Dirty White Boys (23 page)

“Dad, you ought to buy the gun you like. If you ever have to use it again, it’d be better to have one you liked rather than one you got a good deal on.”

Bud nodded. The boy was right. At least someone in the family was thinking straight.

Mick’s Driving Range and Batting Cages was set on a rolling chunk of green Oklahoma farmland that overlooked the surrounding countryside, and now and then, when the artillery students were firing over at Fort Sill just to the north, you could hear the rolling booms of the big 155s as they detonated against far mountainsides. The road ran on a crest, the highest point in the county, and from the complex you could see for miles. It was a windy day, and Mick’s was always festooned with pennants, like some kind of extravagant musical comedy, and the pennants snapped and fluttered in the wind.

The driving range was full up with golfers driving their little pills out onto the green like tracer bullets, but for some reason the batting cages had never quite caught on. Jeff had no problem finding an empty one.

“Dad, you going to hit?”

“Nah, I’ll just watch. I’d pop stitches if I swung the bat too hard. We don’t need that. You need some money?”

“Yes sir, I do.”

Bud handed over a ten-dollar bill and took a seat on the bench as Jeff got change and fed the tokens into the machine.

He stood easily at the plate as the mechanical device ninety feet away issued what sounded like a reptilian clank as it came to life. Then, with a shiver, its arm lashed out, and it dispatched a ball. Jeff just leaned into it and sent it sailing with a satisfying crack.

Jeff was hot. He was in the zone. He was really seeing it. Bud just sat there and watched him and enjoyed each second of it: the snap as the arm uncoiled and sent a ball whistling inward, Jeff’s seemingly slow stroke, the inevitable contact, and the rise of the ball, a white dot that screamed toward orbit then fell disconsolately to earth.

“Man, you are really whacking that ball today,” Bud called.

“Yes sir,” said Jeff. “I am out of the slump.”

When Jeff used up the first ten dollars, Bud gave him another, and then, when that was gone, offered still another.

“Dad, you don’t have to.”

“It’s okay. It’s so great to see you out of your slump.”

“Nah, it’s fine. I feel good.”

Jeff and Bud headed back to the truck.

“What are you doing different? Can you tell?”

“It’s the head. I was leading with my chin and it was throwing the whole swing off. That, plus pressing. So I just
concentrate on keeping my head still,
watching
the ball, and swinging through. It’s working.”

“Was it set on fast?”

“Absolutely, Dad. From the start.”

“Well, if I were a scout, I’d give you a hundred-thousand-dollar signing bonus, on the spot.”

“I’d settle for a Coke.”

“It’s a deal.”

They got Cokes at the machine, nodded to gruff old Mick, and headed home as the twilight passed on toward darkness.

“You mind if I see if anything’s on the radio, Dad?”

“Nah, go ahead,” said Bud.

Jeff fiddled with the stations, looking for KOKY, out of Oklahoma City, the big rock station, but as he slid through the sounds he cut across some urgent chatter that signified catastrophe, built around the last two syllables of the word “robbery.”

“Wait, stop,” said Bud, but they couldn’t get a clear signal. It must have been some Texas ghost signal or something.

But Bud grew concerned, in his way, and said, “Switch to the AM. That news station.”

“Dad, you said—”

“Jeff.”

“Okay, okay.”

Jeff switched bands to get to KTOK, and they heard the weather, a network feed out of Washington, with headline summaries of notable local stories.

“See, it’s—”

“Shhh,” commanded Bud, for he’d heard the announcer launch into another story.

“Authorities in Wichita Falls, Texas, have issued an all-points bulletin for three escaped convicts in connection
with a bloody shoot-out and robbery at a Denny’s Restaurant this afternoon. Six persons are dead, including four law enforcement officers, in an armed robbery that netted an undetermined amount of cash. Oklahoma convicts Lamar James Pye, his cousin Odell Warren Pye, and Richard Franklin Peed escaped from the McAlester State Penitentiary in Oklahoma April second. They killed a prison guard, an Oklahoma highway patrolman and a bakery goods driver—and kidnapped an elderly couple—before dropping out of sight four weeks ago. Police say today’s armed robbery and shoot-out in Wichita Falls shows that they are armed and dangerous and at large in the North Texas-South Oklahoma region.”

T
he eggs lay before Richard. They seemed curdled and dissociative as if they were losing their very sense of eggness; they were disintegrating untouched before his eyes. Next to them, a small mountain range of homefries dried out as if in preparation for an ice age. Altogether, it hardly looked like food anymore. His coffee had grown tepid and rancid.

He glanced about, consumed with that same queasy feeling he’d had in the car before Lamar and Odell had gone crashing in on the Stepfords. Everywhere he saw families, couples, a few lone Air Force personnel just sitting there eating their food. They had no idea what visitation was about to come crashing down upon them. In just minutes, Lamar, Odell, and Ruta Beth would be upon them, to take the money and threaten them with violence.

“Coffee?”

He looked up into the eyes of a waitress.

“Ah, no,” he said.

“You okay? You hardly touched your food.”

“No, I’m fine, I’m okay.”

“You want me to take it?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

“That’s a real pretty picture.”

“Huh? Oh! Thanks.”

He’d been doodling. Lions, of course, as per his master’s wishes. He dreamed of lions. They pounced and lunged through his deepest thoughts. He just couldn’t get the neck right, though.

Somehow the waitress dissolved. He wished he could quiet his rapping heart. His knees were shaking. The big minute hand drew nearer and nearer to four, when everything would start happening, depending on what police call signals Lamar monitored on his new Radio Shack scanner in the car.

“Could be a bit before four, could be a bit after. Depends,” Lamar had said, dropping him off half an hour before.

He swallowed. The gun in his waistband hurt. It was a huge thing, and of course they didn’t have a holster for it. He just had wedged it in, though Lamar had done some magical thing with a string, running a little loop down into his pants, tied at either end on his belt, forming a kind of truss that held the gun from slipping further.

He took a last look around, trying to remember.

Men in coats, like the one he wore? No, only a cowboy over there or farmworker or something, in a jeans jacket too short to conceal a handgun. A woman undercover cop? No possibility. That was the thing about Denny’s, it was the American melting pot at its best, every stripe and shape of American you could imagine, but in here today were only doughy middle-aged types, with their mamas, and a couple of Air Force enlisted women, Wichita Falls being a big Air Force town. Air Force people flew airplanes, right? They didn’t have guns. They could bomb, they couldn’t shoot. In the kitchen, from what he could see, was just a mess of
black men, in their forties, working up a sweat and laughing to beat the devil all the time: certainly not off-duty policemen.

That left the manager, a fat boy with pimples in his early twenties, with the eyes of a squirrel and a perpetual grimace of near hysteria. He’d be the one Lamar took in back to open the safe. He’d be the one Lamar had said he could break in a minute, never you mind how. He stole a look at the young man, who was officious and neurotic at once, now shooing two waitresses off to fill water glasses or pour more coffee, now rushing back to get on the cooks, now working the register. What a world of pain awaited that boy. Richard felt indecent, exposed to so much imminent hurt and yet so unable to stop anything.

I’m like a falcon
, he thought. It was a metaphor that had come to him when Lamar had driven off in the station wagon. There he had it, his freedom. He could just drive away, nothing held him, he had a car, he could go and go and go. Instead, ten minutes later, he headed back to the farm. That was the falcon part. Falcons are trained by their masters to believe there’s a tether holding them to the master’s wrist. The master manages this by keeping the falcon on his wrist with a tether until the falcon finally falls asleep. Once he falls asleep, he’s convinced, but sometimes it can go for days, man and falcon just trying to outlast the other until sleep. With him, it had taken about ten minutes. Some willpower! Now he believed that no matter where he went, he was tethered to Lamar, until Lamar set him free. And Lamar would never set him free.

He shook his head, took a last look. Then he felt the pressure of eyes upon him and, turning to look out the window that his table sat next to, saw the station wagon pull into the lot.

The car paused, waited for another to clear out of the lot
and pull into traffic. He took a last look around. He hadn’t thought the room would be so full. It was supposed to be between lunch and dinner. These damn Texans. They couldn’t do anything but by their own rules.

The car pulled up and into a disabled-only parking place. He saw Lamar, in his cowboy hat, and Odell, rocking gently in the back seat, and Ruta Beth, all staring at him. Richard took the handkerchief out of his pocket and waved it gently. That was the signal. He watched as Lamar slid off his hat and pulled the ski mask down. Ski masks seemed to magically appear on Ruta Beth and Odell. The doors were opening. In long raincoats to conceal their weapons they were out of the station wagon. It was happening.

Just then, as he looked back toward the cash register, Richard saw the Texas highway patrolman come out of the men’s room, drying his hands.

Lamar listened to the scanner, set on 460.225MHz, the police car-to-car frequency, as they approached the restaurant. Its messages and strange half-language of ten-codes and regional jargon crackled sporadically.

“Ah, Dispatch, this is R-Victor-twenty-four, I am ten-twenty-four on the Remington Street accident.”

“Ten-four, R-Victor-twenty-four, ah, ten-nineteen the station.”

“Ten-four, Dispatch. I have a ten-fifty-five in custody.”

“Copy that, R-Victor-twenty-four, you want Breathalyzer?”

“That’s a big ten-seventy-four, Dispatch, he can’t hardly walk none. Video would be nice.”

“Ten-four, R-Victor-twenty-four.”

“Dispatch, this is R-Victor-eleven, I am ten-seventy-six the domestic situation on Wilson Boulevard, can you ten-forty-three?”

“Yes, R-Victor-twenty-four, suspect is a black male, about twenty-five, over three hundred pounds, with a knife. Be careful, Charlie.”

“Great. Thanks Dispatch, you always give me the good ones.”

“Ten-four, Charlie. Let me know when you’re ten-twenty-three.”

And on it went.

“Them boys got themselves just a quiet Sunday afternoon. A few drunk niggers, that’s all. Hoo boy, what they got a-coming.”

Lamar waited for a car to clear, then pulled into the restaurant parking lot. Carefully he navigated his way to the entrance and pulled up in front of it, sliding into the open spot marked for a wheelchair.

“Lamar, I’m pretty scared,” said Ruta Beth.

“Sweetie, you gonna be just fine. Odell, you a-ready?”

“Eddy,” said Odell placidly.

“Okay, boys and girls, let’s kick ass and get paid,” he said, pulling his ski mask down.

Each burst from his door. Lamar went first, low and crablike, almost a scuttle, but not a run because there were four steps to climb to get up into the restaurant, but also because when you ran you were out of control and control was the heart of the job.

Armed robbery was about it and nothing else: you made your statement in the first second and drew your lines—you were in charge. If anybody stepped over the line, man, woman, boy, girl, baby, you had to hurt them bad. No exceptions, no mercy: You broke their bones, you broke their spirits, you took their money, and you left them crying and shaking. They could not get it in their skulls that any way but yours existed. If you had to kill them, you just did it, cold and sudden, and went on with business.

Lamar was through the door first, his heart steady as a rock, his eyes darting like swallows, and in the first second he saw the cop. The cop saw him; a little something passed between them, and the cop took a half a backward step as if to say, Whoa, Partner, let me think on this one, but by then Lamar had the shotgun out and the cop knew he was finished and was determined to go out like a man. He was fast; in his life he’d probably dreamed such a thing a thousand times, for it was one of the risks of the job. His right hand flew to his automatic.

Meanwhile, in a fraction of the same second and equally without a conscious thought, and without a twitch of curiosity—though he did note the cop’s unexplained presence, and meant to deal with it later—Lamar raised the cutdown Browning A-5 from under his coat and blew a double-ought into that surprised old boy. Texas Highway Patrol still had those old-timey thirties uniforms, gray shirt, red collar and epaulets, and they carried SIGs, and this boy was meat before he even touched his own gun. The double-ought erupted into nine .32 slugs traveling at over a thousand miles an hour and took his life from him and sent him knocko backward against the wall between the two rest-rooms, to the left of the manager’s office. He slid down the wall, leaving a webbing of gore upon it, for the pellets, or some of them, passed on through, and his life’s blood spurted from his ruptured heart as he fell.

What Lamar didn’t know was that he had just called in on his radio jack, which ran up from the transmitter on his duty belt and was affixed to his lapel. Fourteen miles away in the basement dispatch room of the Iowa Park barrack, a dispatcher heard what she recognized immediately as the amplified sound of a firearms report. She began frantically to call in the men on her network and in two minutes made contact with fourteen of them. The fifteenth had just called
in going-out-of-service (10-7) at Denny’s for his twenty-minute break. Getting no reply, she calmly began to broadcast: “All units, all units, I have a possible ten-thirty-three at the Denny’s off 287, there at Maurine Street, can somebody please verify. Possible Signal thirteen.” Signal thirteen meant “Officer down, assistance required immediately.”