For the others, the engines on the Harleys grew louder as they roared off, then softer as they faded off into the distance.
Woody and I raced off behind the building. Rudolph caught his balance about the same time and unleashed a volley in our direction. I felt the sting of ground spitting at us as bullets hit the earth a few inches away.
We slid and dove behind the building. The gunfire fell silent.
Woody wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. “Well this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” he said.
I held my body against the building and felt the burn in my lungs desperate for oxygen. “Don’t blame this shit on me. This is all about you and your overdone sense of justice.”
Woody gave it a moment of consideration, then shook his head. “Nah. This is your fault.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree then.”
We crouched low to the ground, resting our backs against the building wall. From the cacophony of noise and ruckus seconds earlier, everything fell to a dead silence now.
“American tough guy,” Yakovna said. She said it in a sing-song tone, trying to be funny, failing in the process, but points for the effort.
Woody crept to the far side of the building. There was only three or four feet between the rear of the building and the fence. To get to us, Rudolph and Wilhelm would have to come up the building sides or go outside of the lot and come around. Either way, we had the advantage of seeing them. Not that either of us had weapons. Handfuls of rocks weren’t much of an offensive strategy.
“Tough guy,” Yakovna said again. “Come on out, let us talk. We can negotiate, right? Settle this the American way.”
The sun pushed itself toward the other side of the sky, lengthening shadows. Silhouettes crept around the building. If anyone walked toward us, their shadows would be there long before they were.
I grabbed a piece of wood next to the wall. It was about two feet long, left over from a two-by-four. It was heavy, and I could take someone out at the knees if I needed to. I hoisted it over my shoulder like I was waiting for the next pitch.
“What are we negotiating?” I said.
“Whatever you want to negotiate, tough guy,” she said. “The American way, right? Negotiate.”
“You got any intention of letting us walk out of here?”
She laughed the way you laugh from seeing someone slip on ice and crack their skull. It rattled on longer than it needed to. The laughter wound down, like an engine running out of fuel, finishing with a few coughs and a snort and her trying to catch her breath.
“I’ll take that as a no,” I said.
“You are smart too, then, tough guy,” she said.
“What are we negotiating then?”
“We negotiate how long it take you to die. And which of my men get your bodies when you’re done.”
Woody mouthed something that looked like “What the fuck?”
“What I hear here sounds like a quiet burial in the woods,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Rudolph, he has many interests. He study taxidermy. Perhaps you would like stuffed, like the animals in hunting shops.”
“What about Wilhelm? Where’s his interests lie?”
When Yakovna laughed this time, it was without mirth. “Let’s say you’ll be grateful you are dead already once Wilhelm finishes with you.”
I wasn’t falling in love with either of those options. But then again, there wasn’t much in the way of other options. I kept to a low crouch and walked to the fence and rattled it. It was solid, without give. There wasn’t any way to get underneath it. Going over the fence was a nonstarter also. The blades on the razor wire glistened in the sun. That held as much appeal as Wilhelm’s plans for us.
To Woody, I said, “Got anything you’d like to add to this mess?”
“Only that when the super posse cornered Butch and Sundance, at least there was a river to jump into.”
“Thank you for those inspiring words, Flat Nose.”
Woody poked his head around the corner and pulled it back just as quickly. “There’s three motorcycles over there. We can get to ’em, we ride out of here.”
“You mean the ones with the dead bikers on top of them?”
“Yeah, those.”
“The motorcycles all the way at the gate? Past the crazy guys with machine guns who want to desecrate our corpses?”
“Those would be the motorcycles in question.”
“Still not sounding like a solution here. And besides, I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle.”
“Hell, that’s not a problem. The Russians’ll kill us before we get to them, anyway.”
I pressed myself against the building wall. “Oates!” I yelled. At the top of my lungs, I called out the idiot’s name again. “Oates!”
There was silence, and a motorcycle engine kicked to life and sped off.
Woody peeked back around the building corner.
“Was your idea involving Deputy Oates?” he said.
“I wanted to appeal to his inherent goodness.”
“His inherent goodness is hauling ass at sixty miles an hour down that dirt road.”
“Goddammit.”
“And now there’s only two motorcycles.”
Yakovna laughed again.
“I suppose it is just us again,” she said. The laughter fell from her voice. “Kill them, boys.”
Long shadows reached out on both sides of the building. The shapes of humans carrying guns. On my side, it looked like Wilhelm stalking toward me, waving his gun in the air. Woody was perched and ready for Rudolph on his side. He had found his own slab of wood and was ready to go to town.
We glanced over at one another. The element of surprise was on our side. Charging at the motherfuckers was an option. No one expects someone to attack them with a two-by-four when they’ve got an automatic weapon.
Big sighs. Woody held out his left hand, three fingers raised. I nodded, and he counted off with his fingers.
One.
I clenched my two-by-four as tight as I could. I imagined Buford Pusser, or Joe Don Baker as Buford Pusser. Pusser died at the end of the second movie.
Two.
I thought about Lily. I thought about what Woody always said, about if today was a good day to die. I thought about Billy and wondered if he’d bury me next to my mother. I wondered if anyone would find me to bury, or if there’d be anything left to bury, or if anyone would bother to show up for the funeral. I thought about the people I’d pissed off over the years, and the ones I hadn’t had the chance to piss off yet, and there was a smidge of disappointment in that.
Three.
We came to our feet in a jolt and brought back our weapons over our shoulders and then froze when we heard a horn blaring down the dirt road.
The shadow of Wilhelm turned away and ran in the other direction. Rudolph’s did the same. I jumped to Woody’s side and we peered around the corner and watched as a king cab pickup barreled down the road, that horn singing a song through the sky like the most joyous hymn I had ever heard.
The pickup bumped and thumped down the road and snubbed the edge of the gate, knocking the whole thing off its hinges. The wheels rolled over a Harley and over a dead biker but it didn’t stop.
Woody and I ran along the side of the building and got to the front in time to watch the pickup smack into Yakovna like she was a squirrel trying to cross the street. She slammed into the grill of the truck and slipped underneath it, caught under the wheels and turned into syrup as the back wheels rolled over her.
The pickup rolled on until it smashed into the Jaguar, its brakes squealing and the wheels stirring dust as it slowed to a stop, pushing the car across the impound lot and into the fence.
Rudolph and Wilhelm lifted their guns and were about ready to open a barrage of gunfire when Woody and I smashed them both across the back of their heads with the two-by-four remnants. They both fell forward without another word.
Sometimes it’s nothing
but a traumatic head injury that brings the mayhem to a close.
Woody and I picked up their guns and walked over to the pickup.
The driver’s side door opened, and Big Country climbed out. He had the shit-eating-est grin a man had ever produced. He adjusted the mesh-backed baseball cap on his head and nodded at us.
“Big Country, you are a goddamned undersized angel from heaven,” I said.
That smile got bigger. “How you boys doing?”
“We were about five seconds away from figuring out what was on the other side,” I said. “How the fuck did you know to come here?”
“Heard about the commotion out on Route 331, saw all the cops at the Saints’ place. Seemed like you two would have something to do with it, so I called Sheila and she said you’d be here. I didn’t want to miss out on the path for vengeance.”
His head did a slow pivot, taking in all the carnage. He glanced at what remained of Yakovna clinging to his tires. “Jesus and his disciples. Looks like I got here just in time.”
“We had shit under control,” I said.
“Hate to see what you think having shit out of control looks like.”
The front end of the pickup looked like a crushed soda can. Steam hissed from underneath the hood.
“Insurance ain’t gonna cover this,” Big Country said.
Police sirens sounded from the head of the dirt road. Overhead, a helicopter whirled across the sky, casting a spotlight down on us.
“Lower your weapons!” a voice like God said from a megaphone on the helicopter. “Weapons on the ground and hands in the air now!”
Woody and I put our hands in the air. So did Big Country, but from up high, it might have been more difficult to tell.
36
The next time I was in Raineyville, I drove past Heavenly Towing. Except it wasn’t Heavenly Towing anymore; it wasn’t anything but an empty lot with a “For Sale” sign hanging off the front gate. I never got the sense there was a booming real estate market in Raineyville, and I figured that lot would become popular with junkies who needed somewhere to shoot up, and teenagers who needed somewhere to fuck. That’s the ugly truth for a town like Raineyville: the unrolling stone doesn’t gather moss so much as used needles and cases of hep C. Good times in America.
The Feds shut down the Saints right proper in the wake of everything. I mean, once we got done explaining the various dead bodies and the tractor trailer full of illegal immigrants. I worried about the Mexicans more than I did the dead bodies. Nothing I heard coming from D.C. indicated much love for folks with darker skin and accents, and I wasn’t confident what would happen to them now was better than whatever had waited for them in Chicago.
The Saints who survived sang a song to the Feds about running truckloads of humans from Point A to Point B for Yakovna and the Russian mob. The work had been going on a while now, making the Saints plenty of money, and the Russians even more. Seemed the Feds had taken a bigger interest in human trafficking in recent years, and how the Southern crime syndicates were moving into the game.
G&O Guns and Pawn was still there across from the remains of Heavenly Towing. The gunrunning never got brought up by the Saints. A funny thing, that, keeping loyal to the colonel and selling out the Russians. Goes to prove that in a small town, you support the home team. After all, your throat can only get slit once. That meant Colonel Oates kept on being a miserable old fucker in a big empty house where he could roll around in his wheelchair and click off his losses and disappointments.
The most recent of those losses would be his son. As the literal smoke cleared from the day at the impound lot, someone found Deputy Holland Oates dangling from the end of a rope in a holding cell in the courthouse basement.
Sheriff Gibbs didn’t look as happy to see me as I had hoped he would be. He scowled as he folded his newspaper in half from behind his desk and took a long drink of coffee from his cup.
“We ought to put posters of you and that friend of yours at the county line,” he said as I sat down. “I am more than half-afraid of what might happen with you back in town.”
“Property rates will rise and babies will get prettier.”
“I’ll hold my breath and see how long it takes those things to happen.” He set the newspaper aside. “What can I do for you, Mr. Malone? I assumed you’d be spending the rest of your life talking to the state police and the federal authorities.”
“They’ve all got me on speed dial by now. I should exchange Christmas cards with ’em all, but that would require me to buy Christmas cards.”
Gibbs nodded. He didn’t think I was funny. I got more and more of that these days. It might have hurt my feelings if I gave a shit.
He finished the dregs of his cup and asked me if I wanted to limp down the hallway and get a cup.
The coffee area for the floor was a tiny lunch area that may have been converted from a closet. The coffeepot rested on a counter next to a single basin sink. There was one table in the room, with uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs around it. An older woman with twenty pounds of gray hair piled on top of her head sat at the table, eating egg salad and reading a home and gardening magazine.
I poured coffee into a mug from a cabinet over the sink. Gibbs and the woman exchanged pleasantries before Gibbs and I went back to his office.
“Dave’s home now, isn’t he?” Gibbs said once he was back behind his desk.
“I’m sure you know he is,” I said. “Wasn’t much to be done once they found Deputy Oates’s suicide note.”
“He’s not deputy anymore. All he is, is Holland Oates.”
Oates’s suicide note handed up more back story than a Tolkien novel. He confessed to everything but being the second gunman on the grassy knoll. Said he had been involved in the whole scheme with the Saints and Yakovna, and that he had been the one to pull the trigger on Jimmy Omaha.
I sipped at my coffee. For office coffee, it wasn’t bad. “Funny thing for him to take the blame for Jimmy Omaha, what with Frog and Toad confessing to it to me and Woody.”
“Man like Holland, who knows what goes through his head. He knew he wasn’t loaded with other options. Rich kid, what’s he going to do? Go to prison? Daddy’s money wasn’t enough to get him out of the sea of shit he was swimming in.”
“True enough. You didn’t see him at all before he killed himself?”
“Nope. Why?”
“Because nothing about him felt like the guy who would fall on a sword that way, no matter the reason. Plus, how’d he get down into those holding cells?”
Gibbs drank more coffee. “What you mean?”
“Only that I checked into something with a friend of mine, used to be sheriff back in Parker County, and he said usually the only folks with keys to those cells is the sheriff. Since you’re transporting prisoners to the regional jail these days, there’s no real need for anyone to have those keys. But damned if Oates didn’t get into one of those cells.”
Gibbs traced his fingers across the top of his desk. “There’s an awful lot of implication going on here, Malone. You want to dance around accusing me of having something to do with Oates’s death, or you want to just come out and say it?”
“Not accusing anyone of anything. Simply saying that somehow he got into those cells to hang himself. Plenty of places to do that, but he chose there. And he wrote himself a healthy-sized chunk of blame for things he had no business to take blame for.”
Gibbs nodded. “Holland Oates killed himself, Malone. End of story. Whatever you think you’re digging at, there’s nothing there.”
“Fair enough, Sheriff.”
I started to push myself out of the chair.
“However—” he said.
I dropped back into the chair.
“I guess in theory,” he said, “you could imagine that Oates chose to man up about things. There wasn’t any physical evidence tying Frog and Toad to Jimmy Omaha’s murder. You saying they’d confessed to you, that’s one thing, but there was still the vide
otape, and that was a damning bit of evidence the state police weren’t about to let go of.
“So suppose in theory, Oates could have found me later in the day, after everything had gone down. The state police had already found you and your friend and that pile of dead bodies, and Oates could have been drinking and crying, and he knew things weren’t going to end well for him. Again, there’s only so much even his daddy’s money can fix. Me, being the person I am, might have talked to Oates, told him what the score was, and that he needed to be a man about this situation. No reason for Dave to go away to prison for something he didn’t do. And prison was the only option Oates had looking for him. He could have run for it, sure, but he’d always be looking over his shoulder, wondering when they’d catch up to him. Plus, all of this would just drag his family deeper into a scandal.”
“Keeping up the family name and all.”
“Right. Someone in my position may have suggested to a drunk and susceptible Holland Oates that there was a way out of that, maybe not honorable in the strictest sense, but something that would keep the family shame to a minimum, and let Dave go free.”
“Then someone in your position might also have encouraged him to go down for Jimmy’s murder, to own up to his role in everything else, and perhaps given him a key to the holding cells.”
“He couldn’t ride with the Saints, he couldn’t be the military man the way his father wanted him to be, he couldn’t create a niche to call his own. Holland Oates was a man who would always be in a struggle to define himself.”
“Nothing explains a person away like a suicide note.”
“You write your own definition in that moment, Malone. It’s a legacy in its own right.”
I watched Sheriff Gibbs from across the desk, his face blandly handsome and at ease with himself and the decisions he made in life. He wasn’t a man concerned with his legacy.
My phone rang as I walked out of the courthouse. It was the same number that had been hounding me for weeks now and had almost gotten me killed.
I answered the phone. “Hello?”
Friend of the Devil Page 20