Rusty Puppy by Joe R. Lansdale
After starting with the best beginning phrase I’ve read for a
long while (“I was still getting over being dead…”), this Hap and Leonard adventure was off and running.
Hap, the white half of the team, is recovering from a gunshot
wound, dying twice in the hospital when Louise, a black lady who lives across
the street, comes into the office wanting to speak to the other one, the black
one: Leonard. Her son Jamar, she says, has been murdered in Camp Rapture and
she wants them to investigate. Because that’s a tough, black neighborhood, she
would rather Leonard take her case. When she realizes that she and Hap bonded a
few years ago over an incident at a chicken plant, he’s hired. And no, she
doesn’t want the cops involved. She’s pretty sure they’re the ones who killed her
son.
The investigators wade into this murky case, getting rumors and
half-truths from reluctant witnesses. One of them, Little Woman, is dubbed a “four-hundred-year-old
midget vampire” by Leonard and the description fits. She’s a great character.
They discover that Jamar was trying to gather evidence to defend
his sister, who was abusively arrested by Officer Coldpoint, and he may very
well have been killed by the cops. The story, buoyed along by the hilarious banter
between the two main characters—raunchy but definitely hilarious—takes the
self-professed persistent bumblers to an old mill where broken bodies have been
recovered from an opaque, toxic mill pond. The bodies are dubbed “rusty
puppies” because of the discolored debris they are coated with when they’re
recovered.
Hap spins a tale of racial violence, hatred, and brutality while
the reader wonders if the duo has met their match at last.
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