Young, in her twenties, maybe. Now that's another dot for you to connect. That's your goddamned third point. You find me a category that ain't a category that's got a Toyota that's also got a young girl.
You got to find me that girl and that god damed location. Now get cracking, you old buzzard, and don't you let me down.”
“Bud.” Something like a sob ran through the old man's voice.
“Bud… I'll try. I ain't the man I once was.”
“Well, goddamn, which of us is, except for goddamned Lamar?”
Bud hung up, checked his watch, saw that he was down to forty-five minutes. He jumped in his truck and gunned it.
“So,” said Lamar.
“Your old man. What's he like, you know, in the sack?”
“You pig,” she said.
Tell him, she thought. He's made a mistake. He came to the wrong house. He got the wrong woman.
And then what?
Then he just kills me, that's all. And he still gets Bud.
“How big is he? Is he real big? Or is he just normal? I'll bet he's just normal.”
She shook her head with disgust.
“Yeah. He's just normal. Here. You want to see something?
You want to see something like you never seen before?
Look at this. Hold her, Ruta Beth.”
They had Holly's hands tied behind her tightly, and her feet tied. She felt so helpless and sick. He was the man who’d killed her husband. It was this grotesque white-trash tough boy with stumps for fingers, some malnourished little weasel of a farm girl, and the other one, a soft and delicate man-boy with tussled hair and the look of no guts at all on his prissy, plump-lipped little face.
Now Ruta Beth went behind her and held her head.
Lamar stood and undid his trousers.
“Oh, God,” moaned Holly, and fought to look away, but Ruta Beth had surprising strength and governed her head until it was locked in the proper direction.
Lamar pulled his shorts down and unfolded what looked like an electric cable. It was a penis the size of a reptile, slack and coiled, its foreskin capping it.
“Hah? You see anything like that?”
“You look at Daddy,” said the girl.
“Go on, you look at the king. You ain't never seen nothing like that.
That's the king.”
She thought she'd gag.
“You just dream about it, honey. You just go on and dream until your husband shows up.”
Bud reached the Exxon station with a minute to spare.
But Lamar's call was late by five minutes.
When it came, he ripped the phone off the hook.
“Yeah?”
“Well, howdy. Bud. How you doing? You have a rough old time?”
“Cut the shit, Pye.”
“Bud, biggest mistake I done made is not walking over to you when you was belly-down and capping you with that45. Think of the trouble it'd saved us both.”
“Where are you?”
“Oh, I ain't a-telling. You got a long night ahead of you.
Maybe I'll bring you to me and maybe I won't. Maybe I'll run you into an ambush. Maybe I'm on a goddamned cellular phone right now, looking at your ass through the scope of a rifle. Just twitch my finger and it's all over.”
He laughed. He was extracting immense pleasure from it.
“You haven't hurt her?”
“Honey, you tell your husband what you just saw.”
There was the muffled struggle of someone being pushed to the phone.
“Bud!”
“Holly!”
“Oh, Bud, he made me look. They forced me to look.”
“Holly, I—”
“At his dick. They made me look at it.”
The fury rose in Bud like steam. He wanted to slam the phone against the booth until it broke.
Don't lose it, he warned himself. That's what he wants.
He'll toy with her. He'll torture her in infantile ways to show his power—the size of his pecker, petty pains, maybe drawing on her skin.
He'll do it so that she can tell you, so that you go crazier and crazier, and at the end you are hopelessly jangled and unable to operate.
It doesn't mean a thing. The only thing that counts is getting there and getting her out.
But he knew, too, that Lamar expected him crazy. He lost something if he didn't let Pye know how nuts this was making him.
“Pye,” he screamed.
“Pye, you sonofabitch, I'll kill you. Don't you fucking touch her.
Don't you touch her!”
Lamar laughed again.
“Bud, you still there? You got to git all the way to Snyder. To the 7-eleven on 183 north of Snyder. You best git you going, old bubba.
Yes you best git a move on, or I'll do more than show her the lizard, I'll make her pet it. Maybe even give it a li'l kiss.”
Lamar hung up.
Quickly Bud dialed C. D. Henderson's old office in the City Hall Annex.
But there was no answer.
The old detective heard the phone ring. He'd been there five minutes.
What was the point of answering it?
He opened his coat and removed the bottle of I. W. Harper. Only about a third left. He opened it, took a taste.
Liquid flame, bright and deep. Immediately a tremor passed through him, knocked him into a blurred state, and then pulled him out again.
He reached under his coat and his fingers touched something hard and cold: It was the curvature of the grip of a revolver. He pulled it out, feeling its oily heft: a Colt Frontier model, with an ivory grip, in .44 special, as manufactured in New Haven, Connecticut, in the year 1903. The rainbow of the case-hardened colors had long since worn off, turning the piece almost brown. His grandaddy had carried that gun before Oklahoma was a state; and his daddy had carried it, too, both as lawmen.
C.D. opened the loading gate, pulled the hammer to half cock and rotated the cylinder to see the primers of five tarnished .44 rounds, sited in the cylinder so that the firing pin rested on an empty chamber, the way any sensible man carried a Colt. Only fools carried a six-shooter with six shots; sooner or later, they'd thump the hammer accidently and blow a foot off.
C.D. was no fool.
But he didn't think for a moment he could help Bud, and he had some idea that a terrible, terrible weight rode on all this. He'd fail, a drunken, wasted old man. People would die. Bud, whoever else was involved. And Lamar would go on.
And when that happened C.D. thought he might thumb back the hammer of the old Colt, put the muzzle in his mouth, and pull the trigger. He felt so used up, he was hardly there. His life was a waste, things were changing so
