out. I won’t wait on you, and you don’t wait on me. And the thing then is to get started, to go on in the house and start shooting any one of those sonofabitches that you see. When you get inside, move like you mean it. Seek and shoot, upstairs and downstairs. Keep count of how many you drop, and get the killing in your blood. Get goddamn good and self-righteous about it because that’s the only way you’ll see it through.”
“Merciful Jesus,” I said.
“It’s a pisser, ain’t it?” Jim Bob said. “Now, y’all get started.”
Russel and I eased down into the ravine by sliding on the slick grass and dry clay that made up the sides. Our feet landed in a thin trickle of brackish-smelling water and sent up a cloud of mosquitoes that lit on our faces, hands, backs, and shoulders and sucked blood even through our shirts. Roots and brush tumbled and twisted across the floor of the ravine, grabbed at our feet and tried to trip us. Above us, jutting out from the lips of the ravine, arthritic trees and scrubby brush hid a lot of the thin moonlight and made our path down there damn dark. Still, we stepped quickly, and quietly. At least, I hoped we were moving quietly. I couldn’t hear all that well on account of my blood pounding in my temples.
The scrub brush and trees diminished above us and the light from the house was stronger than the bad moonlight and it fell down into the ravine like tainted butter. The ravine went narrow and the left side of it dropped down and we had to bend low and ease over to the edge of it and poke our heads up to see exactly where we were.
We were almost even with the front edge of the house, and I could see the boulder in the suit standing under a yellow bug light on the front porch. I wondered about him; couldn’t help but think he might be thinking about what was going on inside the house and wishing he was in on it, but was stuck instead with guard duty. And maybe he wasn’t thinking about it at all, didn’t care. Perhaps he was thinking about fast cars and women and the Dallas Cowboys, the price of special made suits that would fit his boulder-shaped body.
I looked at Russel.
“Let’s take him,” he whispered.
43
“I’ve got the shotgun,” I said. “I guess I should do it.” Russel didn’t try to talk me out of it. I waited a second or two hoping he would, then went over the lip of the ravine with a shell pumped into the chamber and before I was halfway there the guy torqued and saw me and reached inside his coat. I was about to fire at him, when Jim Bob, like some kind of cowboy-hatted ghost, swooped out of the night and hit the man in the side of the head with the barrel of the sawed-off. The man spun almost around and Jim Bob kicked his feet out from under him. The man’s head hit the concrete porch with a soft smack and Jim Bob bent over him, made a quick move with his hand and stood up.
All in all, the entire undertaking had been relatively quiet.
I came up alongside Jim Bob, then Russel moved up behind me, breathing sharply. I looked down at the man on the ground. Jim Bob’s sawed-off was lying across his chest and underneath the man’s chin was a swathe of darkness; as I watched it grew broader. Jim Bob had a pocketknife in his hand and the blade was dripping blood. He closed it on his pants leg, pushed it into his pants pocket and picked up the sawed-off. “It’s Howdy Doody time,” he said and jerked the door open and went inside, Russel and I behind him. No one was there for us to shoot at.
Jim Bob nodded up the stairs, and went that way. Russel went right and I went left, the shotgun in front of me. I came to a door and opened it and found a closet. None of the coats tried to get me. I closed the door and went around the corner and down the hall, and then the world started rocking and rolling with the sound of gunfire. It was coming from upstairs. I started to turn, then heard running feet. I whirled and crouched, and one of the men from the van came beating toward me. When he saw me, he tried to slow down, and it was like one of those comic takes, where the comedian does a kind of choppy half-step, half-skid backwards. But this guy wasn’t a comedian. His hand went inside his coat and it came out with a revolver and I cut down on him with the Ithaca and took him full in the chest. He spun and went down, but rolled on his back and got to a near-sitting position and took a shot at me; the bullet burned along my neck. I pumped another load into the Ithaca and fired again and caught the guy in the chin and the shot made his head cock way too far back and he flopped on the floor and the hall filled with the odor of shit and gunpowder.
Shooting had been going on all the while, and I decided to go on down the hall and see what was there, then go back to the stairs and hope for the best. I jumped over the dead man and went around the corner expecting gunfire, but finding only a big empty kitchen with the makings of a sandwich on the counter. The guy must have been fixing himself a snack when the shooting started. I ran back up the hall and took a left toward the stairway, saw a blur of movement, dropped to one knee, and pumped a load into the Ithaca as I did. A man with one arm dangling limp and awkward at his side, an automatic hanging from one finger like a knickknack on a hook, stumbled backwards and fell against one of the big windowpanes that made up the front of the house, and began to slide down it, leaving a road of blood on the glass. Russel came into view, walked over to the man, put the. 357 to the top of his head and shot him.
“Russel,” I said.
He wheeled on me and the revolver cocked, then lifted up. His eyes were stoned looking and his face was as white as a Ku Kluxer’s sheet.
“Stairs,” he said.
There was gunfire up there, and when we got to the turn in the stairway, we found a Mexican. Not the one we were familiar with, but another. The top of his head was gone.
We went over him, on up fast, then a door came open at the top of the stairs and there was a scream like a dinosaur in pain, and Jim Bob came flying out, smashed against the wall and melted onto the landing. He had lost his hat and like Russel his eyes were wild looking and his face was dead white. He still had the sawed-off in his hand. The. 38 was gone from its holster.
It wasn’t Jim Bob screaming. It was the one Jim Bob called the Mex. He stumbled out of the doorway and onto the landing. The front of his shirt was dark and wet and the material sucked into his chest when he breathed. He looked as if he were wired up on something.
Jim Bob rolled his head toward us. “Shoot the motherfucker,” he yelled. “I gave him both barrels.”
Russel’s. 357 rode up and bucked and the Mex’s head snapped hard right and back around as if on a spring. Half his face was gone. The Mex reached down and grabbed Jim Bob by the leg and slung him at us. Jim Bob hit me and I went back, fell over the dead Mexican on the stairs. Russel was still where he was.
The Mex was coming down the steps after Russel like the Frankenstein monster. Russel lifted his gun hand and used his other hand to brace his wrist and he shot the Mex in the nose and the Mex doubled forward and tumbled down over Jim Bob and me and the other Mexican.
Russel continued up the stairs. Jim Bob got to his feet, broke open the sawed-off, and got two shells out of his snap shirt pocket and loaded the gun and flicked it shut.
I got hold of the Ithaca, which I had momentarily lost, and I went up after Jim Bob. Russel went through the door just ahead of us, and we rushed in after him.
The room was the room where they had made the video we had seen. A video camera was on a tripod at the far right, and another lay overturned on the floor. A third without a tripod lay on the corner of the bed. A man lay on the bed too. It was the man I had seen going up the stairs ahead of Freddy; I recognized his suit. He was lying on top of the girl. I couldn’t tell anything about her. I could only see the bottom of her naked feet, her arms thrown out as if in crucifixion, and her black hair spread against the white sheets like an oil spill on snow.
“Freddy and that skinny fuck are around here somewhere,” Jim Bob said. “Them and this guy and the Mex were in here when I came in. The skinny guy was putting the meat to her.”
I went over to the man on the bed and grabbed him by the collar of his suit and pulled him off the girl. He rolled face up. He looked like a man that had never had to work. He had very fine silver hair and a matching mustache. He. must have been fifty at least. Old enough to have been the girl’s father. Jim Bob had shot him several times in the chest and crotch. With the. 38 most likely. The wounds were small.
I looked at the girl. She didn’t move anything but her eyes. They rolled toward me. They were the color of old pecans. The nipples of her small breasts were uncommonly large and wide and matched the color of her eyes. Her
