It was the best chance she had, as long as he, committed to it, went in hard and shot to kill.
Okay, he thought, time to go.
His vest.
He hadn't taken time to put on his vest!
I hope my luck holds, he thought, but he doubted it would.
Lamar watched the slow tick of the minute hand as it swept its way around the face of the big clock on Ruta Beth's mantel. Round and round it went, sucking seconds off the face of the earth, drawing Bud Pewtie nearer to his fate. He'd done his homework. At four. Bud would be in Anadarko; Lamar would bring him back toward Odette, looking for a signal; Bud would never know where it would be so he'd be looking hard, spooked and tired. They'd bring him on in to the farm. He'd sit in the truck cab, with his wife trussed up in plain view. Then, slowly, he'd have to get out and go toward her. That's when they'd take him down, hard, with buckshot in the legs, under the vest he was sure to be wearing; then Lamar would crown him once, twice, maybe three times with the shotgun butt and drag him into the barn. The hard work would be done in the barn. It would take most of the morning. No one would hear the screams.
Then when he was gone, Lamar decided he'd have the woman. Have her all the ways there were to have her; it excited him that she'd know it would be her last thing.
Maybe he'd give a taste to Richard. Didn't know yet. Then he'd kill her. Out of kindness, he'd decided to shoot her in the head.
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“It's about time.”
He looked back toward the clock. Five till.
“Oh, give him a few more minutes, baby,” he said.
“Let him enjoy. He's got some things a-coming, like a freight train.”
Richard was very nervous. He kept licking his lips and trying not to look at the woman, whose helplessness and fear excited him. He'd never had such a response to a woman before; but he was also very frightened. This Pewtie was a tough customer; he'd stood up to and killed O’Dell, and not even the violent and fearless black inmates would stand against O’Dell.
As usual, it was his imagination that betrayed him. He could not quiet it. He saw that Lamar's great gift was his ability to concentrate and act, whereas he, Richard, was always bedeviled by rogue thoughts, erratic impulses. Suppose the buckshot didn't knock Pewtie down; suppose he got a gun into action? Suppose Lamar tripped as he rushed -toward him. It could go wrong a hundred different ways, although when Lamar planned something, it usually didn't go wrong. Lamar just got things done, that was all.
But this was the last hard thing for a while. Lamar had said they would leave, find new territory. Lamar wanted also to find a skin artist to get the tattoo finished, and he wanted Richard to work really hard at that. Richard didn't want to disappoint Lamar. Lamar was a god to him; Lamar stood above him and dominated the sky scape like a tyrant king. Richard had yielded in all totality, replacing a mother he feared and loved with a man he feared and loved.
I love being a slave.
He looked at the girl again and felt a twitch in his dick.
Then he touched the heavy revolver in his belt and looked at King Lamar on his throne and swore eternal fealty.
Bud drove without his lights on, in low gear, guided by starlight, wishing there was a moon; but there was no moon. He watched the tick of the odometer and when at last the nine-tenths mark turned over into a new mile, he halted.
He got out and locked the Warn hubs on the front axle. It was as dark as a convict's dream. The wind, always the wind, snapped across the dry prairie. He looked, saw that the gulch between the road and the field didn't look bad, climbed back in. He eased into four-wheel drive, pushed slowly ahead, and felt just the faintest sense of resistance. A fence, wire; it went down with the sound of metal pranging against metal. He lurched ahead and the truck sank abruptly at a wretched angle, shimmied down a bank, and seemed to come to a rest.
Shit, Bud thought, dropping into low range and giving the gas a feather touch. The engine's muttering deepened and the truck bucked a bit, then began to pull itself out of the gully. It shuddered free with a last grind of tire against earth, and he was on clear ground; he zoomed up into the field and began to pick his way across it.
No resistance; the truck rumbled almost silently along and he steered by a compass on the dashboard, avoiding the stunted mesquite trees, bypassing the low hollows clotted with scrub oak. The prairie was boundless, but like the surface of the sea, its flatness was illusion.
Bud rose and fell through crests and dips in the earth itself, before him only the most basic of pictures: darkness that was air, and slightly less darkness that was land, and the line of demarcation between them too vague to make out.
But at last he seemed to come to a crest and he halted.
He could see Ruta Beth Tun's place. A flicker of heat lightning lit the sky, briefly illuminating the farm. It had a strange familiarity about it, as if from a dream. Why did he know it?
Then he realized he'd been here before, when they were searching for the tires. Lamar must have fooled him that day. He tried to remember the girl and got no image. Why couldn't he remember?
He saw the barn, he saw the house, freshly painted, white in the starlight. A single light was on. It was about three hundred yards away.
It occurred to him to try and drive closer. No, too risky; they wouldn't see a man approaching, particularly if he kept the barn between himself and them, but the truck might make a noise or create too much motion. It was too risky.
Bud returned to the cab. He slipped out of his coat and laid his hat on the seat. This wasn't hat work, no sir. Then he reached behind the seat and slid out the Winchester carbine, Model of 1894, though this one was manufactured in 1967. Gently he eased the lever forward, cam ming a .30-30 -soft point into the chamber. Closing the lever, he groped again behind the seat, found the box of ammunition, and extracted one more round, which he inserted in the loading gate. There, that brought it up to eight rounds. A .3030 carbine wasn't the best for this kind of work, but it wasn't so bad either: He could fire fast, it was accurate, and that soft point bullet would splatter like a pancake as it moved through whatever it hit, hopefully Lamar's brain.
Hell, Texas Rangers had carried them for years and they always got their man.
He touched his other guns, counting them off: Beretta 9-mm, Colt .45, Beretta .380, all loaded, all with spare mags jammed with hollowpoints.
Bud returned to the ridge, studied the farm, glad that he recognized it and that he'd be making his fight on ground he'd at least seen before.
There was nothing else to think of or do.
Oh yeah: a prayer.
Hey, he said, looking upward. Old man. Please help me tonight. You know I need it bad.
Then he swallowed and went off to meet Lamar.
He scurried down the slope, jogging, trying not to breathe hard, watching as with surly inevitability the house and barn grew larger.
As he moved down the slope, his angle on the house changed and it seemed to disappear behind the barn.
New fears assaulted him. What if Lamar had recruited a gang, what if not three awaited him but ten, twenty?
Well, then you die, he thought, and so does Holly, but so be it. In half an hour the SWAT people would arrive; the gunfight would leave no survivors at all, like that crazy thing in Waco—people eaten up in the insanity of the moment.
He got to the barn, again encountering familiarity. He saw the oven that was a kiln, the wood tables, the racks of drying vessels, the cans of paint, glaze, whatnot, the brushes stored carefully in jars, glinting softly in the starlight, all strange, all familiar. Yes, now he remembered: She was a potter. He bought a pot from her! He
