When Conners and the fat boy were back in their chairs, Leonard took the sap out of his pocket, said, “Just so you know, I’m ready to warm you up again.”
“Tell us about the hit folk,” I said. “We’re tired of getting shot at. Tell us about who you sent after us, and just to make it easy on you, don’t say you don’t know what we’re talking about. Just talk or I’m going to give you to Leonard again.”
“We just do as we’re told,” Conners said.
“And why is that?” I said.
“Why do you think?”
“Money” I said, “and now that you’re in, you don’t want someone coming after you, am I right?”
“Something like that.”
“But you’re a bigger dog in all this than you’ve let on. You, and probably your fat friend here—certainly your fat friend—you pick the hitters, so you’re pretty well connected. What the fuck is your name, fat friend?”
“Sykes,” he said.
“I prefer Fat Boy,” I said. “Now, how goes it, Conners? How’s it work?”
“I’ve made some connections over the years,” Conners said. “I’m a cop. You meet people that know people, and you find you can make deals.”
“Sweet deals.”
Conners nodded.
“So, to get right to the fuckin’, no foreplay where is the woman you hired to kill us?”
“Woman?”
“Yep. She hit one of our pards, and blew up Hirem’s kid and girlfriend, and put me and Leonard in a hospital for a while, and just so you know, we’re mad.”
Conners smiled. “Vanilla Ride. I didn’t even know it was a woman. I got her contact a couple years back. She’s made ten hits for what you call the Dixie Mafia. She’s made hits for others. Made them through me. Sometimes those hits are more than one person. You two are supposed to be dead.”
“It wasn’t from want of trying,” I said.
“I’ve never even seen her, or a lot of the hitters. I got contacts, I told you.”
“Tell us how to contact Vanilla Ride. Me and Leonard thought we’d drop in, say hello.”
“I contact her by mail. No e-mail. No phone number. I drop her a letter from a false address to a P.O. box, and the letter has names on it, some general information, where these people are. Then we get a FedEx from her with the names we gave her and she’s got a line drawn through them when the job is done, and then the big dogs pay her at that P.O. box. She, huh? A woman. Now that’s something. I thought Vanilla Ride was some big guy with a shotgun. And you guys, you were on her list with lines drawn through your names, drawing flies somewhere. That’s what I was thinking, what I was hoping.”
“She speculated a bit too much,” Leonard said. “We’re still here. Tired and pissed off, but here. She was on our tail, but she got cocky.”
“Got a question,” I said. “Did Vanilla Ride return the money?”
“No, not yet,” Conners said. “Someday it’ll just turn up on the right doorstep. No one will see who dropped it, it’ll just show up. She knows everyone in the business, where they live, what they do. That’s what makes her so deadly. Damn, a woman. Sounds like my kind of broad.”
“What’s the address?” I said.
“I give it to you, you’ll kill us,” Conners said.
“You don’t give it to us I’ll kill you,” I said. “I’m in no mood to play games, man. Give me the address.”
“You’ll let us go?” Conners said.
“I don’t want any more blood on my hands than I already have.”
Leonard looked at me. I said, “I mean that, Leonard.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “I know you do.”
“He wants us dead,” Sykes said.
“Yep,” Leonard said. “I do.”
“So how’s it gonna be?” Conners said.
“It’s gonna be nice enough, you give us that address.”
“It’s a post office box in Arkansas.”
“All right. Give it to us, and let me just say this. If we go on a wild-goose chase, or anyone gets on our tail, we will come right back to you and kill your asses dead, and then shoot you daily for a week just to make ourselves happy. Tell us what we want to know, this is a way you get out of it scot-free, but you screw with us, we hold a grudge.”
“Hell, I hope you find her,” Conners said. “No idea she was a woman, but you find her, from what I know of her work, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
“You tell us how to find her, you get to live,” I said. “Hell, man, it’s your choice.”
Leonard looked at me like a puzzled dog, said, “They hired Vanilla Ride for the Dixie Mafia. She tried to kill us. What makes these assholes so special?”
“I want who hit our man and those kids and took the money and tried to blow us up, so I’m willing to trade.”
“How do we know your word is good?” Conners said.
“You know as much as we know yours is good,” I said. “Make a choice. Now.”
50
Stopping by the all-night station/store in No Enterprise, we bought some traveling goods and filled up the gas tank and I looked for the guy in the garage, but he and his fuck book were not present and the door was locked. It was too late to work and too late to read. Maybe he was home doing what he had been reading about. Most likely he had the book in his left hand and himself in his right.
One of the things we bought was some bright blue stationery and envelopes. I wrote down the address Conners had given us on it, put it to Vanilla Ride, and then I wrote Conners’ address, which he had been so kind to give us, in the left-hand corner as the sender. Since they couldn’t phone her or find her any quicker than we could, I wanted to get things started. I wrote “Hi” on a piece of the blue stationery and folded it up and put it in the bright blue envelope and laid it on the dash of the car, waiting until we could buy a stamp.
We started for Arkansas, cruising along not listening to music, just quiet for a long time. We had left Conners and Sykes tied up in their kitchen with lamp cords and stripped sheets. I figured they’d work themselves loose in a couple hours or so.
Leonard finally broke the silence, said, “You know that was stupid, letting them live?”
“I do. But I think I have to draw the line somewhere.”
“You draw the line on them but you’re traveling all the way to Arkansas to kill Vanilla Ride.”
“It seems a little more personal.”
“I see them all as one big nest.”
“I’m sure you’re right, but I guess I’ve decided to focus my anger all on one, the one put the bomb under the car and killed Tonto and those kids and gave us a stay in the hospital.”
“All right,” Leonard said. “But you know those guys aren’t through with us.”
“Yep.”
“We’ll deal with them again.”
“Yep.”
“I thought Conners was at the top of our list. You said to put stars by his name.”
“Yep.”
“So why didn’t we just nip it in the bud?”
“I’ve tried my best to explain.”
“And your explanation sucks.”
“I just couldn’t shoot them out of their chairs like that, in cold blood.”
“What if Vanilla Ride is sitting in a chair?”
“I’ll ask her to stand up.”
“You’ll be killing a woman.”
“She may be of that gender, but she’s no woman to me. I’m not even sure she’s human. Conners and Sykes do it for money, and Vanilla Ride gets paid, but, man, I got a feeling she loves that stuff. She liked baiting Tonto along like that, getting him to the point where he thought he was gonna get him a piece, and then, wham, he’s out of there. That’s cold, brother. And those kids.”
“I still don’t see a difference. She took the money. In the end, it’s all about money and they all want the money.”
“Maybe, Leonard, truth is, in the end, there’s no difference at all. Them. Us. We’re all killers, and in the end, the worms sort us out.”