These days they were a lot more freewheeling. They’d kill anyone or do anything to maintain business. That included Hirem’s son and girlfriend, and now that he had come forward to help the cops, it included Hirem himself.
The bad guys were also unhappy that a good chunk of their potential earnings had been flushed down the crapper by me, and Leonard had helped me do it. Couple of goons from a nearby town coming in and slapping their lower-level errand boys around, that didn’t look good. That’s why there had been a hit on us.
In that booger-dotted room Hirem said, “Wasn’t nothing personal, you two. It was business.”
“What about her?” I said, nodding at Brett. “What did she do to you?”
“Not a thing. And in the old days, she wouldn’t have been part of it. But these ain’t the old days, and I’m not in command. New guys at the top, they’re younger and meaner and more demanding, and they keep me on a tight leash. Most likely, ten years ago this would have just been a business loss and we’d have taken care of Tanedrue and his morons and that would have been the end of it. But that’s not the way they play these days.”
“Just for the record,” the Mummy said, “I wasn’t really one of their morons.”
“Informer, double agent, whatever you are or were,” Hirem said. “In the old days, we figured you were a cop, we might have let you go. And a thing like this, my son getting jungle fever, wanting to ride a porch monkey, taking off with a bag of money, it would have been handled differently. I could have paid it back, made him apologize, sent the shine girl packin’, maybe she would have caught a bullet, but no one else. Not like that anymore.”
“Shine?” Leonard said. “That word is still in the vocabulary?”
“It’s right next to colored,” I said. “Just south of porch monkey.”
“Oh,” Leonard said.
Bottom line was, Hirem was under the gun, literally, and instead of following through with what the Dixie Mafia wanted him to do, he decided he’d had enough and it was time to pull the train out of the station. He had come to the FBI to tell them about the hit on us, that he had been behind it. Came to tell them lots of things, some of those things not yet spoken, and the reason for that was he had to have a deal before he let out all the juice he knew.
But the thing was, he needed some patsies to find his son and the money. Some muscle. And since we had our asses in a crack, self-defense or not, and considering the cops figured they could probably find two more just like us to do Hirem’s work if we refused, we got picked and we accepted.
So the FBI, represented by the Mummy and the Dick Tracy villain, they said to us, and I paraphrase: You scratch our back, and we’ll scratch yours. You help Hirem get his son back in one piece, save that girl, and get us the money, since it isn’t exactly earned legal and it could be used by the United States government to continue the war on crime, we will wipe your slate clean. They could do that, they said. No trial, nothing. We would be helping the FBI, ’cause when Hirem got his son back, he was going to sing like a goddamn canary and we would be the recipients of all kinds of goodwill.
Course, on the record, we weren’t working for anyone. If the Dixie Mafia punched our tickets, the FBI wouldn’t know anything about it. If we said at any point we were working for the FBI, they would deny it. They could always find replacements for us in the wings, other fuckups they could take advantage of. They said just that.
“Yeah,” Leonard told them, “but you aren’t gonna find any bigger fuckups than us.”
No one argued.
We could leave the offer, of course, take our chances at trial, but Flat Top said, “Might not go so good you don’t help.”
“Isn’t that blackmail?” I said.
He said, “Uh-huh.”
I looked at Drake. He looked toward the wall.
And so that was how Leonard and I had come to unofficially work for the FBI so they wouldn’t have to get their hands dirty. They said if we wanted to, we could get help, but the help was in the same water we were. No one would know them and no one would protect them. It was us and our friends and whatever moxie we might have against the world, and that was it. Oh, and we did get their best wishes, and if we couldn’t get the duffel bag back, they’d let that go.
24
About four a.m. I heard a car pull in the drive. I had a good idea who it was, but I wasn’t taking any chances. In my pajamas and rabbit slippers, a gun in my hand, I left the bedroom. Brett was still snoring. I went downstairs with the rabbit ears flapping and found Leonard and Marvin in their shorts and T-shirts holding their shotguns.
After a few moments there was a knock on the door, and a voice said, “Ya’ll about to shoot, don’t. It’s me, Jim Bob. I’d like to keep my good-lookin’ ass intact.”
Leonard opened the door. “Hell, man, knowing it’s you is what gives me reason to shoot.”
Jim Bob, tall and broad-shouldered, thin but not skinny, came into the house and Leonard shut the door. Jim Bob took off his gray Stetson. The hatband was a thick strip of cloth in a cheetah-skin pattern, and in the band were toothpicks and little feathers. The hat was stained in a lot of spots. Without the hat, Jim Bob looked a little off; it was like seeing a rooster remove his head. He was red-faced and his hair was short, wheat-textured and orange-colored. He had a scar on his face I didn’t remember from the time before. He had on a light green snap-pocket Western shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of brown boots that looked as if most of the world had worn them for a while and then given them back. He looked at me, studied my bunny slippers. “You look like an idiot.”
“Don’t be jealous. I can hop real far.”
Jim Bob grinned, said, “Ain’t there no coffee?”
“There will be.” It was Brett, at the top of the stairs. She had pulled on some men’s boxer shorts under her T-shirt and she had on some flip-flops. “You loudmouthed guys don’t know how to let a girl get her beauty sleep.”
“Well, now,” Jim Bob said, looking up as Brett came down, her red hair tousled around her shoulders, her braless breasts bouncing pleasantly, “it’s good to see there’s still women know how to make coffee.”
“I didn’t say I was making it,” she said when she got to the bottom of the stairs. “I said there will be coffee. Right, Hap?”
“I’m on it,” I said.
“You look lovely,” Jim Bob said, flashing a grin at Brett that had probably charmed trailer-trash women from LaBorde to Memphis out of their panties and their Beanie Baby collections.
“And you are still full of shit,” Brett said.
“Yes, ma’am, I am. And you are still so lovely my back teeth hurt.”
“Just your teeth ache?” Brett said. “If that’s the case, I’m losing my touch.”
“Well,” Jim Bob said, “I was trying to be polite.”
There was the sound of another car outside, so I put down the coffee makings and went to the living room window for a look.
I peeled back the curtain and had to wipe the frosted pane clear with my arm to get a view. The rain had slacked and there was only a bit of the garage light to see by, but it was all I needed. A big black van was pulled up behind Jim Bob’s classic red Cadillac, the one he calls the Red Bitch, and when the driver got out, came around the back of Jim Bob’s ride, started for the house, it was as if the great shadow of Armageddon had fallen across the cold winter earth. He was at least six foot seven, with shoulders wide enough to make football players slash their wrists with envy. He had legs like trees and arms like smaller trees, a face that appeared to have been knocked into shape from granite and then beat on with a sledgehammer. His muscles moved under his clothes, like animals trying to escape a sack. He had long black hair tied back in a ponytail and he wore a black denim shirt, black leather jacket, black jeans, and black round-toed boots. He walked swiftly, like he was anxiously leaving a prayer meeting and was on his way to a whorehouse with a wallet full of money and a pack of rubbers.