Though the old man must’ve been dead instantly, his body apparently didn’t know that, and he took four quick backward steps on his heels, then fell in the doorway to the living room. Becky looked at Jimmy and said, “Crazy old fuck.”
Tom came in, looked at the body, and said, “Jeez, you killed your pa.”
“And it felt pretty fuckin’ good,” Jimmy said. “Help me drag his ass into the living room. I want to eat some oatmeal, and I don’t want to look at him while I’m doing it.” To Becky he said, “Go on. Cook us up some oatmeal.”
The body downstairs did cause some unease, and Tom eventually got a blanket and went out and slept in the Charger. Jimmy and Becky went and slept in Jimmy’s old bed, which smelled of mold, but neither was about to sleep in the old man’s. Becky insisted on sex, whining until Jimmy gave in. They took a shower together, but Jimmy knew it wasn’t going to work-it just didn’t work for him-and they went in the bedroom and Becky went down on him, and it still didn’t work.
Then he went down on her, after threatening to kill her if she told anyone, and she definitely believed that he would kill her, after what she’d seen that night, and with the body in the front room, but when she screamed down five or six or eight orgasms, she couldn’t have cared less about the body.
Maybe nothing else worked, but Jimmy was good with his hands and mouth.
They got a restless couple hours of sleep, and wound up back in the kitchen, eating more oatmeal. Jimmy said, “We need to get rolling, if we’re going to Hollywood. We get out there, we’ll be okay.”
“What about your pa?” Tom asked. He glanced nervously at the kitchen doorway, where he could see a leg below the knee, a shoe, and a dirty white sock.
“Fuck him. Who’s gonna know? Everybody in town hates his ass, nobody ever comes here,” Jimmy said. “We’ll take the Charger over to Marshall tonight and ditch it.”
“No gas in the Charger,” Tom said. “I tried to heat her up last night, when I was sleeping out there, and it ran for three minutes and died. No gas.”
“You dumb shit,” Jimmy said.
“Good thing I did it,” Tom said. “If we’d tried to go anywhere, we would of got about a mile, and then we would’ve been walking, where everybody could see us. Don’t got enough money between the three of us to buy a gallon of gas.”
Jimmy said, “Well, we got a few bucks. When I shot that bitch last night, I saw a wad on the dresser and grabbed it.”
Becky said, “Really? How much?”
“Quite a bit,” Jimmy said. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a fold of cash. Becky reached out and said, “Let me see,” but he pulled it back and stuck it in his pocket.
“None of your business,” he said. “But we need more. We need a clean car that will get us where we’re going, and we don’t have enough to get one.”
Tom said, “We could just get bus tickets-”
“Fuck a bunch of buses,” Jimmy said. “Let me check the old man.”
They walked through the kitchen to the body, couldn’t look directly at him, but felt his pockets and came up empty. Jimmy said, “Must be upstairs.” He went up to the old man’s bedroom, came back down a minute later, and said, “Eighteen dollars and thirty cents. We got more off the black dude.”
Becky said, “We might get a couple of bucks off my folks.”
Jimmy said, “Good idea. We’ll take the old man’s truck.”
Becky’s folks didn’t have any money, but they had the same attitude that James Sharp Senior had, and they didn’t like Jimmy at all. Old man Welsh was hungover, and not about to put up with any shit.
“Do I look like I’m made of money? When I was your age, I’d been working for five years.”
“That’s ’cause you could get a job way back then,” Becky said. “You can’t get one now, and I mean,
“You little fuckin’ brat, I raised you and fed you and now you come around with your peckerwood friends with your hands out-”
“You just call me a peckerhead?” Jimmy asked, his voice quiet.
“Peckerwood,” the old man said. “I said peckerwood. But you want me to call you a peckerhead? Okay, you’re a peckerhead.”
Becky’s mother snorted at that: funny stuff. She stopped smiling when Jimmy took out the.38.
“Now, we don’t need that,” Becky’s father said.
“You think I’m a peckerhead now?” Jimmy asked. He pointed the gun at Welsh’s chest. “Come on, say it.”
“You’re not one, you’re not one,” Ann Welsh said. She farted in fear, and the smell spread through the kitchen and Tom said, “Aw, Jesus. .” and waved his hand in front of his face.
“Let’s just calm down.” Welsh lifted his hands, like cowboys used to do on TV when they were giving up.
“No. I want to hear you call me a peckerhead again,” Jimmy said.
Becky said, “Yeah, call him a peckerhead.”
Welsh was sweating furiously now, and he said, “I don’t know what to do.”
Jimmy said, “Easy. Just what I told you. Call me a peckerhead.”
Welsh said, “Don’t point the gun-”
“Call me a peckerhead, or goddamnit, I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out,” Jimmy said.
Welsh whimpered, and Jimmy smiled at the sound, and Welsh licked his lips and muttered, “Peckerhead.”
Jimmy shot him in the heart, and Ann Welsh turned on a dime and made for the back door, got three steps and Jimmy, stepping along behind her, shot her in the back of the head. He looked at them on the floor and turned to Becky and asked, “You hate me now?”
Her eyes were steel gray and she shook her head once: “No. Fuck ’em. They ruined my life.”
Tom said, “We better get out of here.”
Becky said to Jimmy: “Let’s go to Marshall. I know where we can get it all-car, money, everything.”
6
Virgil spent a fruitless Sunday morning sitting in his truck, calling people on the telephone-people turned up by Davenport in the Twin Cities, people in Shinder who knew Becky Welsh or Jimmy Sharp, or any of the dead people, scratching for any connection.
The most confounding thing, at least for the moment, was the disappearance of the elder Sharp’s truck. They had it on some authority that it wouldn’t make it fifty miles, but he couldn’t find it anywhere in Minnesota, Iowa, or North or South Dakota, and at this point there were several hundred cops looking for it.
Duke asked, “Where do you think it is? Give me a guess.”
“It’s down in a creek bed somewhere, where it can’t be seen from a road, and they’re camping out with it, or it’s in a garage or a barn and they’ve got new wheels.”
At one o’clock, they had two nearly simultaneous breaks. Virgil had the crime-scene crew work over the Charger, and they’d found dozens of fingerprints, both in the front and back seats, and because of the extreme amount of plastic in the car, they got good ones. At one o’clock, they got a return on one set of them: Tom McCall, who had no criminal record, had been fingerprinted when he went into the navy, and his fingerprints were in the federal database.
A few minutes later, Duke called to say that he’d found McCall’s mother, an elementary school teacher in Bigham. McCall’s father had gone out for a loaf of bread a few years earlier and hadn’t yet returned.
“I want to talk to her,” Virgil said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
He called Davenport and said, “Tom McCall was in the car, in the backseat. So I think I can call it: James
