“But we have a truce, right?” I said.
“You came to kill me, didn’t you?”
“That’s right, we did.”
“You’re not too good.”
“We’re tougher and smarter than you think,” I said. “Except for getting sneaked up on. That part, well, we’re not so good.”
“You want the money?”
“It’s not about money,” I said. “It doesn’t even belong to us. You killed a couple of kids and a friend of ours.”
“Business,” she said.
“It didn’t seem like business to us,” I said.
She shifted slightly to a kneeling position, behind the wall. The gun she held shifted too. She said, “I don’t have any reason to believe you two about anything.”
“No, you don’t,” Leonard said. “But I will say this: I just saw one of those bozos cutting low across the bottom of the hill, moving to the left of the house. They’re trying to circle us. They got six and we got three, and we got the house, so in one way we’re better off. In another, they know where we are and we don’t know where they are, and there are more of them than there are of us. So that’s the situation. How’s it gonna be?”
Vanilla Ride was quiet for a few moments. She said, “I keep my word.”
“We keep ours,” Leonard said.
“Then we have to trust one another, don’t we?” she said.
“So we’re going to maintain the truce?” I said.
“Certainly,” she said.
It wasn’t like I expected. They were brave. Either that or stupid. They came at us hard and they came at us quick. What they did was they opened up with automatic weapons that made the walls jump apart and a splinter from the wall popped into my cheek and it felt like fire. Without really thinking about it, Leonard and I crawled toward the center of the house, toward where the floor was lowered and the couches circled it. We crawled down in there and kept our heads ducked while the stuffings leaped out of the couch and things came off the walls and glass broke.
I looked up once, and there was Vanilla Ride, standing up, bullets buzzing around her like hornets, and she was letting down on that automatic weapon, and it didn’t even seem to jump in her hands, and I could see through the big open window where she was shooting that the ground was churning up, and I could see one body there where she had caught one of the guys, and then everything went silent. She hit the floor and the clip went away, and she pulled the other clip out and slipped it on the weapon smooth as a gigolo sliding on a condom.
The back door burst open with a kick and we raised up, saw a tough-looking guy with a shotgun. Leonard raised up and shot at him and missed. I lifted the rifle as the intruder’s shotgun wheeled toward us, and just before I fired, I knew he had me beat, so I jumped and covered Leonard. The shot tore at the couch and I felt pellets hit my ass so hard one butt cheek slammed against the other. I came up scrambling and firing the rifle twice, and both shots hit the shotgunner as he pumped another load and I saw one of his eyes go big and red and then he was down and two were coming through the front window.
Vanilla Ride was no longer at the window. I wheeled around to shoot, but by this time Leonard was up, and he fired, caught one of them in the kneecap and he dropped with a yelp. Then a shot came from upstairs, and the other one took it through the right side of his head as he was stepping over the spot where the window had been. He seemed to lean against the sill, and then he turned his head slightly, like someone had called his name, sat down hard on the sill, dropping his weapon, his head falling forward in his lap. The guy Leonard had hit in the knee was screaming loudly. It was so loud and strange it made my skin knot up. He quit screaming when Vanilla Ride leaned over the stair railing and shot him through the head. He just lay quietly then, bleeding out.
“That leaves two,” Vanilla Ride said.
56
“Someone’s got to die!” a voice called from outside.
“That would be you,” Leonard called out.
“Why don’t you chicken farts just come out and face us?” the voice said. “What’s stopping you?”
“Bullets,” Leonard yelled out.
“Chickenshits,” the voice called.
“Absolutely,” Leonard said. “Why don’t you just come and get us? We’ll put the coffee on.”
“We got two, you got three,” the voice said.
“You started with seven,” I said.
“Vanilla Ride,” the voice said, “we ain’t got nothing against you. We want them.”
“You fucked up my house,” she called out. “You nearly shot me trying to shoot them. You pick this moment to come after them. No. I think you’re ready to retire me because I know too much. Me and you, we aren’t friends.”
“I don’t have any friends,” the voice said.
“That makes us even,” Vanilla Ride said.
They went silent out there and time slipped by slowly and the beginnings of light seeped in under the trees and rose up between them like a gentle flame. The back door was wide open, and it made me nervous, that and the big front window open as well. I moved once, just to see if I could make it to the back door, and a bullet plowed into the couch about a quarter inch from my face, so I got down and played it close to the floor, my ears perked.
This went on for a long time, and Leonard said, “Fuck it. Let’s you and me go get them.”
