“What do we do?” Belle said.
Buck decided it. He grabbed a big rock and scurried up behind the guard, his arm cocked to brain him. The guy must’ve heard him coming—he spun around and halfway ducked and took the blow on the shoulder. They started grappling for the shotgun.
“Help him out!” Russell shouted, bringing up the long-barreled .38 and bracing his shooting arm on the front seat. I jumped out and ran toward them, slipping the .380 out of my pants.
The other guard was coming on the run. I heard men shouting in the distance and the pop…pop…pop…pop of Russell’s .38 behind me and the running guard went down and his hat rolled off. He rose to all fours and Russell’s revolver popped twice more and the guard’s head jerked and he fell over.
I was almost to them when Buck wrested the shotgun from the guard and hooked him on the side of the head with the stock, staggering him backward. Belle’s pistol popped behind me and the guard grabbed at his side. Then Buck shot him from a span of six feet and he lofted rearward, arms and legs flung wide and portions of his midsection spraying red.
Buck whirled toward me and hollered, “Let’s go get a beer, kid!” He was grinning like a lunatic and I was astonished to hear myself laugh.
Belle was between us and the car, the .38 up and ready. We ran toward her and Buck yelled, “Move that pretty ass!”
She turned and ran, with me on her heels and Buck right behind me.
Then a rifleshot sounded—and Russell hollered, “Nooo!”
I turned and saw Buck sprawled facedown…the back of his head bright red…the ground before him smeared with what must’ve been his brains.
The rifle cracked again and Belle cried out.
She was sitting, clutching her bloody arm, her pistol in the dirt.
“Buck!” Russell shouted. “Get Buck, goddammit!”
I stuck the .380 in my pants and ran to her and scooped her up and lumbered to the car, hearing another rifleshot and the tick of a sudden hole in the windshield.
“Damn you, God damn you!” Russell hollered. He was trying to get out of the rumble seat, hampered by his bad leg. I heaved Belle into the car and slammed the door and ran around to the driver’s side, shouting for Russell to get down—just as the rifle fired again and he jerked and grunted and fell back in the seat.
I rammed the gearshift into reverse and twisted around to see behind me and floored the accelerator. The roadster went tearing backward over the narrow trail, fishtailing and raising a plume of rock dust, the motor whining so high I couldn’t hear anything else. I drove in reverse all the way back to the highway and then wheeled out onto it backward and barely missed getting clobbered by an oil carrier that swerved past with a long angry blare of its horn.
I ground the gears with every shift and sped about a mile down the highway and then pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped.
The sun was low and deeply orange and the dust we’d raised was red. I was pouring sweat. My tongue kept sticking to the roof of my mouth.
Belle was hunkered against the door, holding to her wound, her eyes huge on me. Russell groaned. I hadn’t known if he was dead or alive. I put the gearshift in neutral and squirmed around up on my knees to see how he was doing.
He was slumped down low and looking at me and holding the .38 at his hip, cocked and pointed at my face. The right side of his shirt was sopped with blood.
“You left him,” he said. His voice was wet.
“He was dead,” I said.
“As dead as last time? He’s your partner, Sonny, you bastard! He’s your blood!”
“Point that somewhere else, man.”
Belle sat up and said, “He is dead, I saw him. His head was all—”
“Nobody’s asking you, you—”
In the instant he shifted his eyes to her I grabbed his gun and pushed it away, the hammer snapping on an empty chamber, and arched up and drilled him with a straight right that took his eyes out of focus. Then gave him another shot, right under the ear, and this one put his lights out.
Another oil truck coming. I opened a road map and spread it over his chest to hide the blood and pulled his hatbrim over his eyes, then slid down behind the wheel and put his pistol under the seat. The truck went clattering by.
I got out the flask and took a pull, then offered it to Belle, but she shook her head. “How bad are you?” I said.
“Not too, I don’t think. It hurts.” She cut a look toward the rumble seat. “Jesus, Sonny. Is he gone crazy?”
“Let’s see,” I said, leaning for a better look at her wound.
She took her hand away. The bullet had cut through the flesh of her inner arm just above the elbow. She was lucky it hadn’t hit bone.
“Just hold tight to it,” I said, and then knelt up on the seat again to tend to Russell. I ripped his shirt open to examine the wound and was relieved to see the blood was oozing, not pumping. I got his coat off the rumble seat floor and formed it into a thick pad, packed it against the wound and tied it firmly in place with his shirttails. His jaw was swelling up bad. I’d probably busted it.
No traffic in sight in either direction.
I rinsed her wound with booze and bandaged it with my handkerchief. She flinched and sucked hard breaths between her teeth but didn’t cry out.
“That’ll have to do for now,” I said.
“He was gonna shoot you, Sonny!”
I blew out a long breath.
“He was,” she said.
“That’s his brother dead back there, for Christ’s sake!”
“I know that,” she said softly. “It’s no reason.”
I stared out at the empty road ahead. I thought of saying, Of course it is—except I wasn’t sure what that meant. How could I explain to her what I couldn’t explain to myself? It couldn’t be explained. You knew it or you didn’t.
I forced myself to think clearly. Odessa was at least seventy-five miles away. And we’d have to go through Midland to get there—which would slow us down even more. But Bubber said Gustafson had an office in Blackpatch. A nurse there even when Gustafson wasn’t around. And there was that shortcut he’d mentioned—running from an old water tower on the Rankin highway. Fifteen rough miles, he’d said, but it was a hell of a lot closer than Odessa.
I put the roadster in gear and got us going, heading for the Rankin road.
“He gonna live?” Belle said.
“If I get him to a doctor fast enough, maybe.”
“Think he’s gonna feel any different if he does?”
I didn’t know how to even try to answer that. And I wasn’t aware of my tears until she reached over and wiped at them.
The sun was almost out of sight behind the distant mountains when I finally spotted the water tower and then found the junction of the old wagon trace on the other side of the rail tracks. The route was as rough as Bubber had said. We’d gone about seven miles and were into the last of the twilight when the right rear tire blew.
By the time I finished putting on the spare, the sky had clouded over and swallowed the crescent moon and stars and we were in full darkness. Russell’s coat bandage had darkened with blood. I couldn’t make out his face but I could hear his ragged breathing. I would’ve preferred to have him in the cab but the handling necessary to move him would only have worsened his bleeding. Belle got in the rumble seat with him and held him close to cushion him against the jarring of the car and keep the bandage pressed tight against the wound.