Captains Outrageous by Joe R. Lansdale

Author:Joe R. Lansdale [Lansdale, Joe R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Detective, Fiction - Mystery, Collins; Hap (Fictitious character), Mexico, Texas; East, Mystery & Detective, General, Pine; Leonard (Fictitious character), Mystery fiction, Americans, Mystery & Detective - Series, Suspense, Americans - Mexico, Fiction
ISBN: 9780446679633
Publisher: Warner Books
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

19

T HE COPS CAME and got us, thought we might have done it. It didn’t help that Billy had a gun on him, even if it didn’t have bullets. The police thought we were all buddies.

We were shoved into a Mexican jail with cockroaches big enough to work in an iron foundry, rats that reminded me of a roadside attraction. The guard, a tall, mustached man with a slight belly, looked like he’d nail our balls to a log and give us a knife to free ourselves.

Something about him, and the jail, didn’t give me great confidence in the Mexican judicial system. I tried to tell them about Juan Miguel, and how I thought he might have done it or had it done. They listened to me, but said nothing. I might as well have been talking to those monoliths on Easter Island.

He did manage to ask in English where the knife was.

I realized then they were looking for the murder weapon. Obviously, we hadn’t beat Beatrice to death with Billy’s revolver, nor had we used it to cut her up.

Not finding the weapon seemed in our favor. We certainly hadn’t flushed it down the commode or hid it in our ass.

I reconciled myself with that. No murder weapon. What didn’t reconcile me was that jail and those goddamn rats.

Christ, they were big.

Once, many years ago, I stopped at a little trailer parked beside the road that was painted up with exciting pictures of behemoth rats, and above the painting was a sign that read: SEE THE GIANT RATS OF SUMATRA. I couldn’t resist. I paid my money, went inside, found them to be shaved possums. I said as much to the lady who owned the exhibit. She said, “Yeah, you’re right.” No embarrassment at all.

I said, “Everyone in East Texas knows a danged possum when they see it, shaved or not.”

“I know,” she said. And that was the end of that. She didn’t offer to give my money back. She didn’t care I knew they were shaved possums. It’s like the world’s largest gopher I heard about. You pay and go in and it’s the world’s largest all right, only it’s a stone statue of a gopher and they’ve already got your money.

The rats in the jail were near as big as those possums, only they were very much card-carrying rats. They came through a hole in the wall big enough to put your fist through—up to your elbow. They came at night, scampered and sniffed and nibbled about. I assumed they’d bite. I kept both feet on my bunk, watched them in the dark.

Rats. The dark. It brought me back to thinking about Beatrice. I didn’t want to think about her, but I did. Thought about what human rats had done to her by lamplight. Slowly, methodically.

But why?

The money her father owed?

Wouldn’t they let her pay it back after the fishing trip?

Why would anyone want money that bad?

Who in the hell had her father been in dutch with anyway?

Who was Juan Miguel?

What would be the point in killing her?

Break a finger maybe.

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