Vanilla Ride (19 page)

“There’s no need to call her.”

“Aha.”

“Well. She smiled.”

“She was embarrassed.”

“Maybe.”

“Good night, Hap.”

“Good night, Leonard.”

Lake O’ the Pines is a big lake, man-made, like all the lakes in Texas except Caddo Lake. It was made a long time ago and on this cold morning the water was looking blue as a Patsy Cline song. I thought that by midday, we didn’t get any cloud cover, the cold could burn off a little and it might be a fairly warm day. But if the clouds came in, it could turn damn cold damn quick because a wind was starting up, and as we drove by the lake, I could see through the trees along the bank that the water was rippling the way coffee will ripple when you blow on it to cool it.

We drove around, trying to follow the directions Hirem gave us, but there were a lot of little cabins. Finally, about lunchtime we came out from around the lake and stopped at a gas station and mini-mart and got some gas. There was a couple there with a break-down cage that you could put up easy and dismantle easy and haul away, and in the cage was a bear. It was a pretty good-sized bear. They had a deal where you could get your picture taken with the bear, Cindy. Of course, Leonard had to do it and I had to do it with him. When we went inside the cage and were introduced to Cindy, she was sitting on a stool like a human being, as if on break. I half expected her to be smoking a cigarette. She saw us, got up, waddled over, and stretched out her arms and put them over our shoulders. She had done this before and it was a livin’. The muscles in her arms felt like steel cables.

Jim Bob and Tonto, being smarter, didn’t have their picture taken. They stood outside the cage and looked at us as if they soon expected
to see us eaten. When the photo was taken, Cindy moved her arms and went back and sat on her stool. It was a double cage, two rooms if you will, and part of it had photographs of Cindy the Bear swimming in her pond on her owner’s property. They told us all about it. The bear was a Russian bear.

“Is she a vodka-drinking commie?” Leonard asked.

“The Soviet Union is no more,” said the lady owner. She was a blond woman with a nice build and the attitude of someone who had never met a sense of humor. Her old man was skinny and he grinned. I don’t know if he thought what Leonard said was funny. I think he just grinned a lot.

We got our photograph of us with the bear, which they put between two pieces of cardboard, and then we went inside the station. As we did, Jim Bob said, “You guys are pretty weird, you know.”

The station had a little stove and grill, and there was a glass cover where you could see what they had cooked. There was some fried chicken on greasy white paper and hot links and there was a place where you could get some slices of bread and put mustard and relish on it if you wanted, make a sandwich with the links. There were also a few sides, like some suspicious-looking baked potatoes and a Crock-Pot of red beans in a congealed soup that looked as if you might need a pickax to crack the surface.

We got a little of this and a little of that, picking potato chips and some candy bars and sodas to go with the chicken and links, and went to the back of the place, where there were a few tables, and had our lunch. There was enough grease in the chicken to lube up a whorehouse on a sailor’s Saturday night, but it tasted really good and so did the links. We ate not only because we were hungry but because we were bored. Where I was sitting I could look out the big window at the pumps, and I could see the van parked up front near the door. And I could also see something else. A brown Ford. It slowed out on the highway, and as it did, I stuck an elbow in Leonard and he turned to look.

“Brown Ford,” I said.

“Yep,” he said.

Jim Bob and Tonto looked too. The Ford pulled up at a pump and a guy about the size of Tonto, and then Tonto again, got out. It wasn’t just that he was tall. He was no taller than Tonto, but he was wide as a
truck and had a chest big enough to store a winter’s worth of corn in it. His legs were bigger around than my waist and his head looked like someone had anchored a medicine ball to his neck. He had blond hair and a little goatee and the kind of tan that comes from solar lamps. I figured he had fallen off Jack’s beanstalk and was learning to make his way in our world.

There was another guy in the front of the Ford, and two in the back, and they just sat. After a while, when the gas was done, the others got out and they all came in.

We watched them carefully. The big guy who had been driving and who put in the gas looked back at us and nodded. Just a regular guy, bigger than most regular guys, seeing some other regular guys, acknowledging us. We nodded back.

We kind of huddled over our food and whispered.

“They might not be anything,” Leonard said.

“Maybe not,” I said.

“Lots of brown Fords,” Jim Bob said.

“Yep,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Tonto said. “They’re somebody. They got guns. I can see the bulges under their shirts.”

“Maybe those are cell phone cases,” Jim Bob said.

Tonto looked at Jim Bob. They both smiled.

“But,” Jim Bob said, “probably not.”

“If they’ve been following us without me seeing them,” Tonto said, “they’re good. And Hap, you’re good. You spotted them and I didn’t.”

“They want us to know they’re following now,” Jim Bob said. “They want us to know they’re tired of playing.”

“I didn’t know we were playing,” Tonto said, “but now that I do, I’m ready to get out the toys. Ah, here they come.”

They came back and sat at the table next to us. My side of the bench was closer to the big guy, and on the other side of our table was Tonto, and he shifted a little so that one of his hands was under the table and the other was lying on top of it next to a gnawed chicken leg.

They were all big guys. Only the driver, the guy on my side, was as big as Tonto, but the others were easily bigger than the rest of us. I got to thinking we weren’t nearly as nifty as we thought. These guys had been on us for a while, and though I had gotten glimpses of them, they were good, damn good, at least as far as sneaking went. Thing I was
wondering was when exactly did they get on us, and were they FBI guys or guys from the Dixie Mafia. I was voting pretty heavily on the latter.

The big guy had some chicken and was about to eat it. I said, “That chicken isn’t nearly as nasty as it looks.”

The big guy paused with the chicken close to his mouth. “Yeah. That’s good to hear. I was worried.”

“The links, they’re not bad either. You guys, you don’t look like fishermen.”

“Neither do you,” said the big guy.

“We’re just riding around,” I said.

“That’s a coincidence,” the big guy said. “So are we.” He bit into the chicken and chewed, then looked at me and nodded. “You’re right. That’s pretty damn good.”

He paused and wiped his hands on some paper towels that were on a roller in the center of the table. He shifted on the bench and turned toward me, said, “We’re more the hunter type.”

“Now that,” Jim Bob said, “is one big goddamn fucking coincidence. So are we.”

“Really?” said the big guy.

“Oh, yeah,” Jim Bob said. “Big fucking time.”

“What do you hunt?”

“Skunks mostly,” Jim Bob said.

“Oh,” the big guy said. “I don’t believe there’s a season for that.”

“What makes it thrilling,” Jim Bob said. “Ain’t nothing better than sneaking up on a skunk, or a weasel, and blowing them right out from over their ass.”

“I can see that,” said the big man, and he pushed the paper plate with the chicken on it away from him. “It sure was good to chat with you boys. You know, the weather looks as if it’s going to turn bad.”

“Yeah?” Leonard said.

“Oh yeah, big-time. I think I heard it on the radio. Thing is, I wanted to share that because you don’t want to get caught up in a big old storm that might blow you away. That would suck.”

“Yeah, and it would mess up our hair,” I said.

He gave me a smile thin as the edge of a razor blade. “You got any information for us? You might know where we can find a good place to stop for the day, and get some things we need, and then maybe the storm won’t come.”

“And what kind of place is that?” I said.

“Someplace with a couple of dumb kids with lots of money who aren’t any of your business.”

“Shit,” I said, “you know what another big coincidence is?”

“What’s that?” the big guy said.

“We’re in the same business,” I said.

“Are we?” he said.

“Sounds like it. We too are looking for two sweet kids with lots of money that could be a port in the storm, and we think of them as our business, all the way.”

“Huh,” he said. “Well, we wouldn’t want to cross up, would we?”

“It could happen, though, couldn’t it?” Jim Bob said. “I mean, us both looking for two sweet kids and some money and a nice place to ride out the storm.”

“Storm like the one that’s coming,” the big guy said, “it could blow your little port flat out of existence.”

“We’ve ridden a lot of storms,” Jim Bob said.

“Hell,” Leonard said, “we’re like storm chasers. We’re like
the
storm chasers.”

“I think you’re a bunch of amateurs,” the big guy said. “I think a good wind comes along, might just blow you completely out of the ball game.”

“You know,” Jim Bob said, “you were going pretty good there with the storm analogies, and then you got to go and screw it up with the ball game thing. That doesn’t scan.”

The big guy looked at Tonto, said, “What about the Indian? He talk?”

“Just smoke signals,” Jim Bob said. “And you know what, none of your buddies are talking, so I don’t think that’s fair to ask.”

“My buddies aren’t my buddies, and they say what I tell them to say and when I say it,” the big guy said. “And before I go, just so we stay with the storm analogy, you best not go out without your slickers and your hip boots, and maybe an umbrella.”

“We got umbrellas out the ass,” Jim Bob said.

Big Guy studied us for a moment, said to his boys, “Wrap this shit up, and let’s go.”

The big guy and his bunch wrapped their chicken and links, put them back in the sacks, and carried them out.

I watched them through the glass as they walked toward the Ford. I
said, “Just so I’m certain, when he said slickers, boots, and umbrellas, he was talking about guns, right?”

“Yep,” Leonard said. “That was my take.”

“And they’re the storm?”

“Bingo.”

Tonto, who had just taken a bite of a link wrapped in bread, said, “This would be a lot better with hot sauce, some of that fancy mustard that’s got a tang.”

Full as ticks, we drove to another store near the lake where they sold fishing supplies and rented boats, and parked in front of it and sat in the van. Out front was a rack with T-shirts on it with Lake O’ the Pines logos. The wind moved them about.

The place was doing pretty brisk business for the time of the year. There were cars parked to the left and the right of us and people got out and went in and came out carrying fishing supplies, coolers, snacks, and items like caps and bait. One of the people who parked and got out was a blond woman in jogging pants with a tight top and a baseball cap with her long hair tied up in a ponytail hanging over the stretch band at the back of her cap. The jogging pants were tight and I worried a little about her circulation and watched her out of biological interest until she went into the store. I didn’t see her face, but she had the kind of body, hair, and walk that assured you she looked good and knew it.

Over the top of the joint the sky was losing its blue and turning the color of polished silver and there were starting to be dark puffs of clouds. The lake could be seen on either side of the building and the water was growing choppy; little white waves like nightcaps rose up and fell down. Jim Bob opened up the flooring and got out some handguns. I took a .38 automatic with a clip holster and put it on under my coat. I preferred revolvers—more dependable—but, alas, the times were a-changin’ and nearly everyone these days carried an automatic for more firepower. Leonard took a nine with clip holster and Jim Bob
clipped on a .38 automatic similar to mine under his coat. Tonto had never stopped being armed. He still had his twin .45s.

“What makes me nervous,” I said, “is the fact we weren’t armed back there, unless you count a chicken leg and a link sausage.”

“I was,” Tonto said.

“Yeah, but what about the rest of us?” I said.

“You had my best wishes,” Tonto said.

Leonard said, “Here’s my question. They’re so goddamn sneaky, how come they decided to come to us like that?”

“Way we were wandering around,” Jim Bob said, “my figure is they thought we knew they were following us. They didn’t know we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, so they thought we were giving them a hard time, being clever. And I think they thought they’d be all scary and we’d tell them what they wanted to know, then they’d run us off and they’d find the boy and the girl and all that money.”

“They obviously didn’t know me and Hap had our picture taken with a bear,” Leonard said. “They ain’t so tough. You see me give that bear a bad look, Hap?”

“No.”

“I haven’t been followed like that in a long time,” Tonto said. “Thought I was being careful, and I’m pretty damn careful, and still, they were following. That takes some chops. I mean, I haven’t never been followed before where I didn’t know.”

“You said it couldn’t happen,” I said.

“I was wrong,” Tonto said. “Those guys are good.”

“The big guy,” Jim Bob said, “he knows what he’s doing, all right.”

“You think they’ll take a run at us?” I said.

“I think they still hope we’ll lead them to something,” Jim Bob said.

“How did they get onto us so quick?” Leonard said.

“Someone somewhere told them something,” Tonto said. “You got to wonder who and when, but the thing that matters is, time comes they’ll stop fucking around and come for us. They’ll maybe think they can make us talk by pulling out fingernails or cutting off eyelids or some such thing, sticking a stick up our dicks.”