Carl stops the patrol car at the bottom of the gentle slope leading up to Randolph Welby’s shack, which is dark. The deputy has a bad feeling about this. For five years, ever since Carl forced Randolph to find a cave Doc could use, Carl has had this premonition that the weird little hermit has been biding his time, waiting for revenge.
Carl was surprised that Doc renewed his offer tonight, that even though the nigger woman escaped in the cemetery, Doc said he would still pay Carl twenty-five thousand dollars to kill Welby. Carl keeps watching the dark shack, not sure if he wants Randolph to be home or not. There’s a lot of money at stake, but the question is, can Carl do it?
Ever since he was in junior high school, outweighing even the largest of his classmates by a good fifty pounds, Carl has been beating up on people, striking back at them for making fan of his size, striking out from the confusion caused by his low-wattage mental powers. To balance the scales he has bloodied noses, blackened eyes, broken arms; he’s even delivered people to Doc for killing and then cleaned up the messes Doc and Mr. Gigli made. But killing someone himself is a line across which Carl has never stepped. He thinks he can do it, however. For twenty-five thousand dollars and the continued blessing of his benefactor, Carl is pretty sure he can kill Randolph Welby.
He exits the patrol car, leaving the door open, and starts what for him is a laborious climb up that slope toward the dark shack. Carl has his pistol out, ready to shoot the first dog that shows itself, but he also has his mind on Mary, wondering if Doc was serious about making her go to bed with him.
He loses the start of a hard-on when he hears ferocious barking coming from behind the door to Randolph’s shack. Carl immediately turns to run, pumping his fat legs to get down off the slope, convinced now he’s going to need the shotgun.
Two dogs come off the porch just as the deputy is struggling to squeeze in the patrol car, Carl getting the door closed right before the dogs reach the other side of the car, their fury terrifying. Like they hate him. One of the dogs, in fact, has clamped his jaws on a tire, shaking his head and trying to rip the tread loose, the second dog with its front paws up on the passenger window, looking in on Carl, wanting to be in that car with him.
Carl is trembling so much he fumbles getting the shotgun out of its rack, not even checking to make sure the short-barreled, pump-action twelve-gauge is loaded, barely remembering to flip the safety off. The passenger window is rolled down a few inches and the dog there has turned its head sideways to push its jaws into that open space, growling and foaming and snapping.
Anticipating the sound that the shotgun is going to make in the enclosed car, Carl grimaces as he aims the muzzle at the window. But the explosion is even more severe than he expected, deafening Carl, blowing out the entire passenger-side window, those double-ought pellets blasting the hound with such force that it actually does a complete back flip in midair, dead before it hits the ground.
But Randolph bred his dogs for heart, the second one instantly up into that gaping window space, back feet scratching against the car door for traction, halfway into the front seat now with its eyes pinned on Carl’s face, the dog eager for that thick neck, Carl repeatedly squeezing the trigger to no effect. In the terror of the moment he has forgotten to pump the next shell into the chamber.
And now that dog is twisting and struggling to get the rest of the way in, still snapping and lunging at Carl, who has braced himself against the driver’s door, finally summoning the presence of mind to jack in a new shell, pulling the trigger immediately, the interior of the patrol car once again exploding with flash and sound.
The pellets tear open the dog’s chest with a tight pattern no larger than the palm of your hand, the dog screaming as it goes into a violent death spasm, dog’s blood all over the car’s interior, flung onto Carl’s shirt and face, the hound finally dying, lying limply in that window space, half in and half out of the car.
Up on the porch, meanwhile, hidden by the night, Randolph’s third dog, the big black, is whining to attack. In some dog way he realizes what has happened to his two companions, also understanding in some sense that the same fate awaits him, but still he is eager for the command, willing to follow his Alpha Master’s command into Hell itself.
From behind the front door, Randolph says it with great sadness: “Sic ’em.”
And the big black is gone, down the slope and past the dog on the ground, jumping up to the car, clawing over the dead companion who lies half in and half out of that window space, the big black in mortal pursuit now of the object of his fury.
Carl chambers another shell and blows the dog’s head off.
Up at his door, Randolph Welby weeps for such valor.
Carl keeps dropping the shells he’s trying to load into the shotgun, finally getting three new shells into the magazine and then bracing himself for more dogs. Ten minutes he waits before carefully, shakily getting out of the patrol car. A lamp has been lighted in Randolph’s shack.
Sweeping the shotgun from side to side and occasionally turning completely around, Carl once again climbs that slope.
No more dogs, but Randolph Welby is standing on the porch, half hidden in the shadows.
“How many dogs you got in there, asshole?”
Randolph doesn’t reply.
The deputy, meanwhile, is trying to make out the details of Randolph’s getup, some kind of stupid cowboy clothes. “Who you trying to be, Texas Pete?”
“Ta Wyoming Kid,” Randolph replies, pulling down on the big cowboy hat that is already sitting low on his head, resting on his protruding ears.
“Yeah, well, Kid, let’s go inside, I need to borrow one of your rifles.” Just like Doc said, shoot him with his own gun so it can be made to look like suicide.
Randolph steps to the edge of the porch and draws both pistols from the gunbelt around his tiny waist, leveling the muzzles at Carl’s unmissable girth.
“Those aren’t real,” the deputy insists.
But when Randolph cocks both hammers, Carl suddenly isn’t sure. The light from the shack is weak, and maybe those pistols are real.
“Dwop it!” Randolph shouts, flicking the barrels to indicate Carl’s shotgun.
With some effort, Carl bends over to put the shotgun on the ground — but while straightening up, he draws his own revolver.
Then the two of them wait there, ten feet apart in a Mexican standoff.
“Did you shoot Sheriff Stone?”
“I tink not.”
“All bwowed up. You dwop tat hogweg too, mistah, and get weady to meet you makah.”
Carl isn’t sure what to do. If the pistols the little man is holding are real, can Carl get a shot off before —
Randolph knows what’s going to happen when he pulls both triggers, the hammers clicking into place as Randolph shouts to supply his own sound effects. “Pow! Pow! Got you!”
Carl twitches when the hammers click and then twitches again with each word Randolph shouts. But after a moment’s silence, the deputy grins. “You stupid fuck,” he says, already forgetting Doc’s instructions about killing Randolph with one of his own guns, the deputy shooting Randolph right there on the porch.
Carl is standing over the little man, picking up one of the toy pistols and seeing that it has been loaded with wooden cartridges. “You stupid fuck,” he says again, a trace of regret in his voice, the deputy looking down at the ancient but childlike face, chinless and with a high forehead, a face of old leather, dramatically weathered, the skin around the old man’s eyes drooping with the weight of years, that tiny mouth drawn into a small O.
“You dead,” Randolph whispers without opening his eyes.
Carl grabs one of the bandoliers and drags him inside the shack.
Half an hour later, Carl is sitting in the patrol car making a call on the cellular phone Quinndell gave him last year so they could communicate outside official channels.
Mary answers.
“I have to talk to Doc,” Carl demands.
She hesitates. “He’s busy right now.”
“You better git him ’cause I got trouble out here.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Just git Doc to the phone!”
“He doesn’t want to be disturbed. What’s wrong, you didn’t find Randolph?”
“I found him all right. But there’s something in his shack.”
“What?”
Carl doesn’t know if he should tell her or not.
“Carl?”