And this is Michael Hora and so Chaingang goes right up close and puts one up in his ear and kicks the Llama away and is going up those rotten stairs but the slow lady she moves pretty good she's damn fast for being slow and she's already inside fumbling with a 410 when he plunks her in her pig back and she turns as if to say, Hey, watch it, and he plugs her right in her forehead and she goes down with one of the little chunks of dirty lead in her brain and he's grabbed the 410 and at a window, making sure Hora hasn't moved, and Sissy hasn't come outside but she could be looking out a window and he's got Hora by a boot and dragging him into the dilapidated tool shed in thirty seconds. It went all right.
He goes next door.
“Hear that shootin'?"
“Yeah,” she says, still washing a huge shirt by hand out in back. Stray hair down in her eyes. Sweat pouring from her. She looks whiter than he's ever seen her. Shooting, shmooting, her body said. “I feel like shit."
“Go to town. I want you to see the doctor. Ask him to give you something so you'll feel better."
“I'm okay. I'm just hot."
“Do as I say. Tell him you feel like you're gonna pass out."
“I do feel a little faint.” What an idiot.
“Right. Here's the keys. Drive carefully."
“Okay.” She goes out and heaves herself into the vehicle. She can barely get behind the wheel even with the seat pushed all the way back. She starts the car and drives off at about fifteen miles an hour. At that speed she'll be an hour just getting to town and back. Fine, he thinks, getting the keys to Hora's pickup and starting to clean up the messes. Get the slow sow and Hora loaded and covered. Start for the bridge. He puts them down in the graveyard and drives back. Takes a marking pen and makes a sign for the door of the house and starts packing. He has everything ready to load into the Caprice by the time she comes back from town to find they're leaving.
“He said I was okay."
“I don't trust small-town doctors. Now that you're getting this close I want us near a city doctor who really knows his stuff."
“Okay.” He seemed so considerate lately.
“I want somebody good nearby, in case there's any trouble with the, uh, delivery. First, though, I want to give you some more acting practice.” It was a word he hadn't used in nearly eight months, the whole time she'd been with him, and her face lit up with the luminosity of the eternally hopeful.
“Sure."
“Need some new wheels.” Also need some new money. He'd turned up nearly six hundred dollars squirreled away inside Hora's place, but that wasn't nearly enough now. He wanted a nice cushion. But he could go out and get what he needed that night ... Or the next day ... He'd get it.
Daniel Bunkowski almost never killed to rob. He had little intrinsic interest in material goods, and certainly none whatsoever in the accumulation of monetary wealth. But he enjoyed the sport, the challenge, and the RIGHTNESS of thievery. It was important to him to rob now and then. Those scum out there OWED it to him.
His precognitive computer of a mind stored his next steps for later retrieval. The distancing of themselves from Stobaugh County. The best way to get the next legal wheels and how he would coach Sissy to buy the car. How the second legally bought ride would insulate him. Next the new identities. Clothing. The physical make-overs. His, anyway, almost no point in wasting anything on this one. Let her drop the frog first.
Daniel understood the process of ovulation by which the female egg is fertilized by male spermatozoa. How it develops into an embryo and fetus and after the three requisite trimesters, what the doctor kept calling “the thirty-seven to forty-week gestation,” an infant is miraculously produced. It meant no more to Bunkowski than the lunar cycle. It was just something that was. He had never had any reason to come to terms with the fact that HE, this beast on two legs, was capable of producing a normal, human, viviparous response. When the time came, he would learn the meaning of the phrase “a sense of wonder."
BUCKHEAD SPRINGS
“Juggy” he said to the PR guy, “f'r Chrissakes.” Hey, Jack, what can I say, booby?” He spread out his hands expansively in a totally insincere gesture.
“Hey, this is home, ya know?"
“I hear ya, paisan, but this was the deal,” he whispered conspiratorially, smiling some orthodontist's Bermuda vacation.
“Donna too? Jesus.” Eichord was just a hair away from boiling over and he knew he didn't want that to happen. But the PR dude should have handled it so it wouldn't have ended up on his fucking doorstep.
“It's a PHOTO OPPORTUNITY, poops,” Juggy Jay told him. Juggy and Eichord got along well because they both had a sense of humor, and Juggy had earned his nickname out in the wet trenches, something Jack knew all about. All too well.
“Uh huh,” he said, feeling like a fatuous fool in his old Mets cap.
“What can I tell ya?"
“Right.” Where was a hounds-tooth cape or a meerschaum when yon needed one.
“You guys are news. People wanna see. Superflyyyy.” He grinned.
“Cut me a huss,” Eichord said, without moving his lips.
“It's good for the shop."
“Real smart. And down the line I'm on a homicide and some crazy hump sees this and he knows what my lady looks like."
“They got fifty GRILLION shots of her in Dallas, bunky, and one more ain't gonna hoit. Also, that's why the wig.” Booby. Poops. Bunky. Poopsy. Juggy. Christ, it sounded like the fucking East Side Kids. Eichord sulked.
“It's all right, hon,” Donna whispered to him, having already quite obviously accepted the fact that a photographer was waiting to take a picture of the Eichords.
“No. It's not, actually,” he said to her quietly in his most brittle whisper, and he smiled to soften it. “But what the hell."
“Come on.” She held his hand. “If we don't give it to them with our blessing they'll just get it anyway under worse conditions—that's what you've always told me.” She'd acclimated herself to Jack's unwanted celebrity, as well as her own. She'd had her fill of the spotlight too, such as it was, but ever since Dallas there'd been enough vestiges of it from time to time that it no longer jarred. It was certainly part of her husband's life, and for good or bad she figured she might as well do the best she could to accept it gracefully. Jack was hot and cold on it. One time he'd grin and go with the flow. Next time he'd stomp his feet a little.
In Dallas, where Donna had been abducted and raped by the brother of a psychotic killer, she'd had her fifteen minutes of stardom and then some. She'd been hounded by print and electronic media, the American version of the paparazzi, and had not handled it well. They'd talked about it. Jack talked about it. “You have to understand the public's curiosity. The concept of serial killings holds a perverse fascination for these people.” He was talking about a woman buying supermarket tabloids, but he meant everybody. “The horror of it is kinda like terrorism itself, you know? We can't quite put it in any of the accepted pigeonholes.