Vanilla Ride (30 page)

Vanilla Ride was quiet for a few moments. She said, “I keep my word.”

“We keep ours,” Leonard said.

“Then we have to trust one another, don’t we?” she said.

“So we’re going to maintain the truce?” I said.

“Certainly,” she said.

It wasn’t like I expected. They were brave. Either that or stupid. They came at us hard and they came at us quick. What they did was they opened up with automatic weapons that made the walls jump apart and a splinter from the wall popped into my cheek and it felt like fire. Without really thinking about it, Leonard and I crawled toward the center of the house, toward where the floor was lowered and the couches circled it. We crawled down in there and kept our heads ducked while the stuffings leaped out of the couch and things came off the walls and glass broke.

I looked up once, and there was Vanilla Ride, standing up, bullets buzzing around her like hornets, and she was letting down on that automatic weapon, and it didn’t even seem to jump in her hands, and I could see through the big open window where she was shooting that the ground was churning up, and I could see one body there where she had caught one of the guys, and then everything went silent. She hit the floor and the clip went away, and she pulled the other clip out and slipped it on the weapon smooth as a gigolo sliding on a condom.

The back door burst open with a kick and we raised up, saw a tough-looking guy with a shotgun. Leonard raised up and shot at him and missed. I lifted the rifle as the intruder’s shotgun wheeled toward us, and just before I fired, I knew he had me beat, so I jumped and covered Leonard. The shot tore at the couch and I felt pellets hit my ass so hard one butt cheek slammed against the other. I came up scrambling and firing the rifle twice, and both shots hit the shotgunner as he
pumped another load and I saw one of his eyes go big and red and then he was down and two were coming through the front window.

Vanilla Ride was no longer at the window. I wheeled around to shoot, but by this time Leonard was up, and he fired, caught one of them in the kneecap and he dropped with a yelp. Then a shot came from upstairs, and the other one took it through the right side of his head as he was stepping over the spot where the window had been. He seemed to lean against the sill, and then he turned his head slightly, like someone had called his name, sat down hard on the sill, dropping his weapon, his head falling forward in his lap. The guy Leonard had hit in the knee was screaming loudly. It was so loud and strange it made my skin knot up. He quit screaming when Vanilla Ride leaned over the stair railing and shot him through the head. He just lay quietly then, bleeding out.

“That leaves two,” Vanilla Ride said.

“Someone’s got to die!” a voice called from outside.

“That would be you,” Leonard called out.

“Why don’t you chicken farts just come out and face us?” the voice said. “What’s stopping you?”

“Bullets,” Leonard yelled out.

“Chickenshits,” the voice called.

“Absolutely,” Leonard said. “Why don’t you just come and get us? We’ll put the coffee on.”

“We got two, you got three,” the voice said.

“You started with seven,” I said.

“Vanilla Ride,” the voice said, “we ain’t got nothing against you. We want them.”

“You fucked up my house,” she called out. “You nearly shot me trying to shoot them. You pick this moment to come after them. No. I think you’re ready to retire me because I know too much. Me and you, we aren’t friends.”

“I don’t have any friends,” the voice said.

“That makes us even,” Vanilla Ride said.

They went silent out there and time slipped by slowly and the beginnings of light seeped in under the trees and rose up between them like a gentle flame. The back door was wide open, and it made me nervous,
that and the big front window open as well. I moved once, just to see if I could make it to the back door, and a bullet plowed into the couch about a quarter inch from my face, so I got down and played it close to the floor, my ears perked.

This went on for a long time, and Leonard said, “Fuck it. Let’s you and me go get them.”

“You can’t hit the ass end of an elephant with a shotgun at two paces. That would be some shoot-out.”

“I can hit most anything,” Vanilla Ride said. “And you seem to be a good shot.”

I looked up at her on the landing, in the shadows.

“With a long gun,” I said.

“What about a short one?”

“Nowhere as good.”

“But he can hit stuff,” Leonard said. “His bad is someone else’s good. He’s got an instinct.”

“My instinct is to stay right here,” I said. “I don’t like where this is going.”

“I’m tired of waiting,” Vanilla Ride said. “You can go, or you can stay.” Then she turned her attention away from me and yelled outside. “Hey, you still out there, loudmouth?”

“I’m out here,” came the voice.

“You two, you show yourself, handguns only,” she said. “I’ll meet you outside, guns by our sides.”

“You mean that?”

“Hell yeah, I got better things to do with the morning.”

“Oh, you aren’t going to end up doing all that much today, Vanilla.”

“I guess we can find out, swizzle dick.”

There was a long moment of silence. Then the voice yelled back. “Deal.”

“Damn,” I said to Leonard. “You know I got to do it now.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ll do it, you know that, but—”

“You can’t shoot for shit.”

“Bingo,” Leonard said.

I took a deep breath and put the rifle on the floor and pulled the automatic from my belt. Leonard said, “If you get killed, I’m running out that back door like a goddamn rabbit.”

“No you won’t.”

“Yes I will.”

“No. You’re a macho queer.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. Maybe. Christ, Hap, let them come for us.”

“Either way scares the hell out of me,” I said. “I’m always scared. I’m not like you.”

“Hey, I’m scared. You get killed, John doesn’t take me back, where am I to stay?”

Vanilla Ride came down the stairs carrying her automatic pistol in her hand. I eased away from the couch and along the wall near the window. I said to her, “Think they’ll keep their word?”

“Of course not,” she said.

Easing over to the edge of the window on her side, she called out: “There will be two of us, and two of you.”

“That sounds good,” came the voice from the dark.

“One of us will step out, and you’ll show one of you, with a handgun only.”

“High noon,” the voice yelled out.

“High morning,” Vanilla Ride said. She stepped through the gap where the window had been. A tall man with dark hair came up over the rise. He had his hand down by his side. I could see a handgun in it. I stepped out, but kept close to the edge of the windowsill.

The other man came up over the rise. I could see his handgun. He held it in such a way that it was in front of him and resting against his thigh. The sun was still coming up, and though the sun in our eyes should have been a hazard, this early in the morning and coming through the trees it wasn’t so bright and all it did was outline our targets neatly.

“Let’s walk out a ways,” said the tall dark-haired man.

“They’re going to fuck with us,” Vanilla Ride said so only I could hear.

“But we’re going to go on out a ways in spite of that, aren’t we?” I said.

“We are,” she said. “I got to tell you, I always wanted to do this.”

“Not me,” I said, and I could feel my hands shaking. It was all I could do not to break and run.

“What happens we get killed?” she said. “What about your friend?”

“They’ll have hell coming in and getting him,” I said. “It won’t be any cakewalk, that you can depend on.”

“Good,” she said.

“Do we have to do this?” I said.

“No.”

“Then what the fuck are we doing?”

By now the two had spread out. One was going wide, in the direction of the Volkswagen, and I knew he was my guy, as he was on my side. The other guy going the other way, I decided not to think about him. He belonged to Vanilla Ride.

My guy brought his gun up and a shot went by my head so close I felt the heat from it. I jerked my automatic up and fired. If I hit him, he didn’t show it. He started running low along the ground, and I fired again. He did a kind of bunny hop and went down. I heard shots to my right, but I didn’t turn my head. I could still see out of the corner of my eye that Vanilla Ride was standing.

She said, “Goddamn,” and then my guy leaped forward from where he lay, grabbed at an automatic rifle he had planted earlier, in the dark, hid it there waiting to grab it and cheat. I stepped forward and took my time, aiming one-handed, the way I had been taught, not with two hands, and when he lifted up I shot him somewhere along the jawline. It took part of his face off and he rolled on his side and lost the rifle, but he came up then, as if the pain had given him a jolt of power. He stumbled forward. He had another handgun, drawn from under his coat, and he was coming toward me fast, his face seeming to drip. He fired a shot and I found myself standing sideways all of a sudden, looking in the wrong direction. And by the time I had turned, having realized I had been hit, he was firing again, and this time one of his shots punched my coat but missed me, and I took careful aim and fired, hitting him in the center of the chest, but he kept coming. I fired again, and he must have been firing too, because there seemed to be shots popping all over, and I’m thinking I missed, but he went down, propped on a knee. I shot him another time and his body jerked and he went to his right side and lay there, his ruined face in my direction, his body kind of horseshoed behind him.

Turning, I saw Vanilla Ride was standing with her arm to her side, her gun in her hand. Her man lay on the ground squirming, holding his groin.

“Right in the goober,” she said, and started walking toward him.

He saw her coming. One hand went away from his groin and
clawed in the dirt for his dropped handgun. He never got to it before she stood over him and shot him twice in the head.

She came walking back toward me. I could see her right side was stained with blood. She didn’t seem to notice. My left arm had grown heavy, and then I felt as if it was being set on fire. The way she walked, the way she was coming toward me made me nervous. I said, “We still good?”

“We are,” she said, and walked right past me.

“If she hadn’t been good,” Leonard said, “I was going to shoot her.”

He was standing at the edge of the house with the deer rifle. He had gone out the back door. He said, “You’ll find the guy you shot, he’s also got a rifle shot in his chest.”

“I thought I missed.”

“Nope. You hit him. I just hit him again.”

“That was cheating,” Vanilla Ride said to Leonard. “Ganging up on the guy.”

“Damn straight,” Leonard said. “You think I’m going to let that motherfucker kill my brother?”

She grinned at him.

My knees buckled and I fell down.

Inside the house on the couch, Leonard looked at my wound. Vanilla Ride came over. She had removed her shirt and was wearing a sports bra and a bandage around her waist, different blue jeans. She said, “I got hit, but it went through.”