“Cubby, don’t do anything stupid,” Thelma said in a smooth calm voice, walking into the light looking calm, more like a mom than anything. “You just let that fella go. Put the gun down and we’ll work our way through this.”
“Thelma, no! You said, you said-no, I ain’t going back to all that. It ain’t right. Goddamn, oh, why this happening, why why why? I had her licked this time. Oh God, they’s in my head, I hears ’em yelling. Oh Christ. No, Thelma.”
Bob was thinking: Where’s the fucking sniper when you need him? Did he have a Little League game to coach or something? A good man on a.308 and a solid position could send 168 grains of Federal’s best match load through Cubby’s eye and into his ancient snake brain and end this thing in the time it took the bullet to fly at twenty-three hundred feet per second to its target. But there was no sniper, just the woman cop and the three young Tommy Tacticals looking shaken as they crouched, trying to keep good muzzle discipline.
Thelma took another step. She had guts and how. This screwball could pop one into Bob and whirl and fire and take her down before she cleared leather. Of course the three Tacticals would each heroically dump a magazine into him, but both he and Thelma would be beyond caring. Why had he done such a stupid thing? Where could Cubby have gone anyway, cranked as he was on the ice that ate holes into his brain? But his grip on Bob and the force of his wrist against Bob’s throat was iron, and Bob struggled again for air, while smelling his rank body odor, and feeling the fear and craziness vibrate through Cubby’s flesh.
“Don’t you move goddamn you,” said Cubby, pressing the gun muzzle so hard against the thin skin at the crown of Bob’s head that he cut it. A trickle of blood oozed out, and Bob felt the warmth of the liquid and then the sting of the wound.
“Cubby, you just calm down. Nobody has to get hurt now, I’m telling you.”
“But you goin’ send me back. Don’t know why I did it, Thelma, don’t remember none. I don’t know, I been so high for so long don’t think I hit no car, but goddamn I got voices saying you hurt a girl you hurt a girl. Wouldn’t hurt no girl, Thelma. Like them girls sometimes they nice to me. God, they in my head-it hurts. I can’t go back-I can’t go back. It ain’t right-I didn’t do nothing, I don’t want to hurt nobody. God, Thelma, it just ain’t right-I can’t do this no more-it’s just no good no more. Oh, Thelma, you said you’d help me-I am so sorry I can’t-”
Bob heard the oily slide of the hammer against the constriction of the frame, as Cubby drew it back, then the slight vibration as it locked. The gun was now cocked, his finger on the trigger, just a single-action jerk away from firing.
“Thelma, I will kill this boy-you go way-y’all go way-put down your guns, let me go. Don’t want to hurt nobody. Please, please, it don’t have to be this way, but goddamn I will squeeze on this here boy-you just lay down your guns and-”
Thelma drew and fired with a speed that was almost surreal. Bob had never seen a hand move so fast, so sure, so smooth, so clean. It was like a trick of physics, a speed beyond the influence of time, that seemed to come from nowhere, elegant, controlled, blazing. It was professional shooting at its finest.
He saw the flash, saw the slight buck of the automatic as its slide jacked in supertime, saw the spent shell flip away, caught in the light, and even felt the simultaneous vibration as whatever she’d sent off hit its target. The sound of bullet on flesh is always the same, dense and wet and full of the sense of meat splattering and bone shattering, yet compressed into a nanosecond. He actually felt Cubby die instantly, the vivid vital flesh in supertime again alchemizing to dead, directionless weight, pulled on by impatient gravity. As Cubby fell, his draped arm brought Bob down with him harshly, and they landed in a heap and the handgun, still cocked, bounced away.
Bob wriggled free and saw that Thelma’d hit him left of the nose, maybe an inch, and that the bullet had drilled a perfect round black hole, which, in another second, began to release a surprisingly thin gurgle of black fluid. Then his nose began to bleed, not copiously, just a trickle of black as blood under pressure sought escape. The man’s eyes were open, and so was his mouth. Behind him, a ponytail fanned out on the sidewalk in the harsh light, and a puddle of exit-wound blood, black in the illumination, began to delta outward through the hair. That must have been a hell of an exit. He wore a cut-off Ole Miss T-shirt, a pair of tight jeans, and was barefoot. His feet were dirty with long, animal-like toenails crusted with grime.
Bob stood up.
“Mr. Swagger, are you all right, sir?”
“I am fine, Detective. That was some shooting,” he said.
“I am so sad I had to drop him. Only had to do it once before and it shook me up for a year.”
“I am glad you were over your shakes tonight, Detective.”
The other three officers had gathered around, and Thelma put her pistol away, and knelt next to the fallen man. She pried the gun from his fingers-a Smith K-frame, probably in.38-decocked it, and expertly popped the latch open, letting the cylinder rotate out.
They both looked into it.
“Empty,” she said. “Well, I couldn’t wait. I had to put him down.”
“You made the right decision, ma’am.”
“Thelma,” one of FAT kids said, “you didn’t have no choice. You did the right thing.”
“That’s right, Thelma,” said another. “Don’t you worry about it. Nobody could fault you.”
“You sure you’re okay, Mr. Swagger? Maybe when the medical people get here you might want to have them look at you.”
“I’m fine, I’m fine. Maybe it’ll hit me later, but right now it just seems unreal. Detective, where’d you learn to shoot like that? I never-”
“Thelma’s three-times running ladies’ USPSA champ of the Southeast Region, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky. She could go pro, she’s that good, Mr. Swagger. Para-Ord sponsors her. You’re lucky she’s here. She’s probably the best shot of any law enforcement agent in this part of the country. Maybe the whole damn country.”
A cruiser, its lights running hard, pulled up, and then another and another, so on until general delirium took over the scene.
TWENTY-TWO
The thing was, you couldn’t smoke. He might see a lit cigarette glowing in the otherwise-darkened interior of Vern’s red Cadillac El Dorado, then bolt. Agh. So both Vern and Ernie, in cranky moods, sat grumpily scrunched down in the car in a dimly illuminated zone of the parking lot of the Mountain Empire Motel. Neither had had a cigarette in hours. It was a little after midnight.
“I might sneak out and run around back for a smoke,” said Ernie.
“You will not, cousin, no sir. And take a risk he pulls in just as you’re in his lights? That’s how it’ll happen, you know it is, that’s how it always happens when you give in to your hungers on a job. You be a good bad guy now, and do what Daddy has said. We may get a kill out of this tonight and then we can smoke our asses off.”
“Vern Pye, I don’t mind saying, I didn’t enjoy your tone with me just there. Didn’t say I’d do it, now, did I? No sir, said I might. Just talking. You’re so high and mighty, I see your eyes go all buggy anytime a piece of hot under the age of fifteen with no tits goes on by. Please watch that tone, Vern.”
“Well, excuse me, sir, I’m just trying to get the job done right and proper so I can go back to my regular line of business. And what kind of gal I take a fondness toward ain’t nobody’s business. I will say, this here stay in scenic Mountain City has been as hard on me as it has on you, cousin.”