The Elephant of Surprise

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I’m not sure how long I slept because I didn’t check my watch when I woke up. Leonard was still snoozing. The lights in the corridor were flickering as if they were having a fit of some kind.

  I got up and put my shoes on, walked down the hall to the bathroom. I went back and checked on Nikki and the nurse. The nurse was asleep in her chair, her head hung down, her nurse hat on the nightstand on top of the books.

  Nikki lay in bed, unmoving, the IV in her arm, the IV bag in a rack next to her. Her white hair was spread out against the white pillow; a white sheet was pulled over her pale body. The shadows from the cell bars lay over her and the nurse like long bruises.

  I padded down the hall, past the dispatch office, went into the break room, and got a new cup of bad coffee and a packet of peanut butter crackers. I made my way through one stale cracker, then the rest of them, along with the coffee, went into the trash.

  I walked to Hanson’s office. The door was open. Manny was leaned back in Hanson’s chair, asleep.

  I started back to the break room, but when I came to it, I kept walking. Now that I was awake, I was too wired to go in there and sit. I was like a bored child with no one to play with.

  I walked along to the door that led to the foyer. There was a glass-and-wire frame in the door that led out to it. You went out, the door locked behind you. You had to be buzzed back in. I was thinking I might go out and walk around in the wide foyer, perhaps poke my head outside and look at the street from the front of the station, but I didn’t want to be locked out.

  I decided to walk through the back door to the receptionist’s station and ask if it would be all right for me to go out front for a moment and have her buzz me back in. Maybe she and I could visit a bit to knock the boredom down.

  I went in carrying my coffee, and the woman there, pleasant-faced, her hair tied back, dressed in blue jeans, boots, and a loose shirt, smiled at me. She looked fit, muscular.

  I didn’t know her. But there was something familiar about her.

  “This weather,” she said. “Really something, huh?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  There was a long canvas bag at her feet, and the door into the foyer was cracked open, held in position by a brick. I had never seen them do that before. It was always locked. The closet to the right was leaking dark water under the door.

  “Can I get you some coffee?” I said.

  “Maybe later,” she said. She swiveled in her chair and looked at me directly. She had a coat stretched across her knees.

  “Are you new?” I said.

  “I am. Came on shift a little while ago.”

  I nodded. “Well, all right. Hang in there.”

  I went out and closed the door and walked to the break room and poured my coffee into the sink. I picked up a chair and brought it back and tilted it under the door handle to the receptionist’s office.

  I made my way back to the door that was used to buzz visitors in, examined it. No way to put a chair under that. There was only a push bar on my side.

  Quickly, I walked to where Manny was, shoved the door wide, and called her name.

  She opened her eyes with tremendous effort. When she got them open, she glared at me.

  “You better have fresh doughnuts and coffee or I’m going to shoot you.”

  “Let me ask you something. Do you have a new receptionist?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have a new receptionist?”

  “Just Evelyn for this time of night. And I figure, like the rest of us, she’s trapped here for a while. Now, unless you want to know who all is on the day shift, I have to ask: What the hell, Hap?”

  “Evelyn seems to have been replaced, and the new woman’s propped open her office door, one that leads to the foyer.”

  “That’s against regulations.”

  “Figured it was.”

  Manny studied me for a moment, then opened the desk drawer, took out a couple lightweight revolvers. She came around the desk and handed them to me.

  “I have a feeling I’m deputized,” I said.

  “Go wake Leonard.”

  26

  I quickstepped down to the cell, and when I got there Leonard was sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on his shoes.

  He looked at the guns I was carrying, one in each hand.

  “I snore that bad.”

  “Something isn’t right,” I said.

  He finished with his shoes, and we went along the corridor after looking in on Nikki and the nurse. They were still asleep and fine.

  We hustled down the hall, found Manny standing outside the receptionist door. She had moved the chair I had placed there.

  She said to me, “You’re backup if needed.”

  “What about me?” Leonard said.

  “You’re a man without a gun.”

  I gave Leonard the extra pistol.

  I eased to the side of the door with Leonard. Manny opened it, left it open, and went in. I could see the “new receptionist” through the crack in the open door, where the hinges met the wall. She still had the coat stretched over her lap, and her hand was under it.

  Manny said, “Odd, I don’t recognize you.”

  “I’m a replacement,” I heard her say.

  “I don’t think you are,” Manny said. “Not a proper one, anyway. What you holding under that coat, girl?”

  The woman’s face turned sour. “My clit,” she said.

  “I bet mine’s bigger,” Manny said.

  That’s when the woman moved and the coat slid off her lap and her hand came out. It wasn’t her clit at all. It was a big old nasty automatic with a fat silencer on the end of it. The gun huffed once.

  Manny moved. It didn’t seem fast, didn’t seem an excited move. She merely lifted her pistol and fired. It was really loud inside that room. Her shot hit the woman in the face and her head went back, and then I couldn’t see her anymore because she had fallen out of the chair.

  Me and Leonard entered in the office behind Manny. Manny was replacing her gun in its holster. I had the one she gave me held down by my side.

  The woman lay on the floor. Her head was a mess. Her gun had slid across the tile and ended up against the wall. A cell phone was beside her, having also fallen out from under the coat. There was blood everywhere, even on the great sheet of plasti-glass that fronted the receptionist’s area. Manny’s bullet had gone through the woman’s head and hit it. It had made only a small dent. That was some plastic.

  I knew then where I had seen that woman. She had been part of the crew that had tried to kill Nikki, not to mention me and Leonard. Hers was the face I had seen in the lightning flash when we were at the cabin.

  I went over and kicked away the brick holding the door open. The door closed automatically.

  “How’d she get in?” I said. “And where’s Evelyn?”

  Leonard went over to the closet, where the dark liquid was running out from under the door in a broader and more recognizable pool than before. He opened the door. I saw Evelyn inside. She was sitting on the floor with her head on her knees. She was leaking a lot of blood from her ear. The inside of the closet smelled like heated copper. She wasn’t sleeping. I thought of all those photos of her family on her desk, and felt sick.

  “Somehow, this bitch,” Manny said, looking down at the woman she had shot, “convinced Evelyn to let her in. That door is pretty solid, and the lock is good.”

  “Maybe she beat the lock, the keypad code,” Leonard said. “People can do that.”

  “Damn,” Manny said. “Evelyn was all right. What the hell?”

  “Nikki,” I said. “They’ve come for her. And considering the weather, they must want her bad. Someone, Daddy Keith is my guess, is paying some serious bucks to get rid of her.”

  It sort of came together then. The woman Manny had killed had managed to talk her way into the receptionist’s office, maybe used some kind of sob story. Or maybe she shot Evelyn through the little speaker hole in the glass, dragged her
into the closet, and cleaned the blood up a little before she took her place.

  However it had been managed, it had been managed.

  Seemed to me her next step would have been to let some coconspirators in. Folks who could deal with the cops, dispatchers, all of us. Leaving no witnesses, including the most valuable one to the Tyler Police Department’s case.

  “I’m going to take a look outside,” Manny said. “Close the door behind me, and unless it’s me, and just me, don’t open it again.”

  “Hey,” Leonard said, “you’re what law there is here. You got to stay around to handle things. I’ll take a look.”

  Manny thought on that. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I’m going,” he said.

  Before Manny could think on it anymore, Leonard was out of the reception door, clutching the pistol. Me and Manny stood by the glass and watched as Leonard eased across the foyer to the front door, pushed the exit bar, then slowly stuck his head outside into the wild weather.

  The wind came whistling in, slipped through the talk-hole gap in the plasti-glass, hit us inside the reception room. The air was damp and wet and cold, like the skin of a drowned person.

  Leonard eased out farther into the storm, and soon most of him was no longer in sight. We could see his hand, which was holding the door open. Water was rushing in around his feet, washing over his boots.

  He came back quickly and the front door closed behind him. I opened the inside door and let him in.

  He had a look on his face like someone had borrowed his dick and forgotten to give it back.

  “Well?” Manny said.

  “Things are bad.”

  27

  The parking lot is nothing but water,” he said. “Worse, there are people in a fucking armored car out where Highway Seven used to be. There were some people wearing water boots and slickers sitting on top of cars. Sitting there with the rain pounding on them. They have guns. They were pointed at me. Pretty sure they’re the same assholes that tried to kill Nikki in the woods, plus others. Though they are missing one now.”

  He looked at the body on the floor.

  “Armored car?” I said.

  “Yeah. SUV all tricked out. Got a winch and shit on it, probably holds five or so, has a boat trailer on the back and there’s a motorboat in it. The car is about halfway submerged, but it looks like it could plow through some pretty deep and fast water. Speaking of water, it’s two feet high and rising. There’s a dump truck parked on the far side of the street, and there’s a garbage truck too. That’s not where those are kept, is it?”

  “Nope,” Manny said.

  “I think they got them some special rides,” Leonard said. “Makeshift tanks borrowed from the sanitation and street departments. Drivers would be sitting high in those things, could navigate this bad water a lot better than in cars.”

  Manny picked up the dead woman’s coat, popped it out, and placed it over the corpse. “Shit,” Manny said. “I killed that woman.”

  “Yeah, she ain’t gonna get no deader,” Leonard said.

  “I felt like I had no choice.”

  “Drop it, sis,” Leonard said. “We’ve got our asses in a crack here, so feel bad about it later, and when I’m home. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “It’s not the first time I’ve shot someone,” Manny said.

  “There you are,” Leonard said. “Now you’ve had more practice. And she’s still the bitch you thought she was before, only she’s a dead bitch. And you should check your ear.”

  Manny reached up, brought away her hand with blood on the fingertips. “My earring is gone.”

  “Silent shot,” Leonard said. “Clipped your earring. Had she been a better shot or faster, you’d be on the floor instead of her. You did all right.”

  Manny took a deep breath, went where the receptionist had sat, reached under the little counter in front of the voice hole, and flipped a switch. The automatic front-door lock clicked. Water was running under the door now, and that was a tightly framed door.

  A moment passed, and then there was a push against the door, but the door held.

  “Good timing,” I said.

  “That’ll hold them for now,” Leonard said.

  “This is a police station,” Manny said. “They’re assaulting a police station. This is absurd.”

  “And except for you, there are no police here,” I said. “Just the dispatchers and some citizens. Maybe it’s not that absurd.”

  Leonard gave me back the pistol I had given him, picked up the dead woman’s gun, unscrewed the silencer, and tossed it onto the floor.

  “I want those motherfuckers to hear me coming,” he said.

  We went back into the main station, letting the door to the receptionist’s room close. I put the chair back under the latch so I could pretend it was another barrier, but considering these guys had commandeered a dump truck and a garbage truck and had brought a fucking boat, it didn’t seem like something that would stop them for long.

  Manny’s boot heels clicked as she walked along the hallway, and we followed her. She used a key card to unlock a metal door. It was a roomful of weapons and body armor.

  “Suit up,” she said.

  It was the police arsenal.

  Most of the weapons were high-powered pieces of business. I decided on a twelve-gauge pump shotgun and an automatic rifle. I put on a bulletproof vest and traded in the gun Manny had given me for a large-caliber revolver.

  Leonard loaded up with a serious shoot-’em-up automatic rifle and two handguns, including the one from the dead woman. He also put on a vest.

  Manny took an automatic rifle and another handgun and put on a vest. She gave each of us shells for the weapons and a kind of slip-over jumper that had numerous pockets for shells.

  We loaded the weapons and packed the remaining boxes of shells into those jumper pockets.

  There were some rain slickers in there too, and they were better than the ones we owned, so we took them, went ahead and put them on. I had a feeling we were all going to end up outside in the rain.

  All of this was done quickly.

  Manny went down the hall to the dispatch room to prepare them for what might happen. She punched the code and went inside. Me and Leonard hurried down the hall to where Nikki and the nurse were sleeping.

  Just before we reached the cell, when we came even with the short hall that led to the back door, we heard the automatic lock on it click open.

  28

  Damp air blasted through the doorway as it widened, and then we saw Alton. At first, I was much relieved, and then I saw his service weapon in his hand and the stone-cold look on his face, and I knew sure as shit stinks, Alton was bought and sold.

  I could see behind him two other armed men, both holding serious long guns. I didn’t recognize either of them. Alton came in lifting his weapon, startled at seeing us as much as we were startled at seeing him and suddenly knowing on which side he stood. I whirled with the shotgun, pumped a round into place, crouched low, and cut loose.

  At the same time, I heard Leonard’s automatic rifle bark, and I was reasonably certain it was a miss, because they all kept coming. Thinking Alton probably had on an armored vest, I shot low and took out his knees. It was like he had fallen over a trip wire. His head came forward and his legs went backward, into the doorway.

  I got a glimpse of the two other men that were now in the doorway, and then there was a sound like two pans being banged together. I saw one of the men lose half his face, due to Leonard’s second shot making good, and behind me a shot slapped into the wall and sent plaster flying up and snowing down on me.

  I pumped another round, and the last man standing, the one who had sent a shell into the wall behind me, got a load from my shotgun. The blast hit him in the neck, and he went straight to the ground, so fast it seemed as if a hole had opened beneath him. He fell onto the concrete platform outside the door; the rain washed his blood away as fast as it gushed out of him. He raised one h
and and made a movement akin to someone flagging a ride, and then he caught one—the bus to hell. His hand fell down, trembled slightly, and he was still.

  Leonard was already dragging Alton away from the door, letting it close. Alton would have been the one with the key code, but I figured he might have given it to one of the others, and that was a sincere worry. If he hadn’t given it to anyone else, then in time, if Keith’s crew were as well equipped as they seemed, they were coming through that door, one way or another.

  Leonard rolled Alton over on the tile, which was turning wet and dark with blood. My shot had taken out his legs. They were just raw bone and shattered flesh hanging together by frayed strands of muscle. Alton was still alive.

  “Piece of shit,” Leonard said.

  “Needed the money,” Alton said.

  “Piece of shit,” Leonard said again.

  Alton managed a smile. It seemed strange there on that pained face, or maybe he was past pain right then. Maybe it wasn’t a smile but a clenching of teeth.

  “Wish I hadn’t done it,” he said.

  “I bet,” Leonard said. “And just for the record, I ate your slice of that goddamn heavenly pie.”

  Alton laughed blood onto his lips.

  “Of course you did,” he said.

  Alton stared at both of us as if straining to see us from a great distance, and then what was left of Alton’s life left him with a burst of air and a violent tremble. The blood beneath him pooled wider.

  “What the hell was he thinking?” Leonard said.

  “I bet he was thinking about his sick kid,” I said.

  “Well, he might as well have been thinking about dog shit, because he can’t do a damn thing for her now.”