Vanilla Ride (29 page)

The road wound up through the mountains, and at one point, going around a curve, I could look back through a split in the trees and see car lights moving along the road behind us. I said, “I figure that’s them.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said, “that is some good deduction there, Sherlock.”

We hadn’t caught up with the Volkswagen, which had to be hauling some serious ass, and we weren’t all that far ahead of our friends the ugly thugs. I said, “When we get around this corner coming up, let me out.”

“Are you nuts?”

“If it goes well, I’ll catch up with you at the bottom of the hill. If you look back and see it isn’t me running down the hill to leap into your arms, and instead it’s them in their car, or even on foot, then I suggest you drive like you’re in a stock-car race.”

I climbed over the seat and pulled the backseat down and got the sawed-off shotgun out of the trunk and a box of shells. When we climbed up the hill and got to where it curved, Leonard stopped and let me out, said, “Nice knowing you, dumb ass.”

“You just watch for me.”

He motored away and I got back in the woods a bit and hunkered down and waited. More time went by than I expected, or so it seemed. Out here there were no streetlights and the moonlight wasn’t much, and it took me a while to start to adjust to being able to see in the dark. My mouth was dry, and hunkering down like that was starting to hurt
my calves, and I was about to switch positions when I saw headlights coming and then I heard the roar of a car.

When I could see the car well enough to determine that it was the car I had seen our trackers in, I braced the shotgun against me and waited until the car was almost even with me, and fired a little in advance, the blast lighting up the night and knocking the right front tire to shreds. The car swerved and twisted and threw up dirt as it went over the other side of the road and down a hill and out of sight. I heard a crash, trotted across the road and looked down. It was about a thirty-foot drop, but they had most likely rolled most of the way, and the slant was just enough so there weren’t a lot of hard falls on the trip down, at least not as hard as I would have liked. The car was lying on the driver’s side, and the right-side passenger doors were heaved open, and out came the four dark figures. No, seven. They had been stuffed in that car tight as impacted turds in a colon. One of them fell out on the ground, then got up to one knee and stayed there a moment. I could see the car was near a little deer path down there that dipped into the woods and ran back in the other direction, up toward the road where they had been driving. It wasn’t much of a path, but if they could get the car upright, and if it still ran, they might be able to drive out of there.

I turned and started running up the road as fast my legs would carry me. I could tell when I was about halfway up the hill that I needed to get back to road work because my heart was pounding against my ribs hard enough to break them and my vision was a little blurry. I looked back and saw one of the thugs coming up over the edge of the hill, carrying a long gun of some kind. I took to the woods and went along there, getting whacked in the face with limbs for a while, and then when I was sure the road was sloping down, I stumbled out of the woods and went down the hill where I saw Leonard’s car, and Leonard outside of it, standing by the passenger side with the deer rifle.

I huffed out some cold air and waved the shotgun above my head and started down at a speed I didn’t know I had in me. Leonard got in the car and cranked it up, and when I made the passenger side, I was nearly out of wind. Climbing in, closing the door, I looked over at Leonard, said, “There are seven of them.”

He said, “You dumb ass.”

“Now where’s the Volkswagen?” Leonard said. “You’ve caused us to lose it.”

“But I managed to knock the bad guys off a hill and now they’re on foot.”

“Okay I guess that’s something. You get a pass. Seven, huh?”

“It was like a goddamn clown car.”

We continued driving and where there hadn’t been roads going off the main road there were now plenty. Leonard said, “He took one of these, or we would have caught up to him by now. I’m driving this thing like it’s got a real engine in it.”

Pausing at a dirt road that turned to the right, I got out of the car and bent down and tried to check the ground in what little light there was. Finally, Leonard backed the car so that the lights shone on the ground, and then I could see there were recent tire marks.

I got in the car, and Leonard said, “Well, Hawkeye?”

“There are tire tracks that look fresh,” I said. “It could be him. It could be someone else, but it could be him.”

“It’s what we got,” Leonard said, and started down the road. It was dark down there and the trees ate up the sides of the road until there was only room for the car, and then we came to a bridge that looked as if the headless horseman ought to be on the other side of it. We rattled over it and went around a curve that climbed through some trees with winter-dried moss hanging down. When we broke over the hill there was a clearing and an A-frame house, not too big, sitting at the peak of
the hill and we could see the Volkswagen parked in the yard. There was a little road that went into the trees on the right and there was one on the left. Leonard took the one on the right and we drove down it a piece and found a place where the road was a little wide and parked on the right-hand side and got out, me with the shotgun and him with the rifle. We were carrying our handguns and we each had a nifty blackjack and a jaunty stride.

When I loaded up the shotgun, Leonard said, “Here, you’re a better shot. I should have the shotgun.”

We swapped, and I gave him the shells. I took the box of shells for the deer rifle and put the whole box in my coat pocket.

“How long will it take them to get up here on foot?” Leonard said.

“A lot longer yet,” I said, “and then they have to be smart like us and look at the tracks.”

“I’m going to give them that much smarts,” Leonard said. “Let’s get this over with. Maybe we can be in and out and in our car and down the hill before they realize it’s us coming back and they’ll be so startled they won’t shoot at us.”

We started crawling up the hill, down close to the earth, in line with the Volkswagen. It took about a century for us to make it that way, but we thought it might be preferable to being spotted and shot. When we got to the Volkswagen, I stood up behind it and glanced in. My blue envelope was on the seat next to the stationery I had written “Hi” on, and beside it was a black mustache and a cap with a headful of black hair.

I hunkered back down behind the Volkswagen, said, “Unless the driver has some kind of skin disease and his mustache fell off in the altogether along with all the hair in his hat, the guy who picked up Vanilla Ride’s mail was Vanilla Ride.”

“A master of disguise.”

“Well, I think maybe for us she doesn’t have to be all that masterful.”

“That’s certainly true. Now what?”

“I think the now what is I get my wind back.”

“Too many late dinners and not enough exercise, Hap. I’ve been telling you that.”

“Yes, you have. Now shut up.”

“So, in a couple hours when you get your wind back, what do we do?”

“We split up. You go right and I go left.”

“That’s it?” Leonard said. “You complained to me that we didn’t have a plan last time, and now your plan is you go one way and I go another.”

“Okay, what’s your plan?”

Leonard was quiet for a moment. “I go left and you go right.”

We were about to start our plan when we heard boots on gravel, looked up into the smiling face of Vanilla Ride, standing by the Volkswagen pointing an automatic pistol at us. It certainly seemed to be a big automatic. She had come up like a ghost while we were putting our war room together. She had her golden hair tied back in a ponytail, and she looked like some kind of female goddess of war.

“I have systems on top of systems,” she said. “I knew you were here the moment you entered my perimeter.”

“Damn,” Leonard said. She got a determined look on her face, like she was about to pass an anvil through her bowels, extended the automatic, ready to pop us, and then a shot rang out and the window on the Volkswagen above me splintered and some of the glass rained down. Vanilla took a turn around the Volkswagen on one end, and Leonard and I scrambled around to the other side. We ended up behind a tire, close as lovers, and Vanilla was behind the other tire. When I looked at her, she jerked the automatic at us.

“Truce,” I said. “They want us too.”

She studied me for a long moment.

“You’re wondering if you can trust us,” I said, “and I know this isn’t much right now, but we keep our word. Truce. For now, anyway.”

After a moment, Vanilla Ride nodded, said, “I can kill you anytime I want.”

There was an explosion as a low bullet caught the tire we were behind and rang off the rim and the pressure of the exploding tire blew
us back about three feet. Vanilla darted for the A-frame, and Leonard grabbed me by the coat collar and started dragging me. I let him, clinging to my deer rifle like a child with a teddy bear.

When we were inside and the door was slammed, glass began to come out of the windows as shots rained down. It was a two-story house with a short stairway up to what was more a loft than a room. The middle floor had a low section and some standard couches around it. Except for some exercise equipment off to the side of the living room, the place looked as impersonal as a cheap motel room.

I got off my belly and on my knees and looked at Vanilla Ride. She was crawling across the floor toward the corner. She popped the flooring up there with remarkable deftness, took out a long, sleek black weapon with a very large banana clip, and she pulled a spare clip out of there too. She crawled back to where the glass was still dropping from the big window. The glass splattered around her like falling stars and she stood up and let the spare clip drop to the floor and cut loose with the gun. Down below, where their shots were coming from, the dirt leaped up in heaps and the trees whipped and then she went down again, behind the high windowsill where Leonard and I were lurking, but on the opposite end. We were bookends. Same alike. Except we were guys and she was a girl and she had a big gun that would shoot faster than ours.

“They got their car out of the ditch,” Leonard said.

“It was more of a drop-off than a ditch,” I said. “I didn’t think they could turn it off its side and drive it out. Not that easily.”

“You were wrong,” Leonard said.

“Yep,” I said.

“You didn’t do as good as you thought.”

“Nope.”

“Kind of typical, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I said.

“You see, they got it running, and now they are after our ass, and here we are with”—Leonard turned and looked at Vanilla Ride—“her.”

Vanilla looked at us and smiled. Damn, she was a beauty. “How have you two lived this long?” she said.

“Our sterling personalities,” Leonard said. “We charm just about everyone.”

I eased over so I was near the corner of the windowsill and the wall, and then I raised up. I could taste the cold air coming in through the shattered window and smell the pines down the hill, and I could see one of the men coming along where the hill spread up toward the house, and though there wasn’t much light, I could see him well enough. He was the greasy-haired guy and he was stooped slightly, his head down, running for the Volkswagen, the only real cover he had.

I rose up and beaded in and shot and hit him in the top of the head and knocked him rolling down the rise.

I sat down behind the wall and looked at Leonard. He said, “Haven’t lost your touch.”

Vanilla Ride smiled at me.

Leonard said, “You wait until there’s some real light, he can shoot the balls off a dog tick.”

“My guess is they won’t wait until it’s light,” I said. “They like it better this way. Daylight comes we can see them better from here than they can see us, and we got cover. In the light, they got dick, so they’ll either cash in now or come soon. I vote that they come ahead.”

Leonard looked at Vanilla Ride, said, “They may not even be after you, though I’d say that shot hit the Volkswagen was close to all of us.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Vanilla Ride said. “They’ve invaded my home. So have you.”

“But we have a truce, right?” I said.

“You came to kill me, didn’t you?”

“That’s right, we did.”

“You’re not too good.”

“We’re tougher and smarter than you think,” I said. “Except for getting sneaked up on. That part, well, we’re not so good.”

“You want the money?”

“It’s not about money,” I said. “It doesn’t even belong to us. You killed a couple of kids and a friend of ours.”

“Business,” she said.

“It didn’t seem like business to us,” I said.

She shifted slightly to a kneeling position, behind the wall. The gun she held shifted too. She said, “I don’t have any reason to believe you two about anything.”

“No, you don’t,” Leonard said. “But I will say this: I just saw one of those bozos cutting low across the bottom of the hill, moving to the
left of the house. They’re trying to circle us. They got six and we got three, and we got the house, so in one way we’re better off. In another, they know where we are and we don’t know where they are, and there are more of them than there are of us. So that’s the situation. How’s it gonna be?”