“Follow them anyway,” Russel said. “Hurry.”
Jim Bob cranked the pickup and we went down the street briskly and made a left even more briskly. Russel and I took off our wigs and gathered them up along with Jim Bob’s cap and hair and stuck them under the seat For a killing job, they might have been all right disguises, but for tailing a car they were a little silly and obvious. Hard not to take note of Raggedy Andy, a French painter type and Groucho Marx wearing a Beatle wig.
Russel and me took turns wiping the blacking off our faces with the tow sack, wrapped the guns in it again and lowered them behind the seat. I put the Ithaca in the shotgun rack and Jim Bob put his hat on.
We saw the green van take a right onto the highway, and we gave it a few seconds before we gunned up to the intersection and went after it, managing to keep a car or two between us at all times. The van driver drove slowly and cautiously until we wound our way out of the city and out onto Highway 59 North. At that point, he picked up speed and became harder to follow. We had been after him almost an hour.
Houses fell by the wayside and great pine trees appeared in their places and shadows gathered between them like bats. There was plenty of traffic, but all that motorized activity didn’t make me feel less creeped. I guess I was thinking about that young whore I had seen on the tape, or whoever she was. Just some kid, fucked and killed for Freddy’s and the Mexican’s entertainment.
Now we were following those self-same murderers, as well as a number of other most likely unpleasant individuals who probably made them up their steady film crew, down a dark highway with the houses and lights going away and the pines and the moon and the shadows becoming the status quo, and it was my guess that this merry little van-encased group had this night set aside for a very special little film they wished to make, and it was most certainly not a nature flick about the nocturnal mating habits of the brown moth.
We kept on going, and when we were about halfway to LaBorde, the car lights became less frequent and the night had fallen over the countryside like a hood.
We went through some little burg that consisted of a used car lot, a chicken shack, a railroad track, one red light and a fistful of abandoned buildings, and on the other side of that the van took a left and went down a narrow blacktop that seemed almost consumed by pines.
Jim Bob pulled over to the side of the road to give them a chance to get a little farther ahead so we wouldn’t look so obvious. Russel got out a cigarette and lit it and I cracked my window and watched the smoke suck out it like a wraith.
“Long enough,” Jim Bob said, and he checked the highway for cars and pulled across onto the blacktop. Russel leaned over me and tossed the almost whole cigarette through the crack in the window and I rolled it up. Jim Bob said, “Break out the guns.”
42
The blacktop dipped down a deep hill and wound sharply around a corner that was walled with pines, and there in the moonlight, the spears of trees on either side of it, it looked like an enormous ribbon of molasses slick enough to slide on.
We went down the hill and around the corner and down the road a piece, and no van. We went by a gravel drive and a cattle guard and finally another drive that was made of concrete, and on around another curve.
No sign of the van.
“We didn’t wait that long,” Jim Bob said. “They turned off.”
Turning around, we went back more slowly, and as we cruised by the concrete drive, I squinted through the trees and saw lights. “There’s a house down there or something,” I said.
Jim Bob drove on until we came to the cattle guard, and he drove over that and parked the truck in a pasture and killed the lights.
“We can walk back and check,” he said.
“And if that isn’t them?” Russel asked.
“We come back to the truck and start over,” Jim Bob said. “I don’t think this pasture leads anywhere but more pasture, maybe some trees. I think they want a house for what they’re doing. The gravel drive up from this might lead to something, but let’s check out the other one first.”
We got out of the truck with our weapons, but didn’t bother with the wigs or the blacking. Other than those we intended to eliminate, witnesses out here were few and far between. And we didn’t need the blacking to protect us from being exposed in the moonlight. The moon was just a sliver and the shadows were thick and would conceal us as well as anything might.
The air had cooled off with night fall, but I was having trouble breathing it; it felt too heavy and thick to go through my nose and mouth.
Jim Bob led and Russel and I followed. Just before we came to the drive, Jim Bob said, “If it’s them, take it easy. We’ll see what we got and put together some kind of game plan. When it comes down to assholes and elbows, remember this: We’re outnumbered, but we can surprise them. That element doesn’t go as far in real life as it does in the movies, but it’s something. When this shindig gets started, don’t shoot to wing anybody. This is the once and for all real thing, and when the smoke clears, we want to be standing, or at least breathing.”
“Remember,” Russel said, “you’re going to try and leave Freddy for me.”
“Me and Dane ain’t gonna get killed so you can get your shot in, but if it’s within our power he’s yours.”
Car lights curved around the road and we darted into the high grass and peeked out. It was the gray Vette.
“The guy from the video store,” I said.
We watched the taillights go brighter as it slowed, turned onto the concrete drive.
“I think we found our boys,” Jim Bob said.
When we reached the driveway, we stopped short of that and took to the right of it and moved through some brush and scrub trees. The closer we came to the house, the clearer the terrain became, and we finally came to a spot where the brush ended and there was a row of briars like concentration camp barbed wire, and beyond that a scattering of tall pines. Off to the far right, the land and brush tumbled into a ravine. On the other side of the drive it was the same way with the brush ending and the cleared land and the scattered trees taking over, only there was no ravine on that side. Artfully arranged at the end of the drive between the pines was a tall house of glass and redwood and there were lights on in the house and we could see a stairs with a man on them, and walking behind him was Freddy. I recognized him by his bulk and the way he moved-like his old man. The stairs turned at the top and went behind a wall and they were soon out of sight.
Outside the house there were several men standing around, five to be exact, and the thin man in the white suit got out of the Vette and a girl got out on the other side and they went over to join them. I couldn’t tell much about the girl, but she didn’t seem to be forced. But that didn’t mean anything. She wouldn’t have been told the entire plan-the shooting part would have been left out. She was short and had long, black hair to her waist and she walked with plenty of hip roll and had nice hips for the rolling.
One of the men in the group said loudly, “You pull train, baby?” The guy in the white suit said, “Speak Mex,” and the man spoke again in that language, the same question I presume, because the girl laughed musically and her Si drifted back to us and was followed by male laughter sharp and desperate as the barking of caged dogs.
Everyone, except a man who looked like a boulder in a suit, went in the house. The boulder took up a position by the door and folded his hands in front of him and cupped his crotch like he was weighing his testicles.
“Think she’s a pigeon?” Russel said.
“Probably,” Jim Bob said. “I think we’re going to have to play it that way. But watch for her. She could be with them and have a gun and she just might shoot your dick off. You two go toward the house by the ravine, and I’m gonna cross the drive when I get the chance and come up on the other side. I’m good at this sneaking stuff.”
“Hear you tell it,” Russel said, “there isn’t anything you aren’t good at.”
“I don’t whistle too well,” Jim Bob said. “Now remember, we’ve seen six guys outside, two going up the stairs. That makes eight. But there might be more inside. And don’t forget the girl. Like I said, she may not be friendly.
“We’ll do this simple, come up on both sides of the fella at the door, and whoever gets there first takes him
