Savage Season

  “Watch her, watch her,” Leonard yelled, as if I might decide to go take in a little TV. When she came around the couch, she kicked at Leonard, who was doing his damnedest to get up, caught him a glancing blow on the head. But he wasn’t her main target. He seemed for the most part incapacitated. And she hadn’t forgotten me and that shovel.

  She reached for me and I shot out a left jab and her head went back and her nose broke open and spouted blood. I hit her again, and again. Good jabs.

  She stepped in and grabbed me and whipped me up and around and I fell back on the couch. She came down on top of me and I squirmed out from under her, caught her under the arm and twisted her on her back, straddled her and hit her with a hard left-right combination. Her face was nothing but blood now.

  She slammed her forearms into my sides, sending tentacles of pain into my side wound. I fell back on the floor, trying but unable to scream. Next thing I knew she was on top of me, slamming me in the face with her fists. I couldn’t think, couldn’t get oriented, couldn’t fight back.

  Then something long and dark and sharp came into view and it pushed back Angel’s head and blood ran onto my face.

  Leonard had rolled across the floor and shoved the broken end of his stick into her right eye.

  She stood up stiffly. The stick stuck out of her face a full four feet, but it was firm in her head. She didn’t take hold of it. She managed to step over me and start toward the fireplace, but got her feet tangled in Howard’s legs and went face down. Most of her body landed on the couch, but her head missed and the stick in her eye hit the floor and the back of her head cocked up slightly but sharply, stayed that way.

  Then there was a thrashing at the living room window. Soldier had the shovel and was using it to knock out what was left of the glass. Before I could get up, the shovel pulled out, and he kicked out the frame, stooped, and stepped inside, the .45 in front of him. Leonard, still lying on the floor, reached out and caught Soldier’s ankle before his foot was firmly planted, sent him stumbling forward, but he got his feet under him again and went past Leonard and caught his foot on Trudy’s outstretched arm and fell all the way this time, and when he hit I rolled and fought the explosions in my body and chopped down on his wrist with the edge of my hand. His fingers popped wide like a startled starfish, and the gun went sliding, and he crawled for it, but I got him around the neck and tried to choke him. He made it up to his knees and I went up on my knees too, and I tightened my forearm around his throat and tried to squeeze the life out of him. He pulled a knife from his pocket and flicked it open one-handed and brought it up and slashed me at the crook of my elbow, but I didn’t let go, so he did it again, and this time I did.

  I scuttled toward the living room window on my hands and knees, saw Leonard lying there, finally too much out of blood to move, and then I twisted and got up on one knee and Soldier was there, slashing at my face. I caught the blade in my hand and the slash went deep in my thumb and scraped on bone. I tried to get my legs under me and get up, but something had finally gone really bad inside me, and I couldn’t.

  Soldier jerked the blade back and cut me again that way, but I didn’t feel it right then, and I dove forward and put my head between his legs and grabbed him behind the knees and popped my head up and caught him in the balls with the back of it and snatched his legs out from under him. His head hit the floor hard. Real hard. I crawled on top of him and got hold of his knife hand with my good left hand, twisted his thumb back and made him let go.

  I picked up the knife and put it to his throat. All I had to do was thrust and rip. Hadn’t this goddamned out-of-state racist asshole tried to kill me?

  He looked at me through those pathetic glasses and I thought of this gawky, sweaty-faced bastard as a kid with a father who slapped his ear into a cauliflower and had convinced him it was for his own good and that dear old kid-beating, wife-beating dad was a good man that demanded respect. And in that same fleeting instant I remembered that I had not gone to war because I didn’t want to kill needlessly for a cause I didn’t believe in. And here we didn’t even have a cause. Just a sad fuck-up without any hope.

  I got off of him and held the knife close and said, “Roll on your stomach, Soldier, or I’ll kill you.”

  “Easy,” he said. “I got a bad dog bite here.”

  He rolled on his stomach. I cut his coat from the collar to the center of his back, then pulled the sleeves down so they caught at his elbows. I cut strips from his pants legs and tied his wrists. I cut the back of his pants open so I could pull them down around his knees. I took off his tennis shoes and used his shoestrings to tie his ankles. I rolled his socks up tight, lifted his head, and forced them in his mouth, just in case he might want to talk. I’d heard all of him I ever wanted to hear.

  Leonard was trying to sit up. I closed the knife and put it in my pocked and helped him to a sitting position so he could lean against the front door.

  “You should have killed him,” Leonard said.

  “I know.”

  “It’s going to complicate things.”

  “I know.”

  “Same ole Hap.”

  I made a concentrated effort to rise, and had to use the edge of the couch for support, but I made it. Falling down only twice, I got to the place where the phone ought to have been, saw that it had been pulled out of the wall and tossed on the floor near the kitchen table. Soldier or Angel in their haste had made an effort to disable it, way they had the cars. I grunted and cussed on over there, took hold of it, held my heart in my mouth while I examined it. The little connection at the end of the wire was cracked from being ripped out of the wall and the phone had been thrown down hard enough to knock the back off and let the guts out, but the guts themselves appeared to be intact. Looked to me they had been in too big a hurry to do the job right. I hoped.

  I shoved the phone’s insides back into place and crawled over to the wall connection and snapped the clip into place and tried to hold my mouth just right while I punched 0. The operator came on the line after three rings and I had her connect me to the sheriff’s office. I told them what I thought they ought to know and hung up. The phone was slick with the blood from my cut hand.

  I crawled back to the door and sat up next to Leonard.

  “We better come up with some story,” Leonard said.

  I thought awhile. I put my mouth to his ear so Soldier couldn’t hear.

  “That’s for shit,” he said.

  “Got one better?”

  He shook his head. “Hap, you know I told you I been worse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I lied.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “We gonna make it?”

  “I am,” I said.

  Leonard tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. He opened his hand. I took it and held it.

  30

  I remember coming awake on the way to the hospital in the ambulance, and there being a man from the sheriff’s office there. He was determined to have some kind of statement. I think I gave him one. After that, things got hazy, then things got white and there was this light and people bending over me, then I was out again. When I awoke it was to sunlight shining through a hospital window.

  A nurse came in and spoke to me and gave me some water and sat me up in bed so I could see out the window better, and later on she came back with an orderly and a wheelchair and they got me in that and pushed me over by the window for an even better look.

  I sat and looked out on the hospital lawn. The bad, wet weather was gone and the sun was out and the trees on the big lawn were moving gently in the wind. It was probably a cold wind, but certainly nothing like the way things had been. I wanted to take that as some sort of sign of good things to come, but it wasn’t long after that the doctor came in and he had a big man with him in a long black coat and another big man dressed up in hat and boots and the standard issue that the sheriffs office gives out.

  The doctor was a little man with a bland face and thinning blo
nd hair. He stood with his hands in front of him, left palm over right. He made me think of a preacher, way he stood there. He was very polite. He said, “Mr. Collins, I’m Dr. Dumas. You know, you been out three days.”

  “Three days?”

  “That’s right. And I got to tell you, you’re a lucky man.”

  “I don’t feel so lucky,” I said.

  The man from the sheriffs office took off his cowboy hat and showed me a vein-riddled bald head. He went over to the corner and leaned there. The big man in the long coat took the single chair and pulled it around so that he was straddling it. Both he and the sheriff’s man had their eyes on me.

  “You’re lucky nonetheless. Fraction of an inch here, a fraction there, it could have made quite a difference. One bullet went in your back, just above your buttocks, about here, but it caught the fatty part and turned and came out on the right side in front of your hipbone. One in your shoulder tore some muscles, but punched on through. There was a slug lodged just under your skin, right below your sternum, slightly to the right. You weren’t too bad to patch up.”

  “What about Leonard?” I said.

  “Medical science has something to do with Mr. Pine’s survival, but his constitution may be more amazing than even yours. But he won’t be up and around as soon as you are. He’s got some nasty internal injuries, and his leg, well, I don’t know. He’ll keep it, but he may not walk well on it.”

  “My compliments to you, Dr. Dumas.”

  “That’s my job. These men are here to ask you a few questions,” Dr. Dumas said. “I’ll let them introduce themselves.”

  Dr. Dumas went out.

  The man in the long coat said, “I’m Jack Divit.” The man from the sheriffs office didn’t introduce himself. He looked around the room like he was bored.

  Divit said, “I’m with the FBI. Sheriff’s office has a statement from you, and now that you’re feeling better, we’d like one too. You don’t mind going through it again, do you?”

  I took a shallow breath and started telling it the way Leonard and I agreed to tell it.

  “My ex-wife. Trudy Fawst. She came around and said she had a job for me and Leonard. She wanted us to recover a boat for her and some other people and if we did they’d pay us some money.”

  “They tell you why they wanted to recover the boat?”

  “No. It didn’t matter. It was a job. We recovered the boat and it had lots of money in it in watertight cannisters. They didn’t want to pay us then and they took, us with them, said they’d let us go later. Turned out they were going to use the money to buy guns so they could be revolutionaries, you know. Silly idea. One of their bunch, guy named Paco, was out to make his own score and he hooked them up with a guy named Soldier, woman named Angel. There weren’t any guns and Trudy didn’t bring the money along, except for five thousand dollars. She said the rest was at Leonard’s and we ended up going back there, only there wasn’t any money and things got out of hand.”

  “What about this money?” the man from the sheriffs department said. “You say you saw some money, then there wasn’t but the five thousand.”

  “I don’t know. There looked to be more than five thousand. I wasn’t counting. If there was more, I don’t know what happened to it.”

  “This guy, Soldier,” Divit said. “He tells a different story.”

  “Does he? How is old Soldier?”

  “Physically, pretty good,” Divit said. “But you see, he’s a boy we been wanting to see for a long time. He’s got a record.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “He’s got some bad things to his credit. Drugs. Arms. Murder. Rape. Been busy. This Angel that was with him, she wasn’t exactly for the church choir either. But still, Soldier tells it different. He says there’s some money. Says it was some kind of holdup money this Howard fella knew about. Says you were all trying to score.”

  “I told you what I know,” I said. “I don’t know where the money came from originally or what they did with it. Howard claimed it was buried on Leonard’s place, but Trudy, before she died, told me different.”

  “She told you where it was?” Divit said.

  “Nope. She said it wasn’t on Leonard’s place. That was just a lie she told Soldier to stall. You’d seen this guy in action, you’d have lied to him too if you thought it would save you. He’s a real animal. But the bottom line is she told me it was gone forever.”

  “What do you think she meant by that, Mr. Collins?”

  “I got the impression she was trying to tell me it was destroyed. She might have been out of her head then. She’d had a nail driven through her hand, lots of shock, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Divit said. “That shock’s bad stuff. But what Soldier says, it matches some facts. And this Paco guy, he turns out to be a big-time revolutionary, head of the Mechanics. We thought he was dead since way back.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. And Soldier says this Paco told him this money was from a bank robbery some years back. Guy named McCall headlined it. Howard, he was in prison with this McCall. Lot of ties, huh? This money, the five thousand we recovered at your friend’s house, it’s clean money. Means it might not be stolen. Means too it might have been laundered and can’t be traced. And Soldier, amount he’s claiming Paco said there was, is a lot more than was robbed from that bank. Dirty business all the way around.”

  “I got this feeling,” I said. “Soldier might tell a story.”

  “That occurred to me,” Divit said. “Also occurred to me those bank officials might story some.”

  “A banker lie?”

  “Yeah, who’d believe that?” Divit said. “Then you’re saying you don’t think we got cause to believe Soldier’s story?”

  “Not all of it. Sounds to me he’s trying to work me and Leonard into this for vengeful purposes. You wouldn’t want to take the word of a scum like Soldier over my word, would you?”

  “You got a little record yourself,” the man from the Sheriff’s office said.

  “Forget that,” Divit said. “That’s no kind of record.”

  The man from the sheriffs office didn’t look offended. He got out his pocket knife and went to cleaning his nails.

  Divit paused and looked me over. “Listen, Collins. Your friend, the war hero, Pine, he tells it like you tell it. I guess that’s a better story than the one Soldier’s telling. But if that money turns up, you’d let me know, wouldn’t you?”

  “You’d be the first,” I said. “We going to trial for anything?”

  “You don’t end up in the middle of a slaughterhouse like that and not have to do a lot of talking. But you got a good case for self-defense. You’ll be loose in a few days. Get you a pretty good ambulance chaser, and you’ll do all right.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Divit said. “Don’t thank me for nothing.”

  Couple days later they let me limp down to Leonard’s room. He was full of tubes and wires. Those bags they hang on those bars were all over the place, thick as fruit on trees. I hadn’t expected him to look as bad as he did.

  He had his head turned to me. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “You all right?”

  “Good enough. I’m going home pretty quick. I don’t know I’ve got enough insurance for all this.”

  “Man, I lay here and think about my dogs. About old Chub too. Got to considering, he bought the big one standing up for me. Well, maybe not me, but for an idea. I guess if he’d known Soldier was that nuts he’d shut up, but, you know, he maybe wasn’t such a bad guy.… Hap, what I said about you not really being my type? Remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I just wanted you to know, I meant it.”

  I laughed.

  Three days later they let me go home. I talked to Divit again, but it was a conversation not too unlike the other. He said he felt certain Soldier would get some years for a lot of things. Quite a few years. Like maybe three lifetimes. He mentioned t
he money again, about how if it showed up I’d keep my promise about letting him know.

  I lied to him again.

  I went home for a couple of days and rested, then I drove over to Leonard’s. Calvin had left his spare key in the hiding spot, and I took it and went inside. All the crime scene stuff was gone and it had been cleaned up some.

  Calvin had buried the dogs and nailed plywood over the busted windows. I went out to the barn and looked around. The shovel that had killed Howard and that I had used to zing Angel wasn’t around. Maybe the cops called it a clue. I found a hoe, took that and limped out to the creekbank. On the way over there I noted where a lot of digging had been going on. The holes had been filled carefully and leveled off, but it didn’t fool me. A country boy knows about digging and dirt, and those holes were fresh. I wondered if Divit had been here to supervise. I wondered if they had found the money. If so, I might be talking to them again and have to lie some more.

  But it wasn’t likely. I had an edge they didn’t have. I had some idea of where it was supposed to be.

  I went along the bank and found the part where the gravel had been put down. I looked around there but didn’t see anyplace where she might have dug.

  I guess I stayed at that for a couple of hours, looking around like that, digging a spot or two at whim, but I didn’t come up with anything. I got down on the very edge of the creek and tried to think like Trudy might have thought, out here in the freezing weather with a flashlight and a shovel, trying to be quick and smart about it. I went back to the barn and took a straight path from the back door to the creekbank, walked down it to where the gravel was, then went over the edge and right up against where the water ran.

  All right. Don’t think about the gravel and clay except as a guide. She came here and started shining her light around. Maybe she shined it across to the other side. I looked and didn’t see any dig spots, but I saw an armadillo hole in the side of the opposite bank. Roots from trees partially exposed by erosion draped over it.