“What happened?” asked the hellcat.
“Billy Banks is lying over there with an axe in his neck. All our cargo is gone.”
Cargo. That’s what they called human beings.
“Where?” she asked.
“How the hell would I know?” Karl jabbed my chest with a finger. Hard. “You’d better start talking, kid.”
Kid. The son of a bitch was only eight years older than I was.
The hellcat shook the bars again, belted out some kind of desperate animal frustration growl. “Will you please open this fucking cell?”
“Just simmer, missy.” Karl rubbed his face, blew out an exasperated sigh. “This ain’t gonna work, man. It’s all fucked up. No way we can hide all this. The town’s going to wake up soon and start asking questions and Billy’s over there drawing flies. Somebody’s going to have to take the fall on this.”
The hellcat’s eyes narrowed. “You’d better not be looking at me, big man.”
“No, you’re not believable,” Karl said. “Christ, what’s Krueger going to do? Where is he anyway?”
“The cowboy,” the hellcat said.
“The what?”
“Him,” she said. “Pin it on the kid.”
That woke me up a little. “What?”
“Hey, that’s not bad,” Karl said.
“Nobody’s going to believe it,” I said.
“Sure they will. Hell, we can even pin Luke Jordan on you. Shit, that might just work.”
“Why the hell would I kill Luke Jordan?”
Karl bent down until we were eye to eye. “Damn boy, you’re just plain dumb, ain’t you? Maybe we’ll ask Doris, see what she knows about it.”
“You can’t use Doris to get to me,” I said. “She’s gone to her sister’s.”
“That’s even better.” Karl smirked. “She leaves you, and you take it out on Luke.”
“Why the hell would I do that?”
“You just keep pretending you don’t know.”
“I’ll talk,” I said. “You try to blame all this on me, and I’ll sing like a fucking barbershop quartet.”
“You’re not going to say jack shit.” Karl drew the Glock from his holster. “You were killed trying to escape.”
Oh … shit. I felt my sphincter twitch. The bottom dropped out of my gut.
“Shoot him in the belly,” the hellcat shouted.
“Shut up,” Karl snapped. He pointed the pistol.
I tried to think of something, say anything to make him wait. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t make words come out.
“You can’t do it like that,” the hellcat said.
“I’ve got this handled, okay.”
“Idiot,” she said. “You can’t shoot him for escaping if he’s handcuffed to the cage.” Karl lowered the pistol. “Damn, you’re right.”
He dipped two fingers into his shirt pocket, came out with a pair of small keys on a ring and tossed them at me. I caught them on reflex. I held them up. The handcuff keys.
“Unlock yourself,” Karl said.
“I’m not going to help you kill me.”
“You want to die like a man on your feet, or like some squirming coward?”
“I don’t want to die at all.”
“Tell you what,” Karl said. “Sit there and give me shit, and I’ll belly shoot you like the senorita wants. Do what I tell you, and I’ll make it quick and clean.”
I stood, pushed the chair away with my foot. A quick death wasn’t much comfort, but damn if I would just blink at him like some idiot coon hound and wait to be shot. I’d unlock the cuffs and then make some kind of play, jump at him, try to catch Karl off guard. Anything. I didn’t have a prayer, but a one in a million chance was still a chance. I unlocked the cuff on my wrist, braced myself to spring.
“I’m gonna put this shot right between your eyes, kid. I’d say sorry, but frankly I’m just not that sorry.” He squinted, sighted down the barrel at my face.
“Drop it, Karl.”
Karl froze. The new voice startled me.
“I said drop it.”
Karl began to turn his head to look at her.
“Do not turn around, Karl. Stay still and put the gun down.”
Karl muttered curses under his breath. “You don’t know what’s going on here, Amanda.”
“That’s true,” Amanda said. “But I’m pretty sure I just heard you describe how you were going to murder Toby here, and that’s definitely not in the handbook. Now, put the gun down please.” She stood with a two-handed grip on her automatic.
Amanda was athletic and thin, tan, almost as tall as I was. Brownish red hair cut short like a boy’s. The khaki deputy’s uniform hid sinewy girl muscles, like a tennis pro might have, but I knew she got hers from rock climbing and long distance cycling. I’d seen her score perfect marks on the gun range and armlock truckers twice her size when things got rowdy at Skeeter’s.
Karl didn’t put the gun down. She kept her Glock on him, and he kept his on me. I stood as still as stone and tried not to piss myself. The hellcat watched from her cell with big brown eyes.
“I’m waiting, Karl.” Amanda’s pistol never wavered from him.
“Okay, but you put your gun down too, and we can talk about this.”
“That’s not how it works, and you know it, Karl,” she said.
“This is bullshit.”
“Karl.” Amanda’s voice was calm, just above a whisper. “I’m going to give you three seconds to drop the gun. Three seconds went by and nobody moved. Bang.
The shot nearly made me crap my pants.
Karl dropped his gun and went to the floor face down, squirming and cursing a blue streak. “You fucking cunt. Oh, fucking shit! You shot me in the ass, you bitch. Damn, that hurts.”
“Just stay down, Karl. Toby, get his pistol.”
I grabbed it.
“Oh, you complete fucking whore.” Karl was making fists and groaning between outbursts, his eyes crushed closed against his ass pain.
Amanda took a step closer, spared me a glance. “I got your message, but when I tried to call, the phone was out. Didn’t think I’d be shooting anyone today.”
“It’s been that kind of night.”
She said, “Karl, I’m going to grab one arm and Toby’s going to get the other, and we’re going to drag you as gently as possible into the cell, okay? Then we’ll fetch Doc Gordon. You give us any trouble, and I’ll put another one in you. Understand?”
Karl nodded. His face was a sweaty grimace.
We hauled him into the vacant cell, dropped him on the cot and locked it.
“Toby, put that chair over by the far wall and have a seat.”
I did what she told me.
She slapped one cuff on my wrist, the other to the radiator.
“Oh, come on.”
“I don’t have time to hear your story right now, Toby. Sorry. Can’t take any chances. We’ll see what happens when I get back with the doc.”
“Great.”
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the hellcat. “You can start by explaining who the hell that is.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Doc Gordon worked on Karl’s ass in the cell. I heard him tell Karl to hold still, but Karl hissed and bitched every time the doc poked at him. Amanda swung a leg over the edge of the desk, regarded me with her hard, cop eyes.
I’d never have eyes like that, I realized. I’d never make it in the cop business because I wouldn’t be able to put that expression on my face. I knew Amanda, liked her a whole lot better than I’d liked Karl or Billy. She treated me more or less like a fellow deputy, not a part-time errand boy. But right now she was looking at me like some interesting species of bug under a microscope. She’d been a cop back in Eastern Oklahoma. Claremore, I think. She’d said she’d wanted to live farther out in the wilderness, do outdoorsy stuff like hiking and the rock climbing. So here she was in Coyote Crossing just under a year.