Honky Tonk Samurai (Hap and Leonard) (28 page)

Leonard joined me. “I think these are all family photos.”

“Yep. And all dead.”

“What?”

Leonard took the flash off his shotgun and looked closer.

“Goddamn, fuck a lame goat in the ass. You’re right. I have seen some shit, my friend, but in some ways this creeps me out more than the balls in the jars. All we need now is to come across an altar for animal sacrifice.”

“I think this is the ball-snatcher dynasty,” I said. “One dies, they have another to take over the work. I think it’s like Doug said, incest and continuation of the line. They get old enough, they move into the family business.”

“Could be more here than seven or eight,” Leonard said.

“Doug was pretty certain.”

“There you go. Doug, a fucking big-time criminal gave you the true dope, and why doubt his word?”

“Because us killing these folks is to his advantage. If he’s right, we are looking at the last of the line.”

“If he’s right.”

Leonard replaced his light on top of his shotgun.

“How do people end up like this?” I said.

“Choice.”

“Can’t all be choice. They had to have been treated like shit. They think this is normal.”

“Tell you what. We get through here, you get rested, you write a paper on it, and I’ll read it while I’m scratching my balls. But since there’s no one in here except these balls and some cheap photos, and since that paper ain’t written, let’s get down to business.”

We slipped out the door and trotted smoothly toward the circle of homes.

Jim Bob and Booger were by this time both out of sight.

L
eonard and I spread apart. I went closer to the center of the homes, where there was a sizable gap between them. Leonard started in the direction Booger had taken. I hoped to hell Jim Bob and Booger didn’t shoot us. I thought of Vanilla up there in the deer stand with her makeshift rifle, and that gave me some comfort.

I cruised past one of the outhouses, and the stink was strong. I thought, who in this modern age lives like this by choice? But a better question would have been, who cuts people’s throats with wire and cuts off their balls with the wire and keeps them in mason jars in a goddamn shed with pickup trucks?

I hustled on until I could slip through the gap in the circle of homes. They had plenty of ways to keep you outside, but so far nothing I had seen that would alert them you were inside. To my right I saw Booger. He was pointing at the trailer where the light burned. I nodded and joined him. The trailer’s front door was on the inside of the circle. There was a set of wooden stairs, sloppily built, that led up to a wooden porch with a short roof that extended out from the trailer and over it all.

I went up first. The stairs creaked, and when I stepped onto the porch it squeaked sharply. I took a deep breath and put my ear to the door. I could hear a TV going inside. I looked down at Booger.

He came up without so much as a creaking sound. A house cat would have made more noise. He leaned his weapon against the door, got a lock pick out of his pocket, and went at it. It wasn’t much of a door, and it wasn’t much of a lock. It came undone as easy as a whore’s bra.

Booger put the lock-pick kit away, picked up his gun, and looked at me. I took hold of the door handle with my gloved hand and turned it and went inside. It was dark inside, and I had turned my flashlight off. I slipped in and stood on the left side of the door, then decided to squat down. Booger came in and took the right. There were only two ways to go in that trailer, left or right. I went left, Booger went right.

Drifting toward the sound of the television and the weak, yellow light, I came to the section of the trailer that served as a living room, slipped through an open space without a door and into the room. The back of the couch was facing me, and there was a man sitting on the couch. All I could see was the back of his head and broad shoulders. He had long, greasy, dark hair. The little light on the left side of the room near a window, and the flickering motion of the TV, made the whole scene surreal. Worse, he was watching an episode of some fucked-up reality show.

Slipping the rest of the way in, I pointed my shotgun at the back of his head. I hadn’t gone more than a foot forward when I heard a shotgun cut loose in the yard. The man on the couch stood up suddenly and turned. He had a gun in his hand. That figured. Guys like this probably went around armed 24-7. But that’s all he had. He was naked except for underwear, though at that point I couldn’t see his feet. He might have been wearing high heels for all I knew. He saw me and let out his breath. It sounded like a snake hissing in high grass.

“Don’t do it,” I said. And he didn’t. He tossed the gun on the couch.

Booger came in then. “Got you one, huh?”

“Who fired that shot?” I said.

“Let’s hope Jim Bob.”

“Who are you two?” the man behind the couch said.

“Motherfucker can at least count to two,” Booger said.

“Ease around here where I can see all of you, much as I hate the idea,” I said.

He did. He was skinny and white as snow, and from what I could tell in the lamplight, his hair could have been brown or black or purple. He wasn’t wearing high heels. He was barefoot. On the walls were shelves, and on the shelves were jars. I knew without examining them what was in them. They had quite a collection. There were photographs as well as a faded framed invocation:
GOD BLESS OUR HOME
.

“How’d you get in here?” the man said. His accent was East Texas, but it seemed of some other era, not tampered with by time and association with others. The legend they might be mutes was squashed.

“Teleportation,” I said. “Lean your ass into the couch. Booger, why don’t you check on who fired that shot, just in case it wasn’t Jim Bob?”

Booger went away, and I heard the front door open. Me and the man in the dirty underwear stared at each other until I glanced again at the rows of jars. I said, “You couldn’t just buy a few knickknacks?”

The man said nothing. I stared at him, amazed at the banality of it all. This man was part of a tribe of infamous killers who traveled under a single name, and he was really nothing more than an average-looking man in stained underwear. A psychotic sitting around watching TV, scratching himself, drinking beer, and now and again taking a peek at his nut-sack collection. Nothing monsterlike in his appearance, nothing special about him in any way. He was merely a psychopath who liked reality shows, needed a shower, and a lethal injection.

I don’t know how long we stood like that, but it seemed like a lot of time passed before Booger came back. He had Jim Bob with him. Jim Bob said, “Shot one coming out of the toilet. I went around to the trailers and looked and didn’t see anything.”

“You shot Derrick?” said the man.

“Did he look a lot like you, but had pants on?” Jim Bob said.

The man nodded.

“Don’t expect him at breakfast,” Jim Bob said.

“Leonard?” I asked.

“Didn’t see him,” he said, shaking his head. “I went and looked inside a couple of trailers, and no one was there. I came around on the side to look in the others, and here come a guy out of the outhouse carrying a roll of toilet paper in one hand and a pistol in the other. He saw me, and he didn’t know if he should wipe his ass with the paper or the gun. He decided to shoot at me. With the gun, not the paper. I took him out, and not to lunch. Did you hear a twenty-two fire after my shot?”

“No,” I said.

“Pretty sure Vanilla hit him in the back of the head about the same time I shot him. It was a pretty quiet shot. Damn. Look at all those jars full of nut sacks.”

“I want to know where Leonard is,” I said.

“Told you, don’t know,” Jim Bob said. “Hell, that’s a lot of jars. Cut my nuts off they’re going to need a lot of room, lot of jars, more likely a washtub and about ten gallons of rubbing alcohol to preserve them.”

“What do we do with this one?” I said.

“You know the answer to that question,” Jim Bob said.

“You ought to just go on and find someplace to hide, you know what’s good for you,” said the man. “You got some chance like that. Not much, but some. Better yet, you might want to get over the wall before my brothers find me.”

“And when you and your brothers aren’t fucking each other in the ass,” Jim Bob said, “where might we find them?”

“Go fuck yourself with a dog’s dick,” the man said. “They’ll be back soon enough, and you’ll wish they wasn’t.”

Booger laughed and lifted his shotgun quickly and cut down on the man. It was messy.

“Goddamn, Booger,” I said.

“We didn’t come here to sort out their issues,” Booger said. “We came to rid them of them.”

“Jesus,” I said. “He gave up his gun. He wasn’t armed.”

“Sounds like a personal problem,” Booger said.

W
e went out through the door we had come in one at a time, quickly, Booger first, me, and then Jim Bob. We walked inside the circle of trailers. No one shot at us, and there was no sound of movement until Leonard came through the gap in the line of trailers I had come through.

“I heard shooting,” Leonard said. “Saw one out by the shitter who will shit no more.”

“Me and Vanilla nailed him,” Jim Bob said.

“One inside got caught with his pants off,” Booger said. “He won’t be around for the holidays.”

“Where are the others?” I said.

“Now, that’s a good question,” Leonard said. “I didn’t see anyone among the junk and cars. Been in all the trailers?”

“Just one,” I said.

“I was in a couple others,” Booger said.

“I checked some,” Jim Bob said.

We sorted out that only one trailer hadn’t been checked.

We didn’t bother with a lock pick this time. Jim Bob kicked the door down, and we went inside. It smelled like a buzzard’s breath. There was no one there, and there were no balls in jars. It looked more like it was used as their crash pad. Mattresses were thrown about on the floor, and there were sheets and blankets twisted about on those. There were a number of automatic weapons leaning against the wall and on hooks. Their bedroom was also their armory.

In the corner there was a yellow curtain supported on metal poles and stanchions. We walked over and looked behind the curtain. There was a window that looked out over the compound. There were no curtains on it. There was a small wooden table with a couple of thick books on it. The moonlight and the compound light came through the window. There was a hospital bed. It had an electronic device, a little plastic bar with buttons on it, for raising the bed up and lowering it. There were metal stands with metal racks around the bed. There were empty glass containers hanging from the racks, tubes dangled loose from those, like snakes that had died of boredom. The ends of the tubes were fixed with rusted needles. The bed itself was yellowed by time and stank of human waste long left and long rotted. The pillow on the bed had a head on it, and the head had some dark hair on it, though most of it had come loose and lay on the pillow. Attached to the head was a body. It wasn’t exactly mummified, but it wasn’t completely gone, either. It was simultaneously in mid-rot and mid-mummification. I wasn’t sure which was going to win out. Obviously, it was the source of the smell. The light through the window caused it to appear to be coated in a thin film of cheese. The eyes had a strip of duct tape over them. There was a thin once-white gown on her, and it had become one with the rotting flesh.

“Okay,” Jim Bob said. “We killed two, and the rest of them ain’t here, unless you want to count this guy. Woman. Whatever. Jesus.”

“They torturing somebody?” Booger asked.

Jim Bob picked up one of the books on the table, flipped it open.

“I think they were doctoring somebody,” Jim Bob said. “A relative. Doing it themselves. This is a medical book.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say no one on their staff actually had a medical degree,” I said.

“At least someone could read,” Leonard said.

“Not well enough,” Jim Bob said. “The page is turned down on delivery.”

“Delivery?” Booger said.

“Babies,” Jim Bob said. “They were trying to deliver a baby.”

“Since we haven’t seen any babies,” Leonard said, “I’m going to take it this is the potential mother and they failed.”

“It’s like Doug was saying,” I said. “They ran out of sisters.”

“Looks that way,” Leonard said, wrinkling his nose against the stench.

They may be awful people, I thought, but they had tried to save one of their own, give birth to another. I liked it better when they were faceless killers who needed killing and there wasn’t any humanity involved. I wondered if they propped her up and photographed her after she died.

The stink was making me sick. I was starting to cough. We went away from there quickly, outside into the circle at the center of the trailers. As we were starting back to the wall, we saw automobile lights coming down from the hill, between the trees. They were high enough up that the lights shone down into the compound and lay on us like laser beams. Then there was a loud clicking, and I saw red-dot lights on the inside of the gate go off, and I could see the butt ends of half a dozen machine guns positioned below those dots in the gate, just the way Booger had said. Soon as those dots went off, the big gate sprang open electronically, groaning like an old man straining at stool, and into the compound jetted a black Hummer.

As Underwear Man had said, they’d be back soon enough, and here they came.

We scattered like quail as the Hummer braked to an abrupt stop inside the compound. The Hummer’s doors were thrown open on the passenger side, front and back, and two men who looked like stockier versions of the one in his underwear came out into the open with automatic weapons that sprayed the air full of lead. I barely had time to jump behind some piled-up washing machines, and still the bullets tore through them and scattered rust and one nicked my ass as I dove. Once I was on the ground, I immediately began turning my head, looking for Leonard.

I didn’t see him, but I heard him off to my right, opening up with his shotgun. That old Remington of his had a certain sound when you pumped it. He was pumping fast. There was another rattle of automatic-weapons fire, all of it in Leonard’s direction. I lifted my head cautiously and looked through a gap in the washing machine pile and saw that both armed men were hurrying toward me. Neither had been hit that I could see. And then one of them snapped his head forward and then back, and where his eye had been there was a leap of liquid spurting into the lights of the Hummer. The man with him yelled out something, dropped low, and then turned to race back for the Hummer. By then the spray of bullets ceased, and Jim Bob and Booger rose up from the old cars they had ducked behind and starting firing, but that bastard must have been blessed, because he didn’t get hit, or if he did it was minor. It damn sure didn’t stop him.

There came that faint snapping sound from the deer stand, and Vanilla nailed him. He turned his head suddenly as if to look in our direction, then banged into the Hummer and slid down it slowly until he fell with his head under it. His ass humped a little, like he was fucking the dirt, and then he was still.

“That bitch can shoot,” I heard Booger yell out.

That’s when the Hummer roared and burned backwards, running right over the man who had been humping the dirt, squirting what passed for brains out of his head in all directions. The Hummer roared on through the gate, swung around, and turned its nose up the hill with the tires tossing gravel. All of us were firing at it, but nothing we hit on the Hummer caused a problem.

Up in the deer stand, Vanilla snapped off two shots, and I heard the Hummer windshield crack, but it kept going, climbing the hill. We all started running after it.

When it got to the top of the hill, the Hummer turned and ran off the road and went straight for the deer stand, hit it and sent it flying, breaking it apart, launching Vanilla out of it in a flash of black clothes and blond hair. The Hummer tried to run her down then, but she limped behind a tree and the Hummer hit it, backed off, spun around, and started out of there.

We ran up the hill, and by the time we got up there, Vanilla was limping up to us, and the Hummer was gone.

“Get me to the car,” she said, “and I will teach them to knock me out of a tree.”

“Deer stand,” Booger said.

“Whatever,” she said, throwing the rifle across her back by a strap she had fastened to it.

She got between Leonard and me, threw her arms over our shoulders, and with Jim Bob and Booger in the lead, we carried on. We made it to the brush gate, or where it used to be, but the Hummer had gone right through it.

“They just thought they were badasses,” Booger said, “and then they got a load of us.”

“We got lucky,” Jim Bob said.

We limped Vanilla along until we got to the end of the trail that led to the outer road. Booger leaned down with his light and said, “They went to the right. You can see where they dug in turning.”

Our problem was that the Buick was to the left, so we limped Vanilla along that way, finally got to the car. I thought the Hummer might at this point be all the way to the North Pole.

I was still closing my door when Vanilla got the Buick started. She put her good right foot on the gas and spun us out of there backwards, braked, hit the gas, changed the gears, and away we went. Every time Vanilla shifted gears the car roared louder and flew faster. Vanilla was down the road a piece before she turned on the lights, which was a good thing, because the road was growing narrow and there was a bar ditch on either side. The headlights caught standing water in the ditches and made it shimmer.

“We’ll never catch them,” Leonard said.

“Yes, we will,” Vanilla said, and she hit another gear. She wasn’t kidding about the car being souped up beyond reason. We tore along like that for what seemed like ten or fifteen minutes, and then we caught the taillights of the Hummer. Vanilla pushed her foot down, and the Buick’s engine sang like a siren; the tires clawed the road with a vengeance.

I hadn’t thought to put on my seat belt, but right then I remembered and snapped it into place and tried not to shit myself. We were going so fast the car was starting to wobble and the trees to either side of us looked like a solid wall. One thing about a Hummer is it doesn’t run that fast, and the Buick was a goddamn ground jet.

We were closing fast.