would play out, but I didn’t point out it wasn’t mine or that I was the one that had held it. I also didn’t mention that we had a number of cold pieces hidden around the house, the best of them upstairs in the crawl space above the closet.
Drake declined me fixing him a cup of coffee, giving him a soda, anything. No bribes were considered. He sat on the couch and shook his head a few times. It made me feel sort of sorry for him, and sad about the two of us.
“They did break in,” I said.
“Yes,” Drake said. “That’s why they are gone and you are still here. But, you know, what they told me was you two broke into their house and broke them up a few days ago, and they were paying you back.”
“That’s some story,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “That’s some shit, that is.”
“You did break them up, didn’t you?”
“I’m trying to remember,” I said.
“Never mind,” Drake said. “Not right now. I don’t want to hear the lies. It just makes me tired.”
There was a knock on the door. Leonard answered. It wasn’t anyone else there to kill us. It was Marvin. Of course, considering the circumstances, maybe he wanted to kill us too.
Drake, still sitting on the couch, looked up at Marvin, said, “You got to get you some better friends.”
“Tell me about it,” Marvin said.
He took a chair across the way and sat. He and Drake looked at each other like two parents who knew how bad their kids were and had both had just about enough of it. Reform school seemed to be in mine and Leonard’s offing.
“We didn’t shoot anyone,” I said.
“No,” Drake said. “You didn’t do that.”
“I wanted to,” Leonard said, “real bad. But I held back. I fought against that bad side and done good. That ought to amount to something.”
I was thinking that if it hadn’t been for Leonard I would have been dead. I had frozen. I had been unable to move. My brain went blank and my hands had felt like catcher’s mitts, too big and clumsy to use. The thought of aiming a gun at someone again, pulling the trigger, I hadn’t been able to do it. I wondered if I’d ever be able to do it. I was trying to decide if that was a good thing.
If Leonard hadn’t been there, one thing was certain, at that moment in time, good it would not have been. Right now a crew with tweezers would be extracting my brain matter from the wall.
Drake said, “So, you boys didn’t do anything to piss anyone off? I find that hard to believe. You always piss me off.”
“Let me give you a scenario,” Marvin said. “Say there was this little old lady, and she was walking home from the grocery, and this guy, we’ll call him Thomas, assaulted her for the money in her change purse, and that money was less than a hundred dollars. And there were people in the neighborhood who saw this happen, and I know them, and they told me it happened, but they wouldn’t go on record, wouldn’t talk to the police, even though the little old lady, we’ll call her Mrs. Johnson, because that’s her name, talked to the police and told them, but there was no validation, no proof. At least not anything the cops could use.”
“Let me finish this for you,” Drake said. “But the little old lady told you and you got these two guys to go over and politely ask them for the money.”
“Very politely,” Marvin said.
“And things got testy, and they decided to hurt your two boys, and your two boys hurt them instead. So the other boys had a grudge against your boys, found out where Hap lived. So Hap and Leonard, innocent and as pure as baby chicks, are attacked in Hap’s home.”
“That’s pretty much it,” Marvin said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “That sounds about right.”
“Is that mostly true?” Drake asked Marvin.
“Yep,” Marvin said. “Mostly.”
“Did the little old lady get her money back?”
“Yep.”
Drake nodded. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe I can play it some kind of way where the two numbnuts-the other two numbnuts-go down for breaking and entering. They’ll tell their story to a lawyer, but even if it’s a true story they tell, there’s still the part that involves guns and breaking into a home. But the story Marvin just told me, supported somewhat by our two friends trussed up in plaster casts, sort of supports you two breaking into their home.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Anyone see it happen?” Drake asked. “This event involving you two that didn’t happen, but might have.”
“If it happened,” I said, “and I’m not saying it did. I don’t think so.”
“And in this case,” Marvin said, “these two citizens called the police and asked for assistance. Those two goobers didn’t call anyone, so their story is well after the fact and could just be a goddamn lie. This could have been nothing more than home invasion. Possible robbery. Right?”
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “We could have killed them and buried them in the backyard and not mentioned it. Planted some flowers over them. But we called, because that’s just the kind of guys we are. Fucking law-abiding citizens.”
“Satisfied?” Marvin asked.
“No,” Drake said. “Not really. But I think I can live with it. I can’t promise they can’t stir enough shit that charges get brought against the stooges here, but maybe I can get the charges against them trimmed slightly, making them more jovial than they might be otherwise. And maybe part of the persuasion would be they leave you two alone legally.”
“How trimmed will their charges be?” Leonard asked.
“They’re going to go up for sure. Just can’t tell you how long. And you guys, well, if there are no witnesses to fit their story, it’s just a story. You two were smart and called the cops. They had guns, you were home, and you had a bigger gun, which is called home protection and self-defense, and nobody was killed.”
“That’s the story I like,” Leonard said. “It has a nice ring to it. One more thing, if they are mad at us for something they think we did, then they might think the old lady who got robbed ought to get some mojo. She ought to be checked on.”
“The two dumb-asses… The other two dumb-asses… told us you seemed to think you were avenging an old lady you claimed they hurt, and they gave us her name, and we called and checked on her, and she’s all right. Of course, if you didn’t do what they say you did, then you shouldn’t know Mrs. Johnson and what happened to her. Right?”
“Oh, no,” Leonard said. “We could know. Word gets around. We heard rumors.”
“Rumors?”
“Yep,” Leonard said. “Rumors.”
Drake kept looking at Leonard out of the corner of his eye. Finally he sat up straight on the couch, looked right at him, said, “Hey, Leonard. I’ve been trying to kind of let it go. But what in the living hell have you got on your head?”
35
Brett was sitting in the living room with me and Leonard and Marvin. Drake had gone away. It was after midnight and she was back from work. We told her what happened. My first thought was she’d finally decide it was time to ditch me. I was like a shit magnet. It always found me. No matter where I went, what I did, it came flying out of the air and landed on me.
Well, maybe there were things I did that attracted it.
Like breaking that guy’s knee, messing up his ribs.
