Rusty Puppy

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “At least you can count. First grade wasn’t a waste after all. But we’re going to give you what we got and put the rest of it on the installment plan.”

  “The fuck?” Tuboy said.

  “And you’re going to like it,” Leonard said. “Now I got that second question. Where’s that uncle of Reba’s?”

  48

  Leonard got the apartment number from one of the boys, went and knocked on the door. When a big man with more muscles than Charles Atlas opened it, Leonard asked if he was Reba’s uncle. The man eyed Leonard, said he was and that if he was wanting to buy him a piece of her ass, that was all right, but it cost extra for white guys. He meant me, of course.

  “Naw, we ain’t here for that kind of thing. What we’re here for is because of that kind of thing.”

  “There’s a difference?” the uncle said.

  “Oh yeah,” Leonard said. “Mighty big difference.”

  “You’re starting to rub me the wrong way,” the uncle said.

  “You have no idea,” Leonard said, then turned to me and said, “Hold my hat.”

  I took it from him, and that’s when Leonard wheeled and hit Chuck the first time. It was like a missile landing on an aircraft carrier. The uncle dropped hard on his ass. Leonard dragged him out of the doorway by his ankles and let him get up, and then he hit him a couple of sharp blows that made the man bleed. I knew the ass-whup boogie had really begun. He hated Sheerfault, but this was beyond hatred. Leonard knocked the uncle against the building where he couldn’t get away, and then he went to work; a surgeon couldn’t have been more precise. The man tried to hit back, but he might as well been trying to fight a tiger with a toothpick.

  A couple of people came out of doors, saw what was going on, and went back inside. I kept watch in case the uncle had any defenders, and by doing that, I didn’t always have my eyes on Leonard, but I could sure hear him at work. Rhythmic, without hesitation between blows. Leonard certainly seemed to have his wind that day. When the uncle was on the ground unconscious, Leonard started kicking him in the head. I let him do that a few times, then I went over and got Leonard by the shoulder, and then by the waist, and pulled him back.

  “Murder doesn’t help any of us,” I said.

  “That motherfucker dies, that helps the universe,” Leonard said.

  “Come on, I don’t want to visit you in Huntsville.”

  “You stay away from that little girl,” Leonard said as I dragged him off. “You hear me, asshole?”

  “He’s not hearing anything at the moment,” I said.

  “Then he better get him some telepathy,” Leonard said.

  I eventually got Leonard away from there, got him walking toward the car. As we went, the gang of boys stood there with their mouths open.

  “Damn, Chuck was someone Timpson was afraid of, and he bad,” Tuboy said.

  “Think I was bad today, you ought to see me on a Wednesday after breakfast,” Leonard said.

  In the car Leonard took a deep breath as I backed out.

  “And I don’t even like the four-hundred-year-old vampire,” Leonard said.

  “Of course you don’t,” I said.

  49

  We didn’t talk to Tamara, and we didn’t call Marvin. We had other ideas and they weren’t necessarily good ones, but they were what we had.

  First, though, we drove back to my house to give some attention to Leonard’s shoulder. He had pulled the rotator cuff a little from hitting Uncle Chuck so often, nothing that wouldn’t be okay, and not so bad he was out of commission. He was just pained.

  Back at my place, Brett had him take off his shirt. She got a bag of peas out of the freezer and laid those on his shoulder and had him hold it there.

  “That’s cold,” Leonard said.

  “No shit,” Brett said. “Hold it, and don’t be such a big baby.”

  Chance came out of the back room then, looked at Leonard. “What happened to you?”

  “Tennis injury,” Leonard said.

  “Yeah, I bet,” Chance said.

  Brett gave some ibuprofen to Leonard, and then we ended up in the living room. Chance made us coffee, and we sat there sipping, Leonard balancing a bag of frozen peas on his naked shoulder.

  When we were relaxed, I said, “Coldpoint and his minions, Sheerfault and Bobo the Clown, have been using the projects to run drugs. They are feeding that stuff right back to the kids there, as well as branching out. They hide behind being cops and being respectful, helping kids make it to the Olympics in boxing.”

  “They got a little girl beat up and raped and tried to kill her on account of she talked to us,” Leonard said. “Someone told that she did, and I figure that someone is one of the assholes we talked to today, and there will be hell to pay. Shit, I’m not through with her uncle.”

  “It could have been anybody in the projects,” I said. “That place has a thousand eyes and ears. Thing is, we got connections to Coldpoint and his crew all over the place,” I said, “but we don’t have the hard stuff on them. Timpson was their bitch, but he was also his girlfriend’s bitch. He helped kill Jamar, and then he tried to make money off of it with the cops, and they gave him a permanent attitude adjustment. Figure Roscoe was in on all this too, and he wasn’t going to have us beat up or killed because his feelings got hurt and Leonard peed on his barroom floor.”

  I had to stop and explain about that part, catch Chance and Brett up some more.

  “I got my suspicions,” I said. “And it’s if you’re going to sell product, you got to have someplace to do it, and the projects and the bar are part of it. Timpson had us meet him there, and my guess is it was a way for Roscoe to tag us, which is why Timpson made a point of introducing us. Roscoe tagged us, and so did the two dumbasses at the back of the bar. Lucky for us, him using them was like trying to get a couple of Chihuahuas to take down a grizzly. Me and Leonard, collectively, are the grizzly bear.”

  “You know that’s right,” Leonard said.

  “So Timpson set you up, had you identified by meeting you at the bar,” Brett said.

  “He thought he’d get rid of us, keep us out of his and Tamara’s hair, out of the way of their drug business, not to mention his plan to blackmail the cops. Stupid plan.”

  “That all makes sense,” Leonard said. “I hate to say it, but I think you got it figured.”

  “What about Charm and Jamar?” Chance said.

  “Charm was merely taking pictures for a class, and the cops thought she was taking pictures of their illegal fights, had some clue what was going on up there. They gave her shit, tried to throw a scare into her, and her brother tried to protect her. He had a bit of a rep as a boxer, and they thought, Well, he’s going to give us shit, we won’t kill him outright, we’ll get some sport out of it. That’s when Timpson killed him, or beat him bad enough the others finished him off. That part may be hard to know.”

  “But we know Reba heard what she shouldn’t have heard,” Leonard said, “and then she told us stuff that Tamara didn’t want told, and somehow it got back to Tamara what Reba did. Maybe Reba ran her mouth. She strikes me as someone might do that. I don’t know, but it got found out, and that’s when Tamara and Timpson got Roscoe and the goons involved. Had I known they’d done to her what they did, I’d have killed them right then and there. Wouldn’t have been no jail for them.”

  “Did you tell the cops all this?” Chance said.

  “No,” I said.

  “I thought cops were good,” Chance said.

  “They are people,” I said, “and therein lies the problem. Some are good, some aren’t. Marvin certainly is. But the cops in Camp Rapture, not so much. They’re like thugs with a license to steal and murder and pretty much do what they want. It goes all through the city officials. You get rotten apples at the top, it spoils the apples all the way down, or, rather, a head rotten apple attracts others of its kind by design.”

  “Those are some crafty apples,” Brett said.

  “What are you goin
g to do about it?” Chance asked.

  “Me and Leonard came up with something of a plan on the way over here.”

  “How about you give us the working parts,” Brett said, “and I bet me and Chance can make it less stupid.”

  50

  It was a cold night and it was colder for us because we weren’t at home or in the car. Brett and Chance were parked near the police station in Camp Rapture. Before they’d dropped us off, we described Coldpoint, Bobo, and Sheerfault for them and determined Coldpoint was at the station. We had spotted his car in the lot. The four of us even saw him come outside once, smoke a cigarette, and go back in.

  “He’s kind of good-looking,” Chance had said.

  “Yes, and he is kind of a devil as well,” I said.

  “Easy, tiger,” Brett said.

  After that, Brett and Chance let us out on the hill near the sawmill and drove back into position, which took about twenty minutes, the hill being on the edge of town. Chance called and said Coldpoint’s car was still there. As far as they could tell, so was he.

  The lot where Brett and Chance parked was for a country-music nightclub. It was partially filled with cars. It was across the street from the police station. They found a position near the front facing the street, behind one car.

  Through their windshield and the back and front windshields of the car in front of them, they had a good view of the cop shop and the parking lot with Coldpoint’s car in it. They were calling themselves the Sneaky Bitches, and even signed off together on the phone with “Sneaky Bitches rule.”

  “They may have to be sedated at some point,” Leonard said.

  We were hiding among the trees above the sawmill, wearing heavy coats and wrapped in blankets. We had a couple large thermoses of coffee, sandwiches, and a bag of vanilla wafers. Since I knew Leonard was not big on sharing those, and so did Chance, she had bought me a box of animal crackers and packed them for me. We had brought raincoats. It looked like wet weather might be coming. We had backpacks to store everything in. Leonard had a pistol. I had decided not to bring one; they had their place, but I hated the damn things. I had a golf club I had found buried in the grass of our side lawn, must’ve been left there about the time Arnold Palmer took his first swing on a golf course. Some kid probably dragged out his father’s club one day, then lost interest, dropped it, and forgot about it. I had racked a mower blade on it last summer, but I’d kept the club, leaned it against the side of the carport, meaning to throw it away. It was rusted but surprisingly sturdy. I was glad to have it.

  Where we sat was on a rise above the sawmill. We weren’t that high above it, but it was a pretty good-size hill, and from where we crouched we could see the mill, the worn-out drive, and the pond. The pond was dark, as the moon was mostly behind a cloud. It looked like a tar pit. We had cell phones with us, on vibrate, and the plan was simple and slightly refined by Brett to include cell-phone contact.

  We reasoned tonight might be when things happened, if any of our information was correct, and then again, it might merely be a cold night and we’d go home with frozen asses and nothing solved. But I doubted that. There was money to be made on betting. For the better-positioned folks in the community, dogfights, chicken fights, or human fights, it was all the same; it wasn’t their pain or their blood that was in those matches, only their dollars. With everyone from city officials and law enforcement in cahoots, they felt protected.

  About midnight, I began to think my speculation wasn’t good enough. I was starting to miss Brett and my warm bed. We had drank about half our coffee and had eaten our sandwiches. I had also consumed an entire box of animal crackers, and Leonard was well into his bag of wafers. Why he didn’t weigh three hundred pounds, I couldn’t figure.

  It had grown colder, and now there was a light rain, more of a mist, really. We put on our raincoats and pulled up the hoods and sat there in misery.

  “It comes two in the morning, we’re taking our asses home,” Leonard said. “I’m cold as a sled dog’s nut sack.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  About thirty minutes later we saw several sets of car lights hazing through the rain, coming up the hillside road. A second later my phone buzzed.

  “Coldpoint has left,” Brett said.

  “Someone is already here,” I said.

  “Can’t be Coldpoint. He just this minute left.”

  “We’ll see who pretty soon,” I said.

  “You going to be okay?”

  “Have I ever not been okay?”

  “Lots of times,” Brett said.

  “I’m going to text you when to call Marvin. He doesn’t know you’re calling, so you don’t get him, get Officer Carroll, and be sure and call him Pookie.”

  “Fuck you very much,” Leonard said.

  I gave her Curt Carroll’s number, said, “If what we think is going on is in fact going on, we’re going to need a Texas Ranger, some Highway Patrol, someone not bound by jurisdiction. Marvin has friends everywhere, so he’ll know who to send. The Camp Rapture sheriff’s department might be in on it, so not them. If Batman is available, send him.”

  “Got you.”

  “If I don’t text in thirty minutes, get someone starting this way. Make that twenty.”

  “Be careful,” Brett said, and we ended our call. The crowd below wasn’t near enough to hear me on the phone, but in a few more minutes they would be walking under us. I could hear car doors slamming and people talking as they came.

  Glancing downhill, I saw Sheerfault and Bobo get out of a car, which Sheerfault had parked up close to the mill. Others had left their cars, which were parked in the line farther away, and were making their way toward the mill. There were about twelve people, not counting Sheerfault and Bobo. Everyone was wearing a raincoat or carrying an umbrella.

  Bobo pulled back the plywood barrier and slid inside the mill with Sheerfault. A moment later you could see a crack of golden light through the slit in the wall and a beam of the same rising up under the pine tree that poked through the roof. Confident as they were, they weren’t exactly in sneaky mode; who was going to punish them? Well, I had an idea.

  Everyone outside filed in.

  Headlights bounced up the drive. They belonged to a white jailhouse bus, the sort they use for transporting prisoners. The bus slipped to the side of the parked cars, and the hydraulic door hissed open. A brief moment later a man came out. It was someone I had never seen before. I could tell from the back glow of the headlights that he was wearing a sheriff’s deputy shirt, jeans, tennis shoes, and a jailer’s jacket and a ball cap. He had a holstered gun on his hip. A moment passed and out of the bus came four men in handcuffs, followed by a fat man with a shotgun slung over his shoulder. They were followed by some of the men I had seen there before, some of the town’s bigwigs. They came off the bus and walked behind the criminals like Roman soldiers lazily making their way to a crucifixion. They went inside the mill.

  More car lights cruised up the drive, and then cars began to spread out and park in a row behind the bus. Car lights were turned off and six men came out of the cars and so did one dark-haired woman, opening an umbrella as she did. I knew her from newspapers. She was a judge. Jill something or another. I think she was running for mayor next election. Her politics had been described as being to the right of Attila the Hun’s. Tonight, that would most likely be confirmed.

  “I don’t think them convicts are having a field trip to see how the old sawmill worked,” Leonard said.

  “Nope,” I said.

  We sat and waited for some time to pass. No more cars came along. We could hear voices rising inside the mill, and then there were shouts, and even from where we sat, we could hear the sound of fists smacking.

  “No gloves,” Leonard said.

  “Nope,” I said.

  We left our goods, except for our phones, Leonard’s gun, and my golf club, and slipped from the hill. At the bottom of it, we crouched behind Sheerfault’s car.

  “I’m going
to see I can get a phone video and sound recording of what’s going on,” Leonard said. “I’ll send it to Brett as insurance.”

  “Video and sound recording,” I said. “You sound so cute trying to be technological.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Watch your ass.”

  “You’ll be watching it. Try not to get a boner.”

  With that Leonard slipped away and began a soft trot toward the mill.

  51

  The voices in the sawmill rose up and fell down, yelled out, moaned and hissed, and then became a conversational hum. A moment later, the voices were loud again.

  I kept an eye on Leonard. He was the near the slit in the mill, lifting his phone to film through the opening. After a few seconds, he stopped filming, looked back at me, and began to text.

  TOO MANY PEOPLE. CAN’T GIT CLEAR VIEW. THEY ARE BUSY. WALKIN UP BEHIND EM TO FILM.

  I sent a text quickly: THAT’S NUTS.

  His return text popped up. YEP.

  Leonard grinned at me, then turned back to the mill. I watched him pull the rain hood tighter around his head and slip through the crack in the door.

  What a dumbass, I thought.

  I should have sent Brett a text, but I didn’t take time for it. I was already easing out from behind the car. I ran as softly as I could across the worn drive and to the gap that led into the mill. I leaned the golf club against the wall, peeled off my rain slicker, and tossed it aside. I picked up the club and took a peek in the mill.

  Leonard was walking casually toward the back of the crowd. No one noticed him. They had their minds on what was going on inside the wire enclosure. There were some beer coolers on the ground, and a man I recognized as a councilman had a beer in his hand and was walking away from the crowd gathered at the fencing. Had he turned his head slightly, he would have seen Leonard.

  Leonard stood at the back of the crowd near where they had piled their rain gear and umbrellas, raised his phone, and began to film between a split in the spectators. Through that split I glimpsed Coldpoint, Sheerfault, and Bobo close to the fence. Beyond them I caught a sight of two ragged-looking men swinging wildly at each other. There was no skill or plan to it. It was wild arm hurling. Both of them looked as if they might keel over at any moment from exhaustion. If something bad happened and one keeled over for good, there was the sawmill pool waiting.