Dirty White Boys

by Stephen Hunter

  He knew so much!

  He knew how stores were organized, what kind of vaults they had, how police patrol shifts worked, how city and state cops differed in their investigative approaches, how to operate any kind of gun or machine, how to get into or out of anything, how to rewire or deactivate electronic security devices. It was as if he had burrowed into the very structure of the universe and knew all of its useful secrets.

  “Now, Richard, I do want to talk to you ’bout Sunday.”

  Sunday! Richard didn’t want to think about Sunday. He had just willed it out of his mind.

  “You tell me what your job is.”

  “I’m your tail gunner.”

  “That’s it. Now, what’s a tail gunner do?”

  “He pretends to be a victim of the robbery. He doesn’t pull a gun or anything. He’s just with the squares, his hands up, everything. But he’s watching in case there’s some hero or undercover cop.”

  “You never know about undercover cops.”

  “Or some cowboy. Lots of cowboys in Texas.”

  “Now, Richard, what are you looking for?”

  “Man with a gun.”

  “And what might the signs be?”

  “Ah—” Richard struggled to remember. “He’ll have a coat on, no matter how hot it is. And he’ll be very conscious of the coat. He’ll always be adjusting it, you know, pulling it tight to keep it from falling open. You really think we may run into a man with a gun? Remember when that crazy guy went into Luby’s? There were a hundred people in there and not one of them had a gun.”

  “We may not be so lucky. You going to see a bulge?”

  “A bulge. Maybe a—”

  “No, Richard, goddamn, don’t you remember nothing? These new holsters are real slick in holding the piece in tight to the body. In the old days, you could always see a bulge. It’s all changed now with this here ballistic nylon, plus all the cops wearing flat autos instead of rounded wheelguns. You probably be up against a boy with a Beretta or a Glock or a SIG. Rangers carry SIGs, Texas highway patrol, Berettas. You got to read his body. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Richard disconsolately, feeling very much like a teenage boy who had disappointed his father.

  “And what else?”

  “Ah—what else?”

  “What else.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “You dumbhead. It may be a bitch! Yeah, used to be damn few women working police and fewer by God of them packing guns. Now you got a goddamn one-in-five chance it’ll be a woman. Now if there’s an undercover or plainclothes or off-duty cop in there, you got one chance in five it’s a woman. Could be a woman with kids, woman at a table with her daddy or her old man, could be a nigger woman, a Mex, anything. You read the goddamned body, look for the way they carry their hands, the way they don’t swing about fast because it might cause the coat to fluff up, you got that?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And if you see it and she goes for it when the job is coming down, Richard, what’s your assignment?”

  “I have to shoot.”

  “Yes sir, like I told you; gun out front, you look at the sights, you LOOK AT THE SIGHTS, and you fire fast, three times. You put her down, Richard, or she gonna put us down. You think you can’t do it? Think on this: I get hit, Odell may go hog wild with that AR. He could make that goddamned Luby’s thing look like Sunday school. You want that on your conscience?”

  “No sir.”

  “No sir. Quick in, quick out, nobody gets hurt, we go home rich.”

  They were in downtown Altus now, driving through the dusty streets. It was a low old town, with no buildings over three stories, lots of closed-up storefronts, a general store, a courthouse and city hall that looked as if plush times had passed by many a year ago, the usual statue of Will Rogers, who never met a man he didn’t like, a few benches. But Lamar didn’t go for it.

  “Too open. Pull ’round the other side of town, we’ll find something with a bit more privacy.”

  They cut through what passed for the Altus suburbs, little houses swaddled under wilted trees, and soon enough hit the commercial strip, U.S. 283 running north.

  “Yeah, this is more like it. Pull in there.”

  Richard pulled into a strip mall crowded with cars. Food Lion was the big draw; there was also a yogurt shop, a county library, a Rexall, a movie complex with five tiny ratty little theaters, and a sporting goods store.

  “Ooo, movies, ain’t that a treat. Pull in here, Richard.”

  “We’re going to the movies?”

  “No, Richard, we are not going to the movies. Richard, sometimes I wish I’d left you in that goddamn cell for the niggers. They’da been more happy, I’da been more happy, and hell, boy, maybe you’da been more happy.”

  They sat in silence. In awhile a car pulled in, and a father and son got out and went up to the box office. The father bought two tickets and they went in.

  “Now ain’t that a gift. See, Richard, he’ll be in there two hours. When he comes out, it’ll take him at least a half an hour to figure out that he didn’t forget where he parked his car, but that somebody stole it. It’ll take the cops, even in a hick burg like this, another fifteen, twenty minutes to come on by to write the goddamned report. By that time, we’ll have that sucker wearing a different color and new plates.”

  Slowly, Richard drove over to the car, but Lamar said, “We got some time, you just cruise a bit. We got a last thing to talk about.”

  Oh, Christ, thought Richard.

  “You got one other job.”

  “What is it, Lamar?”

  “Now, say something goes wrong. I catch some shit. I don’t make it out. Or I get hit bad and die in the car, bleed to death maybe. The law is closing in, it’s all gone down, it’s turned to yellow cat shit.”

  “Lamar!”

  “It could happen. This is risky business, sometimes the craziest things fuck you up. You listening? You can see it in your mag-i-nation?”

  All too easily. Richard felt like crying.

  “I saved your ass from the niggers, I got you out, I got you this new life. Richard, if they catch you, you can tell them you was forced in all of this. Richard, you might even be a hero in all this, you could tell them all the bad things we done. The Stepfords will say you didn’t do nothing, that goddamn lucky-ass John Wayne-looking Smokey sergeant will say you didn’t shoot nobody. Hell, they’ll make a movie with what’s his fucking name, Richard Gere, that the one, he’s playing you. But you owe me one thing, Richard.”

  “Yes, Lamar.”

  “You still got that Smokey’s gun? You ain’t lost it or nothing?”

  “No, Lamar. I have it. It’s back at Ruta Beth’s under the mattress I sleep on.” He hated it. It was a big silver thing, hard and slightly greasy. He was supposed to dry-fire it a hundred times a night to develop strength in his hands, but he could never pull the trigger more than twenty-five times before it hurt too much.

  “Oh, you don’t have it now? Great, Richard. Well, never mind. If it goes to the skunks on us, Richard, and old Lamar’s been turned to meat by some state cop with a shotgun full of Number Four, you wait till Odell’s head is turned, then you put that gun muzzle behind his ear and you pull the trigger. That’s the sweetest thing could happen to Odell if I’m not here.”

  “I-I—I thought you loved Odell.”

  “I do. Too much to want to have to think about what would happen to him if I weren’t there to watch out for the boy. Who would care for him? Who would explain things to him? There ain’t no mercy in this world for a big old baby who’s listened to his evil cousin, done harm and can’t talk for himself. Who would brush his teeth? Who would make sure he eats? Sometimes, he don’t even know enough to eat at all. He’s the sorriest soul on earth, truth is. They’d make him into some kind of geek show if I’m dead and they catch him, then they send him to some hole without me to figure out what’s going on and to make the way for him. Couldn’t have that, Richard. No way. So y
ou got to do what I tell you.”

  “Yes, Lamar.”

  “I knew I could trust you, Richard. Okay, drop me here.”

  Richard pulled over and Lamar slipped out, took a quick look-see in each direction, then smooth and unruffled as could be, just bent to the car door and slipped a long, flat piece of metal down the window shaft. With a few swift diddles—backward, while looking around with the softest and most relaxed expression on his face—he popped the lock and jumped behind the wheel. In a second, he had it started. He backed out, pulled by Richard with a smile, and headed off on his way.

  CHAPTER

  14

  On Saturday, Bud went to the new Lawton public library just down from the new police station and looked at art books and books on Africa. Lions. What the hell was this thing about lions?

  Was it just lions? Or was it another theme—the lion in art? Of the latter, there wasn’t much. He only came across one painter who could be called a lion artist, a Frenchman named Rousseau who painted the goofiest things Bud had ever seen. The stuff was called primitive. The most famous showed a lion licking a sleeping black man under a spooky moon. Bud gazed on the picture, trying to figure it out. It actually kind of shook him: it was like looking into someone else’s dreams—it had that clear, serene quality to it, almost childish. It seemed somehow smug that its meanings were sealed off to normal folk like himself. It gave him the goddamn willies.

  The other famous lion painting, also by Rousseau, actually wasn’t primarily about lions at all; instead it was about a woman on a chaise lounge in the jungle. She had the same spooky calmness. In one corner of the picture, a lion and a tiger, almost lovers, gazed from the dense green trees. It also had that childish quality, but there was nothing in it that seemed to have to do with Lamar Pye or Richard Peed, because they were so peaceable and in a way, so unnatural. To Lamar, nature was savage; this kind of wussy lion would strike Lamar as a kind of sacrilege somehow.

  But then Bud noted a small drawing in an art history book jammed with paintings of important men and battles. Was it a lion? It was a cat, but could it be a lion? He looked close at the caption, more foreign gibberish with one recognizable key word: “Lion tourné vers la gauche, la tête levée, 1854,” it read. The artist was another French guy, a Eugène Delacroix.

  This Eugène appeared to know a bit more about lions than his poor countryman Rousseau. There was nothing phony or movie-like about it and this lion couldn’t have come out of any dream. It was a big beast, somehow shivering in the delight of its own existence, its head corkscrewed slightly to the left so that you couldn’t see the famous lion profile or much of the familiar mane. The beast seemed to be stretching itself on some plain somewhere. But Eugène must have feared lions and known what they could do, in a way the dreamer Rousseau never could: Eugène somehow got its throbbing power, the bunched muscles under the skin, the sense of sheer grace and coiled energy stored in it, its animal purity. But the eyes, especially, seemed to have some secret meaning: They were jet-black arrowheads set in the narrow skull, animal eyes, devoid of mercy or curiosity, merely intent on feeding whatever instincts happened to play across the lion brain. Odd how much emotion a few lines inked on a piece of paper one hundred odd-years ago could stir.

  Bud shivered himself, though not with delight. He felt the power of the predator, the instinctive killer. Maybe this is what Richard was trying to bring out.

  But that was all he came up with, and so he put the art books aside, and turned to the lion as animal, gazing for hours at lion photography from a variety of texts. This got him even less. Lions, for all their vaunted majesty, were just big cats. In their slouchy poses, their silkiness, their slope-bellied laziness, he saw a cat one of the boys had once had, a yellow tabby thing hung with the name Mischief, who’d laid around the house all day watching the human beings with total disinterest, seeming as harmless as a slightly animated pillow. But every once in awhile, he’d bring in a tiny lung or heart or something, as an offering, as if to a god. As if he, Bud, master of the house, were the god. Whatever, it worked; the cat lived with them in perfect harmony for eleven years before finally dying comfortably of old age. Bud had always liked its split personality: that it could be the complete tabby by day, then slip out at night and revert to savagery, rending some small creature down to its organs.

  But this got Bud nowhere except into a blinding headache. He called Holly and had a brief but entirely pleasant chat, as he told her all about the lions of the Lawton library, and she laughed at the image of the big old boy who looked like John Wayne looking at books on lions and how the mamas must have thought he was crazy or something. She said he was damned lucky they didn’t call the police.

  Then he said, “Uh, I was thinking, I might drop by tomorrow.”

  “You was, was you?” she said, in flirty fake astonishment. “Well, whatever gave you that idea?”

  “Oh, a little fellow.”

  “Well, if you come, you best bring him along.”

  “About noon?”

  “Yes sir,” she said.

  When he got home, everybody seemed happy. He even felt happy, though he had to gobble a Percodan to keep from hurting. It seemed that all was at peace in the strange realm he called his empire; he didn’t have to mollify any of his far-flung, rebellious provinces. He had a few beers, a light supper, and went to bed before either of the two boys got home from dates or parties or whatever. He dreamed of lions.

  On Sunday, Bud rose and, feeling he hadn’t been paying enough attention to Jen and feeling also guilty over what he had planned for noon, went to the nine A.M. service with her and Jeff. Russ, of course, the intellectual, had stopped going to church in the eighth grade.

  So Russ slept, because he’d been out late the night before on some fool thing. At least he hadn’t come back with another earring. Bud put his anger aside or in the little place where he stored it, and drove across town with Jen and Jeff in Jen’s station wagon.

  Jen had taken to going to the Methodist Church though, like Bud, she’d been christened a Baptist. Her father, a prosperous farmer up near Tulsa, had always referred, sneeringly, to Methodists as Baptists who forgot where they came from, and although Jen stuck with her father on pretty near everything, she’d decided to give Methodism a shot, and it stuck. The Methodists had a preacher named Webb Fellowes whom she liked a great deal because he always gave a damned entertaining sermon: for a younger man, he seemed to be quite wise and respectful, and he was funny. Today he told an amusing story about a rich Texas oilman who annually gave 15 percent to the church and quite a sight more when the parishioners decided to build a new building. Afterward, this Texan was asked if he belonged to the church. “Hell no,” he said, “the church belongs to me!” Bud saw what Webb Fellowes was getting at: It wasn’t a thing about how much you gave in dollars, but how much you gave in your heart.

  If that’s the case, he thought, I ain’t much of a Christian, especially because as soon as the service is over and Jen and Jeff and I go to get some breakfast, I’m going to go break a commandment.

  After the service, they walked down the line that got them to the minister, and he was well up on things.

  “Hear you hit a dinger, son,” he called out heartily, clapping Jeff on the arm.

  “Yes sir, I did,” said Jeff.

  “That ball’s still climbing,” said Jen.

  “No ma’am, it just barely made it over the centerfielder’s mitt,” Jeff said, “But it was a home run nevertheless.”

  “Well, Mrs. Pewtie, you’ve got every right to be proud.”

  “And every right to be thankful,” she said, and took Bud’s arm and brought him a little closer.

  “How’re you doing, Sergeant?” asked Webb Fellowes.

  “Well,” said Bud, “they tell me I won’t be going through any metal detectors without setting off every alarm between here and Kansas City, but I feel pretty good.”

  The minister laughed.

  “The Lord looks after those
who know He’s there,” he said.

  Bud smiled enthusiastically at the young minister and at the absurdity of the statement. What a crock, he thought as he pumped Fellowes’ strong hand, the Lord don’t look after nothing. He just sets the goddamned Lamar Pyes of the world loose, and hell comes for a meal nearly every place that boy hangs his hat.

  Afterward, the family went to the Denny’s on Cache Road near the Holiday Inn and had a nice big breakfast, though Bud, who hated to wait in lines, grew restless while waiting to be seated and began to get somewhat angry. But there was no point to that. Then he remembered that once he’d had lunch with Holly in this place, but it hadn’t gone well because he was so frightened of being seen by somebody. He tried to put all that out of his mind.

  Bud had what they called their Grand Slam, three scrambled eggs, homefries, bacon, and a pancake.

  “Bud, I swear, you leave some food for the people still in that line,” Jen said, in her abstract way.

  “I don’t know why, but I am damned hungry.”

  “You haven’t been eating since it happened.”

  “Lamar Pye took my appetite, that’s for sure. But I do believe he gave it back to me today.” He shoveled down a forkful of homefries. They were a significant weakness of his.

  “Dad,” Jeff said, “I wanted to head out to the batting cages on sixty-one. I don’t want to lose what it is I got. Can you drive me out?”

  “Sure,” Bud said, trying to keep a little stab of disappointment off his face, his plan with Holly just washed up. “When do you want to go?”

  “Oh, anytime. Figure we’d get home and change and then go.”

  “Sounds good,” he said, feeling like a heel for what he was about to do. “Oh, say, I’ll tell you. I was going to log in some range time today. I think I may invest in one of those nine-millimeters. I don’t never want to try and speed-load under fire again. Sixteen shots’ll beat six any day of the week. The Lawton boys carry these Glocks and I thought I might head over to their range and see if I could talk one of them into letting me run a box of ammo through to see how I like it. Though Jed Wheelright had a Beretta I liked a lot. So, whyn’t you relax a bit after you get home, let the food settle, and I’ll go on. Be back in an hour or so. Then we’ll go hit.”