Holly tried to clear her head, but it buzzed with fright.
She couldn't stop staring at them. Lamar was big and oily and somehow engorged with testosterone. He couldn't stop grinning. He was like a movie star.
On the other hand, that poor pitiful Sally who was his girl Ruta something, some old-fashioned farm name was nervous as a cat. She was really the scary one; a tight, grim, scrawny little mouse, with the small-featured face she associated with the inbred.
But the prize was the one they called Richard. God, she'd laugh if she wasn't so scared. Richard had dreamy, puffy, tussled hair, and though he was big, he was soft. He had creamy hands, like a piano player's, and a little dance in his walk; when he moved, all these rhythms were unleashed.
He was of no known sex, with his prissy, parched little lips, and his strangely disaffected way of moving, as if he heard everything a second later.
What a trio! These insane fools had killed her own husband as he lay on the ground and then terrorized Oklahoma for two months? They seemed like some hill clan, white trash who hadn't ever seen a toilet that flushed. She almost laughed. They were so unbearably squalid.
And she knew they'd kill Bud. That was the terrible part.
They'd take his life without hesitation and they'd take her life.
“What you looking at, baby girl?” Lamar suddenly demanded, bringing his face close to hers.
“What scum you are,” she said.
“You are the worst scum.”
“Lady,” he said, "you know, I could rape you. Did it for years and years to any woman I could find. Oh, the things I done. The law only knows but a third. They could punish me for a thousand years and be nowheres near even out on the deal.”
“But you won't.”
“Why's that?”
“
“Cause a tiny part of you is scared of Bud Pewtie. You only got the best of him once—then he got the best of you.
It's third time coming up and maybe you ain't quite the stud you think you are.”
Lamar laughed.
“Damn,” he said.
“You got a mouth on you! Half a mind to keep you around for comedy.
You could help Ruta Beth with the cooking. Ruta Beth, you need a helper?”
“No, Daddy,” said Ruta Beth, furiously.
“Sorry,” said Lamar.
“We ain't hiring today.” Then he laughed again, eyes glinting in the low light.
Bud put his lights out and flew by the dirt road entrance.
He saw nothing on 54 except the light of a beat-up old house a mile away against the darkness of the prairie, here and there the blotch of a grove of mesquites or scrub oaks, undulating prairies and crests and the far-off mountains.
He drove a half mile and slowed to a halt, careful not to let his brakes squeak. He tried to think. Did he want to park by the road and come in over the fields? Did he want to try to go down the entrance road, slow, lights out? He could probably get pretty close. But surely Lamar would have someone looking out. As for the walk in, it seemed so long.
He glanced at his watch. Ten to four. He wanted to make his move before they called and got no answer; going off the schedule just a little would set Lamar's hair to bristling;
he'd begin to sniff things out.
You have to move now and fast, he thought. You cannot fuck around. You have to go in and shoot Lamar in the first second. Without Lamar, they would fall apart, though he thought he'd have to shoot the girl, too; he had no illusions.
If she'd sold her soul to Lamar, she was a target and had to be hit.
And maybe Richard, too, though he had fewer worries about Richard: Richard had no guts and would quit in an instant if Lamar was gone.
Bud eased ahead another quarter mile and came to another long, straight dirt road that seemed to lead nowhere. It simply vanished in the darkness. He thought: It's only a half a mile down and roughly/ parallel I can drive down it, turn right, go into four-wheel, buck my way through the grass and scrub and any barbed wire I find. Then he'd close from the rear, shoot Lamar with the rifle from outside, kick in the door and take his chances with the girl and Richard. Maybe Holly would make it, maybe she wouldn't.
It was the best chance she had, as long as he, committed to it, went in hard and shot to kill.
Okay, he thought, time to go.
His vest.
He hadn't taken time to put on his vest!
I hope my luck holds, he thought, but he doubted it would.
Lamar watched the slow tick of the minute hand as it swept its way around the face of the big clock on Ruta Beth's mantel. Round and round it went, sucking seconds off the face of the earth, drawing Bud Pewtie nearer to his fate. He'd done his homework. At four. Bud would be in Anadarko; Lamar would bring him back toward Odette, looking for a signal; Bud would never know where it would be so he'd be looking hard, spooked and tired. They'd bring him on in to the farm. He'd sit in the truck cab, with his wife trussed up in plain view. Then, slowly, he'd have to get out and go toward her. That's when they'd take him down, hard, with buckshot in the legs, under the vest he was sure to be wearing; then Lamar would crown him once, twice, maybe three times with the shotgun butt and drag him into the barn. The hard work would be done in the barn. It would take most of the morning. No one would hear the screams.
Then when he was gone, Lamar decided he'd have the woman. Have her all the ways there were to have her; it excited him that she'd know it would be her last thing.
Maybe he'd give a taste to Richard. Didn't know yet. Then he'd kill her. Out of kindness, he'd decided to shoot her in the head.
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“It's about time.”
He looked back toward the clock. Five till.
“Oh, give him a few more minutes, baby,” he said.
“Let him enjoy. He's got some things a-coming, like a freight train.”
Richard was very nervous. He kept licking his lips and trying not to look at the woman, whose helplessness and fear excited him. He'd never had such a response to a woman before; but he was also very frightened. This Pewtie was a tough customer; he'd stood up to and killed O’Dell, and not even the violent and fearless black inmates would stand against O’Dell.
As usual, it was his imagination that betrayed him. He could not quiet it. He saw that Lamar's great gift was his ability to concentrate and act, whereas he, Richard, was always bedeviled by rogue thoughts, erratic impulses. Suppose the buckshot didn't knock Pewtie down; suppose he got a gun into action? Suppose Lamar tripped as he rushed -toward him. It could go wrong a hundred different ways, although when Lamar planned something, it usually didn't go wrong. Lamar just got things done, that was all.
But this was the last hard thing for a while. Lamar had said they would leave, find new territory. Lamar wanted also to find a skin artist to get the tattoo finished, and he wanted Richard to work really hard at that. Richard didn't want to disappoint Lamar. Lamar was a god to him; Lamar stood above him and dominated the sky scape like a tyrant king. Richard had yielded in all totality, replacing a mother he feared and loved with a man he feared and loved.
I am a slave, he thought.
I love being a slave.
He looked at the girl again and felt a twitch in his dick.
Then he touched the heavy revolver in his belt and looked at King Lamar on his throne and swore eternal fealty.
Bud drove without his lights on, in low gear, guided by starlight, wishing there was a moon; but there was no moon. He watched the tick of the odometer and when at last the nine-tenths mark turned over into a new mile, he halted.
He got out and locked the Warn hubs on the front axle. It was as dark as a convict's dream. The wind, always the wind, snapped across the dry prairie. He looked, saw that the gulch between the road and the field didn't look bad, climbed back in. He eased into four-wheel drive, pushed slowly ahead, and felt just the faintest sense of resistance. A fence, wire; it went down with the sound of metal pranging against metal. He lurched ahead and the truck sank abruptly at a wretched angle, shimmied down a bank, and seemed to come to a rest.
Shit, Bud thought, dropping into low range and giving the gas a feather touch. The engine's muttering deepened and the truck bucked a bit, then began to pull itself out of the gully. It shuddered free with a last grind of tire against earth, and he was on clear ground; he zoomed up into the field and began to pick his way across it.
No resistance; the truck rumbled almost silently along and he steered by a compass on the dashboard, avoiding the stunted mesquite trees, bypassing the low hollows clotted with scrub oak. The prairie was boundless, but like the surface of the sea, its flatness was illusion.
Bud rose and fell through crests and dips in the earth itself, before him only the most basic of pictures: darkness that was air, and slightly less darkness that was land, and the line of demarcation between them too vague to make out.
But at last he seemed to come to a crest and he halted.
He could see Ruta Beth Tun's place. A flicker of heat lightning lit the sky, briefly illuminating the farm. It had a strange familiarity about it, as if from a dream. Why did he know it?
Then he realized he'd been here before, when they were searching for the tires. Lamar must have fooled him that day. He tried to remember the girl and got no image. Why couldn't he remember?
He saw the barn, he saw the house, freshly painted, white in the starlight. A single light was on. It was about three hundred yards away.
It occurred to him to try and drive closer. No, too risky; they wouldn't see a man approaching, particularly if he kept the barn between himself and them, but the truck might make a noise or create too much motion. It was too risky.
Bud returned to the cab. He slipped out of his coat and laid his hat on the seat. This wasn't hat work, no sir. Then he reached behind the seat and slid out the Winchester carbine, Model of 1894, though this one was manufactured in 1967. Gently he eased the lever forward, cam ming a .30-30 -soft point into the chamber. Closing the lever, he groped again behind the seat, found the box of ammunition, and extracted one more round, which he inserted in the loading gate. There, that brought it up to eight rounds. A .3030 carbine wasn't the best for this kind of work, but it wasn't so bad either: He could fire fast, it was accurate, and that soft point bullet would splatter like a pancake as it moved through whatever it hit, hopefully Lamar's brain.
Hell, Texas Rangers had carried them for years and they always got their man.
He touched his other guns, counting them off: Beretta 9-mm, Colt .45, Beretta .380, all loaded, all with spare mags jammed with hollowpoints.
Bud returned to the ridge, studied the farm, glad that he recognized it and that he'd be making his fight on ground he'd at least seen before.
There was nothing else to think of or do.
Oh yeah: a prayer.
Hey, he said, looking upward. Old man. Please help me tonight. You know I need it bad.
Then he swallowed and went off to meet Lamar.
He scurried down the slope, jogging, trying not to breathe hard, watching as with surly inevitability the house and barn grew larger.
As he moved down the slope, his angle on the house changed and it seemed to disappear behind the barn.
New fears assaulted him. What if Lamar had recruited a gang, what if not three awaited him but ten, twenty?
Well, then you die, he thought, and so does Holly, but so be it. In half an hour the SWAT people would arrive; the gunfight would leave no survivors at all, like that crazy thing in Waco—people eaten up in the insanity of the moment.
He got to the barn, again encountering familiarity. He saw the oven that was a kiln, the wood tables, the racks of drying vessels, the cans of paint, glaze, whatnot, the brushes stored carefully in jars, glinting softly in the starlight, all strange, all familiar. Yes, now he remembered: She was a potter. He bought a pot from her! He remembered the pot, with its jagged flashes of color. It was the only colorful thing about her. He now saw her: a drab, scrawny young woman.
He saw exactly how she could fall for the power and the glory of a Lamar, especially as she herself had already known the sick thrill of standing over something that had been alive until just a very few seconds ago.
But still… she was a girl.
Bud hoped he could kill the girl.
Just kill her. Shoot her dead in the head or upper torso and think nothing of it.
But that little bit of doubt upset him; not that she was poignant and needy but only that she was such a drab little creature, un stirred by life's possibilities. He shook his head as he slid through the barn.
Crouching in its doorway he studied what was before him. The house was twenty-five yards off and he could see the back door and dim light from the first-floor windows.
Two cars had been parked in the yard around toward the front of the house, and he could also make out what appeared to be a rickety porch out front.
He first thought of the cars: escape.
Backing out of the barn, he circled around again in a wide low arc, and slithered up to the cars. Neither was locked; one was the Toyota that had so bedeviled everybody, and the other a black Trans Am.
Gingerly Bud opened each, leaned in, and reached up under the dash to a nest of wires. He didn't have time to find the ignition wire, but simply, with a hard yank, pulled them all. Nobody was driving anywhere tonight.
He next crawled to the side of the house. The window was tall and he couldn't quite see in, but from the low secondary light, he gauged the room to be empty and dark, probably the kitchen, its only illumination a doorway into the larger room or hallway. He snaked around back to find a door. He tried it; it was locked. He looked around quickly for something to secure the door from this side, figuring after he shot Lamar, Richard would head for the nearest exit and could be counted on to come to rest against a locked door, ready to give up.
Clothesline!
He ran to it and cut it free with his pocketknife, then came back and swiftly wrapped loops about the doorknob, drew the rope tightly to the clothesline post and tied it securely, a good working cowman's knot.
Richard wouldn't be able to get shit open.
Maybe he'd go out a window and into the fields. They'd find him thirty yards out, nursing a broken ankle.
Bud glimpsed at his watch. Four a .” no two ways about it. Time to go.
He slid around the base of the house to the edge of the porch and peered in. The front door was open, though a screen door blocked entry. The screen would be easy to shoot through, though. He drew closer to the doorway and peered into the blaze of light and sensed bodies but couldn't get a clear look. He stepped out a bit further, until at last he saw Lamar Pye.
Big as life its own self, standing by the couch, Lamar gripped the phone tightly. Behind him was Ruta Beth, a dark blur; Bud couldn't see Richard but figured he was there somewheres. And he made out a head crumpled in one corner of the couch. Holly.
The rifle came up to Bud's shoulder. He kneeled, looking for support.
The light wasn't great, but it was enough. He could see the bead of the front sight. It wobbled, described a filigree in the air, and Bud sought to capture it too hard, driving it wild. He exiled a chunk of air from his lungs and willed steadiness into his limbs.
Kill Lamar, throw lever, kill Ruta Beth. Two easy shots, a second apart. Lamar dies with his brains blown out, Ruta Beth won't react in time to move and she's the next easy target, into the chest. Then dump the rifle, draw the Beretta, and blow into the house. If you see Richard, pop him; otherwise grab Holly and flee.
Yet even now he paused just a second, dwarfed by the coldness of it all.
No, goddammit, he told himself. Do his ass. Send him to hell for breakfast.
Bud concentrated on the front sight as he pressed the trigger and the bead was right there on Lamar's broad, almost handsome face.
He felt it break, and there was perhaps a tenth of a second as the hammer fell when Bud sensed the world suspended, like a note held too long, beyond human endurance.
Time had stopped. There was no sound, no movement, no sense of life anywhere.
The rifle fired, its flash draining details from the dark night, and the door to the house shattered into a billion pieces, a sleet of bitter chaos—goddamn, not a screen but a goddamn glass storm door in the middle of hot summer, who’d ever have imagined that?—and Lamar sank instantly from view but with such goddamned energy and purpose that Bud knew the bullet had been deflected and that he had not been hit.
Lamar had tried again. The phone rang and rang. Now what the hell was wrong with that boy?
“Where'n fuck is he?” he demanded.
“Maybe he had a flat or an accident,” said Richard.
“Not this old boy. He ain't that goddamn type. He is a accident.”
Darkening with fury and frustration, he stood in the room.
What the fuck?
The ringing grated through the earpiece of the phone, but no one picked up.
He tried to run through ways it could have gone wrong.
Had he been too fancy? Should he have done the fuck as he drove along the road? Is there any way, any way at all they could be on to him?
No. He'd been too careful. They weren't that clever.
He stood, watching the girl curled beneath him, bound and gagged helplessly. He could sense Ruta Beth behind him. Richard was off some goddamned place fretting over some goddamned thing.
The door exploded.
Next thing, Lamar was on the floor. How he got there he didn't know: just his fast reflexes taking over, getting him down there, flat and safe.
“Lamar!”
It was Ruta Beth, standing dumbly.
“GEDDOWN!” he screamed.
“THEY HERE!”
Ruta Beth hit the floor.
“I'm hurt. Daddy.”
“Goddamn,” said Lamar.
“Oh, shit,” said Richard from the kitchen.
“You hit bad. Baby Girl?”
“Neck. Oh, Daddy, it hurts.”
“You gotta shoot back, goddammit, or we are cat piss.”
He himself pulled Holly off the couch and to him, as a human shield. He felt her heart beating against her ribs like a trapped little bird. A temptation came to put a bullet in her head, but he knew that was stupid. He slithered to the window, dragging her with him, and snuck a peek out to see nothing, smelled just the faintest whisper of smoke hanging in the air. He calculated swiftly. A SWAT sniper wouldn't have missed, not hardly, and by now there'd have been dozens of gum balls flashing, big boys on loudspeakers, choppers, the goddamned whole world getting ready to kill him. But he didn't see a goddamned thing.
He knew who it was.
How the hell did he find him?
Goddamn!
“Richard, boy, the lights, get ’em out.”
“Lamar, I—”
“GODDAMN BOY, GET THEM OUT!”
Only a scream would get Richard moving. Somehow the worthless piece of shit began to flutter around, and in a second the lights had vanished.
Another second passed, and suddenly Lamar heard a high keening sound.
Sounded like an animal being burned in a fireplace or something, but under the whine of fear and slobbery, pee-pants panic he recognized Richard's tones.
“Locked! Locked! Locked!” Richard was sobbing.
He meant the back door, Lamar thought. Fucking Pewtie had locked off the back door. Smart motherfucker. No other way out, except the side window.
“Ruta Beth, you okay?”
“Oh, Daddy, it hurts so bad. I got blood every damned place.”
“Can you shoot. Baby Girl?”
“What?”
“Can you shoot, goddammit, Ruta Beth. Got to answer him. It's that fucker Pewtie. You're all I got.”
Not really; he had the girl, too. He felt her squirm under him.
“I don't think so, Lamar. I got blood on my hands. So slippery.”
She was losing it fast.
“That's okay. Baby Girl. It don't matter. You're still the goddamn champ. Listen here, I want you to slide out the door. He ain't going to shoot, he sees you're wounded. You yell for help. He's going to say. Put your hands up, and when I hear his voice, I can nail him.”
Ruta Beth crawled by him, leaving a black slime of blood. She got to the doorway and somehow pulled her way up. Then she stepped out on the porch, stood under the bright porch light. Lamar kneeled on Bud's wife's neck, calmed himself, and studied the darkness out the window, waiting for a scream. He had five double-oughts in the Browning cut down When it came, he'd flash to the area and pump the gun empty. If it was only one man as he now suspected, he'd at least hurt him.
Bud had fallen back behind the Trans Am almost directly to the left of the house.
Goddamn! Goddamn!
It had all fallen apart. Now what? Lamar knew he was there and would just as sure as winter be calculating counter moves if he hadn't already cut Holly's throat.
But what Bud saw astonished him.
It was the girl, Ruta Beth Tun. She stood groggily, her hands up. She was drenched with blood. He hadn't even fired a second shot! Then he realized the Comedy King was having a good time tonight with the play of whimsy: He had decreed that the screen door turned out to be a storm door and it would deflect Bud's bullet from Lamar, but the same Laugher saw that it hit Ruta Beth.
“Don't shoot,” she said.
“I's bad hurt.”
She took a step forward.
Bud put the front sight right on her head. The range was thirty feet; he could hit her in the face easy.
“Don't shoot,” she said, taking a wobbly step forward.
He felt the trigger strain against his finger.
Do it, he told himself. Do it and move on to the other.
“Keep your hands high and come out and lie face down in the—” The window lit bright with harsh flame as someone fired five fast shotgun blasts at him. Bud had no consciousness of drawing back, only a sense of an explosion all around him as the buckshot tore into the hood of the car and spalled spastically against the windshield, blowing shreds of glass outward as it turned the sheet into webbed quicksilver.
Abruptly the left side of his face went to sleep for what must have been a whole second, then began to sting.
He touched his face: blood. But had anything penetrated?
He felt a core of ache spread through his brain, and the suffocating odor of gunpowder swirled around him. But he seemed not to be mortally hit.
Next he heard the crash of a window from the other side of the house.
Lamar had jumped free.
Lamar knew the lawman would do the right thing, which was the wrong thing; he couldn't just shoot poor Ruta Beth.
And indeed, Lamar saw a shape hunkered by the left front fender of the Trans Am bending over a rifle and in a second he'd brought the sawed-off Browning up and unleashed its whole tube of shells. The bright fireworks of the gun flashes ate up the world and Lamar now wished for half a second he hadn't cut it down, for with a full-stocked and barreled weapon, the highway patrolman would have been easy meat.
But the gun bucked in his hands and he struggled to bring it back on line and each fresh blast lit the night for what seemed miles, though curiously so intent was he on the mechanics of it, he didn't hear a thing.
Then the gun came up dry, the smoke seethed in the air, and he thought he'd hit but he wasn't sure. Only one thing remained now: to get clear, to get out. Nothing else mattered.
If he got out of the house and across the fields, he could flag down a truck and commandeer it or steal a car from some square John or some such. But his ticket out was the goddamned girl, though she'd slow him somewhat; but Pewtie wouldn't spray in his direction with the little wife along.
“Come on, sweetheart,” he said, rising and pulling her up. The now useless shotgun fell away. He had a SIG, with seven cartridges, but no reloads. Too bad. Didn't have time to look for other magazines now.
In one powerful motion he pulled her along to the side window and threw her out. She smashed through the glass, caught her foot, and fell with a horrible thud to the earth.
He leaped out and pulled her up.
“Come on, goddammit, or I will put a bullet in your head and think no more of it.”
He yanked her off into the darkness.
Bud stepped out from behind the car but then remembered Ruta Beth, still in the doorway. He drew back and put the rifle on her once again.
“GET OUT, GODDAMMIT AND GO FACE DOWN!”
But the woman just stared at him. Then slowly, she seemed to be raising her hands but she stopped midway, and pointed something at him.
Was there a gun in it or what?
Bud didn't have time to think; the carbine fired, he threw the lever and fired again. He didn't see the bullets strike, but with the second one, Ruta Beth seemed to deflate; all the air went out of her as she tumbled sideways and she seemed to hit the floor with sickening force, her arms and legs flung loosely akimbo.
He wanted to race out after Lamar.
But where was Richard?
Where was Richard?
Was it a trap? Maybe it was Richard who had gone out the window, and Lamar, reloading, just waited for him to show himself.
No, it was Lamar. Only Lamar would be smart enough to get out the window that fast. Richard would be inside, in pieces. Richard wasn't a factor, that was clear.
Richard lay on the kitchen floor, sobbing.
It was so unfair. Why did things always have to happen to him? Now the police were here and they would kill him. He hadn't done anything.
Didn't they understand that? He was innocent. No blame should be attached to him. It wasn't like he wanted any of this to happen. He actually tried to prevent it. In the restaurant, he had heroically screamed, trying to save the woman's life. Ruta Beth had killed her, not him.
Richard tugged on the door again. It wouldn't budge.
He turned and crawled to the door and peeked into the living room. The shooting had stopped. The windows were all blasted out and there was no sign of Lamar.
“Lamar?” he called.
No answer.
He looked toward the door and saw Ruta Beth's boots laying splayed on the floor of the porch. He suspected, after all the shooting, that Ruta Beth was still in them.
He crawled over and peeked around. Ruta Beth lay on her stomach, in a huge and spreading black, satiny puddle -of blood. She was utterly inert, utterly without signs of life.
He'd never seen anything so still in his life.
He faced the darkness.
He raised his hands.
“I surrender,” he said.
There was no answer.
It was the worst possible thing. Now he had to pursue an armed and very violent man across unknown terrain in the dark. He couldn't shoot because he'd hit Holly. At any time, Lamar could double back to ambush him.
You fool, he told himself.
You stupid fool. You don't have the sense of a buck worm More out of anger than anything, he plunged ahead, trying to control his breathing, trying to regain his night vision after it was blown to hell by the gun flashes.
But then he thought: Lamar is blind, too. Lamar won't be able to see shit for a good five minutes.
Bud raced ahead, low. He tossed the carbine; it was useless in the close-quarter stuff that was coming up. This was straight cop work: an in-close gunfight with an innocent body in the way. He knew the statistics from Police Marksman magazine: The average gunfight now took place between twenty and twenty-three feet, with an exchange of between 2.3 and 5.5 shots. So he took out his .45 Commander, the bullet being a harder hitter and the gun being easier to shoot straight and well. It would be a close thing, if it happened at all: one, two shots, not like in the tattoo shop, with them all blazing away as if in a war movie.
The gun's familiar grip somewhat comforted him; its known contours, its safety exactly where the safety should be, its short trigger taut and sharp against his finger, the way it settled into his palm and the way his fingers clenched about it—all these things had their pleasures in the tension of the moment. He hunched, looking for signs in the field, thinking of course that Lamar would head for the nearest clump of trees so as not to be caught in the open. The prairie was empty and barren; but ahead, on the right, he saw a clump of trees in a fold, the only feature in the emptiness. There was no other place to go, no other route of escape, and he knew Lamar would move fast because he'd have figured there'd be fleets of cops there in no time.
Or maybe he said fuck it, strangled the girl, and now had just flattened himself into the earth and waited for his blood enemy to approach.
No. Lamar's not like that. He's a professional, whatever else he is, and would put first priority on escaping to steal and kill another day, on another chance to get Bud and get away. He wasn't one for sacrificing himself.
Bud crouched lower and hurried onward.
The girl was slowing him down. He wanted to smash her to the earth.
But the girl was the only card he had, so he had to hold her.
He assumed Pewtie was following him. What choice did the lawman have?
But when he looked back across the fields, he could see nothing, or nothing real; spangles of light, blue and orange like pinwheels from a Fourth of July when he was a boy, still danced before his eyes from the nearness of the shotgun's fireworks. That's the trouble with a goddamned sawed-off.
Once, the girl went to her knees, but he pulled her savagely up.
“You stay with me, girly, or I will finish you here, quiet like and then do your husband and go on my happy way.”
He saw terror, and felt her squirm. She made a sound, low and raw, behind the gag. But she could not meet his power, and looked away, her eyes bugging, the veins in her throat standing out like ropes. She was bleeding, too, from the fall out the window; she'd hit her head hard.
Tough shit.
It was going to be a hard night on everybody.
He pulled her along. He could see the dark line of the trees ahead only a hundred or so yards, and happily accepted the fact that cop cars and choppers and whatever hadn't yet arrived. Maybe Pewtie hadn't called them, had tried to do the whole thing on his own, some John Wayne kind of deal. But no: Pewtie would call for backup and then come in alone. Lamar knew the plan: Kill him and walk out with the girl, knowing the others would fade.
Now Lamar was but fifty yards from the tree line. A sudden spurt of energy came to him, and he roared ahead, pulling the girl. She seemed wasted, without much fight, but in some mix-up of limbs, she went down and he got tangled in her and he went down, too, with a thud, tasting dirt as he fell. There was a slight moment of concussion, and suddenly she squirmed savagely and ripped away from him. With more power than he ever thought she had, she raced away.
“Goddamn you!” he hissed and brought the gun up and began to press the trigger, but stomped on the impulse, knowing the flash would give him away. Instead he rose and leaped after her, slipping once in the mud, but in three short bounds had her. He tackled her, feeling his weight and strength bring her down, but she kicked and bucked under him, and he tried to push her face in the mud, but somehow his hand slid off her face, just enough to dislodge the gag.
“BUD! BUD, OVER HERE!” she screamed as he finally pushed her face into the mud, but before he could do anything more, he saw Pewtie on the crest line He drew up the pistol and fired. He couldn't stop shooting, the mesmerizing pleasure of it drawing him onward as the gun leaped in his hand and the gun flashes blossomed like a tulip of light.
Pewtie disappeared.
He didn't think he'd hit him.
“Come ON,” he yelled, pulling her up, but again she pulled away and this time instead of running after, he simply watched her run and then himself turned and headed to the trees.
Bud saw movement and brought the gun up to fire.
He took the slack out of the trigger as the phantasm wobbled desperately to him but saw in the next second it was Holly.
“Holly. Here.”
She slipped as she turned, and he ran to her.
“I got away. He didn't shoot me. Oh, Bud, I knew you'd come.”
He got out his knife. He cut her arms free. She threw them about him.
“Oh, Jesus. Bud, you have saved my life sure.”
He said nothing.
“You do love me. You came for me. God bless you, mister, you are a man.”
“Yes, well,” he said.
“Bud, you must love me, what you risked for me.”
“Holly—”
“Take me out of here.”
“You have to do that yourself. I want you to go into the field and just lie down flat no matter what happens. We got everybody coming in on this thing in a minute or two.
You're safe. You made it. I got you out.”
“You're done. Bud. Oh please don't do what I think you're going to.”
“I have to finish it up now. I've got to go get Lamar.”
“Bud! He'll kill you!”
“I have to—”
“Bud!”
“I have to go.”
But she pulled him toward her, as if to draw him in forever, to make him hers now that it was so close, so easy and-He hit her with his open hand, hard, left side of the head, driving her down.
No one had ever hit her before.
His nostrils flared, his eyes were wide and strange and fierce. She saw nothing in them at all that she could recognize.
“Don't you get it yet?” he almost screamed.
“It's over!
Goddamn it, I am quit of you and you are quit of me! Now get out of here. I got man's work to do.” And without looking back he set off down the crest for the trees, knowing that he had another few minutes until Lamar's eyes regained their night vision. He saw the dark band of vegetation up ahead, dense and beckoning and otherwise silent.
Wait for backup, the rules all said.
Not this time, he thought. This time we get it done.
Lamar crouched in the trees. No moon, no stars, it was so damned dark.
His eyes still weren't working right. Shooting at the cop had been stupid. Like an amateur, like something little-bitty-dick Richard would do. The gun flashes again, so close to his face had blasted his vision to hell and gone:
everywhere he looked he saw stars and pinwheels, dragons breathing fire, lions' manes flashing in the sun.
Time. He had no time.
He also had almost no ammunition now. The gun hadn't locked back, but he slipped the magazine out and felt its lips and realized they were empty. That meant he had but one cartridge, the one in the chamber.
Damn!
He thought he saw the man coming down the slope through the strobe effect, but there was no way it was a clear-enough image to shoot at.
And he couldn't even see his gun.
The only way was to get in close, real close, put the gun up to him so the muzzle touched flesh, and then blow him away with the last bullet.
But Lamar didn't like that either. It depended on Pewtie getting close and once he got in the goddamn trees there was no way of telling which way he would go. And Pewtie saw better than he did, because the rifle hadn't flashed nearly so much as the shotgun and he hadn't fired in quite a while. And Lamar couldn't just wait. The longer he was here, the surer it was he'd get caught.
No sir. Got to bring him to me and kill him fast and get on out of here before the posse shows.
An idea flashed before him.
The gun, the gun, the gun.
Yes. Secure the gun in the crotch of a tree. With a branch or something wedged into the trigger guard. Let Pewtie come. When he approaches, fire the last shot.
Pewtie will then fire back on the gun flash with every damn thing, blowing his own eyesight to hell and gone.
Then he's blind and you ain't.
In the second after he's done, you hit him hard and low and take him down. It becomes a thing of man on man, strength against strength, and Lamar knew that there was no man who could stand against him one on one. If Pewtie had any doubts, he could ask Junior Jefferson.
Lamar slipped back and in not much time found what he needed: a young sapling with a stout crotch maybe five feet up. Lamar wedged the SIG into it, slipped off his belt, and secured the gun tightly. He looked around and then up and with a snap broke off a four-foot length of branch.
Ever so delicately he wedged the tip into the trigger guard so that it just about filled the gap between trigger and guard. Force it another half an inch and it would trip the trigger and the gun would fire.
Lamar slipped down, waiting for the sounds of his quarry.
I'll still get him, he thought.
Bud had reached the trees.
No sir, don't like this a bit.
He reasoned now that if he had to shoot, it would be in response to fire, and he wanted a lot of chances, not a few.
So he restored the .45 Commander to his high hip holster and reached up and unslung his Beretta. With a thumb he snicked the hammer back.
Then, finger on the trigger, he began to snake ahead.
He's in here, goddammit, just waiting till his vision clears enough.
Got to move fast or I'm a dead man.
He slid into the brush. His night vision was clear as it could be.
Before him he saw only a thin maze of trees, ground cover, the furrow that was a stream, beyond, a fence, and beyond, way beyond that, the humps of the Wichitas. But no Lamar.
He was so slow, he was sure Lamar couldn't see him.
He eased ahead, almost soundlessly, scanning as he went, seeing nothing.
“Lamar!” he called.
“Lamar, give it up. They're on their way. You don't have to die tonight like your poor girlfriend.”
Silence.
“Lamar, they'll just send you back to the House. You'll be a big man.
You'll have it all. You'll be the king.”
Lamar didn't respond.
Was he yelling to a ghost? Had Lamar sped through the trees and was he closing in on some fine family to murder and steal a Lincoln Continental and get clean away?
No. He couldn't have moved that fast.
“Lamar!”
A gun flash blossomed before him, spangling his vision, but Lamar's best shot missed, and Bud drew the Beretta onto the fire and returned.
The gun bucked and rose in his hand, but Bud was in love with shooting it. The gun flashes illuminated the cathedral under the trees, etching each detail in the bright light if only for a millisecond.
Bud fired eight or nine times.
Now he was pretty much goddamn blind, but he heard the scrape of something moving before him and before he could stop himself, he fired again, the flashes even larger this time, like flares or star shells, that seemed to turn the night to day, catching in their shards of blaze the seething smoke.
Damn, he thought, and then Lamar hit him full in the chest.
Lamar watched him come. He had a moment of doubt in his course, for so slow and clumsy was the man, he seemed an easy target. But not at night, when you couldn't see your own gun to aim and you only had one shot. You'd have to wait until he was at contact distance and maybe he wouldn't ever come into contact distance.
You figured fine, he thought.
He watched as Pewtie hesitated, caught in doubt.
Can't make up your goddamn mind, boy.
Then Pewtie put one gun away and got another out. Now what was that all about? Some secret meaning in the guns?
Didn't matter. What mattered was that Lamar now knew Bud was carrying two, one in hand, and one high on his right hip.
Bud gently entered the trees.
Then he halted, and yelled something at Lamar. Lamar couldn't quite make it out, because he was so low into the forest floor, about six feet to the right of where his pistol was- wedged into the crotch of the tree. He controlled the sapling that reached its trigger with his left hand, but he was concentrating real hard on not making a sound, not hardly breathing, on not hardly being alive. At the same time he tried to focus his mind on Bud, to somehow reach out through the trees and take over the lawman's brain, to bring him on. So far it was working.
Bud moved in closer and yelled something else. He seemed to pause, unsure which way to head. Then he seemed to make up his mind, and pivoted as if to head off to the right. If he got too far, Lamar could never reach him.
Okay, Lamar, he told himself. Do it now. Do it and be done with it.
But something in Lamar now held back.
What? Fear, regret?
Whatever, Lamar just watched as the man, twenty-five feet away, seemed to turn in slow motion, just a dark shape in the woods, almost not there unless you'd seen him come in.
Do it, Lamar, he told himself.
With his hand, he nudged the stick forward, and it didn't take long.
The report was crisp and not loud, the flash momentarily lighting the lawman's taut face and then disappearing.
Pewtie fired back almost instantaneously. Lamar looked into the earth to preserve his gradually returning night vision, and heard the cracks and the echoes lashing out, almost like a whip snapping over his head, so many, so fast.
Oh you scared. You so scared. Not two shots, not three, but six, seven. Pray and spray, motherfucker.
A moment of silence. Then absurdly, Pewtie fired again, like a crazy man, rushing forward on the surge of adrenaline and under the roar of the shots. Lamar rose like a lion and bounded the few feet to him on an oblique angle; and if Pewtie ever saw him coming, it was too late, for he thundered fully against the man and felt the surprise and the shock disorganizing Pewtie's body, turning it to water, and Lamar was on him, crushing his thrashing body under his own.
First thing was the gun hand, which he controlled with his own left, then, slithering up to gain control, he hit the cop a hammer blow in the face because with two fingers gone, no way could he make a fist; he hit him right over the eye, and thought he felt a bone in the face break as the man screamed and with his other hand rose to ward the blows off.
It was like terrible fag sex, the two strong men pumping against each other in a rising fog of body stink and fear.
Lamar saw how it would go in a second and knew he'd win easy. He'd pound the head of the man he controlled for another ten seconds, smashing him into submission, then twist across the body to get both hands on the gun wrist and corkscrew the automatic out of his grip and pull it back and shoot the lawman with his own gun.
But Bud's hand shot up to his throat and began squeezing, the thumb driving desperately for the Adam's apple.
Lamar gagged, then threaded his hand under Bud's and gave him a knuckle thrust to the fleshy side of the neck, feeling the body beneath him go rigid in the awful pain. He hit again and thought he felt the tremor of surrender quivering through his opponent. Quick as a big cat, he pivoted and now had both hands on Bud's gun wrist, cranking it counterclockwise to rip the pistol from the grip, seeing the hands turn white as they lost their purchase. Something hit him lightly in the leg and then the gun fired, its flash blinding him gain, but it didn't matter, for the slide didn't lock back and the recoil further weakened the man's grip and now he had it. It was in his hand.
He leaned back, fiddling to get it in his hand right, and then thrust the muzzle against the man's body and pulled the trigger.
Richard heard shots. They seemed to come from out beyond, out on the prairie.
He looked around again, seeing nothingness, and then headed toward the sound. He walked in the darkness and paused for just a second, to see the farm spread behind him and before him only the darker band of the trees.
A shape suddenly appeared before him.
“Lamar?” he said, but it was only the girl, who looked at him in horror and then slipped off. He watched her disappear and wondered why she had such revulsion on her face.
He stood there for a few seconds, wondering what to do.
The world had never seemed so empty to him as it did at that moment.
Then he saw a single shot coming from ahead in the trees; by a trick of fate he had been looking exactly where the flash so briefly blossomed.
It occurred to him: Lamar may need help.
He walked toward the shot.
I have to help Lamar.
He took out his gun.
Bud felt his strength vaporizing, and with it all his will.
He had nothing left to fight with, and Lamar had hit him so hard in the face and throat he was seeing nothing but flares of light as his throbbing optic nerves shot off. But still he clung to the Beretta, knowing it held his purchase on survival.
Lamar was above him, over him, hitting him gigantic hammer blows against which he had no defense. His face swelled like a rotten grapefruit. He saw his sons before him in the strobe effect of the optic nerve and for just a second forgot where he was. Lamar's face was a savage mask, so rigid with hatred and power it seemed like something from ancient times. Lamar's dark eyes glowed and his nostrils flared and Bud could smell sweat and dirt and blood and then Lamar hit him a giant clout on the nose, breaking it, filling Bud's mind with red mist.
Lamar pivoted, and Bud felt Lamar's other hand coming onto his wrist, Lamar's weight still pinning him, and the gun was being corkscrewed from his grasp until it was only a second before he lost it.
Magazine button, he thought.
He pushed it with his thumb and felt the magazine slide out, and then he pulled the trigger, the gun firing pointlessly off toward nowhere, as Lamar then seized it and with a blast of triumph broke contact with Bud and pivoted to jam the pistol against his ribs and squeeze the trigger.
Lamar must have pulled the trigger ten times before he realized the gun wasn't going to fire. Couldn't. No magazine.
In the interim, Bud balled his fist. He hit Lamar in the throat and felt his antagonist sag back.
He rolled just a bit and grabbed his Commander from the high hip holster and tried to bring it up against Lamar, but Lamar was too fast on the recovery and with his own left hand grabbed at the pistol.
The two men began to slide through the mud down toward the stream, hopelessly locked, each desperately seeking leverage, strength, hope as they tried to control Bud's Commander. Bud's thumb was over the safety, trying to get it down, Lamar's below it, trying to keep it up.
Their faces were inches apart.
Suddenly, fast as a snake, Lamar seemed to leap out. He sunk his teeth into Bud's nose. The pain scaled the heights of his spine and he screamed, but in the same terrible second he remembered: I shot his fingers off.
With a jab his thumb lanced out against Lamar's fist, hit bandage, dug through it, and felt scab yielding to blood and heard a new scream, not his own.
Bud tore the automatic free and rammed it into Lamar, but when he pulled the trigger it would not go. Lamar had got a finger between hammer and receiver.
“You fucker, you fucker, you fucker,” Lamar was saying.
Bud got the gun free and with his thumb cranked back the hammer, but again Lamar snared his wrist.
The gun in Bud's hand was like a bayonet as each tried to gain control and drive it into the other's heart. It rose and rose, wavering this way and that, now Bud ahead, now Lamar, the two of them locked in each other's arms, squeezing and biting and batting at each other with their skulls.
Up and up the gun came until it seemed to touch Bud's chin; he felt it hard and cold and saw Lamar's merciless eyes but from somewhere some last ounce of rage unleashed a last ounce of strength.
The gun fired.
The flash erupted in Bud's face; the light was incandescent and unyielding and seemed to fill all the corners of the earth, and as the tide of brightness roared through his brain, it destroyed his vision. A thousand bits of powder and lead drove into his skin.
He fell backward, isolated in his blindness, seeing nothing, feeling nothing.
Bud was helpless.
He'd lost the gun, he was blind, his ears rang.
He's going to kill me, he thought, and waited for the next shot, almost welcoming it, for it would stop the pain that now began to throb in his head, and it would let him rest at last.
But no shot came. He blinked and groped and still saw nothing but only heard some unidentifiable sound, a rasping, a moaning, whatever.
He drove his fists into his eyes and pressed them hard, backing sightly up the bank.
He opened his eyes, waiting to die.
But ever so slowly he identified the sound. It came from a hulk just before him, sunk to the knees in the stream, hands clasped over face.
Lamar's hands came away and another flash of heat lightning crackled in the distance and Bud saw that the bullet, a hollow tip had blown through Lamar's chin upward and like a plow had gouged a furrow up what had been a face. The teeth and most of the tongue were gone, the nose had been eviscerated, and as the bullet had opened and surged upward it had destroyed both of Lamar's eyes and opened his forehead so that pulsing dark matter showed amid the bone. It had erased his face.
“Liilmu, iiilmu, iiilmu,” Lamar moaned and Bud knew it was "Kill me, kill me, kill me.”
Bud finally found the Beretta .380, though it had slipped down almost into his underpants in the struggle. He raised it and aimed. He was three feet away. He fired twice into Lamar's head, and he fell sideways into the creek and did not move.
Bud stared at him for just a second, then sat down as an exhaustion so total it seemed to penetrate to his heart overcame him. He felt numbness everywhere, except where he hurt. The little gun slipped out of his hand and he did not even look for it.
Holly, crying bitterly, had made it nearly all the way back to the farmhouse when she heard the roar. She turned to the west and saw them, or rather their lights; three helicopters roaring in over the tree line, lights flashing dramatically.
Then, from the other direction, she saw the vehicles-state police cruisers, vans, ambulances, a whole convoy-racing down the road to the farm. The vehicles and the helicopters reached the house almost simultaneously, and from each there poured a crowd of black-garbed men in hoods with fancy guns. It was all theater, like a movie; it had nothing to do with anything.
She walked toward them as the men completed their dramatic performance, kicking in doors, presumably racing through the house ready to hose anything that moved down with their machine guns. But there was nothing to hose down.
She reached the perimeter.
“Help,” she said.
In seconds policemen surrounded her.
“They're out there,” she said, pointing.
“Bud Pewtie and Lamar. Over there, in the trees. I heard some shots.
You'd better hurry.”
“Let's go,” said an old man, who seemed to be in charge.
“Please hurry,” she said, but they were already gone.
We were so close, she thought.
Bud climbed up the bank through a fog of exhaustion; he could make no sense of the rising dust, the roar of the helicopters, the flashing of their navigation lights.
His mind worked imperfectly. It closed on one thought:
It was over.
A light came onto him.
He blinked.
“There he is,” shouted the pilot over the intercom.
C.D. looked, and yes, the light came onto Bud, who groped blindly, then sank to his knees. C.D. saw the blood all over him, focused a pair of binoculars on the face and saw how battered it was.
“Put it down, GODDAMMIT,” he screamed.
The bird hit with a thud.
“Listen, you get back to the house and see if there's a goddamned doctor in the cars, or at least a goddamn paramedic.
Get him here fast. That boy's hurt bad. Then you call Comanche Shocktrauma and tell them to expect incoming.”
“Mark the place with a flare. Lieutenant, so we can find it on the way back.”
“Goddamn right I will,” said C.D.
“And bring some more men to secure the area.”
He rolled from the deck of the Huey, and someone handed him a flare, which he ignited with a yank. The flare's red fire blossomed. Carrying it, he raced down to Bud as the helicopter roared away into the night.
He ran down the slope and came to Bud, dropping the flare.
“Bud, Bud—”
“Got him. Lieutenant. He's down there. Blew his face off. Oh, Christ I hurt.”
“Take it easy. Bud.”
He tried to comfort Bud, holding him close, putting his hand to the highway patrolman's chest to check the heart-beat.
Bud fell forward, then caught himself. In the flickering magenta of the flare, the blood all over his face looked almost black, and the swelling had all but buried one of his eyes. The man was shivering, and saliva and phlegm ran out of his bloody mouth.
“I killed him. Oh, fuck, is he dead,” Bud was saying.
“Good work. Bud. You got him. Great goddamn job.
Now settle down. Help is—” But suddenly someone else was before them.
He thought it was another cop, but as the figure drew nearer and acquired clarity out of the darkness he recognized its size.
“ Where's Lamar?” asked Richard.
C.D. was close enough now to see how swollen the man's face was. Had he been hit? Did Lamar beat him? But Richard sniffled and C.D. knew he'd been crying.
“It's all over,” he said.
“It's finished.”
“Where's Lamar?”
“Dead,” said C.D.
Richard held something up. C.D. saw that it was a Smith & Wesson .357.
Bud almost laughed. Richard! With a big gun like that!
His own gun!
“Richard, boy, it's all over. Put the gun down. You don't want to hurt nobody. Not now,” C.D. was saying.
Richard looked at the gun, almost amazed to find it there.
Bud heard vehicles revving, roaring toward them. A chopper suddenly hovered overhead, throwing out a searchlight beam that lit the three of them and beating up a storm of dust.
Richard blinked.
“I—I—” began Richard.
“There now, Richard, it's all over. You just put that old gun down so nobody gets hurt,” C.D. crooned.
Richard looked up at C.D. and then at Bud. In the light Bud saw huge eyes webbed with red and full of fear, trembling lips, drops of dew on the nose.
“Richard, put the gun down, those boys mean business.
It's all over. Nobody has to get hurt now, not you, not nobody. You were a victim, too. He made you do them things.”
Richard nodded numbly.
“Drop the gun, Richard,” said Bud, suddenly anguished, afraid the troopers would shoot this poor, pitiful child.
Richard took a step toward them, seemed to turn and watch the men from the helicopter racing at them, and turned back to Bud and C.D. He faltered, as though he were losing his grip. C.D. reached out to help him.
Richard started to bend to set the gun down as the troopers surrounded him, and it was fine, it was great, it was the happy ending everybody dreamed about.
But something suddenly came into Richard's eyes, from nowhere.
“Daddy!” he cried, and raised the pistol and fired.