coat of paint, but somehow he didn't feel like it. They all needed to chill after the rush of the robbery. It would be a good day to take it easy. He wanted to check the far field, which Ruta Beth said her daddy had once dreamed of planting with alfalfa, but he wasn't quite sure if he wanted to plan that far ahead. It would be a shame to start something so ambitious and then have to let it go for one reason or another. O’Dell was up watching the early morning cartoons on the TV, which he never missed, and Ruta Beth was messing around in the kitchen. Richard was still sleeping, of course.
So Lamar went out to the creek that ran between Ruta Bern's and the Mcgillavery's place. He was trying to think of another job. A job that would light up Oklahoma like the goddamned Fourth of July. But it was hard with this crew.
They'd just managed to skip by on the Denny's and had been lucky, as that goddamned TV nigger had said; suppose that damned woman had hit him, instead of missing?
It was probably Richard's scream that made her miss. Richard wasn't much good at nothing, but the scream had helped probably more than it had hurt. Lamar didn't like to think how close he'd come to buying the ranch, even with a little .380. Goddamn, old Ruta Bern had been faster than O’Dell on the return fire. Wasn't she a peach?
But—what kind of a new job were they capable of? You needed a really hard crew to bring off something fancy.
Richard could drive, he and O’Dell could handle the heavy stuff, and Ruta Bern could tail-gun. That was about all that was available. He now saw that going in without leaving someone in the car was a big mistake. Almost got them all killed. So he tried to think of something they could do.
Another Denny's? Nah. Maybe a grocery market or the big PX at Fort Sill. Or what about something that nobody had ever done—say, a whole mall? Wouldn't that be something:
the whole goddamned thing! Or a rodeo? Had anyone ever robbed a rodeo? What about one of them casinos the Indians had built on their tribal property. Or a high-stakes bingo game?
Lamar sat back, dreaming of the glory of it all, mightily pleased. So much was possible. Two months ago he'd been just another con in the grim hole of the Mac with nothing to look forward to except trying to hold on to what he had.
Now look: He had a family! He had a family! He hadn't worked it out just yet, but if they could do two or three more scores, big ones, then maybe they could lie low.
Maybe buy a camper and go to Florida or something. Lamar had never seen Florida. He had an image of beaches and water and palm trees. He could imagine O’Dell splashing in the water and Richard drawing and Ruta Beth just staring at him in that hard way she had, as if she were trying to suck his soul out of him through her eyes. How that girl could stare! Anyhow, he imagined them happy, happy always.
Come the middle of the afternoon, he got to feeling thirsty and thought how nice one of those ice-cold Coca Colas Ruta Beth kept in the fridge would taste, and so he decided to head on in. He was a man very much at peace with himself and ready to face the world when he rounded the corner of the barn and saw a truck coming down the driveway toward the house.
Bud pulled up in front of the house. He heard no dogs barking; strange, because most of these farm places had dogs. But the Stepfords never did, either. Bud felt a little buzz from somewhere, he wasn't sure where. It was like that time a week or so ago on the reservation; just a sense of being watched.
He picked up the mike.
“Dispatch, I am ten-twenty-three the Tun Farm, off 54 east ofaltus.”
“That's ten-four, six-oh-five, we have you.”
“Listen here. Dispatch, got me a feeling. Want you to run the name Tun through records real fast, see if anything kicks out.”
“Ten-four, six-oh-five. You hang in there.”
“Ten-four.”
Bud sat for a minute or two in the heat. Usually, you pulled into a farmyard, the Mrs. came out to see what was going on, or one of the hands leaned out of the barn or something. But it was just quiet. He could hear the slow tick of the truck cooling. An old farmhouse lay before him and beyond, in the emptiness, the Wichitas, standing out like boulders. The wind snapped; sunflowers along the red dirt road bobbed and weaved in its force. A cicada began to saw away like a lumberjack.
He looked back at the house. These people hadn't given up: someone had commenced scraping to prepare the wood for new paint, though the job was at rest now. Still, it spoke of hope for the future. Looking around, he saw the fields were fallow, but they didn't look grown out.
Hard work:
hard as hell. Bud had worked farms when he was a young man, between classes at Oklahoma U. before he had to drop out, and he'd hated it.
There was no harder way to make a living than to pull it out of the earth with your own two hands.
“Six-oh-five?”
“Ten-four, Dispatch.”
“Ah, we have nothing on Tun in our records. I did do a cross-check and it seems some years back a Mr. and Mrs. Tun, that address, were killed, but there's nothing in the records to indicate adjudication in the case.”
Maybe that was it. The feeling of death, heavy in the air; the way it sinks into the wood. A farm couple, murdered.
Nothing in the records to suggest the culprit had been caught. Seemed eerily familiar, but he couldn't place it.
“Okay, thanks, Dispatch. I'm going in. Wait for my ten twenty-four.”
“Wilco, six-oh-five. Good hunting.”
Bud touched his three guns: the big new Beretta under his arm, the Colt on his right kidney, and the little Beretta380 inside his shirt. Okay, he thought, time to go.
Lamar watched the man climb out of the truck. He knew he was a cop from the long time he'd spent on a radio in the cab. Now the man got out, looked around, set his hat just right, yet still paused, checking.
Cautious bastard.
Lamar had sunk into the high grass. He didn't move a muscle. Then the cop came around the truck, still looking, and by God, Lamar thought he'd fall through the earth itself. It was that goddamned trooper sergeant, the one he thought he'd smoked at the Stepfords, big as life!
Pewtie, that was it. Pewtie. Oh, ain't you a tough bastard your own self? Pewtie was big and had that flat cop face, weathered and serene, that just drank in every damn thing.
Lamar had seen that goddamned face a hundred times.
But now it was time to think. What's he doing here?
What's he up to? Is it a raid? Goddamn no, there'd be SWAT people and FBI and choppers and OSBI hot dogs all over the goddamned place. This Pewtie was here on his own.
Lamar wished he had a gun on him and told himself he'd never again be without one. He thought of his two .45s upstairs in the bedroom, freshly cleaned, each with a magazine of glinting shells in it. But he also knew if he'd had a gun, he'd have drawn and fired and, no matter what. Pewtie's 10-23 would have brought the boys here soon enough.
Then he thought of a new problem. What happens if he sees poor O’Dell?
He'll know him in an instant. He'll draw and shoot and poor baby O’Dell will just go down, spitting blood out with his Frosted Mini-Wheats. Or Richard? He would recognize Richard, too, for he'd have that cop gift for memorizing a face off a bulletin, able to pull it up at a moment's notice.
We are fucked, he thought. If he sees them two, we are fucked. If I kill him now, if I can, then maybe we're not fucked so fast, but we are fucked.
Best thing that could happen?
Ruta Beth.
Come on, Ruta Beth honey. You got to get us out of this.
Bud looked around one more damned time. He could see nothing in the yard that seemed the slightest bit out of place. He decided just to get the goddamned thing over with.
He walked toward the house. A ladder leaned against it, and Bud could see the line where the paint scraping had halted. Whoever did the work knew what he was doing; the old paint was scraped off down to bare wood
