The Elephant of Surprise

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “He said word was Larry Keith’s dad couldn’t let me stay alive. I guess it was a kind of pride thing. You don’t get away from his family, not if they want you dead. And of course, there was that whole not-being-able-to-testify-if-I-was-a-corpse thing.

  “This cop, Cantor was his name, he says, ‘Small-time car thief and lifetime criminal Pete Ridgely got arrested for trying to boost an SUV. Minute he thought he might end up going to prison, he wanted to land as soft as he possibly could, so he decided to cut a deal. He knew who had killed the wrong Nicole: Pete, his own self.’

  “That’s how Cantor put it. ‘Pete, his own self.’ He had been paid to do the job, was so excited he got drunk, looked up Nicole Beckman in the phone book, drove to her house, and killed her. Thing was, the Nicole he wanted was me, and I was in hiding, so the wrong Nicole Beckman was murdered. Cantor said Pete told the cops, ‘I don’t do so good when I drink.’

  “I figured his drinking had to be pretty damn bad, all right. Someone must have at some point mentioned I was Asian and albino, certainly memorable enough for those with brain cells.

  “After that, Pete had his own head on the chopping block for killing the wrong girl. At that time, I was loose in the wild, so to speak, in Hootie Hoot, and Pete, he didn’t know which end was up. He didn’t know where to find me to make things right by killing me, and Wilson Keith wanted him dead for being a screwup, and maybe kind of wished his own son was dead for being stupid enough to hire a drunk who didn’t know an albino from a rhino. Pete knew it was his turn to get whacked, so he went state’s evidence. He didn’t last long in jail. He had provided written testimony, but he wouldn’t be speaking at the trial after all. Hanged himself.”

  “At least he got to quit being stupid,” Leonard said.

  Nikki smiled a little. It wasn’t exactly an amused smile. Maybe her tongue hurt.

  “Do you need to stop?” the nurse said.

  Nikki gently shook her head, kept talking.

  “Cantor said shortly after a jailer named Frank Quinn found Pete hanging, he retired from the jailer business and began living high on the hog without visible means of support. Turned out he liked to talk, and rumor was he talked about Pete’s death now and then, like how maybe Pete got some help getting that rope around his neck.

  “An explanation for Jailer Quinn’s expensive lifestyle didn’t happen. He was found under a piece of tin near an old fallen-down shack by two homeless men that had stopped to pee. Quinn’s mouth was stuffed with his amputated foot, a symbolic suggestion he had put his foot in his mouth. Damn. I feel like I got a foot in my mouth, way my tongue is swelling.”

  “I said you could stop,” the nurse said.

  “I’m okay. At least until I’m not. May I have more water?”

  The nurse gave Nikki the plastic bottle and Nikki let go of Leonard’s hand and took a long pull of the water and gave the bottle back to her. She rested her head against the pillow, closed her eyes, and let whatever she was thinking about ramble around inside her head.

  About the time I thought she might have fallen asleep, she opened her eyes, sighed, and picked up where she’d left off.

  “Quinn had been another of Larry’s hires, and now someone was cleaning up problems. Canton’s guess was it was Wilson Keith doing the cleaning, or having it done, and this time by more efficient people, the cream of the crop, the High Cotton Gang, he called them.”

  Manny nodded. “Yeah. I know of them. Rumored team of hitters, dirty-jobbers sometimes employed by Wilson Keith, the king of East Texas dirt. Right amount of money, they’d kill their mothers.”

  “I was supposed to be safe, and I know Cantor was thinking he was keeping me in the loop, though he wasn’t supposed to do that,” Nikki said. “He had good intentions, I think. And he liked to talk. I figured I was next on the cleanup agenda.”

  That’s when Nikki’s voice began to sound as if it were coming through a potato in a sock. She had to stop. She had the nurse crank her up in her hospital bed, and she picked up the pad and pen on the table beside her and began to write. Her hand wobbled, like it was slowly being electrocuted by a weak voltage.

  What she wrote in that chicken-scratch handwriting boiled down to this:

  Larry’s chop shop had already been shut down by the cops. They found some violations or some such shit, but there wasn’t enough evidence to have him arrested on murder charges, just Nikki’s word. But it was a strong word, and there were other pieces of the puzzle that might fit together and lead to a lethal injection for Larry, and if Pete’s and Quinn’s deaths could be led back to Wilson Keith, that ol’ boy might be having his vein tapped with a spike as well. But to clinch the deal, to get them both, Nikki’s testimony was just the thing. But she had to make it to trial, and it was reasonably certain someone at the cop shop in Tyler was leaking to Keith and cashing a check. Someone with all the ethics of that jailer who’d ended up with enough money to retire. Maybe whoever it was ought to have thought deeper, remembered how the jailer turned out, rotting under a piece of hot tin.

  Cops hid Nikki out in the deep woods between LaBorde and San Augustine, but the one thing wrong with it was that someone, or more than one, in law enforcement was on the Keith payroll. Nikki wrote:

  They knew where I was, where the cop protecting me, Cantor, was. It wasn’t an accident they found me in those woods. Someone squealed, and certainly for money. Place where we were, a cabin, the toilet got stopped up, and I had to go, so I went outside to pee in the woods like some kind of wild animal, and then the real wild animals showed up. Cantor was inside working on the toilet, and there I was outside, peeing in the dark woods, with a storm brewing, feeling pretty safe, and the killers came. I heard a shot from the cabin. That would have been poor Cantor taking a bullet. Then I saw them coming along the trail, wearing night-vision goggles, carrying guns.

  I panicked, ran, but they caught me, held me down and used a pair of tin snips on my tongue. One held my head, another pulled down my chin, and then this little guy used the snips.

  My guess was that was Kung Fu Rabbit.

  I think they planned to get the whole tongue to take back to the Keiths. Symbolic stuff about me not being able to testify. But the little guy snipped quick and I was struggling. Hurt like holy hell. I passed out. And then they got me up and pushed me against a tree, were going to do the tongue business again, get it right, put a bullet in my head or a knife in my gut, but there was a loud crack in the woods, a tree breaking and falling, and in that moment, they wheeled and that limb landed right in the middle of us, knocked the little guy with the snips to the ground. I broke loose and ran, shots dancing around me.

  I was a track star in high school, and I can still run. I got some space between us quick, leaped over a pile of briars and rolled down a deep embankment and landed in a ditch full of water. Then I was out of that and running. They fired down at me, but the night and me running, all the brush, kept them from hitting me.

  I was growing weak. It was hard to breathe. I had to spit blood constantly. My tongue was swelling. I was starting to stumble, felt faint.

  I came through the woods out onto the highway, and soon as I did, there they came. They had me figured. I could see their lights coming down a little road next to the woods that emptied into the highway.

  I ran out into the highway, thinking I had to get across and into the woods on that side. Maybe not really thinking at all. Just trying to get away. And then you guys showed up. Another minute or two, they would have had me.

  That’s where she ended it. She gave the pad to me and lay back against her pillow again.

  24

  By the time we got all of the story from Nikki, she was tuckered from talking and writing, and she had to take her medicine. The nurse handled that, and we went into Hanson’s office with Manny. She sat behind his desk. As always, I noted just how fine-looking she was. Even the scar along the side of her face gave her a uniqueness, like a model who had been in a knife fight.

  She s
aid, “Well, you believe that story?”

  “It sounds possible,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s too outlandish to be made up, and she tells it straight, writes it out straight. I believe it. I mean, hell, she may be protecting herself a bit here and there, and I’m thinking she might actually have helped Pretty Boy steal a few cars, but I don’t know if that’s true or if that’s just the cop in me talking. Do this awhile, you forget not everyone has an angle. Not everyone is trying to get away with something, and not everyone is lying. Lies are saved for presidents and Congress.”

  “Everyone lies,” Leonard said, “and all the time.”

  “Not everyone has a murder to lie about,” I said. “I believe her.”

  “She seems to trust you two,” Manny said.

  “We could be being used,” Leonard said.

  “You really think so?” I said. “Hell, you dragged her hurt ass out of the rain.”

  “Naw, I guess she’s telling the truth. Mostly. Like Manny said, I think maybe she not only knew what Pretty Boy was doing, but she might have been helping him do it.”

  “At this point,” Manny said, “none of that matters. What matters is the big fish, so we have to take care of her, make sure she testifies. You guys mind sticking around? I’m going to see if I can verify what she told us, check out a few things. She might still prefer you two being here if I need to talk to her some more, and I’m sure I will.”

  “We’re at your service,” Leonard said, “long as you have something to eat.”

  “Go to the break room. There’s some snacks there, coffee, nothing special.”

  “We’ve had the cop shop’s hospitality before,” I said. “We know what we’re in for. Potato chips and bad coffee.”

  “Get tired, use one of the cells to lie down. We aren’t exactly packing them in, and with all the storming, I doubt we will be. Even the weasels hunker down in weather like this.”

  Me and Leonard went into the break room and poured coffee so sour and acidic you could have used it to melt a hole through a vault. There weren’t any potato chips, but there were some stale peanut butter crackers. We sat at the break table, sipped our bad coffee, ate our crackers, and felt forlorn.

  Outside, the storm had regained its intensity. It just wouldn’t go away. It would blow out, then blow back, and now the wind was howling and the rain was beating and my soul was quivering. There was something almost apocalyptic about that storm.

  Manny came into the break room, said, “It’s a wet hell out there. Lot of patrol cars can’t get back to the station. Water’s rising. I kid you not, I heard from dispatch there are people in boats cruising around where roads and highways used to be. Boys, you aren’t going home tonight, and I’m not sure about tomorrow either. Supposed to get worse.”

  The lights flickered.

  “We have a backup generator,” Manny said. “Also, there’s that pie Alton left for the station. Chocolate mousse pie.”

  “You took a peek?” Leonard said.

  “Yeah, I looked. He always brings something different.”

  The pie was in a little refrigerator where the cops kept some personal food. Manny took it out of there and placed it on the table and opened the box.

  The pie smelled delightful and my mouth began to water.

  “You know, Alton is not going to get to taste this pie,” she said. “Not even one piece, and I know that’s mean and breaking his rule, but hey, we’re trapped here. I’ll take the hit for it, and I’ll buy him a whole pie. But tonight, we are the pie-eaters of doom.”

  “Pie confiscation,” I said.

  “Absolutely,” Manny said.

  “What about the nurse?” I said.

  “We won’t tell her,” Manny said. “Or the dispatchers, or Nikki, and she can’t eat it anyway, right?”

  “Right,” Leonard said.

  We split the pie in thirds with a plastic knife, put it on paper plates, ate it with plastic forks, and drank more bad coffee. When we finished, Leonard said, “Thank you, Alton, wherever you may be.”

  “He’s on the street,” Manny said. “We’ve lost a lot of the old crew lately, resignations, people moving, and right now some people are on vacation. Bad time for this storm to hit. Currently, some of our force is out in the hinterlands. Now they’re trapped, cut off, can’t get back to the station. Some can’t even leave their homes and get to work to begin with. Lake LaBorde has grown so large the whole western side of town is an enormous lake. The dam isn’t looking too good out there either. It may not hold. The east side isn’t much better. Water is seeping out of creeks and swamps, and the water has closed the roads. Now they got a hurricane coming into the Gulf, and they think it’s going to hit us with more rain, and we may just get a direct piece of that windy monster. To make matters worse, weather people say it’ll stall here for a while.”

  “Damn,” Leonard said.

  The idea of all that water inching toward us gave me the creeps. I began to worry about my family. I stepped out of the office to call Brett to see if she had decided to haul everyone off to Tyler. I wanted to tell her our situation, what we were up to, but there was no cell service.

  When I came back into the break room, I said, “Leonard, try your phone.”

  He did. Nothing.

  Manny tried her cell with the same lack of results.

  “They can’t repair things fast enough,” Manny said. “Tower’s down is my guess.”

  The lights blinked.

  “So, if the electricity goes, does the generator cut on automatically?” Leonard said.

  “It does, if we get to that situation, and I suspect we may,” Manny said.

  “I’m going to see a man about a horse,” I said.

  I thought I’d make a bathroom trip, then use the cop-shop ground line to call Brett. I walked along the hall to the bathroom. The place was quiet and eerie as a politician’s soul. There were only a few people in the station. The three of us, Nikki, the nurse, the receptionist, couple cops, three dispatchers.

  As I walked by the dispatch room, one of the dispatchers was going in, having made her own bathroom trip, I suppose. The door closed slowly behind her. I didn’t hear them answering calls in there. Maybe the landlines were out too, though I knew they had serious backup that most of the town wouldn’t have.

  I went to the bathroom, washed up, walked out, and went to Nikki’s cell. She was up but groggy. The nurse was helping her to the bathroom, holding on to the rack with the juice in it, rolling it along.

  “I thought you were knocked out,” I said to Nikki.

  “Light dosage,” the nurse said. “But she’ll go right back to sleep soon as she gets back to bed.”

  Nikki smiled at me. It was a drunk kind of smile.

  They went on to the ladies’ room, and I went to the back door of the station, pushed it open. It wouldn’t open from the outside unless you knew the code to use on the exterior keypad. That was comforting.

  The air that hit me was cool and sticky. It lifted my hair and shirt collar. It was dark as the source of sin out there, except for occasional rips of lightning. In those flashes, I could see water running wild over the concrete, and where the street dipped down a bit to the left, it was like a little stream. In the flashes, the water was the color of a vein of silver.

  I wondered if we might be able to get home. It was wet and dangerous, but if we went to the right, on up to North Street, we might manage to turn on Main and make it to the house. But then below Main was the creek, and it filled easy, rose up over the bridge, so maybe not. I was thinking about us trying it in spite of what Manny said. Perhaps this was the time, before things got even worse. I wanted to see my family. If I got home and things got so bad we couldn’t get out, at least I would be with them, and Nikki wouldn’t be going anywhere anyway, not until the storm played out and the roads were cleared.

  I took a deep breath of the wet air, let the door close, made sure it was locked, and walked back to the break room. It was
then that the wind outside screamed and the rain fell on the roof like hippos dropped from a plane. The building actually shook.

  All hell was about to break loose.

  25

  We sat around awhile, tried to talk about this and that, but that wind howling and that rain slamming made it difficult.

  Finally, I said to Manny, “I’m going to take you up on that offer to lie down.”

  “Other than the one Nikki’s in, the cells are open,” she said. “Pick one.”

  “We’ve been here before,” I said, “and in a different capacity. We’ve got familiarity.”

  Leonard said, “I’m out too. That coffee didn’t do shit for me. I’m starting to see dancing tigers. Going to bed. I’d like my breakfast on a tray with a little rose in a white vase in the morning.”

  “Yeah, that’s going to happen,” Manny said.

  Me and Leonard walked out together, down the hall, turned past where Nikki and the nurse were, found a two-bunk cell, went in, left the door open, took off our shoes, and stretched out on the bunks.

  “I have never liked storms,” Leonard said.

  “I know.”

  “Think it’ll pass quickly?”

  “No. This one is going to hang around awhile. You heard Manny.”

  “She doesn’t know everything.”

  “And I do?”

  “You’re right,” Leonard said. “You don’t know shit either.”

  I’d thought, as tired as I was, I would probably lie down and then the coffee would hit and I’d be sleepy but wouldn’t be able to sleep, and I’d feel miserable. Too much coffee bothered me that way.

  This didn’t prove to be the case.

  As my head hit that thin little pillow, I had a brief moment where I listened to the wind and the rain, and then I fell into a light sleep, one of those kinds where you are aware of where you are and yet part of you is in the night world. I remember I had a strange near-awake dream about a pack of wild dogs walking across high water like Jesus hounds, their fangs bared. The moon was bright behind them, and then the moon seemed to fall off a shelf and hit the water in a gold explosion, and then I was deep asleep.