“Then what the fuck are we doing?”
By now the two had spread out. One was going wide, in the direction of the Volkswagen, and I knew he was my guy, as he was on my side. The other guy going the other way, I decided not to think about him. He belonged to Vanilla Ride.
My guy brought his gun up and a shot went by my head so close I felt the heat from it. I jerked my automatic up and fired. If I hit him, he didn’t show it. He started running low along the ground, and I fired again. He did a kind of bunny hop and went down. I heard shots to my right, but I didn’t turn my head. I could still see out of the corner of my eye that Vanilla Ride was standing.
She said, “Goddamn,” and then my guy leaped forward from where he lay, grabbed at an automatic rifle he had planted earlier, in the dark, hid it there waiting to grab it and cheat. I stepped forward and took my time, aiming one-handed, the way I had been taught, not with two hands, and when he lifted up I shot him somewhere along the jawline. It took part of his face off and he rolled on his side and lost the rifle, but he came up then, as if the pain had given him a jolt of power. He stumbled forward. He had another handgun, drawn from under his coat, and he was coming toward me fast, his face seeming to drip. He fired a shot and I found myself standing sideways all of a sudden, looking in the wrong direction. And by the time I had turned, having realized I had been hit, he was firing again, and this time one of his shots punched my coat but missed me, and I took careful aim and fired, hitting him in the center of the chest, but he kept coming. I fired again, and he must have been firing too, because there seemed to be shots popping all over, and I’m thinking I missed, but he went down, propped on a knee. I shot him another time and his body jerked and he went to his right side and lay there, his ruined face in my direction, his body kind of horseshoed behind him.
Turning, I saw Vanilla Ride was standing with her arm to her side, her gun in her hand. Her man lay on the ground squirming, holding his groin.
“Right in the goober,” she said, and started walking toward him.
He saw her coming. One hand went away from his groin and clawed in the dirt for his dropped handgun. He never got to it before she stood over him and shot him twice in the head.
She came walking back toward me. I could see her right side was stained with blood. She didn’t seem to notice. My left arm had grown heavy, and then I felt as if it was being set on fire. The way she walked, the way she was coming toward me made me nervous. I said, “We still good?”
“We are,” she said, and walked right past me.
57
“If she hadn’t been good,” Leonard said, “I was going to shoot her.”
He was standing at the edge of the house with the deer rifle. He had gone out the back door. He said, “You’ll find the guy you shot, he’s also got a rifle shot in his chest.”
“I thought I missed.”
“Nope. You hit him. I just hit him again.”
“That was cheating,” Vanilla Ride said to Leonard. “Ganging up on the guy.”
“Damn straight,” Leonard said. “You think I’m going to let that motherfucker kill my brother?”
She grinned at him.
My knees buckled and I fell down.
Inside the house on the couch, Leonard looked at my wound. Vanilla Ride came over. She had removed her shirt and was wearing a sports bra and a bandage around her waist, different blue jeans. She said, “I got hit, but it went through.”
“He’s still got the bullet in his arm,” Leonard said, as he pulled the splinter out of my face.
She took hold of my arm, looked it over, making me wince. “You’ll be all right, tough guy. We got to push the bullet all the way through. It’s in the fat of your arm. You didn’t lose a lot of blood.”
“Any is too much … what did you say?”
“You’re lucky it missed the serious muscle,” she said.
“About that pushing it all the way through business,” I said.
She went away for a while and I lay on the couch, kind of going in and out. She came over and I looked up and she had a kitchen knife, about half of it glowed red-hot.
“Now wait just a goddamn minute,” I said.
“Hold him down,” she said.
Leonard got on top of me and kept my back pinned to the couch, held my injured arm down and at my side. “It’s for your own good, dumb ass,” he said.
“I hate you,” I said.
Vanilla Ride took the knife and stuck it quickly into the wound and pushed and I felt the knife touch the bullet inside of me, and then I passed out. When I woke up, she was cutting at the back of my arm, freeing the bullet. I passed out again.
When I came to I was bandaged up and sick to my stomach. There was a lot of sunlight now, but it was very cold. Leonard was sitting on the couch with the rifle across his knees. He said, “She’s gone,” and when he spoke a cloud of white mist came out of his mouth. “We should have killed her, I guess. She had it coming, Tonto, the kids and all. But she did help save our ass.”
“What?”
“Gone. She left us four hundred thousand dollars. Took the Volkswagen, told me to tell you if she was older, or you were younger, you might be her meat.”
“She said that?”
