Joe Lansdale: Devil Red

Moving in quick, I kicked him in the groin, and then we struggled over the shotgun. It came loose of both our hands and flew behind me and hit the wall and clattered to the floor.

Something winked in the dark and then I felt a smooth motion like the page of a book brushing across my hand, and then I felt the sting. I had been there before. A knife. I skipped backward, tried to get the pistol out of my pocket, but he was on me too fast. I made a kind of horseshoe bend as the knife passed in front of me. I felt it tug at my shirt and hit the edge of my coat as it flared wide. There was a noise as something hit the floor.

I was able to see better now, as my eyes had adjusted. I kicked the inside of his leg, and he went down on one knee. I gave him an uppercut to the chin, but he dodged it. The sonofabitch could see like an owl.

I reached in my coat pocket; it was wide open at the bottom. The knife had cut it at some point, and the damn revolver had fallen out, and that’s what I had heard hitting the floor. I was scuttling backward as he came, and finally I got the clasp knife out of my pocket and snapped it open.

Seeing well enough now, I slapped a stab aside by hitting his wrist, and cut down across his forearm. Or tried to. He slapped it down and brought his knife up, and I just moved in time to keep from catching it in the throat.

He sliced again, inward, and I parried it and cut down again, this time hitting him across the arm. He let out with a hissing sound, and kicked my feet out from under me. He leaped on top of me, and I caught his knife arm and locked my legs around him. I tried to stab him, but he had hold of my wrist.

I twisted so that my blade cut him. He let go and sprang off me and tried to cut my leg, but I avoided it and he kicked up at me. I felt the knife hit my shoe.

Now we were both on our feet again. He came slashing right and left, but keeping it tight. Filipino knife work was his game, and he was good at it. Better than me. I tried to take him with a straight stab, and he disarmed me, cutting the back of my hand in the process. Weaponless, I stepped back, and my foot came down on something, and I nearly slipped.

I knew what it was. The revolver. He lunged at me. I dropped down and his thrust went where I had been. I snatched up the revolver and tossed myself on my back and fired. The shot lit up the room, but it didn’t stop him. He came at me slashing. I scuttled backward. I fired again, and still he kept coming.

He leaped on me. I couldn’t get a shot off. His knife made a hard thunking noise, and then he quit moving. I crawled out from under him. His knife was stuck in the floor and he was lying facedown. I turned on my head beam and kicked him over on his back.

He had taken my shots, and I saw too that I had cut him more than I thought. He may have looked like a scarecrow, but he was tough. I kicked him in the ribs a couple of times to make sure he was dead.

He didn’t move. I turned to pick up the guns and the knife, and that’s when he jumped on my back.

His arm went around my throat and he started choking. It was a good choke. He was shutting off the arteries. I was about to go out. I pressed in on his elbow, pressing his arm tight to my neck, just the opposite of what you might think you should do. It opened enough space on the other side, though, that the blood started to flow and I started to regain my wits. I bent down and then sprang up, and he went over my hip. When he landed, I came down on top of him, straddling his chest, and I crashed my forearm into his throat.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

I could feel something give in his throat. He stopped struggling.

I still had my head beam on, and was still straddling him. He appeared to be a hundred years old, and at a glance skinny and weak. I knew better than that, though. He had been wiry and strong and skilled. I had been better. Or luckier.

I got up quickly and carefully. This time I wanted to be sure it was done. I found the revolver and put it in my belt, the knife in my pocket, picked up the shotgun without turning my back on Kincaid.

I went over and looked at him again.

In the light, I could see he was still breathing. He was alive still. He was a regular Rasputin.

I felt sorry for him for a moment, then I thought he was maybe the one who shot Leonard. Either him or his partner, the ex-wife.

I lifted up the shotgun and pointed it at his head, and let it go. You couldn’t have told much about how he had looked after that. The hallway stank of gunfire and blood.

I moved on through the dark toward the end of the hall, the headlight on, not worrying about it anymore. Whatever came, came.

There were lights now, and large rooms, and I turned off the pointless headlight and went through several of the rooms until I came to a half-open door with a man on his knees, his forehead pressed to the wall.

He had fallen there. He was a large man. There was blood all down his shirt and all over the floor in a fresh wet pool. He had never known what had hit him.

There was another hallway. I went down quickly, and when I came to the end of it, there was a door slightly cracked, and there was light coming out of it. I eased over and touched the door gently, moved it aside.

Looking in, I saw Vanilla Ride squatted on her haunches, the silenced automatic in her gloved hand. Across from her, lying on the floor, her head against a couch, a hand held to her blood-gurgling throat, was Clinton. Her eyes darted toward me. She coughed and blood squirted from between her fingers. There was a little automatic lying on the floor not far from her free hand. Her fingers curled toward it, like a dying spider, but nothing more. A Doberman lay on the floor nearby. Dead, of course.

Vanilla turned her head and looked at me. She said, “You can finish her if you want. If you think it’ll make you feel better.”

I shook my head.

I felt empty standing there watching that woman die. Right then, it didn’t matter to me what she had done. Had I come upon her first, I would have shot her myself, no doubt, but now, looking at the life ease out of her, I just felt confused.

Clinton glanced at Vanilla. She tried to say something. It sounded like “why.”

“Why not?” Vanilla said. Her gun hand flicked up and the silenced weapon made a tubercular noise. Clinton’s body jerked a little. A red spot appeared on her forehead, and whatever muscles were holding her head against the couch released and she rolled over on her face. The blood pooled beneath her. A pool of urine soaked out of her and its smell was rich with ammonia.

Vanilla stood. She looked at me. I can’t describe what I was seeing there, but in that moment she looked much older and stranger and dangerous, a visitor from someplace far beyond Mars.

She said, “Done, and done.”

We searched through the house, looked in all the rooms, all the nooks and crannies. There was no one left. We went out the way we had come in and stopped on the veranda in sight of the dead man in the yard. It had grown bitter cold and the snow was turning hard.

“You lied to me,” I said. “You said you wouldn’t get involved.”

Vanilla put her gun inside her coat and looked at me. “I didn’t know I was getting involved until I started drawing that map for you. Jimson, like I said, that was personal.”

“I presume the map you gave me isn’t really the easiest way for me to get here, is it?”

“I gave you quite a trial, didn’t I?”

“You think I’d give up and go home?”

“I thought if I gave you the long and hard way here, I’d get here first, in plenty of time. Still, I didn’t want you not to be a part of it. I wanted you to know it was done.”