Joe Lansdale - Devil Red

Leonard put the coat on and took his deerstalker out of the pocket and put it on. I didn’t say anything, but I’m sure I sighed. Going out the door, he said, “I’ll be back in twenty or thirty.”

“Don’t screw around,” I said. “We need to pack and get gone. We have people to irritate.”

“I wouldn’t miss that,” he said.

Leonard was gone about five minutes when I realized Leonard had left his wallet on the table with his cell phone, and even his pistol. The sawed-off was there too. He had taken them out of his pants when he had changed clothes. He was driven to have those crackers and cookies and he didn’t think he needed a gun to get them. A wallet with money, though. He needed that. And frankly, the idea of him being out there, and Devil Red maybe being out there, and Leonard without a gun, it unnerved me a little. I was starting to get as paranoid as Bert was.

I got his wallet and phone and my own gun, and drove over to Wal-Mart. I knew that’s where he’d go. It’s where he always went.

As I drove over, it started to sleet and I could see that ice was cresting the grass in yards I passed.

When I got to the lot, I cruised around, looking for his car, and I saw it and I saw him. Leonard was in the lot walking. He had his hands in his coat pockets and his head down against the sleet.

I saw a black SUV turn down the row of cars where Leonard was walking, and when I did, my heart sank.

I drove faster, but the SUV was on him, and the back side window came down, and I saw a pistol poke out of it. I honked my horn at the same time Leonard was turning, reaching under his coat-

– for nothing.

His guns were at home, on the table.

There was a blast of fire from the open window. Snap. Snap. Snap.

Leonard went down.

I pulled over quick and got out and fired at the dark-windowed SUV and the glass popped and made a spider design but didn’t break. The SUV gunned in. They came by my position. I could see a shape inside, through the open window, but my main concentration was on the gun poking out at me. I fired once and leaped over the hood of my car. A bullet scraped something and I lay down tight behind my tire, peeked out and under.

The SUV was roaring away. I stood up and draped my gun over the roof of my car. Someone screamed. I saw a shopper pushing a cart go right behind the SUV. No shot there. No license plate either. Not that it would have mattered. They knew what they were doing. Those plates would be false.

I screamed because I couldn’t do anything else.

I put the gun away and ran toward Leonard.

It seemed to take me forever to get there.

He didn’t get up. He didn’t move.

The lights from Wal-Mart seemed to strobe.

There are some things that happen to you that thicken the air around you until it is as heavy and as hard to penetrate as stone.

I don’t know a better way to explain it. It’s as if air and gravity are coconspirators, pulling you down. I tried to move fast, and I suppose I was moving fast, but I felt like Brer Rabbit caught up in the tar baby. The more I struggled, the worser I got.

My feet didn’t know how to work, and my head wasn’t thinking clearly; my brain was echoing with the sound of gunfire.

When I got to him, he was breathing. But he was bloody, and he was bad. His stupid hat was lying nearby. There was a stream of blood flowing away from Leonard’s body and it was about to touch the hat. I took the hat and put it in my coat pocket.

I said, “Leonard,” but he didn’t so much as blink.

I touched the pulse in his throat. He was going fast.

I stood up to see a half-dozen people standing around me. And the crowd was growing.

A lady said, “I called nine-one-one.”

“I hope you hit the sonofbitch,” someone in the crowd said.

After that, it seemed as if I was down on my knees forever, holding Leonard’s head across my knees. Then there were sirens, and lights, an ambulance and cops.

They took my gun and put me in a cop car and I sat there not able to speak, watching through the window as the ambulance with my best friend-my brother-drove away.

They let me make a call. I called Marvin. They asked me some questions. I did my best to answer them. There wasn’t a lot to say. The cops knew me. They knew Leonard. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. And they knew Marvin.

I went downtown, and my memory of that trip is all a haze. Finally they let me go away with Marvin. I had heard only one thing, a cop saying it to another cop, out in the hallway. It was about Leonard. He wasn’t expected to live.

He should have had chili without crackers, I thought. Goddamn it, Leonard. If you don’t die before I get to the hospital, I’m gonna kill you. Crackers and vanilla wafers. That got you shot? Maybe killed? You sonofabitch.

Don’t die, goddamn it, don’t die.

Shot outside Wal-Mart. How ignoble was that? A man who had fought in a war, and had fought dozens of tough customers over the years, gunned down in a parking lot.

“Who do you think?” Marvin said.

“Jimson. He was mad at us from the time before. And we just saw him again.”

“And you were not endearing.”

“No. It was the usual.”

“Who else is on the list?” Marvin asked.

“Vanilla Ride, maybe. Devil Red. I don’t know. We pulled someone’s chain a little too hard this time, and someone didn’t like it, or hired someone to not like it for them. They must have been scoping us out at the house. Saw Leonard alone, thought they’d take him. Come back for me. Normally, that wouldn’t be an easy thing. But this time, it was.”

“There’s no rhyme or reason to that sort of thing,” Marvin said.

“They caught us apart. We’re not easy apart, but together, we’re really difficult. Except this time.”

“Even monkeys fall out of trees,” Marvin said. “It’s not always about how good you are.”

“Take me by the house before the hospital. I want to get something.”

…

Marvin parked down the street and let me out, and then he drove by, to see what he could see. I walked across two backyards and went to my back door. No one was waiting on me. I used the key and went inside.

Upstairs, I got Brett’s little revolver and put it in my coat pocket. Simple gun. Light enough. No jams.

Downstairs, I looked out the back window. I could see our neighbor’s fence, and nothing else.

I went to the living room, peeled the curtain on first one window, then another. The yard was empty, except for dead grass nipped over with ice.

I put my hand in my pocket and went outside and looked around. I didn’t see a sniper’s nest or black helicopters or Bigfoot.

Marvin coasted up front. I got in and we went away.

It had turned very icy by now, and we almost went off in a ditch once. But we made it.

As I walked into the hospital, shaken to my core, the last thing I told myself was it no longer mattered what had been going on inside of me as of late, because I was past that now.

It didn’t matter.

It was behind me.

Whoever did this to Leonard was going to die.

They wouldn’t let us see Leonard. He was in surgery. Me and Marvin sat in uncomfortable chairs in an overlit waiting room with a TV on without the sound and a lady wrapped up in a blanket sleeping in a chair across the way. From time to time, Marvin got up and made some calls to the cops and who knows who all.

When he came and sat back down, I said, “Thomas and his crony aren’t out of jail, are they?”

“First thing I thought of,” Marvin said. “Answer is no.”

“No idea of anyone else?”

Marvin shook his head. “Folks saw the SUV.

Heard shots. But didn’t really see anyone, same as you. A woman got the license, but-”