Rumble Tumble

Red wandered toward us, like an amnesiac man who had just walked free of a plane crash somewhere in the Yucatan. In the doorway I saw Wilber appear, one hand on the neck brace. He looked at me with fire in his eyes.

“How’s the neck?” I said.

The fire in his eyes turned to lava.

I gave Red a quick pat-down, found a revolver under his coat. I put it in my coat pocket. I put one hand on Red’s shoulder, and we started backing. Brett deliberately stepped on the old woman’s hand as we went. The woman bellowed and her teeth, which she had recovered and replaced, flew out again. Brett kicked them across the room, and we kept backing. We backed like that all the way out to the car. The entire gang, bodyguards, whores, and johns, and the old woman who was constantly gumming cuss words, came out on the porch and stood under the porch light looking at us.

Leonard opened the trunk, told Red to get inside.

“You’ve got to be kiddin’,” Red said.

“I look like I’m in a humorous mood?”

“I can’t stand tight places.”

“You think the grave ain’t tight?”

Brett grabbed the brim of Red’s hat and jerked it down over his eyes. She whapped him a good one on the top of the head with the pistol. “Do what he says, dick-lick!”

Red hesitated almost as long as it takes to skin the wrapper off a stick of gum, then, the hat still over his eyes, he got hold of the car, climbed inside the trunk, and Leonard closed it.

Leonard gave me the shotgun, went around, got behind the wheel and started the engine. Brett slipped into the back seat. I slid in on the front passenger side, closed the door, and stuck the shotgun out the window.

We roared out of there so fast Leonard fishtailed and banged Brett’s car into the side of a pickup truck. But that didn’t stop us. With the moon at our backs, we went up and over the hill and away, rattling the midget and the guns in the trunk.

14

“I don’t like it,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter what you like,” Brett said.

“Leonard?”

“It’s rough, Hap, but far as I’m concerned, it’s the way to go. Little shit nearly got us all killed. We got to profit from him.”

We had found a road out in the boonies and Leonard had pulled off, hoping to lose any pursuers we might have gained. If anyone had followed, we hadn’t seen sight of them yet. Maybe they were thinking about the shotgun. Then again, Leonard had been driving almost seventy miles an hour on roads that were designed for thirty, so there was a good chance he lost them before they could find their car keys. His driving had been almost as scary as our time in the whorehouse.

We were standing outside the car, beside the road in the bright moonlight, about to open the car trunk. Brett wanted to pistol-whip the dwarf into talking, and Leonard was for it too. He and Brett were just trying to decide on the best pistol for the job. Brett favored a long-barrel, and Leonard thought a short one was better because you could use it up close, requiring no more effort than the snap of a wrist. I didn’t know we had a long-barrel, but somehow Leonard had come up with one of those too, a cold piece from his closet.

I didn’t like the idea, short barrel or long. I was trying to talk them out of it. It’s one thing to hit a guy in self-defense, another to deliberately pistol-whip him.

“Just enough so he talks,” Brett said. “Then maybe a little for entertainment.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“We came all the way up here because he said my daughter was in trouble. Then we see him here. What he told us, it could mean anything, Hap. We could wine and dine him and give him a cigar, but I figure a pistol-whipping is a lot quicker and it would certainly make me feel better.”

“That’s the part worries me,” I said.

“We didn’t come here to be nice,” Brett said. “You’re the one told me it might not be pretty, and now you’re trying to make it pretty.”

“I’m trying to be human. Revenge isn’t the way.”

“People say that just ain’t never had call for any revenge,” Brett said. “Besides, I just want to loosen his tongue some.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Till it falls out of his mouth.”

Leonard rapped on the trunk with the shotgun, which I had returned to him. “Hey, turd. I’m gonna open this trunk, and if you’ve got one of those guns in there, I want you to know, all the ammunition is in the suitcases in the back seat, so don’t waste your time. Besides, I fire in there with this shotgun, we’ll be puttin’ what’s left of you in your hat and still have room for your clothes and a pound of shit. Hear me?”

“Yeah,” said a mumbled voice. “But I don’t want to be pistol-whipped.”

“Been listenin’ have you?” Leonard said.

“Yeah,” Red said. “This guy, Hap, you call him. He’s right. You ought not take your anger out on me.”

“Who says I’m angry?” Leonard said. “I just like to watch a midget take a beatin’.”

“You and everyone else,” Red said.

“I’m gonna open the trunk now,” Leonard said, “and when I do you better roll out of there pretty. You don’t, I’m gonna cut down on you.”