Lorna had never seen a shotgun fired before in real life. It was much, much louder than it was in the movies, and the targeted men did not fly through the air backward for twenty feet. They collapsed in place like punctured balloons and lay in two dark heaps.
Paz came running out, pistol in hand, with Emmylou walking slowly some paces behind him. He inspected the bodies on the street and saw that they were beyond help. Together, he and Barlow dragged them from the road, leaving long, wide trails of blood, black as oil in the anticrime light’s yellow glare.
“Well, you got to see their blood all right, Cletis.”
Barlow said, ” ‘I have pursued mine enemies, and overtaken them: neither did I turn again until they were consumed.’ Psalm 18:37. I hope you don’t think I take any satisfaction in this, Jimmy. They come at me tricky and I had no choice. Thirty-two years in the PD and this’s the first time I ever shot a man to death….”
Barlow sat down on the curb and put his head in his hands. Emmylou sat beside him and embraced him. Lorna came out of the car and sat on the curb on Barlow’s other side, taking his hand. Paz observed the tableau stone-faced; he thought it looked like an allegorical sculpture: Faith and Reason Consoling Justice. He couldn’t look at Barlow’s face, because he knew that had he been the one with the shotgun he’d be dead, not because of his reflexes but because the power to deal out death had been taken away from him.
Then he heard the sound of a car door opening behind him, turned, and saw a man jump out of the back of the white Ford SUV. He was small and slight, so that for an instant Paz thought he was a boy. He didn’t have a boy’s face, though. His hair was short and red, and he was dressed in the same dark jeans and sweatshirt as the two dead men. He held some kind of submachine gun, an Uzi or an MP5, Paz couldn’t tell.
“Bugs,” said Paz. “Or John Hardy.”
“What’s up, doc?” said the man with a broad grin. “Paz, why don’t you carefully draw your weapon by the butt and place it on the ground, and then go and sit down with your pals.”
Paz did so.
“Hello, Skeeter,” said Emmylou Dideroff.
“Emmy,” said the man with the gun, “it’s nice to see you again after all these years.”
“Don’t hurt these people, Skeeter. Take me, and let them go. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Oh, you can putthat in the bank! But I need all these folks, honey bunch. Torture don’t work so good on you, as our late Sudanese friend found out, but when I put it to your buddies here, maybe it’ll work better. I actually haven’t done a lot of torture, but maybe I’ll have beginner’s luck.”
Paz couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s face. He was happy, delighted, like a kid at a carnival. Paz had always thought that happy was the whole point of life, but no longer, not if this guy existed.
“This is about the oil,” Paz said.
“Right you are, boy. The oil. Emmy knows it’s there and she wants it safe for her little jungle bunnies, so she keeps telling these lies. I thought she would come clean in her notebooks, or to Dr. Wise over there, but no. All lies. Oh, I forgot you guys didn’t see the last one. She had it hidden away, but I worked over that old lady and she came up with it pretty fast.”
From Barlow came a low growl and he stirred, but the two women grabbed his arms.
Skeeter chuckled. “Yeah, Gramps, you don’t want to get your head blown off.” He looked again at Emmylou. “Shit, girl, what the fuck’re you doing with these people? A nigger, a yid, and a dumbass hillbilly, what a combo! You were a lot better off as a nihilist whore, if you want my opinion.”
“Skeeter, please…,” she said.
“You’ll excuse me, I have to make a call. I’m a little guy and it’s going to be hard to handle this crowd without some help.” He pulled out a cell phone and switched it on. He asked Lorna, “You think that’s why I have a bad attitude, Doc? Because I’m a half-pint?”
Lorna said, “No, I think you’d have been the same piece of shit you are if you were a gorilla.”
Skeeter laughed. “Not very therapeutic, Doc. You need to take a cue from Emmy, sympathy, empathy, all that good shit. And just for that, I think I’ll start on you when we get to where we’re going.”
His weapon didn’t waver as he pressed the buttons. The beeps seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet street.
From the alley between the storage building and the commercial strip Rigoberto Munoz has been observing the goings-on for some time with a mixture of satisfaction and fear. He has drunk most of his bottle of white port and he has wrapped his head in tinfoil, but the voices still come through. What he is witnessing clearly confirms all of his extraterrestrial messages. That nice doctor and the woman with the wonderful smile have been captured by the aliens, which means the aliens are real, and all those stupid people at the Jackson mental health are wrong. This makes him glad. Now he sees one of the space aliens take out a controller and press its buttons. Rigoberto feels a terrible wrenching in his groin, but he fights against it. He takes out his old-fashioned Cuban fisherman’s knife and scuttles out of the alley, keeping to the shadows between the street lamps, working his way around the cars, to attack from behind. He knows what a submachine gun is from his time in the Cuban army, in Angola. Rigoberto is crazy, but not stupid.
“I thought you only had those two guys,” said Paz.
“Oh, you’ve been talking to Dave,” said Sonnenborg. “Yeah, you know it never pays to lay out all your cards, especially to dumb fucks like him. No, I got people watching your place and the doc’s….” Into the cell phone he said, “Yo, Benny. Yeah, get over to the storage. Yeah, like now, asshole.” He broke the connection and dialed another number. “Yeah, it’s me. I need you at the storage right away….”
Paz saw Emmylou come to a decision, her mouth went thin and she nodded her head, and then she started to walk toward where Paz had dropped his pistol.
Skeeter pointed his weapon at her. “Stop right there, you stupid bitch!” he cried and shot a short burst into her path. The bullets went screaming down the street and a car alarm started wailing. She knelt above the pistol. Skeeter extended his arm and pointed his weapon at Lorna. “You touch that fucking gun and I’ll blow her head off,” he yelled.
Emmylou picked up the Glock and at the same instant Rigoberto Munoz came fast around the end of the white van and shoved his knife into the small of Skeeter’s back. Skeeter dropped the cell phone. He spun around and saw a bum shouting at him in Spanish, a filthy, nearly toothless man with a cap of shiny foil on his head. The man danced away and ran behind a car. Skeeter sent half a magazine after him, shattering glass, puncturing steel, but there was no indication as to whether he’d hit him. He reached around to where his back ached unbearably and felt the rough wooden handle. “What the fuck is this…?” he said to no one in particular, and collapsed.
Paz began to move as soon as Skeeter’s head hit the ground. He kicked the man’s weapon under the van, then checked his pulse. Finding none, he took his own pistol from Emmylou and entered the white vehicle. There he found, as he had expected, the fourth and final notebook.
“Is he dead?” asked Emmylou when he emerged. She was standing over the body.
“Yeah,” said Paz. “You knew he was involved in this, didn’t you?”
“No. I’m not a criminal mastermind, Detective.”
“Oh, yes, you are,” said Paz, “in your own sweet way. And you were going to let him shoot Lorna too, weren’t you?”
She said, “He wouldn’t have shot Lorna with me pointing a gun at him, he would have shot me. But the Lord sent an angel.”
“That was a schizophrenic Cuban, Emmylou.”
“Yes, an angel of the Lord. Not all of them are pretty blondes with feathery wings.”