The bad guys were also unhappy that a good chunk of their potential earnings had been flushed down the crapper by me, and Leonard had helped me do it. Couple of goons from a nearby town coming in and slapping their lower-level errand boys around, that didn’t look good. That’s why there had been a hit on us.
In that booger-dotted room Hirem said, “Wasn’t nothing personal, you two. It was business.”
“What about her?” I said, nodding at Brett. “What did she do to you?”
“Not a thing. And in the old days, she wouldn’t have been part of it. But these ain’t the old days, and I’m not in command. New guys at the top, they’re younger and meaner and more demanding, and they keep me on a tight leash. Most likely, ten years ago this would have just been a business loss and we’d have taken care of Tanedrue and his morons and that would have been the end of it. But that’s not the way they play these days.”
“Just for the record,” the Mummy said, “I wasn’t really one of their morons.”
“Informer, double agent, whatever you are or were,” Hirem said. “In the old days, we figured you were a cop, we might have let you go. And a thing like this, my son getting jungle fever, wanting to ride a porch monkey, taking off with a bag of money, it would have been handled differently. I could have paid it back, made him apologize, sent the shine girl packin’, maybe she would have caught a bullet, but no one else. Not like that anymore.”
“Shine?” Leonard said. “That word is still in the vocabulary?”
“It’s right next to colored,” I said. “Just south of porch monkey.”
“Oh,” Leonard said.
Bottom line was, Hirem was under the gun, literally, and instead of following through with what the Dixie Mafia wanted him to do, he decided he’d had enough and it was time to pull the train out of the station. He had come to the FBI to tell them about the hit on us, that he had been behind it. Came to tell them lots of things, some of those things not yet spoken, and the reason for that was he had to have a deal before he let out all the juice he knew.
But the thing was, he needed some patsies to find his son and the money. Some muscle. And since we had our asses in a crack, self-defense or not, and considering the cops figured they could probably find two more just like us to do Hirem’s work if we refused, we got picked and we accepted.
So the FBI, represented by the Mummy and the
Course, on the record, we weren’t working for anyone. If the Dixie Mafia punched our tickets, the FBI wouldn’t know anything about it. If we said at any point we were working for the FBI, they would deny it. They could always find replacements for us in the wings, other fuckups they could take advantage of. They said just that.
“Yeah,” Leonard told them, “but you aren’t gonna find any bigger fuckups than us.”
No one argued.
We could leave the offer, of course, take our chances at trial, but Flat Top said, “Might not go so good you don’t help.”
“Isn’t that blackmail?” I said.
He said, “Uh-huh.”
I looked at Drake. He looked toward the wall.
And so that was how Leonard and I had come to unofficially work for the FBI so they wouldn’t have to get their hands dirty. They said if we wanted to, we could get help, but the help was in the same water we were. No one would know them and no one would protect them. It was us and our friends and whatever moxie we might have against the world, and that was it. Oh, and we did get their best wishes, and if we couldn’t get the duffel bag back, they’d let that go.
24
About four a.m. I heard a car pull in the drive. I had a good idea who it was, but I wasn’t taking any chances. In my pajamas and rabbit slippers, a gun in my hand, I left the bedroom. Brett was still snoring. I went downstairs with the rabbit ears flapping and found Leonard and Marvin in their shorts and T-shirts holding their shotguns.
After a few moments there was a knock on the door, and a voice said, “Ya’ll about to shoot, don’t. It’s me, Jim Bob. I’d like to keep my good-lookin’ ass intact.”
Leonard opened the door. “Hell, man, knowing it’s you is what gives me reason to shoot.”
Jim Bob, tall and broad-shouldered, thin but not skinny, came into the house and Leonard shut the door. Jim Bob took off his gray Stetson. The hatband was a thick strip of cloth in a cheetah-skin pattern, and in the band were toothpicks and little feathers. The hat was stained in a lot of spots. Without the hat, Jim Bob looked a little off; it was like seeing a rooster remove his head. He was red-faced and his hair was short, wheat-textured and orange- colored. He had a scar on his face I didn’t remember from the time before. He had on a light green snap-pocket Western shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of brown boots that looked as if most of the world had worn them for a while and then given them back. He looked at me, studied my bunny slippers. “You look like an idiot.”
“Don’t be jealous. I can hop real far.”
Jim Bob grinned, said, “Ain’t there no coffee?”
“There will be.” It was Brett, at the top of the stairs. She had pulled on some men’s boxer shorts under her T- shirt and she had on some flip-flops. “You loudmouthed guys don’t know how to let a girl get her beauty sleep.”
“Well, now,” Jim Bob said, looking up as Brett came down, her red hair tousled around her shoulders, her braless breasts bouncing pleasantly, “it’s good to see there’s still women know how to make coffee.”
“I didn’t say I was making it,” she said when she got to the bottom of the stairs. “I said there will be coffee. Right, Hap?”
