Joe Lansdale - Devil Red

“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s all a little too sweet to be a coincidence. We talk to Bert. He wants to see us. He ends up dead. And I get a call on his phone, and a hang-up. I think that was a kind of threat. A warning at least.”

“All right, then,” Marvin said. “See if you can tie it all together.”

“We will go about detecting, then,” Leonard said, standing up.

“You mean you two will go about bumbling in the hopes that happens to lead to something.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said. “That’s pretty much it.”

Out in the parking lot, as we got in Leonard’s car, he said, “To Marvin, we are nothing more than a couple of minions. Carrier pigeons to carry messages and bring messages back. Slaves to his judgment. Faces in the crowd.”

“You’ve had way too much coffee,” I said.

“I do feel a little itchy, like my nerves could jerk a decorative knot in my dick. But, minions though we may be, it beats honest work.”

“Actually, we don’t seem to do much, just find out about dead people,” I said.

“And in your case, you even found one that’s fresher than the rest.”

“He wasn’t all that fresh.”

“Since the others, the vampires, are all in the ground,” Leonard said. “He was the lily of the bunch.”

“Ha! If they’re vampires, they may not be in the ground.”

“Oh, you are wise.”

When we were well situated in the car, seat-belted in and hoping it would start, Leonard said, “I’m confused.”

“About what?”

“Who do we annoy next? We have a list, but… who?”

“I vote Cason Statler,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because we can.”

“Now you’re startin’ to sound like yourself,” Leonard said.

But I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t even close.

The drive over to Camp Rapture was nice because it was a pretty day. The rain had cleared up and the sun was out, and the car was a little warm inside. We wheeled to the Camp Rapture Report, the newspaper Cason worked for, and went inside.

Cason was sitting at his desk in the middle of the newspaper office. There were other reporters around, but fewer than I had imagined. There was also an advertising department. One of the women who worked there was overweight and frumpy with pissblonde hair that looked to have been made by electricity and a sense of humor. She was wearing a too-short top that showed a lot of belly and a silver belly ring. She had on shorts that showed way too much ass and on the ass was a tattoo that looked like something an arthritic chicken had scratched in the dirt while dying.

My take is you can dress any way you want, but my amendment to that is that you have to have mirrors at your house, and you have to use them, and you must not lie to yourself about what they show.

“Damn,” I said. “I think my right eye just went dead.”

“Wishful thinking,” Leonard said.

“Oh, the humanity.”

Cason looked up from his work, saw us, stopped typing, and watched as we approached his desk. There was one spare chair, and I took it. Leonard put his hip against the side of Cason’s desk. All three of us looked at the woman in advertising with the too-little clothes and the too-much flesh.

“I try to forget she’s over there,” Cason said, “and then I get my mind off forgetting, and look up, and there she is, and I’m wounded all over again.”

I said, “Does she actually sell any advertising?”

“She threatens to take the shorts off if they don’t buy any,” Cason said.

“Ouch,” Leonard said.

“She’s the curse of the newspaper,” Cason said. “The editor is starting a dress code just to get some clothes on her. The flyer went out today from the boss saying we got to dress nicer, and a certain way. Normally I’m against dress codes. I think it violates our civil rights, but in Carrie’s case, I’m going to make an exception. You got to think of the children. Small animals. Our way of life. The planet earth.”

“If you’re through insulting the poor woman,” I said, “is there a place where we can talk private?” I said.

“The break room.”

Our trip to the break room was short. By the time we had gotten bad coffee in Styrofoam cups and told what we knew to Cason, we were being shuffled away. Cason followed us out to the car. He said, “There’s this guy works here, does research, Mercury is his last name, he can find something about anything. I’m gonna put him on this.”

“Really?” Leonard said. “His name is Mercury?”

“Really,” Cason said. “He lives for research, and anything to do with something odd, that’s his meat. Dumb-asses who think they’re vampires, that’s odd and he’ll like it, and he’ll research them until he falls over dead. I’ll talk to him and see if he can get on it.”

“You seem quick to shuffle us off.”

“Got a lunch date.”

“With a lady?” I said.

“None of your business,” he said, got in his car, and drove away.

As we were driving, Leonard said, “You think Cason’s too busy dropping the rope down the well to do us any good?”

“I think he’s the kind of guy that can screw and chew gum and do math problems all at the same time.”

“I doubt Cason’s date would appreciate his ability to do more than one thing at a time.”

“True,” I said, “but my guess is he’ll have lunch, knock him off a piece, get with this Mercury fella, and have something for us pretty damn quick. He’s pretty high-energy.”

“And if your description is right, he’s not particularly thoughtful,” Leonard said.

Leonard made a curve and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

“How you feelin’, Hap?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It comes in waves. Sometimes I feel fine, other times I want to go back to that big armchair and not get up.”

“The chair’s at the dump, and since we’re not going to the dump to let you sit in it, that means you just got to live with things.”

“How do you do it, Leonard?”

“Because I have to.”

“That’s no kind of answer.”

“It’s my answer. I look at it this way. If what I choose to do seems right to me, I do it.”

“And what if,” I said, “what I choose to do seems right, but isn’t. Ku Klux Klan people think they’re right, but they aren’t.”

“I get your point. But you just made a point. You said they aren’t right, those KKK fucks, and being a black man, I have to agree. But saying they’re wrong means you have what you think is a clear-cut position, and you back it up with experience and facts. Like it or not, you believe you can tell right from wrong, and I trust your judgment and mine on those matters more than I trust the judgment of paranoid and inferior-feeling assholes who are all about making people’s lives miserable because they can. I’m simple enough about the matter to consider that if I’m doing something to protect someone or make their life better, and I have the ability to do it, and I’m going to feel good about myself afterward, that’s what I do.”

“Seems more complicated than that to me,” I said.

“Didn’t say it wasn’t complicated for some. What I said was it’s easy for me. Do you think if we hadn’t killed those who were trying to kill us in the past, they would have let us go with a pat on the butt? Do you really think there’s a god that sorts them out and punishes them if someone here in reality land doesn’t?”

“No. But we’re part of the problem.”

“Let me ask you why we put ourselves in those positions.”

“We’re stupid.”

“Next answer.”

I sighed. “We were trying to help someone, or we were trying to help ourselves, and at least once, we were trying to make some money.”