“Maybe, but then again, let’s see what Brett says about the florist.”
“By the way, how’s the old pecker?”
“The pecker is fine, just a little limp lately.”
“Man, Hap Collins with a limp pecker. Who’d have thought it. Listen, my man. It happens. Even my very well trained anaconda has days. I get up, fix breakfast, my oat meal is lumpy, I get backed up and can’t shit, lose my keys, spill my lunch, you know, a bad day, and when I have one like that, well, the snake can go to sleep.”
“No matter how bad my day is, I don’t normally have that problem. Getting the tool to work usually makes a bad day better.”
“Now, though, I’m thinking you might want to go into the priesthood.”
“Shit, they get more nookie than I do these days. Sometimes what they get they shouldn’t get.”
“Yeah, they use priests to scare children now,” Leonard said. “You better be good, or the priest is going to molest you.”
“Watch out for the politicians too,” I said.
“Yep, they fuck you then pass a bill that makes you the rapist.”
The phone rang.
It was Brett.
She’d found the florist.
(24)
We stayed where we were and Brett drove over to join us. She came upstairs with a coffee and sat with us on the veranda. We were the only ones out there. The air was beginning to become sticky, and out to the west we could see a bit of darkness as rain clouds drifted in our direction. It would be drizzling by nightfall, if not sooner.
“The florist said a lady paid in cash for the flowers, didn’t give her name, but had them loaded into a large van. That’s where Small messed up. The van had Smallette Painting written on the side. A name like that the florist remembered.”
“So, Smallette did, in fact, set this all up,” I said.
“Yeah,” Brett said.
“Wow,” I said. “We did some detective work and it worked.”
“And I think the robbery, the whole thing, went down pretty much like we were thinking it did,” Brett said. “I looked into the Small family, the ones in prison. They were in there for fraud all right, but they were also in there for jewel robbery. Pretty big heist in Houston.”
“No shit,” Leonard said.
“And the rest of the family was under suspicion for the same thing,” Brett said. “Wasn’t enough proof. I’m thinking if Smallette and the Small brothers have the kind of jewels I think they got from Doctor Cotton, they haven’t moved those yet. They’d be the kind of things you wouldn’t deal out to a crooked pawn shop dealer. You’d need professional fences, and to do that, to get top dollar, they’d have to wait for the theft to cool.”
“Look at you,” Leonard said, “all robbery expert and such.”
“I know where this is leading,” I said. “You think they stashed the jewels.”
“Yeah,” Brett said. “And my guess is somewhere at their place of business. They aren’t suspected by the cops, so that’s safe enough. Stuff can cool down there, and the whole family is around, so no one has to depend on anyone else to watch the goods. They may have already spent the money from the safe, or they’ve split that. May never find that, but we just might discover the jewels. We do, their gooses are cooked.”
“That means we got to go take a peek,” I said.
Brett sipped her coffee, said, “That’s about the size of it.”
(25)
I’m a feminist, but that only goes so far. I insisted that when we arrived, Brett should stay in the car. She had done things that showed she was tough, but still, me and Leonard were way more used to the rough and tumble stuff, and besides, if she heard gunfire, she could call the cops. Sue me. I didn’t want my woman hurt.
My hope was they wouldn’t be around, and Smallette would have packed up the jewels in a nice tote bag and left them on her desk with a note that read: HERE THEY ARE.
We veered off the loop and parked off the main road not far from the Smallette Paint business, among some trees, and unless you were looking for our car, you couldn’t see it from the road, not the way the shadows clung.
It was starting to mist a bit, and now and again I could hear a rumble of thunder. I got my automatic out of the glove box, and Leonard left his fedora in back and took my sawed-off club from under the seat, stuck it in his pants, beneath his wind breaker, and away we went, two soldiers in the mist.
Well, Leonard was a soldier. I was just some guy with an automatic pistol and a dick problem. But we did have matching black wind breakers. Brett insisted. They had deep pockets for lock picks, our flashlights, and my pistol.
Still, the windbreakers were heavy for the sticky weather. I was sweating like a goat at a barbecue who had just realized he was the guest of honor.
As we came up on the paint shop, we avoided the lights that were out front of the place, the ones out back as well. We took to the side fence where it was dark, and stopped at the gate. Leonard went to work on it with his lock pick. Bolt cutters would have been better. Enough time passed with him working that lock I almost walked back to the car to see if Brett could drive me into town to pick up some coffee.
Finally, there was a faint clicking and the lock snapped open and we cracked the fence gate and slipped inside. There was the obvious smell of drying paint in the air, chemicals I couldn’t identify. The travel trailer was still in its place. Off to the side were black, metal barrels containing who knew what. No junkyard dogs reported for duty.
We crossed the fenced in lot and came to a back door. It was locked, of course.
Leonard went to work again with his lock pick.
This one was much harder than the first, but with diligence and a lot of soft cursing, the lock finally opened and we slid inside. We were damp from the mist in the air and sweaty from the windbreakers, and inside it was as stuffy as having a wool sock forced over your head.
We took out our flashlights and turned them on and poked them around. On tip-toe we went along, hoping not to trip any burglar alarms, but there didn’t seem to be any.
It was easy.
(26)
Easy up until it wasn’t.
Let me tell you. I been to a bunch of county fairs, a dozen goat ropings, and once saw a fat tourist woman in Mexico so drunk her ancestors were drunk, get up on a bar, drop her drawers, and pick up a cigarette lighter with her snatch, and that didn’t surprise me as much as the sudden coming on of the lights in the paint shop.
I felt as if Leonard and I were on stage under a spot light and that we should break into song. We had actually done that once, but that hadn’t worked out too well. This looked to work out worse.
When my eyes adjusted, I saw Smallette and the ZZ Top imitators standing in a kind of horseshoe shape no more than twenty feet in front of us. Too Tall had a shotgun pointed at us, the opening of which looked about the size of Carlsbad Caverns. The others looked as content as if they’d just had a wet dream.
“You’ve brought a little friend, huh,” Smallette said. “Bad choice for a playdate, but I’m glad you’re here. I was afraid you’d go to the police, on account I realized I slipped up. No one knew about the torture but us.”
“Let’s just go on and blow their heads off,” Wilson said. “I got to get home and set the DVR.”
“I like to gloat,” Smallette said, and then to us: “My cousin works at the florist shop, told me that redheaded smoothie talked to her manager. Overheard her. Ain’t that some shit for you?”
“Ain’t it,” Leonard said.
“So, she tells me we was asked about, and I think about the ego that redhead has got, how the only real proof would be the jewels, maybe the flowers, but I’ll figure out a lie around the flowers eventually. But if you were to get your hands on the jewels, well, that could cook our gooses. That redhead, I figured she’d want to solve this herself, or send someone to do it for her. And here you two are. By the way, where is she?”
“Bali,” I said. “Took a vacation.�
��
“I don’t think so. I think we got to find and kill her too, and I tell you, I hate that. I could lick that redhead’s ass until her crack grew flowers.”
“Eeeeeewwww,” Wilson said.
“Just ’cause you don’t never get any,” Smallette said, “ain’t no reason to wish it on others.”
Now she gave us her full attention. “Come on, assholes. We got a room with a drain in it. Easier to clean.”
“What the fuck, sis?” Too Tall said. “You a James Bond villain? Let’s get this over with. Come on prune balls, march.”
“She’s talking to you,” Leonard said.
I started moving slowly, and Too Tall stepped to the side to let me get in front of him. Me and Leonard know each other’s moves as well as a trapeze act, so when he sort of shuffled a step, looking like he was moving forward but wasn’t, I yelled out, “The Elephant of Surprise.”
That was code for the element of surprise, and that’s when Leonard moved, hit the shotgun up and it went off. Leonard twisted the weapon from Too Tall’s hands, but he couldn’t hang onto it. It sailed away, went clattering into cans of paint, tipping them.
Smallette produced a pistol from inside her coveralls, that little dear of a weapon I had seen on a chair in her office. A bullet whizzed by my head as I gave Rat a left and a right so fast it was almost subliminal. He went down.
Leonard kneed Too Tall in the balls. Too Tall staggered. A bullet from Smallette’s revolver nipped the air, but didn’t hit anyone. Too Tall was bent over, grunting in pain. He managed to say, “Goddamn, sis. You near shot me.”
Me and Leonard dodged behind some racks of paint cans as another bullet punched a hole in one and paint shot out like a geyser, splashing my shoulder with a very attractive blue color. We hustled down behind another row of paint cans, and then veered off, heading toward the door through which we entered. We pushed a rack of paint over as a distraction, then bolted toward the door. The space between there and freedom seemed the length of a football field.
As I pulled the door open, a bullet smacked into it. Glancing back, I saw Smallette and Wilson running at us. Too Tall was in the background, still bent, spinning around and around like top, clutching his balls.
We went through the door and I jerked it closed. As we hustled toward the gate, I saw that Rat had got his shit together and had made his way through the main building, out to the gate, into the misty rain, and what was now a high wind. That little fucker was quick, and like a real rat, had good recovery skills. I saw too that he had produced a pistol from somewhere.
“We got you now,” he said, and it certainly appeared that way. I heard Smallette and her brother coming through the door behind us.
“Trailer,” Leonard said, and we darted toward it.
(27)
We jerked open the trailer door, thankfully unlocked, and jumped inside. Rat’s bullets smacked the door and the side of the trailer. Fortunately, the Smalls were all terrible shots; they couldn’t have committed suicide with a shotgun under their chin.
I locked the door and pulled my pistol out.
“Now you draw it,” Leonard said. “That’s like closing the toilet lid before you shit.”
“Is it?” I said. “Is it really?”
I lifted my head and peaked through the window, yelled, “Duck.”
A shotgun blast took out the window, raining glass down on top of us.
“Guess who’s up and running?” I said.
“That would be Too Tall,” Leonard said.
I yelled out to them, “You’re going to have to repaint, I think.”
“Come on out and get yours,” Too Tall said.
“Nice invitation, but no,” I said.
Leonard had pulled the club out from under his windbreaker. Considering the situation, he might as well have pulled a toothpick out.
I heard something rolling then, but I was afraid to look out the window again; I figured they were focused on it. I moved to the rear of the trailer. There was a kind of bunk bed, and near the top bunk, was a small, round window. I climbed up on the top bunk, eased my head up and looked out the window, saw what was rolling.
It was a big black barrel, and it was being rolled on its side toward the trailer by Wilson. He stopped it about six feet from the trailer, grabbed a crow bar off the floor, jammed it into the edge of the lid, and popped it.
A clear liquid chugged out and fled toward the trailer.
Even inside, I could smell what was in the barrel. Paint cleaner.
Smallette moved out of the shadows and into view, walked over to the barrel, pulled a cigarette lighter from her highly practical and well-pocketed coveralls, and flipped it open. A little flame popped up, guttered savagely in the wind, so much so that Smallette cupped the flame with a palm.
“Ah, shit,” I said. “We’re about to get lit up.”
With a shit-eating grin, Smallette flipped the lighter into the paint thinner.
Let me tell you how it rose, the fire I mean.
It jumped, baby, and I mean jumped.
There was a roar and a flash of light, and I guess the shifting wind was the bulk of the intensity, though that paint thinner had an intensity of its own. But the wind, like the proverbial worm, had turned, and it wasn’t blowing in our direction. The gust caught the flames and carried them to Smallette.
Once, when I was a kid, my friend, Richard, stuck a feather in the ground and doused it with gasoline and lit a match to it. Having some fear of gasoline, I stood back a few paces, and when the feather lit, it went up in a rocket of flame and the flames licked high above the peak of the feather.
That’s how it was with Smallette. That flame grabbed her and wrapped her up as it blew off the gurgling paint thinner. Almost simultaneously the can, which still had the bulk of the thinner in it, exploded. Shrapnel rattled through the air. Some hit the trailer, but most of it blew over Smallette and her family in a wave of fire. One moment she was standing, and in the next she was a blackened shape within a wad of flame. She crumpled to the ground and ash wafted up from her and spun away on the wind.
The fire kept whipping, and I could see shapes moving in and behind the flames. I heard shots, and then I heard screams, and then I could see the far fence through the flames, and I could see police cruiser lights flickering on the other side of it.
It was like an arsonist’s Christmas.
(28)
We got heated up pretty good inside that trailer, and then the heat wave passed, and it was merely warm.
Leonard was looking out the window below the bunk, now. He said, “I think Smallette is well done, and them other motherfuckers are kind of medium rare.”
I slipped off the bunk and came down for a look. The flames had spread and the building to the right had caught on fire. I guess all those paint products weren’t helping. Cans were popping, flames were leaping up here and there, but there was a gap in front of the trailer and to the side where the fence ran.
We didn’t even consult one another. We headed out the door and went to the left. We climbed over the fencing. The fence was warm, but not too hot to climb. We went over it like squirrels. That fire was a great motivation. Barrels exploded behind us nearly knocked us off the wire.
Dropping to the other side, we looked back as the flames hopped and crept across the lot.
Hanson and Brett and Pookie came around on our side, hustling toward us.
“You dumb motherfuckers,” Hanson said.
“Hey, how’s it hanging?” Leonard said.
“Goddamn you, Leonard,” Pookie said, grabbed him and kissed him like it was the end of World War Two.
Brett came over and grabbed me. I held her, and we walked around to the front of the place. We stood for a moment in front of my car, which Brett had driven up, and watched the flames. Wilson had not only been burned, but shot by the police. He was lying on the ground next to a cruiser, his hands handcuffed behind is back. He was dark as inside of a hog, smoking like an overheated hot dog.
I thought the handcuffs were probably not needed. He was done.
Rat was handcuffed and smoky, but alive. He was leaning against a cruiser. His beard and hair were cooked off, his face blackened in spots, raw pink in others. He looked stunned.
We could see what was left of Too Tall cooking inside the flames. The fire had jumped him too quick for him to escape, and police bullets hadn’t helped.
Smallette was little more than a bent crisp of meat, though I could make out her hands, clutching inward like talons.
Hanson said, “Good thing Brett called. We’re going to need the fire department.”
“Yeah,” I said, “my guess is what they stole is inside the shop, so you might want them to try and save that first. Whoops. There goes the travel trailer.”
It had caught fire now with a re-shifting of the damp wind. It cracked and wrinkled and began to collapse.
“Damn, that’s quick,” Pookie said. “If you had been inside, Leonard.”
“I wasn’t. But if I was going to go I had good company.”
I reached out and patted his arm. “Thanks, Leonard.”
“I was talking about the Smalls.”
“Fuck you, Leonard.”
(29)
We didn’t know about it for a couple of days, but the fire department got there in time to save the shop, and they did find what was stolen. Some of it was jewels, some of it was money, and there were some odds and ends from the house in there. Expensive crystal, that sort of thing. It was all worth close to a million dollars fenced, which split four ways beat splitting seven ways.
“Well,” Brett said, after Hanson phoned and told us all the skinny, “our client is dead, robbed, and the bad guys are burned up, and you can say with confidence we lost money on this deal. We may not get in too bad trouble for breaking and entering and trespassing, but Hanson said a fine might be in order.”
Cold Cotton: A Hap and Leonard Novella (Hap and Leonard Series) Page 6