There came the sound of footsteps. But not the heavy-booted feet of the black cowboy I’d been following. The door whined and cracked as it opened. The short honey-brown woman had a wide smile and smaller eyes than JJ’s photograph indicated.
“Hey y’all,” she said, greeting me with all the friendliness of the country.
“Hi,” I said, widening my eyes in surprise.
Misty took my stare as a compliment; it might have been if it were not for my astonishment at her carefree attitude.
“You sellin’ candy?” she asked.
“You bet,” I said. “Milk chocolate and almonds for twenty-five cents a bar.”
“Misty, who you talkin’ too?” The man’s voice was hard and serious.
The cowboy appeared in the disheveled room behind the young Texan miss. His skin was rough and brown with the strong aura of drab green emanating from underneath. His eyes were brown too but just barely. This cowboy’s ancestors could have well included a rattlesnake or two.
“Anthony Lender,” I said, remembering the name of a white private I once went to war with. “Sellin’ chocolate.”
“What you wanna knock on this door for?” he asked me.
“To sell a pretty young lady somethin’ sweet,” I said.
Misty smiled at me and the snake pushed her aside.
“It don’t look like no one live in here,” he said. “Why you wanna come up here?”
“I saw you drive up when I was across the street goin’ door to door,” I said, stalling for time. “I’m sellin’ chocolate to build the house for our minister. It’s really good chocolate and cheap…”
While I spoke I reached into the box as if I were going to show him just how good my candies were. But instead of chocolate I whipped out my .38 caliber pistol and hit him in the center of his forehead. As the cowboy fell backward I hit him again on the side of the jaw. He fell heavily and I knew that he was no longer conscious. I pulled the door closed behind me and presented the muzzle of my gun to the once smiling face of Misty.
“This gun can shout a lot louder than you,” I said. “So I suggest you keep it down and do what I say.”
Misty was not only pretty, she was smart. She nodded and glanced at her boyfriend.
“You got some sheets somewhere?” I asked her.
“In the bedroom.”
“Show me.”
She led me through a doorway into a room so small it would not have been large enough to contain a vain woman’s wardrobe. There was a single bed and sheets strewn around it.
“Take that sheet and bring it back out front,” I commanded.
She did as I said.
“Now tear it into five long strips,” I said handing her my pocket knife.
“We ain’t got no money, mister,” she said as she worked.
“But you will soon enough won’t you, Misty?”
She stopped cutting for a second.
When she was through with the sheets I used the strips to hogtie the cowboy and gag him. When I was through I had Misty sit down on the floor in front of me.
“You gonna rape me?” she asked.
“No.”
“What you want wit’ me an’ Crawford? And how come you know my name?”
“How much they payin’?”
“Who?”
“Clovis and them,” I said, falling into the rhythm of the Texan dialect.
Misty was good. She looked like and talked like a hick off the back of a watermelon truck, but she knew how to feint and lie.
“I don’t know no Clovis,” she said, her voice a fraction softer than it had been before.
“You made the right choice comin’ to L.A., girl,” I said. “But wrong in goin’ in against your half-sister. I know you know Clovis. Clovis is your family too. So now you tell me what’s happenin’ or I’ma make sure you spend your pretty years in jail for extortion.”
“I didn’t do nuthin’,” she said. “I just been livin’ in this shitty house.”
“I bet you Clovis owns the deed on this house.”
“What if she do?”
“Put that together with Clovis forcing JJ to sign over half her business to her and you got prison stamped all over it.”
