She laughed again, wheezing, and choked a little on the smoke of her cigarette and laughed and choked and wheezed at the same time.
'Object,' she gasped. 'You can object like a… like a rat's ass,' and she laughed and wheezed so hard she couldn't talk for a minute. She stopped laughing and wheezed a little longer and got her breath back and squinted at me some more.
'You are a by-God big one,' she said. 'Might be sorta interesting.'
I was gaining ground, so I shut up and smiled and listened. Susan said it was a technique I might consider polishing.
The fat woman pointed with her chin. 'Vern's truck is parked 'cross the street in front of the bowling alley. He'll be inside drinking beer.'
'Thank you,' I said.
She inhaled, coughed, and chuckled in her wheezy way. 'Rat's ass,' she said.
I was wearing jeans and running shoes and a gray sleeveless T-shirt and a gray silk tweed summer jacket and a gun. I took off the jacket, and unclipped the gun from my belt and folded the jacket on top of the gun and put them on the front seat of my car. Then I walked across the street and into the bowling alley. The bowling alley was one of those round-topped corrugated buildings that look like a big Quonset hut or a small airplane hangar. There were only three lanes inside, and a snack bar that sold beer and sandwiches. No one was bowling. A short dark- haired man with a bald spot and tattooed arms was behind the bar. He had on a sleeveless undershirt with a spot of ketchup on it. Sitting on a barstool drinking Budweiser beer from a longnecked bottle was a guy with a round red face and a big hard belly. He was entirely bald and his head seemed to swell out of his thick shoulders without benefit of neck. He had small piggy eyes under scant eyebrows that were blond or white and barely visible and his thick flared short nose looked like a snout. The eyes and nose gave his face a swinish cast. He was wearing a dirty white T-shirt and baggy blue overalls and work boots. He hadn't shaved recently, but his beard, like his eyebrows, was so pale that it only gave a shabby glint to his red skin. He wasn't talking to the bartender, and he wasn't looking at the soap opera on television. He was staring straight ahead and drinking the beer. When I came in he shifted his stare at me and in its meanness it was nearly tangible. The hand wrapped around the beer bottle was thick and hammy with big knuckles. There was no air-conditioning in the place but a big floor fan hummed near the bar, pushing the hot air around the dim room.
I said, 'Vern Buckey?'
He unhooked his bootheels from the lower rung of the barstool and let his feet drop to the floor and stood up. He was at least six feet four, which gave him three inches on me, and he must have weighed eighty pounds more than my two hundred. A lot of it was stomach but what he lacked in conditioning he probably made up in meanness.
'What did you say?' He spoke in a hoarse kind of whisper.
'Vern Buckey.'
'I don't like you saying that,' he rasped.
'I don't blame you,' I said. 'Sounds like an asshole name to me, too, but I want to talk with you about your daughter.'
Buckey put the beer bottle down on the counter and stepped toward me.
'Get the fuck out of here,' he said.
'Your daughter's dead,' I said.
'I told you to get out,' he said, and took another step. 'People round here do what I say.'
'I need to know about Ginger, Vern.'
'Then I'm going to rack your ass,' he said.
I shrugged. 'Sure. In the parking lot. No point messing up this slick amusement complex.'
I turned and went out the door. In the parking lot cars and pickup trucks and two motorcycles had arrived. People sat in the cars and trucks and on the bikes in a kind of expectant semicircle. The fat woman from the town office was there with a group of other citizens in a cluster, near Buckey's green Ford truck. I gave her a short thumbs-up gesture. She poked an elbow into the man next to her and pointed at me with her chin. I could hear her wheeze. Buckey came out of the bowling alley squinting with his little pig eyes in the glare of the summer. He looked around at the circle of onlookers and hunched his shoulders as if to get a kink out and came straight at me.
'Talked with a sheriff's deputy on the phone before I came up,' I said. 'Said you were crazy. Said everyone in this part of the state was afraid of you.'
Bucky tried to kick me in the groin and I turned and he missed and grunted and turned toward me again.
'Said even the cops are afraid of you because you're nuts.' He kicked at me again and missed again. I was moving around him. He was massive and relentless but he wasn't very fast. If I didn't let my mind wander, I could probably avoid him. It was why I'd come out. I didn't want the fight confined in a small space.
'Said you'd get on someone's case and maybe they'd be driving along at night and someone would backshoot them with a deer rifle at an intersection.'
Buckey rushed at me and I slipped aside and slapped him across the face. The sound of it made several onlookers gasp.
'They know it's you but they can't catch you.'
Buckey hit me a roundhouse right-hand punch on the upper left arm and numbness set in at once. He followed with a left but I rolled away from it.
'I can see why you're a backshooter, Vern,' I said. 'You can't hit shit with your fists.'
Buckey was a little quicker than he looked and got hold of my shirtfront, and as I tried to yank away he hit me with his right hand again, this time on the side of my head just in front of my left ear. Bells rang. I brought both fists
