Lucy shivered. “Now what?” Her voice was a whisper, as if the night had ears. Which, around here, maybe it did.
I looked toward the diner. Lights were on over there. Those two were probably scrambling around, removing any last-minute traces of evidence in case the police showed up. Buddie would be certain we were finished, but you never know what a Yeti is thinking. The last thing we needed was for that spotlight to come on again in a final paranoid sweep and get lucky.
“Not sure,” I said. “But get dressed. Dark clothing.”
I was still in jockeys. They were so full of dirt they sagged on me. I took them off, shook out a pound of Nevada, put them back on. My mom wouldn’t have approved. What would people think if I got in an accident? The thought passed through, but I can’t say it had much weight.
Beneath the starry sky we dressed, put on shoes, gathered up what seemed most likely to be useful—the knife, jack handle, one gun each. They didn’t have bullets, but a revolver aimed at a person’s heart tends to intimidate. It could alter behavior, cause hesitations. I took my .357 Magnum, Lucy kept her .38.
So now . . . choices.
Best option was to give the diner a very wide berth and walk out to the highway, flag down the next vehicle to come along. Get the hell out of there. Call the police.
I couldn’t bring myself to do that. What I wanted was to fire up that backhoe and drive it through the diner and level the place, hopefully run over Bigfoot and his bitch mother in the process.
That, of course, was just the worst kind of wishful thinking.
But we were dark, invisible out there. We could get close to the diner and motel, see what was going on. A thought clattered through my head, something about curiosity, a cat, and a bad outcome.
Man, I hated those two.
Really, though. We could get a little closer, listen, maybe get an idea of what was going on.
Or, with luck, we could find a phone, call the police, be right there when those two were packed into a police car in handcuffs.
Stupid thoughts.
We walked quietly toward the diner’s lights. Not many lights were on. I saw two yellowish glows. We were still over a quarter mile away.
“What’re we doin’, Mort?” she whispered.
“You’re not hurt, are you? You can run if you have to?”
“Yeah, but . . . what’re we doing?”
“Seeing how much we can see.”
“Are we gonna kill them? I hope.”
Okay, we were on the same psychological page here. But it wasn’t a good page.
“Nope.”
“Why not? They tried to kill us.” Her voice was low, savage. It wouldn’t carry far into the night, but it would carry pretty deep into her psyche. Well, she’d never had anyone try to snuff her out before, and I had. I was experienced. I could handle it.
Sure I could.
“The law will take care of them,” I said. But I felt no sense of satisfaction at the words, no sense of justice. The words were dust in my mouth. They were logical, dead, and empty, so I had a fine little skirmish going on in my head.
“That what you want?” Lucy asked. “Put the law on them?”
“No. I want to roast their hearts over an open fire. But having them arrested is the right thing to do. And a lot safer.”
Arrested.
An anemic, tepid, civilized word. It had no bearing on what Buddie had done to us. It had no quality of justice. Marching the two of them away in cuffs sounded marginally better, but it had none of the hot-blooded appeal of that open-fire thing.
We went another hundred yards in silence. Finally she said, “If that’s what you want, okay.” I could barely hear her words.
“If you hear anything, like someone coming after you, run.”
“Whatever.”
Curious response.
A light went out inside the diner. Moments later, the last one went out. All that was left was a kind of halo where a floodlight lit the Diner sign on the roof where it faced the highway. Lucy and I were still a quarter mile out, at the helicopter hangar.
“Beddie-by,” Lucy whispered.
“Maybe. Don’t count on it.”
We went past Buddie’s backhoe on its trailer. We made it to the shed behind the diner that held the safe they’d taken out of Jo-X’s place. We stood behind it. I looked around a corner at the diner, still holding the jack handle. This close to the place, I saw a faint glow in a window from somewhere inside—a night-light, or maybe they weren’t asleep or in bed yet.
Lucy pawed through junk behind the shed. “Ouch.” Then, “Look what I found,” she whispered. “Careful. It’s sharp.”
It was the old tree saw I’d seen several days ago. A two-foot gently curved blade, long jagged teeth. I remembered seeing it—a rusty, nasty-looking, possibly useful weapon in exactly the right circumstances, which wasn’t the case here. Here it was unwieldy and hopelessly inadequate.
“If Goliath comes after you, drop that damn thing and run like hell,” I whispered.
“What’re you two doin’ out here?” Melanie the waitress said in a voice loud enough to wake Jimmy Hoffa.
I almost yelped. Lucy let out a terrified little chirp and junk banged against the side of the shed. My heart tried to pound its way out of my chest.
“Well, jeez, I’m sorry,” Melanie said. “I didn’t mean to scare you guys.”
“Quiet!”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
Well, shit. I might have to deck her to shut her up.
Too late.
A pair of floodlights came on behind the diner, blasting the backyard with light. It wasn’t the big spotlight, but it lit the place up. Bigfoot came charging out with a towel around his waist and what might’ve been a billy club in one hand. His hair was wet, water running in his eyes. He saw me looking at him from behind the shed and headed my way, fast.
“Run,” I yelled to Lucy.
