I picked up his gun, a little nine, and went up the stairs again. Leonard was waiting.
“Stop to go to the bathroom?” he asked.
“I was disarming a gentleman.”
Leonard pointed with his handgun. “There’s one door. Shall we see what’s on the other side? Lady or the tiger.”
“I think we might get both,” I said.
We moved quickly down the hall and Leonard kicked at the door and it swung back and came loose, hanging on one hinge, and then it came loose and fell. It was a toilet. It was empty.
“They were guarding a bathroom?” Leonard said. “Really.”
There was probably some way to get across, but we didn’t see it right away, and we were in a bit of a hurry. We put the guns in our waistbands, under our shirts, went down the stairs and behind the stage. The Gospel Opry folks were not deterred. The action, such as it was, was still going on. It was some kind of comedy act. When we got to the other side, we passed the man and the woman who had been wearing the horse outfit. They gave us the hard eye.
“Were you two part of the disruption?” said the woman.
“No, ma’am,” I said, and kept going. We went up the stairs where the deacons had been. We pulled out our guns. There were two doors along the hallway.
“I’ll take one, you take the other,” Leonard said.
We chose a door, nodded at each other, and stomp-kicked them. My door went back completely off the hinges, old as it was. I could hear Leonard still kicking as I went through.
There was a bed in the room and a little light to the right, and there was a row of four chairs on that side, and I’m dying if I’m lying, there were four men in those chairs, and the one closest to the light was reading a newspaper. It was like they were in a barbershop waiting their turn. Tillie was on the bed, and a nude man was on her, his naked ass bobbing like a basketball. Tillie wasn’t there, really. She was in some other zone. She had her eyes open, but they might as well have been closed. She looked skeletal. My guess is she hadn’t been fed in a while, outside of what was in a needle. She looked a lot like Brett, if Brett were a concentration-camp survivor, and that disturbed me even more.
The four men stood up. They were all dressed, though one had taken off his shoes and placed them under his chair. One of them was wearing a police uniform and had his hand on the pistol in his belt. He was out for a little on-duty nookie and a bit of blow it seemed.
By then, Leonard had come through the door. The cop pulled his pistol and I shot him. I hit him in the arm and he fell down on the floor and started going around in circles like Curly of the Three Stooges. He was yelling, “Don’t shoot me no more, don’t shoot me no more.”
Blood was all over the place.
The other three men acted as if to run, but Leonard resorted to foul language that had to do with their mothers. They sat back down, as if still waiting their turn. Their mothers be damned.
I said, “Where’s dickhead? Buster?”
Nobody said anything.
“He asked you a question,” Leonard said. “You don’t say, and we find him, we’re going to shoot all your toes off. And then your dick.”
By this time the man in the bed had got off Tillie and was standing beside the bed with one hand over his pecker.
Leonard said, “I had a turkey neck like that, I’d keep it covered too. Fact is, I’m an expert on dicks, and that is an ugly one.”
“He does know dicks,” I said.
The man in the police uniform had quit spinning and had stuck his head up under a chair. He said, “I’m hit. I’m hit.”
“No shit,” I said.
I went over and saw that Tillie was breathing hard. I pulled the blanket at the end of the bed over her. I looked at the naked man with his hand over his privates and I just went berserk. I don’t know what happened to me, but I just couldn’t stand to think people like this existed, that they could sit in chairs and wait their turns to top some drugged girl. I kicked the naked man in the balls and hit him in the head with the pistol, and then I went after the other three, but not before I kicked the police officer on the floor once and heeled his gun under the bed. I started hitting those three guys with the pistols, one in either hand. I was hitting so fast I looked like Shiva. They tried to run for it, but each time they did Leonard kicked them back into play, and I just went to work. I felt wrong. I felt savage. I felt awful, and yet, I felt right.
It didn’t take long before all of them were bleeding. Two were on the floor. One had fallen back into his chair. The naked man on the floor wasn’t moving. He was lying on his side and had thrown up all over the place, and the air was thick with the stench of vomit.
“Okay,” Leonard said. He walked over and put his gun against the shoeless man’s nose. He was the one who had sat back down. “Where is Buster?”
The man didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. A door opened at the far end and two men came in. One had a shotgun. He cut down with it, but we were already moving. I dropped to the floor behind the bed, and Leonard leaped through the door he had kicked down, landed out in the hallway. From under the bed I could see the man’s legs, and I shot at them, three times in rapid succession. I hit him somewhere because he yelped and fell down. I shot him again, this time in the top of the head, cracking it apart like a big walnut. The other man had a handgun and he had been firing it all this time. So far he had hit the bed, killed the barefoot man in the chair behind me, and had put some holes in the wall.
From under the bed I saw Leonard’s feet as he came through the other door, the one I had kicked down, and then he was on that bastard. I got to my feet and started around, tripped over the policeman who had, without me seeing him, started crawling toward the open doorway.
“Stay,” I said, as if speaking to a dog.
He stopped crawling.
By the time I got around to Leonard he had already taken the man down. Somehow the man had shot himself in the foot. I kicked him in the head, just to let him know I was in the game, and then Leonard reached down and took the man’s pistol. Considering this guy’s aim it was probably best to have left him with it. In time he would have shot himself again, maybe in the head.
“You stick,” I said to Leonard.
“All right, but I hear too much gunfire, I’m coming. Right after I kill the lot of them.”
I went through the door the two had come through, and by now I could hear yelling down below in the auditorium. The gunfire had roused things up, and was probably more exciting than anything they had seen tonight.
When I got into the room upstairs I saw that it was well tricked out for an old building. Lots of modern furniture, including a big couch. It was pushed back from the wall and I could see feet sticking out from behind it. I walked over there and laid my guns on the coffee table and grabbed the man by the ankles and pulled him out face-first. He tried to hang on to the floor, but this only resulted in his dragging his nails across it. He was a long lean man in a plaid sports coat with hair the color of black shoe polish. I said, “You Buster Smith?”
He said, “No.”
I got his wallet out of his back pocket and looked at his driver’s license. “Yes, you are,” I said. “I bet you always got caught when you played hide-and-go-seek as a kid.”
He got to one knee. “I did, actually.”
I went over and got my guns, said, “I wouldn’t try anything. I shoot you, then Leonard will shoot everyone else, and we’ll have a hard time explaining things. But you’ll be dead.”
We didn’t go to jail.
That’s the important part. Let me tell you why. So when it was done and everyone was hauled in, including me and Leonard, they waltzed us into the police chief. This is after interrogations, searches, a rubber glove up the asshole, just in case we were hiding hand grenades. He was a nice-looking guy with his black hair cut close to his head and one ear that stood out more than the other, as if it were signaling for a turn. He sat behind a big mahogany desk. There was a little sign on the desk that read: POLICE CHIEF.