“I don't think I can move ’em.”
“You better move ’em, goddammit.”
Bud brought his hands into the light.
“Who are you?”
“Sergeant Bud Pewtie, Oklahoma Highway Patrol. I've been hit.”
-'You got a shield?”
“Yes, sir. Don't you do nothing tricky now with that gun.
I'm going to reach in my pocket and get my shield out. I'm unarmed. I mean, my guns are all upstairs. You got medics on the way?”
“The whole world is on the way. That's goddamned O’Dell Pye lying up there with a mess of holes in him.”
“He took some killing, I'll say,” said Bud, getting the badge out, opening the folio to show it. Another light came on from the top of the steps.
“Bud? Jesus Christ, ain't you a sight. He's one of ours, Sheriff.
Medic. MEDIC! Get them medics down here, we got an officer down.
Goddammit, ASAP! Get ’em DOWN HERE NOW!”
The trooper came to him first and asked him where he was hit, but in seconds two medics had arrived. They gave him the quick once-over and determined that he hadn't taken any solid, life-threatening hits.
“But you sure are cut to hell and gone,” one of them said, and Bud thought he recognized the man from various turnpike accidents.
“Looks like you got a face full of glass slivers. And goddamn, I can see something stuck under your skin up top your head.”
“That's the one that hurts.”
“Boy, I'll bet she do. Trooper. Goddamn, I'll bet she do.”
The medics got him on a stretcher and a team of sheriff's deputies and troopers labored to get him up the stairs, out of the cellar.
He was pulled into a jubilee of lights. More cars and trucks were arriving even as they wheeled his gantry toward the ambulance, and now a van of FBI agents pulled up. A TV truck had already shown.
“Hold on,” somebody said.
“You Pewtie?”
“Yes sir,” said Bud.
“Lon Perry, sheriff, Jackson County. Trooper, I can't have you boys turning my county into a goddamned shooting gallery when some goddamned undercover op goes dead-dick on you,pecially since you ain't even had the goddamned courtesy to tell me you's working my territory.”
“You're out of line, Sheriff,” a trooper sergeant barked.
“He's hurt, he just got the second most wanted man in the state and probably put a goddamned hole in the first most wanted, and no citizen even got scratched. You back off.”
There were heated words, but soon another man came over and separated the warring sides. It was Colonel Supenski, looking like he'd just been dragged out of bed.
“Goddamn, Bud, you get around, don't you?”
Bud didn't feel much like answering any questions. He just said, 'What the hell took everybody so long to get here? We had us a goddamned World War. Nobody called it in?”
“Not a goddamned soul. Bud. Nobody to call it in.
Jimmy Ky crawled out of the bushes after Lamar and pals departed, waited ten minutes, tried to call, found out the goddamned car had torn out the phone lines, and walked two miles into town to tell the sheriff's department. Lamar, goddamn his soul, got away.”
“Damn,” said Bud.
“I know I hit him, I seen. blood. I seen him drop his piece. I hurt him bad.”
“That you did, Bud. Wilie, bring ’em here. Bud, take a look at your trophies.”
A highway patrol technician came over with a plastic bag. It seemed to contain two grisly pickles, each somewhat tattered at one end.
“What the hell are those?” Bud wanted to know.
-'Lamar's fingers. His last and second-to-last left hand digits. You shot his fingers off. Bud. You killed his cousin, you stopped his tattoo, and you shot off two fingers. Say you done a hell of a night's work, Bud.”
CHAPTER 23
In Comanche Memorial Hospital, a young doctor and two nurses bent over Bud in the emergency room operating theater and picked pieces of glass out of his face for nearly two hours. During this time they also removed a ragged piece of bullet jacket from Bud's scalp, where it had lodged just under the skin, and a double-ought buckshot pellet that had drilled into the meat of his left calf. That was the nasty one. It hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. The painkillers they gave him helped some, but nothing could blunt the force of the pain of a foreign missile blown deep into the muscle tissue.
By the time the first team was done, an ophthalmologic surgeon had arrived by helicopter from Tulsa to work on his blurry eye. This gentleman probed for several minutes and then removed a particularly gruesome glass sliver from in side his left orbit, where it had sunk into the subcutaneous tissue just under the orb itself.
He held it out for Bud to see: It looked like a blade of pure glass, a vivid little knife.
“You're lucky. Sergeant. A millimeter to the right and you might have lost your vision permanently. I'm going to prescribe antibiotics and give you an eyepatch, but in a few days your vision will return to normal.”
“Thank you. Doctor.”
“No, thank you. It's an honor to work on a man as brave as you,” and he went on with some blah-blah about Bud being a hero.
But Bud didn't feel like a hero. It wasn't a thing of heroes; it had no heroics to it; that was for the movies, where things happened clearly, you could follow them, they made sense, the cleverness was apparent. This was just a mad scramble, like cats in a bag fighting, luck happening or not happening, no strength, no cunning, just the blind happenstance of where so many bullets happened to end up.
And, knowing that, he had to think: You could have done better. It was true.
If he'd just taken a look through the window and made out who Jimmy Ky was decorating, he could have gotten to a phone and called for backup, and all of them would be locked up or in the morgue, not just poor, dumb O’Dell. No one had directly confronted him yet, except for the odd nods from the troopers on the scene. Had he done well?
Someone once said, if you're still alive at the end of a gunfight, you've won. But Bud didn't quite buy it. He'd almost gotten Lamar.
Almost!
Once the doctors were done and Bud was washed and dried, he was rolled to a private room. There, Jen and Jeff waited. She came over and just touched him, lightly, on the arm; she didn't look quite real, because with the patch he had no stereoscopic vision; she looked like a picture. And she was haggard, having been awakened from a sleep at nearly five in the morning with the sketchy news that once again her husband had been shot up. Fortunately, the news soon followed that he wasn't hurt bad.
“Oh, Bud,” she said.
He smiled wanly, feeling his dry lips crack.
“Oh, Bud,” she said again.
Jeff stood aloof in the corner of the room.
“Where's Russ?”
“He's not coming,” she said, 'He went up to the lake with his friends.
I didn't call him. They said you'd be all right.”
“That's good. Let him enjoy the Princeton thing. This ain't nothing.”
