Twice, in the first two days, he found the right set of Goodyear radials on the right car, itself no crime. One was down near Cookietown in Cotton County, owned by the town's Southern States Grain and Seed branch manager, a florid redhead with blemishy skin and a belly as large as the outdoors. It seemed unlikely, but maybe the man's son or brother or something had some connection with… Bud called it in, but the computer produced no evidence of previous criminal activities associated with Mr. Fuerman or his wife, no other family members in existence according to records. Then, on the Cherokee reservation near Polk Lake in Tillman, he came across a run-down one-story government tract house, half its shingles flapping in the dry wind, and as he walked to it, he felt a hundred eyes on him.
Cops always have a feeling for such a thing but don't let it go too far, or it just plain flat ruins them. Bud conquered the little whisper of fear and knocked on the door to find a woman with a face that looked as if it had aged in lava for a century or two, as if she had worn away all her teeth gnawing on bones. Finally, after he explained in English what he wanted, she said for him to go out back.
He found the thing, a beat-to-shit Hyundai Excel, once yellow, now nearly rusted out. And only one of the tires was a Goodyear 5400-B, and it was as bald as a rock. Maybe that one and only that one had been the track the detectives had picked up near the Red.
He felt the eyes on him again and looked up at the house, wondering if even now Lamar Pye weren't squinting over a gunsight at him. But he quelled the feeling, walked back to his truck, and called it in. Half an hour later, the response came: The car, registered to a Sonny Red Bear, could not be linked to criminal activities, and no trace of criminal records, either local or federal, could be found for either Sonny Red Bear or any of his family. Just then the door burst open, and Bud saw what had scurried so mysteriously behind the doors of the little house: It was a mess of kids, squalling and seething, led to the car by a handsome woman. The children crammed in any which way, and she got in and drove off.
Bud played a hunch.
“"Dispatch, can you ten-forty-three the name Red Bear for a State of Oklahoma daycare license?”
“Got you, six-oh-five.”
He waited and then it came back that, yes, one Carla Red Bear had applied to the state for just such a daycare license, though its issuance was pending.
“You got a violation to report there, six-oh-five?”
Bud paused. Was a time, yes, he'd report any violation.
The law was rigid and unshaded and it was meant not to be violated, whether the issue was speed limit or murder. And he was a rigid man.
Or at least he used to be. But today he wasn't out here for any business other than Lamar Pye.
He'd cut the Red Bears some slack and maybe it would come back to him in some way.
“Naw, Dispatch, just curious. I'm ten-twenty-four here, and out.”
“Got you, six-oh-five.”
Other than that, there was no excitement as Bud prowled the byways of the third, then the fourth, then the fifth county over the next few days in search of the three car models in their appropriate years. He threw himself into the hunt so because he knew that it represented an escape from It.
And so it was finally, on the sixth day, a Tuesday of the following week, when he was nearing the end of his list, that he reached an address on a rural route near Altus, in Kiowa County.
He paused at the entrance to the road in, and ten-twentythreed his location. It was a barren part of Oklahoma, and the raw wind whistled across the rolling prairie. He could see the house a mile in, clapboard, old and peely, with its constellation of attendant lesser structures. Behind, the mountains stuck out of the earth, and here and there snaggy mesquite trees clawed at the sky or a parcel of scrub oaks nestled like drinking buffalo around a creek. He headed in, checking once again to make sure of the registration of the car, a Toyota Tercel, and the name of the owner: lull, Ruta Beth.
CHAPTER 19
Lamar would never admit defeat or even disappointment.
Still, $4,567.87 wasn't exactly a huge sum, given what they'd had to go through to get it.
“Now, maybe it ain't a lot,” he said, "but it ain't a little either.
Not by a damn sight. Why, there's lots of places to go, lots of places to see, on almost five thousand dollars.”
But the truth was, Ruta Beth had over nine thousand dollars inherited from her beloved late mother and daddy already in a bank account, which she was willing to just fork over to Lamar.
“Ruta Beth, that wouldn't be right. You just don't give money to a person, even though you love him.”
“It would be right if I said so,” she said.
“Well, maybe come a rainy day, that money'll help out.
In fact, maybe we'll borrow against it, though I can't but guess they'd have the serial numbers recorded.”
“That would make Mother and Daddy happy,” Ruta Beth said.
Lamar smiled. Still, he was secretly upset. A night or two after the robbery, when the little family was gathered around the TV at the news hour, watching for the latest on their own celebrity, a flashy black man came on and said, "Some are calling the Pyes the boldest gang to come out of Oklahoma since the thirties, when Pretty Boy Floyd roared out of the Cookson hills and lit up America with his desperado ways.
But what Pretty Boy had in style and substance, this gang makes up for in sheer firepower. And dumb luck.
They are the gang that could shoot straight but couldn't think straight—the horrifying face of modern crime.”
Lamar brooded silently on this for a bit, until his anger at last came welling out during the weather. He suddenly started bellowing like an enraged father.
“All this goddamn shit about Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde and Johnny Dillinger and how great they were! It's shit, I tell you. What we done, we done better'n them old boys, by a goddamn cocksucking mile.” His outburst quieted them all, even O’Dell, who was working on a big bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats. Lamar seemed to have it back under control, but a vein on his head suddenly began to throb. And then Lamar got tooting again.
“In them days,” he said earnestly, looking at Richard, "in them days, the police didn't have nothing. The radios had a range of about ten feet, when they worked, fingerprints was brand spanking new and had to be hand-catalogued by clerks, there weren't no computers, the cars was slow, they didn't have no Magnum pistols, your biggest gun was your .44 Special, they didn't have no helicopters, no infrared, no fax, no nothing. Hell, the FBI in them days was nothing but another gang, with machine guns and BARs.
Nobody did hard time in a joint where all the niggers was uppity. Why hell, any goddamned body could have been a desperado. Now look what we got to contend with. Look what we went through to get a lousy five grand. I'm telling you, no Charlie Floyd, no Bonnie Parker, no goddamned Johnny Dillinger could have pulled off what we pulled off.
We don't get no credit. They're saying we were just goddamned lucky.
Well sir, lot more to it than luck, by goddamn God. Yes sir. Yes sir.”
He sat there, seething.
“You should write that boy a letter, Lamar,” said Ruta Beth.
“No ma'am. Another way of how come our type is better than them old-timey ones. The cops been using that trick for years. Go on the radio or the TV and disrespect an honest job of thieving, so that the thief goes and gits himself all smoked up, and pulls a rash job or sends a letter or something. No sir, what we have is self-control. I guarantee you. We are goddamned serious.”
Then he got up and went outside. They heard the Toyota start up and leave the farm.