Joe Lansdale - Devil Red

“I’ll get right on that,” I said.

Leonard got up and started for the door.

I said, “Where are you goin’?”

“To get Bert’s Camp Rapture address from the folder, then I’m going to go see if you’re nuts.”

Sometime later, Leonard came through the bedroom door. Brett and I were snuggled up together under the covers.

“Glad I didn’t come back fifteen minutes later,” Leonard said. “Or was it fifteen minutes earlier?”

“Whatever time you came in, it would have been the same situation,” Brett said. “His little friend is as tired as he is.”

I said, “Do we need to get me sized for a straitjacket?”

“It was just like you said, including the devil drawing on the sheets. The place was thrown about, maybe just to look like a robbery. He was tortured good. His tongue was cut out. Air conditioner was running, which might have muffled screams and it would keep the body from going to rot too fast. That happened, you could smell that stink for a mile. And maybe Bert just liked it cold. Bottom line, though, is he’s dead.”

“Jesus,” Brett said.

“Good to know I’m not going to be spending Christmas in a rubber room. But, on the other hand, bad to know Bert really is dead.”

“Yeah, with his passing, the world has really lost a big bit of charm. As for you, you’re not off the nut hook yet. I think you need to stay where you are for a while. Get your marbles back together.”

“Yeah, you’re kind of fucked up,” Brett said. “You boys want more coffee?”

“That would be nice,” Leonard said.

“Well,” Brett said, “I want some too, so I’m going to do what any good domesticated woman does, I’m going to have Leonard make it.”

“Hell with that,” Leonard said. “I’m going to the coffee shop.”

“You know what?” Brett said. “I think I was just bitten by a ghost of women past. I’ll go down and make the coffee. You two visit.”

When Brett was downstairs, Leonard pulled his chair closer to me. “You feelin’ better, brother?”

“I think so. I’m just not entirely certain what’s real and what isn’t, but more and more things are coming back to me.”

“Do you remember that five hundred dollars you owe me?”

“Nope. That isn’t coming back.”

Leonard grinned and gave my hand a pat. He said, “Now, while you’re weak, I can smother you with a pillow.”

“Way I feel, you could smother me with a thought.”

We sat silent for a few moments.

“Sometimes in war,” Leonard said, “there are soldiers who killed too much and saw too much, and they have nervous collapses. Sometimes they have it right there, right after they killed someone, or lost a buddy, but mostly they come home and have it years later.”

“And you never had any of that?”

“Once I woke up in a sweat remembering that I had lost a harmonica in the war.”

“A harmonica?”

“My uncle gave it to me, and I had it over there. I never played it. He gave it to me when I was a kid. That and a cap gun and cowboy bandanna. I lost the cap gun, and once when I was in the woods, hunting, and had to shit, I wiped my ass on the bandanna and lost my sentimentality toward it. But I had that harmonica, and though I couldn’t play a lick, I took it to war with me. It was kind of like a charm.”

“So, you’re telling me I lost my harmonica and had a nervous breakdown? I don’t own a harmonica, Leonard.”

“In a way, I am telling you that you lost your harmonica. There were guys went over there to war and came back and went along fine for years. I was once told by an army buddy that anyone killed someone had some kind of hole in them, even if they felt the person killed needed to be killed. Because on some level, human beings identify with other human beings to such an extent they start to see themselves as the dead human. You may be okay for a while, but in time, those things you do, things you’ve seen, they come home to roost, like pterodactyls.”

“Do you have moments like that?” I asked.

“I don’t. Not if I thought what I did was the right thing to do. I’m pretty self-righteous. I mean, there are guys out there, sociopaths that end up in war, and for them it’s like a free hand job every day. They like it. They don’t feel. That’s different. I think it needs to be done, I don’t brood. You, you’re always digging into your feelings. You leave them raw, mess with them so much. You’ve seen plenty, but last night you saw one too many. And I think Vanilla Ride, meeting her, may have been a big trigger, not just poor old Bert. She was the gun. Bert was the bullet.”

Vanilla had been a while ago, but he was right, she was in the back of my mind all the time.

“Vanilla is a beautiful woman,” Leonard said, “charming, very feminine, and she can kill you with an ice pick or a gun, maybe her bare hands, and sleep like a baby. And I know you. In the back of your mind you’re thinking: Once she was a kid like me, and she grew up to kill, and she grew up do it for money and not care who she killed or why. You feel like you might be slipping over into her bit of darkness. I tell you, man, no way. You ain’t comin’ from, and ain’t never been comin’ from, the farm where she was raised.”

“Farm?”

“Figure of speech.”

“How bad was I?” I said.

“I’ve seen a lot worse. But, know what I think? I think you might have sat in that chair for days, maybe starved to death if Brett hadn’t come along, called me.” Leonard swallowed and his facial expression changed. “You know what Brett said to me when you were in the chair? She said he’s your brother, he loves you, maybe more than me. Fix him.”

“And you did,” I said.

“I put a Band-Aid on it. You got to be your own doctor. A little bed rest perks you up. A little experience helps you deal with it. But it’s like a super staph infection. It gets better, but it doesn’t go away.”

In Marvin’s office, he said, “I thought you fuckers had retired.”

“No,” Leonard said. “We were on strike.”

“For what?”

“Better working conditions

Well, you’re shit out of luck.”

“What we figured,” Leonard said. “That’s why the strike is over.”

Marvin eyed me. “You’re awful quiet. Usually I can’t shut you up. No wisecracks?”

“Not today,” I said.

“Hap found a body. Bert, Mini’s stepdad. He’s been killed.”

“No shit,” Marvin said.

“I just missed the murderer,” I said, and I told him what we knew. About how Bert was scared, and claimed to have information, and then he was dead. I told him about the SUV, the phone call from Bert’s phone.

“You tell the police?” Marvin asked.

“Not yet.”

“That’s not smart,” Marvin said.

“I haven’t been feeling smart,” I said. “I have been, shall we say, under the weather.”

“I can work this out a bit,” Marvin said. “An anonymous tip. Let the cops know the body is there, but not who told them. Or I know a couple of them well enough they’ll pretend they don’t know who told them. You all right, Hap?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

Marvin picked up a pencil from his desk and tapped his teeth with it. “How does Bert’s murder tie in with the rest of it?”

“Therein lies the pickle,” Leonard said. “We don’t know.”

The pickle of it all hung in the air like a zeppelin.

“So we don’t know shit?” Marvin asked.

“If we do,” Leonard said, “we haven’t figured out that we do. Not yet. But no doubt in our minds, it’s all connected.”

“You said Bert thought someone was after him?” Marvin said. “Couldn’t it have been someone else did it? Someone not connected to all this? I mean some reason besides our case?”