He wandered into the room with the television. The news was on. Some trashy-looking woman with an armful of babies was blubbering while two or three pretty girl reporters stood around and watched her melt down.
She was blubbering about her poor husband Willard and what a good man he was. Lamar realized that was the wife of his Willard in the truck.
Goddamn. Willard, he thought. You sure married yourself an ugly woman. But he sort of wished he'd fucked her, ugly or not. He wanted to fuck something, that was for sure.
Maybe he'd fuck the old man later.
Next his own picture came on, and somebody was talking about him, saying the authorities considered the escapees to be "armed and extremely dangerous.” Wasn't that a mouthful?
The picture was the lineup shot from nine years ago when he had been picked up by OK City homicide after he and O’Dell had tapped Nicky Pusateri for the Pagans.
Damnedest thing. You just could never tell. Shot that little prick square in the back of the head. Seen him go down, seen the blood squirt like tomato. Shot him again in the back and wrapped him in canvas and drove him twenty miles out and dumped him. And he was alive after all that?
He was, yes, and the dicks had come for Lamar, finding him stoned on amphetamines and living with a woman named Sally Two-Shoes, an Indian gal and sometime hooker who once in awhile would work a convenience store job with him and, though nobody ever found out about it, had killed her own father by drowning him in the toilet when he was drunk.
He'd been making her blow him from the time she was ten on until she finally killed him, age fourteen. Anyway, they'd dragged Lamar into downtown OK City, some fancy building, and taken his pictures; he remembered one of the dicks smelled of garlic. Lamar looked at the picture again in the second before it vanished;
he was wearing a golf shirt, the only one he'd ever had, with a little alligator on the pocket. Made him look like a pussy. Why'd he ever bought that shirt? His nose was squashed and his eyes dull and unfocused because he'd been sliding off the uppers; his lower lip hung open because his face was so relaxed on the drug downslope. His hair was long, though pulled tight behind him. He looked stupid.
It had been his last instant of freedom.
Then some anchorwoman came on. She was pretty, like the farmer's daughters and the girl reporters with Willard's wife, maybe prettier.
He wondered how it would be to fuck her, too. She was talking in a low, urgent voice about how dangerous these men were and how they should be avoided at all costs until the authorities finally caught up to them.
She talked about the terrible obscenity tattooed on Lamar's knuckles, and she talked about how three men were already dead. Her face got all long and somber.
It somewhat tickled Lamar, the edge of breathy fear in her voice. He liked that a lot. He knew he scared square people. They looked into his eyes and they just saw pain and horror. That is, if they looked into his eyes, and they seldom did, or seldom had, even back in the world. You tattoo a f u c k and a y o u I on your knuckles, tends to chill the straights out.
“Lamar?”
It was Richard.
“Yeah?”
“We got ’em. It was a vault. The old lady gave us the combination.”
“What happened to the old man?”
“He isn't breathing too well.”
“He should have made it easy on his self Saved us the trouble. See what it got him? Oh well, fuck him if he can't take a joke.”
They walked on downstairs, then into the basement. A shelf holding jelly jars set in the wall folded out on hinges to reveal an open Tredlock gun vault that stood about four feet tall and whose shelves appeared to display all the handguns known to man.
“Fifty-six, thirty-three, oh-eight,” said Richard proudly.
“I opened it myself.”
Out of deference to Lamar, not even O’Dell had dipped inside. Lamar reached in and touched handguns, many of them.
“Turn on the goddamned light,” he said.
The light came out.
Lamar examined the wares and at last discovered what it was he wanted.
Yes, the man was a pistol shooter all right, and Lamar quickly seized what would be his prize. It was a45 automatic with an extremely long slide and barrel, maybe eight inches. It had fancy sights mounted low to the slide. He looked to see that it was a Colt all right, but someone had added a new inscription under the Colt name that said clark custom guns, new iberia, la.
“A bull's-eye gun?” asked Lamar.
“Go to hell,” said the old man, crumpled on the floor, face swollen.
“I do believe I will, yes sir,” said Lamar, "but it is a bull's-eye gun, ain't it?”
“Bill was state pistol champ, standing bull, rapid fire, three years in a row back in the seventies,” said the woman.
“It'd be a treat to see him shoot one day,” said Lamar, "but that ain't gonna happen.”
Then he reached inside the safe and came out with some thing else: It was a big Colt .357 Magnum revolver with a four-inch barrel called a Python. He handed it to Richard.
“Here,” he said.
“You're a man now.” Then he turned to the old lady.
“I bet you know how to cook real good. How'd you' like to who mp up a real country breakfast? Eggs, bacon, juice, the works. I am hungry as hell and so are my friends, grandma.”
“Don't help him a bit,” said the old man.
“You are going to kill us,” said the old lady.
“Yes ma'am, I probably will have to, not on account of not liking you but because that's the way things is. But could we eat first?”
“I suppose so,” said the old woman.
“You're a fool, Mary,” said the old man.
“Now Bill,” said Lamar, "Mary's just trying to be a good neighbor.”
CHAPTER 6
Must be some kind of trash, Bud thought, amazed at the speed with which he raced through his betrayals. It was so easy. It grew to be a habit, second nature. He could call Jen and bluff his way through a desolate little communication, subconsciously calculated to stay uncommunicative because the less he talked the less likely he'd screw up. Then he'd call Holly, and be so sweet and kind and decent, just that simple, that fast. Made him sick. But he could not stop doing it.
He was in the pay phone outside Jim's Diner in Ratliff City on Oklahoma 76, about halfway between Duncan and 1-35 south to Dallas. Wasn't much here: the diner, a Sunoco, a Laundromat, and a convenience store. The diner was known for chili, but it was too early for chili: about ten in the morning, and they'd been on the road since six, part of a larger sweeping movement aimed at trying to intercept intercept what? The inmates? Those boys hadn't been seen or heard from since the discovery of the truck with the body in it thirty-six hours ago.
The phone rang twice, then Jen picked it up.
“Hi, how are you? Thanks for the uniforms.”
Jen, a slave always to her many jobs, had driven up to the Chickasha facility with five fresh uniforms in a plastic bag, plus underwear and socks, as Bud was running low off his first supply.
“Well,” she said, "that's fine. We're all right here. So how are^ owl Her voice was so Jen: far away, distant, with an undercurrent of some distress but nothing you could put your finger on.
“Fine. You know, it's beginning to get damn dreary, and nobody's got no idea in hell where these boys are. They're going to call off the roadblocks and roving patrols sometime soon, maybe as soon as tomorrow.
It's pointless.”
“It's terrible what they did to that poor vending service man,” Jen said.