Hanson took a deep breath. He tried to smile but made a face like a man that had just found a dog turd in his mouth. “All right,” he said. “All right, I’m OK. I’ll play your way. But only for a little while. A very goddamn little while.”
29.
A night of heat lightning. A giant bed.
Leonard had found that the couch was more to his liking for some reason, so the bed had stayed mine. That had been all right when Florida was around, but now I felt I ought to try and get him to trade. I decided that would be an important topic of conversation tomorrow. Why I should have the fold-out couch and he should have the bed. It was the time of night when stuff like that seemed significant.
I lay there and counted sheep, tried to remember the name of every dog I had ever owned, attempted to let my mind go blank, all the stuff you do when you’re restless, but I still couldn’t sleep. I thought about Florida. The way she smiled and talked, the nights we had spent together. That special first night we had made love, that night out at the overlook when I thought our relationship was cementing.
I thought about Hanson. I wanted to be mad at him, but he hadn’t done anything but respond to what was there to respond to. Hell, I liked the big bastard. Really. He was a swell guy. I just hoped his dick would fall off.
I got up and sat by the window awhile and watched the heat lightning leap around. When that bored me, I watched the drug sellers and their clients. The clients came and went as brisk as patrons at a drive-through hamburger joint. I attempted to listen in on conversations, but all I could hear was talking that sounded like bees buzzing, that and occasional bursts of laughter and the sound of their music, which from where I sat was mostly the throb of the bass line; I felt it more than I heard it.
When I tired of that, I put on my sweatpants and did a few Hapkido moves, shadowboxed a bit, then turned on the end-table light, stretched out on the bed, and tried to get back into reading The Hereafter Gang.
I was managing to do that when along about midnight I heard a noise, like whimpering. Then there was a slight banging under the house, followed by silence.
I listened a moment, and it didn’t repeat itself. I figured a dog had gotten up under there, bumped its head, and moved on, but I was too nervous to let it be. Lately, with the stuff we’d found and the assholes next door, a bird chirped, Leonard cut a fart, I was ready to leap.
I turned off the reading light, got out of bed, put on my shoes, got my. 38, and went out into the living room.
Leonard was up and putting on his shoes. I wasn’t the only one hearing things. There was enough moonlight in the room I could see his face. He nodded at me. He went over to the closet and opened it quietly and got the twelve-gauge pump.
“Front or back?” he said.
“Front.”
“Get the door, count twenty-five slowly. That’ll time us close.”
I went to the door and quietly as possible freed the locks. I was up to fifteen on my counting when I heard Leonard open the back door and slip out. The shitass was counting too fast. I opened the front door and darted onto the front porch, bending low.
The outside was lit with starlight and the clean silver rays of the moon, and off in the east was the heat lightning. I could see quite well, but there wasn’t anything to see.
I held my position and listened, felt a little silly. All I could hear were the assholes next door. Their voices. Their music. I looked over there. The porch light had been turned off, but I could see a couple of people on the porch. I could hear them talking. They weren’t looking in my direction. I eased down the porch steps and stopped to listen again. And heard something this time.
The whimpering. It reminded me a bit of a dog I’d had when I was a kid. It had been fed glass in raw hamburger meat by our next-door neighbor who didn’t like it digging in his flowerbeds. The dog died. When my dad found out what happened, he worked the neighbor over with his fists and tried to feed him about three feet of a garden rake handle. He finished up by using the neighbor’s head to plow the man’s flowers up. My dad liked animals. For petunias, he didn’t give a damn.
I eased toward the sound, which was consistent now and had turned to a moaning. I went around the side of the house and saw Leonard down on his hands and knees. He had put the shotgun on the ground and was crawling through a gap in the skirting around the house.
By the time I got over there, Leonard was backing out and pulling something out with him. It was a kid. He had the boy by the pants, and when he had him tugged out from under there, I recognized him in the moonlight. It was the boy who had gotten the shot of horse on Uncle Chester’s front porch, the boy who’d ended up with a beeper.
The boy was shaking and his eyes were rolled up in his head and he was making the sound that had reminded me of the dog. He was in a bad way and didn’t seem to know where he was. He’d crawled under the house like a wounded animal, seeking the dark, the cool pressure of the ground. I thought it odd that the gap in the siding, the place he’d chosen to hide and try and ride out his pain, was beneath the flooring Leonard and I had built. He had been lying not far from where Leonard had discovered the trunk with the pathetic little bones inside. I realized now in my dream, when I had visualized the child in the trunk, the bones dressed in flesh, it had been the face of this boy I had seen.
“He don’t seem to be injured,” Leonard said. “I don’t see any blood.”
“Overdose,” I said. “He’s riding the merry-go-round, hard.”
“Goddamn them,” Leonard said. “He’s just a baby.”
I gave the revolver to Leonard and picked up the boy. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
I started across the street to MeMaw’s. I heard an asshole yell from the crack house, “Hey, whatcha got there?”
The sound of that guy’s voice was like sandpaper on my brain. Later, I would think back and know that voice had been the snapping point, the catalyst for what was to follow. I heard that voice and was reminded of what was going on next door, and thought: here Leonard and I were trying to stop some whacko from torturing and killing kids, and in quite a different way, next door to us, operating against the law, but not restrained or bothered by it, a whole houseful of ball sweats were doing a similar thing, and we weren’t stopping them, weren’t making any effort to. Kids were being tortured to death by addiction, and the drug dealers were taking in big money and making friends with the bail bondsmen, and were practically being treated like businessmen.
I went up on the porch and kicked the bottom of the door, yelled, “MeMaw. Hiram. Emergency. It’s me, Hap.”
A few minutes later the door opened. It was Hiram. He stood looking at us through the screen. He was dressed in his bathrobe and the expression on his face was odd. You’d have thought I was bringing him a take-out order.
“Wha…?” he said.
“Wake up, man. Got an emergency here.”
I could feel the boy shivering in my arms. I glanced down at him. Saliva was running out of the corner of his mouth and his body was trying to bend into a fetal position.
“Yeah… yeah,” Hiram said, and opened the screen.
I slid inside, said, “I need to call an ambulance. We found him by the house. Drug overdose, I think.”
“I’ll take him,” Hiram said. “No need to wake Mama. She’s sick.”
I handed the boy to Hiram, and he held him and looked at him, then took him around the table and into the back room. I used the phone to call the ambulance. I’d no sooner done that when I heard a shotgun blast.
I ran outside, keeping low. I saw Leonard standing in the yard of the crack dealers. He had a shotgun. He fired another shot into the side of the house. He yelled: “Out, ever’body out!”
“Leonard,” I yelled, and I started running across the street. I wasn’t fast enough. He’d reached the porch over there, and there was one guy still standing on it, standing between Leonard and the front door. Not because he
