The Elephant of Surprise

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Leonard crossed from his spot toward the vehicle. At the same time, two people came through the front door; one went right, the other left. I shot the one on the left as cleanly as if he had been nailed to the floor waiting for it; it was another head shot. Like us, they all wore vests. Bullets we had might penetrate those, but I wasn’t taking any chances now. I was no longer a butcher. I was a surgeon.

  The one on the right was coming up behind Leonard, ducking along the low wall. I wanted to yell out at Leonard but didn’t. I didn’t want to alert the guy to where I was, because it was my guess he didn’t know I was there. Seeing Leonard was just too much for him, like a hound after a rabbit. Worse, I couldn’t see Leonard anymore, but I was pretty sure the shooter would be able to see him near the vehicle that had broken through the wall. Wherever our bad guy lifted up from behind the wall to fire at Leonard, I had to be ready. I began to sweat like a goat at a barbecue.

  That’s when there was another shot from upstairs. More glass rained down and I saw a rifle fly up from behind the short wall and knew Manny had nailed him.

  Bless you, Manny.

  I crawled through the opening in the pin rack, pushing the rifle in front of me, pulling the shotgun behind me.

  I heard shots where Leonard had gone, near the vehicle, and I went there, discarding the rifle and carrying the shotgun with me, anticipating close work. When I got there, a dead woman was on the floor, the one I had seen with Keith back at the police station. Her face had been moved from left to right, or maybe it was right to left; it was such a mess, you couldn’t really tell.

  Leonard was standing there, looking pretty calm considering the circumstances.

  “Okay?” I said.

  “Yep,” Leonard said. “You?”

  “So far, but I may need you to wipe my ass later.”

  We were looking around all the time, watching for Keith or any remaining minions. I’m sure we both expected Kung Fu Bobby to show up eventually. I plucked the splinters from my face and flicked them away. I was trembling a little. I no longer felt warm. Now I could feel the cold air and it made me cold, and the wind from outside was ruffling my hair like an excited girlfriend.

  I opened the door on the vehicle and looked inside. There was no one there. The motor was running and it was warm inside with the heater on, and the overhead light was bright enough you could damn near see the air crawl. There was a scoped rifle of some sort in the seat, and I had never seen such a weapon. It was silver in color and the stock was thick and the scope on it looked large and cumbersome, but when I picked the gun up, it was as light as a poor man’s wallet. I took a moment to look through the scope. It was a nightscope and you could see shapes clearly in it, though all of them looked slightly alien and gold-colored.

  I kept the rifle and leaned the shotgun against the truck, closed the door. We each took a side of the vehicle and made our way through the debris it had created when it slammed through the wall. Outside, in the wind and the rain, we didn’t see anyone. I pulled the hood up on my slicker, and the rain rattled against it. Then we heard the SUV out front start up. We rushed back inside, and we could see headlights shine in through the open front door, and the lights began to move away, like two small, bright moons falling off a cliff. The SUV was backing out of the drive, down the rise of the road.

  Now we knew where Kung Fu Bobby and Keith were. They were hightailing it out of there.

  “Jump in,” Leonard said.

  He rushed back to the armored vehicle, climbed in behind the wheel. I was about to climb in on the passenger side when I looked up and saw Manny standing at the edge of where the glass wall had been. Nikki was beside her. They were both holding handguns.

  “Get him,” Manny said.

  I got in, carrying the rifle I had taken and the shotgun too. Leonard backed us out with the vehicle making a lion-like roar, taking some of the remaining back door and wall with it for a few yards, and then he turned the wheel to the left, and away we went, around the back of the bowling center, around the side of it, and down the driveway, which had already been navigated by the SUV.

  When we reached the highway, we knew which way they had gone, because the road to Tyler was blocked. Unless they had managed to come up with a cloak of invisibility or the SUV had the ability to fly away into the wet, windy blackness of night, they had to have headed back toward LaBorde.

  Leonard yelled out, “Giddyup, Scout.”

  43

  The security vehicle had swift and powerful windshield wipers. They slapped the rain away with the speed of a hummingbird’s wings. The lights were phenomenal, cutting through the wet dark effortlessly. Our roaring ride began to catch up with the black SUV, its taillights revealed in our head beams.

  A moment later we were riding their ass. Leonard bumped them lightly, then hit them harder. The SUV began to spin, and the wet streets made it worse. Leonard slowed, and the SUV wobbled to the side of the road as a tire blew and then it went skipping left toward a deep roadside ditch and a line of dark trees that were in front of a fenced-in pasture. I could see clearly because the morning light was beginning to slip through the sky.

  The SUV’s tires shed rubber like a snakeskin, and the rubber slammed against the windshield of our stolen killer machine and flapped away without so much as leaving a mark.

  We had passed the SUV by then; it had stopped when it jumped the ditch, went off into the trees, and smacked against a big sweet gum. It had turned sideways, but not before a door had come open and dumped the contents of people out of it as fast as shit flying out a diarrheic goose.

  Leonard stopped slowly, then turned Scout—as I now affectionately thought of the armored vehicle—around and headed back where the SUV had gone off into the line of trees.

  He pulled to the side of the road and angled Scout a little so that the headlights and the overhead spots illuminated the scene.

  We could see both Keith and Kung Fu Bobby climbing up out of the water-filled ditch. Kung Fu Bobby was up and gone into the woods so fast, I wasn’t even sure I had seen him. Keith had lost his hat and ran out of steam. He clutched at the far side of the ditch, but the mud came away in his hands and he slid backward like a slug on teflon.

  It was a deep ditch. The rushing water in it came up to his waist and it was moving him around. He caught hold of some roots sticking out of the side of the ditch and clung to them.

  I pulled the rifle off the seat, and we got out. Leonard had the shotgun with him. I climbed on top of Scout’s cab. I looked through the scope at the tops of the trees, and then I stood up on the cab and looked some more. I could see the trees and the fence and the field from up there, and the scope outlined Kung Fu Bobby climbing between the wires of the barbed-wire fence, then running like a goddamn cheetah across that field.

  The wind was stout, and it was all I could do to stand there and not be blown off. I could feel it lashing my hair, so I knew from which direction it was coming and in which direction it would push my bullet. I judged the speed of the wind instinctively, guessed about how fast it would move my shot. I had killed others this night, and before, but this was different. I was homing in on a living human that couldn’t harm me now and who was running away and had his back to me.

  I hesitated.

  And then I took a deep breath and kept Kung Fu Bobby outlined in the scope. I pulled my aim a little to the right, accommodating the blowing of the wind, and elevated the barrel slightly. I slowly let out my breath and gently tugged on the trigger. Kung Fu Bobby looked like part of a video game in the scope and that bothered me even more.

  He tried to kill you and Leonard and Nikki, I told myself. He would kill you now if he thought he had the advantage. He might have been the one that killed the lady in the hospital. He certainly helped make it possible. He may be human, but he lacks humanity.

  I told myself this as I looked through the scope, the very essence of inhumanity to man on my mind. I was surprised when the shot fired. The sound of it startled me a little, li
ke when the proctologist finally sticks his greased finger up your ass.

  I had missed. I had misjudged the rain and the wind. The shot carried past him and hit on his left side and I could see a small jump of dirt in the scope. I pushed my shot a little farther right. He was getting close to the barbed-wire fence on the far side, another line of trees. I had only a few seconds.

  Still, take your time, I told myself. Don’t get in a hurry.

  I lifted the barrel slightly higher. I could barely see him in the scope, as I was having to give up so much of his view for the wind and the carrying of the bullet.

  Once again, when the rifle fired, I was startled, but this time I saw Kung Fu Bobby stagger a little, go to one knee, come up again. By now he had reached the barbed-wire fence. He was slipping between two strands of it when he quit moving and collapsed on the bottom strand, like an oversize bird on a telephone wire. He lay still, his arms and legs dangling, and then he rolled off the wire toward the tree line. Only his left foot was still on the wire.

  I took a deep breath, tried not to congratulate myself on being an efficient killer. I climbed down from the roof of the truck, went down the side of the road to the edge of the ditch.

  Leonard was squatted there. He had laid the shotgun across his knees. I could hear Keith talking when I came up.

  “There’s no reason you should have won that firefight,” he said. “None.”

  “Ain’t life funny,” Leonard said. “Reason we won is our secret weapon. Right, Hap?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “We used the elephant of surprise.”

  “Listen here. I could use boys like you. And I mean for front work, lots of money.”

  “Do you have dental in your plan?” I said.

  “Listen, now, I’m making a serious offer.”

  “And I’m going to give you a serious answer,” Leonard said. “First part of that answer is you’ve done bad to a lot of people, and I’m sure you’ll do more bad if I give you the chance. And the rest of the answer is even more simple: I see that gun you’re reaching for.”

  Keith had been reaching, talking, distracting, looking for his moment, and he’d thought he had us.

  Leonard swiveled the shotgun off his knees, and, still squatting, he shot Keith in the head, taking most of it away. Keith’s gun fell out of his hands and into the water, and then Keith slipped down the slope and was caught up in a clog of brush for a moment. The flowing water moved the brush away from him, and he eased the rest of the way down. His body tumbled over a couple of times due to the power of the water, and then hung up in some exposed roots on the side of the ditch and stayed there, his feet swaying in the water but going nowhere. Parts of his head on the side of the ditch dripped down too. I could see this clearly because the sun was coming up red as a plum, and the wind was beginning to blow out and the rain went with it.

  44

  When we got back to the side of the road, a figure came crawling out of the damaged SUV. It surprised us. We thought everyone inside had been thrown out. He stood and put his hands up.

  “Hey, guys, don’t shoot. I don’t want nothing to do with this shit anymore.” His hair was washed down over his forehead and he looked as pathetic as a drowning rat.

  “You’ve decided to retire a little late,” I said.

  “I’m Larry Keith. Law wants me. For God’s sake, take me to the law. Don’t shoot me. Please don’t shoot.”

  Leonard studied him. “Why not?”

  “Because I want to talk. I want to tell everything I know about my father and his work. I want a deal. Was one of those shots…him?”

  “Yep,” Leonard said.

  Larry looked toward the ditch. I doubted he could see his old man from that angle, but he looked for a long moment anyway.

  “I didn’t even like him and he didn’t really like me, and still I feel bad. Good God. We used to go to the zoo.”

  “I hope you got to see the monkeys,” Leonard said, “because you won’t be going to the zoo again anytime soon. You’ll be living in one.”

  The way Larry stood there, the way his head was hung, his wet hair in his face, his hands lifted, I felt bad for him. There was no reason to feel that way, but I did. Right then I felt bad about everything.

  We found some rope in the back of the truck, tied Larry up with it, loaded him in the vehicle, bound him to the passenger seat. Leonard drove him and us back to the bowling center.

  As we went, the red sun rose higher, and the thin mist in the trees began to melt. I saw birds flying over the tops of the trees, and before we had gone far, the red sun became gold, and the sky was absent of clouds and had turned a bright baby-blanket blue.

  45

  I felt sad about Kung Fu Bobby, more than the others, until they went out to get his body and he wasn’t there. That helped me out, in a way, because I didn’t have to explain shooting him as he was running away. Not to anyone, even myself.

  They looked where I’d said he was, and then they looked in the tree line and beyond, but they didn’t find him. He hadn’t got up wounded and wandered off and died. They didn’t find any blood.

  I knew then I had missed twice. Unusual for me. Maybe in the back of my mind I meant to miss. And maybe it was the rain and the wind. I don’t know. But Kung Fu Bobby had fooled me, had taken a dive into that fence, and, in his acrobatic way, he had been convincing.

  He was out there somewhere.

  Larry Keith turned out to be a big ol’ blabbermouth and he told everything, admitted he saw the murder of Pretty Boy but tried to distance himself from it, like it wasn’t his idea at all, that he was just an observer, not the one who pulled the trigger. He knew singing loud and clear might give him a reduced sentence. It wasn’t all that reduced. Twenty years. Not what he deserved, but what he got.

  Nikki, when her tongue was well, gave her testimony, and if Old Man Keith had been alive, he’d have gotten the death penalty. Well, he got it anyway.

  Leonard and I were cleared of any charges. Manny made us out to be heroes, and I guess we were. I hope we were. Thinking of it that way helps me sleep at night.

  LaBorde was devastated by the storm. Downtown had stood pretty well, but along the streets and out in the country, the hurricane winds, the tornado spin-offs, and the high water had destroyed a lot.

  We got declared a national disaster area, and already the town is rebuilding. That’s the Texas way. We might have our faults, but we can get shit done if someone throws a barbecue with it.

  Leonard’s apartment fared fine, and so did our office, though the bicycle shop below us was washed out. Somewhere a large perch is riding a ten-speed.

  Mine and Brett’s house was easy enough to repair, and we had that done right away, thanks to the insurance, and after a few months had passed and Kung Fu Bobby hadn’t shown up, I decided he had moved on. Practical. He wasn’t the kind of guy, at least in my estimation, to stick to an agenda that wasn’t paying. His loyalty was to the hire, not the man. I wondered where he was right then, what he was thinking. Probably learning to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

  Wondering doesn’t give much in the way of results, though. Months later I would still be wondering, though with less frequency.

  Nikki came out fine, and when our house was repaired, we had a house-repair party, and she was invited. She came over wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a pretty yellow dress dotted with blue flowers, little tennis shoes as white as snow.

  It was a bright day and cold, and we had cooked all morning. We had enough food to feed the proverbial army, and we had an army coming over. Besides Nikki, we had Hanson, minus his wife, who hated us, and we had Manny and Cason Statler, and there was Pookie, Chance, Reba, and Buffy the Dog, wearing a red-and-white neckerchief and new dog tags, and there was Leonard, of course.

  The food was pulled pork and greens and cabbage, and there were hot dogs and hamburgers, fried chicken, dips and chips, and drinks of all kinds. And primarily for Leonard, there was banana pudding with vanilla cookies
mixed into it. It was the one dish Reba had made.

  We pushed the couch and the furniture in the living room aside, and in the kitchen, we added a foldout table and chairs, and at around two p.m. we attacked the food.

  There was lots of talk and laughter, and that helped the storm and the killing seem distant and long gone and unlikely again. Manny said the city was giving me and Leonard some kind of award for helping law enforcement in a unique time of need. That was about as surprising as discovering a thousand-dollar bill in one of my socks.

  Reba was really taken with Nikki’s whiteness. She said, “You white as I am black.”

  Nikki stared at her, said, “But I burn easy and I’m not as pretty as you.”

  The color of Reba’s skin didn’t allow us to see her blush, but we could sure sense it in the way her eyes fell and her head turned.

  “I ain’t pretty.”

  “Yes, you are. But you might think about working on your hair a bit. I can help you with that later, if you like.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “You know about my kind of hair?”

  “I might surprise you with what I know about hair of all sorts.”

  “Maybe,” Reba said. “Where you get that hat?”

  “Goodwill.”

  “Nah, you didn’t.”

  “Did.”

  “Be damn. Looks like it high-end.”

  “It was at one time. But at Goodwill, it was my price.”

  When the talk became repetitive, Brett, beautiful in jeans and a black T-shirt and red slip-on shoes, pushed her long red hair back and bound it, turned on the CD player, put one on and others to follow.