Red, wearing his stupid ten gallon hat, was standing next to him, close to his hip, watching the events.
I shouldn’t have, but I looked at Wilber on his hands and knees, trying to get up, and was overcome with rage. I swung my foot in an arc and brought it down on the back of his neck brace with a snapping motion. Wilber screamed, hit the floor and lay there holding his neck. “That hurt! That hurt! Oh, God, that hurt!”—like maybe it was supposed to feel good.
“Well, Hap,” Leonard said. “Looks like you’ve shit in the porridge again.”
“I’ll say.”
I pulled my ankle gun and backed toward Leonard. The big guy with his head through the door was trying to pull it out again. Leonard let him this time, then rapped the barrel over his head harder than ever. The big guy decided to lie down and rest for a moment, but I could see he was twitching already, working to get up.
Leonard opened the door and we backed through it. I heard the sound just a little too late. It was the man I had encountered on the porch. He was rushing our backs like a missile.
Leonard wheeled, cracked the bastard’s head with the barrel of the shotgun, then kicked out and knocked him down. The man came up with a gun in his hand, and Leonard, casual as an angler casting a fly rod, jerked the shotgun down from where it lay over his shoulder, and fired. The man’s left foot went away and he fell to the floor and thrashed like a chicken. Blood went everywhere. Leonard leaned over and casually picked up the man’s pistol and dropped it in his coat pocket. He said, “From now on it’s all left shoes for you, Bubba.”
Leonard broke open the shotgun, put the discarded cartridges in his pocket, and reloaded. He might have been doing nothing more than looking at a splinter in his hand, he was so blasé.
The door in front of us was wide open now, and gradually the bodyguards were sliding into the room. They had guns. No more tackle and punch shit. They were going to kill us.
Red pushed in between their legs, for all the world acting like a kid who was about to see something neat in a peep show. Leonard snapped the shotgun shut. We all jumped, then froze.
There was a sound behind us. I glanced carefully over my left shoulder and saw Brett enter the room. She was carrying a pistol by her side. The old lady who had invited me to have a good time came after her, as if to claw her. Brett turned and swung the pistol against the old woman’s head like she was burying an ax in a log. The old woman went down on her knees and dropped her dentures on the floor and held her blood-spurting forehead, said, “You stinkin’ cunt.” Or so I believe. It was hard to tell without her teeth.
Whatever it was, Brett didn’t like it. She bent down and struck her again, this time behind the ear, not hard, but solid enough. The old woman hit the floor, rolled and cussed and bled all over the carpet.
Brett walked up between us. I said, “Let’s back out.”
I thought all the guns in the room would go off then, but they didn’t.
Leonard shouted, “I pull this trigger, half the room disappears.”
That got everyone’s attention. Maybe that’s what they’d been thinking all along and that’s why no one had done anything. There’s nothing like a shotgun with barrels big as subway tunnels to make you take time to consider.
“All guns go away now, or I pull the trigger,” Leonard said. “Do it!”
A couple of beats as everyone looked at the guy rolling around on the floor, screaming, clutching his ankle, his foot spitting blood. The guns went back inside suit coats.
“You,” Brett said to the midget. I turned my attention to the front of the room.
Red pointed at himself.
“Yeah, you,” Brett said. “Shit pile in a hat. Get over here, you little cocksucker.”
Red looked around for help. No one was offering any.
Leonard said, “Do as the lady says, or you’re gonna be even shorter.”
Red wandered toward us, like an amnesiac man who had just walked free of a plane crash somewhere in the Yucatan. In the doorway I saw Wilber appear, one hand on the neck brace. He looked at me with fire in his eyes.
“How’s the neck?” I said.
The fire in his eyes turned to lava.
I gave Red a quick pat-down, found a revolver under his coat. I put it in my coat pocket. I put one hand on Red’s shoulder, and we started backing. Brett deliberately stepped on the old woman’s hand as we went. The woman bellowed and her teeth, which she had recovered and replaced, flew out again. Brett kicked them across the room, and we kept backing. We backed like that all the way out to the car. The entire gang, bodyguards, whores, and johns, and the old woman who was constantly gumming cuss words, came out on the porch and stood under the porch light looking at us.
Leonard opened the trunk, told Red to get inside.
“You’ve got to be kiddin’,” Red said.
“I look like I’m in a humorous mood?”
“I can’t stand tight places.”
“You think the grave ain’t tight?”
Brett grabbed the brim of Red’s hat and jerked it down over his eyes. She whapped him a good one on the top of the head with the pistol. “Do what he says, dick-lick!”
Red hesitated almost as long as it takes to skin the wrapper off a stick of gum, then, the hat still over his eyes, he got hold of the car, climbed inside the trunk, and Leonard closed it.
Leonard gave me the shotgun, went around, got behind the wheel and started the engine. Brett slipped into the back seat. I slid in on the front passenger side, closed the door, and stuck the shotgun out the window.
We roared out of there so fast Leonard fishtailed and banged Brett’s car into the side of a pickup truck. But that didn’t stop us. With the moon at our backs, we went up and over the hill and away, rattling the midget and the guns in the trunk.
14
“I don’t like it,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter what you like,” Brett said.
“Leonard?”
“It’s rough, Hap, but far as I’m concerned, it’s the way to go. Little shit nearly got us all killed. We got to profit from him.”
We had found a road out in the boonies and Leonard had pulled off, hoping to lose any pursuers we might have gained. If anyone had followed, we hadn’t seen sight of them yet. Maybe they were thinking about the shotgun. Then again, Leonard had been driving almost seventy miles an hour on roads that were designed for thirty, so there was a good chance he lost them before they could find their car keys. His driving had been almost as scary as our time in the whorehouse.
We were standing outside the car, beside the road in the bright moonlight, about to open the car trunk. Brett wanted to pistol-whip the dwarf into talking, and Leonard was for it too. He and Brett were just trying to decide on the best pistol for the job. Brett favored a long-barrel, and Leonard thought a short one was better because you could use it up close, requiring no more effort than the snap of a wrist. I didn’t know we had a long-barrel, but somehow Leonard had come up with one of those too, a cold piece from his closet.
I didn’t like the idea, short barrel or long. I was trying to talk them out of it. It’s one thing to hit a guy in self-defense, another to deliberately pistol-whip him.
“Just enough so he talks,” Brett said. “Then maybe a little for entertainment.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“We came all the way up here because he said my daughter was in trouble. Then we see him here. What he told us, it could mean anything, Hap. We could wine and dine him and give him a cigar, but I figure a pistol-whipping is a lot quicker and it would certainly make me feel better.”
“That’s the part worries me,” I said.
“We didn’t come here to be nice,” Brett said. “You’re the one told me it might not be pretty, and now you’re trying to make it pretty.”
“I’m trying to be human. Revenge isn’t the way.”