CHAPTER 38
“FIRST ONE’S BY those bushes.”
Lorna Hunt Ellison extends both arms and points. Her wrists are cuffed together under the sleeves of her Day-Glo orange prison jumpsuit. The elastic is tight around her middle, and the legs are too long, but the color reminds her of the hunting jacket Bud used to have, the one he used for deer season, and Lorna likes that memory. She and Bud had gone hunting dozens of times, and Lorna was the one who usually brought the game down – Bud couldn’t shoot for shit. He loved dressing it, though. Bleeding the carcass, stripping off the hide, butchering the meat. Sometimes he couldn’t even wait for her to cook it before having a little taste for himself.
Bud.
She’ll see him again. Very soon.
One of the FBI guys walks up to the tree she’s pointing at.
“Right here?”
Lorna spits. “Looks about right.”
She’s leaning up against the squad car, looking for the spray-painted rock. This should be the right place. She wrote the directions down. Rosser Park, in Liverpool, the second dirt road off of Oregon Street, heading east toward the lake. Take the road until it stops. But she doesn’t see any rocks, painted or otherwise.
Lorna walks away from the car and takes a few steps onto the grass. She’d insisted they remove the leg irons, or she wasn’t showing them where any damn bodies were, guaran-fucking-teed. They listened to her. What harm could an old lady do, right?
The pig with the rifle – the one who is supposed to be pointing it at her the whole time – is scratching his nuts, the rifle butt-first on the ground. Two more cops, holding shovels, are standing next to that FBI asswipe, poking them at the dirt, trying to decide where to start digging.
“Right there!” Lorna shouts. “About four or five feet down.”
She looks to her right. No rock. To her left. The black sedan the Feds drove is parked there. One of the Feds is standing beside it, talking to some fatty sheriff.
Lorna looks beyond the car, to the lake. The area is mostly open: ankle-high wild grass, a few saplings, and those bushes she pointed at. The weather is cool, in the high fifties. No activity, no fishermen or joggers. Too early in the morning.
Everything is perfect, if she can just find that damn rock.
The fatty sheriff walks over, eyeing Lorna like she’s something he stepped in.
“After this, you’re taking me to see Bud, right? Blessed Mercy Hospital in Gary?”
He scowls at her. “That’s the deal. I didn’t make it, though. I don’t deal with scum.”
“You probably don’t deal with much. An ass that fat, you probably ride a desk all day.”
His eyes get dark and mean. “Watch your mouth, bitch.”
Lorna spots it: a small gray boulder about a foot high, surrounded by dry grass and fewer than five yards away. There’s a big red X on it.
“I apologize, Sheriff. You mind if I stretch my legs a little? I haven’t been out in the open in twelve years.”
He grunts.
“Thank you, Sheriff.”
She walks slowly, without apparent direction. When she reaches the rock she stretches, then bends down to tie her shoe.
The gun is there, in an old plastic zipper bag. It’s a derringer – a small, two-shot weapon that Doc Holliday always had up his sleeve in old Western shows.
She removes the gun from the bag and cocks the hammer. The overall length of the pistol is less than four inches, and she can comfortably conceal it in the palm of her large hand.
“Hey, Lorna! You copping a squat over there?”
Laughter from the men. Lorna stands up and gives them the finger, then heads back to the group. There are four cops and two Feds, and the derringer only has two rounds.
But two is all she’ll need.
She walks up to the pig with the rifle, holds out her wrists to him.
“Can you take these off? They hurt.”
He snickers at her, and before he can finish she shoots him twice in the left eye.
The sound is like a firecracker, two sharp bangs, and before the pig even has a chance to fall over, Lorna is dropping the derringer and picking up the rifle, a Remington 7400 auto loader with an eight-shot magazine. She kneels behind the squad car, balancing the muzzle on the hood, and aims at the closest body – the fat sheriff.
The rifle is awkward to fire with her hands cuffed, but she manages to put one between his eyes while he just stands there, looking confused. Dumb-ass desk jockey.
Several people are returning fire, the car getting peppered with bullets. Lorna ignores them. She swings over to the FBI idiot, a tall guy in a gray suit, and shoots him twice in the chest while he struggles to remove his own gun from his holster.
The near threats removed, Lorna turns her sights onto the group by the bush, thirty yards away.
In a gunfight, the longest gun usually wins. The two pigs and the remaining Fed are too far away to hit her. Plus, they have no cover, except for the leafless, sad-looking bush they’d been digging next to.
Lorna had gone varmint hunting too many times to count. She could drop a possum from a hundred feet away.
These men were closer, and lots bigger than possums.
Lorna drops the first cop with one in the head. The second cop hits the dirt, trying to crawl into the hole they’d been digging. The Fed ducks behind the bush, which makes Lorna laugh out loud.
She shoots the cop in the neck, and then shoots the FBI idiot in the arm.
“Toss the gun!” she yells.
He throws his pistol aside and places both hands on his head.
“Stand up!”
He stands. It’s like an FBI version of Simon Says.
Lorna aims, exhaling as she squeezes the trigger.
The agent’s knee explodes in a spectacular fashion.
“I said, stand up! Or the next one is between your ears!”
Lorna truly enjoys watching the man struggle to get up, falling over twice, and finally managing to support himself on one leg.
She thinks about going for the other knee, but drills him through the groin instead.
Again he falls.
Lorna drops the rifle and kneels next to the first pig she killed, the one who took off her leg irons. He has handcuff keys in his pants pocket. She spends a moment freeing her wrists, and then pulls the cop’s sidearm – a Sig Sauer 9mm – from his holster.
“You still alive, Mr. FBI man? Lorna will be with you in just a sec.”
Lorna scans the horizon, doesn’t see another living soul. The fresh air smells wonderful. Like freedom. She walks casually over to the bush, past the dead pig in the hole, over to the Fed who is on his back, grabbing his crotch with both hands and breathing like he’s in labor.
“Ain’t no bodies out here, Mr. FBI man. I was playing with you. Pretty sneaky, wussn’t it?”
His face is soaked with sweat, but he seems more angry than afraid.
“Don’t I scare you, Mr. FBI man? You Feds are tougher than I’d’ve guessed.”
She brings up the Sig, thumbs off the safety, and shoots him in one shoulder, then the other.
There’s fear on his face now. Fear and pain and some craziness too.
“You Feds are something else. You come and visit us – me, and Bud, and people like us – and you talk about trying to understand why we do what we do. Like we’re some animals you’re studying on some nature show on TV.”
She squats down next to the Fed, a big ugly smile on her face.
“This’s what happens when you play with animals, Mr. FBI man. You get bit.”
He cries out, and she fires the gun and stares, curious, as the back of his head decorates the grass behind him.
Lorna doesn’t know how much time she has before someone comes, so she moves fast. First, she pats down the Fed and finds his car keys. Next, she strips out of the orange jumpsuit and hurries over to the sheriff, pleased to see there’s very little blood on his clothes.
She strips him, struggling with the pants, which keep getting stuck on his big feet. It takes almost five minutes, and Lorna curses at herself for taking off her own clothes before she took off his, because she’s freezing by the time she’s done.