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  Booger placed his gun on the cement walk, said, “There’s a firefly. I haven’t seen one of those in years.”

  Twenty-one

  It was kind of a haze after that. We heard a siren, and then we heard more sirens, and then there were lights, the curb filled up with parked police cars, and then the yard filled up with policeman. They took Booger’s gun and put us on the ground and handcuffed us and took us and put us in a police car.

  Lieutenant Ernest showed up, got in the front passenger seat and glared back at us through the wire grating. After a few minutes Sergeant Allen showed up and sat in the driver’s place and looked back at us too.

  I told them what happened, how I had hired Booger to protect me, that I knew him from the army. All of this was just to reinforce what I had already said to Ernest. I told them what the dispatcher had said outside the door, about how he had been sent, how I had stepped aside just in time, and then there was the shotgun blast, Booger putting him down, self-defense, the whole nine yards, minus only a few things, like my trip with Kelly out to the Anthony construction site, the threat and so on. I didn’t want to tell them about that. I thought if I did they might tip Anthony off if they were in on it, and if they weren’t, they might try and have a talk with him, maybe find a reason to arrest him, and that would have the same results for me. He and his son had to be cut completely out of the picture. I didn’t doubt that anymore.

  After a while, Ernest got out of the car and came around and opened the door and took the handcuffs off of us, but didn’t ask us to get out of the car. He said, “Sorry. It’s routine. And you got to understand, you killed one of our own.”

  “And if he had killed me, had Booger not been here,” I said, “he would have showed up at work tomorrow and I’d be an unsolved murder.”

  Ernest closed my door, went back and got in his place on the front passenger side again. He looked back at us. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “This is why your department protecting me isn’t all that satisfying,” I said, rubbing my wrist where the cuffs had been.

  “We have been on him for a while,” Allen said. It was the first time he had spoken. “We just weren’t sure.”

  “Hell of a way to find out,” I said.

  “I didn’t think he was a bad cop,” Ernest said. “I’m still finding it hard to believe.”

  “Believe,” I said. “He was on Anthony’s payroll, and he was sent to get rid of us. He knew about me fingering Will, and he was going to pose as my protection, kill me, head to the house, and be out of the neighborhood before anyone knew what happened. No telling what might have happened to my family afterwards.”

  “Your wife didn’t see Will driving the car,” Ernest said. “Your daughter wasn’t here. That might have been the end of it.”

  “That’s comforting. Personally, I’m not sure I believe he would have quit there. Kelly could say she saw who I identified at the station, and so on. Forgive me if right now your opinion on these matters isn’t particularly inspiring.”

  “Look,” Ernest said. “I’m sorry. I hate it. I liked Fred … That’s his name, the dispatcher. Fred Rutter. I had no idea. He seemed all right. He’d been with the department awhile. Had a bit of a bum leg from an accident on the job, became a dispatcher. Sergeant here suspected someone in the department had been leaking things to Anthony for a while, the boss before him. He was certain it was Fred. I wasn’t. I was wrong. I feel like shit in every kind of way possible.”

  “That’s why we were both a little reluctant to push you into testifying,” Allen said. “We thought someone in the department might be leaking information, and we didn’t want to be the ones that signed your death warrant.”

  “The sergeant thought that,” Ernest said. “I was being cautious, but I thought it was a crock. Now, I know better. Some things you just don’t want to believe.”

  Well, it went on like that for a while, a lot of rehashing of the same thing, apologies, and so on. After that, they took us down to the station for some paperwork, recording out version of events with us in separate rooms, and then they took us back to the house. They kept Booger’s nine for evidence, to prove it was the gun and that the gun was legal, which it was. When we got home the cops went in first, at my request, and looked through the place, and then they let Booger and me go inside.

  First thing Booger did was ask me to get my shotgun and shells, and I did. I had the .38 Cason had given me hidden away, and I got that and put it in my pants pocket. Booger took the shotgun. I had a hammer and nails out in the carport storage shed, and I got that and a screwdriver, and we took the closet door off in the bedroom and nailed it over the big holes in the front door. It was ugly and awkward looking, but it made the door more secure and covered the gap the shotgun blast had made. While we were covering it, I realized again that the hole was about where my head would have been had I been standing in front of the door. I thought about how I would have been plastered all over the hallway, and it made me a little sick. Lately, a lot of things were making me sick.

  The door repaired, we sat in the living room with glasses of ice tea. “You think they believed us?” I said.

  “We told the truth, as far as what happened,” Booger said. “So when we were being talked to separately, our stories were the same. I think they believed us from the get-go. I have a license for the gun, am a real bodyguard, you knew me from the army. Pretty obvious their dispatcher came to kill us, and they suspected him anyway. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

  I heard a car door slam gently outside and I stood up from my chair.

  “It’s Cason,” Booger said, getting up to pull the curtain back for a peek. “I called him at the police station. No one will think it’s weird we called a friend.”

  “You think the cops are watching, then?”

  “Sure. Now they are. They drove out behind us. I see the car across the lot there, parked over by that brown house. Those guys couldn’t be sneaky if they were invisible. If they were your bodyguards, Anthony and his men could take the tires off their car and they wouldn’t even know it.”

  Cason touched the bell. I let him in.

  “I understand you’ve had a big night,” he said as he came in.

  “You could say that,” I said.

  “My suggestion is we make it a bigger night, with what’s left of it,” he said.

  Booger had come into the hall and was standing behind me, still holding the shotgun. As usual, I hadn’t heard him come up.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Booger said. “I’m all fired up right now, and things aren’t going to get better, as I’m sure Anthony has gotten word by now, probably from some other leak, that his man is swimming the Styx. We don’t go to them, they’ll come to us, and it’s best we have the element of surprise. If we do it right, it’ll be the fucking elephant of surprise.”

  “I’m sure you saw the cops down the block,” Cason said.

  “Oh yeah,” Booger said. “Just telling Tom here about them. They might as well have been beating a pan and yelling ‘Here we are!’”

  “So you’re talking about tonight?” I said, as if I didn’t really believe it, because on some level I didn’t. It was like that for me. I couldn’t stop questioning things I knew were going to happen.

  “Yep,” Cason said. “Now.”

  “What about the cops?” I said.

  “Those yo-yos will be waiting for us when we get back,” Booger said. “And if we do it right, they’ll never even know we were gone.”

  Twenty-Two

  Way we played it, Cason was just a friend who had come by to visit after our traumatic night, and after thirty minutes he left to go home. Least that’s how we hoped the cops would see it. He went out and drove away, but we had already left the house through the back door before he did. There wasn’t anyone out back, (so much for ace protection) and the fence around my backyard mostly blocked us, long as we ducked low. We didn’t bring the shotgun, but I brought the cold piece
, the revolver.

  I followed Booger as best I could. Slipping through the fence gate, we went alongside the house, eased behind the carport storage shed. We strolled between two houses with Christmas tree lights glowing in their windows, and came out on a back street and walked up that a bit. That’s when Cason drove up. Booger got in the front passenger seat and ducked down and I lay in the back seat. I felt a little silly doing all that, but after about fifteen minutes, Cason said, “You can sit up now.”

  When I did I saw we were traveling out of town, heading out to the country, and I knew sure as hell where we were going.

  “We’re going to fight them all with my pistol?” I said.

  “Oh no, no, no, silly boy,” Booger said. “No, no. Not just with the pistol.”

  “I have a trunk full of weapons,” Cason said.

  “I put them there,” Booger said. “Handguns, long guns, and an axe. We’re ready for anything up to an angry hippopotamus, and one of them too, if it’s having an off night.”

  Twenty-Three

  We came up behind a pickup truck.

  It was the white pickup that had been at the cabin in the woods in Arkansas. The cabin where Kelly, my mother, and Sue were supposed to be waiting. But it was the same truck. I could tell by the rust and the way the license plate was bent up. When I saw it in front of us, going along at a speedy clatter, I wanted to think I was wrong, damn sure hoped I was. I was about to say what I thought when Booger said, “Goddamn it. That truck—”

  “It’s the one at the cabin,” I said, filling in what he was about to say, or something close to it.

  “Your goddamn wife,” Booger said. “She was supposed to stay put.”

  “Maybe it just looks like the truck,” Cason said.

  “No, that’s the fucking truck,” Booger said.

  I could see three shapes in our headlights. I knew the head of the person in the middle as surely as if she were in the car with us. It was Kelly.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” Booger said. “I’ll tell you how people think that don’t think, but follow what they call their heart, like a fucking muscle that pumps blood has sense and can make good plans. She decided she had left you to the wolves and she couldn’t take it. My guess is the daughter and the mother are fine, up there in the woods, and she came back to be with you. To comfort you. And these fuckers, they were sort of back-up to the asshole I killed tonight. When all those cop cars starting coming, they started easing out, and you know what, the road back into town crosses this one, and as fate would have it—“

  “Shit,” I said. I knew the rest. They had seen Kelly in the truck. It was a million to one, but they had recognized her, had run her off the road, or blocked her path, or some such thing. However it was they had her. I hoped to hell Booger was right and Kelly had left Mom and Sue behind, left them safe.

  “Someone that stupid,” Booger said, “we ought to let them have her.”

  I don’t even remember pulling the thirty-eight, but the next moment I had the revolver stuck in Booger’s ear. “Shut up!” I said. “Shut the fuck up.”

  Booger laughed at me. “You ain’t going to shoot me, my man. Me and Cason here, we’re all you’ve got.”

  “It’s the way you’re talking, Booger,” Cason said. “It’s offensive. You got to treat a man’s wife like you would a fine new weapon.”

  “You mean keep it oiled,” Booger said.

  “Not exactly what I meant,” Cason said. “Look here, Tom. He’s just talking the way he’ll talk. We’re going to do what we can, and if what we can do is bring Kelly out of this mess, we will.”

  “If,” I said.

  “We will,” Cason said.

  By this time Cason had slowed down and had let the truck get ahead of us by some distance.

  “You’ll lose them,” I said.

  “No, I won’t,” Cason said.

  I knew then what he meant. They were taking her to the same place we were heading. The construction site.

  Twenty-Four

  We could see their taillights when they pulled off the main road and down the road that led to the construction site. We cruised right past that exit, went on for a bit, and Booger said, “There’s a little road right up here, a logging road. It ain’t much, but you can tuck the car down there and we can come up on the place through the woods, same as I did earlier.

  We did that, parked off the road in a little clearing and got out. Cason opened the trunk. It was stuffed with weapons, including an axe.

  “I brought us a little bit of this, a little bit of that,” Booger said. He took out a rifle and the axe, which was in a kind of sheath. He fastened it to his belt and the handle swung alongside his leg, almost to his ankle. He got out a box of ammo and put it in his coat pocket.

  “All good weapons,” Cason said. “All simple. Nothing exotic. Harder to trace. Older stuff. Hunting rifles and such. Simple sighting, no telescopes. What we’re counting on is Booger’s and my shooting being great and yours being good enough.”

  “I’m not that bad,” I said.

  “Yes, but I remember you aren’t as good as we are, especially Booger, and for you it’s been awhile. Me too, actually. Booger, he owns a gun range, so he gets plenty of exercise.”

  “This is true,” Booger said.

  “No hard feelings,” I said to Booger. “You’re right. My wife is an idiot.”

  “No hard feelings,” Booger said. “It don’t mean a thing.”

  I studied the weapons in the trunk. “I’ll take a shotgun,” I said. “I got my .38.”

  Booger reached in amongst the weapons and pulled out a knife in a sheath. “Take this, just in case you want to cut everyone’s throat.”

  I took it. It was sheathed. There was a clip on the sheath. I snapped it to my belt. I fished out some ammunition.

  Cason took a long gun and two automatic handguns. He snapped the holstered weapons on his belt, one on either hip. “Well, boys, just like the old days over in the Sand Lot. We go in and hope we don’t die.”

  Booger led the way, and me and Cason followed. I swung back and forth between being really mad at Kelly and being proud of the fact she had come back to be with me. Or maybe she was going to make a last-ditch effort to talk me out of testifying. It didn’t matter. I had to get to her. I had to save her from those fucking maniacs.

  Twenty-Five

  We went down through the woods to where the trees broke open and there was the wide red clay section that made up the construction company. It was in a somewhat shallow bowl, more of a saucer, really, and in the saucer was the deep pit with the bulldozer on the rim. There were half a dozen cars parked out front of the large aluminum building and there was a light behind the windows. Beyond the building was another rise, and on that, more woods. The moon was bright enough to give everything a kind of as-seen-through-a-thin-slice-of-cheese look.

  The three of us went into a huddle, discussed a few things. Then Booger started moving ahead of us, along the edge of the woods, and finally in line with the pit and the bulldozer. Cason and I eased our way along the column of trees toward the entrance road, and then we broke toward the middle of the lot, stooping, keeping the cars between us and the aluminum building.

  We crept up behind the nearest car, a black Suburban, perhaps the one that had been driven by the man who I had hit with the stick and Kevin had killed. Crouching there for a few moments, we moved onward until we were behind the car nearest to the building, a white Cadillac that must have been from the fifties, but looked as if it had just come off the showroom floor.

  I lifted up and looked through the driver’s-side window glass of the Cadillac, across the way through the passenger side, and examined the aluminum building. A shadow moved behind the window, then went away.

  It was then Cason and I heard the bulldozer start up on the hill. That had been Booger’s idea. He had a construction company. He knew how to drive a dozer, start them with or without key
s, whatever it was you used. The bulldozer was so large and powerful when its engine roared the Cadillac vibrated.

  A few seconds later the door on the building opened and a man came out, followed by Kevin and finally Will Anthony. Me and Cason lay down on the ground and looked under the Cadillac at their feet, and while we were watching, another set of legs appeared. That was four that we knew of, and we knew Kelly was inside with some of the others.

  The bulldozer started to move. The men outside began to yell at it, as if they could talk it and the driver into shutting the machine off. The bulldozer started down the rise, rolling rapidly toward the aluminum building. The great blade lifted and caught the moonlight. One of the men popped off a shot that rang on the blade, and still the bulldozer came. More shots were fired. More pings and pangs on the blade, and when I glanced over at it, I saw it was really moving. I didn’t know a dozer could run that fast.

  “Motherfucker,” one of the men said, and then the dozer was nearly on the aluminum building, and for that matter, it was nearly on us lying at the edge of the Cadillac.

  “Heads up,” Cason said, and then we were rushing away and the dozer hit the Cadillac and lifted it up and brought it toward the men in the yard who scattered like geese and then the Cadillac was driven straight into the aluminum building, hard. The front of the building collapsed and the door was knocked off the hinges and thrown inside. I was sick with fear that Kelly would be hurt by all that, but it was a far better way than trying to get past those men and just open the door. The thugs were scattered now, heading left and right at a run. With the Cadillac gone, Cason and I were out there with our asses hanging out, so to speak. That’s when Cason lifted his rifle and fired and hit one of the running men in the back of the head, dropping him straight to the ground like a sack of cement.