O’B chose the blonde.
By the time he managed to get her blown up, he was red-faced and panting, about ready to forget the whole thing. But from a dozen feet away, sitting on the front seat with the door open and the overhead light on, she looked extemely lifelike, from the tippy-tips of her red rubber toes to the Dynel champagne-blond crown of her inflated latex head.
But also extremely nude. Extremely naked.
Well, he was, after all, going to a lover’s lane. But he would drape his sports coat decorously around her shoulders. And by parking broadside and very close to the edge of the bluff, he could lean across his anatomically correct companion, put his elbows on the edge of the open window, and glass the encampment below. All anyone would be able to see of her was her hair. To the casual glance, just a guy snuggling up to his gal.
But he found that the booze was dying in him, his head was starting to ache, there was a distinctly chilly breeze blowing up from off the river, and nearly all of the Gypsy campfires were out. He couldn’t see a bloody thing. To hell with it.
He started to draw back into the car, barked his knuckles on the window frame, and dropped the binoculars on the floor. In leaning down to grope for them, he unwittingly pulled his coat off the inflated nude figure.
Damn! The glasses had gone under the seat. He leaned down farther still, his face pressed firmly into the dummy’s Dynel-ornamented anatomically correct lap, his other hand groping for the doorframe. By bitter mischance, it closed around one of the latex doll’s extremely lifelike triple-D breasts.
That’s when the policemen sneaking up on his car shone their flashlights in the windows.
“He’s got her buckass nekkid and his goddam face in her lap, Lloyd!”
“An’ grabbin’ her tit, Frank!”
O’B tried to sit up, cracked his head painfully on the underside of the dash.
“That ain’t no woman, Lloyd! It’s one of them sex dolls!”
“We got us a damn pervert, Frank! Spyin’ on the women down there to the campground, then up here with his face in—”
Guns were suddenly pointed at him.
“OKAY, YOU, OUTTA THE CAR! HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD!”
“YOU GOT THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT...”
Busted.
Dawn in Nebraska. Grunts of effort, grate of trenching tools against stone as three kneeling figures dug a hole in the rocky soil big enough to bury a midget or a large dog.
“Good enough,” panted one. “They’ll be coming soon.”
The three men in black jumpsuits donned black ski masks, picked up their weapons, and separated to their assigned posts.
The twenty-two-vehicle Lovelli caravan rolled east through the plains along a two-lane highway. The rising sun dazzled their eyes while showing that the early May buffalo grass, nevermore to be cropped by its namesakes, was still green and lush. In a month it would be sere and silver. A low hill rose from the prairie ahead; the road cut straight through it, flanked on both sides by rock faces of shale deposited by the shallow inland seas that had once covered the region. The Lovellis drove toward it.
The black-clad figure prone on the rounded apex of the hill took his binoculars down from his eyes. He said into his walkie-talkie, “Here they come, guys! ETA three minutes.”
As it reached the far side of the narrow cut through the hill, some three city blocks in length, the lead car of the caravan squealed to a stop: crosswise on the highway in front of it was a car-trailer used to haul new cars to dealers. It completely blocked the road. As the caravan skidded to a stop, a second big car-trailer came bouncing out of a sandy-floored wash to block the highway just behind the last Gypsy vehicle.
Trapped.
Yojo Lovelli, the clan patriarch at 55, got stiffly out of the lead car — a new Cadillac Coupe de Ville from Cal-Cit Bank, as it chanced — tested his knees, and looked around. There was a moment of relative silence except for the grumbling of the engines and the soughing of the prairie wind.
Then there was the unmistakable harsh metallic sound of a shotgun shell being jacked into a chamber. A man in a black jumpsuit and wearing a black ski mask over his head came around the front of the car-trailer with a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun.
Yojo, not yet intimidated, began, “Hey, whatta hell you—”
To be drowned out by a bullhorned voice from above them. “NOW HEAR THIS! NOW HEAR THIS! YOU ARE SURROUNDED!”
Another shotgun shell was jacked into another chamber; a second man, dressed and armed like the first, appeared above them on the lip of the embankment with the bullhorn. Behind them, yet a third shotgun was worked to bring a shell into its chamber.
“REMAIN IN YOUR VEHICLES!” ordered the bullhorn. There was a scrambling back of unarmed Gypsies who had started to get out of their cars and pickups. “EXCEPT FOR THE NEW CADILLACS...”
Yojo was poised on a knife-edge of resistance: he didn’t want to lose his Coupe de Ville. He didn’t want to lose face with his clan. But he didn’t want to lose any of his people to these madmen, either. His moment passed.
“Goddammit!” he said as he stepped away from his Caddy.
Within twenty minutes, the seven Cal-Cit cars were lined up on the shoulder of the road, empty of people and possessions, engines whispering. The man on the hilltop stayed there, watching for any approaching highway patrol vehicle. None showed. Where they had real luck was that no other travelers appeared on the road from either direction; of course it was early and the Gypsies themselves had chosen this route for its relative lack of use.
The driver of the truck blocking their passage east climbed up into his cab and ran the truck forward so one lane of the highway was open. The man on the top of the hill just couldn’t resist his bullhorn one last time.
“EASTWARD... HO!”
The caravan moved. Yojo’s wife, Vera, cursed the car thieves through her open window in passing.
“May your testicles wither! May your members be soft! May your wives cuckold you! May your children be born dead!”
As the last car began to move, the other truck pulled around on the shoulder behind it. The driver jumped out to pull down the truck’s clanking metal ramp and fix it in place.
Because occasional cars were passing in each direction now, the three men quickly stripped off their jumpsuits and ski masks to become Bart Heslip (front truck), Larry Ballard (hilltop), and Ken Warren (rear truck). They tossed their attack clothing and sawed-off shotguns into the sage along the shoulder of the road. Within fifteen minutes, all the cars were loaded, along with Bart’s and Ken’s two other Cadillacs they had kept hidden in the arroyo.
“Think the Gyps’ll flag down the highway patrol?” asked Ballard a little nervously.
Ken Warren shook his head. “Gno.”
“Guess not, at that. ‘Hey, Officer — somebody stole our stolen cars!’ ”
“And the closest town is two hours away,” said Bart Heslip. He was feeling mighty good about this coup he had engineered. A lot could have gone wrong, from the highway patrol showing up to a Gyppo buck trying to jump one of their shotguns. None had. He added, “Ken and I’ll be on the interstate inside of one hour.”
Larry shook hands with them before they started off, yelling after them, “GO GETTEM, BEARS!” That had been Kathy Onoda’s invariable order as she sent them out into the field, and since her death it had become a DKA rallying cry.