"The rifle," Leonard said.
I got his keys and limped around there with Trudy, and was about to unlock the trunk when there was a crack and the back glass of Leonard's car exploded into jagged stars. I saw Soldier and Angel coming up over the bank. They were covered in mud from the feet to the knees. Their faces were red and limb-whipped. Not happy campers. They were still a good distance away and not moving at top speed due to the cold blasting rain, but those guns gave them a lot of reach.
I whirled to run and there was another shot, and Trudy, who was slightly in front of me, threw out her hands and went face down. I grabbed her by the coat collar and started yelling for Leonard and there was another shot, smaller caliber, the .38. Then I was dragging Trudy toward the front porch of the house, my wound making my insides jump hard against my bones, and Leonard was limping behind. I heard him let out a grunt and I glanced back and saw him go down on one knee and saw blood flowing out of him to be washed across the cold ground in a dark wave; saw too that Soldier and Angel were coming on hard and fast.
Leonard scrambled for his stick and screamed himself up and yelled something at me that the pounding rain took away, and then I had Trudy pulled up on the porch and my shoulder took a bullet and I grunted and opened the door and hauled her halfway inside and staggered back for Leonard.
He almost ran over me before I could get off the porch. He let out a yell and I felt a punch in my chest and I grabbed him and swung him through the door and he and his stick went sliding across the floor. I fast-limped in, got hold of Trudy and pulled her all the way inside and slammed the door and locked it and Soldier hit it with his body and yelled. I thought Angel would hit it next, take it off its hinges, but that didn't happen. There was silence. And that was more frightening than the noise. I made my way across the room and into the kitchen, to the back door. I locked it just before the knob began to rattle and Soldier began to cuss. He fired two shots, quick succession, through the door about head high. I was just enough out of the way and the slugs slammed into the wall and picked a crock pot off a shelf and sent pieces of it all over.
I stumbled toward the living room, and as I passed the kitchen window, two more shots punched at the glass and threw up the curtains and slammed into the wall, but I was out of there and into the living room.
I avoided the window in the living room by getting low. I went over to Leonard. He was on the floor. Blood was running out of his leg and just below his ribs. That would be the shot that hit him on the porch and went through and got me too, but not bad. Leonard had taken most of that one. The ones in my right side and shoulder, those were the sonofabitches. The one in my lower right chest was just picking at me.
Leonard had taken off his jacket and pulled off his shirt and was tying it around his leg, trying to stop the blood from pumping out. He had never lost his stick, and he took hold of it again, tight.
Soldier was at the side of the house yelling. "Come on out, it's all over. Bam. A bullet in the head. You don't come out, I'm going to take some time with you."
I crawled around in front of the couch where poor dead Howard lay, and got a look at Trudy. The front of her jacket was a dark wet explosion where the bullet had come out.
Viscera poked through the hole in the jacket. My face explained things to Leonard.
"I'm sorry," he said. "Not a thing you can do."
I tried using my hand to close her eyes but I couldn't get her lids to go down. It seemed very important that her eyes close so I wouldn't have to look at them, but the lids just wouldn't do it.
Two shots whizzed through the living room window and struck the fireplace mantel and ricocheted into something I couldn't identify. Arctic rain came through and hit my face and mixed with the tears on my cheeks. I found it almost pleasant.
"You with me, Hap?" Leonard said.
"Yeah," I said, but I wasn't so sure. It was as if my center of gravity had shifted.
"One time," Soldier yelled, "I caught me this nigger trying to do me on a drug deal. I took him out and nailed his balls to a stump and left him there. With a sharp knife. Hear me in there, nigger?"
"Just a couple of licks on him with this," Leonard said, shaking the stick. "That's all I ask."
"The target pistol?" I said.
"In the nightstand by the bed. Not loaded. Shells are there in a box ... Hell, Hap. I got it bad."
"Hang on, buddy."
Soldier was quiet out there. Not a good sign.
"Look here, now," I said. "I'm going to get the pistol. You been worse, right?"
"Oh yeah."
To keep away from stray bullets, I crawled behind the couch and through the open door to the bedroom. I went like that until I was almost to the nightstand, but I never made it. I stopped crawling when I reached a pair of jogging shoes. With Angel's feet in them.
Chapter 29
I looked up and there was her snubnose .38 and above it her impassive face with the right side and top of her forehead swollen all out of proportion from my shovel blows. One eye was almost closed. She looked like a Neanderthal. Behind her the bedroom window was up and the curtains flapped in the freezing wind above the bed and there were muddy footprints on the sheets.
She pulled the trigger on the .38.
It was empty.
She knew that.
Bitch.
She whipped her hand around and whacked me on the side of the head with the gun, tossed it away, grabbed me by the coat and pulled me up. A network of pain went through my wounds and some new connections were found.
She kneed me in the nuts, tossed me backwards with a yell.
I hurtled through the open door and fell on my side in the living room behind the couch. Outside, I heard Soldier yell. "Angel? Angel?"
I rolled and tried to get up, but she got me by the collar and picked me up and tossed me over the couch. I rolled on my back and she leaned over the couch and grabbed Howard by his coat and crotch, and more shoved than threw him at me. He landed on his stomach across my legs.
She started around the couch making deep strides and I kicked out from under Howard and got unsteadily to my feet.
"Watch her, watch her," Leonard yelled, as if I might decide to go take in a little TV. When she came around the couch, she kicked at Leonard, who was doing his damnedest to get up, caught him a glancing blow on the head. But he wasn't her main target. He seemed for the most part incapacitated. And she hadn't forgotten me and that shovel.
She reached for me and I shot out a left jab and her head went back and her nose broke open and spouted blood. I hit her again, and again. Good jabs.
She stepped in and grabbed me and whipped me up and around and I fell back on the couch. She came down on top of me and I squirmed out from under her, caught her under the arm and twisted her on her back, straddled her and hit her with a hard left-right combination. Her face was nothing but blood now.
She slammed her forearms into my sides, sending tentacles of pain into my side wound. I fell back on the floor, trying but unable to scream. Next thing I knew she was on top of me, slamming me in the face with her fists. I couldn't think, couldn't get oriented, couldn't fight back.
Then something long and dark and sharp came into view and it pushed back Angel's head and blood ran onto my face.
Leonard had rolled across the floor and shoved the broken end of his stick into her right eye.
She stood up stiffly. The stick stuck out of her face a full four feet, but it was firm in her head. She didn't take hold of it. She managed to step over me and start toward the fireplace, but got her feet tangled in Howard's legs and went face down. Most of her body landed on the couch, but her head missed and the stick in her eye hit the floor and the back of her head cocked up slightly but sharply, stayed that way.
Then there was a thrashing at the living room window. Soldier had the shovel and was using it to knock out what was left of the glass. Before I could get up, the shovel pulled out, and he kicked out the frame, stooped, and stepped inside, the .45
in front of him. Leonard, still lying on the floor, reached out and caught Soldier's ankle before his foot was firmly planted, sent him stumbling forward, but he got his feet under him again and went past Leonard and caught his foot on Trudy's outstretched arm and fell all the way this time, and when he hit I rolled and fought the explosions in my body and chopped down on his wrist with the edge of my hand. His fingers popped wide like a startled starfish, and the gun went sliding, and he crawled for it, but I got him around the neck and tried to choke him. He made it up to his knees and I went up on my knees too, and I tightened my forearm around his throat and tried to squeeze the life out of him. He pulled a knife from his pocket and flicked it open one-handed and brought it up and slashed me at the crook of my elbow, but I didn't let go, so he did it again, and this time I did.
I scuttled toward the living room window on my hands and knees, saw Leonard lying there, finally too much out of blood to move, and then I twisted and got up on one knee and Soldier was there, slashing at my face. I caught the blade in my hand and the slash went deep in my thumb and scraped on bone. I tried to get my legs under me and get up, but something had finally gone really bad inside me, and I couldn't.
Soldier jerked the blade back and cut me again that way, but I didn't feel it right then, and I dove forward and put my head between his legs and grabbed him behind the knees and popped my head up and caught him in the balls with the back of it and snatched his legs out from under him. His head hit the floor hard. Real hard. I crawled on top of him and got hold of his knife hand with my good left hand, twisted his thumb back and made him let go.
I picked up the knife and put it to his throat. All I had to do was thrust and rip. Hadn't this goddamned out-of-state racist asshole tried to kill me?
He looked at me through those pathetic glasses and I thought of this gawky, sweaty-faced bastard as a kid with a father who slapped his ear into a cauliflower and had convinced him it was for his own good and that dear old kid-beating, wife-beating dad was a good man that demanded respect. And in that same fleeting instant I remembered that I had not gone to war because I didn't want to kill needlessly for a cause I didn't believe in. And here we didn't even have a cause. Just a sad fuck-up without any hope.
I got off of him and held the knife close and said, "Roll on your stomach, Soldier, or I'll kill you."
"Easy," he said. "I got a bad dog bite here."
He rolled on his stomach. I cut his coat from the collar to the center of his back, then pulled the sleeves down so they caught at his elbows. I cut strips from his pants legs and tied his wrists. I cut the back of his pants open so I could pull them down around his knees. I took off his tennis shoes and used his shoestrings to tie his ankles. I rolled his socks up tight, lifted his head, and forced them in his mouth, just in case he might want to talk. I'd heard all of him I ever wanted to hear.
Leonard was trying to sit up. I closed the knife and put it in my pocket and helped him to a sitting position so he could lean against the front door.
"You should have killed him," Leonard said.
"I know."
"It's going to complicate things."
"I know."
"Same ol'Hap."
I made a concentrated effort to rise, and had to use the edge of the couch for support, but I made it. Falling down only twice, I got to the place where the phone ought to have been, saw that it had been pulled out of the wall and tossed on the floor near the kitchen table. Soldier or Angel in their haste had made an effort to disable it, way they had the cars. I grunted and cussed on over there, took hold of it, held my heart in my mouth while I examined it. The little connection at the end of the wire was cracked from being ripped out of the wall and the phone had been thrown down hard enough to knock the back off and let the guts out, but the guts themselves appeared to be in tact. Looked to me they had been in too big a hurry to do the job right. I hoped.
I shoved the phone's insides back into place and crawled over to the wall connection and snapped the clip into place and tried to hold my mouth just right while I punched O. The operator came on the line after three rings and I had her connect me to the sheriff's office. I told them what I thought they ought to know and hung up. The phone was slick with the blood from my cut hand.
I crawled back to the door and sat up next to Leonard.
"We better come up with some story," Leonard said.
I thought awhile. I put my mouth to his ear so Soldier couldn't hear.
"That's for shit," he said.
"Got one better?"
He shook his head. "Hap, you know I told you I been worse?"
"Yeah."
"I lied."
"Me too," I said. "We gonna make it?”
“I am," I said.
Leonard tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. He opened his hand. I took it and held it.
Chapter 30
I remember coming awake on the way to the hospital in the ambulance, and there being a man from the sheriff’s office there. He was determined to have some kind of statement. I think I gave him one. After that, things got hazy, then things got white and there was this light and people bending over me, then I was out again. When I awoke it was to sunlight shining through a hospital window.
A nurse came in and spoke to me and gave me some water and sat me up in bed so I could see out the window better, and later on she came back with an orderly and a wheelchair and they got me in that and pushed me over by the window for an even better look.
I sat and looked out on the hospital lawn. The bad, wet weather was gone and the sun was out and the trees on the big lawn were moving gently in the wind. It was probably a cold wind, but certainly nothing like the way things had been. I wanted to take that as some sort of sign of good things to come, but it wasn't long after that the doctor came in and he had a big man with him in a long black coat and another big man dressed up in hat and boots and the standard issue that the sheriff's office gives out.
The doctor was a little man with a bland face and thinning blond hair. He stood with his hands in front of him, left palm over right. He made me think of a preacher, way he stood there. He was very polite. He said, "Mr. Collins, I'm Dr. Dumas. You know, you been out three days."
"Three days?"
"That's right. And I got to tell you, you're a lucky man."
"I don't feel so lucky," I said.
The man from the sheriff's office took off his cowboy hat and showed me a vein-riddled bald head. He went over to the corner and leaned there. The big man in the long coat took the single chair and pulled it around so that he was straddling it. Both he and the sheriff's man had their eyes on me.
"You're lucky nonetheless. Fraction of an inch here, a fraction there, it could have made quite a difference. One bullet went in your back, just above your buttocks, about here, but it caught the fatty part and turned and came out on the right side in front of your hipbone. One in your shoulder tore some muscles, but punched on through. There was a slug lodged just under your skin, right below your sternum, slightly to the right. You weren't too bad to patch up."
"What about Leonard?" I said.
"Medical science has something to do with Mr. Pine's survival, but his constitution may be more amazing even than yours. But he won't be up and around as soon as you are. He's got some nasty internal injuries* and his leg, well, I don't know. He'll keep it, but he may not walk well on it."
"My compliments to you, Dr. Dumas."
"That's my job. These men are here to ask you a few questions," Dr. Dumas said. "I'll let them introduce themselves."
Dr. Dumas went out.
The man in the long coat said, "I'm Jack Divit." The man from the sheriff's office didn't introduce himself. He looked around the room like he was bored.
Divit said, "I'm with the FBI. Sheriff’s office has a statement from you, and now that you're feeling better, we'd like one too. You don't mind going through it again, do you?"
I took a shallow breath and started telling it the way Leonard and I agr
eed to tell it.
"My ex-wife. Trudy Fawst. She came around and said she had a job for me and Leonard. She wanted us to recover a boat for her and some other people and if we did they'd pay us some money."
"They tell you why they wanted to recover the boat?"
"No. It didn't matter. It was a job. We recovered the boat and it had lots of money in it in watertight canisters. They didn't want to pay us then and they took us with them, said they'd let us go later. Turned out they were going to use the money to buy guns so they could be revolutionaries, you know. Silly idea. One of their bunch, guy named Paco, was out to make his own score and he hooked them up with a guy named Soldier, woman named Angel. There weren't any guns and Trudy didn't bring any money along, except for five thousand dollars. She said the rest was at Leonard's and we ended up going back there, only there wasn't any money and things got out of hand. "
"What about this money?" the man from the sheriffs department said. "You say you saw some money, then there wasn't but the five thousand."
"I don't know. There looked to be more than five thousand. I wasn't counting. If there was more, I don't know what happened to it.'"
"This guy, Soldier," Divit said. "He tells a different story."
"Does he? How is old Soldier?"
"Physically, pretty good," Divit said. "But you see, he's a boy we been wanting to see for a long time. He's got a record."
"Imagine that."
"He's got some bad things to his credit. Drugs. Arms. Murder. Rape. Been busy. This Angel that was with him, she wasn't exactly for the church choir either. But still, Soldier tells it different. He says there's some money. Says it was some kind of holdup money this Howard fella knew about. Says you were all trying to score."
"I told you what I know," I said. "I don't know where the money came from originally or what they did with it. Howard claimed it was buried on Leonard's place, but Trudy, before she died, told me different."
"She told you where it was?" Divit said.
"Nope. She said it wasn't on Leonard's place. That was just a lie she told Soldier to stall. You'd seen this guy in action, you'd have lied to him too if you thought it would save you. He's a real animal. But the bottom line is she told me it was gone forever."
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