caused her to stop before she had started running.
There were three kids standing about forty yards away, in a field, on the opposite side of a fence.
Two boys and a girl. They ranged, he guessed, from eight to eleven years old, and they looked so much alike it was obvious that they were brothers and sister. Even as he turned to look at them, they broke and ran.
Max dropped the whippet and hauled up the rifle. He heard Sally scream, 'No!' behind him just as he pressed the trigger. The rifle cracked and kicked, and the little girl went down, all arms and legs and looseness. The boys stopped for a second and looked at their sister, and then they took off again, running faster than before. Max worked the rifle's lever and just then something hit him from behind. He fired the rifle by accident, and the bullet struck the ground a foot in front of him.
He twisted to-and-fro and finally managed to knock Sally free of his back. She went rolling, and then came up and started for him again. Max worked the lever on the rifle, and when she was two feet from the muzzle he fired into her belly.
The hydraulic action of a rifle bullet entering the human body is something to see. It wasn't quite as grisly as the work of the whippet, but was something, nonetheless. The wound that opened in the front of Sally's body was more than half an inch wide, and she fell without a sound. Max felt a momentary twinge of regret. Now he would never get to do all the things to her that he had wanted to do.
The running boys were almost a hundred yards away by now, but they didn't seem to have enough sense to run in a zig-zag pattern. So they weren't really difficult targets. Max raised the rifle to take aim, and just then he heard a shot and felt something sting his arm. It wasn't agony, and the shot hadn't been the deep, loud roar of the rifle he was carrying. Max looked over in surprise and saw Bradford, untied, free as the air, with an autoloading twenty-two in his hands. He had it across the trunk of his car, and he was aiming for another shot. Max turned toward him and leveled his own rifle, but just then the twenty-two popped again, and this time the pain struck Max in the shoulder.
He dropped the rifle and fell back, and then he started forward again, but the twenty-two went off again, and he felt another sting in the shoulder. The son of a bitch was sure good, he thought, and fell back out of sight, behind the barn.
He had left the shotgun shells in the house, but he still had his pistol. He pulled it out, and felt his arm and shoulder burn like fire from the motion. He would have to shoot with his left hand, he thought, and switched the gun there.
He walked to where Julie was standing and pulled her around in front of him. The exertion made his arm flare up again, but he ignored it. 'How the fuck did he get loose?' Max demanded.
'I don't know.'
'Come on!'
'I swear I don't. Wait a minute,' she said, 'Pete had a knife. If it fell out of his belt when you shot him, maybe that's how Jim got loose.'
'Shit. And where did he get that popgun?'
'From the car. He keeps it there while he drives around the farm, in case he has to kill any injured livestock.'
'You didn't tell me there was a rifle in the car, Goddamn you!'
'I didn't think of it, Max. Honestly.'
'Sure. Well, I'll settle with you later, bitch. Come on now. You're going to be my shield. Hubby isn't going to do much shooting while you're in front of me.'
He shoved her along before him, and when they came to the corner of the barn he wrapped his wounded right arm around her neck and stuck the pistol forward, running his arm under hers. She couldn't block off his whole body, of course, but unless her husband was Buffalo Bill, he'd never risk a shot.
When they rounded the corner, Bradford raised the twenty-two to his shoulder, but he stopped as soon as he had a look at them.
'Why don't you shoot, you cocksucker?' Max yelled. He moved forward until they were standing right next to the rifle he had dropped. 'We're going to squat down together,' Max said in the woman's ear. 'And you're going to pick up that rifle. By the barrel, understand? And you're going to hand it back to me butt first. And if you try anything, I'm going to blow your fucking head right out from between your ears. Understand?'
'Yes, sir,' she said quickly, meekly.
'All right. Down we go.' They squatted together. It was an awkward movement, especially for two people. Her shoulder was lower than Max's and it shoved the gun down so that Max couldn't possibly get a decent shot at Bradford if he had to. Julie picked up the rifle with some difficulty, using both hands on the barrel, and started to hand it back to Max.
Something hit Max in the head like a sledge hammer, and he didn't even hear the report of the twenty-two. He dropped the pistol and fell to the side, and thought that dying was a strange feeling, and he had certainly misjudged the farmer. And then he felt the ground against him, and heard a cry from Julie, and footsteps approaching. Bradford yelled, 'Get out of the way, Julie!' and Max realized that the bullet had only grazed his head. Bradford had had to hold the sights wide to be sure he wouldn't hit his wife. He looked at the pistol, lying just out of reach, and thought that he might have a better chance trying to wrest the rifle from Julie, but then he saw Bradford, only a few feet away, and he knew that either would be hopeless. Bradford stopped and shouldered the little rifle and took aim at the middle of Max's face. Max waited for the little bullet to furrow through his brain.
The report was loud, and it was unexpected. At first Max thought that it was the twenty-two, that this was what even a small bore rifle sounded like when it was aimed right at your face, but then he saw Bradford standing there, with a look of dumbfounded surprise on his face, and a big, gaping wound in his chest, and then the man fell over backwards.
Max looked at Julie in surprise. She stared back at him dumbly for a moment, and then she thrust the rifle out toward him, offering it.
'I had to do it,' she said intensely. 'You can see that, can't you, Max? I had to do it. He was going to kill you.' Max just stared at her. He took the rifle, finally, and worked the lever. 'Max, I love you. I think I've loved you from the first time you took me. You know how to treat a woman. You know how to own her. I just put up with Pete, and I was never happy with Jim, really. I realized that after you showed me what it could be like.'
So she was crazy. Neurotic. She liked to be dominated and treated like dirt. And that was the reason she had been so cooperative, not fear, as he had supposed. He wondered whether she had known her own motive before this moment, and the likelihood of her husband killing him, had forced her to.
'Take me with you, Max,' she said. 'Please. I'll take care of you. I can work while you hide out. I can support us. I'll be useful to you, Max. And I'll be there when you need a woman. I'll always be there for you to use.'
'All right.' Max heard the words croak out of his mouth. 'All right, get the keys to the car. We'll have to get out of here right now. Those kids will have everyone in the county here in a few minutes.'
Chapter Thirteen
Julie grabbed the keys to the car from the dresser in the bedroom, and took the money she had been saving for Jim's birthday. There was more than fifty dollars, and it would come in handy, she knew. She ran into the living room and got the shotgun shells. They might come in handy, too, in case Max wanted to rob a store or something with the shotgun.
She took it all outside, and threw it in the back of the car. Max was sitting in the right hand seat. 'Do you want to take the baby?' she asked. 'She could be a hostage if shooting starts. No one will shoot at you.'
'Sure,' he said. 'Bring her.' He still seemed a little dazed by her actions. Julie smiled and leaned and kissed him quickly. Then she ran into the house again, and got Diane, and while she was there she grabbed some clothes for herself, and some for Max, too.
'Let's go,' she said, when she had thrown the clothes into the back seat. 'Oh, do you want me to drive?'
'Yeah. I'll hold the guns.'
Julie put the baby in the back seat and started the engine. The car was a little hard to start, but it coughed into life finally. She backed around and pointed it toward the driveway, then put it in drive and started over the rut
