Hyenas by Joe R. Lansdale Page A

to come back,” Leonard said. “I was chasing him down because I was in fear of my life.”
    “Uh huh,” Jane said.
    “He turned on me when I caught up with him,” Leonard said.
    “Just be quiet, Leonard,” she said. “Things will go better. You see, the part that’s hard to reconcile, as we in the law business say, is Leonard turning him around, and then beating him like a bongo drum. Leonard grabbed him by the throat and hit him a lot.”
    “A few times,” Leonard said. “He called me nigger.”
    “You called him asshole,” Jane said. “That’s what the witnesses said.”
    “He started it,” Leonard said. “And there’s that whole deep cultural wound associated with the word nigger, and me being black and all. That’s how it is. Look it up.”
    “No joke,” she said. “You’re black?”
    “To the bone,” Leonard said.
    Jane turned her attention back to me. “A guy watching all this,” she pointed to a fellow standing over by the open door of the club, “he said Leonard hit that guy a lot.”
    “Define a lot,” I said.
    “After the nose was broke and the cheek bones were crushed, and that’s just my analysis, Leonard set about knocking out his teeth, said while he was doing it, according to the gentleman over there, and I quote, ‘all the better to suck dick with, you son-of-a-bitch’, unquote.”
    “So, Leonard’s going to jail?”
    “What Leonard has going for him, is yon man in yon ambulance—”
    I looked to see it drive off with the lights on, but it wasn’t speeding and there wasn’t any siren.
    “—hit Leonard with a chair first, and he did call him the Nigger word.”
    “You mean the N word. When you say Nigger word, well, you’ve said nigger.”
    “Did I say the Nigger word instead of the N word?”
    “You did.”
    “If you’re quoting someone said Nigger, isn’t that different?”
    “I think so.”
    “Hey,” Leonard said. “Sitting right here.”
    “Well, hell, I’ve pulled two shifts,” Jane said. “Another hour on the job and I’ll be calling everybody sweetie baby. Anyway, back to Leonard. Somewhere between the N word, and him chasing the track star out into the lot, he hit one of the other attackers with a chair and slammed the other guy’s head into the wall. Ralph, that’s my partner, he’s in there right now trying to get the fellow’s head out of the wall without breaking something. Either wall or victim.”
    “Actually,” I said, “Leonard had to have been provoked. He’s normally very sweet.”
    “No shit?” Jane said.
    “No shit.”
    “I don’t think so. But here’s what we’re going to do. You bring Leonard by the station tomorrow morning, not the crack of dawn, but before lunch, and we’ll fill out some papers. I won’t be there. I’ll be snoozing. But I got my notes and I got statements, and I’m going to turn those in, so they’ll be there. And, just as a side note, I really did enjoy seeing that fellow’s head stuck in the wall. Before you go, you need to go in there and take a peek, if they haven’t got his head loose. They haven’t, then you don’t want to miss this. It’s a fucking classic.”

    I DID TAKE a look inside the BIG FROG CLUB before I drove Leonard home, and the cop trying to work the guy’s head out of the sheet rock was snickering. He looked at me and lost it, made a spitting sound, and let go of him and wandered off bent over and hooting.
    Another cop, smiling, went over, and without a whole lot of conviction, pulled one of the guy’s ears—the other one wasn’t visible—said, “Come on out, now.”
    The guy’s head was pretty far through the wall. It was poking into a bathroom. He must have turned his back to escape and found a wall, and then Leonard shoved the back of his head, pushing the front of it through the wall and into the bathroom. He was all scratched up, like a cat had been sharpening its claws on his face.
    The bathroom walls had never really been laid out, just sheet rocked,