Authors: Stephen Hunter
“Bud.” Something like a sob ran through the old man’s voice. “Bud … I’ll try. I ain’t the man I once was.”
“Well, goddamn, which of us is, except for goddamned Lamar?”
Bud hung up, checked his watch, saw that he was down to forty-five minutes. He jumped in his truck and gunned it.
“So,” said Lamar. “Your old man. What’s he like, you know, in the sack?”
“You pig,” she said.
Tell him
, she thought.
He’s made a mistake. He came to the wrong house. He got the wrong woman
.
And then what?
Then he just kills me, that’s all. And he still gets Bud
.
“How big is he? Is he real big? Or is he just normal? I’ll bet he’s just normal.”
She shook her head with disgust.
“Yeah. He’s just normal. Here. You want to see something? You want to see something like you never seen before? Look at this. Hold her, Ruta Beth.”
They had Holly’s hands tied behind her tightly, and her feet tied. She felt so helpless and sick. He was the man who’d killed her husband. It was this grotesque white-trash tough boy with stumps for fingers, some malnourished little weasel of a farm girl, and the other one, a soft and delicate man-boy with tussled hair and the look of no guts at all on his prissy, plump-lipped little face.
Now Ruta Beth went behind her and held her head.
Lamar stood and undid his trousers.
“Oh, God,” moaned Holly, and fought to look away, but Ruta Beth had surprising strength and governed her head until it was locked in the proper direction.
Lamar pulled his shorts down and unfolded what looked like an electric cable. It was a penis the size of a reptile, slack and coiled, its foreskin capping it.
“Hah? You see anything like that?”
“You look at Daddy,” said the girl. “Go on, you look at the king. You ain’t never seen nothing like that. That’s the king.”
She thought she’d gag.
“You just dream about it, honey. You just go on and dream until your husband shows up.”
Bud reached the Exxon station with a minute to spare. But Lamar’s call was late by five minutes.
When it came, he ripped the phone off the hook.
“Yeah?”
“Well, howdy, Bud. How you doing? You have a rough old time?”
“Cut the shit, Pye.”
“Bud, biggest mistake I done made is not walking over to you when you was belly-down and capping you with that .45. Think of the trouble it’d saved us both.”
“Where are you?”
“Oh, I ain’t a-telling. You got a long night ahead of you. Maybe I’ll bring you to me and maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll run you into an ambush. Maybe I’m on a goddamned cellular phone right now, looking at your ass through the scope of a rifle. Just twitch my finger and it’s all over.”
He laughed. He was extracting immense pleasure from it.
“You haven’t hurt her?”
“Honey, you tell your husband what you just saw.”
There was the muffled struggle of someone being pushed to the phone.
“Bud!”
“Holly!”
“Oh, Bud, he made me look. They forced me to look.”
“Holly, I—”
“At his dick. They made me look at it.”
The fury rose in Bud like steam. He wanted to slam the phone against the booth until it broke.
Don’t lose it, he warned himself. That’s what he wants. He’ll toy with her. He’ll torture her in infantile ways to show his power—the size of his pecker, petty pains, maybe drawing on her skin. He’ll do it so that she can tell you, so that you go crazier and crazier, and at the end you are hopelessly jangled and unable to operate.
It doesn’t mean a thing. The only thing that counts is getting there and getting her out.
But he knew, too, that Lamar expected him crazy. He
lost something if he didn’t let Pye know how nuts this was making him.
“Pye,” he screamed. “Pye, you sonofabitch, I’ll kill you. Don’t you fucking
touch
her. Don’t you touch her!” Lamar laughed again.
“Bud, you still there? You got to git all the way to Snyder. To the 7-eleven on 183 north of Snyder. You best git you going, old bubba. Yes you best git a move on, or I’ll do more than show her the lizard, I’ll make her pet it. Maybe even give it a li’l kiss.”
Lamar hung up.
Quickly Bud dialed C. D. Henderson’s old office in the City Hall Annex. But there was no answer.
The old detective heard the phone ring. He’d been there five minutes. What was the point of answering it?
He opened his coat and removed the bottle of I. W. Harper. Only about a third left. He opened it, took a taste. Liquid flame, bright and deep. Immediately a tremor passed through him, knocked him into a blurred state, and then pulled him out again. He reached under his coat and his fingers touched something hard and cold: It was the curvature of the grip of a revolver. He pulled it out, feeling its oily heft: a Colt Frontier model, with an ivory grip, in .44 special, as manufactured in New Haven, Connecticut, in the year 1903. The rainbow of the case-hardened colors had long since worn off, turning the piece almost brown. His grandaddy had carried that gun before Oklahoma was a state; and his daddy had carried it, too, both as lawmen.
C.D. opened the loading gate, pulled the hammer to half cock and rotated the cylinder to see the primers of five tarnished .44 rounds, sited in the cylinder so that the firing pin rested on an empty chamber, the way any sensible man carried a Colt. Only fools carried a six-shooter with six
shots; sooner or later, they’d thump the hammer accidently and blow a foot off.
C.D. was no fool.
But he didn’t think for a moment he could help Bud, and he had some idea that a terrible, terrible weight rode on all this. He’d fail, a drunken, wasted old man. People would die. Bud, whoever else was involved. And Lamar would go on.
And when that happened C.D. thought he might thumb back the hammer of the old Colt, put the muzzle in his mouth, and pull the trigger. He felt so used up, he was hardly there. His life was a waste, things were changing so fast that he couldn’t keep up. He was sixty-eight years old and should have retired five years back and enjoyed his time. But no. Vanity, anger, whatever, had driven him.
Okay, you old goat, he told himself.
Do some detecting.
Think.
Think
.
You got a new dot to connect. A third point, a third piece of evidence. A girl. A
young
girl. How does that help?
A category that is not a category. A young girl.
How do they connect?
How could they connect?
Original theory: Lamar would go for help or find help in the criminal community in one of its forms. They would always go to their own kind. So: He would go to the cycle gangs or the Indian boys running scams against their own tribes on the reservations or the organized crime interests in Tulsa or OK City or the drug networks supplied by South American gangs but run by niggers in the inner city, Hispanics or Italian groups otherwise; or that small shifting, mobile culture of armed robbers, professional contract killers, enforcers, and tough guys who serviced the bigger gangs on a strictly freelance basis.
But he’d gone to none of those, or at least none of those that could be demonstrated to have corresponded with the one known empirical clue, the tire tread that could only be worn by a small Japanese car, a Hyundai or a Nissan or a Toyota, in three model years.
Nothing. Nada.
Maybe it was just wrong, the assumption. Maybe he’d found somebody not in the life at all.
But no: Lamar, however extravagant, was a type, and types run to pattern. And Lamar’s pattern was simple: He was a professional criminal, a long-term convict, he would only feel comfortable with his peers. Whoever he was bunking with would in some way be in the culture, would have stepped beyond the parameters of the law. And would be on the computer network.
But there was nothing.
The old man snapped on his computer terminal, it had access to Oklahoma Department of Motor Vehicles and criminal records at the state felony level. He could define a field and see what he got.
So he tried the most basic thing: He requested that the computer churn out a listing of all females between the ages of sixteen and thirty who registered or had registered a car in the known range.
SEARCHING SEARCHING SEARCHING
the computer blinked at him for a few minutes, and then a list of names rose against its blue background.
He was not adroit at the mechanics of the computer; he could not physically manipulate the cursor without thinking, so he simply ordered the goddamned thing to print out. It clicked and chattered across the room, and he went to the printer, ripped the page out, and then examined what he had.
It was a list of eighty-three names, all of them meaningless, all of them unknown. Maybe one of them? Maybe not.
He went next to the known felons listing—that is, the felons who also had registered the right cars—and hoped there might be some correspondence, a coregistration that possibly suggested a daughter-father thing.
There was none.
No young woman with a car in the range could be linked to a known felon with the same car, at least according to the records.
Then, very slowly, he typed each of the eighty-three names into the computer and commanded
FELONY RECORD CHECK
.
It took the better part of an hour.
Results—zero.
“Richard,” said Lamar, “come over here.”
Shyly almost, Richard advanced.
“Richard, how long since you had a woman?”
“Ah? Lamar, that’s
private.”
“Oh, God,” moaned Holly.
“Now, lady, lookie here at Richard. Now what’s he got this Bud Pewtie you married ain’t got? He’s a fine, upstanding man. He’s got a true talent, a God-given thang. He’s loyal and hardworking. He’s educated. Richard, you went to a college, didn’t you?”
Richard said yes.
“See. He’s a smart man. He could do you proud. You know, if you play your cards right, when this is all over … I might be able to git you a …
date
with Richard.”
Lamar exploded once again into laughter.
Then he said, “You know, Richard, you could touch her a little. Really. She wouldn’t mind, would you, hon?”
“Please,” said Holly. “Oh, God, don’t hurt me or touch me.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t hurt a bit. Richard, would you like to touch this young woman some place. Or maybe just look at her. You could look at her all you wanted, at least for a little while. Have you ever seen a girl this pretty without no clothes on, Richard? I mean, a
real
one, not in no book?”
The terrible thing was, Richard
did
want to touch her and look at her. She was a really beautiful young thing. He’d never had any woman, of course. It just hadn’t worked out. Not that he was a homosexual. He was sort of a zerosexual. But now he looked at her and the deep stirrings of lust tingled in him. It was her helplessness that excited him. The way the rope cut into her white, freckly skin, the way her flesh blossomed around the raw pressure of the rope, the way her neck was faintly reddish as she squirmed, the look of complete horror on her face, and her goddamned prettiness. She wore Bermuda shorts, Nikes without socks, and a polo shirt; she looked like some kind of coed or something.
But then he thought:
Why is she so young?
“Lamar, why is she so young?”
“What you mean?”
“Look at her. She isn’t thirty. She isn’t twenty-five. How could she have that son who plays baseball. Did she marry him when she was ten?”
“She was in his house. She got a wedding ring. They was fighting. Who else could she be?”
But then Lamar squinted and looked closely at Holly.
“How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-six,” she said. “I
am
his wife.”
“But that ain’t your kid?”
“No, Jeff is not my son. Bud and I haven’t had our children yet. He had his two boys with his first wife. But she died and he married me two years ago. It’s the happiest
two years of my life. He’s a wonderful, kind, decent man. He’s brave, he’s strong. You ought to be ashamed of what you’re doing.”
“Well, ain’t you a goddamned Miss Mouthful. That son-of a bitch shot my cousin over twenty-five times. Just blew the life out of that boy.”
“You are such scum,” she said. “You may get me and you may get Bud, but they will get you in the end.”
Lamar leaned close.
“Don’t you get it?” he said. “I don’t give a shit. I ain’t got much of a string to play out anyways. I just want to settle up. You think I’m afraid to die? Boy, then you ain’t never been in no hard places, I tell you, and you don’t know what hard places do to a man. In this room we’re all going to be dead tonight or by noon at least. But by God, I will settle my dues and leave this world without no uncashed IOUs in my jeans.”
Bud blew through speed limits like a man in flames, and toward the end gave up on red lights. It was near two forty-five, the streets deserted. He charged up and down hills, cut across dirt roads, traversing Tillman and Comanche Counties on sheer instinct, then hit 62 just beyond Cache for a straight-line run to Snyder. He hit the 7-Eleven just beyond the town and found it still open, and someone on the phone.
He pulled his badge.
“Police business. We need this phone free.”
An Indian boy looked at his badge and spat on the ground and went back to his call.
Bud pulled the .45 and rammed it into the boy’s throat.
“You sonofabitch, you git or you and I will have serious business and you won’t like that a goddamned bit!”
In the face of the weapon and Bud’s fury, the boy melted, hung up the phone, and ran off into the dark. Now
Bud felt a moment of shame, having given in to the cop’s worst temptation, the display of brute power to require obedience. You can’t just pull guns on civilians. On another night, it was grounds for suspension. Not tonight. Fuck it, tonight.
He looked at his watch. It was five after three. Shit. Maybe Lamar had called while the Indian was on the phone. He sat, breathing hard, his mind empty. The seconds clicked by. Suddenly it was ten after.
Christ
, he thought,
I blew it
.