Dirty White Boys (11 page)

Bud considered.

“Where is it?”

“Seven miles down the road. Then left, on County Road Six Seventy-nine. A mile, you’ll see the mailbox. I’m afraid maybe he fell or something, can’t get to the phone. People shouldn’t live so isolated like that.”

“Well,” said Bud, “I’ll call Dispatch and see if anything’s going on they need us for. If not, maybe we’ll take a spin by.”

Lamar let Richard shower and sleep first, because Richard had driven while Lamar and Odell slept. So Richard sank into dreamless oblivion, a mercy. But when Lamar shook him awake at nine, he was still in the Stepfords’ upstairs bedroom, still an escaped convict, still in the company of murderers.

Richard pulled on a pair of Bill Stepford’s jeans and a blue workshirt and then settled in to do two things at once, under Lamar’s instructions. He was to sit in the upstairs bedroom and keep watch, just in case. And he was to draw lions.

“Ah, now, Lamar? With everything that’s going on?”

“Yes sir. I want it done, I want it perfect, so that when the time comes, we can move to the next step.”

What next step?

Anyway, he now sat doodling, the original much-studied sketch before him. It was beginning to fade into gibberish, just a random blotch of lines. He wondered what Lamar saw in it to begin with. He knew it was insufferably banal: a lion, a woman, some sort of crazed Aryan fantasy, something out of the Hyperborean age. It matched exactly Lamar’s
arrested stage of development, but it had nothing to do with art; it was, rather, something out of that great unwashed fantasy life of the lumpen proletariat that expressed itself on the sides of vans or in comic books or boorish, bloody, boring movies. It was so coarse, untainted by subtlety or distinction.

Yet it had saved his life, he knew: It had in some way tamed Lamar’s rage and redirected it, made Lamar see there was more to life than predation. And the drawing itself: There
was
something wildly savage and free in it that Lamar himself had responded to but which Richard had since been unable to capture, whether he stuck with lions or moved on to tigers and eagles. When he thought about it, it went away; you just couldn’t do something like that offhandedly. It was a left-brain, right-brain thing. Lamar had understood and let Richard have a little bit of room on the issue. But now he was pressing him for results.

Fortunately, the farmer had a large selection of paper and pencils available. Working with a No. 2, Richard sat at the window, looking out dreamily, and tried to imagine some savage savannah where man and cat were the same creature, but woman was still woman. And on this plain, the strongest ruled, by tooth and claw and without mercy. And of these creatures, the most powerful and cunning was Lamar, Lamar the Lion, who wasn’t merely a killer but also a shrewd and cunning king.

Richard’s pencil tip flew across the page; he felt deeper into the concept of
lion
than ever before, as if he’d somehow entered the red zone, the mindset of the jungle, where you looked at other life-forms and one question entered your mind: What does it taste like?

He stopped. Hmmm, not bad.

Dreamily, he looked out the window. He tried to imagine
a plain dotted with zebra and giraffe and cape buffalo and little wily antelopes, and the ever-present hyenas.

And he almost saw it, too, though the illusion proved difficult to sustain when he noticed a black-and-white Oklahoma Highway Patrol cruiser rolling down the road toward the house.

Even though Bud was driving, he was still in his surly mood.

“Ted, you really ought to call Holly.”

“Nah” was all Ted could say.

“She’ll be worried,” he said.

“The truth is, Bud,” said Ted, “we just don’t have much to talk about these days. I let her down, too. I can see in her eyes, I don’t mean a thing to her. Goddamn, how I love her and there she is, and I can’t reach her.”

Bud swallowed uncomfortably. Something seemed to come up into his throat. Ted was truly miserable, stewing in his own pain.

“Now you and Jen, you have a perfect marriage. You’re a team. She’s a part of your career. She’s happy with what you got. She never puts any pressure on you.”

“Well, Ted, you know that appearances can be deceiving.”

“Not yours, Bud.”

“Ted … look, we’re going to have to have a talk.”

“A talk?”

“About some things you think I am that I am not. And about some other stuff as well.”

“What?”

But they had arrived in the barnyard of the Stepford farm. The house was white clapboard, an assemblage of structures added as the farm prospered. The lawn was neat,
and someone had planted a bright bed of flowers by the sidewalk. A huge oak tree towered over the house.

Bud and Ted climbed out. Bud adjusted his Ray-Bans and removed his Smokey hat from the wire rack behind his seat and pulled it on. He looked about. There was a fallow field, where the spring wheat had already been harvested and the earth turned. Copses of scrub oak showed here and there among the gentle rolls of the land, and far off, a blazing bright green field signaled the presence of alfalfa. There was a blue-stem pasture off to the right, and a few cattle grazed amid the barrels of hay.

“Looks okay to me,” said Ted. “The goddamned phone is probably off the hook.”

“Hello?” cried Bud. And then again.

There was no answer.

“Let’s go up and knock and see what happens.”

Richard ran downstairs. He knew he shouldn’t scream but he wanted to. The panic billowed through him brightly. He wanted to crap again. His stomach ached as he raced thumpingly along.

“Lamar,” he sobbed, “Lamar, Lamar, oh Lamar.”

He plunged down the steps.

In the darkness of the basement, Odell was over by the workbench, sawing with a hacksaw. Richard looked and saw three long metal poles on the floor and three wooden boots or something.

Lamar looked over at him.

“Lamar,” he gasped, “cops. State police.”

Lamar just looked at him blankly. Then he said, “How many? A goddamned team? SWAT, what? Or just a one car?”

“I only saw one,” said Richard. “Halfway up the driveway. Be here in a minute.”

Lamar nodded. He turned and looked at the Stepfords, who sat groggily on an old couch.

“You make a sound and you’re dead. I mean that, sir, and I ain’t a-fucking with you.” His voice was level but intense.

Odell, meanwhile, had risen from his position and was busy threading ammunition into the shotguns that Richard now saw had been sawed off so that they were short and handy.

Lamar took one, threw some sort of lever with an oily clang.

“We’re going upstairs. You tie these people up and I mean tight. Then you come up. You hear shooting, you come a-running, do you get that? And bring your gun.”

“Hootin’,” said Odell happily.

“Yes, Lamar,” said Richard.

“Okay, Odell,” said Lamar. “We goin’ fry us some Smokey.”

Lamar stuffed a dozen bright red-and-blue shells into his pockets and Odell followed. They raced up the steps.

Lamar watched them. A guy with some miles on him, and a kid. Standing in the sun, just looking the place over. The older one called out “Hello” and adjusted his duty belt. Then he got his Smokey hat out and set to fiddling with it. He wanted it just right, just set perfect on his head. Show-offy cocksucker. The kid looked somewhat grumpy, maybe tired. He wanted to get it over with.

Lamar knew they were cherry. He could smell it on them. They had no idea what they were walking into; if they had, they’d have had their pieces out and they’d be behind cover. He watched as they exchanged a few dry words, then made up their minds to come up to the house.

He could tell also that the young one had a vest on by the
unnatural smoothness of the way the cotton of his shirt clung to the Kevlar; the older one, though barrel-chested and big, was apparently without body armor, for there was more give in the material as he moved.

“Odell, you go out the back, around the side of the house on the left. You ain’t gonna fire until I do. You wanna do the old guy first, same as me. He may have been in a scrape or two and maybe has been shot at. He probably won’t panic so bad as the other. But main thing is, they can’t reach the goddamn cruiser, because then they’ll call it in, and in two minutes they got the goddamned backup in. We gotta take ’em out clean, you got that, sweetie?”

“Kwean,” said Odell.

“You shoot for the head on the boy. Aim high, try and hit him in the face. The old boy, you can gutshoot him. He ain’t wearing no vest.”

Odell darted out the back, shotgun in hand.

Lamar moved up to the left of the window. They were too far for a shotgun. If this goddamned old farmer had had an assault rifle, he could have taken them both out with one fast semiauto string. He had four shells in his cut-down Browning auto, a pocketful of spares, and his goddamned long-slide .45, but he hated to shoot it out with a handgun. Too many ifs or maybes with a handgun.

The excitement in him was incredible. But so was the giddiness. He almost giggled. Bliss boomed through him. He tried to chill himself out, but goddamn, this was going to be
fun!

When to fire? Fire when they knock on the door? Fire through the goddamned wood, blow ’em back? But maybe the buckshot didn’t have enough power to get through the wood and would spend itself getting through it. No, best to let ’em get within ten feet and then pull down. Knock ’em
down with the shotgun, then close and finish them off with the .45.

Oooooooeeeeeeee!
Bar-b-cued Smokey!

They walked up toward the house. A large dragonfly flashed in the sun. Bud saw the flowers and the love of flowers the owners had put into them. Jen was like that, too. It seemed strange they hadn’t come out to greet the policemen, as farm people were among the last in America to still show respect to the badge.

He had turned to Ted to remark on the stillness of it when Ted exploded.

Ted didn’t actually explode; he was simply standing stricken in a sudden cloud of red mist and his throat had gone to pulsing colors and his eyes had widened with horror.

To Bud it seemed as if they had stepped through a glass door into another world and were suddenly ensnared in a medium of molasses or oil, something thick that dampened all sound and made their motions utterly painful and slow. There was no noise at all. Or if there was, Bud didn’t hear it a bit. He felt the stings as though being attacked by a swarm of bees and had a sense that a leg had died on him.

And then the world flashed orange and he had no sense of anything, as if he’d been somehow snatched from time itself, and then he returned to earth a second later, surprised to find himself down on the ground. He had no memory of falling. Blood was everywhere. He looked at poor Ted, who was bleeding even more profusely at the throat and screaming soundlessly. A starburst had fractured the left lens of Ted’s Ray-Bans; blood ran in a snaky little line down from the obscured eye. It all seemed to be happening so slowly, and he could make no sense of it at all, though the air seemed full of dust and insects, and then he realized they
were taking shotgun fire from the left window and that he had been hit bad.

“I’M HIT, OH GOD!” screamed Ted, blowing through the soundlessness. Now there was noise everywhere, Bud’s ears were ringing in pain and it was so loud he hurt. He had a coppery taste in his throat, as if he’d just had a penny sandwich. His lungs creaked and the rasp of Ted’s breathing sounded louder than a buzz saw.

Bud didn’t remember drawing the Smith, but he just had it there in his hand out of some miracle or something and he was pumping off rounds at the broken window, just squeezing and squeezing, and then another rake of pain ripped across his chest—Vest! Vest! he mourned—and he went down flat. The gun was lost. Then he had it again and brought it up and fired but came up with nothing but the sounds of hammer striking empty primer. He opened the gun and six shells fell out. He stared at it dumbly.

Speedloader.
Speedloader!

Clumsily he grabbed at a speedloader from the pouch but his fingers were thick and greasy with blood. It fell from them and rolled in the dust, picking up grit where it was smeared with red.

“I’M HIT, OH GOD I’M HIT!” wailed Ted.

Cover, Bud was thinking, cover. The car was too far.

He rose and half-yanked Ted to the tree ten feet away. A large man ran at him and Bud lifted the Smith to fire and the man ducked. Bud couldn’t figure out why the gun didn’t fire. He looked. Oh yes. He hadn’t reloaded. The speed-loader lay in the dust. He thought he had another in the pouch.

Reload, reload, he told himself, pulling the second speedloader out. He dropped it, too. Then he remembered Ted’s gun and tried to get it out, but the security holster wouldn’t permit the piece to be withdrawn. Ted shivered desperately beneath him. Blood pulsed out of a hole under his ear, and his whole face was spotted with blood. His legs were also bleeding.

“I can’t see,” he said. “Oh, Christ, Bud, I can’t see.”

“Be cool, be cool,” Bud said, trying to make sense of it. He picked up his dropped speedloader and somehow got the tips of the six cartridges it held inserted in the chambers. He twisted the knob and the shells dropped into the gun. He slammed the cylinder shut and looked around for targets, but he could see nothing.

The car, he thought. Get to the radio, get backup, do it, do it
now!

“Ted, I gotta run to the car.”

“DON’T LEAVE ME, PLEASE, DON’T LEAVE ME!”