“Fszl,” Routener commanded Harry. He pressed the .45 even harder into Harry’s ribs.
And Harry was about to say screw it and take a chance on diving headfirst down the slope, trying to get away from the Neanderthal with the blocky .45 — when he heard the click. It was right down alongside his ribs. It was the locking mechanism in the barrel of the .45 — a mechanism that kept the pistol from firing as long as pressure was exerted against it. Harry stepped closer to Routener, swung heavily, keeping the .45 imbedded in his side, and stuck his thumb into the pistolero’s eye, as hard as he could. Routener screamed. The thumb went in. Harry dropped his shoulder, hauled back and grabbed the pistol. Then he swung hard. Holding the .45 by the barrel he caught Routener flush on the tip of his prognathous jaw. The squat bully-boy’s head flipped back like the top on a pack of cigarettes, and he did a gainer and a half off the edge of the excavation. Harry watched him go.
When Daddy turned around and saw the big mouth of the .45, his style was fine, just fine:
“How’d you like to drive for me, boy. How’d you like to make ten times what that bonding outfit paid you? You could make a goddamned fortune workin’ for me, boy, a goddamned fortune. Whaddaya say?”
“No thanks, big Daddy,” Harry said, untying Angie as he kept the .45 trained unwaveringly on the bald contractor. “You’ve got a foul mouth, and my family always brought me up to be genteel. Move!” He ushered Daddy ahead of him, with Angie bringing up the rear, rubbing her chafed wrists.
They went back around the construction shed, and Harry saw another nitro truck, a previous shipment from his company. “Get in; see if the keys are there,” he said to Angie. She climbed up, looked inside, said the ignition was empty. “Come here and hold this howitzer on your poppa.” She came to him, took the .45 and stood with legs wide apart staring down the blue-metal length of it.
“Move?” She dared him.
Daddy froze.
Harry went to the cab, opened the hood and proceeded to jump the ignition wires. He crawled behind the wheel, kicked it over, and the engine roared into life.
He was checking just how much juice had been left in the wagon when he heard the first two shots. He was out of the truck and around the side when the next three explosions ripped the air.
Daddy was bleeding profusely. It wasn’t that she was a bad shot, just sadistic. She’d shot him in the neck, both arms, both legs, and seemed ready to put one into his stomach when Harry grabbed the weapon away from her. “Give me that! What the fuck is it with you! You some kind of goddam nut-case? Jeeezus!” She started crying then. She folded against him. He helped her up into the cab of the nitro wagon.
“We’ll call a doctor for you, Daddy, first house we hit down the road,” Harry said. “Stay healthy, Daddy. See you around sometime.” He sprinted around the truck, popped behind the wheel and threw the monster into gear. He drove fast, but carefully, and the image of Daddy lying there, bleeding from every pore, was a heartwarming thought.
“Where are we going?”
“Raleigh. The capitol. I think the highway commission would like to know about Daddy’s dealings.”
“They’ll come after us. If you stop to call, they’ll come after us.”
“We’ll call.”
“Let him die, Harry. He let my mother die; let him die!”
“We’ll call.”
“They’ll come after us. They’ll catch us, there are plenty of them, all over the state. We’ll never get to Raleigh.”
“We’ll call, and we’ll get there. They’ll stay away from us in this truck. I’ve got enough juice in this wagon to turn a lot of hair prematurely gray. And they’ve had experience with my lousy driving already. Nobody’s going to make me too nervous.”
She smiled wanly and after they stopped at a roadhouse to call, the smile strengthened. They were on the highway, heading out, and Angie seemed pleased to be in the warm cab.
“Where will we go after Raleigh?” she said.
“You can go where you want, I suppose, it’s a big world.”
She was staring at him. There was a long moment of silence, then she said, “No, I asked where we would go after Raleigh?”
He stared straight ahead. Kept driving. There were no other cars on the road. “Wrong word. There’s no we . There’s you, and there’s me, and that’s two separate units.”
“Why, you sonofabitch!”
Then she started trying to slap him. Harry let her work at it for a few seconds, then punched her in the mouth. Not hard enough to put her away, but hard enough to convince her he wasn’t there for target practice.
“You’re like all the rest of them,” she said, with the nastiest tone Harry could remember having heard in years.
“How’s that, Angie? Like all the rest of the knights on white chargers who’ve saved you from Daddy and the Klan? Get off it. What the hell’s that supposed to mean: you’re like all the rest? ”
“You took what you could get back there in that barn.”
“I took what was offered. And why not? Does fucking you mean I inherit you? This isn’t the Orient, we’re not locked together forever by a bond of debt. Don’t be cute, kiddo: it didn’t mean any more to you than it did to me. You’re a big girl, and I’m a converted chauvinist pig, and this is the middle of the Seventies and we don’t owe each other anything.”
Then she tried to be sweet. “But, Harry … I want to go with you. You got me out of there, you saved my skin …”
“Call it even for the wonderful sex. But that’s it. When we get to Raleigh you go your way, and I go mine.”
“You’re too wild for that. Harry. You like the excitement.”
Harry hit the brakes. Air blew out, the rig fought the road, slowed, and Harry tooled it onto the shoulder. He let it idle in neutral as he turned to her.
“Okay, now here is what it’s really all about. Not the bullshit that’s swamping your brain, but what it’s really all about.
“My name is Harry Fischer. That’s Fischer with a ‘c’ in it; I figured I’d tell you that because you were too busy getting it on in that haystack to really catch the name; I mean, you were already trying to maneuver me into fucking you before you gave a shit who I was, except that I was a guy who could get you out of town. So the sex is about as big a debt as a hot roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and salad on the side.
“So pay attention: it’s Harry Fischer, and I’m forty years old, and I’ve got a terrific wife and three kids and I like them and they like me and the only reason I’m on this fucking suicide run lugging nitro is because it pays high-hazard and nobody else wanted the goddam job and I took it because the biopsy report came back three months ago and it says with treatment I’ve got maybe another year. Now can you piece all that together and understand that I’m not the fucking Lone Ranger, that I jumped in to ‘save’ your ass because of, hell, I’m not even sure, something I remembered from when I was a kid, and any body can be a hero once, but I’m not John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or any damn body else, I’m just a forty-year-old truck driver who’s dying of cancer and I didn’t have as much to lose as some guys so I did it! But that don’t make me Sir Lancelot, and it sure don’t make me a gay, mad adventurer ready to go streaking off across the countryside with a lady who shoots her old man as many times as she can before I grabbed the gun. Does all of that penetrate, kiddo?”