The Best American Mystery Stories 3

by Edited by James Ellroy

  The big man lifted up his Hawaiian shirt and showed him his hairy belly and against it a little flat black automatic pistol. He took the pistol out slowly and put it on his knee and looked at them.

  “Naw. He ain’t comin’ back, and you boys ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  “Aw shit,” Elliot said, suddenly getting it. “He ain’t no friend of ours. We just come to do business, and if he ain’t here to do business, you boys got our blessing. And we’ll just leave and not say a word.”

  Another man came out of the back room. He was naked and carrying a bowie knife. He was muscular, bug-nosed, with close-cut hair. There was blood on him from thighs to neck. From the back room they heard a moan.

  The naked man looked at them, then at the man on the couch.

  “Friends of Taylor’s,” the man on the couch said.

  “We ain’t,’’ James said. “We hardly know him. We just come to sell a mule.”

  “A mule, huh,” said the naked man. He didn’t seem bashful at all. His penis was bloody and stuck to his right leg like some kind of sucker fish. The naked man nodded his head at the open doorway behind him, spoke to the man on the couch. “I’ve had all of that I want and can take, Viceroy. It’s like cutting blubber off a whale.”

  “You go on and shower,” Viceroy said, then smiled, added: “And be sure and wash the parts you don’t normally touch.”

  “Ain’t no parts Tim don’t touch,” Butch said.

  “I tell you what,” Tim said. “You get in there and go to work, then show me how funny you are. That old woman is hardheaded.”

  Tim went past Butch, driving the bowie knife into the counter, rattling the dishes.

  Viceroy stared at Butch. “Your turn.”

  “What about you?” Butch said.

  “I don’t take a turn. Get with it.”

  Butch put his cap on the counter next to a greasy plate, took off his shirt, pants, underwear, socks, and shoes. He pulled the knife out of the counter and started for the bedroom. He said, “What about these two?”

  “Oh, me and them are gonna talk. Any friend of Taylor’s is a friend of mine.”

  “We don’t really know him,” James said. “We just come to sell a mule.”

  “Sit down on the floor there, next to the wall, away from the door,” Viceroy said, and scratched the side of his cheek with the barrel of the automatic.

  A moment later they heard screams from the back room and Butch yelling something, then there was silence, followed shortly by more screams.

  “Butch ain’t got Tim’s touch,” Viceroy said. “Tim can skin you and you can walk off before you notice the hide on your back, ass, and legs is missin’. Butch, he’s a hacker.”

  Viceroy leaned forward; took up the dollar bill, and sucked up a couple lines of the white powder. “Goddamn, that’ll do it,” he said.

  Elliot said, “What is that?”

  Viceroy laughed. “Boy, you are a rube, ain’t you? Would you believe bakin’ soda?”

  “Really?” Elliot said.

  Viceroy hooted. “No. Not really.”

  From the bedroom you could hear Butch let out a laugh. “Crackers,” he said.

  “It’s cocaine,’’ James said to Elliot. “I seen it in a movie.”

  “Good God,” Elliot said.

  “My, you boys are delicate for a couple of thieves,” Viceroy said.

  Tim came out of the bathroom, still naked, bouncing his balls with a towel.

  “Put some clothes on,” Viceroy said. “We don’t want to see that.”

  Tim looked hurt, put on his clothes, and adjusted his cap. Viceroy snorted the last two lines of coke. “Damn, that’s some good stuff. You can step on that multiple.”

  “Let me have a snort,” Tim said.

  “Not right now,” Viceroy said.

  “How come you get to?” Tim said.

  “ ‘Cause I’m the biggest bull in the woods, boy. And you can test that anytime you got the urge.”

  Tim didn’t say anything. He went to the refrigerator, found a beer, popped it, and began to sip.

  “I don’t think she knows nothing,” Tim said. “She wouldn’t hold back havin’ that done to her for a few thousand dollars. Not for a million.”

  “I reckon you’re right,” said Viceroy. “I just don’t like quittin’ halfway. You finish a thing, even if it ain’t gonna turn out. Ain’t that right, boys?”

  James and Elliot didn’t reply. Viceroy laughed and picked up the beer on the coffee table and took a jolt of it. He said to himself, “Yeah, that’s right. You don’t do a thing half-ass. You do it all the way. What time is it?”

  Tim reached in his pocket and took out a pocket watch. James recognized it as belonging to George Taylor. “It’s four.”

  “All right,” Viceroy said, satisfied, and sipped his beer.

  ~ * ~

  After a time Butch came out of the bedroom bloody and looking tired. “She ain’t gonna tell nobody nothin’. She’s gone. She couldn’t take no more. She’d have known somethin’, she’d have told it.”

  “Guess Taylor didn’t tell her,” Tim said. “Guess she didn’t know nothin’.”

  “George had more in him than I thought, goin’ like that, takin’ all that pain and not talkin’,” Viceroy said. “I wouldn’t have expected it of him.”

  Tim nodded his head. “When you shot his bulldog, I think he was through. Took the heart right out of him. Wasn’t a thing we could do to him then that mattered.”

  “Money’s around here somewhere,” Viceroy said.

  “He might not have had nothin’,” Butch said, walking to the bathroom.

  “I think he did,” Viceroy said. “I don’t think he was brave enough to try and cross me. I think he had the money for the blow, but we double-crossed him too soon. We should have had him put the money on the table, then done what we needed to do. Would have been easier on everybody all the way around, them especially. “

  “They’d have still been dead,” Tim said, drinking the last of his beer, crushing the can.

  “But they’d have just been dead. Not hurt a lot, then dead. Old fat gal, that wasn’t no easy way to go, and in the end she didn’t know nothin’. And Taylor, takin’ the knife, then out there in that car in the crusher and us telling him we were gonna run him through, and him still not talkin’.”

  “Like I said, we killed the bulldog I think he was through. Fat woman wasn’t nothin’ to him, but he seemed to have a hard-on for that dog. He’d just as soon be crushed. But I still think there might not have been any money. I think maybe they was gonna do what we were gonna do. Double-cross.”

  “Yeah, but we brought the blow,” Viceroy said.

  Tim grinned. “Yeah, but was you gonna give it to ‘em?”

  Viceroy laughed, then his gaze settled lead-heavy on the mule rustlers. “Well, boys, what do you suggest I do with you pickle heads?”

  “Just let us go,” James said. “Hell, this ain’t our business, and we don’t want it to be our business It ain’t like Taylor was a relative of ours.”

  “That’s right,” Elliot said. “He’s cheated us plenty on little deals.”

  Viceroy was quiet. He looked at Tim. “What do you say?”

  Tim pursed his lips and developed the expression of a man looking in the distance for answers. “I sympathize with these boys. I guess we could let ‘em go. Give us their word, show us some ID, so they spill any beans we can find them. You know the littlest bit these days and you can find anybody. “

  “Damn Internet,” Viceroy said.

  Butch came out of the bathroom, naked, toweling his hair.

  “You think we should let ‘em go?” Viceroy asked.

  Butch looked first at Viceroy and Tim, then at James and Elliot. “Absolutely.”

  “Get dressed,” Viceroy said to Butch, “and we’ll let ‘em go.”

  “We won’t say a word,” Elliot said.

  “Sure,” Viceroy said. “You look like boys who can be quiet. Don’t the
y?”

  “Yeah,” Tim said.

  “Absolutely,” Butch said, tying his shoe.

  “Then we’ll just go,” James said, standing up from his position on the floor, Elliot following suit.

  “Not real quick,” Viceroy said. “You got a mule, huh?”James nodded. “What’s he worth?”

  “Couple thousand dollars to the right people.”

  “What about people ain’t maybe quite as right?”

  “A thousand. Twelve hundred.”

  “What were you supposed to get?”

  “Eight hundred.”

  “We could do some business, you know.”

  James didn’t say anything. He glanced toward the door where the men had been at work on Mrs. Taylor. He saw the bulldog lying there on the linoleum in its pool of hardened blood, and flowing from the bedroom was fresh blood. The fresh pool flowed around the crusty old pool and bled into the living room of the trailer and died where the patch of carpet near the couch began; the carpet began to slowly absorb it.

  James knew these folks weren’t going to let them go anywhere.

  “I think we’ll take the mule,” Viceroy said. “Though I ain’t sure I’m gonna give you any eight hundred dollars.”

  “We give it to you as a gift,” Elliot said. “Just take it, and the trailer it’s in, and let us go.”

  “That’s a mighty nice offer,” Viceroy said. “Nice, huh, boys?”

  “Damn nice,” Tim said.

  “Absolutely,” Butch said. “They could have held out and tried to deal. You don’t get much nicer than that.”

  “And throwing in the trailer too,” Tim said. “Now, that’s white of ‘em.”

  James took hold of the doorknob, turned it, said, “We’ll show him to you.”

  “Wait a minute,” Viceroy said.

  “Come on out,’’ James said.

  Butch darted across the room, took hold of James’s shoulder. “Hold up.”

  The door was open now. Rain was really hammering. The mule, its head hung, was visible in the trailer.

  “Ain’t no need to get wet,” Viceroy said.

  James had one foot on the steps outside. “You ought to see what you’re gettin’.”

  “It’ll do,” Viceroy said. “It ain’t like we’re payin’ for it.”

  Butch tightened his grip on James, and Elliot, seeing how this was going to end up and somehow feeling better about dying out in the open, not eight feet from a deceased bulldog, a room away from a skinned fat woman, pushed against Butch and stepped out behind James and into the yard.

  “Damn,” Viceroy said.

  “Should I?” Butch said, glancing at Viceroy, touching the gun in his pants.

  “Hell, let’s look at the mule,” Viceroy said.

  Viceroy put on his odd hat and they all went out in the rain for a look. Viceroy looked as if he were some sort of escapee from a mental institution, wearing a hubcap. The rain ran off of it and made a curtain of water around his head.

  They stood by the trailer staring at the mule. Tim said, “Someone’s painted its nose, or it’s been dippin’ it in shit.”

  James and Elliot said nothing.

  James glanced at the trailer, saw there was no underpinning. He glanced at Elliot, nodded his head slightly. Elliot looked carefully. He had an idea what James meant. They might roll under the trailer and get to the other side and start running. It wasn’t worth much. Tim and Butch looked as if they could run fast, and all they had to do was run fast enough to get a clear shot.

  “This is a goddamn stupid thing,” Butch said, the rain hammering his head. “Us all standing out here in the rain lookin’ at a goddamn mule. We could be dry and these two could be —”

  A horn honked. Coming up the drive was a black Ford pickup with a camper fastened to the bed.

  The truck stopped and a man the shape of a pear with the complexion of a marshmallow, dressed in khakis the color of walnut bark, got out smiling teeth all over the place. He had a rooster under his arm.

  He said, “Hey, boys. Where’s George?”

  “He ain’t feelin’ so good,” Viceroy said.

  The man with the rooster saw the gun Viceroy was holding. He said, “You boys plinkin’ cans?”

  “Somethin’ like that,” Viceroy said.

  “Would you tell George to come out?” the man said.

  “He won’t come out,” Butch said.

  The man’s smile fell away. “Why not? He knows I’m comin’.”

  “He’s under the weather,” Viceroy said.

  “Can’t we all go inside? It’s like being at the bottom of a lake out here.”

  “Naw. He don’t want us in there. Contagious.”

  “What’s he got?”

  “You might say a kind of lead poisonin’.”

  “Well, he wants these here chickens. I got the camper back there full of ‘em. They’re fightin’ chickens. Best damn bunch there is. This’n here, he’s special. He’s a stud rooster. He ain’t fightin’ no more. Won his last one. Got a bad shot that put blood in his lungs, but I put his head in my mouth and sucked it out, and he went on to win. Just come back from it and won. I decided to stud him out.”

  “He’s gettin’ all wet,” Butch said.

  “Yeah he is,” said the chicken man.

  “Let’s end this shit,” Tim said.

  James reached over and pulled the bar on the trailer and the gate came open. He said, “Let’s show him to you close up.”

  “Not now,” Viceroy said, but James was in the trailer now. He took the rope off the trailer rail and tied it around the mule’s neck and put a loop over its head, started backing him out.

  “That’s all right,” Viceroy said. “We don’t need to see no damn mule.”

  “He’s a good’n,’’ James said when the mule was completely out of the trailer. “A little touchy about the ears.”

  He turned the mule slightly then, reached up, and grabbed the mule’s ears, and it kicked.

  The kick was a good one. Both legs shot out and the mule seemed to stand on its front legs like a gymnast that couldn’t quite flip over. The shod hooves caught Viceroy in the face, and there was a sound like a pound of wet cow shit dropping on a flat rock, and Viceroy’s neck turned at a too-far angle and he flew up and fell down.

  James bolted, and so did Elliot, slamming into Tim as he went, knocking him down. James hit the ground, rolled under the trailer, scuttled to the other side, Elliot went after him. Butch aimed at the back of Elliot’s head and the chicken man said, “Hey, what the hell.”

  Butch turned and shot the chicken man through the center of the forehead. Chicken man fell and the rooster leaped and squawked, and just for the hell of it, Butch shot the rooster too.

  Tim got up cussing. “I’m all muddy.”

  “Fuck that,” Butch said. “They’re gettin’ away.”

  Even the mule had bolted, darting across the yard, weaving through the car crusher and a pile of mangled cars. Their last view of it was the tips of its ears over the top of the metallic heap.

  Tim ran around the trailer and saw James and Elliot making for a patch of woods in the distance. It was just a little patch that ran along both sides of the creek down there. The land sloped just enough and the rain and wind were hard enough that the shot Tim got off didn’t hit James or Elliot. It went past them and smacked a tree.

  Tim came back around the trailer and looked at Butch bending over Viceroy, taking his gun, sticking it in his belt.

  “He bad?” Tim asked.

  “He’s dead. Fuckin’ neck’s broke. If that’s bad, he’s bad.”

  “We gonna get them hillbillies?”

  “There ain’t no hills around here for a billy to live in. They’re just the same ole white trash they got everywhere, you idiot.”

  “Well, this ain’t Dallas .. . We gonna chase ‘em?”

  “What for? Let’s get the TV set and go.”

  “Got a stereo too. I seen it in there. It’s a good’n.”