“Bud, we got a call-out. It's a big ten-ninety-eight. Up at goddamn McAlester, three tough-ass inmates. They capped a guard, another convict and probably a guy they stole a truck from.”
“Yes sir,” he said.
Bud was secretly relieved. He'd seen a lot of random destruction on the highway, what speed and metal can do to the innocent or the stupid. Twenty-five long years in, he knew a certain part of himself was wearing away: that part that could look without flinching at young lives crunched into bent metal.
Russell 'Bud” Pewtie was forty-eight, a strong, large man with short, graying hair and brusque ways. He wasn't exactly an emotion machine, and his profession had conspired to drive what few public feelings he had even deeper behind the set lines of his squarish face. No one could read much on Bud. He was a sergeant and Zone Five assistant commander of Troop G, of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, that is, for Comanche, Caddo, Grady, Cotton, Stephens, and Jefferson Counties, as well as for the long northeast-south-west run of 1-44 down from Oklahoma City on the way to Wichita Falls, Texas.
“Affirmative, Captain,” he said.
“I'm rolling.”
“Bud, nobody's riding alone on this one. Oklahoma City's orders. These boys are too goddamned mean and you can bet their first stop's gonna be a gun store or some hunter's basement. We're partnering up and traveling cocked and locked.”
“Who’m I partnering with?”
“I see you broke in that kid Ted Pepper. He lives near you, don't he?”
For just a beat. Bud paused. He tried to clear his head, but yeah, it would be Ted. Somehow, it had to be Ted.
“Yeah, Ted's about ten minutes away on the other side of Lawton.”
“Okay, you double with Ted. This is just an ad hoc thing, but we're setting up roadblocks on all the majors between here and McAlester. Gonna be a meeting up in Chickasha in the highway maintenance shop. Can you get there by oh-seven-hundred for roadblock assignment? I want you and Ted to represent our troop, and I'll rotate others in as I can.”
“Yes sir,” said Bud.
“I'll call Ted.”
“Bud, I know you'll do damned good. But be careful.
These boys are trash.”
Bud rolled out of bed, pausing just a second on the edge to collect his scattered wits. It felt cold, as if a terrible wind were blowing, but it was just a random chill.
“Bud?”
It was Jen, in the dark.
“Yes?”
“What is it?”
“Oh, it, was Tim. A goddamn call-out. Escaped cons. I'll be sitting on a goddamned roadblock or running up and down the highway, that's all.”
“You be careful. Bud.”
“I always am,” he said.
Bud went down to the kitchen and, after just the faintest pause, dialed Ted Pepper's number. He knew it by heart.
It rang three times.
“Hello?”
Ted's wife Holly answered. He knew her voice too well.
He swallowed hard. On the phone she sounded like syrup;
there was a low vibration, a hum, that still made him a little woozy. She was twenty-six. How complicated things can get!
“Holly?”
“Bud! You shouldn't call me here. He—”
“Holly, is Ted there?”
“Of course he isn't here. You know that. He's in the other bedroom. I'll get him.”
“Good, you do that. Holly.”
Thirty seconds later Ted came on.
“Bud?”
“It sure is,” said Bud heartily, and gave Ted the news.
“I'm swinging by in fifteen, and I want to find you with all your creases straight and your AR-15 locked and loaded.
Got that, son?”
“Oh, Christ,” said Ted.
“I only just went to sleep.”
“Well, now, I know you have it in you.”
“Christ, Bud, you got all the damn answers. You're goddamn happy, I can tell. See you in twenty.”
“Fifteen, young trooper,” said Bud.
He was so merry with Ted. Old trooper sergeant, all the damn answers, full of laughs and teasing and the subtle insistence of obedience. Before he'd won his stripes, he'd been 'the kid” to a dozen tough old sergeants, and now, here he was, a sergeant himself.
Bud hit the shower, was out in a flash, and rushed through the rest. Then, stepping into his closet, he found his next day's uniform spring-fresh on the hanger. He pinned on the gold badge, an Indian shield with two wings above it, and the words to protect and serve. To a lot of the younger men, the badge meant nothing. But he still felt as if it symbolized his membership and acceptance in an elite society: we enforce, it said to the world. We protect.
He pulled on his socks and a Gaico ankle holster, then stepped into his taupe, striped slacks, still thirty-sixes. The brown shirt, with its flashy gray epaulets and pocket flaps, fit him like a glove. Its three yellow chevrons stood out bright as daisies, just below the yellow-piped arrowhead shoulder patch that said Oklahoma Highway Patrol. Nineteen years to make that rank, even if he'd passed the test up at the top the first time, when he'd only done a decade. He buttoned it up, swiftly tied the tie.
“Bud, you put your vest on!” Jen called from the bedroom, where she should have been sleeping.
It irritated him, but most things Jen said irritated him these days.
“That goddamn thing's heavy as a washing machine.”
“Still, you put it on.”
“Of course I will,” he lied. He hated it. Made him feel like he had on a girdle.
Last, Bud slipped into his black patent oxfords and tied them tight.
He stepped out of the closet.
“Bud, you don't have that vest on, I can tell. You're going to get yourself killed, and leave me with a mountain of bills,” Jen said.
“Nobody's killing me,” he said.
“Now go back to -sleep.”
“I swear, you are an ornery man these days,” she said sullenly.
She settled in under the blankets, rolling over.
He stepped into the short hallway. Not much of a house, but nobody'd ever complained. It was dark, a blue dark, but Bud knew every square inch of it. He walked a bit, and leaned in to look at Russ, who snoozed with some trouble;
he was restive in sleep as in life. Russ's hair, mottled and tangled, ensnared his handsome face; above him the specter of some rock performer made up like the devil himself rose on a poster, stark white and psychotic. He looked like a PCP zombie Bud had once seen a DEA team blow away on 44 the other side of OK City. But Bud didn't worry about Russ. Russ, who was seventeen, looked like six kinds of shit, with all that damned hair and the black clothes he wore and a little glittery something in his earlobe that Bud didn't even want to know about, but Bud somehow knew he had too much of his mother in him to do anything crazy. He still got mostly As. He had a chance
