Devil Red

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “So it all does go back to Kincaid?” I said. “He wanted revenge, so he hired Devil Red to do the deed, but Devil Red couldn’t resist leaving his mark. I guess someone killed my son and daughter, I’d feel pretty vengeful.”

  “Thing is,” Cason said, “Devil Red seems to put a lot of people to sleep, all over the country. They can’t all be people who’ve done something to the Kincaids. What Mrs. Christopher wants is whoever killed her son. She wants Devil Red, and I’m sure, if possible, she wants whoever arranged it, so the Kincaids aren’t off the hook, no matter what.”

  52

  When we arrived at my place, we were hungry. I decided on chili.

  I got a wide and deep cast-iron frying pan out from under the cabinet and put hamburger meat in it. As it fried, I black peppered it.

  Leonard cut up half an onion and a jalapeño, scraped that off the cutting board into the meat. I stirred it while he got the chili powder out of the cabinet and shook some of that in.

  I let it cook for a while, and we got soft drinks and sat at the table and smelled the chili cooking.

  “So, what do you think?” Leonard said.

  “I think Mercury is probably right,” I said. “It’s all connected, and the thing now is, how do we get enough evidence to nail Devil Red, and find a way not to nail Kincaid and Ms. Clinton.”

  “I’m not sure I care as much about them as you do,” Leonard said. “There’s something about this whole thing still bothers me. It’s like an animal called Not Quite Right crawled up my ass and is wiggling around.”

  “I thought you enjoyed that kind of thing.”

  “Wrong kind of animal.”

  “All right. How about we try to find evidence to nail Devil Red, not make an effort to stick our vengeful couple, but if things shake out that way, and we can’t keep it from happening, we let it. Him in that chair, and she his former wife, they might get off with something light.”

  “She might not have anything to do with it,” Leonard said.

  “Oh, she did somethin’, all right. She’s still in love with him. That much was easy to tell. And if anyone knows his business, it’s her.”

  “He dumped her, and she’s still moonin’ over him like a preteen,” Leonard said. “I don’t get it.”

  “I think love is hard to explain, brother.”

  “Yeah. Well, I think it’s made up.”

  “You do? What about John?”

  “I think I was attracted to him, and him to me, and we had certain things in common, both being queer was right up there, and—”

  “He made you laugh, right? That’s what everyone always says.”

  “You and Brett make each other laugh. Me and John, not so much. But I think our basic attraction created love. I think love is real, but I think it’s created, kind of like a smoothie.”

  “You are such a romantic.”

  “No. No I’m not,” Leonard said.

  The chili cooked for a long time, and we were starved when it was ready. We ate quickly, devouring huge bowls of it with crackers, and then we did seconds. Between it all, we made some general plans about going back to Houston to shake Kincaid’s and Clinton’s tree some, see we could get them to make a mistake, wiggle something out of the woodwork. It wasn’t a plan up there with Patton, but it was a plan. We had plenty of clues now, plenty of circumstantial evidence. Thing to do was to see if our knowing what we knew made them nervous.

  And then the worm turned.

  53

  Leonard had a lot of his stuff at my place, so we decided he could easily pack and go from there. Some of his clothes were dirty, though, so we put them in the washer, and while it churned, we sat and talked.

  Sometime later, Leonard moved his clothes to the dryer and put on a fresh shirt and pants. He came back from changing, said, “I’m cravin’ more of that chili.”

  “Help yourself,” I said. I was sitting on the couch with my feet on the coffee table, glancing at one of Brett’s magazines. It didn’t really have anything to do with anything I was interested in, but it killed a bit of time.

  “No more crackers,” he said.

  “Eat it without crackers.”

  “I like crackers.”

  “I like steak and baked potato, but what you have is chili, no crackers.”

  “I’m gonna go get some.”

  “You want crackers that bad?”

  “It’s the way you eat chili.”

  “You have a rule book?” I asked.

  “I know things.”

  Leonard got his coat. “And you’re out of vanilla cookies.”

  “Wow, wonder where those went.”

  Leonard put the coat on and took his deerstalker out of the pocket and put it on. I didn’t say anything, but I’m sure I sighed. Going out the door, he said, “I’ll be back in twenty or thirty.”

  “Don’t screw around,” I said. “We need to pack and get gone. We have people to irritate.”

  “I wouldn’t miss that,” he said.

  Leonard was gone about five minutes when I realized Leonard had left his wallet on the table with his cell phone, and even his pistol. The sawed-off was there too. He had taken them out of his pants when he had changed clothes. He was driven to have those crackers and cookies and he didn’t think he needed a gun to get them. A wallet with money, though. He needed that. And frankly, the idea of him being out there, and Devil Red maybe being out there, and Leonard without a gun, it unnerved me a little. I was starting to get as paranoid as Bert was.

  I got his wallet and phone and my own gun, and drove over to Wal-Mart. I knew that’s where he’d go. It’s where he always went.

  As I drove over, it started to sleet and I could see that ice was cresting the grass in yards I passed.

  When I got to the lot, I cruised around, looking for his car, and I saw it and I saw him. Leonard was in the lot walking. He had his hands in his coat pockets and his head down against the sleet.

  I saw a black SUV turn down the row of cars where Leonard was walking, and when I did, my heart sank.

  I drove faster, but the SUV was on him, and the back side window came down, and I saw a pistol poke out of it. I honked my horn at the same time Leonard was turning, reaching under his coat—

  —for nothing.

  His guns were at home, on the table.

  There was a blast of fire from the open window. Snap. Snap. Snap.

  Leonard went down.

  I pulled over quick and got out and fired at the dark-windowed SUV and the glass popped and made a spider design but didn’t break. The SUV gunned in. They came by my position. I could see a shape inside, through the open window, but my main concentration was on the gun poking out at me. I fired once and leaped over the hood of my car. A bullet scraped something and I lay down tight behind my tire, peeked out and under.

  The SUV was roaring away. I stood up and draped my gun over the roof of my car. Someone screamed. I saw a shopper pushing a cart go right behind the SUV. No shot there. No license plate either. Not that it would have mattered. They knew what they were doing. Those plates would be false.

  I screamed because I couldn’t do anything else.

  I put the gun away and ran toward Leonard.

  It seemed to take me forever to get there.

  He didn’t get up. He didn’t move.

  The lights from Wal-Mart seemed to strobe.

  54

  There are some things that happen to you that thicken the air around you until it is as heavy and as hard to penetrate as stone.

  I don’t know a better way to explain it. It’s as if air and gravity are coconspirators, pulling you down. I tried to move fast, and I suppose I was moving fast, but I felt like Brer Rabbit caught up in the tar baby. The more I struggled, the worser I got.

  My feet didn’t know how to work, and my head wasn’t thinking clearly; my brain was echoing with the sound of gunfire.

  When I got to him, he was breathing. But he was bloody, and he was bad. His stupid hat was lying nearb
y. There was a stream of blood flowing away from Leonard’s body and it was about to touch the hat. I took the hat and put it in my coat pocket.

  I said, “Leonard,” but he didn’t so much as blink.

  I touched the pulse in his throat. He was going fast.

  I stood up to see a half-dozen people standing around me. And the crowd was growing.

  A lady said, “I called nine-one-one.”

  “I hope you hit the sonofbitch,” someone in the crowd said.

  After that, it seemed as if I was down on my knees forever, holding Leonard’s head across my knees. Then there were sirens, and lights, an ambulance and cops.

  They took my gun and put me in a cop car and I sat there not able to speak, watching through the window as the ambulance with my best friend—my brother—drove away.

  They let me make a call. I called Marvin. They asked me some questions. I did my best to answer them. There wasn’t a lot to say. The cops knew me. They knew Leonard. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. And they knew Marvin.

  I went downtown, and my memory of that trip is all a haze. Finally they let me go away with Marvin. I had heard only one thing, a cop saying it to another cop, out in the hallway. It was about Leonard. He wasn’t expected to live.

  He should have had chili without crackers, I thought. Goddamn it, Leonard. If you don’t die before I get to the hospital, I’m gonna kill you. Crackers and vanilla wafers. That got you shot? Maybe killed? You sonofabitch.

  Don’t die, goddamn it, don’t die.

  Shot outside Wal-Mart. How ignoble was that? A man who had fought in a war, and had fought dozens of tough customers over the years, gunned down in a parking lot.

  “Who do you think?” Marvin said.

  “Jimson. He was mad at us from the time before. And we just saw him again.”

  “And you were not endearing.”

  “No. It was the usual.”

  “Who else is on the list?” Marvin asked.

  “Vanilla Ride, maybe. Devil Red. I don’t know. We pulled someone’s chain a little too hard this time, and someone didn’t like it, or hired someone to not like it for them. They must have been scoping us out at the house. Saw Leonard alone, thought they’d take him. Come back for me. Normally, that wouldn’t be an easy thing. But this time, it was.”

  “There’s no rhyme or reason to that sort of thing,” Marvin said.

  “They caught us apart. We’re not easy apart, but together, we’re really difficult. Except this time.”

  “Even monkeys fall out of trees,” Marvin said. “It’s not always about how good you are.”

  “Take me by the house before the hospital. I want to get something.”

  …

  Marvin parked down the street and let me out, and then he drove by, to see what he could see. I walked across two backyards and went to my back door. No one was waiting on me. I used the key and went inside.

  Upstairs, I got Brett’s little revolver and put it in my coat pocket. Simple gun. Light enough. No jams.

  Downstairs, I looked out the back window. I could see our neighbor’s fence, and nothing else.

  I went to the living room, peeled the curtain on first one window, then another. The yard was empty, except for dead grass nipped over with ice.

  I put my hand in my pocket and went outside and looked around. I didn’t see a sniper’s nest or black helicopters or Bigfoot.

  Marvin coasted up front. I got in and we went away.

  It had turned very icy by now, and we almost went off in a ditch once. But we made it.

  As I walked into the hospital, shaken to my core, the last thing I told myself was it no longer mattered what had been going on inside of me as of late, because I was past that now.

  It didn’t matter.

  It was behind me.

  Whoever did this to Leonard was going to die.

  55

  They wouldn’t let us see Leonard. He was in surgery. Me and Marvin sat in uncomfortable chairs in an overlit waiting room with a TV on without the sound and a lady wrapped up in a blanket sleeping in a chair across the way. From time to time, Marvin got up and made some calls to the cops and who knows who all.

  When he came and sat back down, I said, “Thomas and his crony aren’t out of jail, are they?”

  “First thing I thought of,” Marvin said. “Answer is no.”

  “No idea of anyone else?”

  Marvin shook his head. “Folks saw the SUV.

  Heard shots. But didn’t really see anyone, same as you. A woman got the license, but—”

  “It’s not to an SUV.”

  “That’s right. It’s not. It was stolen from a car that’s already been traced. They must have taken it off the car tonight. Quick and fast. They’ve already traded the license plate on their car back by now, tossed the other one.”

  “Shit. I should have been with him. We’re together, shit like that doesn’t happen.”

  “Of course it does. You two have just been lucky. All of us, we just been lucky. We’ve all been shot, nearly killed. Just not as bad as Leonard got tonight.”

  “I’m thinkin’ maybe Jimson,” I said. “We rode him pretty hard.”

  “Possibility.”

  “And then there’s Devil Red.”

  “Really?” Marvin said.

  “Could be. Jimson implied he knew how to contact Devil Red. Like maybe he could hire him, he wanted to. Or maybe we got Kincaid stirred when we were in Houston and he put Devil Red on us. I don’t know. Anyone say anything about finding a drawing, something with a devil head on it?”

  “No. But that might be information even my buddies wouldn’t tell me,” Marvin said. “But, if it was Devil Red, he might not leave a warning if there’s no time. Also, since the shots came from the back window, he’s got help.”

  “That could point to Jimson,” I said. “It might just be him and some of his boys.”

  Marvin was hesitant. “Well, when it comes to you two, there is a long list. Only thing I can say, it wasn’t random, and it wasn’t for robbery. They had one purpose. Shoot Leonard. And if they did that, I pretty much think you’re next.”

  It was a long time before Leonard came out of surgery. We weren’t allowed to see him then, just a glimpse as they pushed his gurney onto an elevator and took him away. He looked ashen, and when a black man looks that ashen, it’s not good, not good at all.

  The surgeon met with us in the break room a few minutes later. The surgeon’s name was Rogers and he was out of his surgery duds and wearing some loose clothes with slip-on shoes.

  We sat at a break table in plastic chairs. The room seemed too bright.

  “He’s pretty bad,” Rogers said. “He’s tough, though. I’ll tell you that. I couldn’t believe he’d taken those slugs, bled that much, and was still alive. He could even talk a little.”

  “He say who did it?” Marvin asked.

  “He asked me if we found the cookies.”

  “The cookies?” I said. “Why that silly sonofabitch. The last thing he asked about were cookies? He never even made it inside the store.”

  “He was kind of out of it. He asked about a hat too. Neither meant anything to me.”

  I smiled. Thought: That’s probably why he was shot, that hat. “Wish I could tell you he was going to be better,” Rogers said. I held my breath.

  “I can’t,” he said. “He could recover. Like I said, he’s tough. But he lost a lot of blood, lots of trauma.”

  “What kind of chance does he have?” I asked.

  “No way of really knowing,” Rogers said. “But I’d say he’s on the low end of possibilities.”

  “What’s that mean?” Marvin said.

  “This is all guesswork, gentlemen. Ten, twenty percent maybe.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said.

  “Ten, twenty percent, that’s something, though,” Rogers said. “It’s a wait-and-see situation, not a wait-for-certain-death kind of deal. And like I said, he seems to have a lot of willpower. That’s w
hat makes someone tough. Not just muscle and flesh, but willpower.”

  “He’ll make it,” I said.

  Rogers stood. “We’re doing all we can.”

  “Do all you can and more,” I said. “That’s my brother in there.”

  56

  After we talked to the surgeon, I told Marvin to go home, be with his family. I walked outside with him to his car. He opened his trunk and got out a golf club bag with clubs poking out of it. He said, “Borrow these.” I just looked at him.

  “Inside,” he said, “is a sawed-off pump shotgun, twelve-gauge. You might want to put it together.”

  “I might at that,” I said.

  I opened my trunk and he put the bag inside. “We’re on hospital camera, you know,” Marvin said.

  “I know.”

  I closed the trunk.

  I called Brett. I waited in the parking lot till she arrived. I put the golf bag in the trunk of her car. She didn’t say anything. We went up to the waiting room. We were the only ones there.

  Brett was red-faced and her eyes were red too. Her hair was tied back and her shoulders were slumped. She sat down beside me and took my hand.

  “How is he?”

  “No word,” I said. “I think the same.”

  She patted my hand.

  “I know you need to find out who did it,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I know what you’ll do when you find them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Those weren’t just golf clubs, were they?”

  “No,” I said.

  “So, how are you gonna get who did it sitting here?”

  “I want to know how he is. I want to know he’s okay.”

  “We have phones. You sitting here doesn’t change anything. You get that sonofabitch. Whatever it takes, you get him. And if you need me to help you get him, I will.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She pulled my head around and looked me directly in the eyes. “I’ll stay here. You … you have any ideas. Any way to get ideas, anyone to get ideas from, you do it. Take my car. And when you find who did this, and I know you’ll find them, show no mercy.”