He locked the safe up tight and pulled his Smokey off its top. The dark green flat brimmed hat was perched just so atop his head, its brim just edging off the top of his vision, as it was supposed to. Maybe that's where it started for him, all those years back. Goddamn, he still thought it was the best-looking hat he'd ever seen; it was the only hat he'd ever wear. He wanted to be buried in it, or at least with it.
He stepped out of the house and went to the cruiser parked in the driveway, a gleaming Chevy Caprice, in the black-and-white tones of the state. Firing up the engine, he picked up the mike and pressed the send button.
“Ah, Dispatch, this is six-oh-five, I'm ten-fifty-one to Officer two-eleven.”
“Got you, six-oh-five,” said the woman's voice, the night duty dispatcher.
“Advise you switch to Police Intercity Net for updates as they come through.”
“Affirmative, Dispatch. Any news?”
“Big zero, so far.”
“Okay, Dispatch, off I go.”
He switched to the intercity net, 155.670 MHz, eased the big car out of the driveway, and headed to Ted and Holly Pepper's.
The Pepper trailer, alone on its grim little street, was lit up like a turnpike gas station. Ted, fully uniformed, stood outside with a rifle case in one hand. He was a tall, good-looking youngster, perhaps too handsome; if there was weakness to his character it was that as a young man things had been given to him too easily, without his ever quite acquiring the lessons of humility and hard-ass work. If you're a blue-eyed boy with a button nose, things just show up on your plate. But he was all right. Ted just didn't have the gift—that special instinct for human deviance, that cunning about motive, that twitch for the truth under the lie, and finally, the will to do the job flat out—that marked a great cop. But there weren't too many great cops left, and Bud knew he himself fell short in a bunch of areas, too. He had only this on Ted: He'd been around a bit more.
As Bud pulled in, the door opened, and Holly came out in a housecoat with two sealed 7-Eleven plastic cups that presumably held hot coffee. Her freckles stood out now, without makeup; her straw-colored, almost reddish mass of hair looked like she'd been electrified, but, dammit, that was Holly, she was a cute one.
Ted was in a surly mood. Bud could tell, and Holly kept her distance.
“Hi, Bud,” she chirped.
“You and Ted off on another excellent adventure?”
“Holly, for Chrissakes,” Ted said.
“Howdy, Bud.”
“Ted, you locked and loaded?”
“Yes sir, and I got three mags with the sixty-nine-grain hollowpoints. Eighteen in each one, as per.”
“Good man. Let's get her in the trunk and get on the road. Morning, Holly.”
“Oh, don't notice me or anything there, Mr. Sergeant Bud Pewtie.”
He laughed. Holly was a flirty thing.
“I made you boys some coffee. I hope it helps.”
“Anything helps,” said Bud, opening the trunk. Ted put the rifle case in next to Bud's own rifle case, where a Mossberg 12-gauge pump gun with an extended magazine was concealed.
“You boys could start yourself a war,” said Holly.
“Ain't gonna be no shooting,” said Bud.
“These trashy boys just want to stretch their legs before they go back. It's just a little vacation.”
“Way I hear, they already killed three people,” Holly said.
“Okay, so, they're a little testy,” said Bud. But then he turned to Ted.
“Ted, I want you to go back and get your vest on. This is a vest day if ever there was one.”
“Bud, you know I hate the goddamn vest. You ain't wearing one.”
“No, I ain't. That's because I figure if there's any shooting, you going to be a hero while I sit in the goddamn back seat and pray. So I don't need no vest. You do, young trooper. You don't want to widow this beautiful young woman, do you?”
“Ah, Bud—”
“Now, Ted, don't make me pull hard rank in front of your wife. You just go on and do it. And don't think you can shame me by calling me a hypocrite, because I already know I am one and goddamn it, son, I am proud of it!”
Like a chastised child, Ted went sullenly into the trailer from where, presently, the sound of things being tossed and doors being slammed arrived.
“It's his day in the barrel, I guess,” Bud said.
“He'll be fine, once he gets the coffee in him. Bud, how are you?”
“Oh, Holly, you know.”
He and Holly met at least twice and sometimes, depending on hunger and possibility, five or six times a week at various sites around the motel-rich greater Lawton area and made love with a desperation and a purity that Bud could never remember having felt in his life before. He hadn't made love to Jen in over two years. He could hardly remember making love to Jen. But he could never forget making love to Holly.
And what was going to happen next? Hell if he knew. It had the sense of a high speed chase to it: going faster and faster, and something bad was bound to come of it, but once you start, in some terrible way you have to finish.
“You said you'd work it out and I think you will. You'll be a man. Somebody has to be around here.”
“He is upset about something, isn't he? Could he know—”
“Bud, that boy hasn't paid no attention to me in a year.
If I turned green, he wouldn't notice. So no. Bud, he don't 'know a thing.”
“Okay. I don't want him getting hurt. It's important we tell him when we tell Jen. So nobody gets hurt any more than necessary. We'll work this out. I promise. I swear.”
“You never want anybody getting hurt, do you, Bud?
That's what I like so very much about you. But you should be wearing your vest.”
“Well, Ted's right. I'm too old to itch that much all day, though you're the third person who’s told me to wear it in the past twenty minutes.”
“Bud, you should. You really should.”
“Nobody's shooting this old boy, that I promise you.”
“Bud, I love you,” she suddenly said, as if she had to get it in quick. Then Ted, looking stiff with the seven pounds of Kevlar-reinforced fiberglass that now girdled his torso under his uniform shirt, came back out.
“Okay,” said Bud, "time to get humming.”
He shot Holly a secret look as Ted climbed into the car, then climbed in himself, backed out of the driveway, and sped out of the trailer park, heading cross town to pick up Gore on the way to the 44.
Ted was silent.
“Well,” Bud finally said, "looks like we got a hard couple of days coming up. Nobody goes home on these jobs till it's over. I remember back in 1978, there was this con who—” But he glanced over and saw that Ted had settled back involuntarily and begun to breathe the heavy breath of sleep.
Middle of the night! thought Bud, and put the pedal to the metal, goosing the 350-cube engine, shooting through the deserted city as the sun just began to edge into the eastern sky.
It was full dawn when Bud pulled into the Chickasha highway maintenance barracks forty miles up the 44 toward Oklahoma City from Lawton, and Ted had slept the whole way. It was no big deal; Bud would have just talked to hear himself talk. If it made Ted sharper later on, so be it.
He entered the lot, not at all surprised to see cruisers not only from his own outfit but half a dozen others: the county sheriffs offices, the Lawton and Chickasha municipal police, MPs from the Fort Sill reservation whose vastness abutted Lawton, as well as a couple of black sedans that were the trademark of the OSBI, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, the state's own down-home FBI.
Oh, Christ, Bud thought: Osbies. Always think they know just that much more. Somehow always a little bit better protected than us poor old Patrol Smokies.