Joe Lansdale - Leather Maiden

“Quit fucking around,” the male said. “Give us the money.”

“Let me put this so you’ll understand it,” Jimmy said. “Give me the DVD, or I’m going to walk over to you and kick your ass up so high, when you need to shit you’ll have to move your teeth.”

The girl came up the hill a little then. She had pulled a gun from her pocket when I wasn’t looking.

“Give him the money, Mr. Statler,” she said.

“I got a guy up the hill,” Jimmy said.

“Ha!” said the guy in the ski mask.

I pulled my little flashlight out of my pocket and poked it at them and turned it on, blinked it a couple of times.

“He’s got a night-vision camera and a recorder taking in all of this,” Jimmy said. “He’s got a rifle too, and it’s trained on you. So girlie, I suggest you put that pistol down.”

“Your brother?” said the guy. “He’s the one up the hill?”

“That’s right. You know a lot about me.”

The guy said, “I got this copy, but I got other copies.”

“So now I know,” Jimmy said.

“And we got a gun,” the girl said.

“So you do,” Jimmy said.

“We’re going to take that money,” the guy said.

“You might if I had it with me. But you move toward me, even if you shoot me, my brother up there is going to put a bullet in your heads so fast you’ll never even hear the shot that gets you.”

The two blackmailers stood their ground.

Jimmy said, “You put that gun down, girlie. Then the two of you stretch out on the ground, or I’m going to start feeling unpleasant. My brother up there, he’s got an itchy finger. He’ll blow your fucking heads off.”

The guy turned toward the girl. He let out with a yell. “Run, baby. Run.”

Problem was, they broke in opposite directions. The guy went left, the girl went right. Jimmy leaped toward the girl. His hand flashed out and she screamed. Her gun went sliding across the gravel and she did a somersault and rolled down toward the house and nestled up in the vines like a fly in a web. The guy turned and started running back toward her. He raised his hand above his head, like he was going to strike Jimmy with his fist. Jimmy stepped right into the middle of him and hit him quick with the asp. Hit him right between the legs. The guy went down, his knees folding under him, and then he lay back with his head on the gravel and I could hear him moaning all the way up the hill, and not just through the monitor. Jimmy hit him again, this time in the forehead.

I started down. Jimmy stood over the guy, raised the asp again. I could still hear him on the monitor. “You shit. You fucking shit. Give me the DVD or I’m going to crack your head wide open, then hers.”

“Easy, Jimmy,” I said, as I came nearer. “Just take it easy.”

We made them go inside the Siegel house. It was dark in there, of course, and the only light was from my flashlight. It smelled musty inside and there were lots of spiders on lots of webs and the dust was thick and it came up from the floor when you moved. When I flashed the light around I could see the walls were the color of unchewed snuff. The girl was crying, lying on her side, holding her leg where Jimmy had whacked it with the asp. The guy was sitting with his back against the wall, his knees pulled up, his arms wrapped around them. We had pulled the ski masks off, and where the asp had hit the guy he was bleeding; blood was in his dark hair and running down his face. I tossed him his ski mask back, said, “Wipe your face with that.”

The girl had begun to whimper less. I put the flashlight on her. She was pretty, with short blond hair, and thin as a rail.

Jimmy had her gun and he was pointing it at them. The gun business made me nervous. I had seen too many guns and I had seen what they could do, and I had seen how sometimes things happened that wouldn’t have happened just because of them.

“Hold it by your side,” I said.

Jimmy did that, but he walked back and forth, agitated.

“Where’s the goddamn DVD?” he said. “All of them.”

“I just got the one,” the guy said, and worked it out of his coat pocket. He tossed it to me and I caught it and held it. The guy said, “Can I take off this jacket? It’s hot.”

“Why did you wear it?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“To keep the DVD and for a disguise,” he said.

“You try and pull something besides your arm from out of that coat, and my brother here will put a hole in your head,” I said, fearing he might do just that.

“You didn’t have a rifle up there, did you?” the kid asked.

“No,” I said. “But Jimmy’s got your girl’s gun now, and he’s got one of his own. Don’t push him.”

“Girlie,” Jimmy said, “why don’t you take off that coat too, and be careful about it when you do.”

She whimpered once, moved to a sitting position and worked the coat off. She was wearing a dark sports bra and she had dark tattoos on her stomach around her navel, all down her arms. I couldn’t tell what they were, flowers maybe. She tossed the coat across the floor toward us. She said to Jimmy, “You hurt my leg with that thing. You hurt it bad.”

“Forgive me if I don’t give a shit,” Jimmy said. “Put the light on that boy.”

I did.

“Hold your face up,” Jimmy said.

The kid did that. He had a red mark between his eyes where Jimmy had whacked him. It wouldn’t leave a permanent mark, but it would bruise up.

“Hell, I knew I knew you,” Jimmy said. “You’re in the history department. I don’t know your name, but I know you. You can fucking figure on failing now, ’cause I’ll sure think of your name in time.”

“I’m not in your classes,” the boy said.

Jimmy let out with a laugh. “Well, that saves you, doesn’t it?”

The girl bawled some more, paused to say: “I’m scared of spiders.”

20

They had come by car, and it was on the other side of the hill. We all walked up the hill and through the woods, the same way they had come, then down the other side to a little dirt road where their car was parked. It wasn’t much of a car and looked like the last time it had been washed someone had rubbed it down with sand and waxed it with a hammer.

We made them get in the front seat, the guy behind the wheel. Jimmy and I slid into the back seat and Jimmy waved the gun around a little too much.

“What are we doing?” the guy asked, and he was so scared his voice vibrated.

“Going for a ride,” I said. “We want you to take us to your place, where you got the computer that copied the DVD.”

“We made copies,” the girl said, “but we found the DVD.”

I tucked that bit of information away. I said, “What about Caroline Allison?”

“I knew her,” the guy said. “She was in the history department with me. I knew her and that’s how I came up with this idea.”

“Stupid idea,” the girl said. She had grown pouty, like a child whose birthday party had been ruined by bullies.

“It was stupid,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah,” the guy said. “Stupid. But Tabitha needed the money for school.”

“Jesus,” Jimmy said. “Whatever happened to a student loan?”

“I couldn’t get one,” she said. “I failed too many classes goofing off.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “You needed tuition money, so what better way to get it than to kill some girl and take her DVD of her and the kindly professor here doing the bop and blackmail him with it? That sure beats a student loan, or heaven forbid, working for the money.”

“We didn’t kill anyone,” the guy said. “You know we didn’t kill anyone.”

He said that like he thought we really did know he didn’t do it. And I was pretty sure they hadn’t, even if I wasn’t sure they were telling the total truth. In fact, I was more than certain they weren’t.