Buddie came after me.
So did Lucy.
Sonofabitch.
I whirled, backpedaled, dodged sideways. Buddie scrambled after me making a kind of insane growling, roaring sound. The towel came loose and suddenly Buddie was stark naked. I tried to lead him away from Lucy since she was behind him, not backing off. I yelled for her to run, goddamnit, but she hopped around in the yard with that stupid tree saw in her hands, getting close to him. Too damn close.
Buddie tore after me. I kept out of his reach, barely. It wasn’t something I could keep up for long. He was big, not very fast, but I wouldn’t be able to trade blows with him—him with that billy club, me with a jack handle. Judo sure as hell wasn’t an option. I hadn’t learned enough judo to trade punches with Ma. Maybe the best I could do was run, try to keep him away from Lucy.
I was about to turn and run but Lucy was only five or six feet behind him. If he turned fast enough, he’d have her. I drew my .357 and aimed it at his chest. He pulled up short. Then Lucy swung that saw between Bigfoot’s legs from behind with its teeth pointed upward. She lifted the teeth up into his groin, hard, and pushed the blade forward, sawing testicles. Buddie screamed, then did exactly the wrong thing. He tried to turn as Lucy yanked the blade back toward herself, lifting and sawing, and Buddie used his stupidity and strength to rip out the femoral artery in his right leg.
Lucy fell on her back. Buddie let out another roar of pain and fury, tried to lunge at her, discovered that she was quick as a lynx, so he turned around and came back toward me, spurting blood like a fire hose. He took eight or ten half-staggering steps with one pink-white testicle dangling out of his torn scrotum, a sight that would haunt my dreams, then fell to his knees, flopped to one side, and stared up at me.
“Aw, fuck,” he said.
“Yup,” I said, then a shot rang out. Arlene was out the back door, revolver aimed in my general direction, a whiff of smoke spiraling from the barrel. She took aim again.
I dropped. A bullet tore over my head. I don’t know where the first one had gone. I rolled, scrambled to one side, dodged another bullet, then zigzagged out into the night, a procedure I’d more or less perfected playing football a lifetime ago and used last October when Julia Reinhart was blasting away at me with a Glock only seconds after she’d murdered Jeri.
Another shot rang out behind me and Lucy let out a cry.
Oh, no.
I turned around, came zigzagging back. Arlene screamed at me. She was in a bathrobe that was flapping open, gun in hand. I didn’t see Lucy. I ran at Arlene, threw the jack handle, missed her by half a foot, jumped sideways. She fired off another round that didn’t come very close, then ducked back into the diner.
Stalemate.
I’d counted five shots. She had at least one more, and could be reloading in there.
“Lucy,” I yelled.
“Over here.”
She was in relative darkness behind the shed. When I got to her, she was looking at a furrow in her upper left arm. Blood was flowing, but it was a groove, not an artery opener.
“That . . . that bitch shot me.”
“Wow,” Melanie said. “I never seen anyone shot before.”
“Go back to your trailer,” I told her. “Call the police.”
“Don’t got no phone in there. We want to phone, we got to go over to the diner.”
Perfect.
“Take off your shirt,” I told her.
She took a step back. “What for?”
“I need a bandage.” I didn’t give her time to back farther away. I got hold of her shirt.
“Okay, okay,” she said. She took it off. Her bra was pale white in the light reflecting off the backyard.
“Now get back in your trailer and stay there. Where’s your husband?”
“Kirby? He’s sleepin’. He kin sleep through anything.”
“What a guy. Keep him inside if he wakes up. Now go.”
She went.
I tore Melanie’s shirt into one long strip, folded it, tied it tight around Lucy’s arm.
“Hurts,” she said.
“Bullet wounds are like that.”
“My very first one,” she said, and there was a proud note in her voice.
“How about you make it your very last one, too?”
“I’ll try. This’ll probably leave a pretty good scar.”
“Count on it.”
I looked around the corner of the shed. Buddie was out in the yard, still on his side. Not moving. He’d probably bled out by now. The dangling nut was probably annoying at the time, but a shredded femoral artery tends to kill quickly.
“Nice work with the saw,” I said. “I wouldn’t have thought to do that between the legs thing.”
“Thanks. Now what? She’s still got a gun.”
Going after Arlene under these conditions was something a fool might do. Not me.
“Now we get out of here,” I said. “Buddie’s dead. We won. Let the law handle it. She won’t make it far even if she runs.”
Right then, headlights pulled off the highway in front of the motel. Life is all about timing. With floodlights blazing in the backyard, I hadn’t seen the headlights as they drew near. Peeking around the shed, I saw Ma pull up in that old brown 1963 Cadillac Eldorado of hers. Maude Clary, my boss. She got out of the Caddy and looked around, but the lights behind the diner got her attention and she headed my way.
Not good. Arlene was still inside with a gun.
“Stay put,” I said to Lucy.
I ran out from behind the shed, zigging, yelled, “Stay back, Ma!” and Arlene came out the back door and shot the top quarter inch off my right ear as I was passing Goliath who was sprawled in an Olympic-size pool of his own
