The Struggles of Johnny Cannon (24 page)

She tried getting up again, but groaned even louder.

“You're going to kill yourself if you try heading out there right now.”

“If he gets arrested or killed before I get the chance to talk to him, I won't be able to live with myself. He's staying around for my sake. It'd be my fault.”

Now I was the one that groaned. Why'd I have to be so danged addicted to doing things for other folks that wasn't helping me live my life one bit?

“I'll do it,” I said. “I'll go talk to him.”

She didn't seem like she believed me and started to try and get up again.

“No, really,” I said. “I'll do it.”

“Because you think it's safer for you to go than for me? Trust me, Rudy is a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of guy. If he thinks you're trying to get him in trouble—”

“He won't,” I said. “He don't know I know he's a Trafficante, or that he blowed up half of Main Street. I'll just tell him I'm bringing a message from you. Besides, I'm a shoot-first kind of guy too. So I'll be fine.”

She probably would have kept fighting me on it if it wasn't for the fact that she felt like a dead squirrel that had been left out for two days and then reheated in a pie pan for dinner. She told me where he was planning on meeting her, which was down by a stream just about thirty yards out our back door. Which wasn't very far at all, when you're walking it to skip rocks or something.

But, when you're headed to talk to somebody that likes to shoot before he says hello, it's the longest walk you'll ever take in your life.

And there I was without my gun.

I
found them two crazy fellas right about where Sora said they'd be, but I didn't barge right in between them off the bat. Instead, I hid behind a couple of trees so I could listen in on their conversation. 'Cause, brother, was they having a conversation.

“No!” Rudy said, waving his arms around like a chicken trying to learn how to fly. “No, we can't go back into town, you idiot! They're looking for us.”

“But . . . but what about them fellas we left in there?” Eddie said. “What if they didn't get out? What if we—what if they're dead?” His voice quivered a bit when he said that.

“Did I know it was going to blow?” Rudy said. “No, no I didn't. I lit my cigar for effect. It's what you do, you leave an impression so they're afraid of you. Oldest trick in the book.”

“But you threw your match on them fireworks.”

“Who leaves boxes of fireworks in an auto shop? If the idiot owner died, he deserved it.”

Eddie got real quiet after that.

“Anyway,” Rudy went on, “that Tigger was strong enough to drag him out of there. And getting hit with a tire iron won't kill you. Trust me, if I had a nickel—”

Didn't really want to hear the end of that sentence, mainly 'cause I could tell Eddie was real close to blurting out some truth that he wouldn't want Rudy to hear. So I stepped out of the trees.

“Hey there, fellas,” I said.

Rudy whipped his gun out of his shoulder holster and spun around. I raised my hands in the air.

“Sora sent me,” I said.

Rudy stared at me and his eye twitched a bit. Must have been a trait he got from his pa. One of many, I was beginning to believe.

“Why didn't she come?” he asked. “We have to get out of here.”

“She ain't feeling up to it,” I said. “She's sick as a dog.”

He put his gun back in the holster.

“She's not going into labor or something, is she?”

“No, it ain't nothing like that,” I said. “She just ain't feeling up to it.”

He didn't seem too convinced.

“You'd tell me if she was going into labor, right?”

“Can't see any reason why I wouldn't,” I said. Course I didn't tell him I couldn't see any reason why I would, either. Didn't want him pulling that gun out again.

He glanced at Eddie again, who was sitting on a log with his head in his hands.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Rudy said, nodding and thinking while he talked, which never was a good idea 'cause that's how you blurt out what you got your brother for Christmas. “This is okay, she'll feel better soon. And then she'll join us.”

“She said something about you going on your own. Leaving her behind.”

“No!” he said. “No, I'm not going to do that. She's got to go with me. I can't—” I'll be darned if that fella didn't start crying out of his eyeballs. He wiped them tears off with his wrist. “She's all I've got anymore. She has to go with me. With us.”

“I don't know what to say,” I said, 'cause I really didn't.

He fumbled around in his pocket and pulled out a notebook, then he used a tiny little pencil to write something down. He ripped the paper out, folded it up, and handed it to me.

“Give this to her. Please,” he said. “As soon as possible. There's not any time to lose.”

I turned to run off, just glad that I didn't have no bullet holes in me. I heard Eddie sob a little and realized how ate up he must have been over his pa. I looked over at him.

“Bob's gonna be okay,” I said, almost without thinking.

He shot me a look, then he glanced at Rudy, but Rudy seemed too messed up over Sora to have heard nothing I said. Eddie nodded at me and pulled himself together. And I ran off, 'cause I'd done more than I needed to as it was.

I got up to the house with that little note in hand, intending to give it to Sora and then run over to Willie's with my letter so we could finally solve the mystery. Pa stopped me before I headed inside, though.

“Sora is laying down,” he said. “So don't you go bothering her none. She said she feels worse than she's ever felt before. I tried to call the doctor, but they're all busy with the folks from the explosion.”

I reckoned Rudy's note would have to wait.

“Where you off to?” I asked, 'cause I saw that Mr. Thomassen was in his Cadillac, waiting in the front.

“Short-Guy contacted me,” he said. “He's heading back to town. Said he lost something and asked me to meet him at Mr. Thomassen's so we could try to find it. You want to come?”

Not even if he paid me. If I knew Short-Guy, he knew exactly why he'd lost them keys and he was ready to use his fancy CIA interrogation methods to get me to squawk.

“Nah, I ain't good at finding nothing, you know that.”

He chuckled and headed off, and I walked on over to the Parkinses' house.

Mrs. Parkins was on the phone, talking to somebody that was apparently giving her the runaround at the hospital. She was asking to get connected to Reverend Parkins's doctor, and they kept setting the phone down or something. As soon as I got inside, Willie grabbed me and we went to his room. He took the letter out of my hands and started blabbering.

“Okay,” he said. “Since the word ‘Superman' has a lot of letters from the second half of the alphabet, we'll line up the letters in reverse order after the
N
, starting with
Z
.”

I still didn't understand a bit of that, but he showed me by writing it down.

Then he wrote down the coded words under it.

JVSJN IND KQUZT

“Okay, so here we go,” he said. “
J
equals
S
.
V
equals
M
.
S
equals
A
. Then there's
J
again, which is
S
.”

“The first word is ‘smash,' ” I said, “and the second one is ‘the.' ”

He grinned at me.

“Good job, see, I knew you'd get it eventually,” he said. “Okay, so the last word is
KQUZT
.
K
is
R
,
Q
is
O
,
U
is
B
,
Z
is
I
—”

“ ‘Smash the Robin,' ” I said. “What in the heck is that supposed to mean?”

He shrugged.

“Maybe another code, or—”

I jumped up and hollered.

“That dadgum Robin statue!” I smacked myself on the forehead. “Tommy knew I'd want to smash it anyway. He probably did this code as a last resort, just in case I didn't.”

He hurried and put on his shoes.

“Let's go smash the Boy Wonder, then,” he said. “And then I can tell you about something else Short-Guy and I figured out.”

We went and told his ma where we was going, though I don't think she really paid no attention on account that she was still yelling at whoever she was on the phone with. Then we went and hurried as fast as we could over the hill and back to my house.

We got to my porch and we was both all set to bust in through the door, but then I remembered that Sora was bad off, so I told him we had to be as quiet as church mice. Then he reminded me about them rats we caught at his church back in July that was squealing and carousing like a couple of drunk sailors home on leave. In Texas, which is where the loudest drunks live. But I told him they was rats, and I said mice, so we was having a wasteful conversation.

I gently pushed the door open and tried my absolute hardest to keep it from creaking, which was a stupid thing to try and do, 'cause that door had creaked ever since my great-grandpa had been running booze up into Chattanooga during Prohibition. But still, we tiptoed in and we was pretty sure we was in the clear. Sora wasn't on the couch no more, so I reckoned she'd done gone up to bed.

Willie spied the Robin on the mantel and grabbed it. He turned it over and under, and then he shook it.

“Yeah, there's something in there, definitely,” he said. “Dang, it's a real shame to have to break it. I mean, look at this craftsmanship, and the way they got his eyes just right.”

I'd heard enough. I grabbed the statue and slammed it down on the ground in between us. Robin's head exploded like the Joker had stuffed a grenade in his ear, and I felt real good about myself. Even if there wasn't anything inside that darn statue, it was still plenty worth it.

But there was something in there.

It was a reel of tape, like what Willie used in his recorder. He bent over and picked it up.

“Will you look at that!” he said. “Look at this label, it says ‘For Johnny's Ears Only.' ”

“Well, my ears is itching to hear what's on it, that's for darn—”

There was a bloodcurdling scream that shot out from behind us. We both spun to see what it was. It was Sora. She hadn't gone up to her room after all, she'd only been in the kitchen.

And I reckoned she was real mad that we'd just broke the one thing she and Tommy ever bought together.

“Oh, gee, I'm sorry, Sora. But it ain't what it looks like,” I said.

She screamed again. She grabbed the doorjamb around her and bent over a little bit, probably to get her breath in order for another scream to come popping out.

“Listen, if you'd just stop screaming,” I said, and I went to get closer to her, thinking it might get her to quiet down a bit.

It didn't. She screamed even louder.

“Hey, look, you gave it to me, and I can do with it what I want,” I said. Had more to say too, but I slipped a little when I got close to her and it made me forget what I was going to say. I looked down to see what was so slippery.

There was a puddle on the ground right underneath her.

She screamed again.

“Oh, dadgum, did you just pee yourself?” I asked. “Hey, it ain't nothing to get this worked up over, we all do it sometimes.”

“No, you birdbrain!” she hollered, and her face was contorting up like a spasmodic banshee. “I'm having my baby!”

Willie dropped the tape. I just about dropped some poop into my pants. There's a lot of things they teach you in school, but what to do when a girl has just peed herself
and
she's having a baby? They must save that for senior year.

“Here,” I said. “Let's get you onto the couch.” Actually, I screamed it. Not so much 'cause she was still screaming herself, but 'cause that was the only volume that felt about right. “Willie, call the doctor.”

Willie was already on it. He grabbed the phone and called up the doctor, but there wasn't no answer.

“They must still be messing around with folks from earlier.”

She was still screaming, her whole body was tensing up, her legs was kicking at me. I tried to get away from her, but she grabbed me by the wrist and her nails started trying to draw blood.

“Call your ma, then,” I yelled.

He nodded and dialed his home number.

“Dang, it's busy.”

“Oh my God!” Sora hollered. “Do something!” Then she screamed again.

“Hey, do you still have that book of medical facts I gave you?” Willie said.