Joe Lansdale: Devil Red

A part of me wished I had been late. From what I could see, she hadn’t needed me at all.

“What made you do it?” I said.

She looked at me like that was a question that didn’t immediately compute. Finally, she said, “I don’t know. I learned a lot in that big room back there so long ago, the one with the mats. I learned how to fight and use a knife, ice pick, most anything I could lay my hands on. There’s also a gun range farther in. Everything nice and padded and silent. There’s also a bedroom that wasn’t my room and it wasn’t their room. You didn’t see it. It’s a large room, and it’s silent too. I learned a lot there from Mr. Kincaid.”

“I’m sorry, Vanilla.”

“All part of the drill, I suppose. The males got the same.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“I suppose I had to close things out. I believe that’s why I came, more than for you.”

“How do you feel?” I said.

“Just the same.”

“What now?”

“I’ll show you to my car, drive you around to yours, and we go our separate ways.”

“I mean what now for you?”

She shrugged and started walking across the yard. I slung the shotgun strap over my shoulder, followed, our feet crunching on the snow-covered grass. We went out through the open front gate and I swung the shotgun off my shoulder, and we got in her black Volkswagen Beetle. The one I had passed when I drove over to No Enterprise and found Jimson and his goons.

Vanilla had merely driven straight up the drive and gone inside. I don’t know how she had gotten through the gate. Maybe it was open. Maybe she knew a code. After that, it had been easy. Drop the guard and the dog, and then I showed up. I’m sure she had answers to those questions, but at that point in time, I didn’t really care.

As she started up the Volkswagen, I said, “I thought you were like James Bond till I saw this car. Does it have machine guns in the headlights?”

“It’s maneuverable and dependable,” she said. “Just like me. Did I ever tell you how maneuverable I am?”

“It’s best I don’t hear,” I said, and she wheeled us out of there.

When we stopped at my car, Vanilla turned slightly in the seat, said, “You could go with me.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“You can.”

“All right. I can. But I won’t.”

“The redhead?”

“That’s some of it, yes.”

“And Leonard.”

“Yep.”

Vanilla nodded. She smiled. “I don’t know, Hap. I don’t understand it. Why they mean so much to you.”

“I don’t think I can explain it.”

“There’s another thing I don’t understand.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Why am I attracted to you?”

“It’s the way I dress.”

“Hardly,” she said.

As I put a foot outside the door, Vanilla said, “You ever been to Europe?”

“No.”

“Italy is a wonderful country,” she said. “Beautiful people. The best food you can imagine. Scenery that has to be seen to be believed.”

“You go there often?”

“I’ve never been to Italy. But I’ve read about it.”

“You believe everything you read?”

“Only when I want to. The money I got, I don’t need to do anything anymore but lie on a beach in a bikini somewhere and soak up the sun. I might just retire there. Maybe you could come see me?”

“All I can say is I owe you one,” I said.

“Oh, that was a freebie. That wasn’t for anybody but myself. I didn’t feel good or bad about it before, but now, sitting here, I’m starting to get the warm fuzzies. I liked the way Ms. Clinton looked when I shot her. Lean over here.”

I did. She kissed me gently and quickly on the lips.

“Our secret,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

I got out of the car with my shotgun and she backed around and was gone.

Vanilla should have been everything I detested in a human being, a stone killer with the conscience of a fly, but there was no denying I felt something for her. I didn’t know exactly what it was. But I felt it. And she felt it back. But then again, who was I to hate someone for being a killer?

I drove back to LaBorde through a bad storm mixed with rain and snow and a vision of that young girl’s face, the one I had killed in the mat room. She was just a kid. I told myself if I hadn’t killed her she would have killed me. I told myself she was being trained to kill others for money. For all I knew she might have been the one who shot Leonard. There wasn’t any certainty Devil Red, the two of them, or either of them had done the shooting. And if it wasn’t that young woman, someday it would be, for someone.

I arrived drained and exhausted at the hospital. It was way past visiting hours, but when I got upstairs I found Brett and Marvin in the waiting room. Brett had found a blanket and was curled up in a chair asleep. Marvin sat beside her, wide awake. He nodded at me as I came in, put a finger to his lips. We went outside the waiting room to a few chairs along the wall. We sat down.

“How’s Leonard?” I said.

“Better.”

I sighed with relief.

“Not out of danger yet,” Marvin said. “But better.”

“Good,” I said.

“Did you find them?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you take care of them?”

“Vanilla Ride took care of them mostly. I took care of some of it.”

“Vanilla Ride? Our Vanilla Ride?”

“How many of them could there be?” I said.

“I’ll be damned,” Marvin said.

I told him all about it, everything Vanilla had told me, how it had all gone down.

He sat for a while when I finished. “So it was like Brett thought, Devil Red killed all those people for revenge. Twilla too?”

“Maybe. And then Leonard and I fell into their line of fire.”

Marvin considered for a moment. “They most likely arranged the hit on Godzilla in prison, don’t you think?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “They decided to kill us all, symbolically salt the earth. They couldn’t get rid of their grief any other way. And I doubt that did it.”

“What amazes me is to think they actually cared that much for their children, considering what they were, what they did to Vanilla,” Marvin said.

“I think for them it wasn’t child molestation or abuse in the way we think of it. I mean it comes down to the same thing, but I think for them it was just business. They were sharpening the tools of their business by making them willing and moldable. When Kincaid was away from there he was an accountant, a husband to his airhead wife, and a father to his children, who he loved. One life had nothing to do with the other.”

“That’s what you call compartmentalization,” Marvin said.

“Yeah, I suppose it is.”

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“My hand won’t quit shaking. I got a few minor wounds, but that’s what surprises me the most. In all the gunfire and knifing, I didn’t get a serious wound. Worst thing I got was back pain from falling out of a tree. Thing I’m wondering is how we tell Mrs. Christopher that the job is done without telling her how it was done, and without getting our dicks in a crack.”

“That’s my job,” Marvin said. “I’ll find a way to satisfy her without telling her everything. There’s some things she doesn’t need to know. Do you think you’ll see Vanilla again?”

“I don’t want to. She makes me nervous.”

At that moment, Brett came out of the waiting room and came over to me and grabbed me before I could stand and hugged me. I kissed her near her ear. She was crying. She fell into my lap.

“My God, I thought that was you I heard talking,” she said.