Conners did a push-up and Leonard let him. When Conners was up, he said, “Them chink tricks ain’t gonna help you none.”
“They seem to be working all right,” Leonard said.
Conners came again, throwing a right cross that was so slow you could have gone out and bought a paper and been back in time to dodge it. It went over Leonard’s right shoulder, and Leonard kicked out and caught Conners on the side of the leg, mid-thigh. The nerve cluster there lit up and Conners went down with a yelp. When he hit the floor, Leonard kicked him in the jaw. Conners fell on his back and groaned.
“You can get up if you want to,” Leonard said.
I will say this, Conners could have just lain there, but he didn’t. He got up and came again, and this time Leonard moved to the right and jabbed right-handed and caught Conners over the eye enough to make him step back, and then it was like a wolf at the slaughter. Leonard hooked Conners in the belly with a left, and then it was a double right jab to the face, and finally Leonard kicked out with his front leg and caught Conners in the lower abdomen and sent him flailing back against the table, which crashed underneath his weight, causing the fat man to slide on the floor and out of the way.
Conners lay in the wreckage of the table, bleeding from the mouth.
Leonard looked at Fat Boy. “Now, how about you?”
The fat man shook his head.
“Damn skippy,” Leonard said, then looked at me. “That’s what I meant to do to that big guy.”
“Me too,” I said, “but it didn’t work out.”
“Yeah, I just couldn’t get warmed up.”
“Was that it?”
Leonard toed the fat man a little, making him roll over on the floor so he could get to the refrigerator. He found a can of beer in there and brought it out and popped the top and took a foam-dripping swig. “There, assholes. I drink your beer. I kick your ass. And you will give us some information.”
When Conners and the fat boy were back in their chairs, Leonard took the sap out of his pocket, said, “Just so you know, I’m ready to warm you up again.”
“Tell us about the hit folk,” I said. “We’re tired of getting shot at. Tell us about who you sent after us, and just to make it easy on you, don’t say you don’t know what we’re talking about. Just talk or I’m going to give you to Leonard again.”
“We just do as we’re told,” Conners said.
“And why is that?” I said.
“Why do you think?”
“Money” I said, “and now that you’re in, you don’t want someone coming after you, am I right?”
“Something like that.”
“But you’re a bigger dog in all this than you’ve let on. You, and probably your fat friend here—certainly your fat friend—you pick the hitters, so you’re pretty well connected. What the fuck is your name, fat friend?”
“Sykes,” he said.
“I prefer Fat Boy,” I said. “Now, how goes it, Conners? How’s it work?”
“I’ve made some connections over the years,” Conners said. “I’m a cop. You meet people that know people, and you find you can make deals.”
“Sweet deals.”
Conners nodded.
“So, to get right to the fuckin’, no foreplay where is the woman you hired to kill us?”
“Woman?”
“Yep. She hit one of our pards, and blew up Hirem’s kid and girlfriend, and put me and Leonard in a hospital for a while, and just so you know, we’re mad.”
Conners smiled. “Vanilla Ride. I didn’t even know it was a woman. I got her contact a couple years back. She’s made ten hits for what you call the Dixie Mafia. She’s made hits for others. Made them through me. Sometimes those hits are more than one person. You two are supposed to be dead.”
“It wasn’t from want of trying,” I said.
“I’ve never even seen her, or a lot of the hitters. I got contacts, I told you.”
“Tell us how to contact Vanilla Ride. Me and Leonard thought we’d drop in, say hello.”
“I contact her by mail. No e-mail. No phone number. I drop her a letter from a false address to a P.O. box, and the letter has names on it, some general information, where these people are. Then we get a FedEx from her with the names we gave her and she’s got a line drawn through them when the job is done, and then the big dogs pay her at that P.O. box. She, huh? A woman. Now that’s something. I thought Vanilla Ride was some big guy with a shotgun. And you guys, you were on her list with lines drawn through your names, drawing flies somewhere. That’s what I was thinking, what I was hoping.”
“She speculated a bit too much,” Leonard said. “We’re still here. Tired and pissed off, but here. She was on our tail, but she got cocky.”
“Got a question,” I said. “Did Vanilla Ride return the money?”
“No, not yet,” Conners said. “Someday it’ll just turn up on the right doorstep. No one will see who dropped it, it’ll just show up. She knows everyone in the business, where they live, what they do. That’s what makes her so deadly. Damn, a woman. Sounds like my kind of broad.”
