“What’s that thing?” asked May, pointing to a shiny black square of plastic above the bazooka’s trigger housing.
“Dunno,” Fritz said, peering at it. “Some kind of inventory control for the bean-counters, most likely.”
“It’s got words in English on it,” May said.
Fritz shrugged. “So what? I got a John Deere cap with Chinese shit on the tag inside. Everybody sells everything to anyone. Thanks to the Jews, that’s just the way the world works. The Jews, they—”
“Never you mind the damn Jews,” Little Low said. If he let Fritz get on a roll about the Jews, he’d shortly be on to the federal government, and they’d be hunkered around this fucking hole in the floor for the rest of the spring. “All I care about is does it work. If it don’t, tell me now, lest we come back here and tear off your ballsack.”
“I think we should tear off his ballsack, anyhow, Low,” May said. “That’s what I think. I bet it’s small.”
“It works, it works,” Fritz said, presumably talking about the bazooka rather than his ballsack. “Now let loose of me, you scum.”
“Got a mouth on him, don’t he, brother?” Maynard observed.
“Yes,” Little Low said. “Yes he does. But we’ll forgive him this time. Get a couple of those grease-guns.”
“Those ain’t grease-guns,” Fritz said indignantly. “Those’re fully automatic army—”
“It’d suit me fine if you shut up,” Low said, “and what suits me is going to suit you. We’re going now, but if this bazooka of yours don’t work, we will return and make it disappear up your saggy ass all the way to the trigger housing.”
“Yessir, what he said!” May exclaimed. “Try shittin after takin a load like that!”
“What are you going to do with my boom-tube?”
Little Low Griner smiled gently. “Hush, now,” he said, “and don’t worry about what don’t concern you.”
2
From a hilltop a quarter of a mile away, Van Lampley observed the Silverado pull into Fritz Meshaum’s scabrous dooryard. She observed the Griners get out and return to their stolen truck a few minutes later, carrying stuff—no doubt more stolen goods—which they put in the truckbed. Then they took off again, once more in the direction of Dooling. She considered pulling into Meshaum’s place once they left, but in her current state, she felt incapable of asking any questions that would make sense. And really, did she have to? Everyone in Dooling knew that Fritz Meshaum was in love with anything that had a trigger and went bang. The Griner brothers had stopped to gun up. It was as plain as the nose on her face.
Well, she had a gun herself, her good old .30-.06. Probably not much of a shake compared to what was now in the bed of that stolen truck, but so what? Did she really have anything to lose that she hadn’t been planning, just an hour ago, to give away to the universe?
“Want to mess with me, boys?” Van said, keying the ATV and revving it (a mistake, as she had never bothered to check how much gas was in the Suzuki’s tank before setting out). “Well, why don’t we see just who messes with who?”
3
The Griners had listened to their scanner only off and on during their days at the cabin, but they did so constantly on the trip to town, because the police band had gone crazy. The transmissions and crosstalk meant little to Maynard, whose brains rarely got out of first gear, but Lowell picked up the general drift.
Someone—a bunch of someones, actually—had taken a mess of guns from the armory at the sheriff’s station, and the cops were just as mad as hornets in a shook-up nest. At least two of the gun-robbers had been killed, a cop had also been killed, and the rest of the gang had gotten away in a big RV. They had taken the stolen guns up to the women’s prison. The cops also kept talking about some woman they wanted to pull out of the Ho Hotel, and it seemed like the gun-robbers wanted to keep her for themselves. Low couldn’t follow that part. He didn’t much care, either. What he cared about was the cops had raised up a posse and were preparing for a big fight, maybe starting tomorrow morning, and they planned to rendezvous at the intersection of Route 31 and West Lavin Road. That meant the station would be undefended. It also gave Lowell a brilliant idea about how they might be able to nail Kitty McDavid.
“Low?”
“Yes, brother?”
“I can’t make out from all that bibble-babble who’s in charge. Some say Deputy Coombs took over from the Norcross bitch, and some say a fella named Frank. Who’s Frank?”
“Don’t know and don’t care,” Little Low said. “But when we get into town, you keep an eye peeled for a kid by himself.”
“Which kid, brother?”
“One old enough to ride a bike and carry a tale,” said Low, just as the stolen Silverado passed the sign reading WELCOME TO DOOLING, A NICE PLACE TO RAISE YOUR FAMILY.
4
The Suzuki ATV could do sixty on the open road, but with night coming down and her reflexes shot to perdition, Van dared no more than forty. By the time she passed the WELCOME TO DOOLING sign, the Silverado containing the Griner brothers had disappeared. Maybe she’d lost them, but maybe not. Main Street was nearly deserted, and she hoped to spot it there, either parked or cruising slowly while those bad boys looked for something worth holding up. If she didn’t spot it, she supposed the best she could do was pop into the sheriff’s station and report them to whoever was on duty. That would be sort of an anticlimax for a woman who was hoping to do something good to make up for a shooting she still felt bad about, but it was like her daddy always said—sometimes you get what you want, but mostly you get what you get.
The beginning of downtown proper was marked by Barb’s Beauty Salon and Hot Nails on one side of the road and Ace Hardware (recently visited by Johnny Lee Kronsky, in search of tools, wires, and batteries) on the other. It was between these two fine business establishments that Vanessa’s ATV chugged twice, backfired, and died. She checked the gauge, and saw the needle resting on E. Wasn’t that just the perfect end to a perfect fucking day?
There was a Zoney’s one block up where she could buy a few gallons of gas, assuming anyone was bothering to run the place. But it was getting dark, those damn Griners could be anywhere, and even walking a block seemed like quite a trek in her current state. It might be better to go ahead and end it, as she’d set out to do earlier . . . except she hadn’t become a statewide arm-wrestling champion by giving up when the going got tough, had she? And wasn’t that what she was thinking of? Giving up?
“Not until my damn hand’s down on the damn table,” Van told her beached ATV, and began plodding up the deserted sidewalk toward the sheriff’s.
5