Red Dog (23 page)

Sometimes, late at night, I still hear the sound, the high-pitch squeal of the boy's scream of pain and confusion as the dog lunged and found the soft underside of his scrawny throat with its jaws. The little semiauto popped, injecting lead into the dog's chest and belly, but even in its death throes it was a true killer. A. Evan's head snapped back and lolled sideways with a sound like the wet snap of fresh corn husks and a cloud of blood. The boy collapsed to the
ground, dead before his head sank into the cool banks of the stream, his throat ripped out and his head hanging by a few gory threads. The last sound I heard was the dying dog's passing sigh.

And then it was quiet again.

I
T TOOK ME ALMOST AN HOUR TO CIRCLE BACK THROUGH THE
high stands of pine and black oaks and elms down the hill to the road. The day was another scorcher, and there wasn't even a breeze in the high hills to stir the humid soup. Amazingly, I found myself about two hundred yards behind my lawyer's car. I'd walked a big, hellish circle. I looked, but the boy's body was gone. So was his pistol. Lew had apparently dragged them both away.

I'd nearly made it to the car, hoping against hope that the keys were still in the ignition, when I heard the rifle hammer kick behind me. An irrational part of me thought maybe he'd have run.

“You're good, boy. I'll give you that.”

I turned. Best to face it. See it coming. Be a man about it. Whatever. I kept telling myself that. You tell yourself all sorts of things when you think you're about to die.

“You look like bloody shit on a stick, but you're good. I really didn't expect you to make it off the road.” He looked me a question. “A. Evan?”

“Back with your dogs.”

“Dead, I assume.”

“Unless he can live in two pieces.”

“Then that's another problem off my plate. I found them useful for a while, of course, but things have changed now, and you understand these are people you can't fire.”

“Cold, motherfucker. Course, I imagine you're also the one who shot up Sheldon's Woodrat Road playdate.”

He nodded. “That was me. I've been following you around for days. Your daughter put one of those apps on your phone. A tracker. When you were in Jackson County lockup, I talked her into letting me log into the same account. That's how I found you here today, and that's how I followed you to Pyramid.”

“That was some fancy shooting.”

“My time in service. I always was good with a long gun. You might consider thanking me for not killing you that day. I wasn't sure whether I should.”

I ignored him.

“Dennis Reach was an easier target for you, I guess.”

“Took you long enough to figure it out.”

“You followed me to his place that afternoon.”

“Followed you and found that you'd gift-wrapped him for me. I was honestly grateful about that.”

“You killed him with his own gun,” I said. “Then you ordered the Cleaveses to pay me off.”

“I did. And they did. Then they double-crossed me and tried to kill you. I didn't have anything to do with that. You'd done me a favor, whether you knew it or not, and I still have a conscience.”

“Oh, I can tell by the way you kill off your allies.”

“They're less allies than a convenience to me. Their little
stunt put us at odds for a while. That's when they grabbed you, by the way. But I finally managed to bring them back on board.”

“To kill them?”

“Get them close, stick the knife in. Besides, is there any doubt they'd have turned on me eventually? You've seen them. You've seen what they're capable of.”

“Plus, it's more slices of the pie for you.”

“That too.”

“And how big is that pie, precisely?”

“What?”

“How much is in the account?”

Lew laughed and shook his head.

“My God. You never quit.”

“We have to walk to the car anyway. Might as well talk.”

He lifted an eyebrow.

I explained, “You shoot me here, you'll have to move me and my lawyer's body both. Let's walk back to his car, I'll help you load him in. Or did you plan to use your own car?”

“His. You're not getting blood all over mine, boy.” A real humanitarian.

Lew waved his rifle. I walked in front of him. He talked.

“Three point five million.”

“Seriously?”

“Surprised?”

“I guess so. That's a lot of white sales.”

Lew sniffed at the dummy making jokes with his last few breaths.

He said, “It's enough to give my Eun Hee the life she's always deserved.”

“I think Eun Hee probably likes her life just fine.”

“Well, I don't.”

“God, you're worse than them.”

We stopped again. We'd nearly reached the car. I turned to find Lew staring at me in a fury.

“Them?”

“The assholes you spent all those years cleaning up after. Like the abusers. The boy who set the cat on fire. You're worse because you think you're better, because you think that having lived a certain way for a certain amount of time gives you license now to throw a cosmic shit fit. Goddamn, man, do you have any inkling of just how many people have died because of you?”

“Just . . . just one more.”

I could tell by the look on his face that I'd finally managed to piss him off for real. He was going to enjoy it now. In a way, I was grateful. I hated the idea of being offed by someone who didn't give a rat's ass. He raised his rifle and jerked the trigger.

The first shot was so loud it was like it tore through the middle of my skull in a screaming stream of molten silver. It ripped away most of Lew Mandamus's scalp and sent him whirling like a corkscrew into the ground, rifle sailing, his shot going wide. The second blew away most of his left
shoulder, lifting him, howling, from the ground and into the side of my lawyer's Lincoln.

“Motherfucker shot up my car and finest suit, man,” the boy said, miraculously alive, appearing from the brush.

I sank to the ground, never having known exhaustion.

Lew Mandamus was smeared across the driver's side door, gulping for breath. Amazement and terror misshaped his face. The lawyer approached, staring at him like a half-squashed insect. He raised the Python. Its smoking barrel wavered inches from Lew's face.

“You're killing . . . you're
murdering
a good man,” Lew gasped. “A good man.”

The kid said, “Shit's unfair, brother, all over the goddamn world,” and blew Lew Mandamus's brains all over the Shawnee.

W
ELL, THAT WAS ANOTHER WEEK IN A RECOVERY ROOM, THIS
time at the hospital in Carbondale. I'd been shot and dog bit a half dozen times. What really hurt, though, was my insurance premium. Jeep and Opal sat by my bedside for days on end, until finally I ordered them away and back to their own lives. Peggy was with me nearly the entire time, but even Peggy eventually had to get back to work. Nothing I said would move Anci, though.

“I solved it,” she kept saying. “I actually solved it.”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of, hell. I led you to Lew Mandamus, right?”

“Kinda accidentally.”

She ignored me.

“And Lew Mandamus ended up being the perpetrator, right?”

“He did. But you thought he was innocent. And technically, he found me.”

“Don't sit on my top hat, man.”

“Sorry.”

It was like the last part of a movie, end of the third reel or whatever. Everybody was dropping in one last time.

Lindley came by with frowns.

“You're innocent,” he said. “I can't believe it.”

“Can't or don't want to?”

“I can do both.”

“You're good.”

“And you're an asshole.”

“I guess we're square then.”

“I guess,” he said. He thought a moment. “Stay out of my county, man.”

Ammons came to collect his badge. The Illinois State Police had lost out on the larger bust, but they'd arrested Leonard Black.

“It's a big story,” he said. He was gleeful. “You should have seen the cameras. And the icing is that all of Black's friends in high places are scurrying back into their holes. The score settling is not going to be pretty.”

“I don't get you, man. Are you a cop or a politician?”

Ammons laughed himself right out of my room.

Ben Wince dropped by with cookies and Cokes. We watched some conservative booger on the tube and laughed at all the craziness in the world until the nurse appeared to shush us.

Even Agent Carter stopped for a visit, bearing flowers.

“You destroyed my case,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“Saved Uncle Sam some money, too.”

“These are patriotic days,” I said. “I just want to do what I can.”

“Take.” He shoved the flowers at me.

I took.

“Did you use taxpayer dollars to buy these?”

“Go to hell,” he said, and walked out.

“My new best friend,” I said to Anci.

O
NLY
E
UN
H
EE
M
ANDAMUS STAYED AWAY.
B
UT THAT WAS
probably for the best. Maybe she'd been in on her husband's wickedness, maybe she hadn't. Wince didn't know, and I never asked, afraid of what I might learn. Last I heard, she was still alive, still surviving, still tending the menagerie at Shinshi. Somehow, life goes on, despite everything.

C
AROL
R
AY APPEARED A DAY LATER.
I
WAS HALF ASLEEP, AND
when I awoke into a world of haze she was leaning over my bed, lipstick smiling. Her floral perfume was sharp against the antiseptic neutral of the hospital. Anci stepped out quietly into the hallway. This time, she didn't offer to shake Carol Ray's hand.

“Hey, Slim.”

It took me a moment longer to shake off the pain meds and prop myself slowly onto my elbows. A wall of cops filled my open door with their backs. Carol Ray had come with company.

“I insisted they bring me, before . . .”

“Before you're whisked away,” I said.

“Shit has hit the fan in full, darlin',” she said, and chuckled. “Time to make a bow, kiss a few asses, and race for the sun.”

“Guess it is,” I returned. “Ask you something?”

“Why not?”

“Why the hell'd you get involved with this evil bullshit in the first place?”

“Boredom,” she returned.

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Carol Ray laughed a sad little laugh.

“I'm too old for bullshit, sugar. The self-deceptive kind most of all.”

“Cut the shit,” I said. “No one ever gets too old for that.”

“I guess.”

“So it was thrills. And I'm guessing something in the neighborhood of revenge.”

She nodded. “Something like that. Remember when I told you about stumbling into that coke buy gone bad? Well, I didn't talk the guy holding the gun on me into letting me out. I talked him into letting me
in
. As soon as I touched down, I started collecting evidence on the whole operation. Guns, blow, booze, and theft. You name it.”

“Freelance? That was pretty risky.”

“Oh, from time to time I questioned my sanity, sugar. I won't deny it. But these are bad men, and someone needed to do something about them.”

“But then they got into blood sport.”

“J.T. and his brothers were into it from way back. They'd given it up, but Dennis grabbed the idea and ran with it. He talked me into getting Leonard Black to let us use the mine. They wouldn't tell me for what, and when I tried to make them tell me, they threatened to kill me. Twice.”

“Reach was the front man?”

“He supplied the face. Least he was supposed to. But Dennis was chicken shit, so when the Dragons muscled in on his trade he brought in Sheldon and that boy of his.” She shuddered. “I knew at five hundred yards they were going to be chaos and mayhem, but Dennis wouldn't listen.”

“I don't guess he could have told the Dragons to butt out?”

“The White Dragons own dogfighting in southern Illinois, Slim. It's their territory. So it was either bring them in on the front end or deal with their bullshit later. That was Dennis's idea, too. No surprise.”

“Fair enough. So what now?”

“I don't know, but I don't think I'm done going after bad men,” she said. “I don't like assholes and I don't like liars. I don't like people who abuse the helpless. That's what made me go to the Feds, when I found out what they were really doing down there. I just couldn't take it. I still can't. So maybe I'll go into business for myself, see about putting a few more losers on notice.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Competition for me?”

She leaned over my bed. She smelled like strawberry soda and cigarettes.

“Not for you, trouble,” she said. “My days in Little Egypt are done. For now, anyway. But maybe I'll see you in the funny pages.”

“Or the obits.”

“Hope not.”

She kissed me on the cheek, and she was gone.

O
H, AND ABOUT THAT RED DOG.
J
EEP ENDED UP COTTONING
to her. And she to him. She liked me good enough, but she loved Jeep. She lives with him and Opal now. They're all in love. Not every ending is a sad one.

T
HE
B
LACK
G
AMES PACKED UP AND LEFT TOWN.
W
HEN
I
asked Carter to where, he only smiled mysteriously and patted me fondly on the shoulder. I really was beginning to like the sonofabitch, so I told him to get the fuck out of my room. At least the web broadcast was interrupted, if only temporarily. My lawyer made a fairly quick recovery, considering his wounds. Last I heard, he was heading south again for a final showdown with the Scientologist who'd run away with his wife.

Two weeks after my release, a pair of hikers stumbled upon the bodies of J.T. Black and Mandy in a shallow grave near the Little Grassy. Without a suspect in hand, the investigation remains open.

“
S
O WHAT'S NEXT?”
A
NCI.

“What's next? How about a long stay in Bedlam? Or a vacation.”

Anci snorted. “Vacation? I can just see it. You'd go crazy inside of three hours at some fancy resort. Besides, dead bodies follow you like Jessica Fletcher.”

“Thanks.”

She gave me a hug.

“I'm glad you're home, stupid.”

“Me, too. You finished your paper.”

She picked it up off the sofa. She'd written an essay about
The
Hound of the Baskervilles
.

“Yeah.”

“And what'd you think?”

“It was okay,” she said. “In the end, anyway. I still think Holmes is full of crap, though, and the hound doesn't seem nearly so scary as the real thing.”

“Amen to that, anyway.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. She flopped down in the light and opened her new book, Vachss's
Hard Candy
.

“Anci?”

She didn't look up. “Yeah?”

“Anci, for God's sake, don't take that one with you to school.”

O
THER MATTERS NEEDED CLOSING.
I
TOOK A COUPLE OF
weeks—time to heal, time to think about everything that
had happened, everything that had almost happened. I didn't expect him to answer my call, but he did, and on a hot night in July I once again found myself standing behind the hulking form of Bran-Wichelle Industrial, surrounded this time by a host of armed men. When Tibbs appeared, he seemed to have aged. Touches of gray frost spread at his temples, and worry lines traced wide swaths around his lips. He didn't look the least bit happy to see me.

“You got what you wanted,” was what he said. He used his prosthetic hand to smooth down his hair, an anxious gesture, I realized.

I shrugged. “I got tortured and beaten up. I got shot. I got dog bit more times than I can count. I nearly died. A lot of other people didn't get the
nearly
.”

“And we lost three million dollars of our money.”

“Three point five. In Uncle Sam's pockets.”

“Yes.”

“Small carrots, I guess.”

A thin smile broke his face, but there wasn't anything in it but rue.

“The days are changing. The black socialist boosted our recruitment somewhat, but . . .”

“But all good things.”

“Something like that,” he said. “You didn't come here to chat.”

“No, I did not. Came to gloat.”

He stared at me. The armed men shuffled, suddenly on edge.

“To . . . gloat?”

“That's right. Your fucking stupid plan backfired. When you figured out how much money Reach's games were bringing in, you tried to take them from him, all the way. You tried to take his cut for yourself. If you'd left well enough alone, Reach might never have gotten the Cleaveses involved, everything might have been fine. As it was, Reach paid a visit to your boy Lew Mandamus and decided to grab one of Lew's dogs, the one he was using to hold a certain key bank account number.”

He was a frozen statue of hate, but for a change I wasn't worried.

“
Your
bank account number, as it happens. When your pals find out that it was your personal horseshit that touched off a war between the Cleaveses and Reach, they're going to ask you to join J.T. Black in a shallow grave. If they find out you tried to use me to shut the games down when the Cleaveses started to win that war, they're going to make you take your time doing it. I'm thinking . . . blowtorches.”

“It's time for you to go.”

I laughed. The sound of it shot around the courtyard. I said, “All those lectures about the honor of the Dragons, the quotes from Scripture, and you're nothing but a small-time crook.”

“Leave.”

“Seriously, brother, three weeks from now, you're a missing person. I've got a bottle of bubbly in the fridge. I want you to know, it's for the occasion.”

“Leave
now
.”

I tipped my hand at him and left, escorted to the parking lot and to my truck and away.

It would happen just a few hours later. And I wondered what it would be like, Tibbs quitting the warehouse as dusk spread purple and orange across a Little Egypt sky. I wondered what he would be thinking, if he honestly thought I'd let him run, even after all that bloodshed and horror and murder. I knew he wouldn't see Jeep Mabry, hiding a quarter mile away, on his belly in the high growth. I wondered whether he'd hear the shot, or feel it, if his hand would slide away from his car's door handle as the supersonic round punched a hole through the organ that functioned as his heart.

I wondered whether he'd see the sky one last time, hear the gutter-growl of the world as it tore apart around him. I wondered if he'd know the dogs had got him, too.