Joe Lansdale - Devil Red

I took a breath and looked around. No one. I walked over to the counter and looked behind it. Like I expected. Shit Fingers. He was dead too, crumpled on his side with his knees drawn up. His mouth was leaking blood. Blood was splattered on the cigarettes in a rack behind him.

For some reason the only thing I could think was a dedicated smoker could buy those cheap.

Blood. All of it fresh. This had just happened.

I felt the hair on the back of my neck crawl around. I took another deep breath and backed out of there.

I went home to get a bigger gun.

I went home to get more than one.

I went home to break into the stash upstairs. A twelve-gauge pump better than the sawed-off, and a. 45 automatic pistol. I kept them inside the closet there, behind the opening in the ceiling, up in what served as an attic. Both were cold pieces. There was plenty of plastic-wrapped ammunition up there too.

Sometimes when I thought of those things up there, I felt as if a sleeping dragon were just waiting for me to call it out and use it wrong.

But this time, I was happy. Whoever had wiped out Jimson and his men, and Shit Fingers, they had been the one who shot Leonard. Had to be. Too big of a conincidence otherwise. And I had no reason to doubt that I was next on the list.

This time I couldn’t wait to get my hands on those guns, to let the dragon loose.

I was thinking about all that as I drove into my drive, got out carefully, and looked around, Brett’s revolver hanging loose in my hand. I thought I heard the icy grass crunch once, but I went still and waited and didn’t hear it again. It could have been anything. Ice shifting. A cat or a dog running across the backyard. Anything.

Or nothing.

When I was on the porch I kept Brett’s revolver in my right hand and held my keys in the left.

As I was pushing the key in, a voice said, “I wouldn’t do that.” I dropped and wheeled.

Standing in the yard, wearing a long heavy duster-style coat, was a young woman with long blonde hair. In the glow of the single streetlight at the end of the drive her hair appeared to fall over her shoulders and down the front of her coat like a waterfall of butter. She had a gun in her right hand, and the hand was leveled at me, and I knew before I could even get a shot off, I’d be dead.

It was Vanilla Ride.

Once upon a time, Vanilla Ride had been hired to kill me and Leonard. But her employer, one Cletus Jimson, got greedy on the money he owed her for other hits, and decided to hit her together with us instead. It was a cost-cutting plan.

As it worked out, Leonard and I helped her fight them off. There was a lot of gunfire, a lot of blood, and the hit on the hitter failed.

That gave us a connection with Vanilla.

It gave me and her another kind of connection that I can’t explain. Not romantic. Brett wouldn’t like that, and in the long run, neither would I. But it bonded us. Still, I never really expected to see her again.

Or hoped I wouldn’t.

“Hi, Hap,” she said, as cheery as if we were meeting for coffee. “So, it was you who shot Leonard.”

“Don’t be silly. He’d be dead. I’m not here to shoot you. I’m here with a warning.”

“What do you mean a warning?”

“I’m not going to shoot you. Not unless I have to. I don’t even have a silencer on my gun. I’m not here for business.”

I knew she was right. She walked like a ninja and had the aim of Annie Oakley. Had she wanted, she could have killed me and I would never have known she was there. I lowered the revolver by my side, but I didn’t put it away.

I said, “I’m not in the mood, Vanilla. You could kill me, maybe. But I might not die so easy.”

“Yeah, you would. This is a twenty-two. Not a big caliber. But I can put a bullet where I want to standing this close. I can write my name in bullet fire on your forehead before you hit the ground.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I bet you’d have to leave out one of the l’s.” She smiled.

“What’s the warning?” I said.

“Let’s start with don’t open your door, because if you do, you’ll get blown out into the street.”

I looked at the door.

“How do you know?”

“I know. I’ve already checked. But I didn’t disarm it. Wanted you to see me do it. I wanted you to know I’m not here to kill you.”

“I was here not long ago,” I said.

“And they must have been here a few minutes ago,” she said. “While you were in No Enterprise looking up Jimson. Don’t look so surprised. I passed you as you were going in, stopped by the road getting something out of the trunk. A gun would be my guess.”

“Sawed-off. I left it on the seat. Now I wish I hadn’t.”

Vanilla put her gun away, came up on the porch, turned the key, and unlocked the door. I stepped back off the porch. Way back.

I saw her push the door open ever so slightly. She reached in her coat and took out a little leather parcel. She pulled a small flashlight from it and turned it on and put it in her teeth. She knelt down on one knee and removed something else from the parcel. She used it on something near the bottom of the door. A trip wire I figured. I heard a slight snip, and then another snip.

“Disarmed,” she said, and pushed the door open.

Inside, just for safety measures, we turned on the lights and looked through the house. There was a bomb at the back door too.

Vanilla cut some wires like before. She said, “This would have blown you in half. Either one of them. You pushed the door open, it would have pulled the wires, and that would have pulled a trigger. You go boom, baby.”

She picked the bomb up and carried it inside and placed it on the kitchen table, which is where she had put the other one. She walked into the living room, looked around. Her coat fell open and one long, black, panted leg poked out. Just for the record, she was wearing what Brett calls sensible shoes, low slung and soft and easy to move in. Even under the circumstances, I couldn’t help but note she was breathtakingly beautiful-an evil wet dream with vanilla creme skin, sea blue eyes, and bloodred lipstick.

“Cozy,” she said.

We stood across from each other. I still had the revolver in my hand. She said, “You really ought to put your rod away.”

I put the revolver in my coat pocket.

“We never seem to meet just to say hi,” she said.

“This is only the second time we’ve met,” I said.

“But it was such an exciting meeting.”

“Truth is, I don’t feel like a lot of chitchat right now.”

“Because of Leonard,” she said.

I hesitated before I answered. “That’s right. How would you know about that? How would you know to check my house for a bomb?”

“I’ve been watching you. I wasn’t watching Leonard. I wasn’t sure I was going to warn you. I was here to do it, but I wasn’t sure I’d go through with it. I was down the street, parked in a car at the curb when Leonard left. I saw it was him, I stayed. I’m here to protect you, not him. Later, I followed you to the hospital. I figured things out. I know how to ask the right questions at a hospital desk without seeming nosy. I told them I was your sister. They told me whatever I asked.”

“How clever of you.”

“You and me, we need to sit down on the couch and talk.”

“I don’t feel all that chatty. Thanks for not letting me get blown up, but I got things to do.”

She looked back at the kitchen. “You have anything to drink?”

“Vanilla…”

“No. Really. We need to talk.”

“So,” I said, when we were seated on the couch, “you were just in the neighborhood.”