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 Odell, and not even the violent and fearless black inmates would stand against Odell.
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 skyscape 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 Tull’s place. A flicker of heat lightning lit the sky, briefly illuminatin
g 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, camming a .30-30 softpoint 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 .30-30 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 softpoint 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, unstirred 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.M., 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 th
ere 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 gumballs 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.