Authors: Stephen Hunter
The gun didn’t fire.
He looked at it. He’d shot it empty against Odell’s bulk.
In the next instant, a huge billow of dust flew into the room, and the thunder of collision mixed with the roar of an automobile engine. A car literally stove through the front of the shop, blasting glass and wood everywhere.
In the driver’s seat, a figure in a black hood leveled a shotgun at Bud, who dropped just a fraction of a second before the gun fired. He felt the sting of another pellet, this one lodging in his scalp. Bud thrust himself backward down the stairwell, felt himself float in darkness, and then hit the steps with the sensation of a beating delivered by six cons, which took the breath out of him and filled his eyes with stars.
He rolled over and slithered deep into the darkness, totally animal now, intent only on escape.
But no one followed him down the steps.
Instead he heard the roar of the car as it backed out, presumably with Lamar now aboard, and then howled away.
Bud listened to the sudden silence.
He felt chilled, and missed his sons. He wasn’t sure if
he’d done right or wrong. He yearned to call Jen or Holly or have his old life back.
He began to shiver.
Richard had never heard anyone howl in such pure animal pain before.
“AAAAAAAH!” Lamar cried, bucking and sobbing in the back seat, holding his crippled and bloody hand. There was blood everywhere, all over the seats, on the sideboards, everywhere.
Meanwhile, curled in total concentration, her face grim and unyielding, Ruta Beth drove mindlessly onward.
“Slow down, goddammit,” yelled Lamar once through his pain, when he thought she was going too fast.
But if they expected squad cars rushing their way, the howl of sirens, ambulances, helicopters, whatever, it didn’t happen. They drove on through darkness.
“We’ve got to find him help,” said Richard. “He’ll bleed to death.”
Again, through his pain, Lamar screamed out. “You shut up, Richard, goddammit. It ain’t bleeding no more. It’s only pain. I kin git through pain. Ruta Beth, you git us home, you hear?”
“He’ll bleed to death,” shrieked Richard. “It
is
bleeding.”
“Shut up, Richard,” said Ruta Beth, “let Daddy decide.”
Lamar tried to lie still but the pain was intense.
“Should we dump the car, Lamar?” asked Richard. “Maybe they have a description.”
“And what then, you moron. They’ll find it and trace it and beat us to the farm. I don’t think that sonofabitch got a good lookiesee, he was so goddamned busy jumping down
those goddamned stairs. He didn’t have no time to get no read on the license plate, tell you that. Oh—”
A sudden spurt of pain seemed to jack through him; he tensed and wailed. It seemed to come like that, in spurts; or when they took a corner and the centrifugal force spun blood toward his wound and the pain flamed again.
“Daddy, you sure you’re all right?”
“Just drive, goddamn it, Ruta Beth. Where’n the hell was you? We’s in there shooting it out with that johnny for a
hour
before you came in. Whyn’t you jump him in the goddamn lot?”
“Lamar, baby, we didn’t know he was a cop. He looked like a cowboy, in a pickup truck, that’s all. Then all hell’s breakin’ loose and Richard and I are trying to figure out what the hell to do. So I just finally goose her, figuring any other way, either you or he shoots us as we come through the doorway. Couldn’t a been more than a minute.”
“Felt like a goddamn
day
. Oh, that fucker was good, shoots me in the goddamned hand.”
There was a silence.
Then Ruta Beth said, “What about the baby?”
“The baby is dead. That goddamned Smokey must have hit him fifty goddamned times. I never saw a boy soak up so much lead and keep a-going. Goddamn, Odell, he was a man, Odell was—AWWWWWWWW.”
A spark of pain erupted somewhere inside him. Then he was quiet.
Ruta Beth began to cry.
“Poor Odell,” she said, “he never meant no harm to nobody. If the world had left him alone, he’da left it alone. Oh, that’s so sad. He never got to see his mama’s grave neither. Oh, Lamar, oh Daddy, that’s so
wrong
what they done to him.”
Richard just looked out at the dark Oklahoma countryside
as it flowed by, more emptiness than he’d ever seen before in his life.
“How that fucker got there, that’s what I want to know.
How
did he know we’d be there?”
“Maybe it was just bad luck,” said Richard.
“No luck is that bad, Richard. It was that goddamned Bud Pewtie, that trooper sergeant. Fuck has more lives on him than a goddamn black cat. I blowed him away
twice
at that farm and
still
he mantracks me down, that fucker. How’d he do it? How’d he know? He some kind of Dick Tracy or somethin’? Is he goddamn Columbo? Is he the Pink Panther? What the fuck? How’d he know?”
The question hung in the silence.
Lamar lay back, rocking gently.
Then he sat back up.
“Only one goddamned way a cop know
anything
these days. Someone drops a fucking dime to buy some time off. You got that gun, Richard? That heavy one?”
“Yes I do, Lamar.”
“Well, give her here.”
Awkwardly, Richard handed it to Lamar, who sat up in the seat to take it. He cocked it and pointed it at Richard’s head.
“God, Lamar, you—”
“You sure you ain’t been talking to anybody, boy? You sure? I ought to blow your head off just to be sure.”
“Please Lamar. Oh, please, please. I
swear
to you. When would I? How could I? I didn’t even
know
we’d end up there. Who knew? You wait, the papers will say why he’s there.”
“Ahh, it ain’t that. You don’t have the
guts
to betray me,” Lamar said. He uncocked the Smith and chucked it on the seat. Then he lay back again.
“Goddamn, it hurts,” he said. “Oh, Christ, it hurts so bad. That goddamned Bud Pewtie!”
Bud had no sense of time. He hid in the basement for what felt like hours and hours. His scalp wound began to sting unbearably and would not go away, but at the same time his leg wound throbbed; the second was somehow a deeper and more troubling pain. At one point he touched his face and realized it had been ripped to shreds. The vision in one eye was blurred, as if he had a stone the size of a cinder block in it. His mind blacked out into shock, but he never really lost consciousness.
He remembered the last camping trip, in the Wichita Mountain Preserve. It would have been about 1991. It was the last time they were really a family. Russ was a freshman and little Jeff would have been in the seventh grade, already having troubles, grades that just weren’t happening and serious self-doubts. Bud remembered wishing he could reach the boy, cut through whatever ailed him, could put his hands on him, and say, Hey, it’ll be all right.
Bud lost himself in this world for quite a bit: he remembered how green the world had seemed up there, how pure. They camped in a Nimrod that he’d pulled behind his truck, high up on a ridge, with much of the state spread out before him, and the air so clean it almost ached to breathe it in. He’d been so happy. They’d loved each other so much, even if no one had said a thing about it. He remembered the shouts of the kids and Jen’s pleasure in being out of the house, and the sense of the world being forgiving and wide with possibility.
Then he saw the light.
The beam caught him and he blinked. Behind it he made out crouched shapes, the Weaver position, shooting arm
straight, support arm locked underneath, the posture somewhat bending the body shape.
“Don’t you twitch, mister, goddammit. Show me your hands.”
“I don’t think I can move ’em.”
“You
better
move ’em, goddammit.”
Bud brought his hands into the light.
“Who are you?”
“Sergeant Bud Pewtie, Oklahoma Highway Patrol. I’ve been hit.”
“You got a shield?”
“Yes sir. Don’t you do nothing tricky now with that gun. I’m going to reach in my pocket and get my shield out. I’m unarmed. I mean, my guns are all upstairs. You got medics on the way?”
“The whole world is on the way. That’s goddamned Odell Pye lying up there with a mess of holes in him.”
“He took some killing, I’ll say,” said Bud, getting the badge out, opening the folio to show it. Another light came on from the top of the steps.
“Bud? Jesus Christ, ain’t you a sight. He’s one of ours, Sheriff. Medic. MEDIC! Get them medics down here, we got an officer down. Goddammit, ASAP! Get ’em DOWN HERE NOW!”
The trooper came to him first and asked him where he was hit, but in seconds two medics had arrived. They gave him the quick once-over and determined that he hadn’t taken any solid, life-threatening hits.
“But you sure are cut to hell and gone,” one of them said, and Bud thought he recognized the man from various turnpike accidents. “Looks like you got a face full of glass slivers. And goddamn, I can see something stuck under your skin up top your head.”
“That’s the one that hurts.”
“Boy, I’ll bet she do, Trooper. Goddamn, I’ll bet she do.”
The medics got him on a stretcher and a team of sheriff’s deputies and troopers labored to get him up the stairs, out of the cellar.
He was pulled into a jubilee of lights. More cars and trucks were arriving even as they wheeled his gantry toward the ambulance, and now a van of FBI agents pulled up. A TV truck had already shown.
“Hold on,” somebody said. “You Pewtie?”
“Yes sir,” said Bud.
“Lon Perry, sheriff, Jackson County. Trooper, I can’t have you boys turning my county into a goddamned shooting gallery when some goddamned undercover op goes dead-dick on you, ’specially since you ain’t even had the goddamned courtesy to tell me you’s working my territory.”
“You’re out of line, Sheriff,” a trooper sergeant barked. “He’s hurt, he just got the second most wanted man in the state and probably put a goddamned hole in the first most wanted, and no citizen even got scratched. You back off.”
There were heated words, but soon another man came over and separated the warring sides. It was Colonel Supenski, looking like he’d just been dragged out of bed.
“Goddamn, Bud, you get around, don’t you?”
Bud didn’t feel much like answering any questions. He just said, “What the hell took everybody so long to get here? We had us a goddamned World War. Nobody called it in?”
“Not a goddamned soul, Bud. Nobody
to
call it in. Jimmy Ky crawled out of the bushes after Lamar and pals departed, waited ten minutes, tried to call, found out the goddamned car had torn out the phone lines, and walked
two miles into town to tell the sheriff’s department. Lamar, goddamn his soul, got away.”
“Damn,” said Bud. “I know I hit him, I seen blood. I seen him drop his piece. I hurt him bad.”
“That you did, Bud. Wilie, bring ’em here. Bud, take a look at your trophies.”
A highway patrol technician came over with a plastic bag. It seemed to contain two grisly pickles, each somewhat tattered at one end.
“What the hell are those?” Bud wanted to know.
“Lamar’s fingers. His last and second-to-last left hand digits. You shot his fingers off, Bud. You killed his cousin, you stopped his tattoo, and you shot off two fingers. Say you done a hell of a night’s work, Bud.”
A
t Comanche Memorial Hospital, a young doctor and two nurses bent over Bud in the emergency room operating theater and picked pieces of glass out of his face for nearly two hours. During this time they also removed a ragged piece of bullet jacket from Bud’s scalp, where it had lodged just under the skin, and a double-ought buckshot pellet that had drilled into the meat of his left calf. That was the nasty one. It hurt like a sonofabitch. The painkillers they gave him helped some, but nothing could blunt the force of the pain of a foreign missile blown deep into the muscle tissue.
By the time the first team was done, an ophthalmologic surgeon had arrived by helicopter from Tulsa to work on his blurry eye. This gentleman probed for several minutes and then removed a particularly gruesome glass sliver from inside his left orbit, where it had sunk into the subcutaneous tissue just under the orb itself.
He held it out for Bud to see: It looked like a blade of pure glass, a vivid little knife.
“You’re lucky, Sergeant. A millimeter to the right and you might have lost your vision permanently. I’m going to
prescribe antibiotics and give you an eyepatch, but in a few days your vision will return to normal.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“No, thank
you
. It’s an honor to work on a man as brave as you,” and he went on with some blah-blah about Bud being a hero.
But Bud didn’t feel like a hero. It wasn’t a thing of heroes; it had no heroics to it; that was for the movies, where things happened clearly, you could follow them, they made sense, the cleverness was apparent. This was just a mad scramble, like cats in a bag fighting, luck happening or not happening, no strength, no cunning, just the blind happenstance of where so many bullets happened to end up. And, knowing that, he had to think: You could have done better. It was true.
If he’d just taken a look through the window and made out who Jimmy Ky was decorating, he could have gotten to a phone and called for backup, and all of them would be locked up or in the morgue, not just poor, dumb Odell. No one had directly confronted him yet, except for the odd nods from the troopers on the scene. Had he done well? Someone once said, if you’re still alive at the end of a gunfight, you’ve won. But Bud didn’t quite buy it. He’d almost gotten Lamar. Almost!
Once the doctors were done and Bud was washed and dried, he was rolled to a private room. There, Jen and Jeff waited. She came over and just touched him, lightly, on the arm; she didn’t look quite real, because with the patch he had no stereoscopic vision; she looked like a picture. And she was haggard, having been awakened from a sleep at nearly five in the morning with the sketchy news that once again her husband had been shot up. Fortunately, the news soon followed that he wasn’t hurt bad.