Vanilla Ride (28 page)

“All right,” Leonard said. “But you know those guys aren’t through with us.”

“Yep.”

“We’ll deal with them again.”

“Yep.”

“I thought Conners was at the top of our list. You said to put stars by his name.”

“Yep.”

“So why didn’t we just nip it in the bud?”

“I’ve tried my best to explain.”

“And your explanation sucks.”

“I just couldn’t shoot them out of their chairs like that, in cold blood.”

“What if Vanilla Ride is sitting in a chair?”

“I’ll ask her to stand up.”

“You’ll be killing a woman.”

“She may be of that gender, but she’s no woman to me. I’m not even sure she’s human. Conners and Sykes do it for money, and Vanilla Ride gets paid, but, man, I got a feeling she loves that stuff. She liked baiting Tonto along like that, getting him to the point where he thought he was gonna get him a piece, and then, wham, he’s out of there. That’s cold, brother. And those kids.”

“I still don’t see a difference. She took the money. In the end, it’s all about money and they all want the money.”

“Maybe, Leonard, truth is, in the end, there’s no difference at all. Them. Us. We’re all killers, and in the end, the worms sort us out.”

There was no real address for Vanilla Ride, just the P.O. box Conners had told us about, and the rest of the address was a town called Sylvester, Arkansas. What I had in mind was staking out the post office, waiting till she came to collect her mail. It wasn’t exactly a plan up there with Robert E. Lee, but then again, it was me and Leonard. We’re not dumb, but strategy is not our long suit.

It was about three hours to Arkansas, and it was still night when we got there, and we stopped at a station and put more gas in the car and checked our map to make sure we were heading the right way, then pushed on, like Mounties after our man, or in this case, our woman.

Daylight was breaking as we drove into the mountains amongst the trees, and there was a light frost on our windshield. The roads grew narrow, the trees thickened. Leonard rolled down the window to get some air, to keep himself alert, so as not to drive off a cliff. He let it blow cold on his face for a while, then touched the electric window button and sent it up. I looked ahead at the sun-stained road and the countryside and listened to the hum of the heater.

Sylvester looks almost unreal, a kind of holdout from frontier days, but the truth is it isn’t all that old. It was founded some fifty years ago and built to resemble a frontier town, and they’ve kept it that way. Traffic was pretty intense for a place that claimed twenty thousand people, but the traffic would be the tourists, because there’s a nice lake nearby with plenty of fish and the scenery is beautiful. It’s the kind of place people come to rest and not Jet-Ski or mountain-climb or party all night. There are a few restaurant clubs, and from what I could see they catered to the older set as well. We parked and headed toward the post office. I read on a sign for a place called the Buckin’ Horse Saloon that it opened at four for dinner, had entertainment, and closed at ten. If the horse bucked, it did it quietly and at reasonable hours.

At the post office, which was one open window commanded by an old man in a plaid shirt with a postal name tag (Jake), I bought a stamp for our bright blue envelope and mailed it. We walked around the post office and saw there were rows and rows of mailboxes with thick glass windows in them so you could see when you got mail, and finally we located the one that went with our envelope.

“All right,” Leonard said. “She has to come here.”

“Except she won’t,” I said.

“Surrogate?”

“Of course. She’d be too easy to find otherwise. Why do you think I got that bright blue envelope?”

“Ah, but what if she gets lots of mail and whoever picks it up mixes
it with other envelopes, and we’re watching from a distance. What if it’s night?”

“Oh. Well, I didn’t think about that.”

Leonard sighed. “Guess we got what we got.”

We walked across the street to a hotel and Leonard stayed outside to watch the post office while I went inside. At the desk I talked the clerk into giving us a window facing the street, so we could enjoy the view, and then I took Leonard’s spot on the sidewalk and he walked back to the car for our little bit of supplies.

For the next week we hung out in that hotel room, looking at the post office out the window, hoping we’d be able to spot the blue envelope come out in someone’s hot little hands. From time to time one of us would walk over to the post office and look through the little window of her mailbox, and we could see the blue envelope was there, waiting, and no one had been in to get it.

We took shifts so one or the other could go out and buy food. We also bought underwear and we didn’t shave, under the odd notion that maybe if Vanilla Ride saw us she wouldn’t recognize us unshaved. It was lame, but again, it was what we had.

First day we were there we started seeing some interesting-looking guys showing up at the post office, watching for what we were watching for, I guess. But had they been smart enough to send her a brightly colored envelope? I thought not.

They couldn’t hang around the place any more than us, but they did get a room in, you guessed it, our hotel. I passed one of them, a lean, greasy-haired fellow, on my way out to pick up some sandwiches. He was sitting in the lobby, and when he saw me, he watched me go out, and I didn’t let him know I was watching him. Across the street, in front of the post office, another guy sat in a car, getting out now and then to feed quarters into the parking meter. He was tall and fat, with very little hair on his head. Sometimes he moved the car and parked elsewhere, but he was always parked so he could see the post office. I guess the other two were out buying sandwiches and underwear, same as us. But they all swapped out from time to time, and it was my guess they weren’t lawmen and they weren’t from the IRS and I doubted they
were the men in black since their wardrobes were varied. All I was certain of was I had seen four of them over a period of time.

Back in the room with our sandwiches, Leonard said, “You know, this sucks. Those guys were sent here from Conners, and had we put a hole in his head, him and his fat friend, we’d be sitting here without contention, except for Vanilla Ride herself. But now, thanks to you, we got her and them.”

“I know.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Hell, yeah, I mind,” I said. “But I did what I could do, Leonard. That’s it. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s my flawed nature.”

Leonard shook his head and patted me on the shoulder. “I love my little idealist. In a gay sort of manly way, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Look at it this way: if we’d killed those two, you wouldn’t have to kill these four. Or, worse yet, get killed by them.”

“You are a goddamn sage, Leonard.”

One day we’re in the hotel room, looking out the window, having sucked down too much coffee, my personal plumbing backed up to where my insides felt like a brick factory, and I’m thinking a little fruit juice might be good, when Leonard, who is nibbling around the edges of a vanilla cookie, said, “These guys, they here for us or Vanilla Ride?”

“Maybe both,” I said. “Could be they’ve decided she needs to go too. Maybe because she hasn’t returned the money.”

“You think she’ll keep it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s her plan. I think she’s a professional. But I also think the people she’s dealing with are falling apart. The talent they’ve sent out has cost them big-time, and it would probably be nice to get the money back, but they want us because we’re a couple of amateurs who have survived everything they’ve got, including Vanilla Ride. My guess is they haven’t paid her because she didn’t finish the job, because we didn’t die, and now she’s got their money on top of having not wiped us out.”

“She’s got more money than they think,” Leonard said.

“That too.”

“So, Hirem lied about the amount of money, which was probably because there was extra he was going to give the Mummy and his friend to make sure his son got a good deal with the FBI, and then they got whacked, and then we got the money, and then Vanilla Ride got the money, and she’s thinking, well, they don’t pay me, I got a little windfall. They do pay me, I keep the rest.”

“That’s the way I figure,” I said. “And the Dixie Mafia is thinking they’re running low on guys, and they aren’t considered such bad dudes if they can’t stop a couple of yokels from East Texas, and if they just quit, that looks bad too, so they got to keep them coming. And now, since Vanilla didn’t finish the job, and we’re on her tail, they’re starting to see her as expendable. That way they don’t pay her and she’s dead and they’re rid of her. I bet on top of all that, finding out she was a woman chapped their ass.”

“If only she had been black,” Leonard said.

“Yep, that would have been aces.”

“And gay.”

“Better yet. And we may have it all wrong,” I said. “Guys following us could be just very persistent insurance salesmen.”

One night I’m at the window, and the brilliance of the streetlights is all there is in the way of action, and what do my wandering eyes see but a lemon-colored Volkswagen pulling up at the curb in what might be called a sprightly manner, or what I might call in my East Texas vernacular, pretty goddamn fast. A young man, gangly as a puppet, with a dark mustache and a cap from under which shoulder-length black hair hung, got out and went into the post office, walking heavy.

I looked at my nifty Warner Bros. Looney Tunes watch with all the great cartoon characters on it with my flashlight and saw the time was three a.m. The post office lobby was always open. You could go in at any time. Just an old-fashioned town with an old-fashioned mailbox connected to an old-fashioned killer who liked to live quietly in Arkansas. I figured not a lot of folk were out and about at three a.m. in a town like this, and if they were, how many just decided it was necessary to check the mail at this time of night?

It could happen, but it made me curious.

He came out quickly and got in the Volkswagen and started up the hill. I yelled Leonard awake, and since he was already dressed, he only had to roll into his shoes, and then the two of us were on our way downstairs, pulling our coats over our holstered handguns and our manly buttocks.

The fat guy had his turn in the lobby chairs, and when he saw us he stood up and a magazine fell out of his lap and flapped to the ground. Leonard gave him a little wave. We went out and got in our car,
Leonard driving, and he cranked it up and started up the hill in the direction the Volkswagen had gone. I looked back and saw the fat man was on the curb with a cell phone to his ear. They weren’t any niftier than we were, which in real life is often the case. There just aren’t that many James Bonds or Mike Hammers outside of the pages of books or the brightness of film.

Of course, Vanilla Ride, now she was another matter altogether. That woman was spooky like Tonto was spooky, only more so, because she had killed Tonto right when he thought he was about to visit the fun house.

That’s just mean.