Cold in July (24 page)

I picked up the .44. Guess Ann was right, too many John
Wayne movies and cowboys books. It was in a sleek, black holster, but it didn’t
have a belt and tie-down straps; the holster had a clip that fastened to your
belt or waistband.

“Good choice,” Jim Bob said. “Revolvers don’t jam.”

“This is a lot of artillery to kill two guys by surprise
with, isn’t it?” I said.

“The rules here are that there are no rules. We’re gonna do
it quick and fast and get out. But things can happen. As the Boy Scouts say, Be
Prepared. Since we’re gonna be doing this in the open, I’m gonna have us some
disguises. Simple stuff. Just so we can’t be recognized easy, and with the
truck worked over, well, we just might get away with it. The key is to do it
quick and to move on.”

“We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?” I said.

“Damn tooth,” Jim Bob said.

          
· · ·

After five o’clock we started over to Freddy’s part of town.
All three of us in the cab of the truck. Jim Bob driving, Russel in the middle,
me on the passenger side. We had the revolvers and the sawed-off in a tow sack
behind the seat. The sack was tied with a rope, and one end of the rope was
fastened to the gun rack behind us. In the rack, in plain view, was the Ithaca.
The guns had been cleaned and loaded and the glove box was full of extra
ammunition, just in case we had to fight the Marines.

          
· · ·

We got to Freddy’s side of town too early because the
traffic chose to be unusually moderate. We drove a few miles past Freddy’s and
stopped at a McDonald’s for coffee. Russel hadn’t said a word since we left Jim
Bob’s house. But he looked different. Tough again. Committed. As if during the
night he had conjured up enough will to chase Old Age out of his skin. He was
hard-faced, clear-eyed and level of shoulders. He looked like an old soldier
about to go into battle.

At about seven-thirty, I excused myself from the McDonald’s
booth and went into the bathroom and threw up my coffee in the toilet. That was
getting to be a habit, throwing up. If it wasn’t killing somebody caused it, it
was the heat or planning to kill someone. I washed my face and rinsed my mouth
out by cupping water in my hand. I studied my face in the mirror. It was like
after I had killed the burglar, just the same. No sign of anything on it. Just
good old Richard Dane, husband and father, would-be vigilante.

I wondered if there would be much blood when we did the
killing, and I wondered if they would scream. I wondered if Russel really would
be able to make Freddy understand he was his father, and if it really mattered
in the long run. I guess it mattered to Russel.

I rinsed my mouth again and went back and sat down next to
Jim Bob and tore up my paper coffee cup, and at seven-thirty we left and headed
back to Freddy’s part of town.

It wasn’t dark when we got there. The sky was showing gray
and there was a haze of light, but the days were getting longer and they had a
way of dying slowly. There was still plenty of light to see by, to shoot by, to
be shot by. I felt as if we were waving a flag with Identify Us written on it.

We cruised some streets near the subdivision where Freddy
lived, killing time, thinking about what we were about to do, checking our
watches.

Jim Bob reached some things from under his part of the seat
and tossed them into Russel’s lap. “The disguises I promised.”

One item was a cap with hair attached to it. The hair looked
like the stuff Raggedy Ann and Andy have on top of their heads, the same
carroty orange. Jim Bob took off his cowboy hat and hung it on the gun rack and
reached for the cap from Russel and put it on. The orange hair hung down over
his ears and almost in his eyes. He got a pair of sunglasses off the dashboard
and put them on. All he needed was a red, round nose and some floppy shoes.

Russel handed me a black wig and took a blond one for
himself. There was a can of blacking there too, and Jim Bob said, “Make a
mustache or something with that stuff.”

Russel put on the wig and opened the can of blacking, rubbed
a little on his upper lip and put a dab on his chin, passed the can to me. I
put on my wig and made myself a thick mustache with the blacking, assumed I
looked like Groucho Marx in a Beatle wig.

I put the blacking in the glove box and checked my watch.

Nine minutes to eight.

As we turned down the street that led to Freddy’s house,
Russel took hold of the rope that was attached to the bag full of guns and
pulled it up.

“Careful,” Jim Bob said, “them sumbitches are loaded.”

“I know that, goddamnit,” Russel said.

The brave assassins get jumpy. I realized I was breathing
through my mouth and that I felt a touch light-headed.

Russel put the bag in his lap and opened it. He took out the
sawed-off shotgun and the .38 and put them in Jim Bob’s lap. Jim Bob clipped
the .38’s holster to his belt with one hand and held grimly to the wheel with
the other. Beads of sweat were running out from under the carroty hair and down
his face thick as condensation on an ice tea glass.

I took the .44 and clipped it to my belt and reached the
Ithaca down from the rack and pointed the barrel at the floorboard, started
counting from one hundred backwards, trying to calm myself. My hands were moist
and slippery against the shotgun.

Russel had strapped Jim Bob’s little ankle holster and
revolver to his leg before we left the house. He had only the .357 to mess
with. He put it on his knee and put one massive hand over it like a lid over a
pot about to boil.

We were armed and dangerous.

We came even with Freddy’s house and took a right onto a
street that led up a slight hill. We went over the hill and dipped down between
a sprinkling of houses and went all the way to the end of the street and turned
around slowly and started back up the hill. When we topped it and were just
about to go down, the Nova showed itself. It was five minutes until eight.

Jim Bob said, “We’ll go down now,” and he lifted his foot to
stomp the gas as the Nova started to make its careful turn into the driveway.
But before Jim Bob could do what he meant to do, a green Dodge van came along
behind the Nova and pulled up next to the curb just before the driveway. The
Nova went on into the drive and we coasted over to the curb and stopped.

The garage door came open and the Nova coasted inside and
the Mexican and Freddy got out. The driver of the van got out, went over and
shook hands with the Mexican and Freddy. A man got out of the back of the van
then and went over to stand in the drive and face the street, watching. We
eased down in the seat and Jim Bob killed the engine. After a moment Jim Bob
pulled off his cap and wig and eased his head up for a look.

“The Mex is in the house,” he said. “Freddy and the other
two are smoking cigarettes. The one in the drive is looking this way but he
ain’t acting like he sees anything. The man on the passenger side of the van is
looking this way too, but he’s just looking. Now he’s looking to the van’s
front.”

“Guess this is one of those unforeseen circumstances you
were talking about,” I said.

“That’s the size of it,” Jim Bob said. “The Mex is coming
out and he’s got some bags over his shoulders and he’s carrying something. It
might be a shotgun or rifle. Freddy is using the garage device, lowering the
door… No, that’s not a gun the Mex has, it’s a tripod. I think he’s got video
equipment there.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Russel said.

“I should have thought that this being Friday they might
have something planned for the weekend besides TV,” Jim Bob said. “We should
have waited until Monday.”

“What’s happening now?” Russel asked.

Jim Bob eased his head slightly higher. “The Mex is putting
the bags and the tripod in the back of the van and the other guy that got out
of the back is getting back inside. Freddy’s getting in there with them. The
driver is getting behind the wheel. They’re turning around in the drive…
heading back up the street.”

We raised up.

“What do we do now?” I asked. “Wait until Monday?”

“Let’s follow them a bit,” Russel said. “They got in mind
what I think they’ve got in mind, I think we should be there before they do
it.”

“It ain’t just two fellas now,” Jim Bob said. “We’re talking
two up front and three in the back. And that’s all I saw. There might be more
in the back.”

“Follow them anyway,” Russel said. “Hurry.”

Jim Bob cranked the pickup and we went down the street
briskly and made a left even more briskly. Russel and I took off our wigs and
gathered them up along with Jim Bob’s cap and hair and stuck them under the
seat For a killing job, they might have been all right disguises, but for
tailing a car they were a little silly and obvious. Hard not to take note of
Raggedy Andy, a French painter type and Groucho Marx wearing a Beatle wig.

Russel and me took turns wiping the blacking off our faces
with the tow sack, wrapped the guns in it again and lowered them behind the
seat. I put the Ithaca in the shotgun rack and Jim Bob put his hat on.

We saw the green van take a right onto the highway, and we
gave it a few seconds before we gunned up to the intersection and went after
it, managing to keep a car or two between us at all times. The van driver drove
slowly and cautiously until we wound our way out of the city and out onto
Highway 59 North. At that point, he picked up speed and became harder to
follow. We had been after him almost an hour.

Houses fell by the wayside and great pine trees appeared in
their places and shadows gathered between them like bats. There was plenty of
traffic, but all that motorized activity didn’t make me feel less creeped. I
guess I was thinking about that young whore I had seen on the tape, or whoever
she was. Just some kid, fucked and killed for Freddy’s and the Mexican’s
entertainment.

Now we were following those self-same murderers, as well as
a number of other most likely unpleasant individuals who probably made them up
their steady film crew, down a dark highway with the houses and lights going
away and the pines and the moon and the shadows becoming the status quo, and it
was my guess that this merry little van-encased group had this night set aside
for a very special little film they wished to make, and it was most certainly
not a nature flick about the nocturnal mating habits of the brown moth.

We kept on going, and when we were about halfway to LaBorde,
the car lights became less frequent and the night had fallen over the
countryside like a hood.

We went through some little burg that consisted of a used
car lot, a chicken shack, a railroad track, one red light and a fistful of
abandoned buildings, and on the other side of that the van took a left and went
down a narrow blacktop that seemed almost consumed by pines.

Jim Bob pulled over to the side of the road to give them a
chance to get a little farther ahead so we wouldn’t look so obvious. Russel got
out a cigarette and lit it and I cracked my window and watched the smoke suck
out it like a wraith.

“Long enough,” Jim Bob said, and he checked the highway for
cars and pulled across onto the blacktop. Russel leaned over me and tossed the
almost whole cigarette through the crack in the window and I rolled it up. Jim
Bob said, “Break out the guns.”

42

The blacktop dipped down a deep hill and wound sharply
around a corner that was walled with pines, and there in the moonlight, the
spears of trees on either side of it, it looked like an enormous ribbon of molasses
slick enough to slide on.

We went down the hill and around the corner and down the
road a piece, and no van. We went by a gravel drive and a cattle guard and
finally another drive that was made of concrete, and on around another curve.

No sign of the van.

“We didn’t wait that long,” Jim Bob said. “They turned off.”

Turning around, we went back more slowly, and as we cruised
by the concrete drive, I squinted through the trees and saw lights. “There’s a
house down there or something,” I said.

Jim Bob drove on until we came to the cattle guard, and he
drove over that and parked the truck in a pasture and killed the lights.

“We can walk back and check,” he said.

“And if that isn’t them?” Russel asked.

“We come back to the truck and start over,” Jim Bob said. “I
don’t think this pasture leads anywhere but more pasture, maybe some trees. I
think they want a house for what they’re doing. The gravel drive up from this
might lead to something, but let’s check out the other one first.”

We got out of the truck with our weapons, but didn’t bother
with the wigs or the blacking. Other than those we intended to eliminate,
witnesses out here were few and far between. And we didn’t need the blacking to
protect us from being exposed in the moonlight. The moon was just a sliver and
the shadows were thick and would conceal us as well as anything might.

The air had cooled off with nightfall, but I was having
trouble breathing it; it felt too heavy and thick to go through my nose and
mouth.

Jim Bob led and Russel and I followed. Just before we came
to the drive, Jim Bob said, “If it’s them, take it easy. We’ll see what we got
and put together some kind of game plan. When it comes down to assholes and
elbows, remember this: We’re outnumbered, but we can surprise them. That element
doesn’t go as far in real life as it does in the movies, but it’s something.
When this shindig gets started, don’t shoot to wing anybody. This is the once
and for all real thing, and when the smoke clears, we want to be standing, or
at least breathing.”

“Remember,” Russel said, “you’re going to try and leave
Freddy for me.”