Devil Red Read Free Page B

was always able to find some truth in herself. Me, I wasn’t sure I knew which way was up, let alone which way was true.
    As I finished getting ready, I thought too about how I had come by the money I now had in reserve. Vanilla Ride, the beautiful assassin who had been hired to kill me, gave it to me and Leonard as a gift. It had worked out strangely, with me and her and Leonard in a cabin in Arkansas. Nothing as kinky as that sounds. The three of us bonded together for a moment to have a shootout with Clete Jimson’s Dixie Mafia goons. The goons didn’t do well. I came out with a wound that a good veterinarian took care of. But, most important, we had parted from Vanilla with a truce intact and a pile of dough that had belonged to some unsavory characters who I liked to believe would just spend it on unsavory things. It was still hard for me to grasp the insanity of it, or to understand how someone like Vanilla could be so deadly, and yet, in her own way, honorable.
    It was also hard to believe that the very man who had wanted us killed, Clete Jimson, we had also formed a truce with, primarily because we had made it not worth his while, and there was in the background the threat of Vanilla Ride, and Jimson hadn’t wanted any part of that. No one in their right mind would.
    I was ready just before noon and sat at the table drinking decaffeinated coffee, waiting for Leonard to pick me up. Our friend Marvin Hanson had started a private detective agency. His plan was to hire us as grunts from time to time, which was best, because as detectives we made very good grunts.
    Today we were supposed to meet him at the office to talk about a real job, not getting some old lady’s money back. Then we were supposed to go to lunch and put a game plan together. What I wanted to do was go back to bed and read, or watch some TV, or just lie around on the couch. But if fish could fly they’d live in trees.
    About eleven-twenty, Leonard showed up and drove us over to Marvin’s office. The car had a smattering of bird crap across the windshield, and Leonard tried to clean it by turning on the windshield wipers, which made a slick whitish smear across the glass. Leonard cursed at it and hit the wipers again and made it worse than before.
    I made a note to self. Do not try and clean bird shit off a windshield by using the wipers. It doesn’t work. Cursing does not clean it either.

7
    Marvin’s office was in a nice area off the main drag, down a house-lined street. We parked in front of a huge, broad oak and got out. A space of dirt had been left in a rare example of city planning. Someone, perhaps leaving it as a kind of sacrifice to the forest gods, had placed a used rubber and a potato chip bag by the tree trunk, and it smelled like someone had taken a piss, but otherwise it looked natural and lovely and gave off a bony kind of shade.
    As we sniffed the urine on the fall air, brown oak leaves were dropping and tumbling across the lot with a crackling noise, like someone stepping on paper sacks, or like someone breaking a big guy’s knee with a baseball bat.
    Across the way, a sweet gum tree had shed messy gum balls onto the concrete in a way that made me fear for its future with the city council.
    Marvin’s office was in a two-story building next to a one-story comic shop with a big blue blow-up gorilla on the roof. Some days it was a giant red ant, and on other days it was a big silver alien. One day there was a great brown bear wearing Bermuda shorts with a fish in its air-filled teeth and a fishing rod in its paw.
    The bottom part of the building Marvin was in was a bike shop. The building had been painted a bright yellow. A young blonde woman, who from the shape of her legs looked like she rode a lot of bikes herself, was out front, defying the cool, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops. She was unlocking the bike shop door when we came up. She turned and flicked her long blonde hair and smiled. She had a smile that would