Dirty White Boys

by Stephen Hunter

  Armed robbery was about it and nothing else: you made your statement in the first second and drew your lines—you were in charge. If anybody stepped over the line, man, woman, boy, girl, baby, you had to hurt them bad. No exceptions, no mercy: You broke their bones, you broke their spirits, you took their money, and you left them crying and shaking. They could not get it in their skulls that any way but yours existed. If you had to kill them, you just did it, cold and sudden, and went on with business.

  Lamar was through the door first, his heart steady as a rock, his eyes darting like swallows, and in the first second he saw the cop. The cop saw him; a little something passed between them, and the cop took a half a backward step as if to say, Whoa, Partner, let me think on this one, but by then Lamar had the shotgun out and the cop knew he was finished and was determined to go out like a man. He was fast; in his life he’d probably dreamed such a thing a thousand times, for it was one of the risks of the job. His right hand flew to his automatic.

  Meanwhile, in a fraction of the same second and equally without a conscious thought, and without a twitch of curiosity—though he did note the cop’s unexplained presence, and meant to deal with it later—Lamar raised the cutdown Browning A-5 from under his coat and blew a double-ought into that surprised old boy. Texas Highway Patrol still had those old-timey thirties uniforms, gray shirt, red collar and epaulets, and they carried SIGs, and this boy was meat before he even touched his own gun. The double-ought erupted into nine .32 slugs traveling at over a thousand miles an hour and took his life from him and sent him knocko backward against the wall between the two rest-rooms, to the left of the manager’s office. He slid down the wall, leaving a webbing of gore upon it, for the pellets, or some of them, passed on through, and his life’s blood spurted from his ruptured heart as he fell.

  What Lamar didn’t know was that he had just called in on his radio jack, which ran up from the transmitter on his duty belt and was affixed to his lapel. Fourteen miles away in the basement dispatch room of the Iowa Park barrack, a dispatcher heard what she recognized immediately as the amplified sound of a firearms report. She began frantically to call in the men on her network and in two minutes made contact with fourteen of them. The fifteenth had just called in going-out-of-service (10-7) at Denny’s for his twenty-minute break. Getting no reply, she calmly began to broadcast: “All units, all units, I have a possible ten-thirty-three at the Denny’s off 287, there at Maurine Street, can somebody please verify. Possible Signal thirteen.” Signal thirteen meant “Officer down, assistance required immediately.”

  Lamar knew none of this, of course. He turned from his murder to face what he did expect, utter incredulity. Everywhere he looked he saw slack mouths and gaping eyes as the echo of the shotgun blast seemed to rattle around in the still air and the gun smoke drifted into layers. Then the stupidity broke like glass into fear: Lamar could almost feel it shatter through the room. A child began to cry; moms squirmed to draw their children in to them, and dads put out their hands to calm the older kids, though their faces drained of blood as the great possibility of death dawned on them. The airmen at the far table were sheet white, almost pissing in their fancy blue uniforms. The gun smoke spread through the room like vapor. It was incredibly quiet except for the sudden clickety-click as the spent 12-gauge shell hit the floor and rolled.

  Quickly Ruta Beth had pulled Bud’s Mossberg from under her coat and vaulted the counter to chill out the nigger boys behind the Dutch door and the two waitresses behind the counter. Odell had the AR-15—two feet of black plastic Colt assault rifle—and waved it toward the seated citizens, who immediately melted under its threat. Though it was a semiautomatic, Lamar knew its power for crowd control was awesome, for anyone who’d watched TV would assume it was a machine gun.

  “Y’all stay seated and we won’t hurt you none. We come for Denny’s money, not yours,” Lamar yelled in a loud, unhurried, almost country-and-western voice. Witnesses would later say he sounded friendly-like, sort of like Travis Tritt or Randy Travis.

  His eyes caught on Richard at his window table. The boy looked almost as scared as the square johns.

  Then he pivoted his attention to the short, pimply boy at the register. He closed quickly, put the 12-gauge at the youngster’s chin.

  The boy’s mouth was working dryly. He looked like a fish Lamar had caught during one of his infrequent stays in society. His jaw seemed to twitch as he sucked for air.

  “Don’t hurt me,” he said.

  “I will kill you if you don’t gimme what I want.”

  The boy’s fingers flew to the computer register and he punched a key and it flew open.

  “Take it, sir. Take it all.”

  “That’s smalltime shit, boy. In back. The safe. You open it or by God, you’ll wish you had.”

  Using the gun as a prod, Lamar pushed him along. They stepped over the dead cop, whose eyes had glazed like marbles. He lay in a satiny pool of his own blood, legs akimbo, head bent in an unnatural way, both hands almost delicately relaxed. He looked like a fallen angel. Lamar dipped down and with one hand removed the SIG from a safety holster. Lamar knew how to bypass the fake thumb-break and find the real one further down the strap. It was a P220, in .45. That made him happy. He liked .45s. He slid this one into his back waistband, right next to the holstered long-slide Clark Colt.

  In the office the safe was a small Sergant & Greenleaf model, an eight-digit multiple-tumbler combination variant, sunk in the wall behind the manager’s grimy desk. He pushed the boy over to it.

  “It’s a time lock,” the boy lied badly.

  “Do you think I’m dumb, sonny?” Lamar asked. This was the dicey part. He really only had but a minute to break the boy down. It’s funny the reservoirs of courage and sheer cussed orneriness you find in the most common people. Maybe the boy would be a surprise hero, giving up his life to save Denny a few grand. It bothered Lamar that he was so young. An older man would roll over in a second, having the wisdom of witnessed pain in his time and knowing nothing was worth a squalid death in the back of a cheap restaurant.

  Lamar walked around behind the boy and suddenly smashed him with the shotgun, driving him to the earth. The shudder of the blow resounded satisfyingly through the weapon. The boy, leaking blood, lay on the floor, dazed. When his senses returned, his eyes bulged with animal fear. Lamar bent and, with one quick movement, he trapped the boy’s little finger in the fulcrum of his fist.

  He broke the little finger.

  The boy yowled in pain. He began to weep. He blubbered and was attempting to request mercy when Lamar stilled him by thrusting the shotgun muzzle into his larynx.

  “I ain’t got no time. You open the safe or I’ll break all your fingers. You won’t never play the piano again. Then I’ll gut-shoot you to die slowly. You think I won’t? You want to try me? I will as sure as rain.”

  He stood back. The boy regained some composure and crawled to his feet. Snot ran down his swollen face. He applied himself to the combination lock and had it opened in a second.

  “You shouldn’t have lied to me,” Lamar said, like a stern father. He fired once into the boy’s chest, blowing him out of the way. He wasn’t sure why he’d done it. It just was there for the doing, and without a conscious decision having been reached, he did it.

  From the floor, the boy gurgled and mewled and began to address a speech to someone named Andy, but Lamar paid no heed. He stepped over the fallen boy and leaned inside the safe. Pay dirt! Fourth of July! A little stab of elation jerked through him. Swiftly enough, he pulled the locked cash bags off the shelf, knowing they could be easily enough cut open later, and dumped them into a laundry bag he had purchased that very morning. He took a last look around, noted nothing, and stepped out into the restaurant proper.

  It was as if he’d never left: It was like a still photo called the Robbery. Ruta Beth and Odell held the public and dispirited staff at bay. A couple of the waitresses were weeping, one almost hysterically. The square johns just
looked up in horror, afraid to disobey, afraid to do anything, afraid to exist. No heroes in this crowd, no sirree. It was going swell. Plus, he’d got to whack a Smokey!

  “Okay, boys and girls, time to—”

  The sound of a siren rose, and then another.

  It froze them. Lamar turned, Ruta Beth turned, even Odell turned. Watching them, Richard turned, too.

  Oh no!

  He felt the panic flap through him, and though he struggled to control it, he could not. His mind was full of spiders and firecrackers. A squad car, its flashbar pumping electric light into the bright air and its siren howling like a wounded animal, sped toward them, followed by another and another. He knew he had to get out of there. The police would kill him! He jumped to his feet blindly, and then confronted his next most devastating horror. A woman had risen from the table across the aisle with a small automatic pistol in her hand. She was aiming at Lamar. Richard’s hand flew to his gun, but he couldn’t get it out. He screamed as loud as he could.

  The woman fired.

  The bullet missed.

  She fired again, and missed again, as Ruta Beth fired. Her double-ought buck, delivered from a range of about twelve feet, drove into the woman, punching her backward into another booth, containing old people, who like atoms liberated in a chain reaction began to race toward the exit. Plates and glasses spilled to the floor and coffee spewed across the tables.

  Lamar screamed, “The cops are coming. They going to shoot y’all dead.” He raised his shotgun and fired two fast blasts into the ceiling.

  It was too much, the noise, the death, the seething gun smoke. Someone threw a chair through one of the big windows and then through another one, and the square johns, like rats on a ship, began to pour out into the parking lot, leaping the three-foot drop to the earth just as the first two cars pulled up. A cop emerged from each, shotgun ready, but could find no targets in the human tide that gushed from the restaurant.

  Quickly Lamar threw his shotgun away and handed the money bag to Odell, taking the AR.

  “I’ll cover, you git yourself out.” He grabbed Odell and gave him a kiss on the mouth, then turned to Ruta Beth.

  “You saved my bacon, hon. You did just fine.”

  “Lamar, you have to—”

  “Don’t you worry about me none. Now git. Take old Richard, too.”

  He quickly went to the doorway and fired three swift shots at the only cop he could see. The gun had a liquid jerk to it as it fired, but it came back on target quickly; the officer sat down sadly. Then Lamar swept over to the other target and fired twice at it, smearing the windshield with a quicksilver of fractures.

  “Wi-chud,” yelled Odell, picking Richard off the floor. The bigger man half-carried him through the broken window. There was glass everywhere, the sounds of gunfire, a general sense of panic loose upon the face of the planet, and Richard’s own immense fear. He looked back and saw Lamar like some crazily heroic mythic sergeant from some war movie firing away, blazing like Rambo at the police. Then he was in the car.

  Odell punched it and the car backed savagely, hitting something and knocking it down with a terrific clatter, then roared ahead, seemed almost to tip as it lurched on two wheels into the street and then, in a burst of sheer acceleration, really whooshed down the road. But just as quickly it slowed to almost a halt, took a severe turn, and began ambling along at a content pace.

  Richard sat up; they were in some quiet suburb, an undisturbed fifties world of small frame houses, overhanging trees, and green-filtered sunlight. Behind them, the turbulent sounds of sirens rose and rose and rose.

  “Mar,” keened Odell. “Mar.”

  “That’s okay honey,” said Ruta Beth, who’d taken the mask off to shake out her long hair. “Daddy can take care of himself.”

  Lamar dropped the mag out and slammed a new one in. He pulled back the bolt, a weird kind of plunger deal atop the weapon, and let it fly forward. He looked over the sights and could see nobody. Two cop cars were parked aslant at each entrance to the parking lot, and he knew he’d hit one of the cops and the other had shown no signs of fight, having retreated behind his car, where he was bet-your-ass on the horn, calling in reinforcements.

  Lamar licked his lips, which were dry as sand.

  Well, goddamn, boy, he told himself, you done got yourself in some damned pickle.

  He took off his ski mask and threw it away. If he was going out, he was going out as Lamar Pye, bad man and legend, the white boy with the biggest dick in the whole Mac. He shucked the raincoat, a great relief, as the goddamned thing was hot.

  He fired five quick shots at the gas tank of one of the cop cars, hoping he’d get an explosion, but it never happened. Instead a couple of poorly aimed shots came his way.

  He fired quickly, emptying the magazine to drive them down, then slid back from the door and crawled low over glass until he reached the kitchen. A black teenager cowered against the sinks, crying.

  “Don’t hurt me none, sir,” the boy sobbed.

  “Shut up. You ain’t been hurt. I’m the one they’s tryin’ to hurt.” He almost shot the boy, but what would that prove? It might do him some good back in the joint if he let a nigger live where he’d killed a passel of whites.

  He rose and ran to the rear delivery entrance and opened it. Two cops fired shotguns at him, but he ducked inside in the second before the buckshot arrived to spall the door.

  You got to bring the fight to them, he told himself. Cops ain’t used to that. They used to men folding up, but here I got to go at them and go at them hard, or they going to get my white boy’s ass for good and only.

  He went to the back wall, where, high up, there was a window. He could never get through it, but he could get a good, clean shot at one of the officers.

  But as he was about to fire, he noticed what he had climbed up on. It was the sink, and next to it was the garbage chute. He kicked the flap that covered the chute and discovered a ramp about eighteen inches wide leading at a sharp angle into darkness, though he thought he saw a glimmer of light.

  Fuck this, he thought. They got me covered if I stay here.

  He dumped the AR and wedged himself into the chute. A sickening stench rose to his nose, the stench of decayed food, grease, decomposition. He thought for a second he wasn’t going to make it, that his ass would hang him up, and the cops would come find him half in, half out. But he slid down with astonishing speed, was launched airborne into lightness, had a strange sensation of liberation, and then found himself amid fetid food and packaging in a Dumpster. He rolled out of it, wishing he had the AR. But he still had two .45s. He looked about quickly, finding himself in a well in the rear right side of the restaurant. Lamar stepped upward and found himself slightly flanking the two cops who had the back cover. He saw the Texas Highway Patrol car parked out back, too; now he got it. The first patrolman had come in and parked at the rear, entered through the rear, and gone in to wash his hands. That’s how come Richard hadn’t seen him.

  He shook his head. From out front came the crackle of shots and the sounds of sirens as yet more reinforcements arrived. Time to kick ass, he thought and ran toward the police car.

  It was simple murder, the best kind. The guys never knew he was on their left. He just ran at them, a gun in each hand, and when they looked up it was too late to do anything. It seemed to happen in slow motion; it had an incredible clarity to it, like a football replay on the TV. He watched as the one half rose to bring his shotgun to bear, but the man seemed to be climbing through molasses or motor oil, his eyes big as eggs, his fingers scrambling at his gun like some kind of honky-tonk piano player as he tried to find the trigger. Lamar’s first shot hit him in the throat. The Adam’s apple seemed to explode as if rigged by demolitions experts, and the blood spurted from it in a dark red spray. The other took more killing. As he spun away into the fetal position, Lamar shot him twice, only to discover he had a vest on, so he leaned in close and shot him in the head. He watched the hair fly—why was
this familiar?—and the dust or mist rise as the body went into that complete stillness that was sheer animal death. He stood over them and emptied his magazines into them, feeling for just a moment the most powerful king on the face of the earth.

  Lookame, lookame! he thought, exultantly.

  He threw both handguns and one of the police shotguns into the back of the cruiser, slid in, found the key, and started the car. Another cop car came around the corner, and Lamar gunned straight at it until it swerved. He banged it hard, shattering glass. Then he backed and turned to face the fence that kept him in. It was a Cyclone. Lamar knew it to be weakest dead center between poles, and so that’s where he aimed the car, punching it.

  The big Crown Victoria smashed the fence, slowed, then blasted through vegetation; something lashed and shattered the windshield. But in a second burst of energy the car bashed through, seemed to drop a bit, then landed in a backyard. Lamar pushed the accelerator down, smashed over a patio—driving lawn chairs this way and that and sending a picnic table full of hamburgers and deviled eggs flipping crazily through the air—crunched a hedge, and peeled across front lawn until he hit street, took a hard right, and really leaned into it. Behind him, he heard the sound of sirens.

  CHAPTER

  16

  Bud got there by ten P.M., and the crime scene was still a damn county fair. He’d listened all the way in on the radio. The identification had come quickly enough through elemental police work: The serial number of the recovered AR-15 was checked against the National Criminal Information Center computer files, which promptly revealed it to have been Ted’s, taken at the Stepford farm. Within minutes, a faxed bulletin from Oklahoma authorities with Lamar’s mug on it was shown to the busboy who’d gotten a good look at Lamar; he ID’d him immediately. So by six P.M., the APB for Lamar, Odell, and Richard and an unknown fourth gang member had been issued.

  But so far, there’d been no arrests, although the brass had ordered a full roll-out of all North Texas and Southern Oklahoma law enforcement units, including air-ground search teams with infrared capacity, canine units, and horseback Rangers moving across the range and farmland south of Wichita Falls. The Rangers set up roadblocks on all the major roads and at the three bridges over the Red River fifteen miles north of the city, and established patrols up and down the riverbanks.