Starkey let his eyes slip closed. For a moment all the sweet downers deserted him. "God bless you, too, Len," he said, and his voice was close to breaking. He switched off and went back to stand in front of monitor 2. He put his hands behind his back like a Black Jack Pershing reviewing troops. He regarded Frank D. Bruce and his final resting place. In a little while he felt calm again.
Going southeast out of Sipe Springs, if you get on US 36, you are headed in the general direction of Houston, a day's drive away. The car burning up the road was a three-year-old Pontiac Bonneville, doing eighty, and when it came over the rise and saw the nondescript Ford blocking the road, there was nearly an accident.
The driver, a thirty-six-year-old stringer for a large Houston daily, tromped on the power brake and the tires began to screech, the Pontiac's nose first dipping down toward the road and then beginning to break to the left.
"Holy Gawd!" the photographer in the shotgun seat cried. He dropped his camera to the floor and began to scramble his seat belt across his middle.
The driver let up on the brake, skirted the Ford on the shoulder, and then felt his left wheels start to drag in the soft dirt. He matted the gas pedal and the Bonneville responded with more traction, dragging back onto the blacktop. Blue smoke squirted from beneath the tires. The radio blared on and on:
Baby, can you dig your man,
He's a righteous man,
Baby, can you dig your man?
He tromped the brake again, and the Bonneville slued to a stop in the middle of the hot and deserted afternoon. He drew in a ragged, terrified breath and then coughed it out in a series of bursts. He began to be angry. He threw the Pontiac into reverse and backed toward the Ford and the two men standing behind it.
"Listen," the photographer said nervously. He was fat and hadn't been in a fight since the ninth grade. "Listen, maybe we just better-"
He was thrown forward with a grunt as the stringer brought the Pontiac to another screeching halt, threw the transmission lever into park with one hard thrust of his hand, and got out.
He began to walk toward the two young men behind the Ford, his hands doubled into fists.
"All right, motherfuckers!" he shouted. "You almost got us fucking killed and I want-"
He had been in the service, four years in the army. Volunteer. He had just time to identify the rifles as the new M-3A's when they brought them up from below the rear deck of the Ford. He stood shocked in the hot Texas sunshine and made water in his pants.
He began to scream and in his mind he was turning to run back to the Bonneville but his feet never moved. They opened up on him, and slugs blew out his chest and groin. As he dropped to his knees, holding both hands out mutely for mercy, a slug struck him an inch over his left eye and tore off the top of his head.
The photographer, who had been twisted over the back seat, found it impossible to comprehend exactly what had happened until the two young men stepped over the stringer's body and began to walk toward him, rifles raised.
He slid across the Pontiac's seat, warm bubbles of saliva collecting at the corners of his mouth. The keys were still in the ignition. He turned the car on and screamed out just as they began shooting. He felt the car lurch to the right as if a giant had kicked the left rear, and the wheel began to shimmy wildly in his hands. The photographer bounced up and down as the Bonneville pogoed up the road on the flat tire. A second later the giant kicked the other side of the car. The shimmy got worse. Sparks flew off the blacktop. The photographer was whining. The Pontiac's rear tires shimmied and flapped like black rags. The two young men ran back to their Ford, whose serial number was listed among the multitude in the Army Vehicles division at the Pentagon, and one of them drove it around in a tight, swaying circle. The nose bounced wildly as it came off the shoulder and drove over the body of the stringer. The sergeant in the passenger seat sprayed a startled sneeze onto the windshield.
Ahead of them, the Pontiac washing-machined along on its two flat rear tires, the nose bouncing up and down. Behind the wheel the fat photographer had begun to weep at the sight of the dark Ford growing in the rearview mirror. He had the accelerator pressed to the floor but the Pontiac would do no more than forty and it was all over the road. On the radio Larry Underwood had been replaced by Madonna. Madonna was asserting that she was a material girl.
The Ford swung around the Bonneville and for one second of crystal hope the photographer thought it was going to keep right on going, to just disappear over the desolate horizon and let him alone.
Then it pulled back in, and the Pontiac's wildly jittering nose caught its mudguard. There was a scream of pulling metal. The photographer's head flew forward into the wheel and blood sprayed from his nose.
Throwing terrified, creaky-necked glances back over his shoulder, he slid across the warm plastic seat as if it were grease and got out on the passenger's side. He ran down the shoulder. There was a barbed wire fence and he leaped over it, sailing up and up like a blimp, and he thought: I'm going to make it, I can run forever -
He fell down on the other side with his leg caught in the barbs. Screaming at the sky, he was still trying to free his pants and dimpled white flesh when the two young men came down the shoulder with their guns in their hands.
Why, he tried to ask them, but all that came out of him was a low and helpless squawk and then his brains exited the back of his head.
There was no published report of disease or any other trouble in Sipe Springs, Texas, that day.
Chapter 18
Nick opened the door between Sheriff Baker's office and the jail cells and they started razzing him right off. Vincent Hogan and Billy Warner were in the two Saltine-box cells on Nick's left. Mike Childress was in one of the two on the right. The other was empty and it was empty because Ray Booth, he of the purple LSU fraternity ring, had flown the coop.
"Hey, dummy!" Childress called. "Hey, you fuckin dummy! What's gonna happen to you when we get outta here? Huh? What the fuck's gonna happen to you?"
"I'm personally gonna rip your balls off and stuff em down your throat until you strangle on em," Billy Warner told him. "You understand me?"
Only Vince Hogan didn't participate in the razzing. Mike and Billy didn't have too much use for him on this day, June 23, when they were to be taken up to the Calhoun County seat and jugged pending trial. Sheriff Baker had leaned on Vince and Vince had spilled his yellow guts. Baker had told Nick he could get an indictment against these ole boys, but when it got to a jury trial, it was going to be Nick's word against these three-four, if they picked up Ray Booth.
Nick had gained a healthy respect for Sheriff John Baker these last couple of days. He was a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound ex-farmer who was predictably called Big Bad John by his constituents. The respect Nick felt for him was not because Baker had given him this job swamping out the holding area to make up for his lost week's pay, but because he had gone after the men who had beaten and robbed Nick. He had done it as if Nick were a member of one of the oldest and most respected families in town instead of just a deaf-mute drifter. There were plenty of sheriffs here in the border South, Nick knew, who would have seen him on a work farm or roadgang for six months instead.
They had driven out to the sawmill where Vince Hogan worked, taking Baker's private car, a Power Wagon, instead of the county prowler car. There was a shotgun under the dash ("Always locked up and always loaded," Baker said) and a bubble light Baker put on the dash when he was on police business. He put it up there when they swung into the lumberyard parking area, two days ago now. Baker had hawked, spat out the window, blew his nose, and dabbed at his red eyes with a handkerchief. His voice had acquired a nasal foghorn quality. Nick couldn't hear it, of course, but he didn't need to. It was clear enough that the man had a nasty cold.
"Now, when we see him, I'll grab him by the arm," Baker said. "I'll ask you, ‘Is this one of em?' You give me a big nod yes. I don't care if it was or not. You just nod. Get it?"
Nick nodded. He got it.
Vince was working the board planer, feeding rough planks into the machine, standing in sawdust almost to the top of his workboots. He gave John Baker a nervous smile, and his eyes flicked uneasily to Nick standing beside the sheriff. Nick's face was thin and battered and still too pale.
"Hi, Big John, what you doin out with the workin folk?"
The other men in the crew were watching all this, their eyes shifting gravely from Nick to Vince to Baker and then back the other way like men watching some complicated new version of tennis. One of them spat a stream of Honey Cut into the fresh sawdust and wiped off his chin with the heel of his hand.
Baker grabbed Vince Hogan by one flabby, sunburned arm and pulled him forward.
"Hey! What's the idea, Big John?"
Baker turned his head so Nick could see his lips. "Is this one of em?"
Nick nodded firmly, and pointed at Vince for good measure.
"What is this?" Vince protested again. "I don't know this dummy from Adam."
"Then how come you know he's a dummy? Come on, Vince, you're going to the cooler. Toot-sweet. You can send one of these boys to get your toothbrush."