Devil Red (16 page)

55

They wouldn’t let us see Leonard. He was in surgery. Me and Marvin sat in uncomfortable chairs in an overlit waiting room with a TV on without the sound and a lady wrapped up in a blanket sleeping in a chair across the way. From time to time, Marvin got up and made some calls to the cops and who knows who all.

When he came and sat back down, I said, “Thomas and his crony aren’t out of jail, are they?”

“First thing I thought of,” Marvin said. “Answer is no.”

“No idea of anyone else?”

Marvin shook his head. “Folks saw the SUV.

Heard shots. But didn’t really see anyone, same as you. A woman got the license, but—”

“It’s not to an SUV.”

“That’s right. It’s not. It was stolen from a car that’s already been traced. They must have taken it off the car tonight. Quick and fast. They’ve already traded the license plate on their car back by now, tossed the other one.”

“Shit. I should have been with him. We’re together, shit like that doesn’t happen.”

“Of course it does. You two have just been lucky. All of us, we just been lucky. We’ve all been shot, nearly killed. Just not as bad as Leonard got tonight.”

“I’m thinkin’ maybe Jimson,” I said. “We rode him pretty hard.”

“Possibility.”

“And then there’s Devil Red.”

“Really?” Marvin said.

“Could be. Jimson implied he knew how to contact Devil Red. Like maybe he could hire him, he wanted to. Or maybe we got Kincaid stirred when we were in Houston and he put Devil Red on us. I don’t know. Anyone say anything about finding a drawing, something with a devil head on it?”

“No. But that might be information even my buddies wouldn’t tell me,” Marvin said. “But, if it was Devil Red, he might not leave a warning if there’s no time. Also, since the shots came from the back window, he’s got help.”

“That could point to Jimson,” I said. “It might just be him and some of his boys.”

Marvin was hesitant. “Well, when it comes to you two, there is a long list. Only thing I can say, it wasn’t random, and it wasn’t for robbery. They had one purpose. Shoot Leonard. And if they did that, I pretty much think you’re next.”

It was a long time before Leonard came out of surgery. We weren’t allowed to see him then, just a glimpse as they pushed his gurney onto an elevator and took him away. He looked ashen, and when a black man looks that ashen, it’s not good, not good at all.

The surgeon met with us in the break room a few minutes later. The surgeon’s name was Rogers and he was out of his surgery duds and wearing some loose clothes with slip-on shoes.

We sat at a break table in plastic chairs. The room seemed too bright.

“He’s pretty bad,” Rogers said. “He’s tough, though. I’ll tell you that. I couldn’t believe he’d taken those slugs, bled that much, and was still alive. He could even talk a little.”

“He say who did it?” Marvin asked.

“He asked me if we found the cookies.”

“The cookies?” I said. “Why that silly sonofabitch. The last thing he asked about were cookies? He never even made it inside the store.”

“He was kind of out of it. He asked about a hat too. Neither meant anything to me.”

I smiled. Thought: That’s probably why he was shot, that hat. “Wish I could tell you he was going to be better,” Rogers said. I held my breath.

“I can’t,” he said. “He could recover. Like I said, he’s tough. But he lost a lot of blood, lots of trauma.”

“What kind of chance does he have?” I asked.

“No way of really knowing,” Rogers said. “But I’d say he’s on the low end of possibilities.”

“What’s that mean?” Marvin said.

“This is all guesswork, gentlemen. Ten, twenty percent maybe.”

“Oh, hell,” I said.

“Ten, twenty percent, that’s something, though,” Rogers said. “It’s a wait-and-see situation, not a wait-for-certain-death kind of deal. And like I said, he seems to have a lot of willpower. That’s what makes someone tough. Not just muscle and flesh, but willpower.”

“He’ll make it,” I said.

Rogers stood. “We’re doing all we can.”

“Do all you can and more,” I said. “That’s my brother in there.”

56

After we talked to the surgeon, I told Marvin to go home, be with his family. I walked outside with him to his car. He opened his trunk and got out a golf club bag with clubs poking out of it. He said, “Borrow these.” I just looked at him.

“Inside,” he said, “is a sawed-off pump shotgun, twelve-gauge. You might want to put it together.”

“I might at that,” I said.

I opened my trunk and he put the bag inside. “We’re on hospital camera, you know,” Marvin said.

“I know.”

I closed the trunk.

I called Brett. I waited in the parking lot till she arrived. I put the golf bag in the trunk of her car. She didn’t say anything. We went up to the waiting room. We were the only ones there.

Brett was red-faced and her eyes were red too. Her hair was tied back and her shoulders were slumped. She sat down beside me and took my hand.

“How is he?”

“No word,” I said. “I think the same.”

She patted my hand.

“I know you need to find out who did it,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I know what you’ll do when you find them.”

“Yeah.”

“Those weren’t just golf clubs, were they?”

“No,” I said.

“So, how are you gonna get who did it sitting here?”

“I want to know how he is. I want to know he’s okay.”

“We have phones. You sitting here doesn’t change anything. You get that sonofabitch. Whatever it takes, you get him. And if you need me to help you get him, I will.”

“I know,” I said.

She pulled my head around and looked me directly in the eyes. “I’ll stay here. You … you have any ideas. Any way to get ideas, anyone to get ideas from, you do it. Take my car. And when you find who did this, and I know you’ll find them, show no mercy.”

57

I drove over to No Enterprise. I drove carefully. There was a little park by the side of the road just outside of the city limits. I pulled over there and opened the trunk and took out the golf bag and dug in there until I found the shotgun. It was in two pieces. There was a little bag with tools in it. I put the shotgun together swiftly. There were shells in a plastic bag. I loaded the gun.

I looked up as a black Volkswagen drove by, heading back the way I had come. I hoped they weren’t pulling into the park.

They drove on.

I put the bag back in the trunk and took the shotgun and laid it on the front passenger’s seat and drove on into No Enterprise. There was no reason to expect Jimson to be where I hoped he was, but Shit Fingers or someone there would know. I’d get him to come there if I had to beat the information out of an innocent bystander. I might even make them drink the coffee.

When I got to No Enterprise, I saw the service station/convenience store. It occurred to me as I arrived that it might not be open. But it was. It was all night. It was the swinging spot in No Enterprise.

The lights were on, but right then it wasn’t swinging.

I cruised into the lot and parked. There was a dark SUV parked in front of the store, near the door. I tried to determine if it was the one in the Wal-Mart lot, came to the conclusion it was not.

I got the shotgun off the seat and opened the door. My legs felt like lead, but I made them move anyway. I held the gun down by my side, and used my other hand to tap the revolver beneath my coat.

I walked straight to the door and went in.

No one was there. That was alive.

I saw Jimson on the floor, his head turned funny and his mouth open. So were his eyes. His blood was all over the floor. He had one hand inside his coat. Probably reaching for a gun.

Sitting in a chair at the table was Muscles. He had his head thrown back, and his mouth was open, like something you were supposed to toss a ball into.

The thin man lay on the floor. He was on his back. He had his hand on his gun, but it wasn’t drawn. He had a hole in the center of his forehead, nice and neat, like it was painted there with a paint pen. The back of his head was oozing blood. The place smelled of blood, gunfire, and feces from evacuated bowels.

I took a breath and looked around. No one. I walked over to the counter and looked behind it. Like I expected. Shit Fingers. He was dead too, crumpled on his side with his knees drawn up. His mouth was leaking blood. Blood was splattered on the cigarettes in a rack behind him.

For some reason the only thing I could think was a dedicated smoker could buy those cheap.

Blood. All of it fresh. This had just happened.

I felt the hair on the back of my neck crawl around. I took another deep breath and backed out of there.

58

I went home to get a bigger gun.

I went home to get more than one.

I went home to break into the stash upstairs. A twelve-gauge pump better than the sawed-off, and a .45 automatic pistol. I kept them inside the closet there, behind the opening in the ceiling, up in what served as an attic. Both were cold pieces. There was plenty of plastic-wrapped ammunition up there too.

Sometimes when I thought of those things up there, I felt as if a sleeping dragon were just waiting for me to call it out and use it wrong.

But this time, I was happy. Whoever had wiped out Jimson and his men, and Shit Fingers, they had been the one who shot Leonard. Had to be. Too big of a conincidence otherwise. And I had no reason to doubt that I was next on the list.

This time I couldn’t wait to get my hands on those guns, to let the dragon loose.

I was thinking about all that as I drove into my drive, got out carefully, and looked around, Brett’s revolver hanging loose in my hand. I thought I heard the icy grass crunch once, but I went still and waited and didn’t hear it again. It could have been anything. Ice shifting. A cat or a dog running across the backyard. Anything.

Or nothing.

When I was on the porch I kept Brett’s revolver in my right hand and held my keys in the left.

As I was pushing the key in, a voice said, “I wouldn’t do that.” I dropped and wheeled.

Standing in the yard, wearing a long heavy duster-style coat, was a young woman with long blonde hair. In the glow of the single streetlight at the end of the drive her hair appeared to fall over her shoulders and down the front of her coat like a waterfall of butter. She had a gun in her right hand, and the hand was leveled at me, and I knew before I could even get a shot off, I’d be dead.

It was Vanilla Ride.

59

Once upon a time, Vanilla Ride had been hired to kill me and Leonard. But her employer, one Cletus Jimson, got greedy on the money he owed her for other hits, and decided to hit her together with us instead. It was a cost-cutting plan.

As it worked out, Leonard and I helped her fight them off. There was a lot of gunfire, a lot of blood, and the hit on the hitter failed.

That gave us a connection with Vanilla.

It gave me and her another kind of connection that I can’t explain. Not romantic. Brett wouldn’t like that, and in the long run, neither would I. But it bonded us. Still, I never really expected to see her again.

Or hoped I wouldn’t.

“Hi, Hap,” she said, as cheery as if we were meeting for coffee. “So, it was you who shot Leonard.”

“Don’t be silly. He’d be dead. I’m not here to shoot you. I’m here with a warning.”

“What do you mean a warning?”

“I’m not going to shoot you. Not unless I have to. I don’t even have a silencer on my gun. I’m not here for business.”

I knew she was right. She walked like a ninja and had the aim of Annie Oakley. Had she wanted, she could have killed me and I would never have known she was there. I lowered the revolver by my side, but I didn’t put it away.

I said, “I’m not in the mood, Vanilla. You could kill me, maybe. But I might not die so easy.”

“Yeah, you would. This is a twenty-two. Not a big caliber. But I can put a bullet where I want to standing this close. I can write my name in bullet fire on your forehead before you hit the ground.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I bet you’d have to leave out one of the
l
’s.” She smiled.

“What’s the warning?” I said.

“Let’s start with don’t open your door, because if you do, you’ll get blown out into the street.”

I looked at the door.

“How do you know?”

“I know. I’ve already checked. But I didn’t disarm it. Wanted you to see me do it. I wanted you to know I’m not here to kill you.”

“I was here not long ago,” I said.

“And they must have been here a few minutes ago,” she said. “While you were in No Enterprise looking up Jimson. Don’t look so surprised. I passed you as you were going in, stopped by the road getting something out of the trunk. A gun would be my guess.”

“Sawed-off. I left it on the seat. Now I wish I hadn’t.”

Vanilla put her gun away, came up on the porch, turned the key, and unlocked the door. I stepped back off the porch. Way back.

I saw her push the door open ever so slightly. She reached in her coat and took out a little leather parcel. She pulled a small flashlight from it and turned it on and put it in her teeth. She knelt down on one knee and removed something else from the parcel. She used it on something near the bottom of the door. A trip wire I figured. I heard a slight snip, and then another snip.

“Disarmed,” she said, and pushed the door open.

Inside, just for safety measures, we turned on the lights and looked through the house. There was a bomb at the back door too.

Vanilla cut some wires like before. She said, “This would have blown you in half. Either one of them. You pushed the door open, it would have pulled the wires, and that would have pulled a trigger. You go boom, baby.”

She picked the bomb up and carried it inside and placed it on the kitchen table, which is where she had put the other one. She walked into the living room, looked around. Her coat fell open and one long, black, panted leg poked out. Just for the record, she was wearing what Brett calls sensible shoes, low slung and soft and easy to move in. Even under the circumstances, I couldn’t help but note she was breathtakingly beautiful—an evil wet dream with vanilla crème skin, sea blue eyes, and bloodred lipstick.

“Cozy,” she said.

We stood across from each other. I still had the revolver in my hand. She said, “You really ought to put your rod away.”

I put the revolver in my coat pocket.

“We never seem to meet just to say hi,” she said.

“This is only the second time we’ve met,” I said.

“But it was such an exciting meeting.”

“Truth is, I don’t feel like a lot of chitchat right now.”

“Because of Leonard,” she said.

I hesitated before I answered. “That’s right. How would you know about that? How would you know to check my house for a bomb?”

“I’ve been watching you. I wasn’t watching Leonard. I wasn’t sure I was going to warn you. I was here to do it, but I wasn’t sure I’d go through with it. I was down the street, parked in a car at the curb when Leonard left. I saw it was him, I stayed. I’m here to protect you, not him. Later, I followed you to the hospital. I figured things out. I know how to ask the right questions at a hospital desk without seeming nosy. I told them I was your sister. They told me whatever I asked.”

“How clever of you.”

“You and me, we need to sit down on the couch and talk.”

“I don’t feel all that chatty. Thanks for not letting me get blown up, but I got things to do.”

She looked back at the kitchen. “You have anything to drink?”

“Vanilla …”

“No. Really. We need to talk.”