Hatchet Girls

Book 0: Hap and Leonard

by Joe R. Lansdale

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Private Investigators; Mystery

Synopsis

Your next dose of pitch-black comedy, mystery, and mayhem has arrived as Hap and Leonard find themselves in a vicious and ridiculous situation—just as the best friends may finally be calling it quits.

When Hap and Leonard are called in on a strange request (subduing a meth-hopped hog) by a desperate young lady, they quickly learn this woman is part of a fringe group: The Hatchet Girls, who have pledged their allegiance to a crazed and grudge-bearing leader bent on bloody societal revenge. The timing couldn't be worse to be caught in such a vile, sticky wicket of a case: both boys are wrapped up in their domestic lives: Leonard is in the midst of wedding planning with fiancee, Pookie. And meanwhile, Hap and Brett are hard at work on their new home. Homemaking bliss will have to wait as Hap and Leonard are driven to stop the danger in its tracks and better understand the group's mission and the plans they have already set in place for helter-skelter esque mayhem.

Life changes, midnight sneaks, and dark encounters with misguided dames who yell "Chop, Chop," lead Hap and Leonard into one of their darkest adventures yet.

Release date: August 19, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 288

Sample

Wait a minute, now. You’re saying you want us to deal with a pig problem?” Leonard said.

We were sitting in the agency office, just me and Leonard along with an economy-size woman in a colorful flower-patterned muumuu and house shoes. She looked as if she might take a bite out of your ear. She had thick and bright false teeth and in my view wasn’t afraid to use them.

“It’s a hog. Sizable. Keeps attacking the family,” the woman said. “My kids, three of them. Another one, Sharoline, doesn’t live at home, so she’s pig-free. I hardly knew her father. I was pretty wild once. Used to drink a lot. But that’s a different story, and you don’t want to hear about that.”

She paused, perhaps hoping we did want to hear about it, but we offered no encouragement. I found a fly on Brett’s desk to watch. The moment passed for her story. The fly had had its moment as well and flew off.

She said, “All the kids are afraid of Porky. That’s what we named him. One time, Porky humped my leg like a dog. I had to let him finish because he wouldn’t let go. He was kind of soothed afterward, so I was able to escape with a wet leg and all of me still intact. Big as he is, wonder he didn’t push me down. But he’s quite agile and can stand on his hind hooves. He was more of a shoat then. He put on some weight since that lovesick moment. I bet that son of a bitch tops out at four hundred pounds. He still gives me the love eye when he catches me hurrying from the house to the pickup.

“The kids go to catch the school bus or come home on it, they got to run like wild horses to keep Porky from getting to them. Goddamn bastard ate my daughter’s cat, Tulip. And that cat was sizable and a scrapper. Seen Tulip whip a good-sized dog once. But that hog ate old Tulip like she was an ear of corn. Sometimes, to get the kids on the bus, Baby Darling, my youngest girl, owner of the cat, also the fastest of the kids even though she’s short-legged, will put herself out there first and run around the house, old Porky following. That gives the other kids time to run to the bus, and then Baby Darling will beat it to the bus just before the driver closes the door. She’s a brave little scamp.”

“Lady, we’re a private detective agency, not swine management,” I said. “There’s got to be someone else to talk to. American Pig Patrol or something. Besides, how much are you willing to pay for Leonard here to catch that pig and throw him in the can?”

“Leonard?” Leonard said. “I’m not catching no damn pig. If Jim Bob Luke was here, he’d catch him. He used to raise those things. He could teach it to drive you to work.”

“He’s not here, and he’s retired from the pig business,” I said.

“I have a little disability pension,” she said. “I work cleaning houses, but it’s not a daily job.”

“Hog capture is not really our bailiwick,” I said.

“So, no help?” the woman said. “Me and my kids have to live in terror from the neighbors’ hog?”

“Officially,” Leonard said, “I don’t work here no more.”

“You talked to the neighbors about it?” I said.

“Yep. Called the sheriff’s department too. Sheriff’s deputy came out and tried to herd it back into its pen, but he wasn’t much of a herd dog. He got pulled in the mud and bitten. Understand he filed a suit against the hog’s owners, the Planters—who are cousins of mine, by the way—but no action was taken that I know of. Like me, the sheriff is a cousin to the Planters, so he’s a cousin to me. He’s more closely related to the Planter family tree than I am. I don’t know if he’s a branch of it or a root. I think had he known the call came in from me, he wouldn’t have done anything on account of that. I figure they’ve interbred enough, one could take a shit for the other. The other thing is we don’t live close enough to the city limits for the city cops to take the matter in hand.”

“The Planters being your cousins,” I said, “couldn’t they just do you a solid? Put the hog up.”

“And they live next door?” Leonard said. “What are the odds?”

“It isn’t because we feel great warmth toward one another. They’re cousins quite a few times removed. I haven’t got any pull with them. I’d just like to get the hog corralled and penned up and the pen made stouter. Planters are like a bunch of hillbillies from a cartoon. That hog goes in their house, and they let it. It don’t bother them none. One time, I looked out my kitchen window, and my window’s close enough to their house I could see through their big ol’ living-room window. There they were on the couch watching TV, and that big-ass hog was sitting on the floor by them. For them it’s a house pet. For us, it’s a pork chop terror.”

“Was the show they were watching Green Acres?” I asked.

“What?” she said.

“Never mind.”

“I don’t see how this is anyone’s job but the Planters’,” Leonard said.

The woman tapped her pocketbook on her leg. “I got two hundred dollars if you nab it, three hundred if you kill it. If you kill the neighbors or their kid, I can come up with something more, but I don’t want it to look like I was involved.”

“Damn,” Leonard said. “The rural life is even more savage than I remember.”

“Hell, we aren’t all that rural,” she said. “We live on the edge of town. Sit on the porch at night slapping mosquitoes, and we can see the lights from LaBorde. Or we used to sit. That hog roaming around, we stay tight inside now, look out the window to note if we can make a run for our transportation. Come on. Help a lady out. You pigging it up or not?”

I thought, Grab a pig, take two hundred. Do not pass Go.

Me and Leonard had grown up country boys and had been around a few pigs, some by birth, some by personal transformation, so we weren’t without some experience in the matter.

I looked at Leonard.

Leonard looked away, adopted an expression that indicated he had heavy thoughts on his mind that had nothing to do with pig hustling.

“Oh, all right,” I said. “But we’re just nabbing the hog, not killing anyone. And that includes Porky.”

“We?” Leonard said.

“I was just funning about all that killing,” she said. “I just want it caught and put up, maybe sent to a good pig school or something.”

I got the feeling she hadn’t been funning.

She told us a little more about Porky and her situation. We took her name, Belinda Grant, got information and locations, took her check, and set about getting ropes at my house for pig-nabbing.

In my garage, while I was coiling the ropes over my shoulder, Leonard said, “What kind of low have we dipped to?”

“Brett Sawyer Investigations and Swine Control,” I said. “I mean, hell, Leonard. We got nothing else going on, and with Brett gone for a while, we got to find something. Pay the bills, you know.”

“Last gig got us enough money that we could hire someone to pay the bills.”

“But we won’t. That would be lazy.”

“I’m okay with lazy,” Leonard said.

“We took that woman’s money, and I bet that was lunch money for her kids.”

“You took it. I didn’t. I never said I’d do shit.”

“What’d she say? She had four children?”

“I wasn’t the one fucking her, so I’m short on feeling sorry for her,” Leonard said. “That many kids, little heathens ought to strip naked, put on some war paint, get some rocks and two-by-fours, hunt that hog down themselves. That’d save two hundred dollars and they’d have a nice supper. They wanted, they could sell some of the meat. I could give them a sauce recipe. Shit. Another idea is human sacrifice might appease it. A kid a day for three days to appease the hog gods. If they could get the grown kid home, Belinda could offer her up as well.”

I just looked at him. “Don’t do that, Hap.”

“Do what?”

“You know what.”

“Do not.”

“Look at me like I’m a heartless asshole.”

“If the asshole fits.”

Technically, Leonard no longer worked for the agency. He was teaching martial arts and boxing at a health club downtown, but Brett had talked him into sticking around part-time for another six months so she could decide if she needed to hire help when he left.

I was cherishing the remaining six months, even if he still worked at the health club some days and on the weekends.

He told me he was given a chance to buy the club and was seriously thinking about it. He wanted me to come in with him, be a kind of martial arts coach. He said when age caught up with me, which he felt was dwelling on my front porch already, I could maybe sort towels or some such.

It wasn’t the worst idea in the world, but I didn’t want to abandon Brett. I had to do a lot of thinking on that offered job. Brett was not only my boss, she was my wife.

Belinda told us the hog came out late afternoons and early mornings most of the time, but she also said Porky didn’t wear a watch and could show up most anytime he took the notion. One time in the middle of the night she said she went outside to sit on the glider and take in the night air, and when she looked off to her left, there was Porky, partly in shadow, just eyeing her with a kind of “Surprise, motherfucker” attitude. She had to hustle back into the house. She could hear Porky climbing the steps and then the next thing she heard was him snuffling at the front door, like he could get her scent and suck her under the door, out of her house, and into his mouth.

We put the rope in Leonard’s pickup, then we went inside and changed into work clothes. Leonard keeps some clothes at mine and Brett’s house from when he lived there. He was already wearing a pair of lace-up boots, and he had a straw hat in the truck. The hat had a purple band with a short yellow feather in it. For some reason, he pushed the brim of it up in front.

Morning was gone, so we planned for the afternoon. We went to lunch at a hamburger joint, then drove over.

As we were riding in Leonard’s truck, he said, “Someone always has to fuck it up for the rest of us country folk by fitting a cliché. Belinda could be central casting for The Beverly Hillbillies or Li’l Abner.”

“I fit some of those clichés,” I said. “Some of my relatives fit those clichés, and some didn’t. You and I have risen above our clichés and are on our way to Nirvana.”

“I do like fried chicken necks and greens cooked with bacon, though. I don’t want to lose those stereotypes.”

“And I can tear some crispy pork skins up,” I said.

Both of us tried to eat better these days, but my mouth watered thinking about fried necks and pork skins. Greens without grease and bacon was a little too close to eating weeds. Grease and bacon rind fixed them up. Fixed that way, they tasted as if they came from the Garden of Allah. Also, it takes grease to make a turd.

It was a nice spring day and the houses and cars we saw were coated with a patina of yellow pollen. There were woods, but they were cut wide in spots, interrupting what should have been a solid strip of greenery. Still, the trees and the sky, blue with clouds as puffy and fine as the breasts of Hera, were soothing.

I had plenty to soothe. Leonard and I had spoken of it a bit, the loss of our friend Hanson, murdered before our eyes, shot by Kung Fu Bobby while floating in cold water, us spared by hiding behind moss and trees. Saying it out loud about him being murdered and it being partly our fault had only made it hurt worse, so we didn’t talk about it anymore. At least not much.

There wasn’t a thing we could have done, but it didn’t always feel that way. Rachel, Hanson’s wife, had been murdered at their home; they were starting a new life. He had retired from law enforcement, but his killers feared he might know something we could use to find them.

We found them. Vanilla Ride took care of Kung Fu Bobby, kicked him around like an empty cardboard box. The rest of them didn’t survive either. One, Purple Eyes, might have gotten away or might be rotting somewhere in the Colorado woods. She took some damage. Literally ran off a cliff.

Bad fall, baby. Bad fall.

But we didn’t see her body, so the possibility of her escape was tucked into the back of my mind along with all the horrid dreams of people I had killed in service of justice as I saw it.

Leonard wasn’t bothered. His code was simple: Did they belong in this world? Were they dangerous? Did they plan to hurt people and would they? The answer to all those simple questions was yes, but a simple answer didn’t touch well on my feelings about having become a killer. It got easier as I went. I satisfied myself enough most of the time knowing I saved lives, including my own, but taking a life from someone is the ultimate. I felt there were some people who deserved to die, but I wasn’t happy that me and Leonard had become judge, jury, and executioner.

This was why something simple like capturing a hog seemed worthwhile. Wash away some of the nastiness of last winter with hog slop. It beat the idea of washing it away with blood.

As a side note: We hadn’t been invited to Hanson and Rachel’s funeral. Their family didn’t care for us.

I didn’t blame them.

When we found Belinda’s house, it was extremely close to another with a large front window that took up half the house. That house had been nice once, but time and occupants had mistreated it. I assumed it belonged to the Planters, Porky’s parents and Belinda’s cousins. Belinda hadn’t been exaggerating about being able to easily look from her window into their living room.

Today, however, the Planters’ living-room curtain was pulled, and the blinds were down in Belinda’s kitchen. There was a shabby slab-lumber pen between the houses, and part of it was broken down and spilling into Belinda’s yard. There was a sizable storage shed not too far behind the pen almost tumbling into a creek.

Both small houses were coated with pollen, making them glow gold in the sunlight. Some of the pollen had blown up on the front porches of the houses, and lying facedown on the steps of the Grant house in a powder pool of it was Belinda. McDonald’s bags were shredded all around her. Drink containers were draining their contents into the ground. The door to a car that might once have been blue was wide open. There were some French fries trailing from it to the disaster on the porch.

“Damn,” Leonard said, and he was out of the truck.

We ran up to the porch. Belinda’s head was bleeding and she had wounds on her arms and blood seeping through her muumuu and running down the steps. Leonard got her head lifted. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

“Porky ate my goddamn breakfast,” she said.

“And a bit of you, it looks like,” Leonard said.

“Got me in the hock and on the arm,” she said. “A stray dog ran by and Porky let me go and went after it. That dog saved my life. I hope he can run fast. Damn, where in hell did you get that hat, fellow?”

“I forget,” Leonard said.

We helped her to a sitting position.

“Better get us in the house before he eats us all,” she said. “That bastard don’t even leave bones.”

We helped her to the door after Leonard recovered a sack of food that looked unmolested. I opened the door and we guided her inside. As I was about to close the door, I looked back and saw what looked like a hippopotamus rushing us at no less than the speed of a bullet.

We barely got inside and slammed the door before Porky hit it with a thud like a cannonball.

I glanced out the window by the door. It had been a hell of an impact. He had rolled off the porch and was now on his back kicking his short legs in the air, squealing. Then he rolled onto his feet and, in an insane burst of angry energy, took off running around the house and out of sight.

“Now you know my concern,” Belinda said, standing at the kitchen sink, pressing a towel to her head. The kitchen was really just an open extension of the living room. No doorway, just a wide gap.

“I’ll say,” I said. “Are the Planters home?”

“They come home about five most of the time, but that’s not set in stone. They have a wrecker business, but that isn’t all of their business. They got some illegal things going on, you can count on it. You can hear them coming in that goddamn wrecker from a mile away. Sounds like a train that’s got a cold or some such. It’s smoky too. I thought three or four times it was on fire, but no such luck.”

“Reckon all that was left of your lunch is this bag of fries,” Leonard said. “Hog stepped on the sack, but they look all right. Out in the yard, I saw a couple of Big Mac containers, maybe part of a burger left in one, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Maybe I’ll take a look at it later, when or if I feel it’s safe. So what are you boys gonna do?”

“I recommend we shoot it, and tell the Planters next door that God shot him,” Leonard said.

“Think that would work?” she said. She sounded like she thought it might be a viable tactic. She might have hit her head harder than I’d thought.

I went to the kitchen window and looked out. Porky came whistling by, darted around the corner of the house, and was gone. I waited a few seconds, and he appeared again, still galloping at full speed, circling like a hyper–pork shark.

“He is not slowing down,” I said.

“Raised around livestock, never seen anything similar,” Belinda said.

I tried to come up with our next move. While I did, I looked around the small house. It had quite a few shelves with knickknacks: colored glass angels and little statuettes of gnomes and bears and deer and such. There was even a big souvenir back scratcher on the wall. It had a thick wooden handle with a slightly bent long metal rod poking out of it, and the scratcher had elongated prongs on it. It could have been used to comb briars out of an alpaca’s fur. Burned into the handle were the words “Hot Springs, Arkansas.”

“Ropes are in the truck,” I said.

“I’m not going out there,” Leonard said.

“We can’t stop him if we don’t make an effort.”

“This isn’t Hatari,” Leonard said.

“You got my two hundred dollars,” Belinda sa. . .