Devil Red (18 page)

62

Not long after that cheery little comment from Vanilla, I had warm clothes on, including a wool cap, the heater turned up, and my foot heavy on the gas pedal. I had a thermos of coffee and a tuna fish sandwich in a plastic bag on the seat beside me. Brett’s revolver was holstered on my hip. In the glove box was my .38 Super. In the trunk, the twelve-gauge pump and ammunition for all three weapons. Also there was a toolbox with a pair of snips in it and some other things I needed. I had my clasp knife in my pocket and a roll of breath mints so as not to offend anyone I might want to stab or shoot. Marvin’s sawed-off I had left at the house, replaced by my own twelve-gauge. Call me sentimental. I preferred my own gun.

Outside the air was damp with a cold mist, and the highway in the beam of the headlights looked like a ribbon of blue steel. It was late and the road was oddly empty, as if while Vanilla and I talked there had been some kind of apocalypse.

I was still trying to wrap my mind around what Vanilla had told me, and there were parts of my brain that doubted what I heard. For all I knew she was setting me up. But that didn’t make a lot of sense. If she wanted me dead, she would have done it. I’d have had a bullet up my ass while I was still trying to find my house key. Not to mention that since she suspected a bomb, she could have just let it go off and they would have found my pecker in a tree the next day. And when I came downstairs from fetching my guns, she was gone, and she had taken the bombs with her.

A tidy cleanup for someone who would want me dead. And if she was using me to take out the competition, so far I wasn’t proving to be that good. Neither was Leonard. A bag of crackers and cookies had got him shot, maybe killed, and Vanilla had snuck up on me while I was on my porch about to unlock a door that would have blown me apart.

I decided to believe she was on my side. I also thought maybe she had arrived at the house by means of teleportation. Where was her car? And after she had drawn the map, and I had gathered up my weapons and ammunition, how did she get out and gone so quickly, without making a sound?

That girl was creepy.

No more slacking. No more being distracted. No more feeling sorry for myself. Tonight, I had to be back on my game, like the old days.

I called Brett and asked how Leonard was doing.

“Same ole, same ole,” she said. “You on the road, baby?”

“Yes.”

“For reasons discussed?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“That was quick.”

“I had some help.”

“Help?”

Brett knew about Vanilla Ride, and what she knew about her she didn’t like, so I decided not to mention her.

“I’ll tell you about it later,” I said. “At some point I’m going to cut off my phone. Not for a while, but in the next couple of hours.”

“Be careful,” she said.

“Always careful,” I said. “Take care of Leonard.”

“You’ll be back to do it.”

I hesitated. “You’ll take care of him, right?”

“You know it,” she said.

When I finished with Brett, I called Marvin.

“I need you at the hospital. To watch Brett. To make sure she and Leonard are okay. I know I told you to sleep, but—”

“Say no more. I’m on my way.”

“Marvin … I know what happened. I know who did it.”

“Wait until you’re not so steamed up, Hap. You know who it is tonight, you’ll know who it is tomorrow, and you can put a plan together. Right now you’re acting on anger.”

“I am at that.”

“Cool some.”

“Now’s the time,” I said.

“Tomorrow we can get Jim Bob. Me. My leg is better. I’m sort of up to it now.”

“No you’re not.”

“You’re gonna hurt my feelin’s, Hap.”

“Right now I don’t have room for that, my friend. I’m tellin’ it like it is. You’re not up to it, and I’m not waiting. And I don’t want to pull you or Jim Bob or anyone else into this. At least not directly. This is goddamn personal. And they don’t expect me to come to them. That’s the only edge I got. That and knowing you’re there with Brett and Leonard.”

“Who are they?” Marvin asked. “Who are them?”

“I told a certain someone that if I didn’t come back, they were to let you know what happened.”

“Who’s that certain someone?”

“You’ll know if I don’t come back.”

It was a promise Vanilla had made me before I went upstairs to get the guns. If I didn’t come back, she’d let Marvin and Brett know, warn them that Devil Red would be after them. I hoped they were smarter than me. I hoped they’d take Vanilla’s advice and run. I hoped she would keep her word. I was pretty certain she would.

Marvin said, “You sound a little dramatic.”

“I feel a little dramatic,” I said.

I heard Marvin sigh. “You doing something like whatever the hell you’re doing, and Leonard not being there … Man, that don’t seem right. I can’t think of one of you without the other. It’s like Siamese twins have been halved.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

63

It had started to snow. Real snow. Highly unusual for East Texas. The flakes were huge, like cotton balls. Normally snow in this area was little more than flakes that barely stuck and lasted about as long as it took to melt one on your tongue. If I hadn’t been on a mission to blow people’s brains out, I might have enjoyed its uniqueness and beauty. Right now, it was nothing more than a hindrance.

I wasn’t far from where I wanted to go. There was a rest stop nearby and I pulled in there and tried to eat the sandwich because I thought I was crazy hungry, but it just turned out I was crazy scared. I drank a cup of coffee, slowly, because my hands were trembling. I turned on my overhead light and looked at the map Vanilla had drawn on a piece of paper. I studied it. I was close. I was very close. I turned off the light and sat and thought, and it seemed as if the trees in the roadside park were drawing nearer to me, as if the darkness between them were gathering together into something solid and demonic, trimmed in snow and ice.

I squeezed my eyes shut, and then opened them. I didn’t look at the trees.

I poured another cup of coffee and tried to work my courage up as I sipped it.

My cell phone rang.

I almost jumped out of my skin.

It was Brett.

“He’s slipping,” she said.

“Oh, shit,” I said. I felt the bit of sandwich I had eaten churn in my stomach and nearly rise up.

“Hap, I’m so sorry. They don’t think he’ll make it through the night.”

“Goddamn it! Goddamn it to hell!”

“They let me in to see him. They said I could come in because I’m all that’s here. I shouldn’t have told you to go. Oh, shit, Hap. I never thought he’d die.”

“He isn’t dead yet.”

“I held his hand. I told him you were taking care of things. I told him we loved him. Marvin is here. He’s out in the waiting room.”

“I told him to watch over you,” I said.

“He has a gun under his coat. And he gave me one. But really, a shootout in the hospital?”

“I’m just being cautious … So the doctor said … no hope?”

“Just said he was slipping away.”

“Tell Leonard I have his hat.”

“What?”

“Whisper in his ear. Tell the big bastard I have his deerstalker, and if he wants it back, he’ll have to take it from me. Tell him, he dies, I’ll shit in it. You tell him that.”

Brett laughed a little. It was strained, but it was a laugh.

“I’ll tell him. If he can hear me, he’ll come back just to kick your ass.”

“Right now I’d let him. You go back in there, and you take Leonard’s hand, and tell him his brother loves him. You hear me? You tell him that again. And you tell him what I said about his hat.”

“I will,” she said.

“I’m gone,” I said. “And so is the phone.”

I turned off the phone. I rolled down the window and tossed the coffee from the cup and threw the cup on the floorboard and sat for a moment. My stomach was really churning now. I got out of the car quickly and walked around back of it and upchucked the sandwich and the coffee. It burned my throat.

“Leonard. Don’t you die,” I said out loud.

I got back in the car and got a Kleenex out of the glove box and wiped my lips. I tossed out the sandwich. I put a few of the breath mints in my mouth to kill the vomit taste. I pulled away from the rest stop onto the highway.

Devil Red, I’m coming.

64

There was a little logging road, and according to Vanilla it went down behind Kincaid and Clinton’s property. I took it, bumped along, almost got stuck a couple of times, made my way to where the road stopped amid what looked like the results of a nuclear strike but was in fact the end product of logging. In the moonlight, I could imagine the snow as nuclear ash, all the world dead and turned to powder.

Off to the south, that myth dissolved. The woods were thick there. Out there without lights, the moon behind cloud cover, all I could see were vague tree shapes, nature’s own palisades rising thick and wild against the dark sky.

I got out with the .38 Super and my flashlight and went crunching over the frozen leaves and pine needles to the trunk of the car and opened it up, removed the shotgun, and laid it on the roof. I opened the toolbox, got the snips, and removed a little strap-on headlight like the kind you use to read in bed so as not to wake up your partner. I turned it on and slipped it over the wool cap on my head. It wasn’t a big light, but it was a good enough light. I turned off the flashlight and put it in my coat pocket. I got a machete from the toolbox and the ammunition out of the trunk and stuffed my pockets with it. I made sure I had the Super’s spare ammo clips where I could get to them quickly. The shotgun had a strap, so I slung it over my shoulder.

I took a pee.

I picked up a wad of snow and made a snowball in my gloved hand and threw it at a stump of a tree. I missed.

I hoped that wasn’t an omen.

I was ready as I was going to be.

Way Vanilla had explained it, I had to go through the woods there, had to find my own trail, of which there were a few, and if I kept going south, I’d come to the high wall that led to the grounds of the estate. How to get over the wall was another matter, but Vanilla felt that since there were high woods on my side of the wall, on property other than their own, the logging company’s property, I could maybe find access that way.

I didn’t think that far ahead. If I did I’d turn around whimpering and head back to the car.

I tried several times to find a path but couldn’t. The woods were thick and dead winter vines were twisted up between the trees like ancient fencing. Worse, I was no longer exactly sure which way was south. It was too damn dark, and among the trees I couldn’t see anything but the whiteness of the snow and the occasional glare of moonlight on dangles of ice.

I made an attempt to follow my instincts, knowing full well that could get me in deep doo-doo, but I went ahead with it.

Hacking my way through the undergrowth, following the little beam of my head-strap light, I fought my way forward. At some point, I came upon a path through the trees and I followed that. It finally veered off to the right. I reluctantly abandoned it and started hacking again. I kept moving forward, inch by inch. I figured by the time I got through this mess and arrived, it would be two weeks from Tuesday.

Even in the cold weather, wearing all those clothes and hacking away, I was steamed and had to pause to cool it. I opened my coat and leaned against a tree. I was glad Leonard and I had been doing more workouts as of late. I had dropped a few pounds and my wind was better. Still, I was tired.

I reached up and turned off the head-strap lamp, leaned against the tree in darkness. I thought about Leonard. I thought about how long I had known him. I thought about all we had gone through. Here I was in the deep woods hacking through twisted dead winter vines and brush, and he was lying up in the hospital without me. That didn’t seem right.

For a moment I considered going back, driving to the hospital to be with him. But then I thought about what Devil Red had done. I thought about how I had been sympathetic toward their killing of those who hurt their loved ones. And then I thought about what they had done to Vanilla and so many others, made them Prostitutes of Death. I was better than they were. I was much better.

I reached up and turned the light on again, and started forward.

In a very short time I saw a glow ahead of me. It was faint and blurry in the misty night. As I neared, I realized it was not a small light, but a large light that spread to my left and right, and that it was shining between the trunks of the trees. I kept going, and finally came to a thinning of the pines and saw a wall ahead of me. It was at least twenty feet high. The light was seeping over it.

Okay.

Now we separate the men from the mice.

Squeak. Squeak.

65

I walked along the edge of the barricade, feeling like a Mongol considering how to make it over the Great Wall and into China. I finally found what Vanilla suggested. A tree that grew with limbs close to the wall.

But not that close.

Kincaid and Collins kept the limbs pretty well trimmed off their side. I’d have to climb the tree and jump to the wall, and then drop down on the other side. The trick then, according to Vanilla, was to move along a certain line of trees, and then onto a long open veranda. All of this was in a blind spot for the camera. Then I had to snip a certain wire in a certain hidden place just inside the foyer, and then I had to get in, all of this without the dogs or the guards or the camera seeing me. Then I had to kill two of what she said were the greatest assassins alive, and once that was done, all that was left was to sneak out and go over the wall without being shot by the guards or having being torn apart by the dogs. Piece of cake.

I turned off my headlight, slipped the machete in a scabbard on my belt, started up the tree, which was a kind of sickly pine coated in a light casing of ice that crackled as I went. Snow drifted down on me, both from the sky and from where it had gathered on limbs. With me in my heavy coat and with the shotgun strapped on my back, I kept getting hung up, and I kept slipping on the ice, but finally I made it without falling, nestled on a limb, and gathered myself.

I was high enough up I could see over the wall. There were lights there, most of them closer to the house. There was a huge brick estate with a long veranda and a sloping roof nestled in the center of some open land. There was a line of thick-limbed trees that ran from the wall toward the house, but ended some thirty or forty feet before they got there. Everything was covered in snow.

I began to think Vanilla was way right. I was in over my head. I was having a hard enough time getting over the wall, let alone going into the house and killing Devil Red—the both of them.

Finally, I felt rested enough to scoot out to the edge of the limb, and just as I was trying to get up on it to jump, it broke, and I fell.

I lay on the ground for a long time. I had landed with the shotgun strapped to my back, so that didn’t help matters either. I felt as if it had been driven into my back. The fall knocked the breath out of me and I lay there trying to get it back. I felt like the Oz Scarecrow with the stuffing pulled out. Only colder.

I was off to an excellent start, if I was a comedian.

Eventually, I felt strong enough to stand. I looked up at the tree. The limb had been my best access, and now it was gone. I went down the fence row again, this time in the direction closer to the shrubs, looking for a new way over, and finally came upon a sweet gum tree with a limb that projected just over the wall and hadn’t been recently trimmed.

The problem was there were few limbs until you got up about ten feet, so I had to climb using the pressure of my palms and the soles of my shoes. The tree was damp and it was no easy business. By the time I got to the first limb I could reach, I felt on the verge of a rupture. I got hold of the limb, swung up, and sat on it for a moment. I was much closer to the line of shrubs here. I could see them through the cluttered boughs of the leaf-stripped, snow-coated tree.

I had too much stuff on me, and that was making it hard to move along, so with reluctance, I removed the machete and dropped it on the ground. I crawled out on the limb. It dipped slightly, like a horse nodding for me to get off. The wall was festooned with barbed wire and sharp pieces of metal and broken glass that had been imbedded in the cement when it was drying. Vanilla said there was a camera, but the trees had grown large and bushy and would hide someone from sight if they came over the wall in line with them.

I was in line with them.

I eased out farther on the limb, near to its thinning tip, and that made me nervous. It was long enough that with my weight on it, it dipped over the wall. I grabbed hold of the limb and swung out, catching my pants on the glass in the wall, but only slightly. I dropped to the ground inside the compound and went down on one knee, giving things a look. The wet ice and snow came through my pants and made my knees numb.

I went at a crouch along the line of trees, and if Vanilla was right, out of camera shot. My back ached from the fall. I felt a little light-headed. Either not enough food. Too much activity. Being scared. Or a combination of all three. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go number two, so I had that going for me.