Honky Tonk Samurai (Hap and Leonard) (12 page)

“If he exists?” Leonard said.

“Somebody killed them bad boys I know. That’s no rumor. The question is, how bad is the bad guy who done it? Rumors about him are true, then he’s the baddest of the bad, and you don’t want that hellhound set on your trail.”

“We might have another couple of questions before you leave town,” I said.

“I might can find out the name of the guy whose last name I can’t remember, you just got to have it, but let me tell you, I’m not going out of my way to do it. I told you my plans, and right before I make with the runaway, I’m going to score me some cheap trim and some expensive whiskey, then I am gone. You might not think so, but you got your thousand worth and some change.”

“Have a nice trip,” I said.

“You know that’s right,” Weasel said.

“I’ll run him home,” Cason said.

“Drive fast,” I said.

A
fter Cason and Weasel left, Brett said, “This has gone from a missing-person case to blackmail and murder. Now we’re talking an invisible hit man who cuts off balls. Anyone believe any of what Weasel said?”

“Some of it,” Leonard said. “He kind of gets wrapped up in his own story, and it grows. He mentions the hit man and what he did, then at the end he tells us stuff about him he didn’t seem to know at first, that he’s part of a syndicate or some such, and he’s just waiting for a phone call, carrier pigeon, whatever, to get his orders for another hit. I don’t know what to think.”

“A while back I didn’t believe there was a guy and a woman who took in orphans and turned them into killers, but I was wrong,” I said. “I should have believed it. Vanilla Ride is pretty badass, and this could be someone just as badass.”

“Or it could be Vanilla herself,” Brett said. “She might fit the time line, and she’d be a pro they might hire.”

Brett did not have a soft spot for Vanilla, because Vanilla had one for me.

I said, “I don’t think this is her style—the wire and the balls cut off—though a woman might think that way, cutting off the balls. It could be a comment on how she was treated when younger, and Vanilla wasn’t treated too well. Still, I don’t think it’s her. She goes for efficiency, not statement.”

“You have a blind spot for her,” Brett said.

“He has a blind spot for just about everyone, you give him time to consider,” Leonard said. “But I’m with him. I don’t think it’s her. Can’t say why, but I don’t. If this killer always does it this way, using the wire, maybe that’s an MO he can’t change, least not comfortably. It could be like a serial killer thing, a signature, except he gets hired to do it. He gets the pleasure and the money both.”

“Other side is,” I said, “maybe he does change up. Could be the employer is the one collecting nut sacks, way Weasel suggested. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he makes change purses out of them. But if he does a lot of hits, he may not do them all the same way, only does them that way because that goes with the payment.”

“Good point,” Brett said. “So see? It could have been Vanilla who did it, just fulfilling her boss’s request.”

“If it was, it wouldn’t matter now,” I said. “That’s in the past. She’s in Italy somewhere. Not here as a threat.”

“So she told you,” Brett said.

“I believe her,” I said.

“Because she’s beautiful?” Brett said. “That’s why you believe her?”

“Her looks have nothing to do with me believing her.”

“But she is beautiful, right?” Brett said.

“Some say so.”

“Oh, Hap. Really.”

“All right,” I said. “There’s nothing about her that makes you want to look away. Well, on second thought, she does carry a gun and will point it at you. She will shoot to kill, and we know she’s blown a man up.”

“Okay,” Brett said. “That might make you look away. But you’d look as long as you could.”

“You are putting words in my mouth. She’s not my type.”

“Damn, Hap,” Leonard said. “That’s one of them little white lies we were talking about.”

“Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“Brett’s.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Brett. She is not my type, because you are my type.”

“And if I wasn’t around?” Brett asked. “Honest answer.”

“She might be my type. Except for that murderous assassin part. That would put me off.”

Brett said, “Maybe it would be best if it was Vanilla did it—killed those two men, I mean. I don’t think she’d bother you, and by extension, us. But if it wasn’t her, and there is a Canceler, isn’t that a bit scary?”

“I admit, it’s a bit scary,” I said.

She looked at Leonard.

“If he’s out there I’d like a run at him,” he said. “I think I can fuck him up.”

Brett thought for a while. “Do we continue?”

“You’re the boss,” Leonard said. “I wouldn’t trust Weasel to give me a cold. Hell, Cason brought him here, and he doesn’t trust him. Not completely. Guy like that, he works like psychics. They listen around, figure out what it is we’re interested in, then feed it back to us. He may have picked up clues from Cason when they first talked. I mean, Cason, he can be clever, but a guy like Weasel, fucking people around is what he does for a living. He takes a cold reading, swirls it around in his head a little, and by the time he comes to us he may have gotten enough from Cason to weave a story that fits the way we wanted it to fit. It’s like making someone believe in flying saucers. You do the whole thing on a person’s head, about how conceited it is to think we are the only thinking creatures in the universe, as if we think all that much. The flying saucers are a jump in logic. We are conceited, therefore extraterrestrial life is likely, therefore aliens have arrived on earth in flying saucers. But if that’s logical, why do they always land somewhere weird with some two-toothed ignoramus standing on a stump with his dick up a cow’s ass? The aliens cut the cow’s udder out, haul Two Tooth off to some place high in space, spread his ass with salad spoons, play with his pecker, and send him home. Why is that? That makes no sense. They’re so damn space handy why the fuck don’t they just let everyone know they’re here, hold a conference at the White House? Might be some folks out there that’ll come in for a landing some day, but so far, not so much, and I’m not holding my breath. But you talk shit right, and people believe it.”

Brett and I stared at him for a moment.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said.

“I’m using a comparison, you two. Surely you get it. Bullshit can be given a solid platform so anyone that’s willing to believe it can. It makes sense if you think about it,” Leonard said.

“You think?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Brett said.

“Don’t wave me off. The flying saucer story really has to do with what we’re talking about.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said.

“Does too.”

“You had that hobbyhorse in your mental garage and pulled it out. You been looking for some spot to put that in a conversation.”

“Have not.”

“Have too.”

“Boys,” Brett said. “That will be quite enough.”

We gave each other a wicked look, and then we looked at the floor.

“Thing is, unless she was abducted by aliens, as far as Sandy goes, we still don’t know dick,” I said.

“He hasn’t quit,” Leonard said. “He’s picking at me.”

“Boys. I mean it. That’s enough. Look, we got a missing girl. We got dead folks connected to the missing girl. There are no cow udders and no aliens.”

“What I’m saying,” Leonard said. “I’m not saying there are. I’m saying it’s easy to believe in incredible assassins and all manner of bullshit if it’s presented to you right. That’s all I’m saying.”

“And now you’re done,” Brett said. “Right?”

“Right,” Leonard said.

“Here’s some hard, cold truths,” Brett said. “There’s no more money coming to us on this, and I don’t like the old bitch that hired us. Stay on this we go in the hole as far as money is concerned. It’s all gratis. And by the way, it’s a deep hole. Everyone got that?”

“Got you,” I said.

“Just so you know,” she said.

“We know,” I said.

“Story of our life,” Leonard said.

Brett was quiet for some time, but I could sense she was arranging thoughts in her head like a bricklayer laying bricks. She said, “I say we stick. See how this comes out. It’s about a missing woman, and I have a daughter, such as she is, and I know how I’d feel, cause I been there.”

I nodded. Leonard and I knew, of course. We had sort of rescued her daughter, Tillie, twice.

“Seeing it through, that’s all right by me, but sometimes it’s not a pretty picture,” Leonard said.

“I been around you two long enough to know that,” Brett said. “It’s not like I haven’t had my tit in the wringer a few times.”

“You’ve shown you’ve got what it takes more than once,” Leonard said.

“I think so,” Brett said.

“No doubt about it,” I said. “You got tough tits.”

“You can say that again,” Brett said.

“All right, then,” I said. “We’re in to the end. As for the Canceler, finding out about him, there’s another person I can think of has an ear to the ground. Better than Cason, I think. Maybe better than Weasel. We need someone wades through shit on a regular basis and can turn it into tapioca.”

“Ain’t that us?” Leonard said.

“I think this is deeper than our usual crap.”

“Oh, hell,” Leonard said. “You don’t mean that cornpone motherfucker—”

“Jim Bob Luke,” I said.

O
f course I can figure it out,” Jim Bob Luke said. He smiled like an alligator and moved a well-chewed toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other with his tongue. “You do know who you’re talking to, don’t you?”

“We know, all right,” Leonard said. “But ego alone won’t solve what we’re up against.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jim Bob Luke said. “That’s only true if I’m a blowhard. And I’m not. I can do what I say. It has never occurred to me but once—and I was feeling kind of sick that day—that there might be something I couldn’t figure, couldn’t solve. And by the way, that day I had my doubts, I solved it anyway. That cured me from doubting me. I always say: I want someone smart to talk to, I go out back of the house and talk to myself. I am fucking sterling company.”

We were at our office, and Jim Bob, who lived in Pasadena, just on the other side of Houston, had driven down that morning after a phone call the night before, and he’d even brought doughnuts. They weren’t on my diet, but damn it, I had two of the chocolate-coated kind. Brett had three, and Leonard asked for his cookies and we gave them to him. I have no idea how many he ate. Now, if I could only remember how many doughnuts Jim Bob ate, I’d be one happy man. I think he also brought apple fritters.

Jim Bob wasn’t a young man, but he wasn’t exactly old, either. He looked younger than he was. He was long and lean with a quick smile and eyes that sometimes looked green and sometimes blue and I suppose were actually a shape-shifting gray; they changed with the light or the clothes he was wearing. Today they looked blue in his tanned face. He wore a black shirt with snap pockets, what we used to call a cowboy shirt. He had on crisp blue jeans and black boots with red explosions on the toes, like he had kicked something dead and bloody. He had a white straw cowboy hat with a wide paisley band and a big green feather in it. He had taken it off and had rested it on his knee. He always looked wrong without the hat on. Looked like the kind of guy that had been born with it on his head. His hair was a little sweaty and hat-shaped.

As always, Jim Bob appeared happy and in a good mood, though I knew behind that friendliness was a granite-hard reserve and a dark streak. He seemed like the biggest redneck that ever walked the earth until you spent time with him. Then you realized that behind that rawness, that laid-back coolness, was a sharp mind and quick reflexes and street-fighting skills. I had seen them in action. Woe to the man that thought Jim Bob was a simple Texas goober. He could not only fight, he could also think, and he was as brave as they come without being foolish. He had depth that he kept hidden, but you could sense it was there, the way the smell of ozone alerts you to the approach of lightning.

Brett told him everything we knew, even her thoughts about Vanilla Ride, whom he knew. He knew damn near everyone who had ever done an illicit deed, and he had done a few himself here and there, but in his mind, and my own, it was for the greater good. Still, knowing that, and sometimes being a part of such myself, didn’t help me sleep all that well at night. I think Jim Bob, like Leonard and Brett, snoozed just fine.

Jim Bob listened quietly, looking like he always does, like he’s already got the answers before you get through explaining.

“Weasel tells a good story,” Jim Bob said. “Some of it might have the whiff of bullshit about it, but I’m thinking it isn’t all fairy tale. I’ve heard word of this Canceler. He supposedly wiped out an entire Mexican drug gang that was bringing dope into Houston, not because he was trying to do a humanitarian thing but because he got hired to whack them. And he kept on whacking them until what was left of them decided to stay down below the Rio Grande and sell tacos. They were bumping into the drug business in Houston, hurting some of the local boys’ revenue. This Mexican gang, the Canceler took them out one by one, and though he didn’t use a wire on all of them, it was mostly that. He isolated the ones he could, wired them, cut off their balls, and in the end I think there were four left, and like I said, they ran back to Mexico. Canceler followed them somehow, broke into their stronghold in Mexico, and killed all four. Took their nut sacks and left.”

“That part sounds like some of Weasel’s rumors,” Leonard said.

“Wouldn’t sound like that if you knew better,” Jim Bob said. “Some of that gang was seriously bad and mean as a snake in a latrine. I knew folks dealt with them. Bought drugs. Not saying they’re friends of mine, saying through my underworld contacts I came up against them, and one of them was an American beaner who did enough business with them he thought he might be next on the list.”

“Beaner,” I said. “Nice.”

“Oh, hell, Hap. I got friends that are beaners, real friends.”

This was the kind of stuff that made Jim Bob confusing, but I didn’t say anything else. I had long ago given up on trying to sort out who was who by what they said. It was as Leonard said, “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.”

Jim Bob continued.

“So, as I was saying, this beaner named Miguel, who is not a friend but comes to me for protection, wants to hire me for it. Tells me this Canceler is real, and Miguel knows he’s on the list, cause he’s been doing drug business in a heavy way with the boys from Mexico, and now those boys are missing their balls, not to mention their lives, and he wants to hire me. I don’t have nothing for that shithead, so I tell him no, and a week later they find him in a storage container out by the docks with his pants off and his balls gone, his throat cut. Maybe with a wire. No one knows what’s true and what’s myth about the guy, but this Canceler fella is real. My bet is he doesn’t take the balls to prove he’s done his job but takes them as a souvenir.”

“I guess they don’t give out awards for best serial killer,” I said. “So he has to provide his own trophies.”

“Unless you count the prize the press gives him. And this guy, he doesn’t get treated like a serial killer. He’s a hit man. He gets paid. For him, those men’s nuts, it’s like a little boy stealing girls’ panties. He likes to take them out, look at them from time to time, maybe sniff them and bat them around with a tennis racket or some such, no telling what all, but he gets more respect than the dime-store serial killer, least among those who pay for his services.”

“Does the Canceler kill women?” Brett asked. “I’m thinking I might get a pass if he comes after us.”

“I think he’d kill anyone,” Jim Bob said. “Maybe he’s got some vaginas in his collection, too. I don’t know. Stretches them over his head like a horse collar. How this all fits in with the car business and the blackmail I don’t know. That’s a lot of working parts, and some of those parts grind together a little. Think what we ought to do, since you two took a run at this Frank, and then your friend Cason did the same, is I take a run at her. I am one charming motherfucker when I want to be.”

“Really?” Brett said.

“Really,” he said. “Girl with a dick or no dick, I can make them smile.”

“Or feel ill,” Brett said.

“You good-looking little darling, you are so right. I can do that, too. But sometimes you got to play a different card in a different situation. I can smooth out when I want to.”

“Cason is as charming as they come,” Leonard said. “He kind of charms me. But you, charming? I don’t know, man.”

“All right, let’s talk straight,” Jim Bob said. “Am I good-looking?”

“Oh, hell, man,” I said.

“Really,” Jim Bob said. “Brett? What do you think?”

“You are a handsome man,” she said. “And to tell you true, if I didn’t already have my man, you’d butter my biscuit, no doubt. I mean I’d probably kill you in a week, but as much as you’re arrogant, you are somehow appealing, like whipped cream, which also makes me sick. I think calling people beaners and such would wear on me, and that toothpick annoys me, and I don’t like the hat, unless it’s to shit in, but as long as we didn’t talk all that much, I can see you being appealing enough. I’d think of you as someone who could hit the high spots.”

“I think I’m wounded to the bone,” I said. And I was a little.

“All is well,” Brett said. “I’m just giving my honest opinion as a beautiful and highly appealing woman.”

“There you have it,” Jim Bob said and winked at Brett. “Thank you, you fine-looking honeypot, cause your opinion really matters to me. Hell, Leonard there, even he’s thinking—and tell me if I’m wrong, Lenny—you’re thinking: that is one fine-looking man, and I’d like to do him. Aren’t you, Leonard?”

“Hardly,” Leonard said, but I thought there was a bit of a catch in his voice.

“Well, we need not worry about that. I don’t throw the saddle on homos, just women.”

“You are going to get hurt,” Leonard said.

Jim Bob laughed. Unlike most people, Leonard didn’t faze Jim Bob in the least. He liked messing with people, pulling their strings. Life was his oyster, and you were living outside the shell as far as he was concerned.

“Here’s the thing,” Jim Bob said. “I got me a date with a barrel racer tonight, a twenty-nine-year-old big-tittied blond home wrecker if you ever saw one. Fortunately for me I don’t have a wife, so there’s nothing to wreck. I don’t even have a hog farm anymore. Sold it. But I do have that date.”

“This might be a little more important than dating a barrel racer,” I said.

“You haven’t seen the barrel racer, Hap. She’s got legs so long you want to climb her like a tree. Least up to where it forks. I mean, yeah, she’s younger than me by some years, but shit, way I see it, if she dies she dies. But here’s the other thing. I don’t want to go into this car place looking to buy a car close to when all you numb nuts went in. I say we give it a week or so, let this Frank get your visit off her mind. She’s bound to have her flag up and ready to tussle. So I don’t want to make her think I’m part of the problem. I want her to see me as a mark.”

“Makes sense,” Leonard said.

“Also, I got to tell you, since you went in there and pulled on Frank’s string pretty hard, I figure she went to her boss and pulled on his string. People like that, they don’t like their strings pulled. If they’re connected like this Weasel says, they may not like it so much you might even get a visit from them, and they won’t be bringing flowers and a bottle of wine. On the other hand, they may just figure you guys aren’t really on to shit and are no threat.”

“Good,” Leonard said. “Then we get to meet the Canceler sooner than later.”

“I don’t think so. Guy like the Canceler, they don’t pull him out for just any old hit on a peckerwood and bop-a-nigger job.”

“Hey,” Leonard said.

“I’m telling you how they think, Leonard. First rule of becoming a good detective—not something I think is in your immediate future—is you got to think like they do, and sometimes you got to be them, at least in spirit.”

“Call me a nigger again and you’ll have my spirit up your ass.”

“Trying to say watch your backs, cause they might send problem solvers, one of those that’s on the low end of the totem pole. Not some hot-dog professional but a crowd of dick draggers that come cheap. Eyes and ears open, and keep your left up. And by the way, since you didn’t mention pay, I suppose this is one of them jobs where I’m doing this for you to have the pleasure of my company.”

“Looks that way,” I said. “Maybe something comes along later that we can’t do, don’t want to do, we can throw it your way, something has money in it, I mean.”

“Thoughtful. I figure it’s most things you three can’t do when it comes to real detective work, so I might have a long line of referrals coming my way. No offense, Brett, you can learn, these two, I’m not so sure. They are blunderers. How they have lived as long as they have and managed to have all their legs and arms is beyond me. Deal is, I’m going back to Houston.”

Jim Bob looked at his watch.

“I got time to get there and shower up, put on some smell-good, buy a couple packs of rubbers, and meet my barrel racer.”

“Couple packs of rubbers,” Brett said. “Very romantic.”

“Ah, honey, I’m taking her to dinner first, and I always let the woman put the rubber on, and I think two packs is enough. And don’t worry. I need an extra pack, I can send her to the drugstore. I got a bicycle in the garage.”

“You can leave now,” Brett said. “Wouldn’t want you to miss your barrel racer.”

“And she wouldn’t want me to miss, either, in more ways than one. But as you know, I’m a straight shooter.”

He stood up, put on his hat, and went out.

As we listened to him going down the stairs, I said, “He can rub a dildo wrong when he wants to.”