnie had created Will in his image. It was the two of them doing the torturing, the killing. I was waiting for the inevitable.
That’s when a gun went off. I expected I had been shot, but that’s not what happened. I watched as Donnie sagged, slightly. There was another shot, and he went down on one knee and dropped his gun. Blood seeped out of his right shoulder and out of his right leg, splashed onto the floor, looked orange in the harsh light.
Will had darted out of the gap at the sound of the first shot.
I turned. Leonard was holding a little revolver in his hand, an old-fashioned snub nose twenty-two. I looked back at Donnie. He was trying to pick up his gun.
“Nope, nope, nope,” Leonard said, “or the next one gives you a hole in the head. Did you see that, Hap? I didn’t miss either shot. Course I was aiming for his head with the first one.”
I had forgotten I told Leonard to bring protection, and hadn’t noticed the gun tucked beneath his shirt. I was glad, that for once, he had listened to me.
“Go get Will,” Leonard said. “I got this one.”
I raced past Donnie, kicking his gun to the side as I went, then I darted out the gap in the wall, through the front door and into the crisp night air. I could see Will running toward the tire shop. He was almost there. I jogged after him.
When I got to the shop, Will had already opened the door and slipped inside. I eased into the dark building and fetched up behind some tires on racks. There was a shot and a chunk of rubber flew out of one of the tires and hit me in the face, hard. That shot had missed me by inches.
I kept moving behind the rows of tires. The son-of-a-bitch had run in here to get a gun, and I had followed him inside, the way he had wanted. I was a duck in a shooting gallery.
There were three more pops, but all they did was ruin a couple more tires. At least he was a bad shot. I bent down behind the tires and tried to peek between a gap in them. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, and I could make out his shape on the landing above, framed by the moonlight slipping past a little window up there. He was squatting, the gun pointing in my general direction, waiting for me to stick my head out.
I pushed a tire loose from the top rack. It bounced when it hit the floor, and when it did Will popped off a nervous shot. I was already moving, back along the row of tires, and then under the landing above. I rushed my way along until I was pretty near under him. I glanced at the sagging timber that helped hold the top floor up. I charged it, hit it with my shoulder, heard it crack; the board, not my shoulder, though I was certainly feeling pain. I hit it again, and I could feel it move this time, and then a third time and it came down in an explosion of lumber, tires, dust and unidentified crap. I tried to get out from under it, but I was too slow. I don’t know anyone could have been fast enough.
Junk was lying on me. It was heavy. I was trapped. Looking out from under the debri
s, I saw Will rise up from the floor uninjured. I had only succeeded in making him fall, and pinning myself under the wreckage. He looked about, spotted what he could see of me under the junk, and lifted his gun. There was a shot, and Will did a bit of sideways dance, then toppled to the floor.
I heard Leonard say, “Got ’em Boscoe,” and then I passed out for awhile.
twelve
Leonard dragged me outside and propped my back against the tire shop. That’s where I was when he slapped me awake.
“Damn, quit that,” I said.
“How do you feel?” he said.
“Like a bunch of lumber fell on me and then my brother started slapping my face.”
“I enjoyed that a little,” Leonard said.
“Did you kill Will?”
“Boy did I.”
“Donnie?”
“Yeah. I went ahead and shot him too. He kind of died in a gunfight, but I was the only one shooting. Wasn’t like I could tie him up. I knew you needed help. I could hear the gunshots.”
“Jesus, Leonard.”
“Wasn’t like he needed a room with a bunk for the rest of his life, sitting in some cell breathing stale air and making turds. He needed a bullet. You dumb ass, you should have took his gun with you.”
“I didn’t want to kill anyone.”
“That’s all right,” Leonard said. “I did it for the both of us. I’m going to go back down there and fire off his gun a few times to make sure it looked like he put up a fight.”
“That’s cold,” Leonard. “He was unarmed when you killed him.”
“Yeah. He was.”
thirteen
A crowd of people showed up, due to all the shooting. A light was shone in my face.
Before their arrival, Leonard had fired off Donnie’s gun so he could claim there was a shootout and that he had prevailed. The noise, along with all the other racket we had made, stirred the locals. By the time they arrived, Leonard was leaning against the wall next to me, his gun lying on the ground six feet away. Donnie’s gun was back in the formerly secret room, probably firmly placed in his hand by Leonard.