“When is it going to end?”
“It has ended,” he said.
“I swear it.”
Presently, a nurse came along and shooed them out. They had to wait in the hall. He needed his rest; he was still in danger of shock and he'd need to be sharp the next day, anyway.
But, alone in the dark at last, he couldn't rest. He lay there unsettled. He tried not to think about it. Images from the fight kept flashing back on him. He'd think he was done with it and then it would come back to him, blown up and in slow motion. The slack look on O’Dell's face in that first second. Goddamn, must have beat him to the draw by just a fraction of an instant, that's how goddamn close it was.
It made him almost physically sick; he'd drawn the Colt and thumb-wiped the safety off and fired at a speed that had no place in time. But it was so easy to screw up a presentation like that; suppose he hadn't gotten his grip right and hadn't depressed the grip safety, or he'd missed the safety with the thumb, or he'd missed the shot. But goddamn, he'd put out the telling shot and it kept him fighting. Any single little muff in that complex of movements, and he was a goner.
He'd fired so much! Suppose he'd held back on the shooting? Maybe if he'd placed his shots better and aimed more. He remembered aiming once, at Lamar's big hands on the Colt. How the blood exploded from them on the hit, the gun flying. Funny, in a gunfight they say that you concentrate on your opponent's weapon and that hand and arm wounds are the rule, not the exception. That was it exactly, there.
It was such a close goddamn thing, is what it added up to. Physical violence with guns at close range always involved the fantastic, the unbelievable. Every shooting was a Kennedy assassination in replica, a twisted mess of events where everybody was operating in an ozone layer of stress and nothing made sense. Funny, Bud had done all that shooting and had all that shooting directed back at him, and he couldn't remember hearing a single shot! But his ears rang like somebody was beating on them with a bat. He had no sense of how long it took, either. An hour? More likely three minutes, or two. All that shooting, so much shooting, and how few bullets actually found targets. Even the great Lamar hadn't shot very well. So much for your gunfighter myth.
It was the flashes that haunted him. When the guns fired, they produced huge clouds of burning gas that in the dark blossomed like star bursts blinding and disorienting everybody.
Maybe that's why in all the shooting, so few rounds had gone home? Who could see in the middle of the Fourth of July? But those flashes, cruelly flaring out in the dark, each blindingly white and hot, each a potential death sentence.
He'd see them for the rest of his life, he thought; he'd never be finished with them.
But mostly. Bud couldn't get O’Dell out of his mind. It was like something from some horror movie, the way O’Dell kept eating up the lead and coming for him. He'd seen the boy's heart explode, seen his throat blown out, seen part of his brain fly away. But still O’Dell came, like some robot or something, outside of pain, beyond death. What kept him going, what reserve of pure animal fury? Or maybe it wasn't fury.
Maybe fury couldn't get you through something like that. Maybe it was love. Only person in the world poor O’Dell cared about was Lamar, and by all reports Lamar cared back just as hard. That kept him going beyond the collapse of his nervous system. Finally finished him with the .380. And suppose he hadn't had the belly gun?
Conceivably, dying, O’Dell had enough strength left to crush the life out of him. Goddamn, that little gun sure was worth the money he'd laid out for it!
The next morning, a new doctor came in and gave him a once over and confirmed that he probably wasn't going to die, at least not in the next thirty years. And then, one by one, the boys in suits came in.
Colonel Supenski was there, representing the state police, as well as two highway patrol investigators and an investigator from the Jackson County sheriffs department. But Lt. Henderson, of the OSBI, was missing.
The chief questioner was a tough, young state's attorney.
How did he feel?
He felt fine.
Was he up to it?
He was up to it.
Did he want his own attorney present?
“Now hold on,” started the colonel-'Strictly a routine question in a case involving death by force,” said the state's attorney.
That settled, it began.
Slowly Bud told the story, trying to leave nothing out of the lead-up, except the detail of Jack Antelope Runs. Then the gunfight, in excruciating detail.
“Did you warn them before shooting?”
“Warn them? I was trying to kill them.”
“Strike that from the record, goddammit,” said Colonel Supenski.
“He didn't mean that.”
“Did you mean that. Sergeant Pewtie?”
“No sir. I was merely trying to survive. There wasn't no time for a warning. I saw a weapon in' the perpetrator's hands and I established that he meant to harm me, and so I opened fire.”
It went on for several hours: where he'd been, what he remembered, where Lamar and O’Dell had been, and so forth and so on.
Bud had a curious moment here, as a realization reached him.
-'You know, for three weeks I been packing three guns and spare magazines for each. I had fifty-eight rounds of ammunition, which I been bitching about like a old lady.
Goddamn, if I'd had fifty-nine, Lamar would be dead meat today.”
The lawyers left about six. The boss, after conferring with the investigators, gave him the good news.
“I think you did a great job, Sergeant. Mr. Uckley agrees with me. No state indictments. You're in the clear.”
“Thank you.”
That left Bud alone with the colonel.
“Okay, Bud,” said the boss, who’d been holding his piece for a long time.
“I have to say this. You got guts to burn and what you brought off is a masterpiece of police work. We're so very proud of you. But Bud, I told you, and it's beginning to grate on me—this ain't a goddamned private war. You ain't a cowboy. You understand me? It's modern times, we work in teams now. Bud, I cannot have a lone wolf operator working on some personal revenge agenda. I catch you on Lamar's tail again, by God, I'll prosecute you. I could even git you on carrying a concealed weapon, since by all lawful interpretation, you were not duly authorized to carry under those circumstances as you were formally on medical leave.”
“Yes sir. But I can only repeat: It ain't personal. I never want to see that sonofabitch again, except when I testify against him.”
“You understand then that you're on official administrative leave? You ain't to be hanging around or going places where you might run into Lamar? You are formally relieved of police duties. It's routine, it don't mean a thing, but I do mean to see that you hew to that line.”
“Yes sir, that's fine. I just want to go home, is all.”
“All right. I'll believe you on that. Another thing, I got the prelim on O’Dell. Want to hear it?”
“Yes.”
“You hit him thirty-three times. Bud. Four .45s, thirteen380s and sixteen 9s. And most of ’em were good, solid torso hits. You even hit him three times in the head. The doc says the hollow tips opened up like they should. There wasn't much of him left.”
“He took a basket of killing, that's for sure.”
Bud shivered a bit.
“Now what you don't know isn't going to make you happy. I've had a report from our press officer who’s been watching the TV and seen the evening paper from Oklahoma City. The press people are all excited about you shooting Lamar's fingers off. Like it's a joke or something.
Like you're Annie Oakley.”
“Anyboy tell ’em how common hand hits are in gunfights?”
“You can tell ’em anything you want, but they only listen to what they already know from movies. That's how
