So far, the adrenalin was holding out; Van hammered on Fritz Meshaum’s door hard enough to rattle it in its frame. A long-fingered hand that looked as if it had too many knuckles pulled aside a filthy curtain. A stubble-spackled face peered out. A moment later, the door opened. Fritz opened his mouth, but Van seized him and began to shake him like a terrier with a rat before he could utter a word.
“What did you sell them, you scrawny little shitepoke? Was it a rocket launcher? It was, wasn’t it? How much did those bastards pay you so they could blow a hole in the middle of downtown?”
By then they were inside, Van roughly steering Fritz across his cluttered living room. He beat feebly at one of her shoulders with his left hand; the other arm was bound in a makeshift sling that looked as if it had been made from a bedsheet.
“Quit it!” Fritz shouted. “Quit it, woman, I already had my damn arm dislocated by them two cretins!”
Van shoved him down in a filthy armchair with a stack of old skin magazines beside it. “Talk.”
“It wasn’t a rocket launcher, it was a vintage Russian bazooka, coulda sold it for six, seven thousand dollars at one of those parkin lot gun sales up in Wheeling, and those two country-fried fuckers stole it!”
“Well, of course you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Van was panting.
“It’s the truth.” Fritz looked at her more closely, his eyes sliding from her round face to her big breasts to her wide hips, then back up again. “You’re the first woman I’ve seen in two days. How long you been awake?”
“Since last Thursday morning.”
“Holy moly, that must be a record.”
“Not even close.” Van had Googled it. “Never mind that. Those boys just blew up the sheriff’s station.”
“I heard a hell of a bang,” admitted Fritz. “Guess that bazooka works pretty good.”
“Oh, it worked fine,” Van said. “I don’t suppose you’d know where they’re going next.”
“Nope, not a clue.” Fritz began to grin, exposing teeth that hadn’t seen a dentist in a good long while, if ever. “But I could find out.”
“How?”
“Damn fools looked right at it, and when I told em it was an inventory tag, they believed me!” His laugh sounded like a file scraping on a rusty hinge.
“What are you talking about?”
“GPS tracker. I put em on all my high-end items, case they get stolen. Which that bazooka was. I can track it on my phone.”
“Which you will give me,” Van said, and held out her hand.
Fritz looked up at her, his eyes a sly and watery blue under wrinkled lids. “If you get my bazooka, will you give it back before you go to sleep?”
“No,” Van said, “but I won’t give you a broken arm to go with the one they dislocated. How’s that?”
The little man chuckled and said, “All righty, but it’s just cause I got a soft spot for wide women.”
If she had felt more like herself Van might’ve had to beat the shit out of him for a comment like that—it wouldn’t be hard and it would be public service—but in her exhaustion, she hardly considered it. “Come on, then.”
Fritz pushed up from the couch. “Phone’s on the kitchen table.” She backed up, keeping the rifle on him.
He led her down a short, dark hall and into the kitchen. There was a stench of ash that made Van gag. “What have you been cooking?”
“Candy,” Fritz said. He thumped down at a linoleum-topped table.
“Candy?” It didn’t smell like any candy she knew of. Gray scraps, like bits of burned newspaper, were scattered around the floor.
“Candy’s my wife,” he said. “Now deceased. Lit the mouthy old bag up with a kitchen match. Never realized she had such a spark.” His black and brown teeth were revealed in a ferocious grin. “Get it? Spark?”
No avoiding it now. Tired or not, she was going to have to put a hurting on the vile bastard. That was Van’s first thought. The second was, there was no cell phone on the linoleum-topped table.
A gun banged and the air went out of Van. She thumped against the refrigerator and down to the floor. Blood spilled from a bullet wound at her hip. The rifle she had been holding had flown from her hands. Smoke curled from around the edge of the eating table directly in front of her. She spotted the barrel then; the pistol that Meshaum had strapped underneath the tabletop.
Fritz pulled it free of the duct tape that had held it, stood, and came around the table. “Never can be too careful. Keep a loaded gun in every room.” He squatted down beside her and jammed the barrel of a pistol against her forehead. His breath smelled like tobacco and meat. “This one was my opa’s. What you think about that, you fat pig?”
She didn’t think much of it, and didn’t have to. Van Lampley’s right arm—the arm that had put down Hallie “Wrecker” O’Meara in the championship match of the 2010 Ohio Valley Women’s 35–45 Year-Old Division, and snapped one of Erin Makepeace’s elbow ligaments in 2011 to repeat—was like a spring trap. Her right hand swung up, catching Fritz Meshaum’s wrist and squeezing with fingers made of steel, jerking down so violently that he was pitched forward on top of her. The antique pistol went off, putting a bullet into the floor between Van’s arm and side. Bile rose in her throat as the weight of his body pressed into her wound, but she kept twisting his wrist, and at that angle all he could do was fire into the floor again before the gun slipped from his hand. Bones popped. Ligaments twanged. Fritz screamed. He bit her hand, but she just turned harder on his wrist, and began to methodically punch him in the back of the head with her left fist, driving down with the diamond of her engagement ring.
“Okay, okay! Uncle! Fuckin uncle! I give!” screamed Fritz Meshaum. “That’s enough!”
But Van did not think so. Her bicep flexed and the tattoo of the headstone—YOUR PRIDE—swelled.
She kept twisting with one hand and punching with the other.
CHAPTER 12
1
On the prison’s last night, the weather cleared and the rain clouds of the day were blown south by a steady wind, leaving the sky to the stars and inviting the animals to stick their heads up, and sniff, and converse. No seventy-two hours. No second thoughts. A change was coming tomorrow. The animals felt it the way they felt oncoming thunderstorms.
2
Hunkered beside his partner in the rearmost seat of one of the schoolbuses that had been requisitioned to block Route 31, Eric Blass listened to Don Peters’s snores. Any vague remorse Eric had felt about burning Old Essie had been assuaged by the fading of the day. If no one ever noticed she was gone, what did she count for, really?