They headed upstairs.
The phone pulled Bud from a blank and dreamless sleep, and he awoke in the dark of his bedroom, his wife breathing heavily beside him. All through the house it was quiet.
Groggily, he picked it up.
“Pewtie.”
“Well, howdy there, Bud” came a voice from far, far away. It swam at Bud from lost memories, out of a pool of still green water. He fought to recall it but its identity lingered beyond his consciousness.
“Who is this?”
“Oh, you know who it is, Bud. It’s your old goddamned buddy Lamar Pye.”
Bud’s head cleared, fast.
“Pye. What the hell are you—”
“Missing anything?”
“What?”
“Missing anything?”
Bud thought: My boys.
“Lamar, so help me Christ—”
“Sure must be lonely in that bed tonight.”
Bud looked: He could see Jen stirring under her blankets.
“I don’t—”
“I hope you didn’t call nobody yet, there, Bud.”
“I—”
“She’s damned pretty, your old lady. A bit young for a old goat like you. Bet she gits you to working hard.”
“Lamar, what the—”
“Here, say something to your baby. Bring her over, sweetie.”
A faraway voice said, “Git over here, you bitch,” and in the next second, another voice came on the line.
“Oh, Bud, oh God, they came in and got me, oh, Bud, I am so scared, Bud they’ve all got guns and he hit me, he hit me—” and then Holly was taken away.
“Who is it, Bud?” said Jen groggily.
“You hear that, trooper? We got your wife. Yes sir, got your goddamned wife. You take my baby cousin, and shoot him full of holes, I’m going to take your lady, for my pleasures. Let me tell you how it’s going to be, okay? You call anyone, you tell anyone, you mention this to anyone, by God, I will kill her and you know I will. First though I’ll fuck her in every hole she got. Every one.”
“I swear—”
“Now, Bud, if you want this pretty gal back, you’d best come and do what I tell you. I want you to go to a pay phone. You got about a hour. It’s at 124 and Shoulder Junction, outside of Geronimo. Exxon station. I’m going to bounce you from pay phone to pay phone before I bring you in, just to make goddamned sure you don’t have no SWAT boys with you. Got that?”
“Lamar—”
“You miss that goddamned call and I’ll cut her throat and cut her nose off, Bud, and then come git you and the rest of your family at my leisure.”
“Don’t hurt her, goddamn it,” Bud barked.
“Oh, and Bud?” Lamar asked in a voice rich in charm. “You want her back? Tell you what. Bring some guns.”
He hung up.
Bud jumped out of bed, fought to clear his head. But, really, there was no decision to make, not one he could face anyway. If he called headquarters, he could play the game and sooner or later close with Lamar with a SWAT team, choppers, snipers, the works; the professionals would handle it as well as they could, but it wouldn’t matter. One look at other boys at his private party with Bud and Lamar would cut her up without so much as a by-your-leave and take his goddamned chances with the lawmen. He didn’t give a damn; he didn’t fear his own death, he only wanted Bud’s.
Bud pulled on jeans, boots, and a black shirt. He grabbed a sports coat, only to cover the guns he’d be wearing.
“Bud, what is going on?”
“I have to go.”
“Bud, you—”
He faced his wife.
“I’m sorry. I have to go one last time. If you love me, you let me go. You trust me, you let me go.”
Then he raced downstairs, opened the gun safe. There they were. He pulled on his shoulder rig and the high hip holster and then busily threaded rounds into the magazines, all of them, jamming them up with hollowtips. If his thumbs hurt, he didn’t notice; it just seemed to take so goddamned long. He holstered the Beretta and the .45; the .380 went behind his belt on his belly. Then he looked for a rifle, knowing only a fool fights with a pistol if he has the choice, but came up short until he remembered that .30-30 lever gun outside, still under the seat in his truck. He closed the safe.
A shape loomed in the dark.
“Dad?”
It was Jeff.
“Jeff, I’ve got to go, fast.”
“Dad, what’s—”
“Never you mind.”
“Dad—”
“Jeff, I love you. No matter what you hear or what they tell you or what happens, I love you. I love your mother and your brother more than anything. Now I have something to handle and I have to handle it. You stay here and take care of your mother. It’ll be fine, I swear to you.”
“Dad—”
“Jeff, I have to go!”
“Dad … I love you.”
Bud grabbed his youngest son and gave him a bone-squeezing hug. He felt the boy’s ribs and beating heart under that sheathing of muscle.
“Go on, now,” he said, and dashed out.
Bud got to the truck, worried now, absurdly, that he was low on gas. But he had gas. He gunned it, whirled out of the quiet neighborhood for Geronimo forty-five miles away. He had about fifty minutes.
But suddenly a thought came to him. Goddamnedest thing. From where he didn’t know, but an idea just flashed into his head. He saw a gas station phone booth and stopped and ran to dial 411.
“You have a number for a C. D. Henderson, out on Thirty-eighth?”
It took a few seconds.
“That number isn’t listed, sir.”
“Goddammit, this is a police emergency, I’m Oklahoma highway patrol sergeant Russell B. Pewtie, ID number R-twenty-four, and I want that number. Give it to me or give me your supervisor.”
Soon enough Bud had the number and called.
The phone seemed to ring and ring.
Then a groggy woman’s voice answered, the old woman, and Bud asked for the lieutenant.
“Carl,” he heard her say, “it’s some old boy for you.”
Henderson’s raspy voice came on.
“’Lo?” he said.
“Lieutenant, it’s Bud Pewtie.”
“Bud, my God!”
“You still have your keys, don’t you? You can still get into that goddamned office?”
“I could break in if I had to. Now what—”
“Listen to me, you drunken old goat. You get your ass over there. You say you’re a detective? Well, this here’s the night you’re going to prove it.”
“What are you talking about? What’s going on?”
“You never mind what’s going on. I got something for you. The mystery person in Lamar’s gang. Wore the mask all the time. Here’s why. It’s a goddamned girl. A young girl. Heard him call her ‘sweetie.’ Heard her say, ‘Get over here, bitch.’ That’s all. But … a young girl. Young, in her twenties, maybe. Now that’s another dot for you to connect. That’s your goddamned third point. You find me a category that ain’t a category that’s got a Toyota that’s also got a young girl. You got to find me that girl and that goddamed location. Now get cracking, you old buzzard, and don’t you let me down.”
“Bud.” Something like a sob ran through the old man’s voice. “Bud … I’ll try. I ain’t the man I once was.”
“Well, goddamn, which of us is, except for goddamned Lamar?”
Bud hung up, checked his watch, saw that he was down to forty-five minutes. He jumped in his truck and gunned it.
“So,” said Lamar. “Your old man. What’s he like, you know, in the sack?”
“You pig,” she said.
Tell him, she thought. He’s made a mistake. He came to the wrong house. He got the wrong woman.
And then what?
Then he just kills me, that’s all. And he still gets Bud.
“How big is he? Is he real big? Or is he just normal? I’ll bet he’s just norma
l.”
She shook her head with disgust.
“Yeah. He’s just normal. Here. You want to see something? You want to see something like you never seen before? Look at this. Hold her, Ruta Beth.”
They had Holly’s hands tied behind her tightly, and her feet tied. She felt so helpless and sick. He was the man who’d killed her husband. It was this grotesque white-trash tough boy with stumps for fingers, some malnourished little weasel of a farm girl, and the other one, a soft and delicate man-boy with tussled hair and the look of no guts at all on his prissy, plump-lipped little face.
Now Ruta Beth went behind her and held her head.
Lamar stood and undid his trousers.
“Oh, God,” moaned Holly, and fought to look away, but Ruta Beth had surprising strength and governed her head until it was locked in the proper direction.
Lamar pulled his shorts down and unfolded what looked like an electric cable. It was a penis the size of a reptile, slack and coiled, its foreskin capping it.
“Hah? You see anything like that?”
“You look at Daddy,” said the girl. “Go on, you look at the king. You ain’t never seen nothing like that. That’s the king.”
She thought she’d gag.
“You just dream about it, honey. You just go on and dream until your husband shows up.”
Bud reached the Exxon station with a minute to spare. But Lamar’s call was late by five minutes.
When it came, he ripped the phone off the hook.
“Yeah?”
“Well, howdy, Bud. How you doing? You have a rough old time?”
“Cut the shit, Pye.”
“Bud, biggest mistake I done made is not walking over to you when you was belly-down and capping you with that .45. Think of the trouble it’d saved us both.”
“Where are you?”
“Oh, I ain’t a-telling. You got a long night ahead of you. Maybe I’ll bring you to me and maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll run you into an ambush. Maybe I’m on a goddamned cellular phone right now, looking at your ass through the scope of a rifle. Just twitch my finger and it’s all over.”
He laughed. He was extracting immense pleasure from it.
“You haven’t hurt her?”
“Honey, you tell your husband what you just saw.”
There was the muffled struggle of someone being pushed to the phone.
“Bud!”
“Holly!”
“Oh, Bud, he made me look. They forced me to look.”
“Holly, I—”
“At his dick. They made me look at it.”
The fury rose in Bud like steam. He wanted to slam the phone against the booth until it broke.
Don’t lose it, he warned himself. That’s what he wants. He’ll toy with her. He’ll torture her in infantile ways to show his power—the size of his pecker, petty pains, maybe drawing on her skin. He’ll do it so that she can tell you, so that you go crazier and crazier, and at the end you are hopelessly jangled and unable to operate.
It doesn’t mean a thing. The only thing that counts is getting there and getting her out.
But he knew, too, that Lamar expected him crazy. He lost something if he didn’t let Pye know how nuts this was making him.
“Pye,” he screamed. “Pye, you sonofabitch, I’ll kill you. Don’t you fucking touch her. Don’t you touch her!” Lamar laughed again.
“Bud, you still there? You got to git all the way to Snyder. To the 7-eleven on 183 north of Snyder. You best git you going, old bubba. Yes you best git a move on, or I’ll do more than show her the lizard, I’ll make her pet it. Maybe even give it a li’l kiss.”
Lamar hung up.
Quickly Bud dialed C. D. Henderson’s old office in the City Hall Annex. But there was no answer.
The old detective heard the phone ring. He’d been there five minutes. What was the point of answering it?
He opened his coat and removed the bottle of I. W. Harper. Only about a third left. He opened it, took a taste. Liquid flame, bright and deep. Immediately a tremor passed through him, knocked him into a blurred state, and then pulled him out again. He reached under his coat and his fingers touched something hard and cold: It was the curvature of the grip of a revolver. He pulled it out, feeling its oily heft: a Colt Frontier model, with an ivory grip, in .44 special, as manufactured in New Haven, Connecticut, in the year 1903. The rainbow of the case-hardened colors had long since worn off, turning the piece almost brown. His grandaddy had carried that gun before Oklahoma was a state; and his daddy had carried it, too, both as lawmen.
C.D. opened the loading gate, pulled the hammer to half cock and rotated the cylinder to see the primers of five tarnished .44 rounds, sited in the cylinder so that the firing pin rested on an empty chamber, the way any sensible man carried a Colt. Only fools carried a six-shooter with six shots; sooner or later, they’d thump the hammer accidently and blow a foot off.
C.D. was no fool.
But he didn’t think for a moment he could help Bud, and he had some idea that a terrible, terrible weight rode on all this. He’d fail, a drunken, wasted old man. People would die. Bud, whoever else was involved. And Lamar would go on.
And when that happened C.D. thought he might thumb back the hammer of the old Colt, put the muzzle in his mouth, and pull the trigger. He felt so used up, he was hardly there. His life was a waste, things were changing so fast that he couldn’t keep up. He was sixty-eight years old and should have retired five years back and enjoyed his time. But no. Vanity, anger, whatever, had driven him.
Okay, you old goat, he told himself.
Do some detecting.
Think. Think.
You got a new dot to connect. A third point, a third piece of evidence. A girl. A young girl. How does that help?
A category that is not a category. A young girl.
How do they connect?
How could they connect?
Original theory: Lamar would go for help or find help in the criminal community in one of its forms. They would always go to their own kind. So: He would go to the cycle gangs or the Indian boys running scams against their own tribes on the reservations or the organized crime interests in Tulsa or OK City or the drug networks supplied by South American gangs but run by niggers in the inner city, Hispanics or Italian groups otherwise; or that small shifting, mobile culture of armed robbers, professional contract killers, enforcers, and tough guys who serviced the bigger gangs on a strictly freelance basis.
But he’d gone to none of those, or at least none of those that could be demonstrated to have corresponded with the one known empirical clue, the tire tread that could only be worn by a small Japanese car, a Hyundai or a Nissan or a Toyota, in three model years.
Nothing. Nada.
Maybe it was just wrong, the assumption. Maybe he’d found somebody not in the life at all.
But no: Lamar, however extravagant, was a type, and types run to pattern. And Lamar’s pattern was simple: He was a professional criminal, a long-term convict, he would only feel comfortable with his peers. Whoever he was bunking with would in some way be in the culture, would have stepped beyond the parameters of the law. And would be on the computer network.
But there was nothing.
The old man snapped on his computer terminal, it had access to Oklahoma Department of Motor Vehicles and criminal records at the state felony level. He could define a field and see what he got.
So he tried the most basic thing: He requested that the computer churn out a listing of all females between the ages of sixteen and thirty who registered or had registered a car in the known range.
SEARCHING SEARCHING SEARCHING the computer blinked at him for a few minutes, and then a list of names rose against its blue background.
He was not adroit at the mechanics of the computer; he could not physically manipulate the cursor without thinking, so he simply ordered the goddamned thing to print out. It clicked and chattered across the room, and he went to the printer, ripped the page out, and t
hen examined what he had.
It was a list of eighty-three names, all of them meaningless, all of them unknown. Maybe one of them? Maybe not.
He went next to the known felons listing—that is, the felons who also had registered the right cars—and hoped there might be some correspondence, a coregistration that possibly suggested a daughter-father thing.
There was none.
No young woman with a car in the range could be linked to a known felon with the same car, at least according to the records.
Then, very slowly, he typed each of the eighty-three names into the computer and commanded FELONY RECORD CHECK.
It took the better part of an hour.
Results—zero.
“Richard,” said Lamar, “come over here.”
Shyly almost, Richard advanced.
“Richard, how long since you had a woman?”
“Ah? Lamar, that’s private.”
“Oh, God,” moaned Holly.
“Now, lady, lookie here at Richard. Now what’s he got this Bud Pewtie you married ain’t got? He’s a fine, upstanding man. He’s got a true talent, a God-given thang. He’s loyal and hardworking. He’s educated. Richard, you went to a college, didn’t you?”
Richard said yes.
“See. He’s a smart man. He could do you proud. You know, if you play your cards right, when this is all over … I might be able to git you a … date with Richard.”
Lamar exploded once again into laughter.
Then he said, “You know, Richard, you could touch her a little. Really. She wouldn’t mind, would you, hon?”
“Please,” said Holly. “Oh, God, don’t hurt me or touch me.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t hurt a bit. Richard, would you like to touch this young woman some place. Or maybe just look at her. You could look at her all you wanted, at least for a little while. Have you ever seen a girl this pretty without no clothes on, Richard? I mean, a real one, not in no book?”
The terrible thing was, Richard did want to touch her and look at her. She was a really beautiful young thing. He’d never had any woman, of course. It just hadn’t worked out. Not that he was a homosexual. He was sort of a zerosexual. But now he looked at her and the deep stirrings of lust tingled in him. It was her helplessness that excited him. The way the rope cut into her white, freckly skin, the way her flesh blossomed around the raw pressure of the rope, the way her neck was faintly reddish as she squirmed, the look of complete horror on her face, and her goddamned prettiness. She wore Bermuda shorts, Nikes without socks, and a polo shirt; she looked like some kind of coed or something.