I dropped, rolled, got up, and Arlene shot me in the shoulder, which dropped me in the dirt. She came across the yard, revolver in her fist. She walked up, taking her time, aimed it at my head, and from the corner of the diner Ma shot Arlene in the right temple with a .45 Sig and blew out the left side of her head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“NICE SHOT, MA,” I said, grimacing. I pressed a hand to my shoulder as I sat up on the ground. I had the feeling that standing wouldn’t be a good idea. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Officer Day walked up beside her. The behemoth had been riding shotgun. Interesting. He had a big service automatic in one hand. Ma had beaten him to the corner of the diner and taken Arlene down ten seconds before he got there.
“Someone’s gotta keep an eye on you,” she said. Then a tear leaked out of her left eye, second time I’d seen Ma cry. The first was when I told her Jeri had been murdered. Normally Ma was as tough and dry as a nickel steak.
Lucy dropped down beside me and gave me a hug. “Are you okay? She shot you. You’re bleeding. Does it hurt?”
“Slow down, kiddo. I’ll live.”
“You better.”
The bullet had hit me low in the shoulder, hit meat, no bone, and went on through. It hurt like a sonofabitch and the pain was only going to get worse. And soon.
Lucy helped me to my feet. I felt wobbly. “Officer Day,” I said. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“You, too, Angel. Any more hostiles around?”
“Nope. Got a crime scene you could secure though.”
“Not my jurisdiction, not my job. And it’s ugly, but if no one else is gonna pull a gun, I think it’s secure enough.” He wasn’t in uniform, but he had his on-duty holster on his hip. After one last look around, he holstered his weapon.
Lucy stared at Day. He was huge, only marginally smaller than Buddie, lying ten feet away. Arlene was on her back, eyes staring emptily at the sky, a faint look of surprise on her face, not much remaining of the left side of her head, which is what a .45 Hydra-Shok bullet will do.
“That’s Officer Day?” Lucy said to me with what sounded like a little snarl in her voice.
“Yes, it is. Just in time, too.”
“Not very svelte, is she?”
“Nope.”
“You poophead. She’s a he.”
“You noticed. Good job. And he’s a he. I never said he was a she.”
Day let out a low bass rumble.
“For God’s sake,” Ma said. “This is your assistant?”
“Yep. Lucy. She killed Bigfoot over there. You shoulda seen it. I think he’s lying on one of his nuts.”
“One of his nuts? What’s that mean?”
“You really don’t want to know.”
Then, of course, Russell Fairchild pulled up at the motel in his blue Explorer, two minutes late and a dollar short. He got out and ran over to us on short bandy legs, stopped short, and stared at six feet seven inches of naked Yeti in a gallon or two of blood.
“Holy shit,” he said. Then he noticed Arlene, bloody brains glistening in the dirt not far away. “Jesus. What the hell—”
“You’re late,” I told him. I gave him a manly smile, blood on shirt, bullet hole in shoulder, top of right ear missing. Something for him to remember. I was sure he’d never been shot. The wimp. I would be able to lord this over him for years.
The tableau held for a few more seconds. Dead lying in the yard, two of us wounded, floodlights glaring. Justice had been done, no judge or jury needed. I wished it had been done without bullet wounds, but Lucy and I had been damned lucky. My nicked ear was the least of it, but one inch to the left and the bullet would have scrambled my brains.
Then the pain started to get serious and I felt faint again. Casually as possible, I said, “This get-together is great even if no one brought wine, but Lucy and I could use a hospital. Sometime tonight? So if someone could arrange that, maybe we could talk to the police and give statements after we get all this bleeding stopped?”
Manly.
Then I slowly crumpled to the ground and passed out.
Shit. Ruined it.
The media circus got fired up about the time the sun poked above the hills east of Vegas, fading the miles and megawatts of neon. I didn’t see that. I was in surgery, so the calliope played its cotton-candy music and clowns lit exploding cigars without me. But I heard about it from Ma, later, upstairs in recovery, groggy from the anesthetic—Mortimer Angel, PI extraordinaire, was in the news again, having not only located the missing Jo-X the previous week, but was instrumental in busting up what appeared to be a mother-son family enterprise engaged in mass murder for profit. Maybe O’Roarke would give me more freedrink coupons.
I was starting to hate hospitals, but they’re a lot like enemas. When you need ’em, you need ’em, so you grit your teeth and take it and try not to let the whining leak out to where people can hear it and fuck with your gravitas.
“How’d you get there, Ma?” I asked her. My mouth had that gummy, after-surgery medicinal aftertaste that comes up from the lungs. I was in bed in a room that was costing between two and three dollars a minute. I had an IV in one arm and a drain in my shoulder with stuff I didn’t want to look at collecting in a bag attached to the side of the bed. Later I found out the bullet had hit a fair-sized blood vessel and Day had compressed the wound all the way to the hospital and possibly saved my life. I would never hear the end of that. And, shit, now I owed him one.
“Get where?” Ma asked.
“To that diner last night. You and Officer
