Inside LuAnne’s Pizza & Beer it was busier than he expected. He saw the Grimsby family sitting at the long banquet table, seven girls, four boys, the balding father, who always looked as if he had gone a few days without sleep, and the mother, who was impossibly good-looking for the mother of eleven homeschooled kids. The rumor was that Ken Grimsby had made a killing in computers before moving to Desperation, and had come, at least partly, because he was terrified somebody else was going to try to sleep with his wife. Gordo let his gaze linger on Patty Grimsby for a second, and realized Ken probably had good reason. There was something unaccountably sexy about Patty. It wasn’t just that she’d been a model—nineteen years old and almost that much younger than Ken when they got married—but also something else, a sort of availability, and though she’d never done or said anything that had led Gordo to think she actually wanted to sleep with him, he couldn’t shake the feeling that she did actually want to sleep with him. Pheromones. Something like that, he thought. Maybe it was just that with the eleven kids sitting at their table, there was something about her fertility that sparked lust in men. Or the appearance of fertility: two sets of twins, two single births, and five adopted. But whatever the provenance of her kids, she looked a lot more like an ex-lingerie model than the wife of a semi-crazy survivalist and mother of eleven. And while her sexiness might be an interesting question, it was not one he could really talk with Amy about. He knew there were lots of men who, even if they didn’t cheat on their wives, liked to fantasize about it. He wasn’t one of those men. He’d never wanted anybody other than Amy since the moment he first saw her sitting in her cubicle at the hedge fund in the heart of Manhattan. But that didn’t mean it was a good idea to talk to her about the perceived sexual availability of Patty Grimsby.
He could talk to Shotgun about it, though. Shotgun wasn’t much into women, but despite his being gay, his marriage, to Fred Klosnicks, was a heck of a lot like Gordo’s, and the two couples had become good friends the last couple of years. Gordo supposed that Shotgun probably had a real name, something benign like Paul or Michael or even Eugene, but nobody in Desperation had ever heard Shotgun called anything else. Actually, as Gordo looked at Shotgun sitting at the bar, for the first time he realized how appropriate the name was. Shotgun was tall and thin, several inches taller than Gordo, who was not a short man himself. Shotgun reflexively ducked when walking through doorways and constantly banged his head on the light fixture hanging above the pool table in the corner. He was lean and hard, like the barrel of a shotgun, and even the prematurely gray hair interspersed in the thick coat of black hair on Shotgun’s head gave the impression of gunmetal. Shotgun was probably in his late thirties, and like a lot of the survivalists out here, an autodidact. There were three kinds: the plain old morons, who hadn’t learned much of anything anywhere and seemed to blow themselves up on a regular basis; the guys like Gordo, who’d gone to good universities—in his case, Columbia—and trained as engineers or in some other field that leaned toward problem solving; and those like Shotgun, who were just smart as hell and able to teach themselves anything they needed to know. Shotgun was always building something new up at his ranch or working on some new project that sounded impossible and quixotic and always worked out. A lot of the families and men in and around Desperation were broke, jury-rigging houses out of discarded plywood and plastic, making survival shelters out of buried culverts and construction debris, but some of them had money. Gordo and Amy were relatively wealthy, and would be considered rich in most places other than New York City, and the Grimsby family had to have ten or twenty million in the bank, but of all of them, Gordo was sure Shotgun was the only one who was, without question, rich. As in rich rich. Wrath of God money. Shotgun held at least twenty-seven patents that Gordo knew about, and a couple of those were for high-use devices, kicking back serious money to Shotgun on a regular basis.
You wouldn’t know it from looking at the man, however. Every time Gordo saw him, Shotgun was dressed the same way: sneakers, a pair of dark cargo pants, a black T-shirt, and a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. He drove a beat-down truck, and his house, from the outside, looked like it could be blown down by a stiff fart. Of course, once you got to know Shotgun, everything was a little different. First of all, once you passed through the front door of his house, you realized it was built on top of an abandoned mine. What you saw from the outside was just a shell. While Gordo had built a shelter near his house, Shotgun had done one better and built his shelter as his home. From the outside, it looked like a Sears kit house with an extra-large garage, but underground there was close to twenty thousand finished square feet of living quarters and workshops. The living space consisted of four bedrooms, and an open kitchen and living room/dining room combo that would have looked at home in a swanky New York City high-rise, but it was the workshops that left Gordo drooling. High-tech stuff as well as every power tool you could think of. If Shotgun didn’t want to wait for something to be delivered—or if it didn’t exist yet—he could machine it himself. And in the garage, bigger than a basketball court, aside from a few toys like a Maserati and a vintage Corvette, Shotgun kept a couple of heavy-duty pieces of construction equipment, and, most impressively, a six-seater airplane.