It was three A.M.
Moving right along.
Leonard went right back to sleep. He even snored. For me it was more nodding in and out. Once I awoke and Chub had gone back to his place on the floor and Paco was on the couch, gun in his lap. There was a saucer on the arm of the couch and it was full of cigarette butts and there was a cigarette in his mouth and a cloud of smoke hung over his head. He looked a little twitchy. It was the first time I'd seen him that way. There were beads of sweat on his wrecked face and that studied cool he'd had was on vacation. When he saw I was awake he called some of the cool home, smiled, gave a slice-hand wave and picked up his gun with the other hand.
I thought about jumping him, but I also thought about getting shot. If Leonard were awake, I might signal to him, and we could jump him at the same time. The bastard couldn't get both of us.
Or maybe he could. And if he only got one of us, I didn't want it to be me, and I assumed Leonard felt the same way— about himself. And if we did take him, it probably wouldn't be without a noisy struggle, and that would bring the rest of them awake, and they all had guns.
I gave Paco the foulest look I could muster, twisted in my chair, and was about to close my eyes when Trudy came out of the bedroom. She was carrying a flashlight, wearing her lumberjill outfit again, only this time with less bundling under the coat.
Paco looked a question at her.
'Can't sleep. Going to take a walk.'
Paco nodded.
She went out through the kitchen. She was a walking kind of gal this night. I closed my eyes and slept. It was Trudy coming back that woke me. She wasn't all that loud, but I wasn't that deep in sleep either. She came in red- faced from the cold again, pulling off her brown cotton gloves. She came over to the edge of the couch, looked at Paco, then stared at me for a long, hard time. I studied her in return. The bottoms of her pants and the toes of her boots were crusted with clay and there were a few pieces of gravel stuck in the clay at the front ridge of her boot like ugly gems on hard red velvet. The great Hap Holmes deduced she had been out walking along the edge of the creek, where Leonard had tried to build up his land to keep it from washing away.
She tired of trying to stare me down—which was good, I was about to look away—and walked behind the couch and into the bedroom and closed the door.
'She's still got the hots for you bad,' Paco said.
'Save it,' I said.
The clock showed a little after five.
I didn't go back to sleep again. By six, Howard and Trudy were both up. Trudy had already showered and was wearing one of my shirts with a clean pair of jeans. Everyone else had on what they had worn the night before. Howard got guard duty. The rest went into the kitchen and scrounged through Leonard's stuff for breakfast. Leonard awoke in time to see them using up his coffee, his bread and butter, and most importantly, his vanilla cookies. Losing the cookies really bugged him. He had a passion for them, kept them hidden even from me. Paco found them by accident and put them on the table so they could be had with coffee, and though we were offered some, I could tell it was no fun to Leonard to get his own cookies from assholes.
I had picked up tidbits of information here and there, listening to them talk when we were at the Sixties Nest, and now here at Leonard's, and I had a good idea of their general, if not specific, plans. With the exception of Paco, who was tight-lipped and unreadable, they weren't secretive about the general stuff. They had brought us here because the guns they intended to buy were to be bought someplace outside of LaBorde, and neither LaBorde or that place were excessively far from Leonard's house. Last, but not least, Trudy said Paco had contacts in LaBorde that would help them go underground. They weren't ex-movement people, they were drug runners. But the method for getting lost from the mainstream was the same no matter what your purpose. After all, Paco had done it for years. They only had to follow his lead.
I hoped they would do what they were going to do and get it over with, then let us go. I didn't want to spend another night sleeping in a chair. The rose fields seemed like a better career today than yesterday. I wanted out of the picture. I wanted to toss away its frame and knock down the wall it hung on.
But when we were out of this mess, I was uncertain what I'd do. If I went to the police, I had to tell them about the money I'd helped find. I could lie my way around it for a while, but if they caught one of the others, the truth would come out, and I might end up viewing the world from behind bars again. Maybe Huntsville prison this time, but a prison just the same. The difference in their exercise yards would not be of enough interest to make the time appealing. And even if I didn't mention Leonard, one of the foiled revolutionaries might. Leonard wouldn't like prison any better than I had or would again. Yet, if I said nothing, innocent people might die during one of the group's holdups, and no matter how I might rationalize it, that would be on my head.
It was not an exciting morning. Paco used Leonard's phone a couple of times to mutter a conversation at someone, and with the exception of Howard, who was sitting on the couch with his gun, guarding us, we were essentially ignored.
Finally Trudy came over and sat on the couch, reached under her (my) shirt and took the gun out of the waistband of her pants and said to Howard, 'I'll watch awhile.'
· Howard got up and went to the table, laid his gun beside the bag of cookies, opened the bag and went to work. I could almost feel Leonard flinch while Howard ate. Leonard sure loved his cookies.
I smiled at Trudy. It was not a nice smile. 'You're all jackasses,' I said.
She smiled at me. It was not a nice smile. 'Whatever you think, Hap. You and I aren't connected in any way anymore. It's just not there. What you say doesn't matter to me. You don't do what we say, try to get away before we're ready to let you go, try to screw things up, we'll shoot you. Wound you if we can. Kill you if we have to. Don't think our past will keep me from pulling the trigger myself. Understand?'
'All too well.'
'What are you going to do with us, and when?' Leonard said.
'Paco's got to make another call, then we'll know when and where to meet our contacts, know better what we're going to do.'
