There were no students on the top floor. I went to one of the windows and looked out. I had gone to the university for awhile. I had been a good student. I enjoyed it. I still liked the atmosphere of a university, but I was too lazy to finish up my education, and most likely the classes I’d taken long ago in stalking the wooly mammoth and how to build a fire with flint and steal and a gust of wind were no longer valid.
We looked around a while and found an open door and heard some clattering, went in there and discovered Kelly banging a garbage can against the inside of his cart so it would empty.
Kelly looked up at us. The swelling around his eyes had gone down. He said, “You wouldn’t believe the stuff you find in these cans.”
I leaned my ass into the desk up front, and Leonard took a seat at one of the standard desks in the front row. Kelly put the garbage can back in place by the teacher’s desk, said, “Well.”
“We reckon you’re right,” Leonard said. “Those people Donny is running with, they’re not up to any good, and that means neither is Donny.”
“Can you do something about it?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But here’s the thing. We do what we’re talking about doing, you might not be safe. You might not want to go home for awhile.”
“How long’s awhile?”
I shook my head.
“I see,” he said. “And you can get Donny out of this?”
“You can’t make a man believe what he doesn’t want to believe,” I said. “But we can try and show Donny that things aren’t as good as he might think. In fact, they’re really worse than we thought.”
“How?” Kelly asked.
We told him about the dead man in the car, what we suspected. When we finished, Kelly found a desk and sat down. He said, “Shit, how does stuff like this happen?”
“Humans,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “they can be pesky.”
“So,” I said, “What we’re asking is, do we go ahead with things? ’Cause if we do, it might make it hot around the old hacienda. Meaning, you need to not be there. And the job here, I don’t know how safe it keeps you.”
Donny nodded slowly. “I got some place I can go for awhile. I mean, I can figure that out. But the job, I need this job. I need it bad. I can’t just walk away.”
“We can’t guarantee your safety, you stay on the job,” I said. “We don’t recommend it. We didn’t have any trouble getting to you, and if they decide to find you, it won’t just be to talk.”
“I’ll leave the house,” Kelly said. “But I’ll stay with the job. Go ahead and do what you need to do.”
“We’ll need a photo of Donny,” I said.
“I can do that, after work,” Kelly said. “But, you will try to save him, won’t you?”
“We’ll do what we can,” Leonard said, “and more often than not, that’s a lot.”
Marvin was out of it now, and we didn’t work in shifts after that. We just drove over together and parked down the street from where Kelly lived. Ever now and then we would move the car to a new position, so no one in a house nearby would call the law on us.
Kelly had followed our advice and found a new place to stay. We told him not to tell us where. That way we didn’t have information we didn’t need and wouldn’t want to accidentally spill.
We also had something else. A last gift from Marvin. Having been a former cop, he had good connections. He got us information on Smoke Stack. Once he knew where he lived, and what his car license was, it wasn’t so hard. Marvin wasn’t sure about the other guys, but he was sure about Smoke Stack. The license led to the car, and that led to a description, and that led to a rap sheet. I had that with me. And a grainy photo that had been faxed to Marvin and that he gave to us. Smoke Stack’s real name was Trey Manton.
Leonard had a small flashlight on and he was using it to look the photo over again and read the rap sheet. We had already done that, but it was a way to pass the time. Leonard spent a lot of time looking at the bad photo. He clicked off the light and closed the folder and put it on the seat between us, said, “Man, that guy looks like he tried to roller skate in a buffalo herd.”
“I’m going to guess the buffalo may not have turned out so well. And he’s done time for drugs, and he is, shall we say, a violent person, as his prison time shows.”
“We are violent ourselves,” Leonard said. “But we’re the good guys.”
“I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” I said.
“Rather us as tough guys than people like Smoke Stack as tough guys.”
“And yet another way of looking at it.”
Leonard gave me Smoke Stack’s photo. I looked at it again just to have something to do. I gave it back, and took the photo of Donny and looked it over. He looked like the usual, pimple-faced, sassy ass kid. It was a full body shot, and it made me think of the photos I’d seen of Billy the Kid, only without the cowboy hat, the rifle, and the six-gun on his hip. But it had the same attitude about it. The rifle and six-gun had been replaced by sagging pants and tennis shoes that looked too big for his feet. The strings were untied. That’s showing them.
As it got dark and they didn’t show up, we decided to go to their place and have a chat. Maybe Donny was already with them. With Kelly gone, maybe he no longer saw a need to go home. Next thing was they’d move into Kelly’s house and never let him come back. They were the type. I had seen it before.
When we got over to the address Marvin had given us, we parked down from their house in the lot of an abandoned convenience store. It was about three blocks from their house, but seemed the best place to park. Everything there was as Marvin said. The houses and most of the convenience store were burned out and you could smell the dead fire still. Something had set the whole block on fire. Where the burned buildings ended, the woods took over, and up on a hill with some logged-out acres behind it was the house.
I opened the glove box and got out my automatic and gave Leonard his. They were both in black holsters, but the guns themselves did not match. Brett thought it would be cute if we got matching guns with our initials on them.
We got out of the car and Leonard pulled out his shirt and lifted it up and clipped on his holster. He arranged his shirt around it. It was only hidden if you weren’t looking for it or you were blind in one eye and couldn’t see out the other. I clipped mine to my belt. I was wearing a loose T-shirt, so it didn’t cover much.
“Ready?” I said.
“I was born ready,” Leonard said.
“Scared?”
“I never get scared.”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, I’m a little scared. Let’s get it done before I get more scared.”
We started walking.
The house had a car out front, and we had to climb up the hill to get there. We stayed to the right side where there was still a line of trees just behind a barbed-wire fence, and then there was a pasture, and more trees, and then the house with the logged-out area behind it.
The house was not well lit and there wasn’t much you could tell about it in the dark, but there seemed to be a sadness that came from it. All old uncared for houses seem that way to me. As if they are living things dying slowly from neglect. It’s like they’re old people no one will visit, or if they do, it’s out of obligation or even spite.
There were a series of walking stones that led from a place near the road to the front porch, but grass had mostly covered them. There were a few shingles lying like scales in the yard; they had blown off the roof in a high wind. The rest of the yard had grass growing tall enough to hide a rhinoceros if he crouched a little. There was a washing machine in the yard, tipped on its side, and it looked to have been a popular model about the turn of the century. An old stone bird feeder was still standing. Grass seeds had gotten in it along with enough blown dirt and dust to make a bed, and blades of grass had grown up in a manner that made it look as if someone had used Butch Wax on them.
There was a thin bea
m of light escaping from under a window to the right of the door. I went up and bent down and looked through the window. There were three guys on the couch passing a joint back and forth. The light of a television strobed across their faces. One of them was Smoke Stack. He was hard to miss. He took up about a third of the couch. He was wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up so folks could get a look at his biceps, which looked like bowling balls in tight rubber tubing. There were tattoos on his arms, some kind of Chinese writing. I figured Smoke Stack was doing well to read English, let alone Chinese. The tats looked like they had been made by a blowtorch and a fountain pen.
I didn’t see Donny.
I stepped back and Leonard took my place. After he took a look, he said, “Rock and roll.”
I went up on the porch and Leonard went around back. We didn’t say that we should do this. We just knew it. It wasn’t our first rodeo.
I carefully pulled back the screen, which had so many holes punched through it, it might as well have just been a frame. It squeaked a little, like a dog toy.
I waited. No one shot at me through the door. No one jerked the door open. I could hear the TV. It was some kind of music show. Music videos, I guess. The music playing was rap, the only kind of music I can’t stand, unless it’s bagpipe music, which, with the exception of Amazing Grace, always sounds to me like someone starting up a lawn mower.
I heard the back door breaking open, and when I did, I kicked the front door with all my might. It hurt my foot a little, but the door sagged back, which spoke not so much for my manliness as it did for the geriatric state of the house.
Rushing inside, I had my gun drawn. I was wearing my bad-ass smile. I know it’s bad ass, because I practice it in front of a mirror.
As we came in, me from the front, Leonard from the back, I focused on the three on the couch. As I said, one of them was Smoke Stack. The thugs on either side of him were almost interchangeable. Lanky with pot bellies and greasy hair, arms branded with tattoos, their heads wreathed in cigarette smoke. They looked like the kind of guys that might share a brain, and today the brain had a day off.
Sitting in chairs to the side were Donny and another guy. Leonard was watching them. Donny looked like a dumb kid, thin-faced, big-eyed, his chin bristling with a few hairs and competing pimples. The guy next to him was dark and short and stout and sunburned. He had his hair cut in a military do, probably because the hair on top was as thin as dirty water. Overall, he gave the impression of someone who had lived on a planet with heavy gravity and too much sunlight.
They jumped up and went for guns they had in their pants. Except Donny. He just sat there with his mouth hanging open.
Leonard waved his gun, said, “Who do I shoot first?”
There were no volunteers. They stopped moving.
I had my gun pointed too. I said, “Okay, boys, let’s keep standing, and take them out one at a time, starting with you, Smoke Stack. Put them on the floor. And I’m not talking about your dicks.”
“Do I know you?” Smoke Stack said.
“No,” I said. “But you’re about to know a little about me, and my guess is you aren’t going to like it.”
When they had the guns on the floor, I told them to kick them lightly away. Leonard held his gun on them, collected theirs, and took them outside. I watched through the open door as he threw them under the porch and came back inside.
“Nice night,” I said to no one in particular.
Leonard turned off the TV.
“What you guys want?” Smoke Stack said. “We ain’t got nothing for you to rob.”
“I think maybe you got some money from a bank robbery somewhere,” Leonard said.
Smoke Stack looked at Leonard, then me, then they all looked at Donny. They just kept staring, like they were waiting for him to break out into a little dance.
“No, man,” Donny said. “I didn’t tell them anything. I don’t even know these guys.”
“He ain’t lying,” I said. “He doesn’t know us. But, we are here for Donny’s benefit. We want that you should quit this group, Donny. Come home and quit acting like a gangster wanta-be. Or what we refer to in the privacies of our home as a dumb dick.”
“My brother,” Donny said. “He sent you. That’s it, isn’t it? Well, he and you both can keep your nose out of my business.”
“Just come home and forget these guys,” I said. “You do that, life will be a lot better for you, and so will the air. Man, you guys could use a bath. Or is it because you’re shitting behind the couch?”
“Ha!” Smoke Stack said. He looked at us and our guns like he was looking at kids with suckers. “You ain’t so much.”
“We got guns,” I said. “That puts us way ahead of you. We took yours away from you. And you know what? We might not give it back.”
Smoke Stack looked at Donny. “Who are these guys, kid?”
“I tell you, I ain’t had nothin’ to do with them. I tell you, I don’t know these guys.”
“They know you,” he said.
“Actually, we know who he is,” I said. “He doesn’t know us, and we don’t know him. But we have a nice photograph. And we know this. You are planning to pull a heist, and the kid here, you want to get him in on it, and then when it’s over, you’ll pop him, and we’re not talking about with a wet towel.”
Smoke Stack let that revelation roam around in his head for awhile. It went on for so long you could see it cross behind his eyes, like someone moving past a window. I glanced at Donny. There was something roaming around in his head as well. Suspicion, I hoped.
“What the hell you talking about?” Smoke Stack said.
“That doesn’t sound all that convincing,” I said. “The part where you try to act like you don’t know what’s going on, and you’ve don’t remember how you clowns shot your last wheel man and left him in the woods for the ants.”
“What’s he talking about?” Donny said, looking at Smoke Stack.
“They don’t know nothing,” Smoke Stack said. “They’re just talking air. Don’t pay them no mind. You really don’t know them, then just keep your mouth shut.”
“What they like to do,” Leonard said, looking right at Donny, “is they hire some dumb ass to drive their car, and then they kill him and split it between themselves.”
“What, for one less split we kill a guy?” Smoke Stack said.
“Yep,” I said. “And, hey, you fellas, what makes you think one of you isn’t next? Were you all in on the previous job? Are there some bodies in the woods somewhere?”
I could tell from the way a couple guys looked at Smoke Stack that I had hit a chord.
“You guys don’t listen to this shit,” Smoke Stack said. “And you, Donny. Ain’t I treated you right? I been more of brother to you than your own brother.”
“You mean you’ve kind of let him do what he wants,” I said, “because at the bottom of it all, you don’t care about him. He’s just a pawn. It’s tough being a father or mother or big brother, ’cause they got to tell you stuff you don’t want to hear, make you do stuff you don’t want to do. But you, you can just tell him everything’s all right, even when it isn’t.”
“I ain’t got to do nothing,” Donny said. “My brother, he ain’t much of a man.”
“And Smoke Stack is?” I said. “Your brother works his ass off for you. Butt-wipe here steals what he wants and hangs out. Not a whole lot of manly in that.”
“I could snap you like a stick,” Smoke Stack said.
“No,” I said. “No, you couldn’t.”
“You talk tough with a gun,” Donny said. “I’ve seen what he can do. You ain’t so tough.”
“What?” Leonard said, grinning at Donny. “Smoke Stack? Tough? With some drunk, maybe? Some poor guy half in the bag. You think he’s bad because he has muscles and tattoos and cigarette breath. Hap here, on his worst day, could turn him inside out and make him say how much he likes it.”
“Ha!” Smoke Stack said.
I went
over and gave Leonard my gun. Now he had one in either hand. I took off my jacket, hung it over the doorknob of the door I’d kicked open.
“Why don’t I show you that he’s not so tough?” I said.
“That’ll be the goddamn day,” Smoke Stack said.
“This is, in fact, that day,” Leonard said.
Smoke Stack grinned at Leonard. “I get through mopping the floor with him, you’re next, nigger.”
“Oh, don’t make me wet,” Leonard said, then he waved the guns at the others. “All you assholes, except Smoke Stack, and you, Donny, all of you over here and on your bellies. Make like fucking run-over snakes.”
They did what they were told. They lay on the floor on their bellies by the wall, lifted their heads up to see what was going on.
Leonard looked at them, said, “All you dick cheeses, all you move is your heads, savvy? Donny, you sit on the couch. You get a bird’s-eye view.”
“Why we doing this?” Smoke Stack said.
“Because we can,” I said. “And because you think you’re tough as an old saddle.”
“You’re too old for me,” Smoke Stack said to me.
“Yeah, well, I’ll try not to hurt you too bad.”
“I think tough guy is starting to waffle, Hap,” Leonard said. “I think he’s looking for a hole to run into.”
Smoke Stack said to me, “We get started, it goes bad for you, your man will step in with the guns?”
“He’s got the guns to keep your friends in line. It goes bad for me, I’ll take my beating, and then we’ll leave.”
“Shit,” Donny said. “Think you can beat Smoke Stack, you’re crazy. I seen him whip two guys once, and one of them with a board.”
I felt a little nervous right then, because that old adage about how bullies are always cowards isn’t true. Sometimes they’re bullies simply because they can do what they say they can do, and they enjoy doing it.
Leonard said, “Yeah, but it ain’t how many guys he whipped, it’s the guys. Hap, he wasn’t one of those guys.”
“He whips Smoke Stack, hell, I’ll go with you,” Donny said. “That’s how much faith I got in him.”