Lamar got out, and bent to check his .45. Richard heard mysterious clickings. Then Lamar walked up to the door and knocked hard.
Time passed. The wind whistled through the high grass out back. Above, the stars seemed to fizzle and pop like silent fireworks—the sky was the record of a huge explosion. Violence was everywhere, or at least the hint of it. There wasn’t a sound to be heard anywhere in the universe except for the persistence of the wind.
Eventually definite shuckings and shiftings were heard, and deep inside the house a light came on. The door opened a crack.
“Go away,” somebody whispered. “We closed.”
The door slammed shut, but Lamar caught it perfectly with the flat of his foot, his full force behind it, and knocked it back open. In reddish light there stood a scrawny Asian, about sixty. He looked mottled, as if suffering from some skin disease.
“You Jimmy Ky?” Lamar demanded.
“Jimmy Ky no here no more. He go away. Go far away. I Jimmy Ky’s father.”
“My ass,” said Lamar. “You’re Jimmy Ky. Got a goddamn proposition for you.”
Lamar stepped inside and Richard followed.
“I heard you the best,” said Lamar. “Well, I want the best.”
The Asian looked at him, betraying no fear. Richard now saw that the mottling on his face was tattooing, but of a sort he’d never imagined: It was lustrous, dark, vivid, incredibly detailed, and ominous. The old man was dark blue and red, his face gone in a kaleidoscope.
“You do that yourself?”
“My master Horimono.”
“Well it’s pretty goddamned good. You that good?”
Lamar’s aggression filled the air; he was like the lion confronting a goat. But the goat was strangely unafraid; the old man just looked at Lamar without much emotional investment.
“I his apprentice still,” he finally said.
“Show him, Richard.”
Richard gave him the drawing of the lion. Jimmy Ky looked at it for a long moment.
“It’s shit,” he said. “Why you want this trash? Go town. Lots of people in town do this trash.”
“No, no,” said Richard, “that’s just from your Asian perspective. This is done from the Western perspective, and it’s stylized in a different method. It has to look Western, it can’t have that exotic—”
“I can do. Best! Make it roar. But it trash,” said Jimmy Ky, bluntly.
“It ain’t trash,” said Lamar. “Look at the way he got the fire and the pride of that lion. Look at that bull neck. That’s a goddamned piece of art. We got money.”
“How much?”
“How much you need?”
“Ah, for that, forty-five hundred dollars. You wan, you pay.”
“Four thousand bucks! Ain’t no tattoo worth that kind of money.”
Jimmy Ky looked at him shrewdly.
“How bad you want it, mister? You no want it, you go away now. I go back to sleep.”
“Goddamn,” said Lamar. “Seems like a robbery.”
“Gotta pay for the best,” said the old man.
“Shit,” said Lamar. “How long?”
“Maybe twelve hours. Start now, be done tomorrow afternoon. Then you go lie down for about a week. Get drunk. Infection set in, lots of pain. You got want it. For every color, you suffer. Fever, sweats, lots of agony. No fun at all. How bad you want it?”
“Shit,” said Lamar. “I can get through any goddamned thing.”
He turned to Richard. “You and Ruta Beth, you park across the street at that gas station, out of sight. You stay there as backup. You tell Odell to come on in. He’s working shotgun. Got that?”
“Yes, Lamar.”
“Okay, old man. Let’s get to work. You make me a lion, okay.”
“Hokay, Joe. Can do.”
The old man actually seemed happy.
Bud missed it the first time. There were no lights on. It was just a deserted clapboard shack on the way to Indiahoma on a bleak stretch of highway. But when he’d gone on into Indiahoma, he realized he’d gone too far. He turned around and headed back. He seemed to course through inky darkness. The roast beef in his stomach hadn’t settled yet. He was half a minute from pulling that goddamned .380 out from under his belt buckle where it had grown into a massive problem. What on earth did he need three guns for? Two was enough for any man.
But then he saw it, standing stark against the bleak prairie under some runty trees. He pulled halfway into the parking lot, gave it a once over. It seemed completely quiet and abandoned. There were no cars in the parking lot, and he could see a neon sign that wasn’t on. But up near the edge of one window, he could make out just a sliver of light.
What the hell, he thought, feeling ridiculous. I’ve come this far, I may as well go all the way so the evening won’t be a total loss.
Richard looked at Ruta Beth in the low light. He could hear her breathe, see the darkness in her eyes. He actually felt pity move through him. Imagine, a child like that coming upon the murder of her parents.
“How are you doing, Ruta Beth?” he asked.
She fixed him with a narrow glare.
“What the hell do you care?”
He felt her pain. “Ruta Beth, I know how hard life can be sometimes. I was thinking how if you ever needed anyone to talk to, why, I’d be ready and will—”
She recoiled.
“You ain’t got no romance in mind?”
“Ah, Ruta Beth, why—”
She drew back her little fist, knotted into a clot.
“You put your hands on me, Richard, and I swear, you will be sucking teeth for a month. And that before Lamar gits done with you!”
“Ruta Beth, I only meant—”
“Shut up,” she hissed. A truck pulled into the parking lot across the way.
A man in it waited for a second, then got out and just stood there.
“Can you see?”
“Big guy, cowboy hat, that’s all.”
“A cop?”
“I don’t know. Not in uniform. Do they have plainclothes detectives way the hell out here?”
“I don’t know,” said Richard, who had no idea.
“I doubt it,” said Ruta Beth, to herself mainly, since she expected no sensible answer from Richard. “Maybe if he come from the city. But he come from the other direction, from Indiahoma. He’s probably some big goddamn brave, in a big truck the government bought for him, just out for a cruise. A chief or some such shit.”
“Why would he stop here?”
“Maybe he knows Jimmy Ky.”
“He ain’t a cop,” said Ruta Beth. “How could a cop have found this place. Coincidences like this don’t happen in the universe. Not no how.”
They watched as the big man went up toward the house.
* * *
It wasn’t the pain. Pain didn’t frighten Lamar; it was the helplessness and the pain. He lay flat on his back, under a big light. His chest had been shaved and scrubbed with astringent until it stung. Now what he saw was so weird: In the back room, he saw a one-eyed giant. That’s what it looked like, at any rate. Really, it was only the old slope, bent over him with the needle, his eye swollen huge and bloodshot by the lens it wore. It was an operation, for now the surgeon’s latex gloves were slippery with blood.
“You gotta lotta blood in you,” the doctor laughed. It connected with something somewhere in Lamar’s previous life, but he couldn’t say what or when.
The only reality was the needle. It hummed and tapped as Jimmy Ky leaned over and worked it. Not a big pain, like the thrust of a blade or the channeling of a bullet, but a sharp, brief flash of explosion on his body, enough to make him jump or leap each time.
“No move, goddamn. Make you look like kitty cat, not lion.”
Lamar tried to ride it. Eleven more hours of this shit?
And this wasn’t even the bad stuff. This was the easy part: doing the base colors, the larger shapes. The hard work would come later, when the little man got down to det
ails and moved in with the tiniest of needles for the little drips of color that gave the piece life. And he was a careful craftsman, unmoved by the pain he caused his subject. He never looked hard at Lamar, but only at the design.
Lamar was afraid to breathe. He took strength from one thing and one thing alone: his cousin Odell, Baby Odell, sitting with the implacable patience and loyalty of the retarded, watching and waiting and playing sentry at the door to the back room.
* * *
It was so goddamn dark! Ruta Beth couldn’t see a thing. The truck was just a truck, the man just a man, standing there, as if deciding. When he finally moved, he walked toward the door and there was something familiar in the gait. Where did she recognize it from?
“H-he’s going in,” came Richard’s sing-songy voice. “What should we do?”
“Shut up,” she barked, but herself thinking, What should I do?
She watched as the man approached the door, paused again, adjusted his hat as if he were stepping into a fancy restaurant. He was a big guy, well packed with bulk and girth, but no damned youngster. Something familiar to him, goddammit.
She reached under the car seat and pulled out her ski mask. She pulled it over her face, feeling the scratch of wool, the stink of her own sweat, its warmth, its closeness. Her mouth tasted pennies.
“It’s nothing,” said Richard wanly. “He’s just a cowboy. He wants to get tattooed. He’s some oil-field hand. He wants ‘I Love Susie-Q’ on his biceps, that’s all.”
“Shut up, you pussy boy,” she said. She slid Lamar’s cutdown Browning 12-gauge semiauto from the back seat, pushing the safety off. Her hands flew to her waist, where she’d tucked Lamar’s .45 SIG.
“It’s all right,” said Richard. “Please make it be all right.” The man stepped in, closed the door behind him. There was a glorious, blessed moment of silence.
“Whew,” said Richard. “It’s all—”
Then the sound of shots, lots of them, fast and wild, and from where they sat they could see the gun flashes illuminate the darkness of the tattoo house.
CHAPTER
23
Animals!
Zoo!
Odell’s eyes roamed the extravagant figures on the wall, utterly transfixed.
Magic!
He saw lion. He saw birdie.
Big birdie and snake. Tiger.
Grrrrr! Tiger bad! Bear. Growlllll!
He began to make animal sounds and shake just a little. So many animals. It touched a far-off and not coherent shard of memory: He was very small and Mama took him over to Mrs. Bean’s farm and let him pet the goats. Odell remembered the goats all round him, the funny funny sounds they made, the thickness of their animal odors, the soft wetness of their tongues as they licked his face, and his mama saying, “Oh, I ain’t seen him smile like that ever.”
But then they had to go back to Daddy; Daddy was mad. Daddy whipped and hit Odell.
“That goddamn stupid boy, ugly as shit, no brain in his goddamn head nowheres,” Daddy screamed, beating him with the belt while Mama cried. But Odell never cried.
The door opened.
Bud paused at the door, put his hand on the knob, and was surprised that it yielded to let him enter. He stepped into a small, darkened chamber awash with the smells of incense, disinfectant, and sweat.
He felt enveloped in quiet. It was as if he’d entered a religious shrine. He blinked in the low light, half in and half out of the door, and his eyes quickly sped to sinuous forms in sheer bursts of color on the walls. Was it a museum, like earlier today? Snakes, he saw snakes, and strange, stylized beasts, ornate and muscular, formal and alive at once. Eyes of beasts bore savagely down at him. He heard breathing, the low sounds of a tinny radio, and looked across the room to the primary source of radiance, a doorway behind a counter, which revealed portions of still another chamber, well-lit, like an operating theater. He could see a form splayed out in white seminudity and another form bent across him, with bloody-fingered latex gloves holding a strange implement that must have been a tattoo needle. And slouched in the doorway like a sleepy dog was another form.
Bud looked, said, “Say, I’m—,” and then focused on the slack but puzzled face of Odell Pye. Odell grinned absurdly, and his tongue flicked out. There was a black hole in the center of his face, just under his nose, and his eyes had the guileless stupidity of a young boy drunk for the first time.
Bud looked at Odell, all his instincts clotted up in his heart, but he knew he was in big trouble.
The moment seemed to last forever, like a breath taken and held. Then it exploded.
Odell stirred into action, yanking a shotgun from somewhere, but without willing it Bud had drawn his Colt Commander from the high hip holster and hit the thumb safety, and he and Odell fired almost simultaneously.
The flash from the gun muzzles filled the room with incandescence; the snakes seethed and pounced in its blinding whiteness. Bud was not hit and did not know if he had hit Odell—he doubted it, as he had pointed, not aimed, and had fired with one hand—and without a conscious thought anywhere in his head, he jacked the trigger seven more times, pumping .45s at Odell in a burst that sounded like a tommy gun. And like a tommy gun, it was evidently inaccurate, for Bud saw clouds of plaster flying, large chunks of masonry ripped up, the flashes blotting details from his vision. Then the gun came up dry, Bud cursing, for only an idiot shoots a gun empty without counting shots to reload with one in the spout and less vulnerability.
He dived into the room, ripping a fresh mag off the pouch on his belt, slamming it home, and thumbing off the slide release to prime the pistol once again. He came to rest behind a counter that now atomized into shreds before his very eyes. He saw the glass liquify as buckshot pulverized it, and the stuff blew into his face, knocking him back, blinking. But he felt no pain, and in response fired three fast times at the gun flash, receiving on the middle shot the impression of a yowl. Odell had disappeared. Smoke hung in the air. There was a moment of silence.
Then a small, blue Asian man came crashing from the open doorway. Bud tracked and nearly fired at him but didn’t and instead redirected himself toward the opening itself, to see the low, hunched form of Lamar Pye bent in a combat crouch, good two-hand hold, but apparently unable to see Bud.
Bud couldn’t see his sights, it was so dark, so he just put the back of the pistol against what little he could see of Lamar and fired three more times, fast, reloading his last .45 mag with one shot left in the chamber, just as he knew he should.
He also understood that in firing he’d given away his position. If Lamar wasn’t hit mortally, he’d return fire in just a second, so Bud slithered to his left, coming hard against a wall, then backed spastically until he found what appeared to be a door, and slipped back into it.
Flashes lit the darkness. Both Lamar and Odell fired, Odell obviously not dead at all, maybe not even hit; and the counter behind which Bud had cowered simply evaporated as Lamar’s .45s and Odell’s buckshot remodeled it. He heard Lamar’s pistol lock back dry and another sound—hollow, like someone blowing in a wand—seemed to suggest that Odell was reloading as well. He could see no part of Lamar, but he put the pistol before him in that segment of darkness out of which had sprung Odell’s bursts and, convinced he saw a shape, squeezed off what he meant to be but two or three shots. But in shooting he banished the sudden demons of fear that had come from nowhere to tell him what a fool he’d been, how he’d walked in here without backup, without even a radio, and so he could not stop shooting until the gun was empty. Again, he thought he heard a cry, as he dumped the Colt, and his hand sped to and ripped his big new Beretta from the shoulder hoslter.
“Waharrrrr, Waharrrrr” came a gurgling cry from the dark. It was Odell, his voice veined with hurt.
“Goddamn it, boy, you stay put,” cried Lamar in return, equally anguished. “Who the fuck are you, mister? What the hell, you ain’t no cop, we don’t mean you no goddamned harm.”
Bud was silent. All
he had to do was open his mouth and Lamar would have a source of noise for him to bring fire on.
“Wahh-arrrrrrrr. Mama. Wah-marrrrrrrrrr, pweezze. Mama.”
“Odell, you stay down, Daddy come git you in a bit. Where’s that goddamn car?”
A car? More of them? The criminals had backup. The cop didn’t.
Shit, Bud thought.
Who the fuck was he?
Where had he come from?
Why was it happening like this?
Lamar hurt every damn place, and he felt so goddamned naked, his shirt off, blood all over his chest. But what had him worried was Odell. Odell sounded hit bad. He’d never heard that tone in the boy’s voice. It was so pitiful, so animal. Odell, hurting. It just filled Lamar with rage.
If only he could clear his mind and think, or if only that goddamned Ruta Beth would get here. Where the hell was she?
“Wharrr?” came Odell’s quavery voice.
“You shut up, Odell, we be out of here in a jif,” he called back.
He had one goddamn magazine left, he’d fired the other two. Seven .45s. Where was goddamn Ruta Beth?
His breath came in wracking sobs. The room was so dark. He could see nothing.
Lamar looked about. How stupid that he was in the light and his enemy in the dark. Kind of goddamned mistake that could get you killed.
He slipped back in the room, jumped up, and with a light tap of his gun muzzle shattered the huge light over the table. The space plunged into darkness.
How long had it been?
Maybe thirty seconds?
Where was goddamn Ruta Beth?
He slid back to the door, edging out. He could see nothing. The guy was somewhere in the back of the shop, amid the destroyed counters that had just exploded as Odell’s buckshot had blasted them. But where? Had he found cover? Was he dead himself already? Lamar couldn’t see a thing, and he could hear nothing over Odell’s labored breathing.
Lamar tried to clear his head. The main thing was to get out. Fuck this boy, let him live or die, but get out, go back to the farm and regroup. He wondered if the sounds had carried. All that gunfire in the little room in so short a time, the stink of gunpowder in the air.
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