Midnight Lullaby

by James D F Hannah

  "So am I." She looked at Walters. There was genuine affection there. The fuck if I understood why.

  I had the driver’s side door open when she said, "You didn’t tell me your name. Are you a friend of Richie's?"

  I looked over the roof of the car to her. "No, ma'am. I'm sure as hell not his friend."

  I got into my car and drove away.

  30

  Woody met me at his door dressed in a black turtleneck and black cargo pants and black lace-up boots, looking like he was set to free POWs from a Vietcong compound with Chuck Norris.

  “I need to talk to Bobbi,” I said.

  “What about?” A defensive expression crossed his face. Perhaps I should have waited until he was less well armed, which would have been never.

  I told him about Walters. He led me into the living room. Bobbi was stretched out on the couch, reading a paperback.

  “Hey, commandoes,” she said, setting the book aside.

  I looked at Woody. “You told her?”

  “I’m not dressed to pick up a pizza,” he said. “This involves her.”

  I shrugged. What-the-fuck-ever. To Bobbi, I said, “Walters is looking for you.”

  She sat upright, shifting straight from relaxed to worried, ignoring other emotional gears along the way. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He passed out before he could tell me. But he admitted working with the National Brotherhood, and he said you have something they’re looking for. What's he talking about?”

  She shook her head. “No idea. All I did was what he asked me to do. I pushed paperwork, that was it.”

  I narrowed my eyes, tried to look intimidating. I probably just looked stoned. “Are you sure that’s it? Nothing else?”

  She nodded. “Swear to God, Henry. You met Walters. You think that man would tell the truth about anything. I just want this done so my daughters and me can get back to whatever life we’ve got left.”

  I considered this for a moment. Woody placed his hand on my shoulder. “Work for you?”

  Not really, I thought, but we had to be for the time being.

  “Sure,” I said. “We’re rock stars.”

  He smiled. “Then let’s go have fun.”

  We pulled up the narrow road at a snail's pace, feeling each pothole and rut as we eased through, stopping and cutting the engine around a mile from the trailer. The address Teller had given me for the cook house was up a country road, away from utility lines and most of humanity, in a deserted chunk of the county. Woody and I wandered for an hour trying to find the road before we stumbled across it.

  From the rear of the Aztek, Woody and I each took an one-gallon cans of gasoline, a nine millimeter pistols, and a sawed-off 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and headed off into the brush that lined the road. The growth was thick and thorny, heavy despite the winter. We kept eyes on the ground, checking for trip wires and IEDs.

  I’d asked early on if we needed flashlights and got nixed by Woody like I’d offered to carve the roast beef at a PETA banquet.

  "Unless you want to make us easier targets, we do this in the dark," he had said.

  The trailer was a single-wide dropped onto a cleared-out section of land set well away from anything. It made my digs look luxurious, with the aluminum siding rusted and peeling to expose tattered insulation. Someone had tiered concrete blocks to makes steps inside. Light shone through the curtains in the windows. Jimi Hendrix played inside, but it was barely audible over the steady pumping of the genny that powered the place.

  "That's 'Voodoo Chile,'" I said.

  "Sounds like it," he said.

  "You suppose they know he was black?"

  “He was half-Native American, too, and even utter ignorance has to appreciate good music.”

  We rushed through the clearing, me to the left and Woody to the right. We crouched low and uncapped the gas cans once we were at the trailer and moved clockwise, pouring fuel on the ground. I held my breath—not because of the smell, but because I didn't want a random spark to ignite an explosion inside the trailer while I was holding a gasoline can. The resulting fireball would have been visible from space.

  We finished and poked around the side to the front of the trailer, saw each other, gave a nod, and crept toward the door.

  The goal was simple: Lure everyone out and set the meth lab on fire. This wouldn't be the Brotherhood's only lab, but something like this would get their attention. At best, it would cause enough chaos to force the Brotherhood into the open; at worst, they would do something stupid and give the police something to bust them on. If all else failed, at least it was one less meth lab in Parker County. Like I said, it wasn’t much of a plan, but it was what we had.

  We paused at the concrete block stairs. Woody gestured toward himself, then the door, then me. It looked cool and military. I nodded. He stood up and took a first step up as the door opened from the inside.

  The skinhead coming out wore a heavy coat over a white T-shirt and blue jeans and cowboy boots. He had a cigarette hanging from his lips as he stood at the open door and stared back into the trailer.

  "I don't give a fuck if he was Chief Sitting Fucking Bull, he was a goddamn nigger, and I’m not listening to that shit all night," he said, lighting the cigarette and taking a draw. "When I'm done with this, we're listening to some real music. Like Conway Twitty."

  Woody looked straight up at the skinhead. The skinhead stared forward, smoking as he descended the steps. Once the skinhead had both feet on solid ground, Woody jumped to his feet and slammed the butt of the shotgun into the back of his head.

  The skinhead dropped to his knees with a stunned guttural grunt. Woody pounded the shotgun into his face. The skinhead's nose shattered and blood spurted as he fell backwards. Woody hit him again, this time with his fist. Teeth shattered, and bones cracked in the skinhead’s face. Woody was pulling back for another punch when I whispered, “Woody!” He stopped in mid-swing.

  The skinhead's face was already purple and swollen. Blood poured out of the twisted bag of cartilage that had been his nose, crimson glugging down the sides of his skull and pooling around his ears.

  I watched the skinhead's chest, checking for the rise and fall. Every breath he took was a gurgling, bubbly sound, the mixture of air and blood.

  Woody's eyes shifted back and forth, from me to the skinhead and back. There was a trepidation, a sense of being unsure of what to do next. The sound of the genny and the shitty stereo and everything else in the world dropped out, and all I heard was breathing: my inhalation and exhaling, the skinhead's strained noises, and Woody in stasis, not seeming to breathe at all.

  "Clock's ticking here, boss," I said.

  Woody nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, it is." He came to his feet, kept his eyes on the skinhead.

  "We ready to do this thing?"

  "I am. You ready?"

  The racking of the action on a shotgun echoed through the darkness. This was when I realized we had both let our backs go to the trailer, and we hadn't been paying attention to what was going on.

  "Drop the gun," a man's voice called out behind us.

  Woody looked at me. “Didn’t cover our six, did you?”

  “It would seem that I did not.”

  "How many back there, you suppose?"

  "Well, we know one, and he's already dropped a shell in there, so he's ready."

  "And he's in a good range, too. One shot would probably be enough, give us both sucking chest wounds."

  “What other types of chest wounds are there? Getting shot in the chest would always suck.”

  Whoever was holding the shotgun cleared his throat. "Are you fuckers deaf? I said—"

  "We know what you said," I said. "We're debating options here."

  "I got a shotgun pointed at the back of your goddamn skulls," he said, his voice shaky. "Options are, you want shot in the head or the ass?"

  Woody sighed and lowered his shotgun to the ground. I followed suit.

  "Now turn around," th
e man said.

  The guy holding the shotgun looked barely big enough to lift damn thing. His skin was red and blotchy, sores dotting his face. He wore an apron that read "Kiss the Cook." He was maybe mid-twenties, going on 50.

  "Oh look," I said. "He's got a shotgun, too."

  "There was a sale at Walmart," Woody said. "More like in the parking lot of Walmart. Guy had 'em in his trunk."

  "I guess you really can get everything there."

  The guy with the gun wasn't laughing. He told us to lace our fingers together and place them on our heads and drop to our knees, the way he’d heard it said on cop shows. Like all good kids who don't want to die in the middle of nowhere at the hands of a tweaker holding an illegally modified firearm, we did as told.

  The trailer door opened behind him and an older guy with a short white ponytail walked out, talking on a cell phone. "Don't know who they are," he said. "Yes, sir. We'll hold 'em until you get here."

  Ponytail Guy ended the call and shoved the phone into his pocket and stuck his hand out to the tweaker. "Gimme the gun."

  The tweaker's eyes danced like an epileptic doing the jitterbug. "Why? What am I giving you the gun for? I got this."

  "Gimme the gun, Mossy."

  Mossy didn't move. Okay, to be fair, he did move, but twitchiness didn't count as the moving Ponytail Guy wanted. Plus, his finger on the trigger kept jumping, which didn't fill me with confidence. I took a deep breath and consigned myself to being shot in the face. It would have been the perfect capstone to my day.

  “Mossy,” Ponytail Guy said. There wasn’t room for debate in his tone.

  Mossy handed the shotgun to Ponytail Guy, who aimed it at us again. "Need you to go inside, get me some pillow cases."

  Mossy shifted to an almost-violent tremble. I felt safer with Ponytail Guy pointing the shotgun at us, and then I realized how fucked it was to have varying degrees of okay about having a gun pointed at you at all.

  "Where ... where ... where they at?" Mossy said.

  "On the pillows, dumb ass," Ponytail Guy said.

  Mossy disappeared into the trailer. There was chattering inside, and the curtains parted and faces peered out.

  “Get back to work in there,” Ponytail Guy said without turning around. The curtains closed back. To us, he said, “Off with the masks, assholes.”

  Woody and I pulled off the masks.

  To Woody, I said, "Doesn't it bother you they don't seem to care about their friend on the ground behind us you took the time to beat unconscious?"

  “Everyone has different priorities,” Woody said.

  Ponytail Guy stepped back. "What are you assholes talking about?" He looked around us and seemed to notice the skinhead on the ground. "Did you kill Roger?"

  Roger snorted a breath full of blood.

  "He's alive," I said.

  "Damn shame," Ponytail Guy said. "Though his Spotify list sucks."

  “Won't be much of an issue here soon,” I said. “We worked him over pretty good. He’s not going to make it much longer.”

  “‘We’?” Woody said. “Who’s ‘we’ here? I didn’t see you helping.”

  "What d'you beat him up so bad for?" Ponytail Guy said.

  “He called you a goat-sucking faggot,” I said. “I told him that was an insult to both gay men and goats. And probably gay goats.”

  Mossy came out of the trailer holding pillow cases. "What now?"

  Ponytail Guy gestured toward us with what was left of the barrel of the shotgun. "Pat 'em down, see if they’ve got any guns on them."

  Mossy walked to us, the pillowcases hanging in his hands. He dropped them to the ground and stood beside Woody. Woody didn't flinch.

  "Stand up," Mossy said. The words didn't have much weight behind them, and Woody didn't respond. Mossy nudged at Woody with the toe of his shoe. "I said to stand up." He said it with more determination, like a toddler making demands of a parent. Still nothing. Mossy pushed at him harder with his foot. "Stand the fuck up."

  Woody’s movements were a blur. He was on his feet, one arm around Mossy's neck, his pistol in his other hand pressing against Mossy's right template. Mossy began to shake again. If he vibrated much harder, he’d slip dimensions.

  Ponytail Guy swung the shotgun barrel toward Woody. "Drop the gun or I'll blow you both away right here."

  There was a trickling sound. A puddle formed at Mossy's feet as urine ran from the cuff of his pants. The bitter chemical stink cut through the cold night air. I fought back the urge to retch.

  Woody grounded himself, tightening his grip around Mossy's neck. What remained of Mossy's teeth chattered, and a constant stream of "fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck" spewed out between the rattling.

  There was maybe six feet between Ponytail Guy and Woody. The shotgun stayed level on Woody, and by default, on Mossy. Mossy started crying.

  I lowered my hands and moved to rise. My pistol was at the small of my back. If I could get to it soon enough ...

  "You go for a gun, and I'm shooting one of you sons-of-bitches," Ponytail Guy said, like he was reading my thoughts off a billboard. His eyes never left Woody and Mossy. His voice was level. No emotion.

  I resumed the position.

  A smile flickered across Woody's face. “Where were you?”

  Ponytail Guy said, "Vietnam, '70 to '72, a few places after that. You?"

  "Middle East shit, some stuff in Central America," Woody said. "Later, though. Toward the end of Reagan, and I hung around for most of Bush the Greater."

  "Fun times. I heard good things. Shame I never got a piece of that."

  "You didn't miss much, outside of the food."

  "Everyone said the food was great. The pussy, not so much. Out of curiosity, you ever find it funny, the guys you trained in the Middle East, they were lobbing bombs and airplanes at us 15 years later?"

  “It’s not ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s,’ but there’s humor in it, sure.”

  Behind me, Roger gurgled out a breath. He drew in a raspy gasp and coughed and strangled out a noise meant to be a scream, but it caught somewhere in the clotting blood and came out more like a breeze whistling through a leaky window.

  "Roger!" Ponytail Guy said.

  Roger rolled his head to one side. "Mike," he said.

  "How you doin' over there?" Ponytail Guy—or Mike, if you prefer—said.

  Roger coughed and gasped. "Been better. Fucked me over, the assholes."

  "So I can tell." Mike walked toward Roger, keeping the shotgun pointed at Woody and Mossy. He paused in front of me and said, "Gimme your gun. And don't be stupid. Set it on the ground. One hand. Other hand stays on top of your head."

  I lowered one hand and reached back and took my nine millimeter and laid it next to me. Mike turned the barrel of his shotgun toward me as he bent down and took my shotgun and threw it toward the trailer, then picked up the pistol and kept it hanging loose in his hand.

  Mike stood up straight and moved closer to Roger. He kept the shotgun aimed at me. Woody twisted his body around to face Mike, bringing Mossy along for the ride. Mike stood over Roger.

  "I'm gonna need help, Mike," Roger said. "I need a goddamn doctor. I ... I can feel all this blood in my head ..."

  "It's gonna be good, don't you worry," Mike said.

  Mike shot Roger in the face with the pistol. He didn't look down, never breaking eye contact with Woody. Roger's body jumped off the ground and landed hard. His head shattered and chunks of him scattered, and something hard and sharp flicked across my face, and I knew it was a shard of skull.

  Woody didn't move.

  Mike stepped over Roger's body and behind me. He put a foot to the back of my head and pushed until my face hit the ground. "Stay down," he said. I moved my head to where I could see him walking toward Woody.

  "Let him go, or I'll just shoot him and then I'll shoot you," Mike said.

  Woody weighed it for a second. You could see him calculating options and variables. He finished the mental math and pulled his arm away from Mos
sy's neck and let the pistol fall.

  "On the ground," Mike said.

  I got a mouthful of cold winter soil as Mossy said, "Oh fuck god thank—" followed by a shotgun blast.

  The last thing I saw before the pillowcase went over my head was Mossy's body, bleeding from a dozen different places, twisted in a way it never should have been.

  Mike tied my hands behind my back. I guessed he did the same thing to Woody, since I doubted I was that special.

  I tried to not think about the smell on the pillowcase, or what I was breathing in through the material. I worked to not think about the endless number of minutes where I laid there on the ground with my face to the dirt, listening to Mike make phone calls, maybe waiting for the sound of a gunshot next to me and the end of Woody, followed by the gunshot I'd never hear. I struggled to not think about the two dead men who were footsteps away.

  Mostly I tried to not think that maybe I should have died in that traffic stop outside of Morgantown, standing there in the rain. People had always seemed obliged to tell me I was lucky to be alive. Face down to the ground, waiting to see what would happen next, I didn't feel any of that luck, or much luck at all.

  31

  No clue how much time passed before I heard tires crunch into the frozen ground. It sounded like pickup trucks. The engines shut off and people got out. Someone stopped, and I heard a kick and Woody grunted. A moment later a boot connected with my right side. The air rushed out of me, and I might have ached more if that were possible. There was the sound of a woman’s laughter.

  "It's too quiet," the woman said. "What kind of music you got into that shit shack?"

  "Whatever you like, Ms. Mayhew," Mike said. He sounded softer, more subservient now, less the gun-welding asshole. The district manager only has so much power once the company president shows up, I guess.

  "Go surprise me," she said.

  The trailer door opened and closed and then the Ramones blared from inside, "Blitzkrieg Bop." The woman said, "Very nice," and tapped her foot on the ground. She waited until the next song came on—The Voidoids and "Blank Generation"—before she said, "Stand 'em up and take the hoods off of 'em."