Wednesday, August 29
1940 hours
Raton, New Mexico
What did he think, Frank wondered, pushing the table back and getting up. Do a restaurant in the middle of dinner—sure as shit some civilian will be right next to you at the cash register waiting to pay his bill. T-Shirt had the jacket up and there was the piece.
Frank couldn’t see it—T-Shirt’s back was to him—but the civilian did, standing next to him, and he had to do something about it. Raised on stuff like America’s Most Wanted. A clean-cut business type in a polo shirt and jeans and Topsiders, young, with a pricey Nautilus body.
Maybe he had a girlfriend back at the table, whatever. Frank could see him staring at T-Shirt, see the thought forming, see the guy thinking about it as his hand came up and he started to step forward into T-Shirt. T-Shirt saw it too.
T-Shirt took a half-step right and started to turn, the civilian still seeing himself on the eleven o’clock news, saying, Well, ma’am, this is New Mexico, not New York, lady, we don’t let these outastate boys pull that shit around he—
T-Shirt shot him in the middle of the face, shot him so hard Frank could see the man’s last thoughts come flying out the back of his blow-dried cut. A big round, must have been. It shattered a ten-foot-wide sheet of plate glass thirty feet away. Glass spears came down on a tableful of kids and moms.
Fuckfuckfuck, said Keogh, moving, going right.
The cashier, an old lady in a Fiberglas hairdo with a pin on her chest that said EMMA, starts to scream and the cash door drops right down behind the counter.
People all over the room are hitting the floor.
T-Shirt is still watching the civilian fall. Frank has the table out of his way and he’s falling to his right, away from the line, away from the little guy standing six at the door.
Six is coming forward, the piece coming up from under his cattleman’s coat, a big Ithaca shotgun, a riot gun.
Oh, Jesus, thought Frank, rolling under the next table and tugging at the nine-mil. Where’d he get that?
The civilian hits the ground.
The plate glass hits the ground.
Emma hits the ground behind the counter. T-Shirt hears the cash drawer fell, sees the bills scattering on the tiles, coins skittering. Two steps, turning now to face the room, Frank can see the weapon, a big black auto.
T-Shirt puts his right hand down behind the counter, comes up with a fistful of Emma’s hair and Emma underneath it, face red, squalling in pain, real pain as T-Shirt gets her up in front of him and steps back away from the room, behind the counter.
Six still coming forward now, the shotgun out and rigid, the muzzle pointing every which way, covering everybody. He’s screaming, too, out of control, screaming at his partner.
“Cash! Get the fuckin’ cash!”
A door opens now, at the side of the room.
Frank starts to come up, the nine-mil low and in his right hand, coming up above the table line.
It’s a bathroom door.
LADIES, it says.
Six puts two shells into it, two massive ear-slamming bangs, the Ithaca held solid and hard against his right hip, his left arm over and rigid, his right controlling it.
The door disappears. A flicker of red and powder-blue, something going down behind the door.
Six is turning now, looking back at T-Shirt, starting to say “CASH!” or something, the muzzle turning with him, Frank thinking, Well, damn, this guy’s good, Frank now over the side of the table and firing at him, three times in the middle of his chest, three in a tight pattern, bambambam, the noise small after the sound of that big Ithaca, and then, an afterthought, Frank thinking about Kevlar vests and other Soldier of Fortune shit these assholes’d be into, two more into the side of Six’s head, and Six is now on his way down.
T-Shirt gets Emma all the way up and puts three out at Frank, at the place where Frank isn’t now.
Never stand and shoot was a rule of Frank’s. A good rule. You’ve shot; now move. Turn up again somewhere else.
My, Emma’s a big lady, he thought, seeing no piece of T-Shirt to try for.
T-Shirt’s on that wavelength too.
“FUCKINDONMOVE!” He’s shrieking it, voice going high and scratchy and his neck cords all wired and standing out. “I’ll do her! I’ll do the bitch!”
Jesus, thought Frank. Feature my luck.
Frank stood up, the nine-mil out in the combat position, instinct-centered on Emma’s right breast, where most of T-Shirt’s lungs would be. On the other side of Emma, of course.
“Drop the fucking gun, asshole!” T-Shirt’s voice was going, but the thing in his hand was solid enough. Now that Frank was getting closer to it, he made it as one of those new Colt Deltas, a ten-mil with serious hitting power, twice the numbers of the old .45.
“I can’t do that,” said Frank, keeping his voice reasonable. Friendly. Cool the guy out.
Wrong thing to do. T-Shirt was way out there.
“Cocksucker,” said T-Shirt, shoving the Delta up under Emma’s left breast. Emma’s knees went, but he had his left hand in her hair and she came back up again, eyes big, sobbing.
“So what’re you saying, fuckhead?” said Frank. Reasonable, but like he was losing his patience.
People were crying in the room, kids from over to his left. No noise from the ladies’ room, though. It pissed Frank off, this shit. He was afraid, but there was only so much shit a man could put up with and then all he had was being pissed off.
“I’m saying I’ll blow this lady to shit if you don’t drop the piece, asshole.”
“Fuck it,” said Frank. “I don’t know the lady. Shoot her.”
“What?”
“I said, shoot her. What’s it say there? Emma? So shoot Emma. I could give a fuck. I’m new around here myself.”
Frank didn’t think he meant it, but on the other hand he wasn’t going to let this asshole have his nine-mil. The world was full of Emmas but he had only one nine-mil.
“Bastard! Drop the piece!”
Frank had the nine-mil out in front of him. He knew that T-Shirt was looking right down the muzzle.
“You have a problem, son.”
Emma’s eyes were as big as boiled eggs. She was staring at the weapon in Frank’s hands. Seemed like a nice lady except for the Fiberglas hair.
T-Shirt was looking around like somebody in the room was going to say, Hey, yeah, that’s right, the guy with the hostage gets to say what happens. Like Frank wasn’t playing fair.
Well, I better figure this right, thought Frank, and he shot Emma in the right shoulder, in the muscle about three inches from her little Peter Pan collar. Somebody screamed. T-Shirt grunted and Emma feinted, slipping down T-Shirt’s body, and T-Shirt was standing there looking at the hole in the middle of his shirt, off to the left a bit, actually in the middle of Kennedy’s forehead, Kennedy still smiling, now some blood starting to run out of Kennedy’s head and into the famous teeth.
T-Shirt looked up at Frank again.
“I know,” said Frank. “You never seen that done. You can’t believe I did that, can you?” And shot him again, bambam, in the middle of his ugly face, and T-Shirt starts to go down, Frank turning to leave, and in the door there’s a trooper coming in and Frank says, Well, fuck this, the trooper halfway into the room and—I don’t believe this, thinks Frank—no piece out.
There. The sirens now, a long way off But coming.
Man, this troop’s here for lunch.
All this in a tenth of a second.
Frank puts the nine-mil on him.
“Stop it there, officer.”
The trooper puts it together, sees the bodies on the ground.
Somebody says, “Bart—no! That guy, he stopped it.”
Bart’s frowning now.
“What?”
“He’s a good guy, Bart!” Same voice, Frank’s fan.
“The hell with that,” says Frank. “Take your weapon out. Put it down on the floor.”
Bart doesn’t like that. “I can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can,” said Frank. “You can do it. There’s no shame in it. I don’t want to shoot a cop.”
“Who the hell’re you?”
“Tonto. Take the piece out, put it down, Bart.”
Sirens again. How long now?
“Bart, for God’s sake, man. Do it.” Another fan, in the back row. A woman’s voice.
Bart takes his weapon out by the fingertips and sets it down on the floor.
“What happened here?”
Frank smiled at him, stepped around wide and came up behind him, and put him down on his face and cuffed him with his own cuffs, the nine-mil hard into Bart’s neck.
“Shit happened,” said Frank.
* * *
That made local news and then regional.
In Santa Fe one of the FBI special agents put the two descriptions together and got it out onto the wire.
It made the news in Denver too.
Lucas looked at Sonny.
“Well, he ain’t going to Florida, Sonny.”
They were on the interstate in fifteen minutes, going south to New Mexico, Sonny Beauchamp pushing his black Toronado into the gathering night, looking hard at every Cadillac he passed.
Lucas fell asleep in the back seat. His breath sounded, in the silent car, like somebody sharpening a knife. Sonny could tell he was sick, that the trip was wearing him down. He told himself that Lucas would hold out and everything would come out all right for his friend.
But he didn’t think about it much. He put it down in the bottom of his mind. He had the car red-lined and that was all he really cared about right now. That and looking for a certain set of taillights.
The Toronado was one of the classics. Sonny hated the new cars. They all looked like suppositories. Aerodynamics had killed the American car. This Toronado rode as smooth and quiet as a crow over a river and there weren’t very many cars built after 1983 that could catch it on a straightaway.
It had a radio. Sonny hadn’t turned it on. Sonny didn’t need the distraction. On his left the deepest blue night had risen out of the east. On his right, the mountains glided along with him, black and jagged on the horizon. Behind them the last of Wednesday the twenty-ninth of August had gone down in glory, and Sonny saw none of this.
On his blunt face the lights of oncoming cars flickered and faded away. Under his hands he could feel the steady rumor of the roadway, and in his ears was the sound of rushing wind.
Butler pissed away two hours in the Thunderbird, waiting for Frank to call on the pay phone by the doors. A lot of Yonkers cops were there and actually he had a pretty good time, all things considered, watching an old video of the Big Wheel rally in Far Rockaway, wondering how Johnny Keogh would make out with Pickett, until around twelve-thirty, when a couple of patrol guys came in from the road for a Ten-Seven and a shot of Bushmills and saw Butler there and one of them came over, pushing his hat back on his head, savoring the moment.
“Butler. Why are you still here?”
“What?”
“Your buddy—Frank?”
“Yeah.”
“Man”—he looked at his partner, grinning at him—“you ever go to high school, Butler?”
“Yeah. So …?”
“So, you take Current Events? Or was you in Shop?”