Dirty White Boys - Страница 6

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“You be careful. Bud.”

“I always am,” he said.

Bud went down to the kitchen and, after just the faintest pause, dialed Ted Pepper's number. He knew it by heart.

It rang three times.

“Hello?”

Ted's wife Holly answered. He knew her voice too well.

He swallowed hard. On the phone she sounded like syrup;

there was a low vibration, a hum, that still made him a little woozy. She was twenty-six. How complicated things can get!

“Holly?”

“Bud! You shouldn't call me here. He—”

“Holly, is Ted there?”

“Of course he isn't here. You know that. He's in the other bedroom. I'll get him.”

“Good, you do that. Holly.”

Thirty seconds later Ted came on.

“Bud?”

“It sure is,” said Bud heartily, and gave Ted the news.

“I'm swinging by in fifteen, and I want to find you with all your creases straight and your AR-15 locked and loaded.

Got that, son?”

“Oh, Christ,” said Ted.

“I only just went to sleep.”

“Well, now, I know you have it in you.”

“Christ, Bud, you got all the damn answers. You're goddamn happy, I can tell. See you in twenty.”

“Fifteen, young trooper,” said Bud.

He was so merry with Ted. Old trooper sergeant, all the damn answers, full of laughs and teasing and the subtle insistence of obedience. Before he'd won his stripes, he'd been "the kid” to a dozen tough old sergeants, and now, here he was, a sergeant himself.

Bud hit the shower, was out in a flash, and rushed through the rest. Then, stepping into his closet, he found his next day's uniform spring-fresh on the hanger. He pinned on the gold badge, an Indian shield with two wings above it, and the words to protect and serve. To a lot of the younger men, the badge meant nothing. But he still felt as if it symbolized his membership and acceptance in an elite society: we enforce, it said to the world. We protect.

He pulled on his socks and a Gaico ankle holster, then stepped into his taupe, striped slacks, still thirty-sixes. The brown shirt, with its flashy gray epaulets and pocket flaps, fit him like a glove. Its three yellow chevrons stood out bright as daisies, just below the yellow-piped arrowhead shoulder patch that said Oklahoma Highway Patrol. Nineteen years to make that rank, even if he'd passed the test up at the top the first time, when he'd only done a decade. He buttoned it up, swiftly tied the tie.

“Bud, you put your vest on!” Jen called from the bedroom, where she should have been sleeping.

It irritated him, but most things Jen said irritated him these days.

“That goddamn thing's heavy as a washing machine.”

“Still, you put it on.”

“Of course I will,” he lied. He hated it. Made him feel like he had on a girdle.

Last, Bud slipped into his black patent oxfords and tied them tight.

He stepped out of the closet.

“Bud, you don't have that vest on, I can tell. You're going to get yourself killed, and leave me with a mountain of bills,” Jen said.

“Nobody's killing me,” he said.

“Now go back to -sleep.”

“I swear, you are an ornery man these days,” she said sullenly.

She settled in under the blankets, rolling over.

He stepped into the short hallway. Not much of a house, but nobody'd ever complained. It was dark, a blue dark, but Bud knew every square inch of it. He walked a bit, and leaned in to look at Russ, who snoozed with some trouble;

he was restive in sleep as in life. Russ's hair, mottled and tangled, ensnared his handsome face; above him the specter of some rock performer made up like the devil himself rose on a poster, stark white and psychotic. He looked like a PCP zombie Bud had once seen a DEA team blow away on 44 the other side of OK City. But Bud didn't worry about Russ. Russ, who was seventeen, looked like six kinds of shit, with all that damned hair and the black clothes he wore and a little glittery something in his earlobe that Bud didn't even want to know about, but Bud somehow knew he had too much of his mother in him to do anything crazy. He still got mostly As. He had a chance to go to a fancy Eastern university if certain things worked out right.

Across the hall, he looked in on the younger boy, Jeff.

Jeff was the smaller at fifteen but the tougher. He had a pug face and an athlete's wiry, muscley frame. The room stank ever so slightly of stale sweat socks, moldy jocks, ten pairs of sneakers. He was the jock wannabe, no genius, not a reader, but on any kind of field a hard and earnest plugger who yearned to do well and almost never did. There was something tragic in Jells wanting and continual air of disappointment in himself. Bud felt a wave of love and melancholy wash across him, so intense that he felt he could bend over and kiss the young man on the cheek. Jeff seemed to need him so.

I'm going to leave this young boy? he asked himself, feeling the weight come onto his shoulders. But leaving was being discussed. It was a possibility up ahead on the road.

Scared the hell out of him. Am I really getting ready to pull out?

Well, maybe I am. Maybe they'll be all right.

“Daddy?” Jeff had stirred, seeing his father.

“Yes, Jeff, what is it?”

“What's going on?”

“Oh, they need me. Nothing much.”

“You don't have your vest on. I can tell.”

“It's nothing,” he said.

“Don't you worry a bit. You're just like your mother. Get on back to sleep now.”

Bud put his family behind him and walked downstairs to the end of the hall to a closet. He opened it to face his gun vault. Quickly, he turned the familiar combination.

His heavy patent-leather belt hung on the pegboard inside the door; he peeled it off, ran the belt around his waist, and pulled it tight, third hole. A belt was important to a policeman; it carried so much: cuffs, can of mace, a baton if he was working crowd control, a sap as some of the boys carried, a radio jack, a speed loader pouch, and the gun, of course.

Of course the gun. A four-inch Smith & Wesson M66357 Magnum. He took his off the shelf and gave it a quick wipe down its stainless steel ugliness gleamed in the low light, but the damned thing felt so good in the hand. It fired six murderous little Federal 125-grain hollowpoint bullets, with a one-shot stop rating of 93 percent. Bud went to the range twice a week; he was a very good shot.

He opened the cylinder and quickly dropped in six Federals from the open box; he had two speed loaders each charged with six cartridges for quick refills. Unlike many state officers. Bud laboriously practiced with the speed-loaders, and could get his six empties out and have six new shells deposited in the cylinder in less than two seconds.

He'd never had to do so, just as he'd never shot a living man, but it was better to be able to do it fast and not need it than to need it and not be able to do it. He secured the pistol in his holster, snapping the thumb snap. Then he reached into the gun safe and removed a tiny Smith & Wesson 640, a two-incher, flicked the cylinder open to assure himself it carried five +P .38-Special hollow tips locked the cylinder, and slipped it into his ankle holster, left inside ankle, again securing it with the strap.

He locked the safe up tight and pulled his Smokey off its top. The dark green flat brimmed hat was perched just so atop his head, its brim just edging off the top of his vision, as it was supposed to. Maybe that's where it started for him, all those years back. Goddamn, he still thought it was the best-looking hat he'd ever seen; it was the only hat he'd ever wear. He wanted to be buried in it, or at least with it.

He stepped out of the house and went to the cruiser parked in the driveway, a gleaming Chevy Caprice, in the black-and-white tones of the state. Firing up the engine, he picked up the mike and pressed the send button.

“Ah, Dispatch, this is six-oh-five, I'm ten-fifty-one to Officer two-eleven.”

“Got you, six-oh-five,” said the woman's voice, the night duty dispatcher.

“Advise you switch to Police Intercity Net for updates as they come through.”

“Affirmative, Dispatch. Any news?”

“Big zero, so far.”

“Okay, Dispatch, off I go.”

He switched to the intercity net, 155.670 MHz, eased the big car out of the driveway, and headed to Ted and Holly Pepper's.

The Pepper trailer, alone on its grim little street, was lit up like a turnpike gas station. Ted, fully uniformed, stood outside with a rifle case in one hand. He was a tall, good-looking youngster, perhaps too handsome; if there was weakness to his character it was that as a young man things had been given to him too easily, without his ever quite acquiring the lessons of humility and hard-ass work. If you're a blue-eyed boy with a button nose, things just show up on your plate. But he was all right. Ted just didn't have the gift—that special instinct for human deviance, that cunning about motive, that twitch for the truth under the lie, and finally, the will to do the job flat out—that marked a great cop. But there weren't too many great cops left, and Bud knew he himself fell short in a bunch of areas, too. He had only this on Ted: He'd been around a bit more.

As Bud pulled in, the door opened, and Holly came out in a housecoat with two sealed 7-Eleven plastic cups that presumably held hot coffee. Her freckles stood out now, without makeup; her straw-colored, almost reddish mass of hair looked like she'd been electrified, but, dammit, that was Holly, she was a cute one.

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