“How could a cop have found this place. Coincidences like this don't happen in the universe. Not no how.”
They watched as the big man went up toward the house.
It wasn't the pain. Pain didn't frighten Lamar; it was the helplessness and the pain. He lay flat on his back, under a big light.
His chest had been shaved and scrubbed with astringent until it stung.
Now what he saw was so weird: In the back room, he saw a one-eyed giant. That's what it looked like, at any rate. Really, it was only the old slope, bent over him with the needle, his eye swollen huge and bloodshot by the lens it wore. It was an operation, for now the surgeon's latex gloves were slippery with blood.
“You gotta lotta blood in you,” the doctor laughed. It connected with something somewhere in Lamar's previous life, but he couldn't say what or when.
The only reality was the needle. It hummed and tapped as Jimmy Ky leaned over and worked it. Not a big pain, like the thrust of a blade or the channeling of a bullet, but a sharp, brief flash of explosion on his body, enough to make him jump or leap each time.
“No move, goddamn. Make you look like kitty cat, not lion.”
Lamar tried to ride it. Eleven more hours of this shit?
And this wasn't even the bad stuff. This was the easy part: doing the base colors, the larger shapes. The hard work would come later, when the little man got down to details and moved in with the tiniest of needles for the little drips of color that gave the piece life. And he was a careful craftsman, unmoved by the pain he caused his subject. He never looked hard at Lamar, but only at the design.
Lamar was afraid to breathe. He took strength from one thing and one thing alone: his cousin O’Dell, Baby O’Dell, sitting with the implacable patience and loyalty of the retarded, watching and waiting and playing sentry at the door to the back room.
It was so goddamn dark! Ruta Beth couldn't see a thing, The truck was just a truck, the man just a man, standing there, as if deciding. When he finally moved, he walked toward the door and there was something familiar in the gait. Where did she recognize it from?
“H-he's going in,” came Richard's sing-songy voice.
“What should we do?”
“Shut up,” she barked, but herself thinking, What should I do?
She watched as the man approached the door, paused again, adjusted his hat as if he were stepping into a fancy restaurant. He was a big guy, well packed with bulk and girth, but no damned youngster. Something familiar to him, goddammit.
She reached under the car seat and pulled out her ski mask. She pulled it over her face, feeling the scratch of wool, the stink of her own sweat, its warmth, its closeness.
Her mouth tasted like pennies.
“It's nothing,” said Richard wanly.
“He's just a cowboy.
He wants to get tattooed. He's some oil-field hand. He wants 'I Love Susie-Q' on his biceps, that's all.”
“Shut up, you pussy boy,” she said. She slid Lamar's cut down Browning 12-gauge semiauto from the back seat, pushing the safety off. Her hands flew to her waist, where she'd tucked Lamar's .45 SIG.
“It's all right,” said Richard.
“Please make it be all right.”
The man stepped in, closed the door behind him. There was a glorious, blessed moment of silence.
“Whew,” said Richard.
“It's all—” Then the sound of shots, lots of them, fast and wild, and from where they sat they could see the gun flashes illuminate the darkness of the tattoo house.
O’Dell stirred into action, yanking a shotgun from somewhere, but without willing it Bud had drawn his Colt Commander from the high hip holster and hit the thumb safety, and he and O’Dell fired almost simultaneously.
The flash from the gun muzzles filled the room with incandescence; the snakes seethed and pounced in its blinding whiteness. Bud was not hit and did not know if he had hit O’Dell—he doubted it, as he had pointed, not aimed, and had fired with one hand—and without a conscious thought anywhere in his head, he jacked the trigger seven more times, pumping .45s at O’Dell in a burst that sounded like a tommy gun. And like a tommy gun, it was evidently inaccurate, for Bud saw clouds of plaster flying, large chunks of masonry ripped up, the flashes blotting details from his vision. Then the gun came up dry. Bud cursing, for only an idiot shoots a gun empty without counting shots to reload with one in the spout and less vulnerability.
He dived into the room, ripping a fresh mag off the pouch on his belt, slamming it home, and thumbing off the slide release to prime the pistol once again. He came to rest behind a counter that now atomized into shreds before his very eyes. He saw the glass liquify as buckshot pulverized it, and the stuff blew into his face, knocking him back, blinking. But he felt no pain, and in response fired three fast times at the gun flash, receiving on the middle shot the impression of a yowl. O’Dell had disappeared. Smoke hung in the air. There was a moment of silence.
Then a small, blue Asian man came crashing from the open doorway. Bud tracked and nearly fired at him but didn't and instead redirected himself toward the opening itself, to see the low, hunched form of Lamar Pye bent in a combat crouch, good two-hand hold, but apparently unable to see Bud.
Bud couldn't see his sights, it was so dark, so he just put the back of the pistol against what little he could see of Lamar and fired three more times, fast, reloading his last45 mag with one shot left in the chamber, just as he knew he should.
He also understood that in firing he'd given away his position. If Lamar wasn't hit mortally, he'd return fire in just a second, so Bud slithered to his left, coming hard against a wall, then backed spastically until he found what appeared to be a door, and slipped back into it.
Flashes lit the darkness. Both Lamar and O’Dell fired, O’Dell obviously not dead at all, maybe not even hit; and the counter behind which Bud had cowered simply evaporated as Lamar's .45s and O’Dell's buckshot remodeled it. He heard Lamar's pistol lock back dry and another sound-' hollow, like someone blowing in a wand—seemed to suggest that O’Dell was reloading as well. He could see no part of Lamar, but he put the pistol before him in that segment of darkness out of which had sprung O’Dell's bursts and, convinced he saw a shape, squeezed off what he meant to be but two or three shots. But in shooting he banished the sudden demons of fear that had come from nowhere to tell him what a fool he'd been, how he'd walked in here without backup, without even a radio, and so he could not stop shooting until the gun was empty.
Again, he thought he heard a cry, as he dumped the Colt, and his hand sped to and ripped his big new Beretta from the shoulder holster.
“Waharrrrr, Waharrrrr” came a gurgling cry from the dark. It was O’Dell, his voice veined with hurt.
“Goddamn it, boy, you stay put,” cried Lamar in return, equally anguished.
“Who the fuck are you, mister? What the hell, you ain't no cop, we don't mean you no goddamned harm.”
Bud was silent. All he had to do was open his mouth and Lamar would have a source of noise for him to bring fire on.
“Wahh-arrrrrrrr. Mama. Wah-marrrrrrrrrr, pweezze. Mama.”
“O’Dell, you stay down. Daddy come git you in a bit. Where's that goddamn car?”
A car? More of them? The criminals had backup. The cop didn't.
Who the fuck was he?
Where had he come from?
Why was it happening like this?
Lamar hurt every damn place, and he felt so goddamned naked, his shirt off, blood all over his chest. But what had him worried was O’Dell.
O’Dell sounded hit bad. He'd never heard that tone in the boy's voice.
It was so pitiful, so animal. O’Dell, hurting. It just filled Lamar with rage.
If only he could clear his mind and think, or if only that goddamned Ruta Beth would get here. Where the hell was she?
