I awoke about eleven to find Russel and Jim Bob out in the garage applying putty to the license plates of the truck. The camper and hood ornament and stripes were already on it.
“What a day I’ve had,” I said.
“Yes sir,” Jim Bob said, “worked your little fingers right down to the bone. We’re gonna grab a sandwich in a minute.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Not now,” Russel said, and he smiled at me.
After we ate our sandwiches, Jim Bob opened a drawer in the kitchen and took out the guns he and Russel had chosen. He put them on the kitchen table and went out to the Bitch and got the sawed-off and the little ankle holster with the revolver in it. He went upstairs then and came back down with the Ithaca 12-gauge, a. 45 automatic and a Western style. 44. He also brought down a gun cleaning kit and several boxes of ammunition.
“Okay,” Jim Bob said to me, “I’m gonna suggest you take the Ithaca. You’re not used to shooting guns, and this one is very light and you can hit what you’re shooting at without being a good shot. Just in case you need a backup, take one of the handguns.”
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.”