Vanilla Ride cap-7

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Leonard finally broke the silence, said, “You know that was stupid, letting them live?”

  “I do. But I think I have to draw the line somewhere.”

  “You draw the line on them but you’re traveling all the way to Arkansas to kill Vanilla Ride.”

  “It seems a little more personal.”

  “I see them all as one big nest.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, but I guess I’ve decided to focus my anger all on one, the one put the bomb under the car and killed Tonto and those kids and gave us a stay in the hospital.”

  “All right,” Leonard said. “But you know those guys aren’t through with us.”

  “Yep.”

  “We’ll deal with them again.”

  “Yep.”

  “I thought Conners was at the top of our list. You said to put stars by his name.”

  “Yep.”

  “So why didn’t we just nip it in the bud?”

  “I’ve tried my best to explain.”

  “And your explanation sucks.”

  “I just couldn’t shoot them out of their chairs like that, in cold blood.”

  “What if Vanilla Ride is sitting in a chair?”

  “I’ll ask her to stand up.”

  “You’ll be killing a woman.”

  “She may be of that gender, but she’s no woman to me. I’m not even sure she’s human. Conners and Sykes do it for money, and Vanilla Ride gets paid, but, man, I got a feeling she loves that stuff. She liked baiting Tonto along like that, getting him to the point where he thought he was gonna get him a piece, and then, wham, he’s out of there. That’s cold, brother. And those kids.”

  “I still don’t see a difference. She took the money. In the end, it’s all about money and they all want the money.”

  “Maybe, Leonard, truth is, in the end, there’s no difference at all. Them. Us. We’re all killers, and in the end, the worms sort us out.”

  There was no real address for Vanilla Ride, just the P.O. box Conners had told us about, and the rest of the address was a town called Sylvester, Arkansas. What I had in mind was staking out the post office, waiting till she came to collect her mail. It wasn’t exactly a plan up there with Robert E. Lee, but then again, it was me and Leonard. We’re not dumb, but strategy is not our long suit.

  It was about three hours to Arkansas, and it was still night when we got there, and we stopped at a station and put more gas in the car and checked our map to make sure we were heading the right way, then pushed on, like Mounties after our man, or in this case, our woman.

  Daylight was breaking as we drove into the mountains amongst the trees, and there was a light frost on our windshield. The roads grew narrow, the trees thickened. Leonard rolled down the window to get some air, to keep himself alert, so as not to drive off a cliff. He let it blow cold on his face for a while, then touched the electric window button and sent it up. I looked ahead at the sun-stained road and the countryside and listened to the hum of the heater.

  51

  Sylvester looks almost unreal, a kind of holdout from frontier days, but the truth is it isn’t all that old. It was founded some fifty years ago and built to resemble a frontier town, and they’ve kept it that way. Traffic was pretty intense for a place that claimed twenty thousand people, but the traffic would be the tourists, because there’s a nice lake nearby with plenty of fish and the scenery is beautiful. It’s the kind of place people come to rest and not Jet-Ski or mountain-climb or party all night. There are a few restaurant clubs, and from what I could see they catered to the older set as well. We parked and headed toward the post office. I read on a sign for a place called the Buckin’ Horse Saloon that it opened at four for dinner, had entertainment, and closed at ten. If the horse bucked, it did it quietly and at reasonable hours.

  At the post office, which was one open window commanded by an old man in a plaid shirt with a postal name tag (Jake), I bought a stamp for our bright blue envelope and mailed it. We walked around the post office and saw there were rows and rows of mailboxes with thick glass windows in them so you could see when you got mail, and finally we located the one that went with our envelope.

  “All right,” Leonard said. “She has to come here.”

  “Except she won’t,” I said.

  “Surrogate?”

  “Of course. She’d be too easy to find otherwise. Why do you think I got that bright blue envelope?”

  “Ah, but what if she gets lots of mail and whoever picks it up mixes it with other envelopes, and we’re watching from a distance. What if it’s night?”

  “Oh. Well, I didn’t think about that.”

  Leonard sighed. “Guess we got what we got.”

  We walked across the street to a hotel and Leonard stayed outside to watch the post office while I went inside. At the desk I talked the clerk into giving us a window facing the street, so we could enjoy the view, and then I took Leonard’s spot on the sidewalk and he walked back to the car for our little bit of supplies.

  For the next week we hung out in that hotel room, looking at the post office out the window, hoping we’d be able to spot the blue envelope come out in someone’s hot little hands. From time to time one of us would walk over to the post office and look through the little window of her mailbox, and we could see the blue envelope was there, waiting, and no one had been in to get it.

  We took shifts so one or the other could go out and buy food. We also bought underwear and we didn’t shave, under the odd notion that maybe if Vanilla Ride saw us she wouldn’t recognize us unshaved. It was lame, but again, it was what we had.

  First day we were there we started seeing some interesting-looking guys showing up at the post office, watching for what we were watching for, I guess. But had they been smart enough to send her a brightly colored envelope? I thought not.

  They couldn’t hang around the place any more than us, but they did get a room in, you guessed it, our hotel. I passed one of them, a lean, greasy-haired fellow, on my way out to pick up some sandwiches. He was sitting in the lobby, and when he saw me, he watched me go out, and I didn’t let him know I was watching him. Across the street, in front of the post office, another guy sat in a car, getting out now and then to feed quarters into the parking meter. He was tall and fat, with very little hair on his head. Sometimes he moved the car and parked elsewhere, but he was always parked so he could see the post office. I guess the other two were out buying sandwiches and underwear, same as us. But they all swapped out from time to time, and it was my guess they weren’t lawmen and they weren’t from the IRS and I doubted they were the men in black since their wardrobes were varied. All I was certain of was I had seen four of them over a period of time.

  Back in the room with our sandwiches, Leonard said, “You know, this sucks. Those guys were sent here from Conners, and had we put a hole in his head, him and his fat friend, we’d be sitting here without contention, except for Vanilla Ride herself. But now, thanks to you, we got her and them.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Hell, yeah, I mind,” I said. “But I did what I could do, Leonard. That’s it. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s my flawed nature.”

  Leonard shook his head and patted me on the shoulder. “I love my little idealist. In a gay sort of manly way, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Look at it this way: if we’d killed those two, you wouldn’t have to kill these four. Or, worse yet, get killed by them.”

  “You are a goddamn sage, Leonard.”

  52

  One day we’re in the hotel room, looking out the window, having sucked down too much coffee, my personal plumbing backed up to where my insides felt like a brick factory, and I’m thinking a little fruit juice might be good, when Leonard, who is nibbling around the edges of a vanilla cookie, said, “These guys, they here for us or Vanilla Ride?”

  “Maybe both,” I said. “Could be they’ve decided she needs to go too. Maybe because she has
n’t returned the money.”

  “You think she’ll keep it?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s her plan. I think she’s a professional. But I also think the people she’s dealing with are falling apart. The talent they’ve sent out has cost them big-time, and it would probably be nice to get the money back, but they want us because we’re a couple of amateurs who have survived everything they’ve got, including Vanilla Ride. My guess is they haven’t paid her because she didn’t finish the job, because we didn’t die, and now she’s got their money on top of having not wiped us out.”

  “She’s got more money than they think,” Leonard said.

  “That too.”

  “So, Hirem lied about the amount of money, which was probably because there was extra he was going to give the Mummy and his friend to make sure his son got a good deal with the FBI, and then they got whacked, and then we got the money, and then Vanilla Ride got the money, and she’s thinking, well, they don’t pay me, I got a little windfall. They do pay me, I keep the rest.”

  “That’s the way I figure,” I said. “And the Dixie Mafia is thinking they’re running low on guys, and they aren’t considered such bad dudes if they can’t stop a couple of yokels from East Texas, and if they just quit, that looks bad too, so they got to keep them coming. And now, since Vanilla didn’t finish the job, and we’re on her tail, they’re starting to see her as expendable. That way they don’t pay her and she’s dead and they’re rid of her. I bet on top of all that, finding out she was a woman chapped their ass.”

  “If only she had been black,” Leonard said.

  “Yep, that would have been aces.”

  “And gay.”

  “Better yet. And we may have it all wrong,” I said. “Guys following us could be just very persistent insurance salesmen.”

  53

  One night I’m at the window, and the brilliance of the streetlights is all there is in the way of action, and what do my wandering eyes see but a lemon-colored Volkswagen pulling up at the curb in what might be called a sprightly manner, or what I might call in my East Texas vernacular, pretty goddamn fast. A young man, gangly as a puppet, with a dark mustache and a cap from under which shoulder-length black hair hung, got out and went into the post office, walking heavy.

  I looked at my nifty Warner Bros. Looney Tunes watch with all the great cartoon characters on it with my flashlight and saw the time was three a.m. The post office lobby was always open. You could go in at any time. Just an old-fashioned town with an old-fashioned mailbox connected to an old-fashioned killer who liked to live quietly in Arkansas. I figured not a lot of folk were out and about at three a.m. in a town like this, and if they were, how many just decided it was necessary to check the mail at this time of night?

  It could happen, but it made me curious.

  He came out quickly and got in the Volkswagen and started up the hill. I yelled Leonard awake, and since he was already dressed, he only had to roll into his shoes, and then the two of us were on our way downstairs, pulling our coats over our holstered handguns and our manly buttocks.

  The fat guy had his turn in the lobby chairs, and when he saw us he stood up and a magazine fell out of his lap and flapped to the ground. Leonard gave him a little wave. We went out and got in our car, Leonard driving, and he cranked it up and started up the hill in the direction the Volkswagen had gone. I looked back and saw the fat man was on the curb with a cell phone to his ear. They weren’t any niftier than we were, which in real life is often the case. There just aren’t that many James Bonds or Mike Hammers outside of the pages of books or the brightness of film.

  Of course, Vanilla Ride, now she was another matter altogether. That woman was spooky like Tonto was spooky, only more so, because she had killed Tonto right when he thought he was about to visit the fun house.

  That’s just mean.

  The road wound up through the mountains, and at one point, going around a curve, I could look back through a split in the trees and see car lights moving along the road behind us. I said, “I figure that’s them.”

  “Yeah,” Leonard said, “that is some good deduction there, Sherlock.”

  We hadn’t caught up with the Volkswagen, which had to be hauling some serious ass, and we weren’t all that far ahead of our friends the ugly thugs. I said, “When we get around this corner coming up, let me out.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “If it goes well, I’ll catch up with you at the bottom of the hill. If you look back and see it isn’t me running down the hill to leap into your arms, and instead it’s them in their car, or even on foot, then I suggest you drive like you’re in a stock-car race.”

  I climbed over the seat and pulled the backseat down and got the sawed-off shotgun out of the trunk and a box of shells. When we climbed up the hill and got to where it curved, Leonard stopped and let me out, said, “Nice knowing you, dumb ass.”

  “You just watch for me.”

  He motored away and I got back in the woods a bit and hunkered down and waited. More time went by than I expected, or so it seemed. Out here there were no streetlights and the moonlight wasn’t much, and it took me a while to start to adjust to being able to see in the dark. My mouth was dry, and hunkering down like that was starting to hurt my calves, and I was about to switch positions when I saw headlights coming and then I heard the roar of a car.

  When I could see the car well enough to determine that it was the car I had seen our trackers in, I braced the shotgun against me and waited until the car was almost even with me, and fired a little in advance, the blast lighting up the night and knocking the right front tire to shreds. The car swerved and twisted and threw up dirt as it went over the other side of the road and down a hill and out of sight. I heard a crash, trotted across the road and looked down. It was about a thirty-foot drop, but they had most likely rolled most of the way, and the slant was just enough so there weren’t a lot of hard falls on the trip down, at least not as hard as I would have liked. The car was lying on the driver’s side, and the right-side passenger doors were heaved open, and out came the four dark figures. No, seven. They had been stuffed in that car tight as impacted turds in a colon. One of them fell out on the ground, then got up to one knee and stayed there a moment. I could see the car was near a little deer path down there that dipped into the woods and ran back in the other direction, up toward the road where they had been driving. It wasn’t much of a path, but if they could get the car upright, and if it still ran, they might be able to drive out of there.

  I turned and started running up the road as fast my legs would carry me. I could tell when I was about halfway up the hill that I needed to get back to road work because my heart was pounding against my ribs hard enough to break them and my vision was a little blurry. I looked back and saw one of the thugs coming up over the edge of the hill, carrying a long gun of some kind. I took to the woods and went along there, getting whacked in the face with limbs for a while, and then when I was sure the road was sloping down, I stumbled out of the woods and went down the hill where I saw Leonard’s car, and Leonard outside of it, standing by the passenger side with the deer rifle.

  I huffed out some cold air and waved the shotgun above my head and started down at a speed I didn’t know I had in me. Leonard got in the car and cranked it up, and when I made the passenger side, I was nearly out of wind. Climbing in, closing the door, I looked over at Leonard, said, “There are seven of them.”

  He said, “You dumb ass.”

  54

  “Now where’s the Volkswagen?” Leonard said. “You’ve caused us to lose it.”

  “But I managed to knock the bad guys off a hill and now they’re on foot.”

  “Okay I guess that’s something. You get a pass. Seven, huh?”

  “It was like a goddamn clown car.”

  We continued driving and where there hadn’t been roads going off the main road there were now plenty. Leonard said, “He took one of these, or we would have caught up to
him by now. I’m driving this thing like it’s got a real engine in it.”

  Pausing at a dirt road that turned to the right, I got out of the car and bent down and tried to check the ground in what little light there was. Finally, Leonard backed the car so that the lights shone on the ground, and then I could see there were recent tire marks.

  I got in the car, and Leonard said, “Well, Hawkeye?”

  “There are tire tracks that look fresh,” I said. “It could be him. It could be someone else, but it could be him.”

  “It’s what we got,” Leonard said, and started down the road. It was dark down there and the trees ate up the sides of the road until there was only room for the car, and then we came to a bridge that looked as if the headless horseman ought to be on the other side of it. We rattled over it and went around a curve that climbed through some trees with winter-dried moss hanging down. When we broke over the hill there was a clearing and an A-frame house, not too big, sitting at the peak of the hill and we could see the Volkswagen parked in the yard. There was a little road that went into the trees on the right and there was one on the left. Leonard took the one on the right and we drove down it a piece and found a place where the road was a little wide and parked on the right-hand side and got out, me with the shotgun and him with the rifle. We were carrying our handguns and we each had a nifty blackjack and a jaunty stride.

  When I loaded up the shotgun, Leonard said, “Here, you’re a better shot. I should have the shotgun.”

  We swapped, and I gave him the shells. I took the box of shells for the deer rifle and put the whole box in my coat pocket.

  “How long will it take them to get up here on foot?” Leonard said.

  “A lot longer yet,” I said, “and then they have to be smart like us and look at the tracks.”

  “I’m going to give them that much smarts,” Leonard said. “Let’s get this over with. Maybe we can be in and out and in our car and down the hill before they realize it’s us coming back and they’ll be so startled they won’t shoot at us.”