Joe Lansdale - Leather Maiden

“More games,” I said.

“You have a pattern,” Mercury said. “A real pattern. A real goddamn mystery. Murders. Skinning. Assassinations. And someone with stolen money.”

I thought: Who was the little girl who loved mysteries, puzzles and games, and the darkness of Edgar Allan Poe, the bleakness of Jerzy Fitzgerald?

Answer: Caroline.

She couldn’t have been in on all the assassination business, any of that stuff. It happened over too many years. She would have been a kid, and I had some idea where she was during that time.

But Stitch, he fit. He was the one behind it all. He had other accomplices then. But now he had added Caroline to his team. Why and how I didn’t know, but I was sure of it. As sure as I was that if I ever caught up with Stitch or Caroline and they had harmed Belinda, they would never live to see another day.

39

Mercury and I looked through more records, trying to make comparisons, and then I had had enough. What I needed to know was, where was Belinda? And there was nothing more Mercury could tell me that would help answer that. But at least I was armed with some information about my adversaries, and the first rule of war is Know Your Enemy.

I left the newspaper office feeling as if my small corner of the world was ruled by something dark with tentacles that reached into all parts of my life; some monster from behind the veil of reason. Only someone like Booger could enjoy a world like that. I tried to remember what it was like before I knew of Caroline and before I knew of the war and Booger, and even before I had loved Gabby. What it was like when I was a child in my underwear playing Tarzan in what was now Jazzy’s tree, calling out to all the apes to come and save me.

I drove on through the night, back toward my place and Booger. I glanced in the rearview mirror, saw there was a car behind me, the only one on the street, and I watched it in my mirror, then I turned off. I hadn’t gone far when I realized the car had turned too.

It could be a coincidence.

I decided not to drive home. I drove over to the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart, went inside, but not before I saw the car pull into the lot. It was an old car and maybe it was green. It was hard to tell in the lights of the parking lot. I was beginning to think I had seen it before. I tried to think where, but all I could think of was that I had seen it; a spot here and there, a time now and then.

Maybe it was like a déjà vu thing, where you think you’ve seen something before, but your mind is playing tricks on you. Tired and stressed as I was, it could be that way.

I went inside and stopped at the magazine rack by one of the checkout counters and stared at stuff there. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a guy come in. He looked a little ragged in the clothes department, but he had a hard-looking body and close-cropped hair. I couldn’t make out much else about him, not from that distance, but I figured he was the guy in the car.

I moved away from the magazines and down some aisles, but he didn’t follow. There were more people in the store than you would expect that time of the morning, and they trailed along the aisles like zombies.

I found a large diet soda and went back toward the checkout counter. I didn’t see my guy anywhere. When I got near the checkout, he was there. He suddenly came out of nowhere and pushed a case of beer onto the runner in front of me and the sleepy-looking kid behind the register checked him out while I studied the back of the guy’s head. He took his beer and left.

I paid for my diet drink and left. I drove away, and behind me I saw the lights of a car come on, and pretty soon the car was behind me. It was a good distance behind me, but I could tell it was the same car from the way the headlights were set. It was hard for him to be sneaky this late at night when the streets were damn near empty.

I decided to ride out to the edge of town, where it was dark and the roads were narrow. The car followed. I went a little more swiftly, and then I took a curve and saw a road that he couldn’t see, not yet, not until he made the curve behind me. I whipped onto that road as I cut the lights, looked back over my shoulder through the back window as he passed and went over the hill, on down to the other side.

I turned on the lights and backed down the road, back onto the highway, went the way he had gone, driving fast.

I came down the hill and saw his taillights, noticed he was slowing. He had just figured out he had been snookered. He pulled to the side of the road and sat, waiting for me to pass. Maybe he didn’t know for sure I was on to him.

I went on down the hill like I was going to pass him, but I turned off the road toward him suddenly and gave my car a little gas. I could see his eyes in the headlights, big as saucers. I hit his car with the front of mine and knocked it, flipping it over a couple of times, and the front end of my car went off in a ditch and if my old wreck had had airbags they would have popped out. But all I had in my car was a seat belt and a hope for good luck.

I sat there and looked at his car through the windshield. It was resting on its roof, rocking a little from side to side. The lights were still on and I could see him hanging upside down in his seat belt. Some of the beers he bought had busted open and were spraying and foaming about. He didn’t have air bags either. Good, I thought. I hope he busted his head on the steering wheel.

I didn’t even know the guy, but I didn’t like being followed, and I figured he had some connection to all the bullshit I was dealing with.

I put my car in reverse, and was surprised I got enough traction to back out of the ditch. I parked the car alongside the highway, turning it so that the front pointed the way I had come. I turned off the lights and pulled the key, pulled the .38, went over to his car and tugged at the upside-down door without success. I kicked at the glass in the window, but all it did was bulge. I bent down and looked at him. He had been stunned, but now he was starting to twist in the seat belt, trying to figure out how he had ended up the way he was. I hammered at the glass with the butt of the .38 and the glass popped, made a kind of gooey-looking star that spread from one end of the glass to the other. I hit it a few more times, finally got it busted out good. I reached through the window and grabbed the guy by the ear, turned his head toward me and hit him with the butt of the .38. I did that two or three times. Once or twice because he needed it, and once because I wanted to. He went out.

I had to work at it, but I got his seat belt unsnapped, and when it let him loose, I got hold of him and dragged him out of the car, cutting him on the broken window. I dropped him on the ground, still unconscious. I reached inside the car and turned off the lights, and then I killed the engine by twisting the key. I pulled the key out and threw it in the ditch.

When I turned around he was waking up. I said, “Pardner, I don’t like being followed.”

He was up on his hands and knees now. He lifted his head, said, “Go fuck yourself.”

I kicked him pretty hard in the throat, and he rolled over holding his throat and making a noise like someone trying to swallow a couple of Ping-Pong balls.

I got him by the back of his belt and dragged him up the side of the ditch and over to my car while he continued to grab at his throat. I stood back and kicked him hard in the ass. “Get up,” I said.

He got up. I watched in case he went for a gun. “I don’t want to hurt you,” I said.

He almost laughed, but his throat was too sore to give more than a kind of cough.

“I don’t want to hurt you any more than I have, but I will,” I said. “Put your hands on the trunk and spread your legs, and I’m going to put this .38 to the back of your skull with one hand and search you with the other. You make a move, you might get to see your brains jump out the front of your head before you die.”