Joe Lansdale - Devil Red

Inside, the place looked like an ad for chewing tobacco and blue jeans. Cowboy hats floated on the crowd, and there was a lot of crowd. Last time I’d seen that many people was in a rerun of The Ten Commandments. Who knew cows were that exciting. The animal crap smell was now so intense I felt I needed mountaineer equipment to scale it.

We started moving in among them, and as we went, Leonard pulled the deerstalker out of his back pocket, unfolded it, and popped it out like a wet towel and put it on.

“You sonofabitch,” I said.

As we rambled through the crowd, a tall cowboy with a hatband full of toothpicks watched Leonard pass with open curiosity. I was right behind Leonard. I said to the cowboy, “He’s working a child’s party after this.”

The cowboy looked at me and nodded, like that explained everything.

We found a spot with a break in people, and went there. I took out my cell and called.

“Yeah,” Bert said.

“This is Hap Collins. I spoke to you earlier.”

“What about?”

I was more than a little certain now that Bert was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

“Your stepdaughter. You told me to call.”

“Oh, yeah. I’m over by the door. Too many people in there, and hot.”

“Okay,” I said. “Meet you there. What’s your description?”

“What’s yours?”

“There’s two of us. I’m about six foot with brown hair, stocky. The guy with me is black-”

“Black?” He seemed surprised.

“Yeah. There’s a whole race of them. He’s just one of them.”

“Black, huh.”

“Now and always.”

There were actually a few black cowboys scattered about the barn, but they had on the proper duds. I said, “You’ll know us because he’s bigger than me and has gray at the temples. Oh yeah, he’s got on a funny hat.”

“Hey,” Leonard said.

It was hot in the auction barn, and it felt good to come out into the open air. There were a number of men and women in cowboy hats and gimme caps out there, and a few of them were smoking cigarettes. One was wiping cow shit off his boots, scraping them over the edge of a concrete step.

That guy, the shit scraper, turned and looked at us. He smiled when he saw Leonard. I had a suspicion he was Bert. He was tall and strong-looking in a working man sort of way; had long muscles and a face that had seen too much sun, and maybe too many fists.

“Damn, man, that is the ugliest goddamn hat I ever seen,” Bert said, coming over, pushing his cowboy hat back on his head. “You just wear that to crap in?”

I thought, Bert, my man, you are taking your life into your own hands. Leonard stood there with his hands in front of him, right folded over left, at his belt buckle. That was how he stood when he wanted to look casual but was ready to knock your head off.

Leonard said, “Naw, I crap in cowboy hats. This I keep clean.”

Bert and Leonard looked at each other. Bert looked like a tough hombre. Thing was, though, Leonard was a tough hombre.

I said, “Bert, we’re just trying to find out who killed your daughter.”

“Stepdaughter,” he said. “Could have been anybody.”

“So no idea?”

“I got an idea.”

“And?” Leonard said.

“Keeping it to myself.”

“You tell the cops what you thought?” Leonard asked.

“Nope.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Didn’t care for Mini much. A real weird one and a bitch. Don’t like her mother much now. Left her money to the daughter, then to a bunch of fuckin’ cats. How about that? Cats. What the fuck are cat’s gonna buy?”

“Cat toys,” Leonard said.

Bert gave Leonard a look.

“And there’s catnip,” Leonard said.

“Listen, I don’t really care I talk to you guys or not,” Bert said.

“What if there was money in it?” I said. I wasn’t sure where I was going with that, but I had a hunch Mrs. Christopher might be willing to put out a few dollars for information.

“That depends,” I said.

“On what?” Bert said.

“The quality of the information,” Leonard said, just like he knew what I was thinking. And he probably did.

“Well, money talks, and bullshit walks,” Bert said. “You two don’t exactly look like fucking Fort Knox.”

“We’re not talking about our money,” I said.

“How much of the other fella’s money, then?”

“Again, that depends,” I said.

Bert let that run through his head, which I considered was an easy task.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I got a feeling I say too much I might get in trouble.”

“With who?” I said.

“That’s my business.”

I could see he was actually nervous, but was waffling on the matter.

“How about I give you a card,” I said, “and you call us if you change your mind. This offer is short-term.”

“How short-term?” he asked.

“How about tomorrow morning,” Leonard said.

“I think you’d take it two weeks from now,” he said.

“And I think you don’t know us too well,” Leonard said.

I took out my wallet and opened it up and took out a card. I gave it to him.

He looked at it, then at me. “Hanson Investigations. Well, if you’re Hap Collins, then you must be Hanson.”

“Nope,” Leonard said. “We work for Hanson.”

“You change your mind, call us,” I said.

Bert turned the card around and around in his hands. He was giving it serious thought. Finally he put the card in his shirt pocket. He said, “I’ll consider on it.”

And then he turned and walked away, across the parking lot. We watched until he got in a black truck so old I didn’t know what decade it was from. He cranked it, and we kept watching while it coughed smoke and rattled away like something broken tumbling downhill.

“You have cards?” Leonard said. “I don’t have any cards.”

“Marvin gave them to me.”

“He didn’t give me any.”

“He told me to tell you we would share.”

“How are you sharing if you’re carrying the cards and I don’t have any?”

“I’ll share for the both of us,” I said.

Driving back to my place, I said, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “He’s an odd one. He’s either paranoid, or has delusions of his own importance, or he knows something and he didn’t tell us. And what he knows he’s trying to turn into money. Maybe with someone else, and us, but the someone else may be someone he shouldn’t have messed with. I think he may actually have been afraid. He was acting tough, but-”

“He was overacting,” I said.

“Yep, we ought to know. We do it all the time.”

Back home, upstairs in the bedroom, I called Brett on my cell. She answered on the first ring.

“So, just sitting around waiting for me to call?” I said.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m sitting around in case my boyfriend calls.”

“Is he handsome?”

“Not particularly, but he looks great by phone.”

“Is he hung?”

“Nope, but I can dream.”

“This boyfriend, would he be me?”

“He would.”

“Thanks for lifting my spirits.”

“You know I love you, even with all your deficiencies.”

“How are things?”

“Well, pretty good for a small-blown crisis, but it’s the same crisis,” Brett said. “The one where my daughter is leading a screwed-up life, but pretends she wants to change and tells me all her woes, then goes right back to doing what she’s always done, being who she always was and is. A whore who drinks too much and buys her clothes at expensive stores in Houston, and her underwear at Wal-Mart.”