“Let me have a turn!” May held out his hands for the bazooka.
“No, we need to get out of here,” Low said. “But you’ll get your chance, brother. That I promise.”
“When? Where?”
“Up to the prison.”
Van Lampley stood by her ATV, stunned. She had seen the first contrail cross Main Street, and knew what it meant even before the blast. Those son-of-a-bitching Griner brothers had gotten an RPG launcher or something like it from Fritz Meshaum. As the smoke from the second blast began to clear, she could see flames licking out from holes that had been windows. One of the triple doors was lying in the street, twisted into a corkscrew of chromed steel. The others were nowhere to be seen.
Woe to anyone who was in there, she thought.
Red Platt, one of the salesmen at Dooling Kia, came swaying and staggering toward her. Blood was sheeting down the right side of his face, and his lower lip no longer looked completely attached—although with all the blood, it was hard to tell.
“What was that?” Red shouted in a cracked voice. Shards of glass glittered in his thinning hair. “What the fuck was that?”
“The work of two swinging dicks who need a broomhandle stuck in their spokes before they hurt anyone else,” Van said. “You ought to get patched up, Red.”
She walked toward the Shell station, feeling like herself for the first time in days. She knew it wouldn’t last, but while it did, she intended to ride the adrenalin. The gas station was open, but unattended. Van found a ten-gallon can in the garage bay, filled it at one of the pumps, and left a twenty on the counter beside the cash register. The world might be ending, but she had been raised to pay her bills.
She toted the can back to her ATV, filled the tank, and headed out of town in the direction the Griner brothers had come from.
Kent Daley was having a very bad night, and it wasn’t even eight o’clock. He had no more than turned off Route 31 and accelerated toward the buses blocking West Lavin Road when he was clotheslined off his bike and driven to the ground. His head hit the asphalt and bright lights flashed in front of his eyes. When they cleared, he saw the muzzle of a rifle three inches from his face.
“Shit fire!” exclaimed Reed Barrows, the deputy who had taken Kent down. Reed had been placed at the southwest point of Terry’s compass rose. He put his gun down and hauled Kent up by the front of his shirt. “I know you, you’re the kid who was putting firecrackers in mailboxes last year.”
Men were running toward them from the new and improved roadblock, Frank Geary in the lead. Terry Coombs brought up the rear, weaving slightly. They knew what had happened in town; there had already been a dozen calls on a dozen cell phones, and they could easily see the fire burning in the middle of Dooling from this high vantage point. Most of them wanted to go tear-assing back, but Terry, fearing it was a diversion to get the woman out, had ordered them to hold their positions.
“What are you doing out here, Daley?” Reed asked. “You could have gotten yourself shot.”
“I’ve got a message,” Kent said, rubbing the back of his head. It wasn’t bleeding, but a large knot was forming there. “It’s for Terry or Frank, or both of them.”
“What the fuck’s going on?” Don Peters asked. He had donned a football helmet at some point; his close-set eyes, deep in the shadow of the forehead shield, looked like those of a small and hungry bird. “Who’s this?”
Frank pushed Don aside and dropped to one knee beside the kid. “I’m Frank,” he said. “What’s the message?”
Terry also took a knee. His breath was redolent of booze. “Come on, son. Take a beep death… deep breath… and pull yourself together.”
Kent groped among his scattered thoughts. “That woman in the prison there, the special one, she’s got friends in town. Lots of them. Two of them grabbed me. They said to tell you to stop what you’re doing and go away, or the police station will only be the first thing to go.”
Frank’s lips stretched in a smile that came nowhere near his eyes. He turned to Terry. “So what do you think, Sheriff? Are we going to be good boys and go away?”
Little Low was no Mensa candidate himself, but he possessed a degree of cunning that had kept the Griner operation afloat for almost six years before he and his brother had finally been brought down. (Low blamed his generous nature; they had let the McDavid cunt, who was hardly a ten, hang around and she had repaid them by becoming a snitch.) He had an instinctive grasp of human psychology in general and male psychology in particular. When you told men they oughtn’t to do a thing, that was what they did.
Terry didn’t hesitate. “Not going away. Going in at sunrise. Let them blow up the whole goddam town.”
The men who had gathered around raised a cheer so hoarse and so savage that Kent Daley flinched. What he wanted more than anything was to take his sore head home, lock all the doors, and go to sleep.
So far, the adrenalin was holding out; Van hammered on Fritz Meshaum’s door hard enough to rattle it in its frame. A long-fingered hand that looked as if it had too many knuckles pulled aside a filthy curtain. A stubble-spackled face peered out. A moment later, the door opened. Fritz opened his mouth, but Van seized him and began to shake him like a terrier with a rat before he could utter a word.
“What did you sell them, you scrawny little shitepoke? Was it a rocket launcher? It was, wasn’t it? How much did those bastards pay you so they could blow a hole in the middle of downtown?”
By then they were inside, Van roughly steering Fritz across his cluttered living room. He beat feebly at one of her shoulders with his left hand; the other arm was bound in a makeshift sling that looked as if it had been made from a bedsheet.
“Quit it!” Fritz shouted. “Quit it, woman, I already had my damn arm dislocated by them two cretins!”
Van shoved him down in a filthy armchair with a stack of old skin magazines beside it. “Talk.”
“It wasn’t a rocket launcher, it was a vintage Russian bazooka, coulda sold it for six, seven thousand dollars at one of those parkin lot gun sales up in Wheeling, and those two country-fried fuckers stole it!”
“Well, of course you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Van was panting.
“It’s the truth.” Fritz looked at her more closely, his eyes sliding from her round face to her big breasts to her wide hips, then back up again. “You’re the first woman I’ve seen in two days. How long you been awake?”
“Since last Thursday morning.”
“Holy moly, that must be a record.”
“Not even close.” Van had Googled it. “Never mind that. Those boys just blew up the sheriff’s station.”
“I heard a hell of a bang,” admitted Fritz. “Guess that bazooka works pretty good.”
“Oh, it worked fine,” Van said. “I don’t suppose you’d know where they’re going next.”
“Nope, not a clue.” Fritz began to grin, exposing teeth that hadn’t seen a dentist in a good long while, if ever. “But I could find out.”
“How?”
“Damn fools looked right at it, and when I told em it was an inventory tag, they believed me!” His laugh sounded like a file scraping on a rusty hinge.
“What are you talking about?”
“GPS tracker. I put em on all my high-end items, case they get stolen. Which that bazooka was. I can track it on my phone.”
“Which you will give me,” Van said, and held out her hand.
Fritz looked up at her, his eyes a sly and watery blue under wrinkled lids. “If you get my bazooka, will you give it back before you go to sleep?”