“I know what you’ll do when you find them.”
“Yeah.”
“Those weren’t just golf clubs, were they?”
“No,” I said.
“So, how are you gonna get who did it sitting here?”
“I want to know how he is. I want to know he’s okay.”
“We have phones. You sitting here doesn’t change anything. You get that sonofabitch. Whatever it takes, you get him. And if you need me to help you get him, I will.”
“I know,” I said.
She pulled my head around and looked me directly in the eyes. “I’ll stay here. You… you have any ideas. Any way to get ideas, anyone to get ideas from, you do it. Take my car. And when you find who did this, and I know you’ll find them, show no mercy.”
57
I drove over to No Enterprise. I drove carefully. There was a little park by the side of the road just outside of the city limits. I pulled over there and opened the trunk and took out the golf bag and dug in there until I found the shotgun. It was in two pieces. There was a little bag with tools in it. I put the shotgun together swiftly. There were shells in a plastic bag. I loaded the gun.
I looked up as a black Volkswagen drove by, heading back the way I had come. I hoped they weren’t pulling into the park.
They drove on.
I put the bag back in the trunk and took the shotgun and laid it on the front passenger’s seat and drove on into No Enterprise. There was no reason to expect Jimson to be where I hoped he was, but Shit Fingers or someone there would know. I’d get him to come there if I had to beat the information out of an innocent bystander. I might even make them drink the coffee.
When I got to No Enterprise, I saw the service station/convenience store. It occurred to me as I arrived that it might not be open. But it was. It was all night. It was the swinging spot in No Enterprise.
The lights were on, but right then it wasn’t swinging.
I cruised into the lot and parked. There was a dark SUV parked in front of the store, near the door. I tried to determine if it was the one in the Wal-Mart lot, came to the conclusion it was not.
I got the shotgun off the seat and opened the door. My legs felt like lead, but I made them move anyway. I held the gun down by my side, and used my other hand to tap the revolver beneath my coat.
I walked straight to the door and went in.
No one was there. That was alive.
I saw Jimson on the floor, his head turned funny and his mouth open. So were his eyes. His blood was all over the floor. He had one hand inside his coat. Probably reaching for a gun.
Sitting in a chair at the table was Muscles. He had his head thrown back, and his mouth was open, like something you were supposed to toss a ball into.
The thin man lay on the floor. He was on his back. He had his hand on his gun, but it wasn’t drawn. He had a hole in the center of his forehead, nice and neat, like it was painted there with a paint pen. The back of his head was oozing blood. The place smelled of blood, gunfire, and feces from evacuated bowels.
I took a breath and looked around. No one. I walked over to the counter and looked behind it. Like I expected. Shit Fingers. He was dead too, crumpled on his side with his knees drawn up. His mouth was leaking blood. Blood was splattered on the cigarettes in a rack behind him.
For some reason the only thing I could think was a dedicated smoker could buy those cheap.
Blood. All of it fresh. This had just happened.
I felt the hair on the back of my neck crawl around. I took another deep breath and backed out of there.
58
I went home to get a bigger gun.
I went home to get more than one.
I went home to break into the stash upstairs. A twelve-gauge pump better than the sawed-off, and a. 45 automatic pistol. I kept them inside the closet there, behind the opening in the ceiling, up in what served as an attic. Both were cold pieces. There was plenty of plastic-wrapped ammunition up there too.
Sometimes when I thought of those things up there, I felt as if a sleeping dragon were just waiting for me to call it out and use it wrong.
But this time, I was happy. Whoever had wiped out Jimson and his men, and Shit Fingers, they had been the one who shot Leonard. Had to be. Too big of a conincidence otherwise. And I had no reason to doubt that I was next on the list.
This time I couldn’t wait to get my hands on those guns, to let the dragon loose.
I was thinking about all that as I drove into my drive, got out carefully, and looked around, Brett’s revolver hanging loose in my hand. I thought I heard the icy grass crunch once, but I went still and waited and didn’t hear it again. It could have been anything. Ice shifting. A cat or a dog running across the backyard. Anything.
Or nothing.
When I was on the porch I kept Brett’s revolver in my right hand and held my keys in the left.
As I was pushing the key in, a voice said, “I wouldn’t do that.” I dropped and wheeled.
Standing in the yard, wearing a long heavy duster-style coat, was a young woman with long blonde hair. In the glow of the single streetlight at the end of the drive her hair appeared to fall over her shoulders and down the front of her coat like a waterfall of butter. She had a gun in her right hand, and the hand was leveled at me, and I knew before I could even get a shot off, I’d be dead.
It was Vanilla Ride.
59
Once upon a time, Vanilla Ride had been hired to kill me and Leonard. But her employer, one Cletus Jimson, got greedy on the money he owed her for other hits, and decided to hit her together with us instead. It was a cost- cutting plan.
As it worked out, Leonard and I helped her fight them off. There was a lot of gunfire, a lot of blood, and the hit on the hitter failed.
That gave us a connection with Vanilla.
It gave me and her another kind of connection that I can’t explain. Not romantic. Brett wouldn’t like that, and in the long run, neither would I. But it bonded us. Still, I never really expected to see her again.
Or hoped I wouldn’t.
“Hi, Hap,” she said, as cheery as if we were meeting for coffee. “So, it was you who shot Leonard.”
“Don’t be silly. He’d be dead. I’m not here to shoot you. I’m here with a warning.”
“What do you mean a warning?”
“I’m not going to shoot you. Not unless I have to. I don’t even have a silencer on my gun. I’m not here for business.”
I knew she was right. She walked like a ninja and had the aim of Annie Oakley. Had she wanted, she could have killed me and I would never have known she was there. I lowered the revolver by my side, but I didn’t put it away.
