Devil Red by Joe R. Lansdale Read Free Book Online Page A

idea of a really neat house is one that doesn’t have to be held up with a stick, and there are no burnt cans in a pile in the driveway or an old Dodge on blocks with chickens roosting under it.
    This house was way past that. It was so cool and connected to the center of the universe it stopped raining when we got there. It was behind a fence and a barred gate. As we cruised up, through the gate, we could see there was enough green yard to play the Super Bowl. Even the colorful leaves that fell from the trees and blew across the grass seemed embarrassed by the intrusion.
    We parked in front of the gate. I rolled down the window and pushed a button on a metal box inside a brick indentation. There was a buzz and a long silence. I was about to push it again when a snappy female voice with an accent south of the border asked if she could help us.
    I explained who we were and what we were doing and that June’s mother had hired us to look into something for her. The voice went away. I turned and looked at Leonard. He was still wearing the deerstalker.
    The voice came back, said we could come up, but the tone now was sharp and hard enough to clip paper dolls from cardboard. I guess she had hoped we would be rejected.
    The gate slid back and we glided in. The driveway was a big loop of shiny wet concrete in front of a yellow adobe house with a Spanish tile roof. The house was big enough and tall enough to hold all of Noah’s animals and a spare woodchuck. You could have driven four horses running abreast through any of the windows, and the doorway was tall enough and wide enough to accommodate at least one war elephant if it bent its head slightly and went through politely.
    No one rode out to meet us in a golf cart, so after I made Leonard take off his hat, we got out and stepped up the walk. When I looked back at my car, it looked unnatural in the driveway. That driveway knew and adored limousines and sports cars, not functional metal, plastic, and glass. I leaned down by the side of the walk and felt the grass. Damn if it wasn’t artificial.
    Leonard wanted to ring the doorbell, so I let him. I wanted to ring it too, but sometimes you have to give in to the children. You could hear it chime throughout the house.
    No one inside made a rush of things. Of course, a house that big, you might have to pack a sandwich before you went to answer the door.
    When the door was finally opened it was the woman that went with the voice over the intercom. She was a petite Hispanic woman in her late twenties and she was actually wearing a maid outfit, just like in the movies. She had beautiful black hair and great skin and lips that looked like they would have been fun to suck on. Because of her stern voice, I had somehow expected her to look like the ass end of a mule and be built like a linebacker.
    We were invited inside. I tried not to rubberneck. I had been in government buildings that size, but not a house, and the government buildings weren’t so well furnished.
    The maid hustled us along a long wide hall with blue and white tile floors. The walls had paintings on them that looked like they had been painted by madmen and recently. I liked them.
    We were led off the hall through another war-elephant-size door and into a library that made the one downtown look like a used-book store. The books smelled of leather and old paper and more knowledge than could be acquired in three lifetimes, plus a whiff of cigar smoke covered in a light overcoat of air freshener. The place had a masculine feel about it, with leather couches and chairs and sliding ladders to climb onto to look at books on the upper shelves. There was a large window at the back and looking through it we could see a shiny pond out there, recently swollen by the rain. Beyond that was a wall like out front.
    The maid told us to make ourselves comfortable and went away.
    We sat on the couch and Leonard said, “Can you believe this is in the center of town? Hidden up here in the