“About some things you think I am that I am not. And about some other stuff as well.”
“What?”
But they had arrived in the barnyard of the Stepford farm. The house was white clapboard, an assemblage of structures added as the farm prospered. The lawn was neat, and someone had planted a bright bed of flowers by the sidewalk. A huge oak tree towered over the house.
Bud and Ted climbed out. Bud adjusted his Ray-Bans and removed his Smokey hat from the wire rack behind his seat and pulled it on. He looked about. There was a fallow field, where the spring wheat had already been harvested and the earth turned. Copses of scrub oak showed here and there among the gentle rolls of the land, and far off, a blazing bright green field signaled the presence of alfalfa.
There was a blue-stern pasture off to the right, and a few cattle grazed amid the barrels of hay.
“Looks okay to me,” said Ted.
“The goddamned phone is probably off the hook.”
“Hello?” cried Bud. And then again.
There was no answer.
“Let's go up and knock and see what happens.”
Richard ran downstairs. He knew he shouldn't scream but he wanted to.
The panic billowed through him brightly.
He wanted to crap again. His stomach ached as he raced thumpingly along.
“Lamar,” he sobbed, 'Lamar, Lamar, oh Lamar.”
He plunged down the steps.
In the darkness of the basement, O’Dell was over by the workbench, sawing with a hacksaw. Richard looked and saw three long metal poles on the floor and three wooden boots or something.
Lamar looked over at him.
“Lamar,” he gasped, 'cops. State police.”
Lamar just looked at him blankly. Then he said, 'How many? A goddamned team? SWAT, what? Or just a one car?”
“I only saw one,” said Richard.
“Halfway up the driveway.
Be here in a minute.”
Lamar nodded. He turned and looked at the Stepfords, who sat groggily on an old couch.
“You make a sound and you're dead. I mean that, sir, and I ain't a-fucking with you.” His voice was level but intense.
O’Dell, meanwhile, had risen from his position and was busy threading ammunition into the shotguns that Richard now saw had been sawed off so that they were short and handy.
Lamar took one, threw some sort of lever with an oily clang.
“We're going upstairs. You tie these people up and I mean tight. Then you come up. You hear shooting, you come a-running, do you get that?
And bring your gun.”
“Hootin',” said O’Dell happily.
“Yes, Lamar,” said Richard.
“Okay, O’Dell,” said Lamar.
“We goin' fry us some Smokey.”
Lamar stuffed a dozen bright red-and-blue shells into his pockets and O’Dell followed. They raced up the steps.
Lamar watched them. A guy with some miles on him, and a kid. Standing in the sun, just looking the place over.
The older one called out 'Hello” and adjusted his duty belt. Then he got his Smokey hat out and set to fiddling with it. He wanted it just right, just set perfect on his head.
Show-ofiy cocksucker. The kid looked somewhat grumpy, maybe tired. He wanted to get it over with.
Lamar knew they were cherry. He could smell it on them. They had no idea what they were walking into; if they had, they'd have had their pieces out and they'd be behind cover. He watched as they exchanged a few dry words, then made up their minds to come up to the house.
He could tell also that the young one had a vest on by the unnatural smoothness of the way the cotton of his shirt clung to the Kevlar; the older one, though barrel-chested and big, was apparently without body armor, for there was more give in the material as he moved.
“O’Dell, you go out the back, around the side of the house on the left.
You ain't gonna fire until I do. You wanna do the old guy first, same as me. He may have been in a scrape or two and maybe has been shot at.
He probably won't panic so bad as the other. But main thing is, they can't reach the goddamn cruiser, because then they'll call it in, and in two minutes they got the goddamned backup in.
We gotta take ’em out clean, you got that, sweetie?”
“Kwean,” said O’Dell.
“You shoot for the head on the boy. Aim high, try and hit him in the face. The old boy, you can gut shoot him. He ain't wearing no vest.”
O’Dell darted out the back, shotgun in hand.
Lamar moved up to the left of the window. They were too far for a shotgun. If this goddamned old farmer had had an assault rifle, he could have taken them both out with one fast semiauto string. He had four shells in his cut down Browning auto, a pocketful of spares, and his goddamned long-slide .45, but he hated to shoot it out with a handgun.
Too many its or maybes with a handgun.
The excitement in him was incredible. But so was the giddiness. He almost giggled. Bliss boomed through him.
He tried to chill himself out, but goddamn, this was going to be/yn!
When to fire? Fire when they knock on the door? Fire through the goddamned wood, blow ’em back? But maybe the buckshot didn't have enough power to get through the wood and would spend itself getting through it. No, best to let ’em get within ten feet and then pull down. Knock ’em down with the shotgun, then close and finish them off with the .45.
Oooooooeeeeeeee! Bar-b-cued Smokey!
They walked up toward the house. A large dragonfly flashed in the sun.
Bud saw the flowers and the love of flowers the owners had put into them. Jen was like that, too.
It seemed strange they hadn't come out to greet the policemen, as farm people were among the last in America to still show respect to the badge.
He had turned to Ted to remark on the stillness of it when Ted exploded.
Ted didn't actually explode; he was simply standing stricken in a sudden cloud of red mist and his throat had gone to pulsing colors and his eyes had widened with horror.
To Bud it seemed as if they had stepped through a glass door into another world and were suddenly ensnared in a medium of molasses or oil, something thick that dampened all sound and made their motions utterly painful and slow.
There was no noise at all. Or if there was. Bud didn't hear it a bit.
He felt the stings as though being attacked by a swarm of bees and had a sense that a leg had died on him.
And then the world flashed orange and he had no sense of anything, as if he'd been somehow snatched from time itself, and then he returned to earth a second later, surprised to find himself down on the ground. He had no memory of falling. Blood was everywhere. He looked at poor Ted, who was bleeding even more profusely at the throat and screaming soundlessly. A starburst had fractured the left lens of Ted's Ray-Bans; blood ran in a snaky little line down from the obscured eye.
It all seemed to be happening so slowly, and he could make no sense of it at all, though the air seemed full of dust and insects, and then he realized they were taking shotgun fire from the left window and that he had been hit bad.
