“We ought to,” Drake said, “but we won’t.”
“You were undercover,” Leonard said. “Might have been nice had you warned us Tanedrue and his mutts were going to take a run at us.”
“I didn’t know,” Milhouse said. “Had no idea. I told them I had some family concerns, got out. My figuring was some higher-ups were gonna come down on them, and I didn’t want to be there when it happened.”
The fat guy said, “Way it was gonna work was we was gonna let Tanedrue and his dopes take care of you guys, then we were gonna come down on them, spread their asses all over Kingdom Come. Guys like them are too stupid to deal dope, and let me tell you from experience, that’s putting them in a real stupid place. We got guys working for us that are damn near retards and they do better. One guy in Dallas hasn’t got any legs and goes around in the streets on a wheeled board selling dope and peddling ass for us, and he does a better job than those fucks.”
“And who are you?” I asked. “My first guess is since you got people selling dope and ass for you, you’re not a cop, though these days, hard to say. And though you could be a priest on vacation, I’m doubtful.”
“I’m the guy that wanted you two killed,” the fat man said.
Leonard shifted in his chair. Drake said, “I got a gun, Leonard.”
“I don’t like people want to kill me or Hap,” Leonard said. “Fact is, it seriously chaps my ass. I don’t like you bringing him, whoever he is, in here to lord over us like he’s somethin’. What the hell is going on here? Tell us or arrest us or shoot us or do some goddamn thing or another. I’m fed up.”
“Hold it a minute,” I said. “Didn’t someone say something about a deal? I mean, there’s some kind of deal, I want to hear it.”
“Oh yeah,” Drake said. “These guys got deals out the ass.”
22
A day after they let us go, after they offered us the deal, Marvin gave us a short-lived holiday. He owned a boat and he took me and Leonard and Brett out to a lake near LaBorde to go fishing. It was a nice lake with a big dam. Marvin had some kind of membership there, and you could only get in with a key to a gate that had a sign on it that said BEWARE OF ALLIGATORS. It was an open boat and had plenty of seats and a lot of room, a place to lay your rods and clamp them down. There was a container in the floor of the boat and we had some cold drinks in there, but it was too cold to want them. We also had a couple thermoses of coffee, some bologna-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, some bags of potato chips that were more inviting.
Marvin steered the boat out to the middle of the calm water, making it less calm as we went. Small, dark birds were in the willow trees across the way and the grass near the trees was tall and still green even in the brisk beginnings of winter; it grew out from beneath the trees, ran across the bank and into the lake like a green tattoo. Once we got settled and the wake of the boat had subsided, the water around us looked like a huge sheet of tin. There was the faint smell of dead fish in the air and there were a number of old logs floating on the lake’s surface. After a while one of the logs swam away.
It was an alligator, probably sneaking up on a frog. It had fooled me. I cast my line away from that direction, but watched the alligator, the way it split the water and gave the lake a darker color wherever it swam.
“I certainly got you guys in a mess,” Marvin said.
“You did,” Brett said, frowning at the little green rubber lizard she had on the end of her line for bait.
“I know, and I regret it. Thanks for having them cut Gadget loose, Hap.”
“I didn’t have them do anything special,” I said. “I just told them they wanted a deal from us she had to be cut loose.”
“It’s the only way they would have let her go,” he said.
“No problem,” I said. “How’s she doing?”
“She’s in rehab, out in Arizona. Rachel and JoAnna are with her. I convinced them, after what you two did, I couldn’t go. Had to be here to help you. But Gadget, I guess she’s doing all right. Rachel said she’s still in a kind of shock. She feels guilty going back to Tanedrue, didn’t know they would come after you and take her with them, didn’t know it was going to be like that. She doesn’t love that dead fuck anymore, sees him for what he is and what he was doing to her. Now, after all that garbage she finally sees. She’s as naive as a fresh-born baby sometimes. Said to tell you, Brett, she deserved every slap you gave her, and then some.”
“Hell, I know that,” Brett said, and cast her line. She looked cute today, in a heavy coat with a tan cap with earflaps and big cream-colored puffy boots full of warm stuffing. Her long hair was tied back in a ponytail, and it was bloodred against her back because of the way the sun was falling on it.
“The FBI sort of got us over a barrel,” I said. “That had something to do with us telling them yes, trying to better our situation. We’re not all that noble, Marvin.”
“Speak for yourself,” Leonard said. “I am one noble sonofabitch, and way special. If I weren’t so tired I’d walk on water and kick that alligator’s ass.”
“You’d have got off anyway,” Marvin said. “There would have been a trial, and a lot of time taken up, but in the end, they’d have let you three off and fined you for the shotgun. I don’t know, might have been some jail time. Witnesses, though, they were on your side. There was one fellow upset about some yard gnomes, another about some pink flamingos, but other than that it came out all right.”
“Death to gnomes and flamingos,” I said.
“Bottom line,” Marvin said, “is I know why you did it, and you can downplay it all you want, but I know why you did it, and I won’t ever forget. Already owed you guys, now I really owe you.”
“We owed you some too,” Leonard said. “For something or another, though I kind of forget what. But after this we’ll be even. We can start running tabs on each other again.”
We fished all day in the cold, dry weather on the flat gray lake beneath the pearl-colored sky, eating the sandwiches and chips, drinking the coffee and talking a little, but not too much. I cast my line without purpose, and with no real hope of catching anything. I was fishing a wish and nothing more. I reeled my line in time after time, watching it cut the water like the thin edge of a knife. I cast and recast until the sun was falling down behind us and the sky that had been clear and pearl-colored at my back turned red as a whore’s lipstick, then was stained with purple like the insides of a plum stretched out. I reeled in my line and turned to take a good look at the sky. I thought it might be the last time I saw a sky like that, or went fishing. Might be the last day and night I saw Brett, because in the morning I was sending her away. It had been a battle, but I had convinced her. She was going out to Arizona too, to join Gadget and Rachel and JoAnna. Secretly, I think events had unnerved her. Not that she was fearful of what might happen to her—well, no more than someone should be reasonably fearful—but because she had enjoyed it all too much; there was something inside of her that had snapped. It was the same thing that had allowed her to set her ex-husband on fire and beat him with a shovel, and pistol-whip a midget. It hadn’t frightened her before, but now it had. She had seen its full face and it was gruesome. This time people had died. I didn’t question that they needed to die, but they had, and by our hands, in an explosion of blood and urine and feces, a whiff of gun smoke on the air.
I knew how she felt. Problem was, that thing inside of me had clicked loose so many times it was starting to feel normal, like the necessary lancing of a wound. I had looked into the abyss so much it was no longer just looking back at me, it had its arms around me and was puckering to kiss.
I wanted to just let it all go, do the jail time, forget about the FBI deal. But then I thought some more about that jail time, and since I had already done prison some years back and I could remember it as if it were yesterday I didn’t want any more of that.