by Jason Miller
The first shot was so loud it was like it tore through the middle of my skull in a screaming stream of molten silver. It ripped away most of Lew Mandamus’s scalp and sent him whirling like a corkscrew into the ground, rifle sailing, his shot going wide. The second blew away most of his left shoulder, lifting him, howling, from the ground and into the side of my lawyer’s Lincoln.
“Motherfucker shot up my car and finest suit, man,” the boy said, miraculously alive, appearing from the brush.
I sank to the ground, never having known exhaustion.
Lew Mandamus was smeared across the driver’s side door, gulping for breath. Amazement and terror misshaped his face. The lawyer approached, staring at him like a half-squashed insect. He raised the Python. Its smoking barrel wavered inches from Lew’s face.
“You’re killing . . . you’re murdering a good man,” Lew gasped. “A good man.”
The kid said, “Shit’s unfair, brother, all over the goddamn world,” and blew Lew Mandamus’s brains all over the Shawnee.
21.
WELL, THAT WAS ANOTHER WEEK IN A RECOVERY ROOM, THIS time at the hospital in Carbondale. I’d been shot and dog bit a half dozen times. What really hurt, though, was my insurance premium. Jeep and Opal sat by my bedside for days on end, until finally I ordered them away and back to their own lives. Peggy was with me nearly the entire time, but even Peggy eventually had to get back to work. Nothing I said would move Anci, though.
“I solved it,” she kept saying. “I actually solved it.”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of, hell. I led you to Lew Mandamus, right?”
“Kinda accidentally.”
She ignored me.
“And Lew Mandamus ended up being the perpetrator, right?”
“He did. But you thought he was innocent. And technically, he found me.”
“Don’t sit on my top hat, man.”
“Sorry.”
It was like the last part of a movie, end of the third reel or whatever. Everybody was dropping in one last time.
Lindley came by with frowns.
“You’re innocent,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”
“Can’t or don’t want to?”
“I can do both.”
“You’re good.”
“And you’re an asshole.”
“I guess we’re square then.”
“I guess,” he said. He thought a moment. “Stay out of my county, man.”
Ammons came to collect his badge. The Illinois State Police had lost out on the larger bust, but they’d arrested Leonard Black.
“It’s a big story,” he said. He was gleeful. “You should have seen the cameras. And the icing is that all of Black’s friends in high places are scurrying back into their holes. The score settling is not going to be pretty.”
“I don’t get you, man. Are you a cop or a politician?”
Ammons laughed himself right out of my room.
Ben Wince dropped by with cookies and Cokes. We watched some conservative booger on the tube and laughed at all the craziness in the world until the nurse appeared to shush us.
Even Agent Carter stopped for a visit, bearing flowers.
“You destroyed my case,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“Saved Uncle Sam some money, too.”
“These are patriotic days,” I said. “I just want to do what I can.”
“Take.” He shoved the flowers at me.
I took.
“Did you use taxpayer dollars to buy these?”
“Go to hell,” he said, and walked out.
“My new best friend,” I said to Anci.
ONLY EUN HEE MANDAMUS STAYED AWAY. BUT THAT WAS probably for the best. Maybe she’d been in on her husband’s wickedness, maybe she hadn’t. Wince didn’t know, and I never asked, afraid of what I might learn. Last I heard, she was still alive, still surviving, still tending the menagerie at Shinshi. Somehow, life goes on, despite everything.
CAROL RAY APPEARED A DAY LATER. I WAS HALF ASLEEP, AND when I awoke into a world of haze she was leaning over my bed, lipstick smiling. Her floral perfume was sharp against the antiseptic neutral of the hospital. Anci stepped out quietly into the hallway. This time, she didn’t offer to shake Carol Ray’s hand.
“Hey, Slim.”
It took me a moment longer to shake off the pain meds and prop myself slowly onto my elbows. A wall of cops filled my open door with their backs. Carol Ray had come with company.
“I insisted they bring me, before . . .”
“Before you’re whisked away,” I said.
“Shit has hit the fan in full, darlin’,” she said, and chuckled. “Time to make a bow, kiss a few asses, and race for the sun.”
“Guess it is,” I returned. “Ask you something?”
“Why not?”
“Why the hell’d you get involved with this evil bullshit in the first place?”
“Boredom,” she returned.
I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Carol Ray laughed a sad little laugh.
“I’m too old for bullshit, sugar. The self-deceptive kind most of all.”
“Cut the shit,” I said. “No one ever gets too old for that.”
“I guess.”
“So it was thrills. And I’m guessing something in the neighborhood of revenge.”
She nodded. “Something like that. Remember when I told you about stumbling into that coke buy gone bad? Well, I didn’t talk the guy holding the gun on me into letting me out. I talked him into letting me in. As soon as I touched down, I started collecting evidence on the whole operation. Guns, blow, booze, and theft. You name it.”
“Freelance? That was pretty risky.”
“Oh, from time to time I questioned my sanity, sugar. I won’t deny it. But these are bad men, and someone needed to do something about them.”
“But then they got into blood sport.”
“J.T. and his brothers were into it from way back. They’d given it up, but Dennis grabbed the idea and ran with it. He talked me into getting Leonard Black to let us use the mine. They wouldn’t tell me for what, and when I tried to make them tell me, they threatened to kill me. Twice.”
“Reach was the front man?”
“He supplied the face. Least he was supposed to. But Dennis was chicken shit, so when the Dragons muscled in on his trade he brought in Sheldon and that boy of his.” She shuddered. “I knew at five hundred yards they were going to be chaos and mayhem, but Dennis wouldn’t listen.”
“I don’t guess he could have told the Dragons to butt out?”
“The White Dragons own dogfighting in southern Illinois, Slim. It’s their territory. So it was either bring them in on the front end or deal with their bullshit later. That was Dennis’s idea, too. No surprise.”
“Fair enough. So what now?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think I’m done going after bad men,” she said. “I don’t like assholes and I don’t like liars. I don’t like people who abuse the helpless. That’s what made me go to the Feds, when I found out what they were really doing down there. I just couldn’t take it. I still can’t. So maybe I’ll go into business for myself, see about putting a few more losers on notice.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Competition for me?”
She leaned over my bed. She smelled like strawberry soda and cigarettes.
“Not for you, trouble,” she said. “My days in Little Egypt are done. For now, anyway. But maybe I’ll see you in the funny pages.”
“Or the obits.”
“Hope not.”
She kissed me on the cheek, and she was gone.
OH, AND ABOUT THAT RED DOG. JEEP ENDED UP COTTONING to her. And she to him. She liked me good enough, but she loved Jeep. She lives with him and Opal now. They’re all in love. Not every ending is a sad one.
THE BLACK GAMES PACKED UP AND LEFT TOWN. WHEN I asked Carter to where, he only smiled mysteriously and patted me fondly on the shoulder. I really was beginn
ing to like the sonofabitch, so I told him to get the fuck out of my room. At least the web broadcast was interrupted, if only temporarily. My lawyer made a fairly quick recovery, considering his wounds. Last I heard, he was heading south again for a final showdown with the Scientologist who’d run away with his wife.
Two weeks after my release, a pair of hikers stumbled upon the bodies of J.T. Black and Mandy in a shallow grave near the Little Grassy. Without a suspect in hand, the investigation remains open.
“SO WHAT’S NEXT?” ANCI.
“What’s next? How about a long stay in Bedlam? Or a vacation.”
Anci snorted. “Vacation? I can just see it. You’d go crazy inside of three hours at some fancy resort. Besides, dead bodies follow you like Jessica Fletcher.”
“Thanks.”
She gave me a hug.
“I’m glad you’re home, stupid.”
“Me, too. You finished your paper.”
She picked it up off the sofa. She’d written an essay about The Hound of the Baskervilles.
“Yeah.”
“And what’d you think?”
“It was okay,” she said. “In the end, anyway. I still think Holmes is full of crap, though, and the hound doesn’t seem nearly so scary as the real thing.”
“Amen to that, anyway.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. She flopped down in the light and opened her new book, Vachss’s Hard Candy.
“Anci?”
She didn’t look up. “Yeah?”
“Anci, for God’s sake, don’t take that one with you to school.”
OTHER MATTERS NEEDED CLOSING. I TOOK A COUPLE OF weeks—time to heal, time to think about everything that had happened, everything that had almost happened. I didn’t expect him to answer my call, but he did, and on a hot night in July I once again found myself standing behind the hulking form of Bran-Wichelle Industrial, surrounded this time by a host of armed men. When Tibbs appeared, he seemed to have aged. Touches of gray frost spread at his temples, and worry lines traced wide swaths around his lips. He didn’t look the least bit happy to see me.
“You got what you wanted,” was what he said. He used his prosthetic hand to smooth down his hair, an anxious gesture, I realized.
I shrugged. “I got tortured and beaten up. I got shot. I got dog bit more times than I can count. I nearly died. A lot of other people didn’t get the nearly.”
“And we lost three million dollars of our money.”
“Three point five. In Uncle Sam’s pockets.”
“Yes.”
“Small carrots, I guess.”
A thin smile broke his face, but there wasn’t anything in it but rue.
“The days are changing. The black socialist boosted our recruitment somewhat, but . . .”
“But all good things.”
“Something like that,” he said. “You didn’t come here to chat.”
“No, I did not. Came to gloat.”
He stared at me. The armed men shuffled, suddenly on edge.
“To . . . gloat?”
“That’s right. Your fucking stupid plan backfired. When you figured out how much money Reach’s games were bringing in, you tried to take them from him, all the way. You tried to take his cut for yourself. If you’d left well enough alone, Reach might never have gotten the Cleaveses involved, everything might have been fine. As it was, Reach paid a visit to your boy Lew Mandamus and decided to grab one of Lew’s dogs, the one he was using to hold a certain key bank account number.”
He was a frozen statue of hate, but for a change I wasn’t worried.
“Your bank account number, as it happens. When your pals find out that it was your personal horseshit that touched off a war between the Cleaveses and Reach, they’re going to ask you to join J.T. Black in a shallow grave. If they find out you tried to use me to shut the games down when the Cleaveses started to win that war, they’re going to make you take your time doing it. I’m thinking . . . blowtorches.”
“It’s time for you to go.”
I laughed. The sound of it shot around the courtyard. I said, “All those lectures about the honor of the Dragons, the quotes from Scripture, and you’re nothing but a small-time crook.”
“Leave.”
“Seriously, brother, three weeks from now, you’re a missing person. I’ve got a bottle of bubbly in the fridge. I want you to know, it’s for the occasion.”
“Leave now.”
I tipped my hand at him and left, escorted to the parking lot and to my truck and away.
It would happen just a few hours later. And I wondered what it would be like, Tibbs quitting the warehouse as dusk spread purple and orange across a Little Egypt sky. I wondered what he would be thinking, if he honestly thought I’d let him run, even after all that bloodshed and horror and murder. I knew he wouldn’t see Jeep Mabry, hiding a quarter mile away, on his belly in the high growth. I wondered whether he’d hear the shot, or feel it, if his hand would slide away from his car’s door handle as the supersonic round punched a hole through the organ that functioned as his heart.
I wondered whether he’d see the sky one last time, hear the gutter-growl of the world as it tore apart around him. I wondered if he’d know the dogs had got him, too.
A BONUS STORY ABOUT THOSE DANG CHICKENS
HARDBOILED EGGS
A Slim & Anci Ruckus
“COME AGAIN?”
“Chickens, Slim. You know? Like yardbirds.”
“I know what chickens are, Foghat. I thought I’d misheard you is all.”
We were at Indian Vale. My daughter, Anci, was reading a book for school and sipping one of those orange sodas. Her favorites. The chicken man, and prospective client, was my old work buddy Foghat. He didn’t have an orange soda. He wasn’t allowed. I was barely allowed, and I paid the bills and bought the sodas. I tell you, it was a raw deal. Other than that, it was a fine fall evening. The cool breeze sighed through the grasses and the leaves of the shingle oaks. The skies were clear and freckled with stars, and the moon was out and smiling.
Foghat wasn’t smiling. He was about my age, early forties, with a long face and the disposition of a nervous house cat. He said, “All kinds of chickens, too. Got into the exotic game couple years back. Belgian d’Uccle, Araucana, Welsummer, Cochin, salmon Faverolle, cuckoo Marans, modern BB red game. You name it. Even got me some of those white Sultans brand-new. Amazing birds.”
“What do you do with them all?”
“Well, they’re pets, mostly. I don’t know. I favor them,” he said. “Course, I also sell the eggs. Folks like that these days. Exotic bird eggs. They’re more flavorful than store-bought and got better nutrition.”
Anci looked up from her book. She said, “You don’t say?”
“Oh, yeah. There’s science about it and everything.”
Anci looked back at her book. She said, “Well, as long as there’s science.”
I said, “Okay. So you got yourself some fancy chickens. Pets and egg-layers both. What’s any of it have to do with me?”
Foghat frowned a little more. Back when we’d worked together, his kip was an on-site safety inspector, so frowning was basically his job. It showed, too, I tell you what. His frowns were professional frowns. They spanked your frowns on the hiney and sent them to bed early.
He scratched his nose with one of his bony fingers. He said, “I was kind of hoping you’d get them back for me.”
“You lost your chickens?”
“Manner of speaking.” His throat cleared a couple times. Anci smiled a little behind her book. She knew and I knew what this was. Sometimes clients hold back the real story of a case on you. It’s a little dance they do. You let them dance, because you want their wallet and the dance is part of the deal, but you always know what it is. They’ll give you the sugar first, so you get to hear a little about the exciting world of exotic chickens and whatnot, and then you finally get down to the bad stuff. That’s what we were doing here now with Foghat.
Finally, he sa
id, “Another manner of speaking, they were taken from me.”
“Taken? Taken by who?”
Anci said, “Whom.”
“Taken by whom?” I corrected. We nodded at each other. I looked at Foghat again. “Some kind of outlaw chicken enthusiast?”
Foghat said, “No, no kind of chicken outlaw, Slim. What happened was, a couple years back, well, I got divorced again. Not another wife, understand. I mean from the same one. Me and Cheryl been hitched and unhitched three times now.”
“Sounds a little rocky.”
He shrugged. “Can be. Some good times mixed in, too, though, so you want to maybe give it another go. I don’t know. Anyway, this time she says we’re bust, for keeps. I think maybe at first I didn’t believe her, but then there was another fella. So that was that. We were bust. I guess I took it kinda hard.”
“Easy to do.”
“Or not so easy,” he said. “I got to where I was slacking at work. Just couldn’t focus. Missed time I couldn’t afford missing and ended up getting fired by the old man. Fell behind on my bills some. You know how it is. Eventually, I reached out to some folks for a little help. You know, financial.”
“Family?”
Foghat said, “No. Ain’t got no family to speak of. What I mean is loan people. Like, private loan people.”
“Oh, hell.”
“I know. But I was fixing to lose my house, and I guess I got desperate. Anyway, I went to a guy and ended up making a deal with the devil. You remember when we were up to that PelCo mine together?”
“Sure.”
“You recall a guy back then went by the name of Bandit?”
I said, “Big Bandit or Little Bandit?”
“Little Bandit.”
“Oh, hell,” I said again.
Anci said, “You’d be happier it was Big Bandit?”
I nodded. “Little Bandit is bigger than Big Bandit. A lot bigger. They came from different mines, and at the one Little Bandit was littler than the other Bandit they had, I guess. That other Big Bandit must have been a damn mountain. Anyway, eventually Little Bandit and Big Bandit ended up working the same boodle, but by that time their names were set in stone, even if they didn’t make sense anymore.”