It was called a whippet, and it was probably the most deadly, close-range, personal weapon ever devised by man. Max was rather proud of his handiwork, really. He had learned about the whippet from a fellow cellmate, and this was his first attempt at making one. But the skillful work had all been done by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co.
When he and Pete had been out hunting for the women, Max had seen the tool shop and hadn't thought much about it at the time. It had simply been there, and he had filed the information away in his mind in case he had need of it later.
Then Pete started acting funny toward him, and he realized that he had made a mistake in thinking the man wouldn't mind sharing Julie with him. It had to be that. There was nothing else that could account for the subtle change in his attitude toward Max.
So Max decided to find some way to give himself an edge over Pete. Switching weapons with him had been the first thing that entered Max's mind, and Pete had agreed without a murmur. In fact, Max thought at first that Pete had been a little too cooperative about that. It occurred to Max that maybe Pete had foreseen the weapon switch and had done something to make the shotgun inoperative. But no. That wasn't likely. Pete wasn't a man who would deliberately fuck up a weapon he might need later. And anyway, Max was certain that Pete didn't suspect Max of having guessed his intentions. When Pete undertook to settle the score he would do it when the odds were all on his side. And he'd do it with little or no warning. Maybe just enough warning to let him gloat a bit.
So Max decided to get himself a bit of an edge in the form of the whippet. He had brought the shotgun out to the toolshop and put it in the vise. With the aid of a hacksaw, he removed the barrel just ahead of the tubular magazine. Then he removed the stock just behind the pistol grip. What he had when he finished wasn't the beautiful Winchester shotgun he'd had before, and it wouldn't be very useful on a duck hunt. But for his purpose, it was lethal.
The whippet was short enough now to be concealed beneath a long coat. There was a pair of overalls hanging on the wall. They were the kind that fit right over regular clothes. Max put them on, then thrust the whippet through his belt underneath the overalls. He made certain the safety was engaged. It was a thumb safety just ahead of the pistol grip, and could be shoved off as the weapon was drawn.
Then a new idea occurred to him. He put the gun on the work table and pulled it apart. When he had the sear out of it, he filed away until he knew he had taken more than enough metal away. The gun would certainly fire at the merest touch of the trigger now. More than that: it would keep right on firing until the magazine was empty or the trigger had been released. And the releasing of the trigger would be a less than sure bet. Once the gun had been unleashed, the only sure way it could stop firing would be by emptying itself.
It was twelve gauge, and loaded with high quality sporting ammunition. It was duck shot, and deadlier, at very close range, than buck shot. And those little BB's would fill a man's gut with just one shot. With the plug pulled out, and the magazine full, and a round in the chamber, as there was now, the whippet held six rounds, and it would pump them out in scarcely more than a second, if that long.
Max shoved the safety on again and put the whippet through his belt. He kept the overalls buttoned up to his belly, but left it open above. He took his pistol out of his belt and slipped it into the pocket of the overalls.
When he was back in the house, he walked into the living room, looking as casual as he could. They were all there, Pete, the farmer tied up against the wall, and the women. Pete had the sleek, satisfied look that meant he had just taken one of the women into the bedroom. It was Julie. Max could see from that look on her face, and the dead look in the eyes of the farmer. The women were all sitting in chairs, hugging their robes about them. There was a hush in the room that made Max go tense all at once.
"Hi," Pete said. "Been out looking around?"
"I just went to the toolroom to see if there was anything we might need to take along."
"Where's the shotgun?"
"Oh, Christ, I left it out there." Max struck himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand, in simulated frustration.
"That was real careless. We wouldn't want one of these little girls to get hold of it, would we, Max?"
"No, I guess we wouldn't at that. But as long as we keep them with us, there isn't too much likelihood of that, is there?"
"I guess not. Still, I think we should have it close by in case we want it. Don't you?"
"Yeah. I guess you're right."
"I'll go get it." Pete stood up and stretched elaborately. He was overacting, Max thought. Even if he hadn't suspected anything up till now, this kind of bullshit would have made him suspicious. "You got your pistol on you?"
"Yeah, sure. I have it right here." Max took the pistol out of his overalls pocket.
"Give it to me. I'll leave you the rifle."
Max handed over the pistol innocently. He was beginning to enjoy himself. As soon as Pete had it, of course, he stepped back out of reach and raised the rifle, leveling it at Max.
"Now, you son of a bitch, I'm gonna give you what you got comin'."
Max looked at him in pretended surprise. "Hey, what the hell? Pete, what the hell are you pulling?"
"You had a dame of your own, you bastard. You had one of your own, and we had another to share. But that wasn't enough for you, was it? You had to go dippin' your wick in my stuff. I don't like that. I don't like it, and I don't think we should go on as partners anymore."
"Are you planning on dissolving the partnership with that rifle?"
"Yeah. Dissolve it. You always were good at the fancy words, Max. You planned the break real good, too. But now you've outlived your usefulness."
Suddenly Julie came up out of her chair and started toward Pete. It was a strange thing for her to do considering what a gutless dame she had seemed to be up to then. But Max supposed that she was thinking about the promise he had made her, and realizing that Pete hadn't made any promise at all. She had put her money on Max, and now she was reacting out of panic.
Pete turned toward her just a little, but in doing so, he took his eyes off of Max. Max's hand dipped inside the overalls and came out with the whippet. He leveled it at Pete from a distance of four feet and pulled the trigger.
The sound of the thing was deafening inside. The women all screamed, though Max could barely hear them over the blast of the whippet. The two who were still sitting came to their feet instantly. Bradford, still tied up and on the floor, almost came unglued.
The French doors behind Pete shattered, and there was a peppering of the wall and ceiling with birdshot as the whippet climbed from recoil. As for Pete, his mother couldn't have recognized him. A few of the BB's had caught him in the face, and that was enough. The bulk of the shot from the first shell had caught him in the gut, and he was ripped like a storm-caught sail all the way up his chest. Bones were shattered and sticking out, and blood was all over him and the carpet around him.
"Oh, Jesus!" Connie screamed. "Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!" She was on the verge of hysterics. Max stepped up to her and slapped her with his free hand.
"Shut up!" he roared, and she stared at him. Sally looked the color of tallow, but she didn't say anything. Julie looked shocked, but she looked relieved, too. The three of them stood there, looking at Max, their robes hanging open and forgotten.
"All right, burial detail," Max said. "You three girls have another little job to do. And it won't take as long as the first one, because Pete isn't as big. Let's go." They looked at him for a moment, then started forward gingerly, looking as though they'd rather pick up a ball of hibernating rattlesnakes than Pete's body. Max picked up the rifle and his pistol and stuck the pistol and whippet through his belt again. "Julie," he said, "go get me some more shells for the shotgun." She knew where they were, and she seemed glad to have that job instead of the burial. She came back a moment later, just as the other two women were getting Pete off the floor. She handed the box of shells to Max. He leaned the rifle against the wall, away from the women, and loaded the whippet full. He slipped the safety on again and stuck it through his belt next to his pistol, then picked up the rifle.
"Okay, let's go."
He led them outside, and it wasn't until they were halfway to the barn that he realized how stupid he had been to do this thing in broad daylight. He had been so eager to get that grisly body out of sight that he hadn't thought about waiting for the cover of night.
He hurried the women along, and when they were behind the barn, he felt a little better about things. Here, there was literally no chance of their being spotted from the road.
The women dug like hell, and Max let all three of them work this time. When the hole was about five feet deep, he had them drag Pete's body over and drop it inside. They started to move toward their shovels again.
"Hold it," Pete ordered, and they stopped and looked at him with glassy eyes. They all seemed to be in a state of shock. "We've had a little shift in the odds," Max said. They didn't seem to get it. "As long as it was Pete and I against three women, and we were armed, that was pretty good odds. But three to one is just too chancy." They seemed to get it a little then, but they fought against the understanding. "So," Max said quietly, "one of you is going to have to join Pete. Any volunteers?" They all started edging, as though they wanted to make a break for it, but Max hauled out the whippet and leveled it at them. "This thing can get all of you with one blast from this range," he said. "Stand very, very still while I make up my mind which two of you are going to walk away." They stood like statues.
"Julie," Max said, and she started before realizing that he wasn't pronouncing his choice, yet. "Julie, you've been the easiest of the three to handle. And as long as I have the family in there, you always will be. Right?"
"Yes, sir," she said eagerly. "That's right."
"Okay, then, you can step away from the grave. Right over there." He indicated with a nod, and she got to that spot with admirable speed.
"Sally," Max said, "you still remind me of my little college student friend. You've got a lot to pay for before you die. So for the time being you're exempt, too." She moved over to where her sister was already standing.
"Oh, no," Connie screamed. "Max, you promised, you…" She turned in mid-sentence, as though to run, but she stopped as quickly as she had started, and that was her last muscular action, because Max hauled back on the whippet's trigger and almost cut her little body in two with shot.
Even above the roar of the gun Max heard screaming, and it didn't all come from the direction of the other two women. He twisted to look in the direction in which Connie had been staring, and then he realized what had caused her to stop before she had started running.
There were three kids standing about forty yards away, in a field, on the opposite side of a fence.
Two boys and a girl. They ranged, he guessed, from eight to eleven years old, and they looked so much alike it was obvious that they were brothers and sister. Even as he turned to look at them, they broke and ran.
Max dropped the whippet and hauled up the rifle. He heard Sally scream, "No!" behind him just as he pressed the trigger. The rifle cracked and kicked, and the little girl went down, all arms and legs and looseness. The boys stopped for a second and looked at their sister, and then they took off again, running faster than before. Max worked the rifle's lever and just then something hit him from behind. He fired the rifle by accident, and the bullet struck the ground a foot in front of him.
He twisted to-and-fro and finally managed to knock Sally free of his back. She went rolling, and then came up and started for him again. Max worked the lever on the rifle, and when she was two feet from the muzzle he fired into her belly.
The hydraulic action of a rifle bullet entering the human body is something to see. It wasn't quite as grisly as the work of the whippet, but was something, nonetheless. The wound that opened in the front of Sally's body was more than half an inch wide, and she fell without a sound. Max felt a momentary twinge of regret. Now he would never get to do all the things to her that he had wanted to do.
The running boys were almost a hundred yards away by now, but they didn't seem to have enough sense to run in a zig-zag pattern. So they weren't really difficult targets. Max raised the rifle to take aim, and just then he heard a shot and felt something sting his arm. It wasn't agony, and the shot hadn't been the deep, loud roar of the rifle he was carrying. Max looked over in surprise and saw Bradford, untied, free as the air, with an autoloading twenty-two in his hands. He had it across the trunk of his car, and he was aiming for another shot. Max turned toward him and leveled his own rifle, but just then the twenty-two popped again, and this time the pain struck Max in the shoulder.
He dropped the rifle and fell back, and then he started forward again, but the twenty-two went off again, and he felt another sting in the shoulder. The son of a bitch was sure good, he thought, and fell back out of sight, behind the barn.
He had left the shotgun shells in the house, but he still had his pistol. He pulled it out, and felt his arm and shoulder burn like fire from the motion. He would have to shoot with his left hand, he thought, and switched the gun there.
He walked to where Julie was standing and pulled her around in front of him. The exertion made his arm flare up again, but he ignored it. "How the fuck did he get loose?" Max demanded.
"I don't know."
"Come on!"
"I swear I don't. Wait a minute," she said, "Pete had a knife. If it fell out of his belt when you shot him, maybe that's how Jim got loose."
"Shit. And where did he get that popgun?"
"From the car. He keeps it there while he drives around the farm, in case he has to kill any injured livestock."
"You didn't tell me there was a rifle in the car, Goddamn you!"
"I didn't think of it, Max. Honestly."
"Sure. Well, I'll settle with you later, bitch. Come on now. You're going to be my shield. Hubby isn't going to do much shooting while you're in front of me."
He shoved her along before him, and when they came to the corner of the barn he wrapped his wounded right arm around her neck and stuck the pistol forward, running his arm under hers. She couldn't block off his whole body, of course, but unless her husband was Buffalo Bill, he'd never risk a shot.
When they rounded the corner, Bradford raised the twenty-two to his shoulder, but he stopped as soon as he had a look at them.
"Why don't you shoot, you cocksucker?" Max yelled. He moved forward until they were standing right next to the rifle he had dropped. "We're going to squat down together," Max said in the woman's ear. "And you're going to pick up that rifle. By the barrel, understand? And you're going to hand it back to me butt first. And if you try anything, I'm going to blow your fucking head right out from between your ears. Understand?"
"Yes, sir," she said quickly, meekly.
"All right. Down we go." They squatted together. It was an awkward movement, especially for two people. Her shoulder was lower than Max's and it shoved the gun down so that Max couldn't possibly get a decent shot at Bradford if he had to. Julie picked up the rifle with some difficulty, using both hands on the barrel, and started to hand it back to Max.
Something hit Max in the head like a sledge hammer, and he didn't even hear the report of the twenty-two. He dropped the pistol and fell to the side, and thought that dying was a strange feeling, and he had certainly misjudged the farmer. And then he felt the ground against him, and heard a cry from Julie, and footsteps approaching. Bradford yelled, "Get out of the way, Julie!" and Max realized that the bullet had only grazed his head. Bradford had had to hold the sights wide to be sure he wouldn't hit his wife. He looked at the pistol, lying just out of reach, and thought that he might have a better chance trying to wrest the rifle from Julie, but then he saw Bradford, only a few feet away, and he knew that either would be hopeless. Bradford stopped and shouldered the little rifle and took aim at the middle of Max's face. Max waited for the little bullet to furrow through his brain.
The report was loud, and it was unexpected. At first Max thought that it was the twenty-two, that this was what even a small bore rifle sounded like when it was aimed right at your face, but then he saw Bradford standing there, with a look of dumbfounded surprise on his face, and a big, gaping wound in his chest, and then the man fell over backwards.
Max looked at Julie in surprise. She stared back at him dumbly for a moment, and then she thrust the rifle out toward him, offering it.
"I had to do it," she said intensely. "You can see that, can't you, Max? I had to do it. He was going to kill you." Max just stared at her. He took the rifle, finally, and worked the lever. "Max, I love you. I think I've loved you from the first time you took me. You know how to treat a woman. You know how to own her. I just put up with Pete, and I was never happy with Jim, really. I realized that after you showed me what it could be like."
So she was crazy. Neurotic. She liked to be dominated and treated like dirt. And that was the reason she had been so cooperative, not fear, as he had supposed. He wondered whether she had known her own motive before this moment, and the likelihood of her husband killing him, had forced her to.
"Take me with you, Max," she said. "Please. I'll take care of you. I can work while you hide out. I can support us. I'll be useful to you, Max. And I'll be there when you need a woman. I'll always be there for you to use."
"All right." Max heard the words croak out of his mouth. "All right, get the keys to the car. We'll have to get out of here right now. Those kids will have everyone in the county here in a few minutes."