“I’m having an apple fritter,” I said.
“Okay,” Leonard said. “Danish and fritters, but if you’ve got something to say besides I’m sorry and let me buy you coffee, then let’s move on. Me and Hap are busy men. We got places to go, things to do, and people to see.”
“Not really,” I said. “Our day is pretty open.”
Leonard gave me a sour face.
“I’ll pay you to help me out,” Kelly said.
“We talking about moving a piano?” Leonard said.
“No,” he said. “We’re talking about maybe you having to rough someone up.”
“First off,” Leonard said. “Why? And how much?”
“It’s my brother, Donnie. He’s in deep doo-doo,” Kelly said.
“What kind of doo-doo?” I asked.
“He got in with these fellas that rob armored cars,” Kelly said.
We all sat there for a moment and let that statement hang between us like a carcass.
“This is starting to sound like doo-doo that’s too deep,” I said.
“It’s deep all right,” Kelly said. “He’s only twenty-one. Good kid, really.”
“Except for wanting to rob an armored car,” I said. “I would consider that possibly a blemish on his character.”
Kelly nodded.
I said, “He’s twenty-one, you’re like, what thirty? You guys are some years apart, aren’t you?”
“Thirty-one, and yeah, he was like a surprise,” Kelly said. “Dad wasn’t all that good about hanging around anyway, but that little surprise, Donnie, it was more than he could handle. He took the car out for an oil change, and just kept going.”
“So what’s this got to do with me?” Leonard asked.
“You know that robbery took place in LaBorde last year, the armored car guards at the bank?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Leonard said. “They got the guards when they were transporting the money out of the bank to the truck. Just walked up with masks on and had guns and locked the guards in the back of the truck. It was maybe, what, two hundred thousand dollars they got?”
“About four hundred thousand,” Kelly said. “They must have had someone waiting that drove up, picked them up and took them away. No one knows. All they know is they were there with Halloween masks on one minute, then they had the money, and then they were gone. That was it. Took the guard’s guns and put the guards in the back of the armored car and put plastic cuffs on them. Fastened one cuff to their left ankle, one to their right wrist. Then had them put an arm behind their back and fixed it there and pulled the plastic down to the other ankle, linked it from behind. That way they couldn’t move well, damn sure couldn’t run.”
“That’s cute,” I said.
“Was your brother one of them?” Leonard asked.
“No, but I think he’s about to be.”
“And, pray tell, why do you think that?” I asked.
“Because in his room he’s got some articles about the heist,” he said.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Leonard said. “Hap has books about Satan, but he ain’t a Satanist. At least, as far as we know.”
“Those damn books and that rap music,” I said. “They can change a man.”
Kelly ignored me. Sometimes it’s all you can do. He said, “Yeah, but Donny, he has these friends come around, and they lock themselves in the back room for hours. I know they’re smoking dope. I can smell it. But what I really worry about is I think these friends are the robbers and they want to pull my brother in.”
“That’s a big guess,” I said. “Any reason to have it?”
“These guys, they’re a real tough bunch,” Kelly said. “And as you can tell, I’m not so tough.”
“You take a good fall, though,” Leonard said.
“You still don’t have any serious reason we should believe your brother is about to be part of a robbery.”
“I heard them talking. I was sort of sneaking around, and I heard them say they needed a driver. The guy talking was the one Donny calls Smoke Stack. That’s the name they all call him. I guess cause he smokes all the time. I don’t allow it in the house, but he smokes anyway. I asked him not to once, and he just lit up and smiled at me, went in the back room with Donny. Hell, even Donny is tougher than me. He grew up different. He grew up tough. I can almost guarantee you these guys are going to rob another armored car, and they’re going to pull Donny into it.”
“Still a little lame,” I said. “But, if you think you got something, go to the police. We know the chief over there. I’m not sure he likes us, but he did get some humor out of the photos of your buddy with his head through the sheet rock. So right this minute, he sees Leonard as a comedian.”
“I go to the police, they’re going to run Donny in, and he’s a good kid, really. He was living at home, and our Mom died. A heart attack. She was overweight, didn’t take care of herself. Went to hell after our dad ran off with another woman and went up North somewhere. She died, I moved back home. But I wasn’t able to do it right away. I had a job in Austin, and I had to find another one up this area. I work at the University, doing janitor work.”
“What did you do before?” I asked.
“I was a computer specialist, and I made half a mil a year. Now, I got just enough to buy gas for the car and bread for the table. I kind of thought Donny wasn’t doing so good and needed me here. Last time I saw him, before Mom died, I could tell he was making some bad decisions. But the bottom line is these friends of his. I don’t like them, and I’m sure they’re the guys.”
“That’s your instinct?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Leonard said, “instinct is all right, but it can be you telling yourself something and thinking you’re enlightened. Gut instinct tells people to believe lots of things, and most of them are wrong. And, Kelly, this isn’t our problem. It’s a police problem.”
He shook his head. “No. The police pick up Donny, his life is ruined.”
“He robs an armored car, a bank, he might get a bullet through his head,” Leonard said. “That ruins things too.”
“Yeah, that can cut a career short,” I said.
“Last night, I went to that bar looking for help. I didn’t tell the details to those guys, but I said I was looking for someone could do a little rough house work. Those guys were recommended to me by a fellow I know. And then there was that whole thing about one of them calling you a name, and it all getting started…I think they started it just to show me how tough they were. Next thing I knew, I was in it with them, you know, part of the pack, and then I’m down, and one guy’s got his head through the sheet rock, and you’re chasing the other guy outside. And you’re older than them.”
“Watch it,” Leonard said.
“All I’m saying is, after I saw that, I decided maybe you were the guy instead of them.”
“I don’t know,” Leonard said.
“Donny, he really looks up to this Smoke Stack. He wants to impress him. The guy’s got muscles on muscles and he’s just mean. Just mean.”
“The gut instinct again?” Leonard said.
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Leonard said, “in cases like that, the gut is often right. We still know a shark when we see one. That’s why we crawled out of the water and became men in the first place. Only thing is, some of the sharks crawled out after us.”
“That would be the lawyers,” I said.
“I told Smoke Stack and his buddies not to come back, but it doesn’t matter,” Kelly said. “They come around anyway, and if they don’t, Donny goes to meet them. Him being twenty-one, I can’t legally tell him squat.”
“You wouldn’t know where he goes to meet them, would you?” I asked.
“No,” Kelly said. “And I’m embarrassed to tell you, I’m afraid to follow. I’m afraid they’ll catch me. I think Smoke Stack and those guys would do anything.”
“What about the other guys, his pals.”
“Three of
them. They’re followers. It’s Smoke Stack runs the program, that’s easy to see. I don’t know their names, anything about them. Hell, I don’t really know anything about Smoke Stack.”
“Say we looked into it, found Donny was just smoking dope, or maybe he was selling drugs. What then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you can discourage him. It’s such a mess. I wanted to be a big brother to him, but he doesn’t care what I think. This Smoke Stack, I think he’s like a tough father figure. And he looks like he could wad up a wrench. Again, I think he’s like a father for Donny.”
“Fathers just need to be tough in will,” I said. “It don’t hurt if they can bend a tire tool over their knee, but it’s not part of the job description.”
“Yeah,” Kelly said, “but Donny doesn’t know that. Look, really. He’s a good kid. He’s just got to get straight. He gets into this, his life is ruined. I got some money. It’s from my savings, saved up before I moved here. I’ll give you ten thousand apiece.”
I looked at Leonard. He sighed.
I said, “Look, for right now, hang onto your money. Let us think about it, maybe look things over, and then, if we think we can help, we’ll talk. If not, we’ll still talk. But you might not like the conversation.”
“Sure,” Kelly said. “Sure, that’s all right. That’s good.”
THAT AFTERNOON, WE went over to the gym to work out. Our gym sucks. It’s small and it’s hot and it has a small mat room. The mat is thin as paper and smells like sweaty feet. The owner isn’t someone who is much into gym work himself. He’s a guy with a physique akin to a rubber apple. He sits on a stool by the door so he can get some wind from outside, meaning there’s no air conditioning. The door’s always open, except dead of winter. Flies are always fluttering about.
He sits there to check memberships. The only advantage his gym has is his memberships are cheap, and he’s not that far from the house. The only conversation I remember having with him was him saying, “That’ll be thirty dollars a month, apiece.”
But, it’s all right. We bring our own gloves when we spar. When we spar we use fists a lot, but in real situations I like to use an open hand along with fists. You can use open hands with the gloves we have, but we’re friends, and that kind of business can sometimes be worse than fists. Nothing says, “Oh, shit,” like sticking a finger in your buddy’s eye.
We moved around a little, flicking punches, throwing kicks. We were gym fighting, not really fighting. The two should never be confused. The first is like a swim in a heated pool, the other is like being dropped into a stormy, shark-infested ocean.
So, we were moving around, getting a work out, popping each other a little, and I said, “You believe him?”
“I don’t know,” Leonard said, pausing a little, putting his hands on his hips, taking a deep breath. “Maybe. A story like that, it’s so stupid it’s bound to have some reality about it. I mean, a guy has a problem with his younger brother hanging with thugs that might be bank robbers, so he goes into a bar to get someone to beat the robbers up.”
“You think that’s all he wanted?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he wants us to do something more permanent with these guys.”
“That, I don’t want to do.”
“We may not need to. Here’s the thing, Hap. I think the guy is serious about being worried about his brother, but maybe we can look into it and solve it better than him. We don’t, he’s going to hire someone like that guy I left in the parking lot. Then things will turn messy, and before it’s over Kelly and his brother both might go to prison.”
“Usually, you’re talking me out of stupid shit
like this.”
“Does it ever work?”
“Not so much. This guy got to you a little,
didn’t he?”
“A little.”
We moved around some more. Leonard hit me a good snap on the forehead. I hooked low, then switched to an overhand right and caught him on the cheek.
He said, “Ouch, I’ve had enough for the day. That was right on my wound.”
“That was your cheek,” I said.
“I don’t mean the taped part of my head, I mean the bruise. I am so wonderfully black you just can’t see it.”
“If you say so.”
There was no place to take a shower, and as part of our workout, we had jogged from my house, into town and to the gym.
As we jogged back to my place, I said, “We can check into things, see the lay of the land. If it’s not lying right, and we don’t like it, we can step out. Call the law if we choose.”
“Then we’ll have some explaining to do.”
“We say we thought the guy was full of it, and just wanted us to straighten his brother out.”
“You think these guys really are bank robbers?” Leonard said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Anything is possible. Say they are robbers. Kid comes along, they see a new recruit. Someone to drive the car is my guess. They start buttering him up with all their King Robber stories, tell him how he’ll be rich and his own man, that kind of stuff. The kid, not having a father around and his mother dead, his brother not being around before, maybe not having the relationship they could have had, Donny’s ripe for bad business.”
“Sure, it could be like that.”
We jogged along, silent for awhile. I could tell Leonard was thinking things over, and I let him.
Finally, I said, “So, are we going to check it out?”
“Say we take it easy. We determine if the kid really is in trouble. If these guys really are robbers, and if there’s anything we can do about it without getting locked up. I reckon we ought to do that much.”
“That’s how it is then,” I said, and we bumped fists.
WE GOT OUR friend Marvin Hanson to come in with us. He runs a private investigation agency, and he was once a cop. Sometimes we work for him. Last job we did was simple and we didn’t get paid because the client didn’t like the outcome. He didn’t pay Marvin so Marvin couldn’t pay us.
Because of that, Marvin owed us a favor.
We had him meet Kelly. We had him watch Kelly and Donny’s house, see where the kid went, and when he went, and if he went with some guys that looked tough.
When he finished a shift, I took over, and then Leonard took over. We had been at this for a couple of days. We were posted down from the house twenty-four seven, near an empty soccer field with grown up grass and missing goal nets.
So, it was Marvin’s watch, and I was home with Brett, and we were upstairs in bed reading, and Leonard was snoozing on the couch downstairs, having finished his shift watching Kelly’s place not too long back. I put the Western I was reading down, glanced at the clock. Twelve midnight.
I was about to turn in, get some sleep before I went on at eight a.m., and the door bell dinged. I don’t like it when the door bell dings that late.
I got my automatic out of the drawer by the night stand, and Brett got her revolver.
“I’ll check,” I said. “Leonard’s down there, and if it’s anything nasty, you call the cops.”
I went downstairs, but the door was already open. Leonard was letting in Marvin.
I said, “Man, that was a short shift.”
“Yeah,” Marvin said.
Marvin has a limp and a cane. He was quick to find a chair. He took off his hat, which had once belonged to a friend of ours, and rested it on his knee. He said, “Things went a way I thought maybe you ought to know about.”
“SO, ABOUT NINE-THIRTY I’m sitting in the car, thinking I’d like to be home in bed with the wife, when I see a car pull up at the curb. Four guys get out. One of them looks like he lifts weights. Lots of weights, big weights, heavy weights.”
“That would be the loveable Smoke Stack.”
“Yeah, for all that muscle business, he’s smoking like the proverbial smoke stack.”
“Oh, Marvin,” I said. “That is good. Him smoking like a smoke stack and having the name Smok
e Stack. You are so clever.”
“Yep. They go around back, and then coming back from around the house I see all of them again, and this younger guy that I figure is Donny. They got in the car, tight as coins in a miser’s wallet, and drive away. I followed. They went out to the warehouse district, and I went with them, but sneaky-like. They never saw me. They went down where the rentals are. It’s one of those cheap places. No cameras, no security gate. You just drive in and take your padlock off your shed. I couldn’t follow them in, so I drove across the street and looked. I could see through the fence and I could see them park, and I could see which storage building they opened. I could see a car in there. An older car, a muscle car. Something that could run like a spotted ass ape if needed.”
“Ah, the old spotted ass ape,” Leonard said. “How fast do they run?”
“They are very fast,” Marvin said. “So, they’re there awhile with the door pulled shut, and I could see they had a light on because it was shining under a crack at the bottom of the door.”
“That is some of that ace detective work you’re famous for,” I said.
“My guess is, if they’re planning a robbery, that storage shed is their villains’ lair.”
“Probably has a basement in there, test tubes and shit,” Leonard said. “It’s like the evil Fortress of Solitude.”
“I got another guess too,” Marvin said. “When the other robbery went down, the one with the guards, about a month later they found a guy in a car out in the woods with a bullet through his head. He’d been dead for awhile. At the time it was unexplained. Just a random murder. But, I been thinking maybe the dead guy was their getaway man. And when he got them away, they put him away. My guess is Donny is next on the list. They get some young guy doesn’t know squat, they use him for the robbery, for the driving, then they pop him and the cut is bigger. Next time they got plans, they recruit again. Each new driver doesn’t know about the other. It works until the word gets out they’re finding lots of dead people in stolen cars with false license plates.”
“So Donny is just a tool for them to use and then destroy,” I said.
“That’s my guess. Another thing, I followed them after they left the warehouse. They didn’t take Donny home. They drove him to a house on the edge of town. Most of the block there is burned out, and beyond it the town quits and the woods start. It’s a rundown place where the back acres have been sawed over by pulp wood workers. I parked there for a little while, then drove to the warehouse and got closer to the building they were in. It’s number fifteen. Then I came here. I could go back and finish my shift, but I don’t know I need to now.”
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