“Okay, bub,” Bud announced.
“Let's go git the particulars.”
“Huh! Oh, Christ, sorry. Bud, didn't get much sleep last night. That goddamned wife of mine kept me up like you wouldn't believe. Hard to believe a scrawny girl like that needs it twice a night.”
“Oh, to be that goddamned young again,” said Bud, completing the circle of the lie. Ted had stopped sleeping with his wife thirteen months ago, for no known reason at all—just stopped; Bud had started sleeping with Ted's wife two months ago, and he knew the reason.
They got out and headed in, finding the place hopping, as was to be expected. He saw a lieutenant from Troop M over in Altus talking to two heavy-lidded types in ill-fitting suits who had to be OSBI. The two men in suits had Remington 700s with scopes hanging over their shoulders. In fact, looking about at the law enforcement types milling in the corridor. Bud saw that nearly everyone packed extra heat.
“Get yourself a cup of coffee,” the lieutenant said to him.
“We're waiting on goddamn C.D. for a briefing.”
“I thought that old coot was dead,” said Bud, acknowledging the mention of the legendary lawman.
“C.D. ain't ever going to die,” said the lieutenant.
“He's too pickled in bourbon to pass on.”
He and Ted found coffee and a big tub of Dunkin' Donuts, and Bud passed on the pastry while Ted took a sugary one. Suddenly Bud noticed guys streaming by them into the duty room as if everyone just knew that it was somehow time to get the word. Bud filed in, too, and the place that was sparsely filled when a twelve-man rotation got its shift briefing was now chockablock with cops.
A state officer made a few introductory remarks, but Bud, like all of them, paid no attention: they were eyeballing the legendary old Lt. C. D. Henderson, sitting there in a string tie and Tony Lama boots, and a definitely nonregulation Colt automatic in some kind of ancient, blackened, multi strapped and -buckled shoulder rig under his suit coat.
CD, was the most famous detective in the state of Oklahoma and a hardcore police gunfighter who went back to great days when the Oklahoma City police pistol team sent its best men into the FBI to handle all violent duties. He himself, it was said, had been trained in the art of close-in shooting by the legendary D. A. "Jelly” Bryce.
But he looked so old. Rumor had it that he was a secret lush and would have been long since retired off the force if he didn't have photographs of well-known politicians with prostitutes or something.
“Well, my compliments to y'all, can't tell you how damned impressed I am with how fast you boys got here and how many of you there are,” C.D. said as he took over.
His face was a prune left in the sun an extra week and the suit, khaki with cowboy piping, seemed to have been originally bought for a much larger man in the unenthusiastic way it hung off his scrawny geezer's frame.
“Anyway, the goddamned Department of Correction dumped a bad one on us, and here's the latest I have, and I just got off the phone with Oklahoma City. Pass the bulletins out, please.”
A couple of lesser lights walked among the men, handing out three-page sheets.
“At about eighteen hundred hours last night, that is, thirteen hours ago, a bad old boy named Lamar Pye led his cousin O’Dell and a poor new boy stiff named Richard Peed out ofMcAlester State Penitentiary. The first bad news is, it was only discovered at ten p.m.” when they did a headcount, learned that the three boys were gone, and began to search.
Found a goddamn treasure chest of bodies—an old guard was found with his throat cut. A big black inmate named Willie Ralph Jefferson, Jr.” stowed in a closet, with a bar of soap shoved down his craw. O’Dell's work, probably. We learned quickly that a vending machine delivery guy whose last stop was the prison never came back. Now that's bad because they were out over four hours before they were discovered missing, which means roadblocks and bloodhounds in McAlester area ain't apt to turn up much.”
He then narrated some colorful details of the escape, including a description of the van they purportedly made their getaway in, an eighty-nine Ford Econoline with hostess products emblazoned on it, and the license number and a description of the poor missing driver, a Willard Jones.
“What you see before you now is the rap sheet on the three inmates. Lamar's the baddest bad news. He's a goddamned professional inmate and criminal. Been breaking the law since he was ten years old. His daddy, matter of fact, was killed in a shootout with an Arkansas state trooper back in fifty-five, when Lamar was just a lump in his mama's belly. Raised in reform school. B and E, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, armed robbery, distribution of narcotics, he just put his hands in everything, working out of Tulsa and Oklahoma City. He shot a convenience store clerk dead in 1974. Just shot him, point blank. That's Lamar. Anyway, it was goddamn plea-bargained down to murder two, and he was paroled in 1980. Then he and his cousin, poor dumb old O’Dell, they commenced to rob banks” fast-food restaurants, hell, they even robbed a yogurt shop in Tulsa mall. They're both shooters. We also believe Lamar pulled the trigger on a couple of snitches who were ratting out the Noble Pagans motorcycle club, on contract from the Pagans. Here's something you won't see on no bulletin: they say this boy's hung like an ox. They say he makes Johnny Dillinger look like a sprout in that department.
So if you have a suspect, you can always check his pecker, and if you need two rulers to measure, I'd say you got your man!”
There was tide of laughter in the room.
“Now O’Dell's like Lamar's body servant. Dumb as a stump and can't hardly talk. Retarded, probably. Anyway, in 1985, Lamar and O’Dell decided to rip off a Noble Pagan road captain who was dealing and they took him out beyond Anadarko and shot him in the head. Well, he didn't die soon as they thought, and he named them first, which is how come the boys ended up in the Mac.”
Bud looked at the pictures of the two men and saw what he'd seen so many times before—the look of billy town trash, hard-burning eyes smoldering with either some obscure grudge against the world or utter stupidity. Minds that worked different from most minds, that's what they were like, as if in some way they were hardwired different. Killers, manipulators, ruthless, savage—and yet, goddamn them, always brave. So much sheer aggression. So used to violence, so comfortable with it.
O’Dell's eyes were like coal lumps; not a goddamned thing in them; he just stared out from the photograph, his strange-shaped head seeming to come from a different planet, a black smear where his upper lip should have been.
Lamar was different: his face was wider and more open and held some charm to it. In a certain hard way, he was a handsome man; but the eyes had such a glare to them, such a fuck-not-with-me attitude. There was something tragic in them, too; the hard cons, the real pros, always had a glimmer of talent. They could have been something else, something better.
“My guess is, here's how we'll catch him,” said Henderson.
“Sooner or later he'll run to his own kind—outlaw biker scum, punks, hard cases Hell, he's been affiliated with half the gangs in Oklahoma; he's done time with all the hardcore convicts and professional criminals in the state. He'll go to them and somebody'll rat him out, you just watch.”
“What about this other boy?” a voice called.
“Peed is hard to figure,” said C. D. Henderson.
“He ain't your inmate material, or so it would seem. No priors.
Some kind of art genius, went to that high school for the gifted they run in Tulsa—his daddy was a oil executive-and he went out East to some kind of art place. A painter, they say. Anyway, back he comes when his mama gets sick and he spends ten years nursing her. Meanwhile, he's teaching art at Oklahoma City Junior College, but mainly he's painting.”