“Oh God, God, God, thank you,” she wailed.
I felt like wailing myself, but I am a rock, I am a . . .
Okay, I cried, too, came about this fuckin’ close to wailing, but managed to hold it off. If we’d been in that ragtop Mustang, we’d be dead already. Saved by a drunk kid in daddy’s car.
“For a while I didn’t . . . didn’t think we were gonna make it,” she said. Her voice sounded blubbery.
“It was close. Good thing you were born when the planets were lined up just right.”
She hugged me tighter.
Finally I looked around. Never had stars looked so beautiful. Never had ordinary air smelled so sweet. Never had I wanted to kill two people so much. Well, one person—Julia Reinhart. To stay alive, I’d had to know she was no longer on this earth. I had needed to kill her, and I had.
Now, there was Buddie and Arlene.
Except . . . maybe not.
Could I do that again? Hunt someone down and kill them? I wasn’t a judge or jury. I had been grievously wronged, as had Lucy. Buddie and Arlene had tried to murder us and had come within a hair’s breadth of succeeding. But they hadn’t, so now it was up to the law to deal with them. Those two weren’t going to escape society’s wrath and vengeance for having tried to kill us, for murdering Vince Ignacio and killing a dozen others over the years. The evidence was buried. It could and would be retrieved. No doubt most of it would be horrible beyond imagining. Buddie and Arlene were headed for lethal injections.
Another problem with our hunting down those two—Buddie was a monster. Six foot seven, three hundred fifty pounds, well fed, psychotic, and—I was guessing here but I think I was on the right track—he would make every effort to kill us and stuff us back in the ground if we showed up. Also, Arlene had a gun and she had bullets, so going after those two didn’t strike me as the swiftest move we might make that night.
Lucy shivered. “Now what?” Her voice was a whisper, as if the night had ears. Which, around here, maybe it did.
I looked toward the diner. Lights were on over there. Those two were probably scrambling around, removing any last-minute traces of evidence in case the police showed up. Buddie would be certain we were finished, but you never know what a Yeti is thinking. The last thing we needed was for that spotlight to come on again in a final paranoid sweep and get lucky.
“Not sure,” I said. “But get dressed. Dark clothing.”
I was still in jockeys. They were so full of dirt they sagged on me. I took them off, shook out a pound of Nevada, put them back on. My mom wouldn’t have approved. What would people think if I got in an accident? The thought passed through, but I can’t say it had much weight.
Beneath the starry sky we dressed, put on shoes, gathered up what seemed most likely to be useful—the knife, jack handle, one gun each. They didn’t have bullets, but a revolver aimed at a person’s heart tends to intimidate. It could alter behavior, cause hesitations. I took my .357 Magnum, Lucy kept her .38.
So now . . . choices.
Best option was to give the diner a very wide berth and walk out to the highway, flag down the next vehicle to come along. Get the hell out of there. Call the police.
I couldn’t bring myself to do that. What I wanted was to fire up that backhoe and drive it through the diner and level the place, hopefully run over Bigfoot and his bitch mother in the process.
That, of course, was just the worst kind of wishful thinking.
But we were dark, invisible out there. We could get close to the diner and motel, see what was going on. A thought clattered through my head, something about curiosity, a cat, and a bad outcome.
Man, I hated those two.
Really, though. We could get a little closer, listen, maybe get an idea of what was going on.
Or, with luck, we could find a phone, call the police, be right there when those two were packed into a police car in handcuffs.
Stupid thoughts.
We walked quietly toward the diner’s lights. Not many lights were on. I saw two yellowish glows. We were still over a quarter mile away.
“What’re we doin’, Mort?” she whispered.
“You’re not hurt, are you? You can run if you have to?”
“Yeah, but . . . what’re we doing?”
“Seeing how much we can see.”
“Are we gonna kill them? I hope.”
Okay, we were on the same psychological page here. But it wasn’t a good page.
“Nope.”
“Why not? They tried to kill us.” Her voice was low, savage. It wouldn’t carry far into the night, but it would carry pretty deep into her psyche. Well, she’d never had anyone try to snuff her out before, and I had. I was experienced. I could handle it.
Sure I could.
“The law will take care of them,” I said. But I felt no sense of satisfaction at the words, no sense of justice. The words were dust in my mouth. They were logical, dead, and empty, so I had a fine little skirmish going on in my head.
“That what you want?” Lucy asked. “Put the law on them?”
“No. I want to roast their hearts over an open fire. But having them arrested is the right thing to do. And a lot safer.”
Arrested.
An anemic, tepid, civilized word. It had no bearing on what Buddie had done to us. It had no quality of justice. Marching the two of them away in cuffs sounded marginally better, but it had none of the hot-blooded appeal of that open-fire thing.
We went another hundred yards in silence. Finally she said, “If that’s what you want, okay.” I could barely hear her words.
“If you hear anything, like someone coming after you, run.”
“Whatever.”
Curious response.
A light went out inside the diner. Moments later, the last one went out. All that was left was a kind of halo where a floodlight lit the Diner sign on the roof where it faced the highway. Lucy and I were still a quarter mile out, at the helicopter hangar.
“Beddie-by,” Lucy whispered.
“Maybe. Don’t count on it.”
We went past Buddie’s backhoe on its trailer. We made it to the shed behind the diner that held the safe they’d taken out of Jo-X’s place. We stood behind it. I looked around a corner at the diner, still holding the jack handle. This close to the place, I saw a faint glow in a window from somewhere inside—a night-light, or maybe they weren’t asleep or in bed yet.
Lucy pawed through junk behind the shed. “Ouch.” Then, “Look what I found,” she whispered. “Careful. It’s sharp.”
It was the old tree saw I’d seen several days ago. A two-foot gently curved blade, long jagged teeth. I remembered seeing it—a rusty, nasty-looking, possibly useful weapon in exactly the right circumstances, which wasn’t the case here. Here it was unwieldy and hopelessly inadequate.
“If Goliath comes after you, drop that damn thing and run like hell,” I whispered.
“What’re you two doin’ out here?” Melanie the waitress said in a voice loud enough to wake Jimmy Hoffa.
I almost yelped. Lucy let out a terrified little chirp and junk banged against the side of the shed. My heart tried to pound its way out of my chest.
“Well, jeez, I’m sorry,” Melanie said. “I didn’t mean to scare you guys.”
“Quiet!”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
Well, shit. I might have to deck her to shut her up.
Too late.
A pair of floodlights came on behind the diner, blasting the backyard with light. It wasn’t the big spotlight, but it lit the place up. Bigfoot came charging out with a towel around his waist and what might’ve been a billy club in one hand. His hair was wet, water running in his eyes. He saw me looking at him from behind the shed and headed my way, fast.
“Run,” I yelled to Lucy. I gave her a little push, then ran in the opposite direction to keep Buddie away from her. No way to avoid the light once I was out from behind the shed.
Buddie came after me.
So did Lucy.
Sonofabitch.
I whirled, backpedaled, dodged sideways. Buddie scrambled after me making a kind of insane growling, roaring sound. The towel came loose and suddenly Buddie was stark naked. I tried to lead him away from Lucy since she was behind him, not backing off. I yelled for her to run, goddamnit, but she hopped around in the yard with that stupid tree saw in her hands, getting close to him. Too damn close.
Buddie tore after me. I kept out of his reach, barely. It wasn’t something I could keep up for long. He was big, not very fast, but I wouldn’t be able to trade blows with him—him with that billy club, me with a jack handle. Judo sure as hell wasn’t an option. I hadn’t learned enough judo to trade punches with Ma. Maybe the best I could do was run, try to keep him away from Lucy.
I was about to turn and run but Lucy was only five or six feet behind him. If he turned fast enough, he’d have her. I drew my .357 and aimed it at his chest. He pulled up short. Then Lucy swung that saw between Bigfoot’s legs from behind with its teeth pointed upward. She lifted the teeth up into his groin, hard, and pushed the blade forward, sawing testicles. Buddie screamed, then did exactly the wrong thing. He tried to turn as Lucy yanked the blade back toward herself, lifting and sawing, and Buddie used his stupidity and strength to rip out the femoral artery in his right leg.
Lucy fell on her back. Buddie let out another roar of pain and fury, tried to lunge at her, discovered that she was quick as a lynx, so he turned around and came back toward me, spurting blood like a fire hose. He took eight or ten half-staggering steps with one pink-white testicle dangling out of his torn scrotum, a sight that would haunt my dreams, then fell to his knees, flopped to one side, and stared up at me.
“Aw, fuck,” he said.
“Yup,” I said, then a shot rang out. Arlene was out the back door, revolver aimed in my general direction, a whiff of smoke spiraling from the barrel. She took aim again.
I dropped. A bullet tore over my head. I don’t know where the first one had gone. I rolled, scrambled to one side, dodged another bullet, then zigzagged out into the night, a procedure I’d more or less perfected playing football a lifetime ago and used last October when Julia Reinhart was blasting away at me with a Glock only seconds after she’d murdered Jeri.
Another shot rang out behind me and Lucy let out a cry.
Oh, no.
I turned around, came zigzagging back. Arlene screamed at me. She was in a bathrobe that was flapping open, gun in hand. I didn’t see Lucy. I ran at Arlene, threw the jack handle, missed her by half a foot, jumped sideways. She fired off another round that didn’t come very close, then ducked back into the diner.
Stalemate.
I’d counted five shots. She had at least one more, and could be reloading in there.
“Lucy,” I yelled.
“Over here.”
She was in relative darkness behind the shed. When I got to her, she was looking at a furrow in her upper left arm. Blood was flowing, but it was a groove, not an artery opener.
“That . . . that bitch shot me.”
“Wow,” Melanie said. “I never seen anyone shot before.”
“Go back to your trailer,” I told her. “Call the police.”
“Don’t got no phone in there. We want to phone, we got to go over to the diner.”
Perfect.
“Take off your shirt,” I told her.
She took a step back. “What for?”
“I need a bandage.” I didn’t give her time to back farther away. I got hold of her shirt.
“Okay, okay,” she said. She took it off. Her bra was pale white in the light reflecting off the backyard.
“Now get back in your trailer and stay there. Where’s your husband?”
“Kirby? He’s sleepin’. He kin sleep through anything.”
“What a guy. Keep him inside if he wakes up. Now go.”
She went.
I tore Melanie’s shirt into one long strip, folded it, tied it tight around Lucy’s arm.
“Hurts,” she said.
“Bullet wounds are like that.”
“My very first one,” she said, and there was a proud note in her voice.
“How about you make it your very last one, too?”
“I’ll try. This’ll probably leave a pretty good scar.”
“Count on it.”
I looked around the corner of the shed. Buddie was out in the yard, still on his side. Not moving. He’d probably bled out by now. The dangling nut was probably annoying at the time, but a shredded femoral artery tends to kill quickly.
“Nice work with the saw,” I said. “I wouldn’t have thought to do that between the legs thing.”
“Thanks. Now what? She’s still got a gun.”
Going after Arlene under these conditions was something a fool might do. Not me.
“Now we get out of here,” I said. “Buddie’s dead. We won. Let the law handle it. She won’t make it far even if she runs.”
Right then, headlights pulled off the highway in front of the motel. Life is all about timing. With floodlights blazing in the backyard, I hadn’t seen the headlights as they drew near. Peeking around the shed, I saw Ma pull up in that old brown 1963 Cadillac Eldorado of hers. Maude Clary, my boss. She got out of the Caddy and looked around, but the lights behind the diner got her attention and she headed my way.
Not good. Arlene was still inside with a gun.
“Stay put,” I said to Lucy.
I ran out from behind the shed, zigging, yelled, “Stay back, Ma!” and Arlene came out the back door and shot the top quarter inch off my right ear as I was passing Goliath who was sprawled in an Olympic-size pool of his own blood.
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.
Gumshoe on the Loose Page 31