Dirty White Boys

CHAPTER 22

“Tattoo?” said Richard.

“Goddamn right,” said Lamar.

“That's what you been workin' on! And now, by God, you done it!”

What lay before them on Ruta Bern's coffee table was Richard's best and final lion, a beast so pure and fierce it leaped off the paper at you to tear your throat out. It sang of blood. Next to it was a beautiful young blond woman, tawny and silky and adoring, her arm around the king, lost in his mane. It was like a Nazi wet dream.

“I want to proudly wear that on my chest. I want a artist to put it there, in a nice parlor. Not no convict thing, like this here trashy shit on my skin now.”

“Lamar. I'm sure a good one could. I mean, I saw tattoos in Mcalester I wouldn't have believed. Evidently it's gotten quite sophisticated. It's not crude anymore. The artists are quite free with line and color.”

Lamar carefully unbuttoned his shirt and shucked it off.

Though he hadn't been working out regularly as in the Mac, his body was still sleek with muscle. On his pneumatic arms, the fading blue ink of prison tattoos that had lost their vitality spilled like stains. But on his hands, the f u c K and the y o u I still told the world who he was.

“See,” he said, "it's like it was meant to be. I never had nothing on my chest. I done that all on my arms and hands and back when I was young and stupid or young and drunk or high on crystal or all three.

But here, I'd like that lion, just as bold as bold can be.”

“Daddy,” said Ruta Beth, "that would be cool. That would be the coolest thing.”

“I think it would be, too,” said Lamar.

“See, I've always seen myself as a lion and this here thing is what would make it so. Baby O’Dell, what do you think? Do you think Lamar would look cool with a lion on his chest? You know, a real roaring lion, like the one Richard here been practicing to draw.”

O’Dell's damaged mind grappled with the concept and at last grasped it.

Picture. On. Skin. Lion. Grrrrrrrr. Scary.

Pretty.

“Too! Too!” he said, so excited he sprayed Frosted Mini-Wheats and milk with each syllable.

“He wants one, Lamar, that's what the boy's saying,” said Ruta Beth.

“Can he get one?”

“Well, sure. Maybe not when I do it, because somebody'll have to stand guard. But later we'll get him a right nice one. O’Dell, what you like your tattoo to be?”

But O’Dell did not want a lion. He wanted something else.

“Doggy! Mar, me doggy. Doggy Dell. Yoppayoppa?”

“Yes sir. Baby O’Dell, we'll get you the goddamnedest best doggy ever there was. Right, Richard. You could design a doggy just like you done a lion, Richard, couldn't you?”

“Of course, Lamar.”

“Daddy, I want one, too.”

“Of course, honey.”

“I want a picture of my mother and daddy. On my back.

And a raven. I want it on my right shoulder blade.”

“Bet Richard could do that too, huh, Richard?”

“Ah—yes.”

Actually, Richard thought he was going to faint. Ever since he was a boy Richard had hated needles. What was tattooing, as he understood it, but ordeal by needle? Just sitting there, the tattoo artist would puncture and puncture and puncture, injecting a small permanent blot of color under the skin, until some hideous banality like a skull and cross-bones or a battleship or f u c k and You! was formed. He knew he couldn't get through it.

But he also knew this is why he was here. In some way, his skill with the pen had jiggered something deep and yearning in Lamar. It had drawn Lamar to him, made him important, even magical, to Lamar. It had, he supposed, saved his life.

“Richard, I want your help.”

“Help?”

“Be the foreman. Son, you worked so hard on the drawing and now I would say it's perfect. I want you to work with the skin artist and get it exactly that way. I don't want no slipups!” His mood turned briefly dark. He pulled the muscle of his biceps until they could see where drops of blood, once red but now faded pink, dripped off a tattooed slash in his arm, opened by a dagger. It was a trompe 1'oeil of some earnestness but not much skill. However, what infuriated Lamar was the third drop from the wound.

“See that one? Look, see it?”

They all crowded around.

“Yes sir. Daddy,” said Ruta Beth.

“What's wrong?”

“See how it goes out. All the others go in. That's what's wrong.”

But Richard realized it wasn't a mistake. The tattoo artist whoever he was, was trying to make the spurts of blood slightly more authentic by varying their configuration and modulating their placement in the stream, knowing instinctively that irregularity meant realism. If he'd done it the way Lamar had assumed he'd do it, it would somehow be deader. It was the endless battle between the patron and the artist for control of the work! It was the Pope versus Michelangelo!

“I suppose I'd have to do some research. I'd have to find a guy with the skill. You can't just walk in on these things.

-I'd have to see samples of his work. I think they have magazines full of tattoos. You could find a guy from them. And then we could—”

“No, no,” said Lamar, "that would take too long. He does something this fancy, I'll be laid up for a month while it heals. Longer I wait, longer it's going to be. Want it done now, tonight.”

“But Lamar, I—”

“The Fort! Don't you get that?”

“The Fort?”

“Fort Sill. Outside the Fort, on that Fort Sill Boulevard.”

“Tattoo parlors?”

“You got that right. We go tonight, we check ’em out, if you find a boy who can do what I want, then we do it tonight. We lay up, 'bout a month. I figure another job. We pull it off, then by God it's Mexico and a vacation!”

“A vacation,” said Ruta Beth.

“Oh, Daddy, you think of everything.”

It happened rarely enough anymore, because everybody had such different schedules and agendas, but it happened tonight, and Bud was a happy man.

They were all there, his wife and his two sons, gathered around a dinner table in the Mahogany Room of Martin's, Lawton's finest restaurant for forty years. And the place still knew how to put out a pretty good plate of roast beef, its specialty, though tonight Jen had decided to have some fish thing and Russ, though the honoree, had chosen a plate of linguini with pepper sauce.

But he was happy. Bud was. They sat there eating, Bud shoveling down the forkfuls of reddish meat that always so delighted him. The boys looked great. Russ, the object of all attention, had slicked up his act a bit: He wore a white shirt buttoned at the top and a pair of black jeans over his black boots, and his long hair smoothed backward.

The earring was still a little one. Jeff, in a blazer and tie, looked a little more like Bud's idea of a Princeton student.

“We are so proud of you, Russ,” said Jen.

“See, what's so great isn't just that Russ is smart,” said Bud.

“The world is full of smart people. Lamar Pye, he's smart. He's smart as hell. But Russ works. That's what's rare. The world is full of people who think they're just too damn smart to work.”

Russ was modest through all this but seemed to be enjoying it. Only Jeff was unusually quiet, although he also had good news: He had been moved up to varsity.

“Well,” said Bud, "they say a man is rich to the degree his sons make him proud—”

“Who says that, Dad?” said Russ, teasing the old man.

“Well, I don't know who exactly it was, maybe a Russian, maybe a Greek, and maybe I just made it up, but if it's true, then I'm the goddamned richest man in Oklahoma tonight.”

“Well, Dad,” said Russ, "maybe I'll flunk out.”

“You won't flunk out. No man who works as hard as you has a thing to worry about. Then you go on and go to work doing what you want and you have sons who’ll make you just as proud as you two make me.”

“You-all listen to your daddy,” said Jen.

“He's speaking the truth. You boys have been a great thing for us, made us so happy. Not a lick of trouble between the two of you, thank the Lord.”

Bud had more roast beef.

“Bud, do you think we should order some champagne?” said Jen.

“I think these boys are man enough.”

“Mom,” said Jeff, "that stuff costs eighty dollars a bottle.”

“Well, Jeff,” said Bud, "your brother has just saved us about a hundred thousand dollars, so I think we can spend eighty bucks.”

“Jeff, the domestic is forty-two fifty,” Jen said.

“You can buy it in a liquor store for about fourteen dollars a bottle,” Jeff added.

Bud called the waiter over and ordered a bottle of champagne, slightly shamed by Jeff into choosing the domestic one. When it came, he ordered it poured for the whole family.

Then, dramatically, he said, "And here's to Russ and all the hard work he's done.”

They all lifted their sparkling glasses and drank; but Bud only let the stuff touch his lips and did not swallow.

“Here, let me pour some more,” he said, giving each a half glass more, until it was all gone.

The boys and Jen finished the champagne and then it was time to go. Bud looked at his watch: about ten. He called for the check and paid it with his Visa card without wincing, though it was about forty dollars more than he had expected. Still, except for Jeff's strange sullenness, it had been a wonderful evening.

Is it the last? he wondered.

Am I about to do some fool thing and move into a little house near the airport with a young woman?

“Bud?”

“What?”

“You were talking to yourself.”

“I must be going crazy.”

They drove in Jen's station wagon through Lawton's quiet streets and pulled in the driveway about ten-thirty.

“Dad, do you mind if I go over to Nick Sisley's?” asked Russ.

“He's having a party.”

“No, fine, but don't be home late. Isn't that right, Jen?”

“That's fine.”

“How about you, Jeff? You have any plans?”

“I think I'll go over to Charlie's,” he said.

When the boys had disappeared, she said to Bud, "And I see you're going out, too.”

“Oh?”

“You didn't drink any champagne.”

“I may go. Have to make some phone calls first.”

“Bud, what's going on?”

“Oh, got me just the tiniest idea that might lead us to Lamar. Probably nothing. Just want to check it out.”

“Tonight? Can't it wait?”

“Jen, it's nothing. I'm just going over to the Tribal Police Department over at the Comanche complex. I just want to ask some questions, is all.”

She fixed him with her harshest stare, as if she'd never heard of such a thing in her life. Then disillusionment crept across her features and, utterly defeated, she went upstairs.

He heard her wheezing disappointment. He watched her go, feeling as though he ought to say something. But no words arrived at his lips, and she just turned into the bedroom and closed the door.

Lawton was two towns. It was a church-going, tree shaded small Oklahoma city, with wooden houses nestled on streets that Andy Hardy would have been proud to call home, where every third block sported a park or a school or a church, a town where all life coagulated toward the Central Mall and the county seat for Comanche county. And it was a soldier's town, jammed up with pawn shops and girlie bars and porn stores, from Fort Sill Boulevard around to Cache Road and out Cache Road for a mile or two.

The Fort Sill Boulevard strip, just beyond Gate No. 3, was hopping tonight. Cars jammed its narrow way and it blazed with neon. Young artillerymen, freed from the day's duty of delivering their 155-mm packages into the mountains, their ears booming still, their heads aswarm with the computations necessary to send the shell in the right direction, wandered in packs up and down it, looking for diversion.

This usually involved fleshly appetites, and there were places on the strip where for an honest hundred bucks a man could get a good drunk with a good blow job thrown in for good measure; in others, two hundred could be spent with no blow job to be had anywhere on the premises. You had to know where you went.

But among the girlie joints, and the Mailbox USAs and the porn shops and the pawn shops, there was to be found now and then a tattoo joint: Skin Fantasy was the title of one; the Flesh House, another; Skin Art still another; Little Burma Art House, the Rainbow Biceps, and on and on.

It was crowded, as it always was in the hours approaching midnight, and the Toyota crawled along through the traffic.

“You sure this is safe?” said Richard.

“Sure it is,” said Lamar.

“Down here it's mostly MPs, looking for drunken soldiers. The city boys stay clear. Besides, this car's been checked by the great Bud Pewtie him self and passed with flying colors. There's nothing in the system on the car.”

Ruta Beth drove through the traffic very carefully, nudging an inch ahead at a time. Nobody paid them any attention; mostly it was cars full of soldiers looking for a place to light.

“How's that look, Richard?” Lamar asked.

The place was called Tat-2's, with a gaudy neon sign on it, and underneath it said "Best in the West” and under that, "Trained By the Great Sailor Jerry Collins of Honolulu, complete to Liner and Shading Machines. Custom work available. Bikers welcome.”

“Hey, that looks like the kind of place, huh, Richard?” said Lamar.

“It looks promising.”

“Well, go check it out, son.”

Gulping, Richard got out of the car and went into the small shop. Two semi human forms lounged behind a counter, and on the walls were hundreds and hundreds of little designs. Of the two, the one that appeared to be the woman watched him most closely; the other was completely zoned. The odor of disinfectant hung in the air.

“Ah, hello,” said Richard.

The woman looked at him up and down, squint-eyed. She must have weighed 350 pounds and wore a cutoff biker denim shirt; her huge arms bulged from them and were inked from top to bottom in webbed darkness, with jots of color here and there. When she lifted her face to him, he saw the tattooing extended from her shirt up her neck to her chin. He turned and looked at the other morose character; he was equally gaudy, but what Richard first took to be skin disease was actually a rather elaborate spiderweb that covered half his face.

He wore a leather vest, exposing a whole blue museum on every square inch of his cellulite, but the best touch was the gold pin that pierced his nipple.

An involuntary shiver glided through Richard.

“Hep, sport?”

Hep?

Help, she meant.

“Ah, yeah,” he said, trying to sound tough.

“Was thinking of a piece. Chest. Multicolored. Private design.”

“Custom-like, you mean?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

- "Don't do much custom. More a West Coast thang.

Movie stars. These goddamn soldier boys just want "I Luv Mama' pricked on.”

“Ah, it's not for me. For a friend. Let me show you the design.”

Richard walked over to the counter and unfolded the lion, rampant, and the beautiful woman, and the castle.

“Shee-it,” said the woman.

“Rufe, you touch that?”

Rufe came out of his stupor, bending to see.

“Glory,” he finally said.

“That's a two-thousand-dollar custom tattoo. Take me best part of a week.”

“Could you get it?” Richard asked.

“The subtlety. The line running down from his mane to his body to his paws, the way it captures his tension and strength. The neck. Look how coiled and alive the neck is. Also, the loft in the woman's breasts. See how elastic and alive they are? We don't want tracing.

We don't want a dead line. We want something vibrant'. Can you do it?”

“Sure he could. You could do it, cun't you, Rufe?”

But Rufe bent over and studied very carefully.

Then he said, "Jamie, show him. The crucifixion.”

She turned and bent and pulled her blue denim shirt up.

What Richard saw on her broad back was indeed the crucifixion, only it was a handsome biker being crucified, etched there in the flesh in vivid blues and reds, surrounded by state troopers in the roles of Roman centurions.

Richard could hardly keep a straight face.

“Pretty goddamned great, ain't it?” said the woman.

“It's a goddamned masterpiece,” said Rufe.

“It's something,” said Richard, meaning it differently than Rufe and the woman took it, but as he looked at it carefully, he saw that it wasn't quite what he had in mind.

What the piece had in drama and detail it certainly lacked in subtlety of line. The figures all had a stiffness through them, and they all stood at the same angle; the faces were identical. It was like a drawing by a sick, crazy boy, high on amphetamines and inner sadomasochistic fantasies of penetration and blood but lacking entirely any grace or sense of life.

“It's just not what we're interested in, sorry,” he said.

“I'd do it for fifteen hundred,” Rufe said.

“Just like that picture you showed me, every last line and detail.

Ain't nobody can do work like that around here but me.”

If he's the best, thought Richard.

“Okay, well, maybe so,” said Richard.

“Still, it's a little you won't be offended?”

“Tell me. I'm a man. I can take it.”

“It's a bit stiff. The person on whom you'd be working he wouldn't want it stiff. It would upset him and when he gets upset, things happen. Take it from me. You don't need this job.”

“Okay. Your money, your skin.”

“Who’s the best? The very best. It's worth twenty bucks for the time it'll save me.”

He pushed the bill across the counter.

“Well,” said Rufe, "truth is, the big action's dried up and left Lawton. It's mostly a West Coast thing. But—well, there's one guy left around here. He don't work much. But, I have to say, he's a goddamn genius. Done it his whole life.”

“What's his name?”

“Jimmy Ky. He's a good fella. Born in Saigon. Started in the Orient, where it's an art. See the spider on my face, Had that done in sixty-five in Tokyo by the great Horimono.” He leaned forward.

“See how much lighter it is; them boys got the touch, I must admit.

Jimmy Ky studied under Horimono. He's got the touch himself. If he'll work on you.”

- "Oh, he'll work on this guy. Where's his place?”

It was Bingo Night.

high stakes bingo! the sign said, lighting up the night sky. The Bingo Palace was the largest and most vivid building in the Comanche Tribal Complex off Highway 65, where an obliging U . government had constructed a quartet of sleek structures for people who cared very little for such things.

The parking lot was jammed, and in the windows of the Palace, Bud could see a full house of farmers and city folks bending over their cards while gaudily costumed "squaws” and "braves” walked among them, selling new cards, Cokes, bags of peanuts, and the like.

“Okay, folks,” came a voice booming over the PA that even Bud could hear out in the dark, "we have an I-6? 16, everybody! And remember: You win on two cards, you win four times the jackpot!”

But Bud turned from that spectacle and instead walked through the dark to a lower building a hundred yards away.

He tried not to notice the high, unkempt grass or the beer cans and coke bottles that lay in it, and he tried not to notice the graffiti defacing the nice new buildings.

Comanches. Once dog soldiers, the most feared of the Plains Indians, a magnificent people, ride a week on pemmican, fight and win a major cavalry engagement against numerically superior and better-equipped foes, then ride another week on pemmican. Now they tended their gambling franchise and watched their customs crumble as their young people were lured away to the cities. Bud shook his head.

He reached his destination, which bore the designation comanche tribal police, and slipped into what could have been any small-town cop shop, a dingy, government-green holding room with a sergeant behind a desk and two or three patrolmen lounging at their desks. All of them wore jeans and baseball hats and carried SIG-Sauers in shoulder holsters.

They were lean, tough young men, none too friendly.

“Howdy,” he said to the sergeant.

“Name's Pewtie, Oklahoma highway patrol.” He showed the badge.

“I'm looking for a lieutenant called Jack Antelope Runs. He around?”

“Oh, you state boys, you always come by when you got a crime to solve and you can't solve it. Gotta be an Indian, don't it?” said the sergeant.

“As a matter of fact, it don't,” said Bud.

“It's gotta be a piece of white trash man killer that makes the average brave look like your Minnie Mouse. But I got a matter Jack might be able to help me on.”

“That's all right, Sarge,” said Antelope Runs from an office, "don't you give Bud no hard time. For a dirty white boy, he's not as bad as some I could name. Howdy, Bud.”

“Jack, ain't you looking swell these days?”

Jack Antelope Runs had a cascade of raven black hair running fiercely free and was wearing a little bolo tie that made the thickness of his neck and the boldness of his face seem even more exaggerated. He was a huge man, approximately 240 pounds, and his eyes beamed black fire.

“Come on in. Bud. Glad you still walking among the palefaces, brother, and not with the wind spirits.”

“Well, old goddamned Lamar Pye tried to show me the way to the wind, I'll tell you.”

Bud walked in and sat down.

“So what's it all about. Bud? Is this a Lamar thang?”

“Yes it is.”

“I figured a Gary Cooper boy like you'd take it personal.”

“Now, Jack, it isn't that way, no sir. I just had an idea I wanted to talk to you about.”

“So, talk, brother, talk.”

“I seem to remember a circular some months back. Isn't there a big Indian gang making a move to take over narco from the bikers? Seems I been bulletinized on that item a few times in the past few months.”

“They call themselves N-D-N-Z,” said Jack.

“Mean and nasty boys, yes sir. Started up in prison. You put our brothers in white prisons and sure enough they going to start up their own gang, to stand against the niggers and the Mexicans and the white boys.”

“It's another thing we're guilty of, yes it is,” said Bud.

“It ain't strictly a Comanche thing, though some of our young men have done the dying. But it's run mainly by Cherokees. You might talk to Larry Eagletalon at the Cherokee tribal complex. He's—”

“Now, actually, I ain't interested in the gang.”

“Except you think maybe Lamar might be profiting from native American hospitality in some jerky tribal backwater?”

“No, it's not even that. One of the hallmarks of N-D-N-Z, as I recall, is a really and truly fine ceremonial tattoo around the left biceps?

No? Yes?”

“Why, yes it is.”

“Now, sir, I got me a funny feeling whoever's doing that work is a real fine tattoo boy. Maybe the best in these parts.”

“The N-D-N-Z braves wouldn't have any less. That's what cocaine money buys these days. Fast cars, white women, bold tattoos.”

“Yes sir. Now, suppose Lamar wanted such a fine tattoo.

Where'd he go? To those goddamned scum joints on Fort Sill Boulevard?

Catch hepatitis B in them places.”

“It don't sound like a Lamar, but you never can tell.”

“But he wants the best. And isn't the boy doing this work the best!”

“So it's said.”

“Where'd such a boy be found?”

“Hmmm,” said Jack Antelope Runs.

“I just want to check it out. See if Lamar been around.

Maybe that's another step. Maybe we stake out. Lamar shows up, our SWAT boys are there, and Lamar goes into the body bag. No one has to know any information came from the Comanche Tribal Police.”

“Bud, for a white boy, maybe you ain't so dumb.”

“I'm just a working cop.”

Antelope Runs thought a minute, and then finally said, "You know what happens to me if I start giving up Indian secrets to white men? The N-D-N-Z boys leave me in a ditch and nobody comes to my funeral and nobody takes care of my widow and my seven little kids.”

“I hear what you're saying.”

“I'll ask around, but that's all I can give you. Understand?”

“I guess I do. Jack. I just hope Lamar doesn't decide to stick up your high stakes bingo game next. He could send a lot of boys to wander among the wind spirits.”

“I hear you, yes I do. But it's a white-red thing. I can't change that. You can't change that.”

“Okay, I see I been wasting your time.”

“Here Bud. Give you a card. Let me write my home phone in case something comes up and you have to get in touch.”

“It ain't—” But Jack Antelope Runs scrawled something and handed it over to Bud, who took it and sullenly walked out.

He felt the laughter of the boys in the squad room as he left. Another white boy bites the dust.

In the parking lot he heard, "N-2. N-2. Last call, N-2.”

He got into his car, feeling old. Another wasted trip.

Then he looked on the card, and at Jack Antelope Run's writing.

It said: Jimmy Ky. Rt. 62, Indiahoma.

It looked deserted. The neon was out, but if you pulled up you could see that, if lit, the sign would have read-under three or four Chinese letters—tattoo key. You'd have to know where to look, though. The parking lot was deserted and the place was way out on Route 62, near Indiahoma.

It was a clapboard shack by the roadside, across from a deserted gas station.

“Nobody's home,” said Richard.

“We'll have to come back.”

“I think tonight's the night. Come on, Richard. Y'all wait here while we take us a lookiesee.”

Lamar got out, and bent to check his .45. Richard heard mysterious clickings. Then Lamar walked up to the door and knocked hard.

Time passed. The wind whistled through the high grass out back. Above, the stars seemed to fizzle and pop like silent fireworks—the sky was the record of a huge explosion. Violence was everywhere, or at least the hint of it.

There wasn't a sound to be heard anywhere in the universe except for the persistence of the wind.

Eventually definite shuckings and shiftings were heard, and deep inside the house a light came on. The door opened a crack.

“Go away,” somebody whispered.

“We closed.”

The door slammed shut, but Lamar caught it perfectly with the flat of his foot, his full force behind it, and knocked it back open. In reddish light there stood a scrawny Asian, about sixty. He looked mottled, as if suffering from some skin disease.

“You Jimmy Ky?” Lamar demanded.

“Jimmy Ky no here no more. He go away. Go far away. I Jimmy Ky's father.”

“My ass,” said Lamar.

“You're Jimmy Ky. Got a goddamn proposition for you.”

Lamar stepped inside and Richard followed.

“I heard you the best,” said Lamar.

“Well, I want the best.”

The Asian looked at him, betraying no fear. Richard now saw that the mottling on his face was tattooing, but of a sort he'd never imagined: It was lustrous, dark, vivid, incredibly detailed, and ominous. The old man was dark blue and red, his face gone in a kaleidoscope.

“You do that yourself?”

“My master Horimono.”

“Well it's pretty goddamned good. You that good?”

Lamar's aggression filled the air; he was like the lion confronting a goat. But the goat was strangely unafraid; the old man just looked at Lamar without much emotional investment.

“I his apprentice still,” he finally said.

“Show him, Richard.”

Richard gave him the drawing of the lion. Jimmy Ky looked at it for a long moment.

“It's shit,” he said.

“Why you want this trash? Go town.

Lots of people in town do this trash.”

“No, no,” said Richard, "that's just from your Asian perspective. This is done from the Western perspective, and it's stylized in a different method. It has to look Western, it can't have that exotic—”

“I can do. Best! Make it roar. But it trash,” said Jimmy Ky, bluntly.”

“It ain't trash,” said Lamar.

“Look at the way he got the fire and the pride of that lion. Look at that bull neck. That's a goddamned piece of art. We got money.”

“How much?”

“How much you need?”

“Ah, for that, forty-five hundred dollars. You wan, you pay.”

“Four thousand bucks! Ain't no tattoo worth that kind of money.”

Jimmy Ky looked at him shrewdly.

“How bad you want it, mister? You no want it, you go away now. I go back to sleep.”

“Goddamn,” said Lamar.

“Seems like a robbery.”

“Gotta pay for the best,” said the old man.

“Shit,” said Lamar.

“How long?”

“Maybe twelve hours. Start now, be done tomorrow afternoon.

Then you go lie down for about a week. Get drunk.

Infection set in, lots of pain. You got want it. For every color, you suffer. Fever, sweats, lots of agony. No fun at all.

How bad you want it?”

“Shit,” said Lamar.

“I can get through any goddamned thing.”

He turned to Richard.

“You and Ruta Beth, you park across the street at that gas station, out of sight. You stay there as backup. You tell O’Dell to come on in.

He's working shotgun. Got that?”

“Yes, Lamar.”

“Okay, old man. Let's get to work. You make me a lion, okay.”

“Hokay, Joe. Can do.”

The old man actually seemed happy.

Bud missed it the first time. There were no lights on. It was just a deserted clapboard shack on the way to Indiahoma on a bleak stretch of highway. But when he'd gone on into Indiahoma, he realized he'd gone too far. He turned around and headed back. He seemed to course through inky darkness. The roast beef in his stomach hadn't settled yet.

He was half a minute from pulling that goddamned .380 out from under his belt buckle where it had grown into a massive problem. What on earth did he need three guns for?

Two was enough for any man.

But then he saw it, standing stark against the bleak prairie under some runty trees. He pulled halfway into the parking lot, gave it a once over. It seemed completely quiet and abandoned. There were no cars in the parking lot, and he could see a neon sign that wasn't on. But up near the edge of one window, he could make out just a sliver of light.

What the hell, he thought, feeling ridiculous. I've come this far, I may as well go all the way so the evening won't be a total loss.

Richard looked at Ruta Beth in the low light. He could hear her breathe, see the darkness in her eyes. He actually felt pity move through him. Imagine, a child like that coming upon the murder of her parents.

“How are you doing, Ruta Beth?” he asked.

She fixed him with a narrow glare.

“What the hell do you care?”

He felt her pain.

“Ruta Beth, I know how hard life can be sometimes. I was thinking how if you ever needed anyone to talk to, why, I'd be ready and will—” She recoiled.

“You ain't got no romance in mind?”

“Ah, Ruta Beth, why—” She drew back her little fist, knotted into a clot.

“You put your hands on me, Richard, and I swear, you will be sucking teeth for a month. And that before Lamar -gits done with you!”

“Ruta Beth, I only meant—”

“Shut up,” she hissed. A truck pulled into the parking lot across the way.

A man in it waited for a second, then got out and just stood there.

“Can you see?”

“Big guy, cowboy hat, that's all.”

“A cop?”

“I don't know. Not in uniform. Do they have plainclothes detectives way the hell out here?”

“I don't know,” said Richard, who had no idea.

“I doubt it,” said Ruta Beth, to herself mainly, since she expected no sensible answer from Richard.

“Maybe if he come from the city. But he come from the other direction, from Indiahoma. He's probably some big goddamn brave, in a big truck the government bought for him, just out for a cruise. A chief or some such shit.”

“Why would he stop here?”

“Maybe he knows Jimmy Ky.”

“He ain't a cop,” said Ruta Beth.

“How could a cop have found this place. Coincidences like this don't happen in the universe. Not no how.”

They watched as the big man went up toward the house.

It wasn't the pain. Pain didn't frighten Lamar; it was the helplessness and the pain. He lay flat on his back, under a big light.

His chest had been shaved and scrubbed with astringent until it stung.

Now what he saw was so weird: In the back room, he saw a one-eyed giant. That's what it looked like, at any rate. Really, it was only the old slope, bent over him with the needle, his eye swollen huge and bloodshot by the lens it wore. It was an operation, for now the surgeon's latex gloves were slippery with blood.

“You gotta lotta blood in you,” the doctor laughed. It connected with something somewhere in Lamar's previous life, but he couldn't say what or when.

The only reality was the needle. It hummed and tapped as Jimmy Ky leaned over and worked it. Not a big pain, like the thrust of a blade or the channeling of a bullet, but a sharp, brief flash of explosion on his body, enough to make him jump or leap each time.

“No move, goddamn. Make you look like kitty cat, not lion.”

Lamar tried to ride it. Eleven more hours of this shit?

And this wasn't even the bad stuff. This was the easy part: doing the base colors, the larger shapes. The hard work would come later, when the little man got down to details and moved in with the tiniest of needles for the little drips of color that gave the piece life. And he was a careful craftsman, unmoved by the pain he caused his subject. He never looked hard at Lamar, but only at the design.

Lamar was afraid to breathe. He took strength from one thing and one thing alone: his cousin O’Dell, Baby O’Dell, sitting with the implacable patience and loyalty of the retarded, watching and waiting and playing sentry at the door to the back room.

It was so goddamn dark! Ruta Beth couldn't see a thing, The truck was just a truck, the man just a man, standing there, as if deciding. When he finally moved, he walked toward the door and there was something familiar in the gait. Where did she recognize it from?

“H-he's going in,” came Richard's sing-songy voice.

“What should we do?”

“Shut up,” she barked, but herself thinking, What should I do?

She watched as the man approached the door, paused again, adjusted his hat as if he were stepping into a fancy restaurant. He was a big guy, well packed with bulk and girth, but no damned youngster. Something familiar to him, goddammit.

She reached under the car seat and pulled out her ski mask. She pulled it over her face, feeling the scratch of wool, the stink of her own sweat, its warmth, its closeness.

Her mouth tasted like pennies.

“It's nothing,” said Richard wanly.

“He's just a cowboy.

He wants to get tattooed. He's some oil-field hand. He wants "I Love Susie-Q' on his biceps, that's all.”

“Shut up, you pussy boy,” she said. She slid Lamar's cut down Browning 12-gauge semiauto from the back seat, pushing the safety off. Her hands flew to her waist, where she'd tucked Lamar's .45 SIG.

“It's all right,” said Richard.

“Please make it be all right.”

The man stepped in, closed the door behind him. There was a glorious, blessed moment of silence.

“Whew,” said Richard.

“It's all—” Then the sound of shots, lots of them, fast and wild, and from where they sat they could see the gun flashes illuminate the darkness of the tattoo house.

O’Dell stirred into action, yanking a shotgun from somewhere, but without willing it Bud had drawn his Colt Commander from the high hip holster and hit the thumb safety, and he and O’Dell fired almost simultaneously.

The flash from the gun muzzles filled the room with incandescence; the snakes seethed and pounced in its blinding whiteness. Bud was not hit and did not know if he had hit O’Dell—he doubted it, as he had pointed, not aimed, and had fired with one hand—and without a conscious thought anywhere in his head, he jacked the trigger seven more times, pumping .45s at O’Dell in a burst that sounded like a tommy gun. And like a tommy gun, it was evidently inaccurate, for Bud saw clouds of plaster flying, large chunks of masonry ripped up, the flashes blotting details from his vision. Then the gun came up dry. Bud cursing, for only an idiot shoots a gun empty without counting shots to reload with one in the spout and less vulnerability.

He dived into the room, ripping a fresh mag off the pouch on his belt, slamming it home, and thumbing off the slide release to prime the pistol once again. He came to rest behind a counter that now atomized into shreds before his very eyes. He saw the glass liquify as buckshot pulverized it, and the stuff blew into his face, knocking him back, blinking. But he felt no pain, and in response fired three fast times at the gun flash, receiving on the middle shot the impression of a yowl. O’Dell had disappeared. Smoke hung in the air. There was a moment of silence.

Then a small, blue Asian man came crashing from the open doorway. Bud tracked and nearly fired at him but didn't and instead redirected himself toward the opening itself, to see the low, hunched form of Lamar Pye bent in a combat crouch, good two-hand hold, but apparently unable to see Bud.

Bud couldn't see his sights, it was so dark, so he just put the back of the pistol against what little he could see of Lamar and fired three more times, fast, reloading his last45 mag with one shot left in the chamber, just as he knew he should.

He also understood that in firing he'd given away his position. If Lamar wasn't hit mortally, he'd return fire in just a second, so Bud slithered to his left, coming hard against a wall, then backed spastically until he found what appeared to be a door, and slipped back into it.

Flashes lit the darkness. Both Lamar and O’Dell fired, O’Dell obviously not dead at all, maybe not even hit; and the counter behind which Bud had cowered simply evaporated as Lamar's .45s and O’Dell's buckshot remodeled it. He heard Lamar's pistol lock back dry and another sound-' hollow, like someone blowing in a wand—seemed to suggest that O’Dell was reloading as well. He could see no part of Lamar, but he put the pistol before him in that segment of darkness out of which had sprung O’Dell's bursts and, convinced he saw a shape, squeezed off what he meant to be but two or three shots. But in shooting he banished the sudden demons of fear that had come from nowhere to tell him what a fool he'd been, how he'd walked in here without backup, without even a radio, and so he could not stop shooting until the gun was empty.

Again, he thought he heard a cry, as he dumped the Colt, and his hand sped to and ripped his big new Beretta from the shoulder holster.

“Waharrrrr, Waharrrrr” came a gurgling cry from the dark. It was O’Dell, his voice veined with hurt.

“Goddamn it, boy, you stay put,” cried Lamar in return, equally anguished.

“Who the fuck are you, mister? What the hell, you ain't no cop, we don't mean you no goddamned harm.”

Bud was silent. All he had to do was open his mouth and Lamar would have a source of noise for him to bring fire on.

“Wahh-arrrrrrrr. Mama. Wah-marrrrrrrrrr, pweezze. Mama.”

“O’Dell, you stay down. Daddy come git you in a bit. Where's that goddamn car?”

A car? More of them? The criminals had backup. The cop didn't.

Shit, Bud thought.

Who the fuck was he?

Where had he come from?

Why was it happening like this?

Lamar hurt every damn place, and he felt so goddamned naked, his shirt off, blood all over his chest. But what had him worried was O’Dell.

O’Dell sounded hit bad. He'd never heard that tone in the boy's voice.

It was so pitiful, so animal. O’Dell, hurting. It just filled Lamar with rage.

If only he could clear his mind and think, or if only that goddamned Ruta Beth would get here. Where the hell was she?

“Wharrr?” came O’Dell's quavery voice.

“You shut up, O’Dell, we be out of here in a jif,” he called back.

He had one goddamn magazine left, he'd fired the other two. Seven .45s. Where was goddamn Ruta Beth?

His breath came in wracking sobs. The room was so dark. He could see nothing.

Lamar looked about. How stupid that he was in the light and his enemy in the dark. Kind of goddamned mistake that could get you killed.

He slipped back in the room, jumped up, and with a light tap of his gun muzzle shattered the huge light over the table. The space plunged into darkness.

How long had it been?

Maybe thirty seconds?

Where was goddamn Ruta Beth?

He slid back to the door, edging out. He could see nothing.

The guy was somewhere in the back of the shop, amid the destroyed counters that had just exploded as O’Dell's buckshot had blasted them.

But where? Had he found cover? Was he dead himself already? Lamar couldn't see a thing, and he could hear nothing over O’Dell's labored breathing.

Lamar tried to clear his head. The main thing was to get out. Fuck this boy, let him live or die, but get out, go back to the farm and regroup. He wondered if the sounds had carried. All that gunfire in the little room in so short a time, the stink of gunpowder in the air.

Oh, who are you, you motherfucker.

“Who are you, goddammit?” Lamar bellowed to silence.

Smart boy, wasn't making a move.

“Wharr?” came O’Dell's wet voice. Then: "MAMA!”

See mama? Yes, he'd promised he'd take Baby O’Dell to his mother's grave and he'd never made good on it. How could he, with all the goddamned cops in the world on his ass?

Then, as his eyes adjusted to the dark, Lamar noticed something. There, just ahead of his eyes, light switches.

Turn on the lights, Lamar. Put this motherfucker in the lights, and kill him.

“Marrrrr,” whispered Baby O’Dell.

Bud was squashed so low to the floor he could hardly move. The darkness was absolute. He could hear O’Dell moaning and breathing harshly, but since Lamar had turned out the lights, nothing from him.

He tried to gauge where the door back to the tattooing room had been.

That's where Lamar would be right now, waiting for him to make a sound.

Or would he? Maybe Lamar was creeping toward him even now, to get close and cut open his windpipe.

No! He'd make noise moving across all that glass on the floor. There's no noise, only the wheezing and moaning of O’Dell. Maybe they're just waiting for their pals.

Suddenly the lights came on.

Bud blinked as his eyes filled with dazzle. A shot cracked out from the now-visible Lamar, but it hit a shard of wood blown loose from the counter, and danced away.

All Bud could see was that big gun in Lamar's hands, not part of Lamar but only the gun, the long-slide .45 gripped tightly. Time seemed to slow down, as if it were an accordion slowly being stretched.

Bud thought. Front sight, and fired.

Lamar's hand exploded in a burst of pink mist and the45 fell away.

Lamar slipped and fell, unarmed, fear on his face.

Front sight, Bud thought.

He tried to take his time, that is, to shoot in two-tenths of a second rather than one-tenth, placing the front sight on Lamar's face, now distended and swollen with fear as Lamar lay helpless before Bud's gun sights Baby Dell hurt so.

Red juicy wet mushy everywhere! HURTY! Clicky BOOM go arm, BOOM go chest, BOOM go tummy, BOOM BOOM BOOM.

Marrrrr?

Mar cry?

No Mar!

Bad man hurt Mar.

No, bad man. No hurt Mar. Mar Baby's friend.

No, man!

Bad man, HURT bad man!

As Bud fired, the world around him suddenly lost its stability as a cloud of dust showered down upon him.

He ducked, feeling a terrible sting in his leg, and turned.

O’Dell stood behind the counter. Part of his jaw had been blown away; Bud could see tiny teeth, the tongue squirming like a mouse. His eyes were wild and insane. He held the shotgun that he'd just fired at Bud in one hand, as the other was useless, soaked in blood that ran in torrents from a high chest hit.^ O’Dell pulled the trigger again but nothing happened.

He started to walk toward Bud, raising the shotgun like a club.

Bud fired six times, aiming at center mass. Each shot tore a hole in O’Dell, and more blood spurted wetly down his shirt, but still he came.

Bud fired seven more times, the 9-mm hollowpoints punching at O’Dell, who halted, went to his knees, and with a look of utter agony climbed back to his feet.

“ODEEEEEEL,” he could hear Lamar shout.

Bud aimed at the forehead and blew a big chunk of it out.

He aimed at the eye and blew a blue hole just beneath it. He aimed at the throat and tore it open.

The Beretta locked dry.

O’Dell was on him, that huge weight, the rancid breath, blood spraying from the ruined mouth, the sound of breathing labored and wet and desperate like an animal's. O’Dell's big hands were on Bud's neck, but the medium of their grappling was liquid. Blood was everywhere, slippery and almost comical, as Bud squirmed for purchase under the huge man. Then he remembered his belly gun.

Bud got the .380 out from his shirt, not even remembering pulling it, and stuck it under O’Dell's armpit and squeezed the trigger. He fired and fired, until at last O’Dell slumped against him, slack.

Bud pulled himself out and stood.

Lamar had climbed to his feet. He held his left hand in his right, another bouquet of roses that was blood.

“You,” said Lamar.

“You goddamned Bud Pewtie. You done killed a baby.”

Bud aimed at Lamar's head—amazed and impressed that Lamar didn't flinch or cower, so intense was his hate—and pulled the trigger.

The gun didn't fire.

He looked at it. He'd shot it empty against O’Dell's bulk.

In the next instant, a huge billow of dust flew into the room, and the thunder of collision mixed with the roar of an automobile engine. A car literally stove through the front of the shop, blasting glass and wood everywhere.

In the driver's seat, a figure in a black hood leveled a shotgun at Bud, who dropped just a fraction of a second before the gun fired. He felt the sting of another pellet, this one lodging in his scalp. Bud thrust himself backward down the stairwell, felt himself float in darkness, and then hit the steps with the sensation of a beating delivered by six cons, which took the breath out of him and filled his eyes with stars.

He rolled over and slithered deep into the darkness, totally animal now, intent only on escape.

But no one followed him down the steps.

Instead he heard the roar of the car as it backed out, presumably with Lamar now aboard, and then howled away.

Bud listened to the sudden silence.

He felt chilled, and missed his sons. He wasn't sure if he'd done right or wrong. He yearned to call Jen or Holly or have his old life back.

He began to shiver.

Richard had never heard anyone howl in such pure animal pain before.

“AAAAAAAH!” Lamar cried, bucking and sobbing in the back seat, holding his crippled and bloody hand. There was blood everywhere, all over the seats, on the sideboards, everywhere.

Meanwhile, curled in total concentration, her face grim and unyielding, Ruta Beth drove mindlessly onward.

“Slow down, goddammit,” yelled Lamar once through his pain, when he thought she was going too fast.

But if they expected squad cars rushing their way, the howl of sirens, ambulances, helicopters, whatever, it didn't happen. They drove on through darkness.

“We've got to find him help,” said Richard.

“He'll bleed to death.”

Again, through his pain, Lamar screamed out.

“You shut up, Richard, goddammit. It ain't bleeding no more. It's only pain. I kin git through pain. Ruta Beth, you git us home, you hear?”

“He'll bleed to death,” shrieked Richard.

“It is bleeding.”

“Shut up, Richard,” said Ruta Beth, "let Daddy decide.”

Lamar tried to lie still but the pain was intense.

“Should we dump the car, Lamar?” asked Richard.

“Maybe they have a description.”

“And what then, you moron. They'll find it and trace it and beat us to the farm. I don't think that sonofabitch got a good lookiesee, he was so goddamned busy jumping down those goddamned stairs. He didn't have no time to get no read on the license plate, tell you that. Oh—” A sudden spurt of pain seemed to jack through him; he tensed and wailed.

It seemed to come like that, in spurts; or when they took a corner and the centrifugal force spun blood toward his wound and the pain flamed again.

“Daddy, you sure you're all right?”

“Just drive, goddamn it, Ruta Beth. Where'n the hell was you? We's in there shooting it out with that Johnny for a hour before you came in.

Whyn't you jump him in the goddamn lot?”

“Lamar, baby, we didn't know he was a cop. He looked like a cowboy, in a pickup truck, that's all. Then all hell's breakin' loose and Richard and I are trying to figure out what the hell to do. So I just finally goose her, figuring any other way, either you or he shoots us as we come through the doorway. Couldn't a been more than a minute.”

“Felt like a goddamn day. Oh, that fucker was good, shoots me in the goddamned hand.”

There was a silence.

Then Ruta Beth said, "What about the baby?”

“The baby is dead. That goddamned Smokey must have hit” him fifty goddamned times. I never saw a boy soak up so much lead and keep a-going. Goddamn, O’Dell, he was a man, O’Dell was—AWWWWWWWW.”

A spark of pain erupted somewhere inside him. Then he was quiet.

Ruta Beth began to cry.

“Poor O’Dell,” she said, "he never meant no harm to nobody. If the world had left him alone, heda left it alone.

Oh, that's so sad. He never got to see his mama's grave neither. Oh, Lamar, oh Daddy, that's so wrong what they done to him.”

Richard just looked out at the dark Oklahoma country side as it flowed by, more emptiness than he'd ever seen before in his life.

“How that fucker got there, that's what I want to know.

How did he know we'd be there?”

“Maybe it was just bad luck,” said Richard.

“No luck is that bad, Richard. It was that goddamned Bud Pewtie, that trooper sergeant. Fuck has more lives on him than a goddamn black cat.

I blowed him away twice at that farm and still he man tracks me down, that fucker.

How'd he do it? How'd he know? He some kind of Dick Tracy or something'? Is he goddamn Columbo? Is he the Pink Panther? What the fuck? How'd he know?”

The question hung in the silence.

Lamar lay back, rocking gently.

Then he sat back up.

“Only one goddamned way a cop know anything these days. Someone drops a fucking dime to buy some time off.

You got that gun, Richard? That heavy one?”

“Yes I do, Lamar.”

“Well, give her here.”

Awkwardly, Richard handed it to Lamar, who sat up in the seat to take it. He cocked it and pointed it at Richard's head.

“God, Lamar, you—”

“You sure you ain't been talking to anybody, boy?

You sure? I ought to blow your head off just to be sure.”

“Please Lamar. Oh, please, please. I swear to you. When would I? How could I? I didn't even know we'd end up there. Who knew? You wait, the papers will say why he's there.”

“Ahh, it ain't that. You don't have the guts to betray me,” Lamar said. He uncocked the Smith and chucked it on the seat. Then he lay back again.

“Goddamn, it hurts,” he said.

“Oh, Christ, it hurts so bad. That goddamned Bud Pewtie!”

Bud had no sense of time. He hid in the basement for what felt like hours and hours. His scalp wound began to sting unbearably and would not go away, but at the same time his leg wound throbbed; the second was somehow a deeper and more troubling pain. At one point he touched his face and realized it had been ripped to shreds. The vision in one eye was blurred, as if he had a stone the size of a cinder block in it.

His mind blacked out into shock, but he never really lost consciousness.

He remembered the last camping trip, in the Wichita Mountain Preserve.

It would have been about 1991. It was the last time they were really a family. Russ was a freshman and little Jeff would have been in the seventh grade, already having troubles, grades that just weren't happening and serious self-doubts. Bud remembered wishing he could reach the boy, cut through whatever ailed him, could put his hands on him, and say, Hey, it'll be all right.

Bud lost himself in this world for quite a bit: he remembered how green the world had seemed up there, how pure.

They camped in a Nimrod that he'd pulled behind his truck, high up on a ridge, with much of the state spread out before him, and the air so clean it almost ached to breathe it in.

He'd been so happy. They'd loved each other so much, even if no one had said a thing about it. He remembered the shouts of the kids and Jen's pleasure in being out of the house, and the sense of the world being forgiving and wide with possibility.

Then he saw the light.

The beam caught him and he blinked. Behind it he made out crouched shapes, the Weaver position, shooting arm straight, support arm locked underneath, the posture somewhat bending the body shape.

“Don't you twitch, mister, goddammit. Show me your hands.”

“I don't think I can move ’em.”

“You better move ’em, goddammit.”

Bud brought his hands into the light.

“Who are you?”

“Sergeant Bud Pewtie, Oklahoma Highway Patrol. I've been hit.”

-"You got a shield?”

“Yes, sir. Don't you do nothing tricky now with that gun.

I'm going to reach in my pocket and get my shield out. I'm unarmed. I mean, my guns are all upstairs. You got medics on the way?”

“The whole world is on the way. That's goddamned O’Dell Pye lying up there with a mess of holes in him.”

“He took some killing, I'll say,” said Bud, getting the badge out, opening the folio to show it. Another light came on from the top of the steps.

“Bud? Jesus Christ, ain't you a sight. He's one of ours, Sheriff.

Medic. MEDIC! Get them medics down here, we got an officer down.

Goddammit, ASAP! Get ’em DOWN HERE NOW!”

The trooper came to him first and asked him where he was hit, but in seconds two medics had arrived. They gave him the quick once-over and determined that he hadn't taken any solid, life-threatening hits.

“But you sure are cut to hell and gone,” one of them said, and Bud thought he recognized the man from various turnpike accidents.

“Looks like you got a face full of glass slivers. And goddamn, I can see something stuck under your skin up top your head.”

“That's the one that hurts.”

“Boy, I'll bet she do. Trooper. Goddamn, I'll bet she do.”

The medics got him on a stretcher and a team of sheriff's deputies and troopers labored to get him up the stairs, out of the cellar.

He was pulled into a jubilee of lights. More cars and trucks were arriving even as they wheeled his gantry toward the ambulance, and now a van of FBI agents pulled up. A TV truck had already shown.

“Hold on,” somebody said.

“You Pewtie?”

“Yes sir,” said Bud.

“Lon Perry, sheriff, Jackson County. Trooper, I can't have you boys turning my county into a goddamned shooting gallery when some goddamned undercover op goes dead-dick on you,pecially since you ain't even had the goddamned courtesy to tell me you's working my territory.”

“You're out of line, Sheriff,” a trooper sergeant barked.

“He's hurt, he just got the second most wanted man in the state and probably put a goddamned hole in the first most wanted, and no citizen even got scratched. You back off.”

There were heated words, but soon another man came over and separated the warring sides. It was Colonel Supenski, looking like he'd just been dragged out of bed.

“Goddamn, Bud, you get around, don't you?”

Bud didn't feel much like answering any questions. He just said, "What the hell took everybody so long to get here? We had us a goddamned World War. Nobody called it in?”

“Not a goddamned soul. Bud. Nobody to call it in.

Jimmy Ky crawled out of the bushes after Lamar and pals departed, waited ten minutes, tried to call, found out the goddamned car had torn out the phone lines, and walked two miles into town to tell the sheriff's department. Lamar, goddamn his soul, got away.”

“Damn,” said Bud.

“I know I hit him, I seen. blood. I seen him drop his piece. I hurt him bad.”

“That you did, Bud. Wilie, bring ’em here. Bud, take a look at your trophies.”

A highway patrol technician came over with a plastic bag. It seemed to contain two grisly pickles, each somewhat tattered at one end.

“What the hell are those?” Bud wanted to know.

-"Lamar's fingers. His last and second-to-last left hand digits. You shot his fingers off. Bud. You killed his cousin, you stopped his tattoo, and you shot off two fingers. Say you done a hell of a night's work, Bud.”