She just stood there, bringing her hands to her face.
A large divot of splintered wood had appeared on the facing of the kitchen entryway about shoulder-high not a foot from her. I could see the splinters on her neck and ear.
In the next instant Hank hit her from behind and took her down to the floor. I heard a loud grunt.
“Bill,” Hank called out. “Head’s up.”
Something sailed through the air toward me from their direction behind the tallest stack of books. I snatched it out of the air and was pulling the slide on the object before I could think much about it. It was a thirty-eight.
I looked again out of the small doorway glass in time to see the passenger door on the other side of the truck fly open.
An engine roared into life.
I don’t know what came over me after that. The moment became somewhat surrealistic, with dark, pulsing, purplish and red tendrils creeping into the corners of my vision. It’s happened to me a few times before, and each time it has, by the time I saw the colors and recognized them for what they meant, it was too late.
The front door was suddenly open and I was across the porch and sailing off into the brilliant green too-tall grass and the too-bright sunlight, and the funny thing about it was I couldn’t even feel my feet touching the ground.
The pickup truck was moving, slamming the corner of the rear fender of my Mercedes in an effort to escape. There was the shatter of glass and the crunch of metal. I didn’t much care, though, at that moment. The red and purple pulses were forming interesting tributaries around the movie theater screen my vision had become. And there was a part of me that was watching the whole thing with a sort of rapt fascination, like a kid at the movies with a box of overly buttered popcorn on his lap and an awed look on his face. But, when you’re watching a movie, you’re safe. The bullets aren’t real bullets and the crunching metal is all staged and all is right with the world. That was how I felt.
It looked as though I was going to beat the truck.
I pointed my right hand at the truck cab and the blurry figures inside it as the whole thing loomed suddenly very large in front of me. My hand bucked once… Twice.
The driver was trying to put his foot through the floorboard of the thing. Tires squealed on the hot pavement and a carburetor whined with a steep over-abundance of horsepower.
The center of the pickup windshield blossomed with a huge, elaborate spider web. Another, duplicate, spider web appeared in front of the driver.
The truck came on.
It had been perhaps thirty feet away a second before, but suddenly it was about half that, or maybe more.
I did this funny thing with my legs-I did a sideways frog-movement. Sort of a cross between a hop and a dive.
I felt a numbness in my left foot, even as my shoulder slammed into the bottom of the ditch across the road from Hank’s house. Anyone who has ever been bitten by a shark while swimming would know how it felt. First there was a bit of a jolt traveling up my leg, a distant cousin to the electrocution variety, then sudden and intense numbness. Last came pain. But that was okay. What was even more noteworthy was the interesting sensation around the crown of my head, and the darkness that came on. Which in itself was interesting because I had been fairly certain that it was early afternoon.
CHAPTER SIX
I’ve had a few rude awakenings in my life. When I came to in the near dark, that first instant was unsettling. I wanted to swat at the wasps that were stinging my head, only there were no wasps.
“Settle down, Bill.” It was Hank’s voice.
“What happened?” I asked.
We were inside a garage. A bare forty-watt bulb cast the only light into the room. I heard a gentle snore nearby.
“That’s Julie,” Hank said. “She’s asleep. Napping. Don’t worry… She’s fine.”
“The last thing I remember was seeing Julie standing in your kitchen doorway. Somebody shot at her.”
“According to Green-Eyes over there, that would be Jake Jorgenson. He’s the one with the rifle. Also, she says he’s a pretty good shot. But he was looking in through glass at an angle, and I think refraction saved her life.”
“Yeah?”
“Also, you tried to tackle a speeding truck. How’s that foot?”
“What foot?”
I looked to where he pointed. My shoe was off and I had one leg partially elevated. My foot was wrapped up with an Ace bandage.
“What the hell?” I said.
“You must have kicked that truck. Or else somebody ran over your foot. I don’t think anything’s broken, though. It’s not as big as it was a few hours ago.”
“Geez. It hurts,” I said. “But not like my head.”
“Good,” Hank said. “Probably you’ll just limp for a few days. But you’ll need to walk on it soon. You know. To see if anything… gives.”
I looked down past my foot and saw an army cot boxed in by a couple of old steel filing cabinets. It was Julie. She was wrapped up in a sleeping bag.
“Carpin wants her dead,” I said.
“Yeah,” Hank replied. “I don’t know the guy, and he sounds like a real asshole. But,” he chuckled, “if somebody did to me what she did to him… Well.” He was sitting in a folding chair facing me, one of the kind you’d use on a fishing trip that is nothing more than a couple of pieces of bent pipe and two swatches of canvas. He had a three-fifty-seven Smith amp; Wesson Magnum on his lap and a large night watchman’s flashlight in his hand.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I put Dingo in the house,” Hank said, offhand. “Anyone tries to go in there, she’ll have them for dinner. Also, we’ll hear it out here.”
As I recalled, Dingo was a cross between a German Shepherd and an Australian Blue Heeler. One of the smartest dogs I’d ever seen. I’d forgotten all about her.
I moved to get up but felt a wedge of cold pain at my temples.
“Take it easy, Cowboy,” he said. “You’ve got a minor concussion.”
“Feels like… Goddamn wasps nest in my head. Why the garage?”
“No windows.”
“Oh,” I said. “Say… What time of day is it?”
Hank looked down at his watch. “About three in the afternoon. Anyway, I can’t let you go back to sleep. Not for awhile.”
“I thought it was night. It’s sure dark in here.”
“We won’t be leaving until it
“Okay,” I said. “Good enough. So what do you want to do?”
“Well, I was thinking about that.” Hank turned to the side in his chair and reached down toward the floor. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see what he brought back up.
“It’s time for the world-series,” he said. “Best two out of three. Or three out of five. Or whatever.”
He unfolded the cardboard square, put it down flat on a small pedestal beside him, and held out a
