Elmore Leonard - Raylan

“She was standing by her things on the bed. I could see her okay but I was wobbly. She’d made up her face, put lipstick on, did her eyes…”

Art said, “I don’t see that makes any difference.”

“She’s gonna take out my kidneys and-I don’t know-wanted to look her best? I woke up naked, in the bathtub.”

“You crawled out,” Art said, prompting him.

“I hignti Aad to move Cuba Franks off me. I still don’t know why she shot Cuba.”

“She’s trying to hit you, ” Art said. “Police have the rounds she fired from your piece.”

“See, but once we’re in the bedroom, I don’t remember if she shot at me.”

“You had Cuba’s piece now, the Sig.”

“I did. I got him off me and went in the bedroom. I see her holding my Glock. She’s in her kimona.”

“You remember that,” Art said.

“I may never forget it,” Raylan said, “the kimona hangin open.”

“You told the police she had your piece in both hands, holding it up above her head, and asked, you said, in a flirty way, ‘Would you like to pat me down?’ ”

“She did,” Raylan said, “and I’m thinkin she’s having fun with me.”

“Till she put the gun on you, your gun,” Art said, “and you shot her right here”-Art touchin the center of his chest-“in the solar plexus.”

Raylan shook his head. “I didn’t think I was aimin.”

“You reacted,” Art said, “like they taught you at Glynco. Shoot first, some dink’s ready to put you down.”

“I’m still not sure what I think of Layla,” Raylan said, “except I wouldn’t call her a dink.”

Art said, “She look like fun to you?”

“If I didn’t already know her game. Yeah, I could have hung out with her.”

“You ever did,” Art said, “I believe I told you, you’d be lying somewhere without your kidneys.”

“Even knowing who she was,” Raylan said, “I came close to losing ’em. I go to arrest her and end up in a bathtub out cold. I was lucky to wake up, you know it?”

“But you aren’t surprised,” Art said. “You’re the law, you expect what you say goes. You’re like an old-time marshal, tells some guy he doesn’t like to get out of Dodge by sundown.”

Raylan was grinning. “You’re talking about that mob guy, the Zip.”

“You think that situation was funny?”

“See, I was to tell him, get out of Miami Beach by sundown? It isn’t like saying get out of Dodge. I gave the Zip twenty-four hours,” Raylan said, “to pack up and hit the road. The next day he’s at the Cardozo havin crab cakes, only a few minutes left of his time, so I know he’s armed. It’s what the man does for a living, brought here from Sicily to shoot some guy and stayed. Bought himself a double-breasted p instriped suit like Joe Columbo’s… Did you know that?”

“He went for the gun,” Art said, “you took it on yourself to shoot him, and got sent to your old Kentucky home most likely for life.”

“Yeah, but I went up two grades,” Raylan said, “after being stuck for seven years. I think somebody upstairs liked me closin the Zip’s file.”

Otis came out of his house and crossed the yard to where Boyd Crowder and some coal company man in a suit of clothes were looking at Otis’s fishpond: the pond down to barely a foot of water, fish floating dead in a scum of coal dust.

“You know how many years,” Otis said, “it took me to dig this pond, get it to look how I wanted? Stock it with channel cat, bluegill, some shiners? My grandkids used to come over and fish for the fun of it. Hook ’em and throw ’em back.”

Boyd said, “I bet less anybody was hungry. Otis, me and Mr. Gracie here are with M-T Mining? We go out to hear there any complaints. Folks in the hollers bitchin about debris coming down where we been stripping coal.”

Mr. Gracie said, still looking at the dead pond, “All the rocks and soil once the coal’s washed out, it’s got to go somewheres.”

“You don’t care it’s full of acid,” Otis said. “It kilt the stream fed my pond and now all my fish are belly up.”

He watched Mr. Gracie squat down at the edge of the pool, Mr. Gracie saying, “Hey, I believe one of ’em’s still alive. Look at the little fella flippin around in there wondering where the pond went.”

Otis stepped up behind him, planted his boot against the back of Mr. Gracie’s suitcoat and pushed him to throw out his arms and go facedown in the scum-covered pond.

Otis said, “Hard to breathe in there, huh?”

Boyd stopped grinning as Otis turned to him, Boyd saying, “I don’t thin Sheang="enk you shoulda done that.”

“Forty years in mines,” Otis said, “the whole time yes-sirin these company pimps. Well, not no more.”

I n the evening Otis put supper on to boil-potatoes, turnips with greens-but first he sat with Marion while she held her robe closed tight to her chest breathing through her mouth. He gave her a couple of her OxyContins and a jelly glass of clear whiskey she’d sip on for a while. She had black lung from breathing the air, not ever having gone down a mine shaft.

He heard a bulldozer start up, a big diesel, knowing the sounds of the equipment, the dozers and draglines. The wolfhound heard it and got up off the floor. They’d blow charges and push the debris over the side from the strip job up on Looney Ridge. But this sounded close. Who was working in the dead of night?

By the time Otis heard branches breaking, rocks flying through the trees-knowing it was too late to grab Marion and run-a boulder the size of his Ford pickup came down on his house like the end of the world and the frame house gave up furniture, the walls, no way to stop the hunk of mountain crushing the floor, blowing out the front wall taking the door and windows, slowed some plowing through the flower beds, on flat ground now, and rolled into Otis’s pond to end its trip.

Marion, in her rocker holding her drink, coasting through clouds on oxy and shine, her back to the path of destruction, said to Otis, “What in the world was that?”

Otis said, “I’m gonna take you over to sister’s while I go up and see the mine company, all right? I come back, we may as well stay the night there.”

Marion watched Otis put on his worn-out suit coat over bib overalls and stuff the pockets with shotgun shells. In this moment her mind sounding clear, she said, “You finally had enough of mine companies, haven’t you?”

The M-T Mining office stood on a flat ridge shorn of trees and brush, carved away in the company’s hunger for coal. Boyd had been hosing the pond stink out of his SUV while Mr. Gracie told him what he wanted done.

“Lemme get this straight,” Boyd had said. “You want me to tip a boulder over the side and see if I can hit Otis’s house with it?”

“You can’t,” Mr. Gracie said, “I’ll get a man knows how.”

“Cause Otis shoved you in the muck,” Boyd said, “you want me to kill him?”

“I said bust up his house,” Mr. Gracie told him. “You don’t want to work Disagreements,” the most disagreeable man Boyd had ever known said, “you can hit theou up road.”

“I’m kidding with you,” Boyd said. “I don’t mind hearin people complain. They know they never gonna get what they want. They vent their ire, so to speak, and feel like they took it to the edge.”

Mr. Gracie had Boyd spread newspaper on the seat of his car, got in with his smell of muck and took off home.

Boyd said, “Pee-yew,” and went in the office trailer, a big double-wide all desks and drawing boards, no alcohol on the premises-half a pint of cheap vodka in a desk drawer, no naked girl on the calendar, nothing to make you want to work here.