“Wasn’t no try about it. You ought to see my balls.”
“No, thanks. You wouldn’t look at my tick, so I’m not looking at your wounds… What I think is, take ’em out. The law’s got itself all balled up, so we got to do it. Charlie, he can only do so much. King Arthur, he’s a man with money and thugs. He does what he wants, unless we get rid of him.”
“Too much for me.”
“After what they did to you?”
“I don’t want to be like them, Leonard. I keep telling you that.”
“Trust me. You aren’t like them.”
I sipped my coffee, studied the sky through the kitchen window. I said, “What about Jim Bob?”
“I think he’s a dick, but I trust him.”
“He’s a friend of Charlie’s. Charlie sees something in him, guess we got to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“He’s full of himself, though.”
“There’s that,” I said. “But let me tell you, he can do what he says he can do. You should have seen him take those two guys out, and ole Big Man, he knew the fucker wasn’t kiddin’. He beat a retreat right off. He’d been about a fraction slower, you could have strained strawberries through him. And I tell you, Big Man, he isn’t a shrinking violet. He told me how when he was wrestling he used to charge himself up with a shot from a generator and a battery.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Leonard said. “Wrestlers, they’re showmen.”
“Hey, I believe him. You haven’t been face to face with the guy. He’s some kind of seriously sincere scary, babe. That’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you. What I think is we ought to turn over the videos and the notebook to Charlie. He does the best he can, and we’re out of it.”
“I know how his best will turn out,” Leonard said.
“He’s a good man,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “but without Hanson around, and the chief having his dick in more holes than we can imagine, it’ll get buried. I don’t want it to get buried.”
“Shit,” I said. “I can’t believe how fucked up I am.”
“What?” Leonard said.
“I’m sittin’ here like I’m on holiday, and Big Man, he threatened Brett. Come on, let’s get over to the hospital.”
I drove us there and we went inside and up the elevator to the floor where Brett worked. I talked to a guy in a white jacket pushing a food cart, but he didn’t know Brett from Eisenhower.
We went to the nurses’ station and I asked a pretty black nurse if she knew Brett, and she did, and she pointed down the hall. A big heavy black nurse, who must have been head of operations, caught the tail end of our conversation and gave me a dirty look. I tried my charming smile on her. She didn’t seem to like it much. She touched her nurse’s hat as if it might have a razor edge and that she might whip it off at any moment and throw it at me.
I knew it wasn’t wise to mess around Brett’s job like this, put her on the spot, but I had to talk to her. Had to tell her what kind of bad position I had put her in. As usual, just knowing me was causing someone I cared about pain.
I looked around as we went down the hall, nervous as hell, half expecting Big Man to come out of a sickroom with a battery and generator under one arm, a ball bat under the other.
At the end of the corridor I saw Brett come out of a room, look in my direction, double-take, smile, then walk toward us.
“That her?” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Looks your type,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
But there wasn’t time for him to answer. Brett was in front of us. I could tell she was looking over my shoulder, back at the nurses’ station.
She said, “Hap. Good to see you. But I’m working right now.”
“I know,” I said. “This is Leonard Pine.”
She smiled at Leonard. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Nice to meet you,” Leonard said.
“Really,” Brett said. “I can’t visit. Old Lady Elmore runs a tight ship.”
“That the fat lady looks like her feet hurt?” Leonard said.
Brett grinned. “That’s her. And her feet probably do hurt. Mine do.”
“Brett,” I said. “I don’t mean to bother you. This is kind of an emergency.”
“Emergency?” she said.
“No one’s hurt,” I said. “Well, not much. But inadvertently I may have got you into some deep shit.”
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “Can you get off?”
“I… I don’t know,” she said. “If I can get Patsy to take over for me. But she won’t like it. I was just on vacation.”
“What about Ella?” I said.
“I wouldn’t ask her right now,” Brett said. “I’m just glad she and I have started talkin’ again. She’s finally thinkin’ about leavin’ that shit Kevin.”
“Good,” I said. “But you got to get off. Really. I wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t important.”
“Okay,” Brett said. “Okay. But will you go down to the lobby and wait?”
We sat in Brett’s living room, Brett and I on the couch, Leonard in a chair across the way. I explained all that had happened, told her about Jim Bob and our conclusions.
“My God,” she said. “I certainly know how to pick my men.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I never thought it would come to something like this.”
“This wrestler?” Brett said. “He threatened me?”
“He knew about you,” I said. “He may have been talking out of the side of his mouth, but after what happened to Raul, and me, I got to be worried about you.”
Brett sat for a moment. She looked at me. She looked at Leonard. She went into the bedroom and shut the door.
Leonard said, “Sorry, Hap.”
“Yeah.”
The bedroom door opened. Brett came out with a holster containing a. 38 -. 38s were certainly popular in my circles.
“Let him come,” Brett said. “I like you, Hap. You got your warts, but so do I. You didn’t bring this on yourself. Let the fucker come. I’ll shoot him so full of holes he’ll think he’s a tennis net. I done burned one fucker’s head, guess I can put a bullet in another one’s.”
I thought, goddamn, if this ain’t true love, I don’t know what is.
23
“They’re a little slow,” I said, “and I’d keep my conversation down to stuff like, ‘Bathroom’s over there,’ ‘Coca-Cola’s in the fridge,’ and ‘Do you want that bucket of chicken crispy or original recipe?’”
We were in Brett’s living room, me and her, and we were looking out the window at Leonard, who had just arrived in my truck with Leon and Clinton. You could see them clearly beneath the bright streetlight.
Leon and Clinton were two black twins in their thirties with heads like bowling balls and bodies like the columns that hold up the British Museum of Natural History.
They were friends of Leonard’s. He met them after whipping their asses. They had given Raul a hard time at a convenience store, and Leonard, who was considerably smaller, heard about it, hunted them down, and wiped the
