Joe Lansdale: Cold in July

Russel put the bag in his lap and opened it. He took out the sawed-off shotgun and the. 38 and put them in Jim Bob’s lap. Jim Bob clipped the. 38’s holster to his belt with one hand and held grimly to the wheel with the other. Beads of sweat were running out from under the carroty hair and down his face thick as condensation on an ice tea glass.

I took the. 44 and clipped it to my belt and reached the Ithaca down from the rack and pointed the barrel at the floorboard, started counting from one hundred backwards, trying to calm myself. My hands were moist and slippery against the shotgun.

Russel had strapped Jim Bob’s little ankle holster and revolver to his leg before we left the house. He had only the. 357 to mess with. He put it on his knee and put one massive hand over it like a lid over a pot about to boil.

We were armed and dangerous.

We came even with Freddy’s house and took a right onto a street that led up a slight hill. We went over the hill and dipped down between a sprinkling of houses and went all the way to the end of the street and turned around slowly and started back up the hill. When we topped it and were just about to go down, the Nova showed itself. It was five minutes until eight.

Jim Bob said, “We’ll go down now,” and he lifted his foot to stomp the gas as the Nova started to make its careful turn into the driveway. But before Jim Bob could do what he meant to do, a green Dodge van came along behind the Nova and pulled up next to the curb just before the driveway. The Nova went on into the drive and we coasted over to the curb and stopped.

The garage door came open and the Nova coasted inside and the Mexican and Freddy got out. The driver of the van got out, went over and shook hands with the Mexican and Freddy. A man got out of the back of the van then and went over to stand in the drive and face the street, watching. We eased down in the seat and Jim Bob killed the engine. After a moment Jim Bob pulled off his cap and wig and eased his head up for a look.

“The Mex is in the house,” he said. “Freddy and the other two are smoking cigarettes. The one in the drive is looking this way but he ain’t acting like he sees anything. The man on the passenger side of the van is looking this way too, but he’s just looking. Now he’s looking to the van’s front.”

“Guess this is one of those unforeseen circumstances you were talking about,” I said.

“That’s the size of it,” Jim Bob said. “The Mex is coming out and he’s got some bags over his shoulders and he’s carrying something. It might be a shotgun or rifle. Freddy is using the garage device, lowering the door… No, that’s not a gun the Mex has, it’s a tripod. I think he’s got video equipment there.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Russel said.

“I should have thought that this being Friday they might have something planned for the weekend besides TV,” Jim Bob said. “We should have waited until Monday.”

“What’s happening now?” Russel asked.

Jim Bob eased his head slightly higher. “The Mex is putting the bags and the tripod in the back of the van and the other guy that got out of the back is getting back inside. Freddy’s getting in there with them. The driver is getting behind the wheel. They’re turning around in the drive… heading back up the street.”

We raised up.

“What do we do now?” I asked. “Wait until Monday?”

“Let’s follow them a bit,” Russel said. “They got in mind what I think they’ve got in mind, I think we should be there before they do it.”

“It ain’t just two fellas now,” Jim Bob said. “We’re talking two up front and three in the back. And that’s all I saw. There might be more in the back.”

“Follow them anyway,” Russel said. “Hurry.”

Jim Bob cranked the pickup and we went down the street briskly and made a left even more briskly. Russel and I took off our wigs and gathered them up along with Jim Bob’s cap and hair and stuck them under the seat For a killing job, they might have been all right disguises, but for tailing a car they were a little silly and obvious. Hard not to take note of Raggedy Andy, a French painter type and Groucho Marx wearing a Beatle wig.

Russel and me took turns wiping the blacking off our faces with the tow sack, wrapped the guns in it again and lowered them behind the seat. I put the Ithaca in the shotgun rack and Jim Bob put his hat on.

We saw the green van take a right onto the highway, and we gave it a few seconds before we gunned up to the intersection and went after it, managing to keep a car or two between us at all times. The van driver drove slowly and cautiously until we wound our way out of the city and out onto Highway 59 North. At that point, he picked up speed and became harder to follow. We had been after him almost an hour.

Houses fell by the wayside and great pine trees appeared in their places and shadows gathered between them like bats. There was plenty of traffic, but all that motorized activity didn’t make me feel less creeped. I guess I was thinking about that young whore I had seen on the tape, or whoever she was. Just some kid, fucked and killed for Freddy’s and the Mexican’s entertainment.

Now we were following those self-same murderers, as well as a number of other most likely unpleasant individuals who probably made them up their steady film crew, down a dark highway with the houses and lights going away and the pines and the moon and the shadows becoming the status quo, and it was my guess that this merry little van-encased group had this night set aside for a very special little film they wished to make, and it was most certainly not a nature flick about the nocturnal mating habits of the brown moth.

We kept on going, and when we were about halfway to LaBorde, the car lights became less frequent and the night had fallen over the countryside like a hood.

We went through some little burg that consisted of a used car lot, a chicken shack, a railroad track, one red light and a fistful of abandoned buildings, and on the other side of that the van took a left and went down a narrow blacktop that seemed almost consumed by pines.

Jim Bob pulled over to the side of the road to give them a chance to get a little farther ahead so we wouldn’t look so obvious. Russel got out a cigarette and lit it and I cracked my window and watched the smoke suck out it like a wraith.

“Long enough,” Jim Bob said, and he checked the highway for cars and pulled across onto the blacktop. Russel leaned over me and tossed the almost whole cigarette through the crack in the window and I rolled it up. Jim Bob said, “Break out the guns.”

The blacktop dipped down a deep hill and wound sharply around a corner that was walled with pines, and there in the moonlight, the spears of trees on either side of it, it looked like an enormous ribbon of molasses slick enough to slide on.

We went down the hill and around the corner and down the road a piece, and no van. We went by a gravel drive and a cattle guard and finally another drive that was made of concrete, and on around another curve.

No sign of the van.

“We didn’t wait that long,” Jim Bob said. “They turned off.”

Turning around, we went back more slowly, and as we cruised by the concrete drive, I squinted through the trees and saw lights. “There’s a house down there or something,” I said.

Jim Bob drove on until we came to the cattle guard, and he drove over that and parked the truck in a pasture and killed the lights.

“We can walk back and check,” he said.

“And if that isn’t them?” Russel asked.

“We come back to the truck and start over,” Jim Bob said. “I don’t think this pasture leads anywhere but more pasture, maybe some trees. I think they want a house for what they’re doing. The gravel drive up from this might lead to something, but let’s check out the other one first.”