Joe Lansdale - Devil Red

I turned off my headlight, slipped the machete in a scabbard on my belt, started up the tree, which was a kind of sickly pine coated in a light casing of ice that crackled as I went. Snow drifted down on me, both from the sky and from where it had gathered on limbs. With me in my heavy coat and with the shotgun strapped on my back, I kept getting hung up, and I kept slipping on the ice, but finally I made it without falling, nestled on a limb, and gathered myself.

I was high enough up I could see over the wall. There were lights there, most of them closer to the house. There was a huge brick estate with a long veranda and a sloping roof nestled in the center of some open land. There was a line of thick-limbed trees that ran from the wall toward the house, but ended some thirty or forty feet before they got there. Everything was covered in snow.

I began to think Vanilla was way right. I was in over my head. I was having a hard enough time getting over the wall, let alone going into the house and killing Devil Red-the both of them.

Finally, I felt rested enough to scoot out to the edge of the limb, and just as I was trying to get up on it to jump, it broke, and I fell.

I lay on the ground for a long time. I had landed with the shotgun strapped to my back, so that didn’t help matters either. I felt as if it had been driven into my back. The fall knocked the breath out of me and I lay there trying to get it back. I felt like the Oz Scarecrow with the stuffing pulled out. Only colder.

I was off to an excellent start, if I was a comedian.

Eventually, I felt strong enough to stand. I looked up at the tree. The limb had been my best access, and now it was gone. I went down the fence row again, this time in the direction closer to the shrubs, looking for a new way over, and finally came upon a sweet gum tree with a limb that projected just over the wall and hadn’t been recently trimmed.

The problem was there were few limbs until you got up about ten feet, so I had to climb using the pressure of my palms and the soles of my shoes. The tree was damp and it was no easy business. By the time I got to the first limb I could reach, I felt on the verge of a rupture. I got hold of the limb, swung up, and sat on it for a moment. I was much closer to the line of shrubs here. I could see them through the cluttered boughs of the leaf-stripped, snow-coated tree.

I had too much stuff on me, and that was making it hard to move along, so with reluctance, I removed the machete and dropped it on the ground. I crawled out on the limb. It dipped slightly, like a horse nodding for me to get off. The wall was festooned with barbed wire and sharp pieces of metal and broken glass that had been imbedded in the cement when it was drying. Vanilla said there was a camera, but the trees had grown large and bushy and would hide someone from sight if they came over the wall in line with them.

I was in line with them.

I eased out farther on the limb, near to its thinning tip, and that made me nervous. It was long enough that with my weight on it, it dipped over the wall. I grabbed hold of the limb and swung out, catching my pants on the glass in the wall, but only slightly. I dropped to the ground inside the compound and went down on one knee, giving things a look. The wet ice and snow came through my pants and made my knees numb.

I went at a crouch along the line of trees, and if Vanilla was right, out of camera shot. My back ached from the fall. I felt a little light-headed. Either not enough food. Too much activity. Being scared. Or a combination of all three. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go number two, so I had that going for me.

I had only gone a few feet when I found a dead Doberman. It lay just inside the shadow of the trees, right before they broke and there was that space between them and the house.

I bent down and touched it. It was warm, and it was bloody. Bending over, I clicked on my headlight and took a look. A bullet most likely. Right through the front right chest. From the way the ground looked, the snow creased and bloody, I knew the dog had dragged itself here and died.

I clicked off the light, sat there thinking.

A thought crossed my mind. One I couldn’t hold on to with any conviction, but it was there. I decided to let it go, and to move on. I hadn’t come this far to turn around and go back over the wall.

I moved to the end of the trees, stopped, and bent down and studied the gap between where I was and the veranda. As Vanilla had said, it was well lit, except right at the corner closest to me. Presumably, if what Vanilla knew about the place was the same, there wasn’t an angle there that accommodated a camera. All I had to do was make a straight run into the shadows, and then, if she was right, pull myself into an indention in the wall and gather my wits, which might take a lot more time than I had available. After that, I had to move quickly, and then it was assholes, elbows, and hot ammunition.

I was about to lunge forward, and then I saw him.

He was just to the front of the veranda. A big man. A very big man. Lying on the snow-covered lawn. A rifle of some sort lay on the snow beside him. I had an idea he hadn’t stopped to put his ear to the ground to hear the sweet vibrations of the earth. He was one of the bodyguards, and I was more than certain he was as dead as Abraham Lincoln; and if not, he was close enough to being dead to see Lincoln’s ghost. Like with the Doberman, the snow around him was coated red.

I went across the stretch and made the edge of the veranda, and slid up against the wall. The dark indention was there, as Vanilla said. I slipped into it and caught my breath. I didn’t know for a fact that the trees and that space between them to the veranda was in a camera blind, or even that I was in one now, but I had to play it that way.

I took the wire snips out of my coat pocket, and turned to where I was supposed to be able to reach through a gap and cut a wire that hooked to the camera, and another that hooked to the alarms. Snapping on my headlight, I saw there was indeed a gap, and that it was some sort of flaw in design. The concrete should have come together in that spot, but it didn’t. I could get my hand in there, inside a large storage room, and flip open the little metal door that held the alarm system without any trouble, but when I flicked it open with the tip of the wire snips, the wires were already cut. I snapped off the headlight. I pulled out Brett’s little revolver and moved along the veranda wall as far away from the lights as possible.

I came to the door lock Vanilla said I’d have to pick, and as I figured, the door was already cracked open.

I slipped in, held the revolver at the ready with two hands. I didn’t always shoot with two hands. I had learned to shoot the Wild West way when I was a kid, and I never dropped it completely. It’s not as accurate, but I can hit pretty much what I shoot at, provided it’s in range and not moving too damn fast.

It was dark inside the house and I couldn’t tell where I was going at first, so I just squatted down and let my eyes adjust to the shadows. I didn’t turn on the little head-beam light, knowing if I did, all I was doing was giving them a little spot target on my forehead. I squatted there with my back against a wall trying not to breathe too loud. After a few minutes I could see better in the dark, make out shapes. It was all furniture as far as I could tell. Rising up, I moved across the floor with the revolver at the ready.

I stopped when a voice said, “Don’t move.”

“Jesus Christ, Vanilla,” I said. “You damn near made me mess myself.”

“Better than a bullet in the head,” she said. “Be quiet.”

She took me by the sleeve and pulled me over to a space behind a stack of boxes.