to go to a fancy Eastern university if certain things worked out right.
Across the hall, he looked in on the younger boy, Jeff.
Jeff was the smaller at fifteen but the tougher. He had a pug face and an athlete's wiry, muscley frame. The room stank ever so slightly of stale sweat socks, moldy jocks, ten pairs of sneakers. He was the jock wannabe, no genius, not a reader, but on any kind of field a hard and earnest plugger who yearned to do well and almost never did. There was something tragic in Jells wanting and continual air of disappointment in himself. Bud felt a wave of love and melancholy wash across him, so intense that he felt he could bend over and kiss the young man on the cheek. Jeff seemed to need him so.
I'm going to leave this young boy? he asked himself, feeling the weight come onto his shoulders. But leaving was being discussed. It was a possibility up ahead on the road.
Scared the hell out of him. Am I really getting ready to pull out?
Well, maybe I am. Maybe they'll be all right.
“Daddy?” Jeff had stirred, seeing his father.
“Yes, Jeff, what is it?”
“What's going on?”
“Oh, they need me. Nothing much.”
“You don't have your vest on. I can tell.”
“It's nothing,” he said.
“Don't you worry a bit. You're just like your mother. Get on back to sleep now.”
Bud put his family behind him and walked downstairs to the end of the hall to a closet. He opened it to face his gun vault. Quickly, he turned the familiar combination.
His heavy patent-leather belt hung on the pegboard inside the door; he peeled it off, ran the belt around his waist, and pulled it tight, third hole. A belt was important to a policeman; it carried so much: cuffs, can of mace, a baton if he was working crowd control, a sap as some of the boys carried, a radio jack, a speed loader pouch, and the gun, of course.
Of course the gun. A four-inch Smith & Wesson M66357 Magnum. He took his off the shelf and gave it a quick wipe down its stainless steel ugliness gleamed in the low light, but the damned thing felt so good in the hand. It fired six murderous little Federal 125-grain hollowpoint bullets, with a one-shot stop rating of 93 percent. Bud went to the range twice a week; he was a very good shot.
He opened the cylinder and quickly dropped in six Federals from the open box; he had two speed loaders each charged with six cartridges for quick refills. Unlike many state officers. Bud laboriously practiced with the speed-loaders, and could get his six empties out and have six new shells deposited in the cylinder in less than two seconds.
He'd never had to do so, just as he'd never shot a living man, but it was better to be able to do it fast and not need it than to need it and not be able to do it. He secured the pistol in his holster, snapping the thumb snap. Then he reached into the gun safe and removed a tiny Smith & Wesson 640, a two-incher, flicked the cylinder open to assure himself it carried five +P .38-Special hollow tips locked the cylinder, and slipped it into his ankle holster, left inside ankle, again securing it with the strap.
He locked the safe up tight and pulled his Smokey off its top. The dark green flat brimmed hat was perched just so atop his head, its brim just edging off the top of his vision, as it was supposed to. Maybe that's where it started for him, all those years back. Goddamn, he still thought it was the best-looking hat he'd ever seen; it was the only hat he'd ever wear. He wanted to be buried in it, or at least with it.
He stepped out of the house and went to the cruiser parked in the driveway, a gleaming Chevy Caprice, in the black-and-white tones of the state. Firing up the engine, he picked up the mike and pressed the send button.
“Ah, Dispatch, this is six-oh-five, I'm ten-fifty-one to Officer two-eleven.”
“Got you, six-oh-five,” said the woman's voice, the night duty dispatcher.
“Advise you switch to Police Intercity Net for updates as they come through.”
“Affirmative, Dispatch. Any news?”
“Big zero, so far.”
“Okay, Dispatch, off I go.”
He switched to the intercity net, 155.670 MHz, eased the big car out of the driveway, and headed to Ted and Holly Pepper's.
The Pepper trailer, alone on its grim little street, was lit up like a turnpike gas station. Ted, fully uniformed, stood outside with a rifle case in one hand. He was a tall, good-looking youngster, perhaps too handsome; if there was weakness to his character it was that as a young man things had been given to him too easily, without his ever quite acquiring the lessons of humility and hard-ass work. If you're a blue-eyed boy with a button nose, things just show up on your plate. But he was all right. Ted just didn't have the gift—that special instinct for human deviance, that cunning about motive, that twitch for the truth under the lie, and finally, the will to do the job flat out—that marked a great cop. But there weren't too many great cops left, and Bud knew he himself fell short in a bunch of areas, too. He had only this on Ted: He'd been around a bit more.
As Bud pulled in, the door opened, and Holly came out in a housecoat with two sealed 7-Eleven plastic cups that presumably held hot coffee. Her freckles stood out now, without makeup; her straw-colored, almost reddish mass of hair looked like she'd been electrified, but, dammit, that was Holly, she was a cute one.
Ted was in a surly mood. Bud could tell, and Holly kept her distance.
“Hi, Bud,” she chirped.
“You and Ted off on another excellent adventure?”
“Holly, for Chrissakes,” Ted said.
“Howdy, Bud.”
“Ted, you locked and loaded?”
“Yes sir, and I got three mags with the sixty-nine-grain hollowpoints. Eighteen in each one, as per.”
“Good man. Let's get her in the trunk and get on the road. Morning, Holly.”
“Oh, don't notice me or anything there, Mr. Sergeant Bud Pewtie.”
He laughed. Holly was a flirty thing.
“I made you boys some coffee. I hope it helps.”
“Anything helps,” said Bud, opening the trunk. Ted put the rifle case in next to Bud's own rifle case, where a Mossberg 12-gauge pump gun with an extended magazine was concealed.
“You boys could start yourself a war,” said Holly.
“Ain't gonna be no shooting,” said Bud.
“These trashy boys just want to stretch their legs before they go back. It's just a little vacation.”
“Way I hear, they already killed three people,” Holly said.
“Okay, so, they're a little testy,” said Bud. But then he turned to Ted.
“Ted, I want you to go back and get your vest on. This is a vest day if ever there was one.”
“Bud, you know I hate the goddamn vest. You ain't wearing one.”
“No, I ain't. That's because I figure if there's any shooting, you going to be a hero while I sit in the goddamn back seat and pray. So I don't need no vest. You do, young trooper. You don't want to widow this beautiful young woman, do you?”
“Ah, Bud—”
“Now, Ted, don't make me pull hard rank in front of your wife. You just go on and do it. And don't think you can shame me by calling me a hypocrite, because I already know I am one and goddamn it, son, I am proud of it!”
Like a chastised child, Ted went sullenly into the trailer from where, presently, the sound of things being tossed and doors being slammed arrived.
“It's his day in the barrel, I guess,” Bud said.
“He'll be fine, once he gets the coffee in him. Bud, how are you?”
“Oh, Holly, you know.”
He and Holly met at least twice and sometimes, depending on hunger and possibility, five or six times a week at various sites around the motel-rich greater Lawton area and made love with a desperation and a purity that Bud could never remember having felt in his life before. He hadn't made love to Jen in over two years. He could hardly remember making love to Jen. But he could never forget making love to Holly.
