Jackrabbit Smile

  “Me and Hap believe in coincidences,” Leonard said.

  “I don’t. I think they came to kill me. They didn’t have any fishing gear. I had my police-issue with me, and I guess they decided the time wasn’t right. Or maybe they got cold feet.”

  “Jimmy didn’t seem like the cold-feet type,” I said. “Just cautious.”

  “Maybe it was a coincidence. Perhaps they had come to fish. If they had, they never did, not near me, anyway. For all I know they didn’t leave, just went downstream to fish away from me.”

  “In our case, tonight was a coincidence,” I said. “They happened to find us with George, and I think Professor sent them to take care of a loose end. I think Professor knew George was a weak link, knew he had been stealing money. Knew he knew some things he wished he didn’t know. We would have been icing on the cake, had they been successful.”

  “Been those twins, might have been a different story,” Johnny said.

  “We hear about them,” Leonard said, “but far as we know they haven’t done shit.”

  “A lot of it might be hot air,” Johnny said, “but a lot of it might not be. I vote on the side of caution.”

  “Do you know their names?” I said.

  “Yeah. The twins.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “That’s all I got, all anyone knows. Word is they have done quite a bit of killing, but the problem is that’s all we got, a word or two. Again, I stick on the side of caution, just in case they’re as badass as some say they are.”

  Delf stuck his head in the door, said, “All right, boys. Going to see the Professor. Going to give him a bit of a talk. I’m bringing you with me.”

  “Really, Delf?” Johnny said. “I mean, Chief. That isn’t protocol.”

  “It is tonight,” Delf said. “I’m the goddamn police chief of this one-horse town, and if I say they go, they go. And Officer Carroll here, I’m temporarily deputizing him in our jurisdiction so he can go with us.”

  “Can you do that?” Johnny said.

  “I’m the goddamn police chief, didn’t you hear?” Delf said. “Consider yourself deputized, Officer Carroll. Town council can fire me if they like. Right now I wish they would, but for tonight I’m still the boss, and I’m calling in everyone, off duty or not. Saddle up, boys, let’s go. Now. I have a judge to see first, and then we will give Professor an antisocial call.”

  43

  Killing people makes you tired. It erodes your soul as well. In Leonard’s case, I think it might energize him, but me, right then, I was feeling worn out and blue with a soul as thin as the edge of a razor. I didn’t seem to know anything anymore. I was like a student at the Helen Keller School of Astronomy for the Blind, looking through a telescope. It was dark out there.

  Me and Leonard were sitting in the back of the cruiser Delf was driving. Pookie and Johnny were in another.

  My cell rang. It was Brett. She gave me some info and I told her I was kind of in a bad spot and had to go. When I turned off the cell, I said, “Here’s something else. Computer guy, he found out something about all this money Jackie has been moving. Librarian, Cinner, that was supposed to have got all the money? Well, she didn’t really get all the money either. Jackie made it look like Cinner had the money. It was in accounts that seemed to point to her, but our man looked closer, saw they were shells, that the money was offshore.”

  “Damn,” Leonard said. “I hate fucking computers. How can you make something look one way and it be something else? It gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

  “Guess whose name the money was really in, when it was all said and done. Guess who had all the money?”

  “What the fuck is this?” Delf said, slowing the car a little. “A quiz show? I’m not in the mood for this shit. Just tell me.”

  “Professor,” I said. “Guy who supposedly was being snookered and had lost all the money suddenly had all the money, and maybe he had it all along, slipped it through other accounts like shit through a goose. Money-laundering it somehow. Getting it offshore. It was a shell game. Everyone thought the peanut was under their shell, but thing was, Professor always had all the peanuts.”

  “It do be confusing for a simple country boy,” Leonard said. “Seems to me, Jackrabbit would have had to do that for him.”

  “Maybe he forced her to do it,” I said.

  “Well, one thing we need are any computers Professor might have,” Delf said.

  Professor’s place wasn’t as fancy as you might think for a man with money. It was a large acreage with a number of storage buildings on it, and the house was good size but looked to have been designed by an idiot. You could see sections had been built onto it randomly, like the Winchester House but without the class. It even had one little stained-glass window, high up on the left side. I couldn’t make out the design because no light came from behind it, but it was the only piece of stained glass visible.

  Before we drove out, Delf had managed to quickly get a search warrant from a judge, went directly to his house, telling him something or other. We had to wait in the car like children while he was inside.

  Now we were at the Professor’s pad with Delf and his search warrant. Johnny and Pookie were already there in the other cruiser. They had come through the open gate the same as we had. It wasn’t locked. Frankly, it wasn’t much of a compound and it wasn’t well kept.

  There was a big white man with a tavern tumor sitting in a lawn chair on the front porch. The overhang was running with rainwater, and some of it was splashing on him, but he had on a rain slicker with a hood. He looked uncomfortable. Another big fellow, also a white guy, also in a rain slicker, was in the yard, wandering about like a child looking for Easter eggs. He came out of the shadows and was partially lit up from a yard light.

  They both had weapons, rifles of some sort. The man in the lawn chair stood up. There was a feeling in the air like the last bridge had washed away and the dam was about to break.

  It intensified as another cop car arrived and two black men got out of it, one short and fat, the other lean and tall. They would be the off-duty guys Delf had called in. They had on slickers and they stood by their cars in the rain. They had pushed their slickers back so they could rest their hands on their guns.

  Delf, Pookie, and Johnny went up to the door to serve the search warrant. The other two cops didn’t move. The man walking around with the rifle stopped moving. This was the time when things could go wonky, shots could be fired, people could be killed. Leonard and I slowly got out of the car and stood in the rain. I didn’t want to be trapped in that damn car.

  Still, I felt kind of helpless standing out by the cruiser with no real power to do anything but put my hands in my pockets and hold my balls and let the rain run over me. Even with the rain like that, in the strong wind you could smell the hog farm that was out back of the house, near the woods. As we’d driven up, we could see the shape of it back there, huge and ominous, pigs getting fat. I wondered if they knew they were going to die for someone’s bacon.

  As Delf, Pookie, and Johnny reached the porch, the man in the lawn chair stood up and blocked Delf. He was much bigger than Delf.

  We could hear them clearly while they talked.

  “Belvin,” Delf said, “are you really going to try and block a sworn officer of the law and someone who’s known you since you were small enough to shit in diapers?”

  “Nothing personal, Delf,” Belvin said.

  Johnny was standing off to the side of the porch, his hand on his gun. His dark skin and the black of the gun blended as if they were one.

  Pookie was standing away from both of them, watching the man in the yard. Pookie had his hand behind his back. He was holding the butt of his pistol where it rested in a holster fastened to his belt.

  The other man came wandering in from the yard. He held his rifle in an obviously nonthreatening manner.

  “Ah,” Delf said to the man as he walked up, “Terry Joe Fisher. Son of a bitch. I didn’t see it was you. Weren’t
you preaching somewhere?”

  “Not enough in the offering plate,” he said. “Had to quit it. I guess I wasn’t called by God after all. For a while I was called by insurance, but I couldn’t sell enough, and then there was real estate, but I wasn’t any good at that either. So now I’m here.”

  “Listen here,” Delf said. “You two, you all behind the Professor’s shit?”

  “Just hired guns,” Belvin said. “Your brothers do the heavy lifting, and those two weird fucks and Red, until he got himself chewed up by a dog or some such.”

  “Jimmy and Lou have joined Red at the hog farm in the sky,” Delf said. “Though not by dog bite. By bullet.”

  “Oh,” Belvin said. “Oh, man. We didn’t know.”

  “It was all of a sudden,” Delf said.

  “Where’s Professor?” Johnny said.

  “We got no idea if he’s in there or not,” Belvin said.

  “Now, that’s not true,” Terry Joe said. “He’s in there, and we both know it.”

  “Goddamn it, Terry Joe,” Belvin said.

  “I ain’t going to talk shit that will get me in a hole,” Terry Joe said. “And I wouldn’t shoot nobody nohow. Thought I’d just have to walk around with a rifle and listen to Professor’s bullshit and pick up a check. I ain’t no better at this than I was at preaching, insurance, or real estate. I’m thinking maybe my calling is selling used cars or some such. I’m going home, if that’s all right, Delf?”

  “You go on, then,” Delf said. “You go on, and that’s the last friendly thing I do. I lost two brothers tonight, and, worse, they both had it coming. But it puts me in a mood. You feel me, boys? You feel my mood?”

  “I feel you,” Terry Joe said.

  Hell, I could feel that mood all the way back at the car.

  Terry Joe leaned the rifle against the doorsill on the porch and walked to where it was darkest at the edge of the house. A moment later we heard a car door slam, then there were lights, and then a truck came barreling around the left side of the house and was gone up the road faster than you could say, “Shit in a can and clamp the lid down tight.”

  The car’s red taillights glowed back at us through the rain.

  “What about you, Belvin?” Delf said.

  “Professor has the note on my house and truck,” Belvin said.

  “Let me worry about that,” Delf said.

  “How worried will you be?”

  “Quite worried.”

  “You’ll do something?”

  “What I can. Go home, have a beer, watch some TV. Jerk your dick, let the dog lick your balls.”

  “I could do that, couldn’t I?” Belvin said.

  “Either that or I’m going to knock your ass down, and if you lift that rifle, Johnny will shoot you.”

  “Two or three times,” Johnny said.

  “What am I going home to?” Belvin said. “Wife left me.”

  “Right sorry to hear that,” Delf said, “but you got that dog I mentioned.”

  “Died,” Belvin said.

  “Hell, didn’t you used to have a donkey? You could go home to the donkey.”

  “Ah, Delf, I was sixteen,” Belvin said. “You know I don’t own a donkey no more.”

  “Belvin here got caught putting the pork to a donkey’s ass in a barn, standing on a bucket behind it.”

  “Sweet, sweet donkey love,” Pookie said.

  “Ah, goddamn it, Delf. People have mostly forgot about that. You didn’t need to bring it up. ’Sides, that donkey died before the dog.”

  Pookie made a nickering sound like a donkey.

  “That’s not funny,” Belvin said. “No call for that.”

  “Belvin,” Delf said. “It’s time for you to go. You can drive home and sit in the dark and dream about that long-dead donkey, or you can think about it in a jail cell. Make a choice, and make it now.”

  Belvin sighed, put his rifle where Terry Joe had put his.

  Delf said, “Anyone in there with him?”

  “Them twins are never far away,” Belvin said.

  “Go on, then,” Delf said.

  Belvin took a deep breath and walked into the darkness and around the corner of the house. Pretty soon there were headlights like before, then a white car, then there were only the taillights, and then like his partner, Belvin was gone.

  “If only he had that donkey to go home to,” Pookie said.

  44

  Del turned and waved the other two cops to him, then he looked at us. “Ah, hell, boys, quit leaning on the car. Come on over here, you’re deputized.”

  We walked over to the porch. Delf handed us the rifles the guards had left.

  “Prefer you just look threatening,” Delf said. “Try not to shoot anybody. I don’t want to have to explain this deputy thing too much, but some asshole in there, the twins, Professor himself, anyone that decides to channel their inner Wild Bill Hickok, shoot the shit out of them.”

  Delf pounded on the door and stepped off to the side.

  No one answered.

  “Johnny,” Delf said. “You up for kicking it down?”

  “Let me,” Pookie said.

  Pookie pulled his pistol out from under his shirt. He was preparing to kick the door when a shotgun blast tore through the door and hit Pookie solid in the chest and dropped him like Newton’s apple.

  45

  The world got slow and I felt as if I were moving through gelatin. When the blast knocked Pookie down, his gun went up in the air, and it seemed to defy gravity, appeared to be floating down toward the earth with all the speed of a feather in an updraft. Along with it, fragments from the door spun in the air and were caught in the glow of the porch light.

  And then the falling gun smacked on the concrete porch floor, spun a little on impact, and time came unstuck.

  Leonard grabbed Pookie under the arms, pulled him off the porch and into the rain, back toward the patrol car. I could hear Pookie gasping like a large fish out of water. Leonard was saying, “It’s all right, gonna be all right.”

  Johnny leaped across the porch and kicked the door. It cracked loudly, slammed hard against the wall, and sagged on one hinge.

  Then Johnny, me, and Delf were inside. I could hear the two cops splashing in the rain after us, and then we were all inside, stupid-like, standing at the end of a hallway, trapped like a pack of rats in a sewer pipe.

  In that moment fear washed over me and I could imagine someone stepping out with a shotgun, firing, smacking several of us in a scattergun blast.

  There were two doorways at the end of the hall, and one to the right near us. I figured whoever had fired the shotgun had taken that closest exit, might be right inside, waiting, so you wouldn’t want to go there. But I did anyway.

  Can’t explain a thing like that, but somehow, the idea of standing there, not doing anything, waiting for the other shoe to drop was worse than the idea of going through that open foyer and into whatever was beyond.

  I went through at a crouch, the rifle in my hand, and when I came into the room, it was empty. In a strange way, I was disappointed. I wanted the bastard who had shot Pookie. I wanted him bad.

  I edged back out into the hallway, and there was just me and Delf and Johnny now. I shook my head.

  “I sent them around back,” Delf said, referring to the two cops. “You can step out of this.”

  “Not likely,” I said.

  “Split up,” Delf said.

  I went back through the foyer and into the room as Delf and Johnny went down the hall, planning to split up and go into the rooms at the end, I figured, maybe right into a trap.

  I moved along through the room, and then through an open door and into another hallway. I looked both ways down the hall and saw nothing. I was keenly aware of the sounds of the air conditioner humming and the rain slamming against the roof of the house.

  Easing along, I came to a kitchen, and on the far side of it was an open door that led outside. There was a back-porch light and the rain made lines in the
light beyond the porch like billions of falling needles.

  I kept up my caution, glanced all about, but there was no trap. The kitchen was empty.

  I made my way to the doorway and peeked around the edge of it and looked out at the night. There was too much light to see what was beyond it, and stepping out onto the back porch under the light would make me a perfect target. I touched the switch on the wall and turned off the light, eased through the doorway, staying low, and stepped off the porch. In the distance, I could see two shapes running toward a structure near the dark line of the woods back there. They were rushing toward the hog farm. I didn’t know if it was the two cops Delf had sent out back or the twins. They were too far away and it was too dark to tell much about them.

  I thought about alerting Delf and Johnny, but there could be other bad guys in the house with guns, and I didn’t want to throw them off their diligence, so I took a deep breath and went out into the rain.

  46

  The hog farm was a long line of buildings linked together by brick and concrete, seemingly glued tight by thick shadows. Off the buildings was a stretch of pens made up of close-together horizontal bars covered over by an aluminum roof, and there were a handful of lights on high metal poles, and the lights shone down into the empty pens, which were floored with concrete. The smell of hog was thick in the air. The rain stirred the stench like a foul soup.

  I didn’t see the twins.

  I didn’t see the cops.

  I didn’t see any hogs.

  The rain plastered my hair to my forehead. I had started to feel cold and uncomfortable. I glanced back at the house and thought maybe I should go back there and find reinforcements, but it wasn’t a thought that stayed with me long. But one thing that did stick with me was the fact that the two cops could shoot me by mistake as easily as they could shoot the twins.

  That was unnerving.

  And then there was a blast that made me crouch, and I got a glimpse of gunfire at the far end of the pen, where it met the building. I saw a shape move quickly and gracefully from the side of the pen into the building, and I saw another shape fall out toward the pen.