“I didn’t say she wasn’t having anything to do with me.”
“Whatever. That doesn’t change things. I did it for you and you did it for her because you thought you should do it. We’ve done it. It’s over. What do you want, to be cheered? Have a little parade or something?”
“That would be nice,” I said.
“Well, you ain’t gonna get it.”
“I killed people, Leonard.”
“You knew that could happen.”
“There were a couple of women back there. I didn’t mean for them to die.”
“I don’t know they had much of a life, Hap.”
“And that makes it okay?”
“No, but you think them being women makes anything any different? It makes it done. War’s hell. You think shit like this is without consequences, man?”
I pushed against the porch with my foot and the swing moved back and forth for a while. I said, “Would you have strangled Wilber if Jim had let you?”
“In a heartbeat. I’m glad I didn’t have to, but I certainly would have. I even liked the idea at the time.”
“What about Bill?”
“What about him? He took a chance for money and it didn’t work out. I didn’t make him do it. He wasn’t lied to or convinced. He didn’t care, long as he made money. He shouldn’t have gone along.”
“Well, maybe, but the one bothers me is Herman. Red a little. Herman had turned. Really. He risked his neck and he helped us get Tillie back.”
“Yeah, he did. But you know what, Hap? I’m an asshole about it. Guy like that, he’d done enough evil in his time, there weren’t enough candles for him to light, enough Hail Marys for him to say. He did all right by us, but he wasn’t someone I saw as a future poker buddy anyway. As for Red, he could talk up a good steak ranchero, but he should have died at birth.”
“How do you sleep at night, Leonard?”
“I sleep like always. Good. I don’t even have Nam flashbacks. I went to do a job I believed in, and I did it. You didn’t believe in it, you didn’t go. Do you have nightmares about not going?”
“Of course not.”
“You would have; had you not done the thing you believed in. It wouldn’t have been the same kind of nightmares, but it would have been something. If not a dream, something hollow. That’s the way I’d have felt had I let you do that business without me. So, far as I’m concerned, I did what was right. Period.”
“And Big Jim gets away scot-free.”
“Looks that way. It happens, man. The world don’t shake out fair all the time.”
“Gets right down to it, I guess it’s just you and me, brother.”
“Give Brett time.”
I nodded.
“I’m going to bed, Hap. Good night.”
Leonard stood, gave me a pat on the shoulder, and snapped his fingers at Bob. Bob got up and trotted after him into the house. I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t think armadillos could be domesticated.
“You keep that big armored rat out of the living room,” I said. “I don’t want him trying to get on the couch with me.”
“He thinks it’s his couch,” Leonard said, and went inside the house.
I sat for a while, nursing chocolate that had gone cold in my cup. The moonlight moved over the field of frozen hay and made it look metallic and sharp. I pulled a deep breath of cold air into my chest and let it out. It felt and tasted like the air that night in the desert some three months, some ten centuries ago.
I thought about the gunfire and the smell of blood and smoke, the strange and horrible passion that had come over me during that time. I think I feared guns and violence because they were so much a part of me. Perhaps no one is more aware of and is enticed by and frightened of violence than the man whose brain is a bomb.
I remembered what Herman had said about the blackness of space, the nothingness between the stars, about the stars being nothing more than dying light.
Bad line of thought, I decided.
I drank the rest of the chocolate, shook out my cup, and went inside.
BOOKS BY JOE R. LANSDALE
LEATHER MAIDEN
After a harrowing stint in the Iraq war, Cason Statler returns home to the small East Texas town of Camp Rapture, where he drinks too much, stalks his ex-wife, and takes a job at the local paper. There he uncovers notes on a cold-case murder. With nothing left to live for and his own brother connected to the victim, he makes it his mission to solve the crime. Soon he is drawn into a murderous web of blackmail and deceit. To make matters worse his deranged buddy Booger comes to town to lend a helping hand.
Crime Fiction/978-0-375-71923-3
LOST ECHOES
