Dirty White Boys

by Stephen Hunter

  Bud parked down Marnine Street a bit and made his way back to the scene. Gawkers, of course, were out in the hundreds; the roadway was jammed with pickups, lots of teenagers and young roughnecks. It had a carnylike feel to it, which Bud had noticed before at big accidents on I-44, and which always made him a little angry. Someone was hooting “Goddamn, ol’ Lamar Pye got clean away” to the beeps of horns. Bud spat in disgust, but it didn’t surprise him that, to some, Lamar might be a hero for his wild ways and unwillingness to take any crap from anybody. That’s what was poisoning America, he thought.

  He approached the barrier of yellow crime-scene tape that had been run from pylon to pylon around the perimeter of the Denny’s. A batch of TV camera crews were off to one side, sending their feeds back to the big cities. At least half the official vehicles in Texas filled the parking lot, and inside the shattered restaurant, evidence technicians probed and collected and representatives from the region’s police agencies stood around talking, issuing bulletins, putting out information on the radio net and what-have-you.

  “Hold on there, sir,” said a Texas highway patrolman as Bud ducked under the tape. “You can’t cross that line.”

  Bud flashed his ID folio.

  “Oh, sorry, Sarge. You Oklahoma boys are all over this one.”

  “These are our boys,” said Bud. “Killed one of our troopers a few weeks back. We want ’em bad.”

  “I know that. I was at that young man’s funeral and it was a sad one. Well, if we catch ’em in Texas, we’ll be glad to send y’all the bodies. They dropped four officers and two citizens. That Lamar, he’s a goddamned piece of work.”

  “That he is, Trooper. Who’s in charge?”

  “Our Colonel Benteen running the show, like he usually does. Some Rangers trying to horn in, as usual.”

  “We got the same problem with our damned OSBI boys.”

  “Well, I think you got your OSBI down here some place and your own colonel, the Polish one?”

  “Supenski. Yep. And that Lt. C. D. Henderson, of the OSBI?”

  “That’s the one. That boy’s a drinker, you can smell it on him. Anyway, you’ll find ’em inside. Good luck.”

  “Thank you, Trooper.”

  Bud walked on, passing between vehicles and knots of men sipping coffee and talking in low, intense voices, and at last entered the restaurant.

  It looked like the last building left standing in a battleground. Its windows all shattered, its walls pocked with bullet holes, shards of glass and window frame everywhere, tables tossed this way and that. And, of course, the chalk outlines of bodies long removed. Bud saw two, one against a far wall, between the men’s and the women’s rooms, and another deeper in the restaurant itself. Great pools of gummy blood marked each spot. Each death spot had the quality of magic to it, somehow: no officer or technician would come within ten feet.

  “There’s a third in the manager’s office. That Lamar, he blew away a twenty-three-year-old trainee manager after breaking one of his fingers to get him to open the safe. Bud, what the hell are you doing here?”

  It was Colonel Supenski.

  “Well, I couldn’t stay away.”

  “No, I suppose you couldn’t. Goddamn this Lamar, he’s a full-toot son of a bitch. He must be crazy.”

  “He ain’t crazy,” Lt. C. D. Henderson said. “He just likes the buzz it gives him when he pops a feller. It’s like sniffin’ human glue. ‘Lo, Sergeant Pewtie.” He fixed Bud with a squinty look from behind his specs. How could he be so old and still be a lieutenant, Bud wondered. Then he sniffed the familiar vapor of bourbon cut by the breath mints that didn’t quite hide it, and he knew.

  “Lieutenant,” he nodded.

  “Goddamn,” said Lt. Henderson, “he’s a smart one. The Texas boys found the car Lamar’s gang made its getaway in five miles down the road. He didn’t just steal one car, he stole two, damn his soul, so eyewitness IDs and tag numbers of the getaway car ain’t worth piss. And there won’t be any prints on it, you watch.”

  “Who was the woman he shot?”

  “Well, the witnesses say this other feller shot her. We don’t know who this guy is. Whoever, he blew away this citizen, a Mrs. Rhonda McCoy, of Wichita Falls. Mrs. McCoy was a probation officer for the State of Texas and had a concealed-carry permit. She tried to do her duty. She was so overmatched it wasn’t even funny. Died in front of her parents, and her husband and her two kids. Jesus.”

  Bud looked at the carnage.

  “He got out through a goddamned garbage chute. Scum in, scum out. Don’t that just fit the bill? Go on, Bud, take a look. Around back.”

  Bud walked through the restaurant and cut into the kitchen. A number of men stood around the chute. There, on the counter, tagged and bagged in a big cellophane evidence bag but unmoved, was Ted’s AR-15. He went over and looked at it. It was a black and glistening thing, plastic and parkerized metal. Had a modern look to it, like some sort of a gun from space.

  “He got it from a goddamned state trooper in Oklahoma,” one of the Texas cops said. “Killed him for it.”

  “I know. I was there,” said Bud.

  “You’re Pewtie.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You must be made out of steel to come out of something like that. They say you’re the toughest cop in Oklahoma.”

  “Right now I don’t feel so tough,” Bud said.

  If I’da been minding my business, he thought, maybe this didn’t have to happen.

  He walked on back through the kitchen to an open door. In the rear he saw two bodies on the parking lot, evidently the last to be removed, and another fleet of cops standing around, some taking notes. Beyond, the Cyclone fence was smashed down, and a path of sheer destruction indicated Lamar’s escape route.

  “Hey, Pewtie, we had twenty cops here and we was overmatched. You shouldn’t feel so bad.”

  “Catch that boy in my sights the next time, and I’ll pull down and lie to the shooting board about it,” Bud said.

  “We all feel that way,” said the Texas cop, “except we don’t got shooting boards in Texas.”

  Bud walked back through the rubble of the restaurant, trying not to step on anything.

  “You don’t have to go so dainty there, Sarge,” an evidence technician in white plastic gloves said, “we pretty much done bagging.”

  “I feel like I’m in a goddamned war zone,” Bud said.

  “Were you in ’Nam?”

  “No, no, I wasn’t.”

  “Well, it reminds me of a place called Hue after Tet. Bad shit, I’ll tell you,” said the tech. “They got coffee over there, you want some.”

  “Thanks,” said Bud, and turned, wondering, What the hell am I doing here? Why did I come? What’s it prove?

  He shook his head, isolated amid the clutter, sure he was stupidly in the way, and then he saw the lion.

  Bud stood stock still, looking about to make sure nobody had noticed it, and wondered whether or not to call out. To call out what? Hey, come look at this?

  It was on the floor, covered in glass splinters, more or less shoved aside amid other papers by the evidence techs as they pawed through the rubble looking for clues. It was so odd how it had just hooked on the tiniest corner of his vision as he scoped the room, wondering what the hell to do.

  He went onto one knee and very gently pushed two crumpled placemats aside, as well as a dozen assorted pieces of glass, to reveal more of a third and what upon it had caught his eye.

  Yes, another lion, drawn absently, presumably by Richard as he waited for the raid. Richard must have been used as recon and then tail gunner, though all agreed it was the new gang member who’d done the shooting.

  “Hey, techie,” he called.

  The technician came back.

  “You got something there, Sarge?”

  “You got prints already?”

  “Yep, we got ’em and fed ’em into the FBI fingerprint lab. Amazing how fast that goddamn computer works.”

  “Yo
u get a make?”

  “We already made both Pyes and the Peed guy, no sweat. As for the fourth member, we grilled witnesses but nobody can remember him touching anything. We got the shell he ejected—maybe a latent will turn up on that.”

  “Okay, I got a feeling this belongs to Richard Peed. He’s the artist.”

  The man looked at it closely.

  “I don’t see no oil spots. Pal, I doubt seriously we could get a print off that. Getting prints off paper is tough. You need some kind of hard, glossy surface, glass, linoleum, Formica.”

  “That’s what I thought. You want to bag this sucker?”

  “Yeah, I ought to.”

  “But, could I get an impression of it, a Xerox or something?”

  “There’s a Xerox machine in the manager’s office.”

  “So you won’t scream if I go Xerox it and then bring it back?”

  “Don’t mean a thing to me, Oklahoma. What you want it for?”

  “I got a thing about lions.”

  Bud picked up the placemat, which was emblazoned with the Denny’s crest and some connect-the-dots games and riddles (“What’s black and white and red all over?—A newspaper”) for kids, and walked into the manager’s office. A flung spray of dried brown blood against the wall, savage and shapeless, almost a map of the explosion of the charge through flesh, signified the spot where Lamar had killed the young manager, and the tape outline on the floor marked his fall. In the other corner, undisturbed, was a copying machine, and routinely, Bud pumped out a facsimile of the placemat, which he folded and put in his pocket. Then he walked back to the tech, who trapped the thing in an evidence bag and ziplocked it shut, pausing only to fill out a slip.

  “Say, Bud?”

  It was C. D. Henderson.

  “Yeah, Lieutenant?”

  “Bud, you want a drink? I got a pint, be happy to give you a shot. Helps clarify the mind, they say.”

  “No thank you, Lieutenant. It’d put me out cold.”

  “Anyway, they tell me you’re a pretty smart boy. Always top of your class, outstanding arrest records, a rep for writing good reports.”

  “I’m just a highway jockey, Lieutenant. You boys are the detectives.”

  “You don’t have something going?”

  “Sorry, I don’t—”

  “You’re not working some angle on Lamar no one else has cottoned to?”

  The odor of the bourbon was overwhelming.

  “As I said, I’m not an investigator. You boys are the investigators.”

  “Yes sir, that’s what it says, and I know you Smokies don’t like it a bit. But a smart boy like you … experienced hand, good operator. I don’t know, Bud. Seen you digging through evidence, and then running off to make a photocopy. Looks mite peculiar,” he finished up, squinting at Bud through shrewd old country eyes.

  “Ain’t doing nothing. Come to see what this goddamn Lamar done. That’s all there is to it, Lieutenant.”

  “ ’Cause I know how it would please a stud boy like you to get another crack at Lamar.”

  “I ain’t going up against Lamar, no way. He got the best of me once and I don’t doubt but that he would again. He’s too much hombre for me. If I should get a lead on Lamar, I’d call the marines, the FBI, and state cops from here to Maryland and back.”

  “Yeah, but would you call the OSBI?”

  “Hey, this ain’t a turf thing.”

  “Yeah, I hear that ever damn time one of you Smokies tries to bump me off my own investigation. Now we might get some good leads out of all this physical evidence. I want to be there when it goes down, you hear me?”

  “Yes I do, Lieutenant. Loud and clear.”

  “Good man, Bud. You and me, we’re old salts, we can get along. You git something, you call old C.D. I want in on it. Ten-four, Trooper?”

  “Copy that,” said Bud.

  CHAPTER

  17

  The water was cold. He couldn’t make it another second. He would die. He could feel his lips chattering and his body growing numb. It was so cold.

  “I can’t make it, Ruta Beth,” Richard said.

  “Shut your mouth, you damned fool,” she spat back. “You lie there like a goddamned man or I’ll have Odell hold your head underwater for a few minutes.”

  “But it’s hopeless. He isn’t coming.”

  “Daddy will come,” Ruta Beth said. “Goddammit, Daddy can take care of himself and he will come. Isn’t that right, Odell?”

  “Will cwuh,” said Odell, also chattering.

  The three of them crouched in a patch of reeds, the cold water of the Red River running up to their necks. They were in a desolate spot, about ten miles outside Burkburnett, between the Burkburnett and the Vernon bridges over the river. A hundred yards of strong black current lay between them and the promised land of Oklahoma, but the rush of the water was so strong, Richard knew he’d never swim it; it would suck him down and drown him. There was no mercy at all in the night. The wind whistled and rattled through the reeds; in the dark he could just see riverbank and mud flat. And enemies were everywhere.

  A few hours back, a Department of Texas Safety four-by-four with two squint-eyed Rangers had come lurching down the riverbank, punching its way over fallen logs, skimming into the low tide where necessary, its spotlight playing in the brush for signs of the robbers. But it had passed by, at one point only fifteen feet from them, and gone on down the line. It would be back.

  Then, about an hour later, there were lights on the Oklahoma side, as presumably a duplicate of the same mission unfolded over there. But the trucks weren’t the problem. The problem was the helicopters.

  They came in fast. They came low, and their noise seemed to explode from nowhere as they roared along the river about a hundred feet up, two, three times an hour. These hunters really wanted to kill something. Once, Richard had caught a glimpse of the observer hanging out of the cabin door, a squat man with huge binoculars, a cowboy hat, some kind of mouth microphone and the meanest-looking, fanciest black plastic rifle Richard had ever seen. It looked like a ray gun. He was a boy who meant business; he wanted to drop a bad man before the night was over.

  “Can’t we wait on the bank?” Richard now moaned through his chattering teeth. “Won’t be another helicopter by for an hour.”

  “You’re the biggest fool I ever met, Richard,” said Ruta Beth. “Didn’t Daddy tell you ’bout infer-red? With that infer-red stuff, they can see you in the dark by the heat of your body. That’s what they’re doing—hunting you by your heat. Them boys get a reading on heat from three bodies hiding in the grass, goddamn if they won’t have a whole company of Rangers here in ’bout a minute.”

  How did Lamar know so much? Lamar knew everything.

  But Lamar was dead.

  “He’d have been here by now if he was going to make it,” Richard said. “We are going to freeze to death and that will be that.”

  “Daddy is too goddamned smart for any Johnny Cop.” She was even beginning to talk like him. “Now Richard, please shut up or Odell will have to discipline you.”

  “Yes, Ruta Beth,” Richard said.

  “Wi-chud,” came Odell’s glottal spasm.

  “Odell, I heard, no bonky, please!”

  But Odell didn’t want to hurt Richard. Instead he gathered him up and hugged him. It was the strangest thing; Odell’s arms just drew Richard in, and his great body seemed to absorb Richard. There was nothing sexual in it at all, for the sex part of Odell’s brain lay happily dormant; but it was all tenderness.

  Wi-chud makey makey good. Wi-chud no cold. Wi-chud, like, makey warm.

  Odell’s love bloomed like a hothouse flower: Richard felt the heat radiating from the big body, and in the embrace, the purity of survival. Odell! What a strange boy! What planet do you come from?

  The warmth saved Richard. It reached out and plucked him from the frozen loneliness of his exile and gave him a life. He yearned to lose himself in it. He knew now he could get through anything.
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  The hours passed. Six more times the helicopter roared by. At last the dawn began to nudge its way across the sky.

  “Ruta Beth?”

  “Yes?”

  “What do we do if he doesn’t show?”

  “Nothing. Wait some more.”

  “But they’ll catch us.”

  Ruta Beth had no response. It was true. The car they had arrived in was deposited under a camouflaged tarpaulin in some trees but a mile or so away, at the end of a farm road near an abandoned farmhouse. In daylight, its shabby fraudulence would be uncovered swiftly enough. Spotted by the chopper, it would draw hundreds of cops within minutes; they’d fan out with bloodhounds, find the trail, follow the little party to the river’s edge, and find it cowering there.

  Across the river, Ruta Beth’s Toyota had been artfully hidden. It, too, would be discovered in daylight. The only real chance was to get across the river in darkness, pull away in the Toyota, which as yet had no criminal charges against it, and head by back roads to Ruta Beth’s farm.

  In the slow progress of light, Richard at last saw Ruta Beth’s stony face. She was a true believer in the cult of Lamar, but even now he could see that her hope was vanishing.

  “He’ll be here,” she said. “Know he will.”

  Waiting for Lamar. It was like some existential play written by a perverted Frenchman high on keef and boy-love. But instead of snappy patter and ironic reflections on fate, the three principals merely huddled in the water, wrinkled as prunes, waiting for the sun to rise and betray them.

  At least, thought Richard, it would be over soon.

  A fish bit him. He started at the impulse of pain fighting through his numbness, but the fish bit him again. Not bit him—goosed him, almost comically, squeezing his balls playfully.