Joe Lansdale - Devil Red

I could hear the air conditioner that poked out of the bedroom window humming, which, considering we were on the edge of winter, seemed unnecessary.

I went to the front door again, thought about trying to jimmy it, but couldn’t see any future in that, other than a visit to the Camp Rapture jail.

Then I thought, What the hell, and tried the doorknob.

It was unlocked.

I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. I looked at the edge of the door frame, near the lock. The wood was cracked there. It was the kind of thing a professional could do in a second, and almost soundlessly. The hair on the back of my neck stood up like brush bristles.

I opened the door and hoped what I smelled was a rat in the wall, but I had smelled that before and I knew what it was. It wasn’t old death. It was the smell of fresh blood and excrement, the common result of violent death.

The thing to do was to call the police and not go inside. So I didn’t call them and went inside. That was my style. I put my right hand in my coat pocket to keep the gun warm, and used my other to flash the light around, but otherwise, I stayed where I was, sniffing that stink, half-expecting someone to pop out at me.

There was a very large and nice television in the front room, and it took up most of it. There was a painting of dogs on the wall playing poker. Someone had to have one. I spent more time admiring it than it deserved. The place was so small, living there might require acrobatics. I kept looking at that painting of the dogs playing poker in the light of my flash. Anything to keep me from going back there where the stench was coming from. The air conditioner hummed and it was cold enough to be uncomfortable.

Finally, I pulled my feet loose and started walking. There was a bedroom in the rear of the trailer, and the door to it was open. I went inside. I bounced the light around. It looked as if it had been hit by a small tornado. Drawers were emptied on the floor, on the bed. Under some of the stuff on the bed was a heap that seemed to be the source of the smell.

Since no vampires seemed to be lurking in the shadows, I put the gun in my pocket and took out my flash and turned it on, shined it on the bed. I took hold of the edge of the covers topping the heap and moved them.

A body was underneath, not sleeping. I pulled my T-shirt up over my nose, but it didn’t help much; that blood and excrement smell was stout. The body lay on its back and it was nude and dark and bloody. I moved the flash over it carefully.

It was, as I expected, Bert.

There was a hole in the forehead. The bedsheets behind the head were thick with dark, drying blood. In the beam of my light it looked as if the victim had leaked black wax. His hands were stretched out and held with rope. The rope had been pulled down on both sides of the bed and tied to the bed rail. His feet were tied off at the end of the bed in the same way.

I moved the beam down his bare chest, down to the groin. There was something there that looked like the remains of a penis, because it had been worked over with something sharp. You might call it a major circumcision.

A cockroach crawled out from under the body and scuttled over the sheet, proving Bert wasn’t much of a housekeeper or the killers had brought their own roaches. Between his legs, about calf level, there was a design drawn on the sheets in dried blood.

A devil’s head.

I threw up out by the car because the stench of the dead man was still in my nostrils. It wasn’t the first time I had seen anyone dead or smelled death, but tonight it clung to me like shit on a stick.

Driving home, I could still smell it.

Several times I thought about pulling out my cell and dialing the cops, or calling Leonard, or Marvin, telling them what I found, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that had I arrived at the trailer just a little bit earlier, I could have ended up like Bert. It wasn’t my first close call, but it seemed to me there had been a bunch of them now, and that my string was bound to be running out.

As I went along the road that led out to the main highway, I kept feeling as if I were disconnected. A part of me kept wondering if I was still asleep, dreaming about all this. But I knew better.

When I got to the highway, I saw a dark SUV pull out and move up quickly. Maybe it was the one I had seen before. Maybe not.

I put my foot on it and sped up. I might as well have been walking. The SUV passed me like I was standing still, but when it got in front of me, it kept going.

Moving along like a jet. Pretty soon, it was out of sight.

My cell rang. I almost crawled out of my skin when it did.

It was Bert’s number.

I said, “Hello.”

The phone went dead.

Shit. They had Bert’s phone, and they had my number. If they had a way of tracing it, they could find me, and these days, with all the Internet stuff, that would be easy. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like what I did for a living. I didn’t like me. I didn’t like most anything I could think of at that moment.

I thought about Bert, and I thought about a person, or persons, who could do to him what they had. He’d been tortured. Maybe he did know something important, or maybe it was back to what I had thought before, they thought he did. Now maybe they thought I knew something.

Damn.

When I got home, I got out of the car and went carefully inside with my gun drawn. I looked around, went upstairs, looked it over.

I went back downstairs and looked out the living room windows, and then the kitchen windows, but didn’t see anything that made me want to start shooting. I felt strangely weak, in a way I had never felt before.

I thought about Brett. I could call her. I could tell her what I found.

I didn’t.

I sat in a chair in the living room and laid the automatic on the chair arm. I kept telling myself to get up and go to bed or make a call to someone. Leonard. Marvin. Brett. But I didn’t move.

I didn’t want to go upstairs.

I didn’t want anyone sneaking up on me.

I wanted to be near the front and rear doors by being in the center of the living room in the chair. I tried to sleep in the chair, but I couldn’t. I felt like I wanted to go to the bathroom, but I couldn’t.

I sat there.

And sat there, and then I realized I had gone to the bathroom. I was in the chair and I hadn’t got up, and I could smell myself. My mind seemed rational. Like it knew what was going on, but it wouldn’t connect to the physical. My emotions were on holiday.

Time folded in on itself. I didn’t move. I sat there and smelled myself and thought about getting up, but still I sat.

I had a feeling vampires were in the room. That they had turned to shadow and slid under the door and were behind me, but I couldn’t turn to look. I couldn’t move. I felt them come closer and closer and closer. They were crawling along the walls. I could see them out of the corner of my eye. When cars drove by on the road out front their headlights moved the vampires away and washed them into the walls, and as the lights passed, the vampires returned and melted down the walls and into the floor. I sensed they were flowing along close to my feet.

But still, I sat.

The sun came up. It reddened the curtains.

The day passed in what seemed like instants. I watched shadows moving along the wall again. They weren’t vampires this time. They were glimpses of time being stolen from my life. The room was as dark and heavy as if it were covered in thick black velvet.

I heard the door open, and Brett called out, “Hap?”

I tried to answer, but all my answers, like my emotions, were still on vacation. I kept thinking I would gather them up and weld them together and be myself, but I didn’t move. I might as well have been a turnip waiting to be plucked.