Joe Lansdale - Devil Red

I squeezed my eyes shut, and then opened them. I didn’t look at the trees.

I poured another cup of coffee and tried to work my courage up as I sipped it.

My cell phone rang.

I almost jumped out of my skin.

It was Brett.

“He’s slipping,” she said.

“Oh, shit,” I said. I felt the bit of sandwich I had eaten churn in my stomach and nearly rise up.

“Hap, I’m so sorry. They don’t think he’ll make it through the night.”

“Goddamn it! Goddamn it to hell!”

“They let me in to see him. They said I could come in because I’m all that’s here. I shouldn’t have told you to go. Oh, shit, Hap. I never thought he’d die.”

“He isn’t dead yet.”

“I held his hand. I told him you were taking care of things. I told him we loved him. Marvin is here. He’s out in the waiting room.”

“I told him to watch over you,” I said.

“He has a gun under his coat. And he gave me one. But really, a shootout in the hospital?”

“I’m just being cautious… So the doctor said… no hope?”

“Just said he was slipping away.”

“Tell Leonard I have his hat.”

“What?”

“Whisper in his ear. Tell the big bastard I have his deerstalker, and if he wants it back, he’ll have to take it from me. Tell him, he dies, I’ll shit in it. You tell him that.”

Brett laughed a little. It was strained, but it was a laugh.

“I’ll tell him. If he can hear me, he’ll come back just to kick your ass.”

“Right now I’d let him. You go back in there, and you take Leonard’s hand, and tell him his brother loves him. You hear me? You tell him that again. And you tell him what I said about his hat.”

“I will,” she said.

“I’m gone,” I said. “And so is the phone.”

I turned off the phone. I rolled down the window and tossed the coffee from the cup and threw the cup on the floorboard and sat for a moment. My stomach was really churning now. I got out of the car quickly and walked around back of it and upchucked the sandwich and the coffee. It burned my throat.

“Leonard. Don’t you die,” I said out loud.

I got back in the car and got a Kleenex out of the glove box and wiped my lips. I tossed out the sandwich. I put a few of the breath mints in my mouth to kill the vomit taste. I pulled away from the rest stop onto the highway.

Devil Red, I’m coming.

There was a little logging road, and according to Vanilla it went down behind Kincaid and Clinton’s property. I took it, bumped along, almost got stuck a couple of times, made my way to where the road stopped amid what looked like the results of a nuclear strike but was in fact the end product of logging. In the moonlight, I could imagine the snow as nuclear ash, all the world dead and turned to powder.

Off to the south, that myth dissolved. The woods were thick there. Out there without lights, the moon behind cloud cover, all I could see were vague tree shapes, nature’s own palisades rising thick and wild against the dark sky.

I got out with the. 38 Super and my flashlight and went crunching over the frozen leaves and pine needles to the trunk of the car and opened it up, removed the shotgun, and laid it on the roof. I opened the toolbox, got the snips, and removed a little strap-on headlight like the kind you use to read in bed so as not to wake up your partner. I turned it on and slipped it over the wool cap on my head. It wasn’t a big light, but it was a good enough light. I turned off the flashlight and put it in my coat pocket. I got a machete from the toolbox and the ammunition out of the trunk and stuffed my pockets with it. I made sure I had the Super’s spare ammo clips where I could get to them quickly. The shotgun had a strap, so I slung it over my shoulder.

I took a pee.

I picked up a wad of snow and made a snowball in my gloved hand and threw it at a stump of a tree. I missed.

I hoped that wasn’t an omen.

I was ready as I was going to be.

Way Vanilla had explained it, I had to go through the woods there, had to find my own trail, of which there were a few, and if I kept going south, I’d come to the high wall that led to the grounds of the estate. How to get over the wall was another matter, but Vanilla felt that since there were high woods on my side of the wall, on property other than their own, the logging company’s property, I could maybe find access that way.

I didn’t think that far ahead. If I did I’d turn around whimpering and head back to the car.

I tried several times to find a path but couldn’t. The woods were thick and dead winter vines were twisted up between the trees like ancient fencing. Worse, I was no longer exactly sure which way was south. It was too damn dark, and among the trees I couldn’t see anything but the whiteness of the snow and the occasional glare of moonlight on dangles of ice.

I made an attempt to follow my instincts, knowing full well that could get me in deep doo-doo, but I went ahead with it.

Hacking my way through the undergrowth, following the little beam of my head-strap light, I fought my way forward. At some point, I came upon a path through the trees and I followed that. It finally veered off to the right. I reluctantly abandoned it and started hacking again. I kept moving forward, inch by inch. I figured by the time I got through this mess and arrived, it would be two weeks from Tuesday.

Even in the cold weather, wearing all those clothes and hacking away, I was steamed and had to pause to cool it. I opened my coat and leaned against a tree. I was glad Leonard and I had been doing more workouts as of late. I had dropped a few pounds and my wind was better. Still, I was tired.

I reached up and turned off the head-strap lamp, leaned against the tree in darkness. I thought about Leonard. I thought about how long I had known him. I thought about all we had gone through. Here I was in the deep woods hacking through twisted dead winter vines and brush, and he was lying up in the hospital without me. That didn’t seem right.

For a moment I considered going back, driving to the hospital to be with him. But then I thought about what Devil Red had done. I thought about how I had been sympathetic toward their killing of those who hurt their loved ones. And then I thought about what they had done to Vanilla and so many others, made them Prostitutes of Death. I was better than they were. I was much better.

I reached up and turned the light on again, and started forward.

In a very short time I saw a glow ahead of me. It was faint and blurry in the misty night. As I neared, I realized it was not a small light, but a large light that spread to my left and right, and that it was shining between the trunks of the trees. I kept going, and finally came to a thinning of the pines and saw a wall ahead of me. It was at least twenty feet high. The light was seeping over it.

Okay.

Now we separate the men from the mice.

Squeak. Squeak.

I walked along the edge of the barricade, feeling like a Mongol considering how to make it over the Great Wall and into China. I finally found what Vanilla suggested. A tree that grew with limbs close to the wall.

But not that close.

Kincaid and Collins kept the limbs pretty well trimmed off their side. I’d have to climb the tree and jump to the wall, and then drop down on the other side. The trick then, according to Vanilla, was to move along a certain line of trees, and then onto a long open veranda. All of this was in a blind spot for the camera. Then I had to snip a certain wire in a certain hidden place just inside the foyer, and then I had to get in, all of this without the dogs or the guards or the camera seeing me. Then I had to kill two of what she said were the greatest assassins alive, and once that was done, all that was left was to sneak out and go over the wall without being shot by the guards or having being torn apart by the dogs. Piece of cake.