Bad Chili

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “You don’t hear me propositionin’ you,” Leonard said.

  “Yeah, well, it was just the good-lookin’ ones,” Jim Bob said. “I was flattered, but I don’t swing that way. But hell, I played the game a little. There was even one with a fat ass and a funny hat I might have had a fantasy or two about.”

  “Cut the shit,” Leonard said. “Get on with it.”

  “I’m doin’ this for a while, then this Raul shows up. He’s with Horse. I start seein’ him around. It don’t mean nothin’ until I go to the park one night with my standard queer duds on—”

  “What are standard queer duds?” Leonard said. “Do I look like I got on standard queer duds?”

  “Well, I don’t know what you got on underneath,” Jim Bob said.

  “You’re startin’ to fuck with me,” Leonard said. “I don’t like it.”

  “Like it or don’t like it,” Jim Bob said. “There’s a way most of them fellas dress. I ain’t puttin’ ’em down for it, but they dress a certain way, ’specially if they’re tryin’ to get their cable up a butt. I dressed way I seen them dress. And it worked. So there.”

  Leonard leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed. He looked as if he could eat ground glass and chew nails.

  Jim Bob said, “I’m tryin’ to connect with these fucks beat up Custer Stevens, so I’m roamin’ the park day and night, and one night this fella, a good-sized fella, comes up to me and makes with the come-on.

  “I’m thinkin’, now, if this guy just wants to play and I lead him on, I’m gonna feel kinda silly when it gets to the part where I’m supposed to swing my rope, but I play along, and this guy leads me to a spot, and these guys come out of the bushes on me. I had to give a couple of them an attitude adjustment with my blackjack.”

  Jim Bob suddenly produced the blackjack from his back pocket and slapped it into his palm. “Couple of shots from this and it’s lights out and a headache in the mornin’. Them fuckers bolted. When they did, I seen there was someone else runnin’, some fuck in the bushes. I chased after him. He had a video camera. I was closin’ on him when this guy—one led me into ambush in the first place—caught up with me and jumped me. It was the fella I shot to hell last night. White guy with the moon craters. I wrestled that fuck all over the park, got him in a step-over-toe hold, and cranked on that baby a while.”

  Jim Bob replaced his blackjack, sucked more beer, continued.

  “By this time his buddies, ones weren’t unconscious, got their shit together, and one of them had a gun, and I hadn’t brought mine, and I knew that was my cue to go to the house. So I darted, and they let me dart. I made it to my car, and what do I see as I’m jettin’ away from the park? The guy with the video camera, and he’s gettin’ on the back of this Harley, and ole Horse is drivin’, and you got one guess who this video man was.”

  “Raul,” Leonard said.

  “On the nosey,” Jim Bob said. “They were videotapin’ this shit for their pleasure. Or, to be more precise, for money.”

  “Raul was the cameraman?” I said.

  “You betcha,” Jim Bob said.

  I watched Leonard’s face do a series of moves, then settle.

  I turned back to Jim Bob. “Did you know these tapes were going underground to video stores?”

  “Having encountered similar things before,” Jim Bob said, “I sort of put it together. And it didn’t take a genius to figure the folks I had my little tadoo with in the park were the ones beat the Stevens kid up and that Horse and Raul were connected. I followed them. And later I followed them some more. Sometimes one, sometimes both.”

  “I guess all that watchin’ got you connected to me and Hap,” Leonard said.

  “Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “And I found out Raul went out to King Arthur’s place to cut hair, and later to his plant. And then all this shit starts comin’ down, and I get to puttin’ it all together, tryin’ to make a case I can give the cops, and guess what. I lose track a bit, next thing I know Horse gets his head blown off and Raul disappears.”

  “And what did our intrepid investigator deduce from all this?” I asked.

  “I figured Leonard done ’em both in. I figured I had to follow that part of the story too, you know, construct the whole picture. So I come here and I see you come out of the house, Hap. I been spot-checkin’ you two ever since. You got good taste in nurses, Hap.”

  “Leave her out of this,” I said.

  “Nothing raw meant,” Jim Bob said.

  “Charlie knew all this?” Leonard asked.

  “Nope,” Jim Bob said. “I didn’t keep Charlie informed. I got the original info from him, then I was on my own. I didn’t even know he knew you two until after Horse bought his ticket. I seen him talkin’ to you then. And I talked to him yesterday some.”

  “When did you decide I wasn’t the killer?” Leonard asked.

  “When the cops decided you weren’t,” Jim Bob said.

  “But still you followed?” I said.

  “That’s right,” Jim Bob said. “I didn’t know exactly what I was followin’, but I was followin’. I was checkin’ other leads too. You guys weren’t the only ones. You’re lucky I was followin’ last night.”

  “And why were you?” I asked.

  “I thought it was time you and me met, talked,” Jim Bob said. “I realized we were after the same thing—folks behind all this shit. I thought I’d talk to you, then Leonard. I was on my way to your place when Big Man Mountain passed me in the Impala and I seen you in the back. And you didn’t look like you were on your way to the skatin’ rink. I turned around, followed, and you know the rest.”

  “Bottom line,” Leonard said. “What’s this all about?”

  “What do you figure?” Jim Bob said. “I’ve showed you mine, now show me yours.”

  Leonard looked at me. I nodded. Leonard said, “We figure King Arthur has some thugs who are stealin’ grease, and Horse gets in with these thugs as an undercover cop. He takes some secret video of King Arthur’s men stealing grease and they want it back. Then there’s this other video of the stuff like happened to your client in the park. I guess Horse and Raul found out about that business by accident, then dealt themselves in. Even started helping make the videos. Christ! I thought I knew Raul.”

  “Shit,” I said, “that’s the whole story right there, isn’t it? Horse started out investigating, then got in on a better end of the business. Grease-napping was the sort of thing he’d turn in, but this other thing, the video business, he could make some real money there. He dove in and went to work for the bad guys. They said anything, he could turn them in and just say he was workin’ undercover, playin’ them along. He had them over a barrel.”

  “In summation,” Leonard said, “we ended up with a couple videotapes and a notebook full of coded stuff.”

  “All right,” Jim Bob said. “That’s interesting. It may not mean what you think, though.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Look here,” Jim Bob said. “You got to see things through. You take flyin’ saucers, for instance.”

  “Flyin’ saucers?” Leonard said.

  “Yeah,” Jim Bob said, “for instance. Guy goes out at night, sees somethin’ in the sky he don’t recognize, he starts talkin’ about UFOs. And he’s right. He did see an Unidentified Flying Object, but that’s all he saw. UFO doesn’t mean flyin’ saucer, spacecraft. It means somethin’ unidentified. But way most people think is they see something they don’t know, next thing is they’re sayin’ they saw a flyin’ saucer, when in fact they don’t know what they saw. Might be a flyin’ saucer, might be God moon’n’ us, but they don’t know. It’s a jump they’ve made.”

  “You’re sayin’ we’re jumpin’ conclusions?” I said.

  “I’m sayin’ you could be,” Jim Bob said. “Or rather I’m sayin’ you could just have part of the story. Know what else it could be?”

  Leonard sounded solemn as a reverend preaching his mother’s funeral. “Could be Raul and Horse Dic
k decided to blackmail King Arthur about the videos he was makin’. Ones they helped make.”

  “Bingo,” Jim Bob said.

  “No shit!” I said.

  “No shit,” Jim Bob said. “Horse still has the undercover connection, King can’t say anything to the cops ’cause he’ll get nailed, and he can’t really do anything legal to Horse, ’cause Horse can do what you said, claim it was all part of his undercover sting.”

  Leonard said, “I figure Raul and Horse decided to mail that package to my mailbox. Thought they were safe long as they had that. But they were wrong. Whoever they were blackmailing decided to eliminate the blackmailers, take the pressure off, then all they had to do was find the blackmail items.”

  “That’s right,” Jim Bob said. “They snooped around. Didn’t come up with the business, decided you guys had a connection, took a flyer and toted Hap out to the woods for a few bouts with a battery and a ball bat.”

  “And they still don’t have what they want,” Leonard said.

  “But they still want it,” I said.

  Jim Bob nodded and sipped the rest of his beer. “That’s about the size of it,” he said.

  22

  I managed a shower to give myself some perk, put back on my clothes, and Jim Bob drove me out to my house. Leonard rode with us. Leonard had armed himself with a little .38 revolver that he wore in a clamshell holster. He had his shirttail out, as usual, so the little pistol was not visible unless you were looking for it.

  Jim Bob, equipped with his twelve-gauge, opened the front door and led the way inside. Leonard went in the back, I went after Jim Bob.

  The place was empty. The back door had been jimmied and the door was completely off the hinges. That was how they had gotten in after parking the Impala out back.

  I hadn’t noticed it the other night, probably because my concentration was mostly on Big Man’s knee in my face, but the house had been tossed from one end to the other.

  “Maybe they know about my old place too,” Leonard said. “We ought to get over there.”

  We went. Inside, his house looked the same. No footprints in the dust. Everything in its place. Leonard pulled the couch from the wall and reached up in the rip and removed the metal container. He opened it. The video and the King Arthur Chili pad were there. He had brought the video we bought from the store in Houston, and he added that to the box and took it with him.

  We drove back to my place and Leonard and Jim Bob helped me set the door back on the hinges. We found the hinge pins they had knocked out lying in the backyard. We shoved those back in. The door hung a little crooked, and when it closed it bulged some at the lock, but at least it closed.

  I went in the bedroom, opened my nightstand drawer. My .38 revolver was still there, along with a box of shells. I changed into a clean shirt and pants, got the revolver out of the drawer and made sure there wasn’t a load under the hammer. I put the .38 in my waistband, took a handful of shells, poured them into my pants pocket. It’s a good thing I was out of grenades, because I wouldn’t have known where to wear them.

  We talked a little about this and that, and Jim Bob gave us the number of the Holiday Inn where he was staying. He drove off, and Leonard took the videos and the notebook out of the box and stuffed them in a couple of plastic bags and put them back in the metal file box. He got my shovel and went into the woods while I straightened the house. He was going to the Robin Hood tree, to bury the file box. Good idea.

  About an hour later he came back and helped me finish straightening up the living room. While we worked, I said, “How’d it go?”

  “The ground was hard,” he said.

  We finished up and I made some coffee. Leonard and I sat down at the kitchen table with our cups. I said, “What do you think?”

  Leonard shook his head. “I don’t know. I think it’s like I said, like what Jim Bob thinks. Raul and Horse Dick tried to blackmail King Arthur and lost their lives for it.”

  “Blackmail,” I said. “That seems kind of intense. I always thought Raul was, as you say, a little shallow, but blackmail?”

  “I look back on things, I think maybe it’s his style. It’s not something you really see close-up, or want to see, but now I feel like a fool. One of the things hardest to figure in life, and you may have been the one told me this, but there’s this person you meet who seems intelligent, you know, has a common awareness of things, but when you get right down to it, they’ve got no real depth. They’re less than what you see. I was beginning to realize that about Raul. Not that it helped much.”

  “Does it change how you feel about him?”

  “Things changed the minute he started hanging out with Horse Dick. I started to understand things about him I didn’t like. Worse, I got to understand some things about myself. Like maybe I’m not quite the tough guy I thought I was. I still love the guy, but it’s mostly in memory. I got to say this, though, he was a hell of a sight tougher than I imagined. That’s a side of him I didn’t know.”

  “You mean the business with the battery? The ball bat?”

  Leonard nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Could be he was just tryin’ to hang on to life,” I said. “Knew he told where stuff was, it was all over. Person will take a lot of pain to live as long as they can. It isn’t necessarily brave, it’s desperate. Guy like Raul, he might have thought no matter how much pain he went through, eventually they were gonna let him go. You know, like when you’re a kid in the school yard and the bully holds you down and roughs you up, but you figure at some point he’s got to quit.”

  “Hell, Hap. Let’s just say he had guts.”

  “All right,” I said. “He had guts. But knowing what you know now, can you let it go? It’s not really our place, this judge-and-jury business.”

  “Don’t forget executioner.”

  “I was trying to skip that part.”

  “Way I see it, you take Raul out of the equation, these fucks have screwed my house up, they’ve tried to torture and kill my best friend—”

  “Wasn’t no try about it. You ought to see my balls.”

  “No, thanks. You wouldn’t look at my tick, so I’m not looking at your wounds. . . . What I think is, take ’em out. The law’s got itself all balled up, so we got to do it. Charlie, he can only do so much. King Arthur, he’s a man with money and thugs. He does what he wants, unless we get rid of him.”

  “Too much for me.”

  “After what they did to you?”

  “I don’t want to be like them, Leonard. I keep telling you that.”

  “Trust me. You aren’t like them.”

  I sipped my coffee, studied the sky through the kitchen window. I said, “What about Jim Bob?”

  “I think he’s a dick, but I trust him.”

  “He’s a friend of Charlie’s. Charlie sees something in him, guess we got to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “He’s full of himself, though.”

  “There’s that,” I said. “But let me tell you, he can do what he says he can do. You should have seen him take those two guys out, and ole Big Man, he knew the fucker wasn’t kiddin’. He beat a retreat right off. He’d been about a fraction slower, you could have strained strawberries through him. And I tell you, Big Man, he isn’t a shrinking violet. He told me how when he was wrestling he used to charge himself up with a shot from a generator and a battery.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” Leonard said. “Wrestlers, they’re showmen.”

  “Hey, I believe him. You haven’t been face to face with the guy. He’s some kind of seriously sincere scary, babe. That’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you. What I think is we ought to turn over the videos and the notebook to Charlie. He does the best he can, and we’re out of it.”

  “I know how his best will turn out,” Leonard said.

  “He’s a good man,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said, “but without Hanson around, and the chief having his dick in more holes than we can imagine, it’ll get bur
ied. I don’t want it to get buried.”

  “Shit,” I said. “I can’t believe how fucked up I am.”

  “What?” Leonard said.

  “I’m sittin’ here like I’m on holiday, and Big Man, he threatened Brett. Come on, let’s get over to the hospital.”

  * * *

  I drove us there and we went inside and up the elevator to the floor where Brett worked. I talked to a guy in a white jacket pushing a food cart, but he didn’t know Brett from Eisenhower.

  We went to the nurses’ station and I asked a pretty black nurse if she knew Brett, and she did, and she pointed down the hall. A big heavy black nurse, who must have been head of operations, caught the tail end of our conversation and gave me a dirty look. I tried my charming smile on her. She didn’t seem to like it much. She touched her nurse’s hat as if it might have a razor edge and that she might whip it off at any moment and throw it at me.

  I knew it wasn’t wise to mess around Brett’s job like this, put her on the spot, but I had to talk to her. Had to tell her what kind of bad position I had put her in. As usual, just knowing me was causing someone I cared about pain.

  I looked around as we went down the hall, nervous as hell, half expecting Big Man to come out of a sickroom with a battery and generator under one arm, a ball bat under the other.

  At the end of the corridor I saw Brett come out of a room, look in my direction, double-take, smile, then walk toward us.

  “That her?” Leonard said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Looks your type,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  But there wasn’t time for him to answer. Brett was in front of us. I could tell she was looking over my shoulder, back at the nurses’ station.

  She said, “Hap. Good to see you. But I’m working right now.”

  “I know,” I said. “This is Leonard Pine.”

  She smiled at Leonard. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Leonard said.