(55)

You know how in your thoughts, you plan a thing, and though it may not seem simple, it does have a design, and you feel, yeah, I’ll do this or that, and this or that will happen?

I visualized Ronnie and me rushing into the room with our weapons pointed; we would say, “Halt, free Buck,” and then ease our way out, and everyone would sit there and watch us leave. But that’s the problem with plans. They generally get derailed to some degree or another by unexpected reality.

Of course, it might have helped if Ronnie and I had had a real plan, but we didn’t have time for that.

Into and down the hall and through the door we went, and when we entered the room, the song had switched to “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley.” Jack Jr. had yelled again, “And I crank,” and from the table came “Crank,” said by Kate and Jack Sr., and Jack Jr., grinning, wound the garrote again. Buck’s tongue was thrusting out of his mouth.

I yelled something, but no one noticed. The music was loud, but I could hear those at the table crying out in chorus, slamming their fists on the table, saying, “Crank it. Crank it.”

I speed-walked right past the table, past Chief Dudley. Ronnie was behind me, gun drawn. The music was coming from a black box of some kind on a shelf. I slammed it with the stock of my shotgun. It fell off and the wire came unplugged and the recorder hit the floor. Plastic shattered and a cassette tape slid across the shiny tile.

“Leave him be,” I said.

Jack Jr. eyed me as if I were nothing more than a fly and held the garrote tight, but he slowly changed his mindset; a shotgun can be persuasive. He let go of the garrote and it loosened. He started to move toward me. I pointed the shotgun at him. “Take your big ass and sit on the stage by the old dead fart.”

Jack Jr. went and sat. In that stupid outfit with the hood, he looked like a sad trick-or-treater who had been robbed of his Halloween candy.

I glanced at Ronnie. She had her pistol on Dudley and then she moved it and pointed it across the table at Coolie, who had gone so far as to rest his hand on the butt of his holstered revolver.

“Please pull it,” Ronnie said. “We been to the range together, and you can’t hit an elephant in the ass with a load of buckshot at ten paces. Go on. Pull it.”

Coolie gave the muscles in his face a workout, but he didn’t say anything back. He slowly moved his hand away.

I went over and kicked Creosote Johnny off the stage. It hurt my foot, but I tried not to show it. When Creosote Johnny hit the floor with a thud, I heard Jack Sr. and Kate Conroy let out their breath.

“Think he’s going to be mad at you?” I said.

“You little meddling shit,” Kate said.

“You old murdering bitch,” I said. “You bunch of fucking cartoon villains.”

I stepped off the stage, walked over to Coolie with the shotgun pointed at him, said, “Pinch the gun out of your holster and place it on the floor.”

He hesitated longer than Jack Jr. had. I cocked back the hammer on the shotgun. The sound was like the latch to hell being thrown open.

“Shit,” he said. He pinched the pistol by the butt, slipped it from his holster, and placed it on the floor.

“Step back some.”

He stepped back. I went over and stood in front of him. Up close, I could see his face looked banged up from our last encounter. I kicked him smooth in the balls. “That’s because I don’t like you.”

He blew air, bent his knees, and slowly brought them to rest on the floor. He tried to say something, but all his mouth did was open and close.

I picked up the pistol and stuck it in my waistband. I looked at the table. Kate and Jack Sr. reminded me of mummies. It made no sense that they were so powerful. As for Estelle, she looked as if all she had ever wanted was suddenly not worth the match it would take to set it on fire. Her eyes were glazed over and the blue light moved against them like dreams.

I looked at Ronnie. She was crouched, holding her gun on Chief Dudley again.

“I wouldn’t have thought it,” she said.

Dudley looked like a kid who had just been found jacking off in the holy water by a nun. “Truth is,” Chief Dudley said, “neither would I.”

“Please do like Coolie and put your gun on the floor.”

He did.

“Now step back against the window.”

He did that too. “I thought I was someone else,” Chief Dudley said.

“I don’t care.”

“I thought I was really all right, then one day I was them.”

Ronnie trembled slightly. She picked up his revolver, dropped that one in her holster, continued to hold hers at the ready.

I crossed in front of the table with the shotgun and stood near the dais. I said to Jack Jr., “Dump dipshit Parker out of the chair there.”

Jack Jr. studied me to see if I was serious, decided I was. He stood up and walked behind the wheelchair, took hold of the back of it, and pushed it. He tilted it forward when he was at the edge of the dais. Judea toppled out of it like a rag doll, hit the edge of the stage, then crumpled onto the floor.

“Take the rope off Buck’s neck and put him in the wheelchair. And please, act like an asshole and drop him so I can blow a hole through you.”

Thunder rolled, doors rattled, the windows shook. I was so engaged in making sure that Jack Jr. did what I asked, I didn’t notice that Estelle had stood up and floated away from the table like a vanilla ghost. I only realized it when I heard the fabric of her gown whispering over her thighs.

She looked back at me with her distant eyes, opened the door, and went into the slice of lemon light and on out. She closed the door as if quietly leaving for a bathroom break. I thought, What the hell? But she was gone.

“Nobody else try that,” I said.

I took note of Coolie attempting to stand up from the floor. I said, “Coolie, that’s not smart. Go sit at the table.”

He gingerly rose to his feet, lightly stepped to the table, and sat slowly where Estelle had been seated.

Jack Jr. had not placed Buck in Parker’s chair. He had only moved to stand behind Buck in the strangle chair.

“Cut down with that, you get me and Buck,” he said.

“I’ll get just you,” Ronnie said. She was now pointing the pistol at him from across the room. It was a long shot with a handgun, but I had a feeling she could manage it, even with him standing behind Buck.

Jack Jr. decided not to test it. He lifted Buck from the garrote chair as lightly as if he were made of feathers and settled him into Parker’s wheelchair.

“Now wheel Mr. Rogers carefully down the ramp and stop in front of Ronnie.”

I went around the table to the wider end of it, nearer Ronnie. Jack Jr. stopped the chair about six feet from her.

“Now,” I said to Jack, “you go back and sit down where you were, on the edge of the stage.”

I could see Jack was starting to get testy, so I tucked the shotgun into my shoulder and eyed down the barrel. Survivalism trumped courage again. He went and sat on the edge of the dais. He rested his feet on Judea Parker like he was a footstool.

It was then that I heard the motor of Kate Conroy’s chair. It was humming and she was rolling toward the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I said.

“Shoot me,” she said. “You haven’t got the balls. That’s why we’re us and you’re you.”

This was true. I didn’t feel inclined to blow the head off a geriatric woman in a wheelchair. She reached the door, tugged on the handle. It rattled a little, but the door didn’t move.

“Goddamn it,” she said.

“I’ll be going too,” Jack Sr. said. He took hold of his cane and crutch and tried to boost himself to a standing position. “Give me a hand, Coolie,” Jack Sr. said. “Get me up on these things.”

“Coolie, you I will shoot,” I said.

Coolie didn’t move.

Jack struggled to rise and balance on his sticks. One of them slipped and he landed on the floor with a smack. That knocked his chair close to Dudley. That made Jack Jr. stand up and start to move toward him.

“Easy,” I said. “Put him back in his chair, but nothing else.”

“Goddamn door,” Kate said. She was still tugging on it. “Someone open this damn thing.”

Chief Dudley said, “You know I carry a hideout gun, Ronnie.”

Jack eased over and picked up his father and sat him in the chair, gave Senior his crutches.

Ronnie and I had been distracted by Kate’s and Jack Sr.’s antics. Dudley had fished a gun from somewhere, a small revolver that looked like a toy. I had no idea where he had been keeping it. He lifted it and pointed it in mine and Ronnie’s general direction.

“Now the fucking worm has turned,” Jack Sr. said.

“Coolie carries one too,” he said and shifted the gun so it was pointing at Coolie, who was reaching into his boot. Chief Dudley shot Coolie through the head. The gunshot sounded like a snap of thunder in that room. Blood jumped across the table and misted in the blue light and sprinkled on the floor. Coolie fell face-first onto the table and one of his hands fluttered at his side for a moment like a dying sparrow, then went still. Blood and strands of brains oozed in a thick puddle from his head, flowed across the table in a stream.

“What the scalded fuck, Dudley?” Jack Sr. said.

Dudley looked at us. He said, “Go. Just go. And Ronnie. I never meant to be this way. It gets in you like tapeworms.”

Ronnie got behind the wheelchair with Buck in it, dropped her pistol in his lap, and started pushing him toward the door.

Kate was still rattling the knob. “Open this fucking door.”

I backed out behind Ronnie, pointing the shotgun. Just as I was going through the door Ronnie had left open, Chief Dudley looked at me with this little grin on his face, like those jagged kinds you see cut into pumpkins at Halloween. He may have felt like he had redeemed himself.

I thought Senior had transformed into a crippled sloth, but I was wrong, at least in one respect. He pulled a long, thin sword out of his cane and stuck it into Dudley’s belly. It went in as smooth as light through a window.

Dudley tried to lift his gun and shoot, but the blade had claimed him. The gun slipped out of his hand and landed on the floor. He slid to the floor so fast, it pulled the sword from Senior’s hand and pulled Senior to the floor again.

Dudley’s ankles crossed as he sat, and his head and neck rested back against the wall. A blue-lit swell of blood, like a colorful Rorschach pattern, puddled on his belly, then leaked to the floor.

Senior was wallowing on the floor like a turtle on its back. Jack Jr. was already eyeing Dudley’s pistol. I didn’t like the idea, but when he reached for it, I cut him down with the shotgun.

When I pulled the trigger there was a faint snap, a puffing sound, and a burst of smoke from the barrel. The smoke twisted in the blue light like the arrival of a genie. But there wouldn’t be any three wishes.

The shell was a dud.

Jack Jr. smiled.