Dirty White Boys (50 page)

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 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 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.

“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 cutdown. 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 countermoves, if he hadn’t already cut Holly’s throat.

But what Bud saw astonished him.

It was the girl, Ruta Beth Tull. 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 buckworm
.

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.