Elmore Leonard - Pagan Babies

"I have to ask again," Laurent said, "why you want me to do it, not someone else."

" 'Cause you're the man here," Terry said. "You may have your doubts about me, but I don't have any about you. If I'm wrong and you keep the car or the money for yourself, well, Chantelle's the one who's out. So it's up to you, partner."

Let him chew on that.

Terry turned to the door, then looked back. "I won't be long." He paused again, remembering something, and said, "Where're all the dogs? I've been meaning to ask that for a long time."

"People don't like to have dogs anymore," Laurent said. "The dogs ate too many of the dead."

The only difference between the beer lady's house and what was called the bar both mud brick with metal roofs the beer lady made her own banana brew, urwagwa, and sold it in used Primus litre bottles with a straw for five to fifteen cents depending on the supply.

The bar offered commercial brands, too, Primus, made with sorghum, and Mutzig, which Terry drank once in a while. He walked into the beer lady's house breathing through his mouth against the stench of overripe bananas and body odor, into a bare-brick room that could be a prison cell.

There was Bernard in his shirt, one of his buddies next to him, both against the wall behind a plywood table, both sucking on reed straws stuck into brown litre bottles, the Primus label worn off from reuse. The third one sat to the left of Bernard in a straight chair with his bottle and straw, the chair tilted against the wall, his bare feet hanging free. The fourth one was just now coming out of a back hall.

Terry waited until he was in the room-the same four from the market the other day-all of them watching him now, Bernard murmuring to them in Kinyarwanda. There was no sign of the beer lady.

Terry said to Bernard, "Any more visions?"

"I told you in the Confession," Bernard said, "what thing is going to happen." He spoke with the reed straw in his mouth, holding the bottle against his chest. "I don't tell my visions in this place."

"It doesn't matter," Terry said. "You told everyone at the market you saw me and I saw you. Talking about the time you came in the church with your machete, your panga. Your words, 'I saw him and he saw me.' Isn't that fight? I saw you hack four people to death, what you told me, and you saw me do nothing to stop you. Now you say you're gonna do it again. Cut anybody you don't like down to size, including me. Right? Isn't that what you said?"

"I speak only to my friends in this place," Bernard said, still with the straw in his mouth. "We don't want you. What do you come here for?"

"To ask you to give yourself up. Tell Laurent Kamweya what you did in the church."

Bernard, smiling now, said, "You must be a crazy person." He spoke to his friends in Kinyarwanda and now they were smiling.

Terry said, "They were with you that day?"

"Oh yes, these and others. It was our duty," Bernard said. "We say,

"Tugire gukora akai." Let us go do the work, and we did, uh? Go now, we don't want you here."

"Soon as I give you your penance," Terry said.

He pulled Chantelle's pistol out of his cassock and shot Bernard, shattering the bottle he held against his chest. He shot the one next to Bernard trying to get up, caught between the wall and the plywood table. He shot the one in the chair tilted against the wall. And shot the one by the back hall as this one brought a machete out of his belt and shot him again as the blade showed a glint of light from the open door.

The shots left a hard ringing sound within the closeness of the brick walls. Terry held the pistol at arm's length on a level with his eyes-the Russian Tokarev resembling an old-model Colt.45, big and heavy-and made the sign of the cross with it over the dead. He said, "Rest in peace, motherfuckers," turned, and walked out of the beer lady's house to wait at the side of the road.

Pretty soon the Volvo appeared, coming around from the front of the sector office.

They stood in the rectory kitchen, Chantelle watching Laurent taking things from the deep pockets of his combat fatigues, a mist showing in the window behind him, the light fading.

"The keys to the Volvo and the house and, I believe, the church."

Laurent laid them on the kitchen table. "Your pistol. I can get you another one that holds twice the number of bullets. There are only two in here now." He laid the Tokarev on the table. "Four men with five shots tells me he concentrated, this priest of yours. He knew he could not waste the shots."

"How do you report it?"

"Unknown assailant."

"No one will question it?"

"The witnesses are dead. As always." Laurent's hand went into the big pocket of nls tunic. "Sabena Air tickets, he said to give you. I told him even the Belgian ambassador will do anything to avoid flying Sabena. I drove the priest to Goma and introduced him to a man who runs arms into Congo-Zaire, a friend of everyone. He'll take the priest to Mombasa. From there he can fly to Nairobi and take British Air to his home."

Chantelle said, "He could have exchanged the tickets."

"He wants you to have them, to cash in or go to Brussels for a holiday.

Why not?"

"He was always generous," Chantelle said, "giving me money to spend."

"A priest," Laurent said, "who took vows to be a holy man. Or maybe he forgot to take them. I always said he was different to any priest I ever knew."

Chantelle seemed about to speak, perhaps to give her opinion, defend her priest. No she pulled the cord to turn on the electric light in the ceiling, brought an unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker black, not the red, from the cabinet above the refrigerator she reached into now for a tray of ice. When she spoke again the priest was gone. She said to Laurent, "Have you had your supper?"

"HEY. EVERYBODY HAVING A GOOD time tonight?…

Yeah? Well, come on, let's hear it, okay? We're up here working our asses off. No dogs or ponies, man, just us."

The comic acting as ME, the bill of his baseball cap funneled around his face, got a pretty good response: half the tables filled this evening, the back part of the big room dark; not bad for an openmike night.

"Right now it's my pleasure to welcome back to Mark Ridley's Comedy Castle a chick who's smokin', so fucking hot that I ask myself, 'Rich, why would a killer chick like Debbie ever stoop to doing stand-up?' And the answer that flashed immediately in my tired brain, 'Because she's funny, dude. Because she's a very funny chick, fast on her way to becoming a headliner.' You with me?… Yeah? Then give it up for… Detroit's own Debbie Dewey!"

She appeared out of the center-stage door in a gray-green prison dress, extra-large, ankle-high work shoes and white socks, the outfit keeping the applause up. The right thing to do now was point to the comic-as-MC in his baseball cap leaving the stage and shout in the noise, "Richie Baron! Yeah! Let him hear it!" But she didn't. When the room was quiet enough she said:

"Hi. Yes, I'm Debbie Dewey," and turned to show herself in profile.

"Or, eight nine five, three two nine." Then, facing the room again, "That was my Department of Corrections number while I was down most of three years for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. True story. I was visiting my mom in Florida and happened to run into my ex-husband.., with a Buick Riviera."

She paused, getting a pretty good response, and said, "It was a rental, but it did the job."

More laughs this time, the audience warming up to her conversational delivery, Debbie holding back, not giving it too much.

"I was stopped for a light on Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, and there was Randy, Mr. Cool in his yachting cap and shades, he's crossing the street right in front of me as the light turned green."