Free The Two-Bear Mambo by Joe R. Lansdale

would soon come to me, and would not disappoint me when I knew it.
    Sometimes I feared I knew the meaning of life. Simplicity itself. We're born to propagate, then we die. In my case, or so it seemed, I was merely born to die.
    Clear the head, Hap, ole buddy, you loser times two. No bad thoughts today. No letting a heavy gray sky hold you hostage. No memories you can't deal with. A step at a time. Keep an even heartbeat and roll on down the road.
    But then I thought of Trudy, my ex-wife, dead now for ... my God, what was it?
    Four years.
    Jesus.
    It seemed like yesterday.
    It seemed like a thousand years ago.
    Blond, long-legged beauty with a smile like an angel and a misguided heart. And it had been winter then too. I nearly lost Leonard then as well, and that too had been my fault.
    Okay, Trudy is dead and gone, Hap, I says to my ownself, but you don't know about Florida. You're overreacting. She's all
    right. You'll find her. If not today, tomorrow. Alive. She may not be happy to see you. Might think you're a meddling sonofabitch, and you are, but when you see her, and she's okay, that's all that will matter.
    She's all right, Hap, my man.
    She's fine.
    Fit as a fiddle.
    Ripe as a peach.
    A roll of thunder. A crack of lightning.
    I opened my eyes and turned and looked at Leonard in the cloud-suffocated light. He looked at me briefly with no expression, his fingers flexed on the steering wheel. He turned back to his driving.
    The clouds were black now, with a little spoiled milk in them. They rolled down low and came in over the highway like hell's own tumbleweeds. The windshield turned dark as early evening.
    Leonard pulled on the headlights and turned on the wipers as it started to rain.
    Chapter 8
    Back in Grovetown, at the Chief of Police's office, a middle-aged lady with a sprayed, bleached blond hairdo high enough to house a colony of African wasps told us Chief Cantuck had gone out to investigate a fire, and she gave us directions. She eyed Leonard as if he might spring on her and rape her at any moment. She had a little aluminum Christmas tree on one corner of her desk and it was surrounded by a city of Christmas cards from well-wishers; she leaned in that direction, as if she might decide to hide behind them.
    Back in the car, I said, "You made that lady nervous, Leonard. She thought you were going to try and take her on her desk."
    "Wishful thinking. Actually, I wanted to fuck that hairdo she had, just in case there was something in it needed fucking. That little gap in it, right over her widow's peak, it reminded me of a butthole."
    "Knowing you like I do," I said, "I hate it when someone says you aren't romantic."
    We followed directions, drove out to where the Chief's car was parked beside the road, along with a rickety fire truck. The rain had temporarily subsided, but the sky was still ripe with it, and it didn't take a weatherman to see it would come again, and maybe harder.
    The Chief, a fat man wearing a straw hat and boots with a khaki pants leg inside one and outside the other, watched the house burn, his hands behind his back. The rain hadn't slowed this baby down a bit. The firemen were all volunteers in regular clothing with a couple of fire hats and one Scott Pack between them—not that they needed it. They were on or around the truck and had a weak spew of water sputtering from a thick white hose. One of them got a brainstorm, got off the truck, turned on a leaky garden hose and started spewing that through a window that had been blown out by the hot pressure of the fire. He might as well have been pissing on an oil well blaze. Two other guys were eating Hostess Twinkies, one of them managing to chew with a cigarette in one corner of his mouth.
    "We seem to have this thing about fire and the law lately," I said.
    "That's the truth," Leonard said.
    The house, which from the looks of things had never been any great shakes, was a lost cause. I'd had enough experience from Leonard's fires to know when a