Vanilla Ride (26 page)

I lay there and tried to put it together. Jim Bob had been right. There had been someone else in on the deal. Maybe an accomplice to our Dracula, Big Guy, or maybe as hired backup. Could have even been someone Big Guy didn’t know about. Someone to watch the watchers. Did that watcher do the torturing of Annie and Hirem and the FBI folks, or was it Big Guy and his pals? Probably never figure that one out.

Bottom line, the she devil was on our ass when we left Lake O’ the Pines, and Tonto was not quite the super ace he thought. Or he’d just gotten tired and, in the end, horny. She lured him out there and killed him and took the money. She had seen the kids and me and Leonard in the Escalade, and we were the hired hits. Anyone else got in the way like Tonto, they had to go. But she figured one bomb would take Tim and Katie and me and Leonard out. And if she was lucky, it would take
the van too, Jim Bob, or anyone else in that wrong place at the wrong time.

She had made one error. Leaving the door on the Escalade unlocked. Probably because we came out more quickly than she expected and she had to get away, forgot the door. Had seen us come out and was gone like a ghost before we knew it. Bottom line was she had succeeded with the bomb. Set it so when the engine cranked, or when the heater was turned on, it would blow. It was just luck Leonard and I had survived.

I really hated that bitch.

Good-looking as all get-out, but still a bitch.

A little over two weeks later and out of the hospital we joined Marvin, and we all went out to Arizona. Leonard had tried to patch things up with John again, but John had got religion, and when that happens, common sense, logic, and the obvious fly out the window of the brain like a horde of bees.

Jim Bob we had talked to, and he had taken care of the van and Tonto. Turned out there was no real home where Tonto lived, just a cell phone number that wouldn’t be answered again and a post office box where any mail he might get would pile up. Marvin told Jim Bob all of this, and Jim Bob took Tonto in his van and drove the van off to a place run by people he knew who owned an auto farm, old cars with a car crusher that made them flat. They used the crusher with Tonto in the van and then they put the cube of metal in the back of a truck and it was dumped in a deep wet place not far from Houston. Jim Bob said the people did it for him were longtime friends and that there were other crushed cars with crushed people in them in the deep waters nearby. He said he was on call if we needed him again, and we might, but I didn’t want him now; didn’t want to put anyone else into what we had created. It was our mess to fix.

There was one other thing. He said he had found the photograph of me and Leonard and Cindy the Bear in the van before he had it crushed with Tonto in it, and he mailed the photo to us.

Leonard and I, and Brett, we were all in Arizona now, but we weren’t all in the same place. Marvin and his family were together with
relatives, and we had been there to visit but the atmosphere was not warm. Gadget couldn’t look us in the eye, and her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother made us feel as though we were only begrudgingly welcome. We didn’t stay long. Brett, who had been there, was glad to leave; her ass whipping of Gadget hung over the household like a little dark cloud. We were given a rental the family owned that was empty. It was a condo with a little backyard next to other little backyards. There was limited furniture in the joint, just a bed, a couch, a table, and some chairs, and Leonard slept on the couch. On this day we were all sitting outside and the weather was cool but not too cold. We were wearing coats and sitting at a table, Brett and I close together holding hands. On the table were some empty plates that had recently held tuna fish sandwiches with apple cut up in them, heavy on mayonnaise, and there had been potato chips and coffee. I was sitting there enjoying the thought of what I had eaten, simple but good, and thinking about some of the vanilla wafers we had in the house.

“So, this hit person, she thinks you’re dead?” Brett said.

“For now. But before word gets out, we thought we might go see her in person.”

“You think you could hurt a woman, Hap … on purpose?”

“Hey, he punched Gadget,” Leonard said.

“You’re talking about killing her, though,” Brett said.

“Woman, man, shemale, they come after me with a gun, a knife, a pointed stick, I don’t like it. And I don’t want her coming around again. Thing is, she’s the best they’ve sent after us, and it’s only luck I’m here to hold your lovely hand.”

“And you didn’t get your dick blown off,” Brett said.

“That too,” I said.

“I consider that an important part of our relationship,” she said.

“As do I,” I said.

“You got it blown off,” Leonard said, “you’d be holding hands with a plastic love doll. Brett would be out of here.”

“Not true,” Brett said. “He’s still got a tongue.”

“That’s a little too much from the instructional manual,” Leonard said.

“Yeah, since when are you grossed out by anything?” I said.

“Since I’ve had a tragic near-death experience. Did you know, when
I was knocked out on the ground out there, shrapnel in my shapely loins and lower stomach, I saw a white light, and I wanted to go to it, because when I got there, and if God was there, I was gonna whip his ass for what he’d let happen to us.”

Me and Leonard touched fists.

Brett leaned over and kissed me. Her eyes were misty. I said, “I’m fine.”

“We could stay here,” she said. “I could get a nurse job, you could find work. Arizona is nice.”

“Need those East Texas trees,” I said. “And besides, I couldn’t live with myself I didn’t find that bitch and put a bullet in her head. And yeah, I can do it, woman or no woman. I don’t want to live under the umbrella of her coming back. She thinks she’s safe and we’re dead, but I’m going to find her.”

“Ditto to that,” Leonard said.

“Can I go back with you?” Brett said.

“You do whatever you want to do, as always, but I’d rather you not. I think it’ll be easier you don’t. Leonard and I have been in this kind of thing before.”

“Maybe not just like this,” Leonard said.

“All right,” I said. “Not just like this, but we can handle ourselves, now that we know what we’re up against.”

“That didn’t sound all that convincing,” Brett said.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’m not all that convinced. But I’d prefer you stay here, let us go after her.”

“What was she like?” Brett asked.

“We don’t know. All we know is what we told you, but when it comes to getting the job done, she’s something. The whole thing with Tonto, that probably happened so quick he was still getting his hard-on. And the way she wired that bomb up, she’s experienced.”

“Didn’t look that old, either,” Leonard said.

“No, she didn’t.”

“You have some idea how to find her?” Brett said.

“Yep,” I said, “I do. Let me ask you something—how’s Gadget?”

“You could feel the cold air back at their place, couldn’t you?”

“Yep.”

“Marvin, he tried to make me feel welcome, but it got so I expected the women of the household to jump me. Except for Gadget. She had
had her butt whipped soundly. I tell you, I was ready to take them all on, do a little head knocking.”

“You’re just the woman to do it,” I said.

“Damn right,” she said.

“You can stay here, alone?”

“Better than at their place. The atmosphere there is poisonous.”

“Good. And now, Leonard and I, and because you are one of us by proxy, should celebrate our survival from a big car bomb with some vanilla wafers.”

“Nope,” Leonard said. “Ain’t gonna happen. I got hungry last night, and I felt I needed a personal celebration.”

“You ate them all?” Brett said.

“Everything but the sack, and I licked that.”

“You turd,” Brett said.

“And there are no more Dr Peppers. I had a kind of festival of life.”

Marvin wanted to go back with us, but we made him feel bad about his leg and told him what a burden he would be and it was best he stayed out of action; it was true, of course. We did get some information we needed from him, though, and then we were in Leonard’s car and he drove us back to East Texas in a two-and-a-half-day run, except for a four-hour stop in Cross Plains, Texas, where we slept a couple hours in a motel, and then we had to go over and see the Robert E. Howard house because Leonard liked his Conan stories and wouldn’t hear of passing it up. I tried to explain to him that we were in a hurry because we had to find and shoot someone, but he wasn’t moved, so we did a tour there and then got back on the road.

In the car Leonard said, “I get killed, I know I’ve seen where one of my favorite authors lived and shot himself to death.”

“You get killed, what you saw isn’t going to matter.”

“Good point,” Leonard said.

With the information we had gotten from Marvin, we drove to my place briefly to get a few things, including a sawed-off shotgun, handguns, and a deer rifle. Then we drove over to No Enterprise in the dead of night, on out to where Marvin told us Conners lived. As Marvin had explained, it was out in the country some, and you could take a road that went up a hill, and you could look down on Conners’ place,
which was on a few acres with a little pond and a lot of junked cars that in the night looked like huge insects. We drove up there behind a little clutch of pines and some gnarly persimmon trees and sat. There were no lights in the house, which meant Conners could be asleep, but there wasn’t a cop car in the yard, so we figured he wasn’t home yet. Probably out doing something corrupt.

Being true professionals, and having driven really far, we both fell asleep.

When we awoke the day was bright and the sun was high. I looked out the windshield between the trees and saw the house looked the same. Still no cop car. We got out and crapped in the bushes and wiped on napkins we had in the car, and a little later on we took pee breaks and drank some bottled water and peed some more. That’s the trouble when you’re an over-forty tough guy. You have to pee a lot.

We got out of the car and washed our hands with some of the bottled water, and washed our faces, and tried to figure if we were well hid up on the hill, and decided as long as no one came up the little hunting road, we were snug as bugs in a rug. From down there, Conners’ house, the only way we could be seen was if someone was looking for us.

We had some vanilla cookies with us, and a couple of cold burritos, and we ate those for lunch and drank some more of the water. If our guy didn’t show soon, we’d be out of food, water, and napkins on which to wipe our asses.

A hawk flew into a tree above us, and we looked up at it and it looked down at us. We didn’t worry it any. It was a large hawk and it cast a big shadow in the cold, bright day. Bored with us, it flew off.

We took turns taking walks along the hunting road to keep our circulation up, and then we took turns sleeping in the backseat of the car while the other watched the house below.

After a couple of hour naps, I felt pretty good, and got a paperback of an Andrew Vachss novel Leonard had in the car and read from that, and then it was his turn, and he read from it, losing my place in the process.

The sun dipped down and the night soaked in, and it got cold. I had slipped out of my jacket during the day, but now I was in it again, and we climbed out of the car and eased down among the trees, closer to the edge of the hill, and looked at the house and waited for some kind of revelation.

Leonard pulled his jacket around him and hunched his shoulders. He reached into his coat pocket and took out a blackjack and gave it to me. He said, “I got one, now you got one.”

“We are same alike,” I said.

“Only I am a handsome black color, and you are white of skin and small of dick.”

“Except for that, we’re same alike.”

Another hour or so passed, and then we saw headlights on the road below, coming toward the house. The road ran past the house, but it didn’t go far before it dead-ended, so we figured this had to be our man.

Sure enough, the car was a cop car and it pulled in the drive, and two men got out, dressed in cop clothes and holstered guns. One of them was Conners. He had looked big to me before, but recently I had seen Big Guy and he made everyone look small, even Conners. The guy with him was short and fat, but he had broad shoulders and carried himself in a manner that gave the impression he might be a load if you messed with him.

We, of course, were going to mess with both of them.

The fat guy was carrying a six-pack. They went inside the house.

Leonard said, “Ain’t that a shame. Man of the law buying beer, carrying it around in his patrol car.”

“Let’s go down and see can we have a little talk with them, maybe set them right on their civic duty.”

“All right.”

“But we don’t shoot anybody. I’m all worn out on shooting. At least until we get to our gal.”

“I will do my best,” Leonard said.