Keeton and his wife sometimes took dinner with the Garsonsthey were nice people, and Garson himself was politically important.
What would he think if he saw these slips? What would he think of that word, EMBEZZLEMENT, screaming off the pink violation slips again and again, screaming like a woman being raped in the middle of the night?
He ran back into the dining room, panting. Had he missed any?
He didn't think so. He'd gotten them all, at least down lieNo!
There was one! Right on the newel post of the stairway!
What if he had missed that one? My God!
He ran to it, snatched it up.
MAKE: SHITMOBILE MODEL: OLD AND WEARY LIC. #: OLDFUCK I OTHER VIOLATION(S): FINANCIAL FAGGOTRY
More? Were there more? Keeton coursed through the downstairs rooms at a dead run. His shirttail had come out of his pants and his hairy belly was bobbling wildly over his beltbuckle. He saw no more... at least not down here.
After another quick, frantic look out the window to make sure Myrt wasn't yet in sight, he pelted upstairs with his heart thundering in his chest.
17
Wilma and Nettle met on the corner of Willow and Ford. There they halted, staring at each other like gunslingers in a spaghetti Western.
The wind flapped their coats briskly to and fro. The sun shuttered in and out of the clouds; their shadows came and went like fitful visitors.
No traffic moved on either of these two streets, or on the sidewalks. They owned this little corner of the autumn afternoon.
You killed my dog, you bitch!"
'You broke my TV! You broke my windows! You broke my microwave, you crazy cunt!"
"I warned you!"
"Stick your warning up your old dirt road!"
"I'm going to kill you!"
"Take one step and someone's going to die here, all right, but it won't be me!"
Wilma spoke these words with alarm and dawning surprise; Nettle's face made her realize for the first time that the two of them might be about to engage in something a little more serious than pulling hair or ripping clothes. What was Nettle doing here in the first place? What had happened to the element of surprise? How had things come so quickly to the sticking point?
But there was a deep streak of Polish Cossack in Wilma's nature, a part that found such questions irrelevant. There was a battle to be fought here; that was the important thing.
Nettle ran at her, lifting the cleaver as she came. Her lips peeled back from her teeth and a long howl tore out of her throat.
Wilma crouched, holding her knife out like a giant switchblade.
As Nettle closed with her, Wilma drove it forward. It thrust deep into Nettle's bowels and then rose, slitting her stomach open and letting out a spurt of stinking gruel. Wilma felt a moment's horror at what she had don other end of the steel buried in Nettle?-and her arm muscles relaxed. The knife's upward momentum died before the blade could reach Nettle's frantically pumping heart.
"OOOOH YOU BIIIITCH!" Nettle screamed, and brought the cleaver down. It buried itself to the hilt in Wilma's shoulder, splitting the collarbone with a dull crunch.
The pain, a huge wooden plank of it, drove any objective thought from Wilma's mind. Only the raving Cossack was left. She yanked her knife free.
Nettle yanked her cleaver free. It took both hands to do it, and when she finally succeeded in wrenching it off the bone, a loose slew of guts slipped from the bloody hole in her dress and hung before her in a glistening knot.
The two women circled slowly, their feet printing tracks in their own blood. The sidewalk began to look like some weird Arthur Murray dance diagram. Nettle felt the world beginning to pulse in and out in great, slow cycles-the color would drain from things, leaving her in a blur of whiteness, and then it would slowly come back. She heard her heart in her ears, great slow snaffling thuds.
She knew she was wounded but felt no pain. She thought Wilma might have cut her a little in the side, or something.
Wilma knew how badly she was hurt; was aware that she could no longer lift her right arm and that the back of her dress was drenched with blood. She had no intention of even trying to run away, however.
She had never run in her life, and she wasn't going to start now.
"Hi!" someone screamed thinly at them from across the street.
"Hi! What are you two ladies doing there? You stop it, whatever it is!
You stop it right now or I'll call the police!"
Wilma turned her head in that direction. The moment her attention was diverted, Nettle stepped in and swung the cleaver in a flat, sweeping arc. It chopped into the swell of Wilma's hip and clanged off her pelvic bone, cracking it. Blood flew in a fan. Wilma screamed and flailed backward, sweeping the air in front of her with her knife. Her feet tangled together and she fell to the sidewalk with a thump.
"Hi! Hi!" It was an old woman, standing on her stoop and clutching a mouse-colored shawl to her throat. Her eyes were mag ould it really be Wilma jerzyck on the nified into watery wheels of terror by her spectacles. Now she trumpeted in her clear and piercing old-lady voice: "Help! Police!