The Last Call

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Where’s my money,” Archie Carpin asked me. There was a gun in his hand, pointed down at the mud.

The two dogs were out there, growling and splashing and snapping at each other.

“Why don’t you ask Julie,” I said.

“She ain’t talkin’,” he said. “She must think I’m gonna kill her after I’ve got it.”

“I wonder why she would possibly think that?”

“Smart fellah, ain’t ya?”

“Not so smart,” I said. “Looks like you’re holding all the cards.”

“I’m holding most of the cards,” he said. “I’ve got the kid and I’ve got Julie. I’ve got Jacob over there covering your partner.”

I looked. It was true. In the light of the stables I could see Hank’s hands coming up into the air. His backpack was gone. Jake stood behind him, gun raised. Also, I didn’t see Dingo.

“I’m only missing one thing,” Carpin said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The money.”

“What money?” I asked.

“Where’s the goddamned money?” Archie Carpin screamed.

There was a sudden screech. One of the two animals fighting out there in the darkness and the mud just experienced the sensation of teeth sinking down into throat, cutting off its last howl. Either Dingo or the mastiff was dead.

I took two steps forward.

His gun swung up, pointed at me.

I laughed. I laughed out loud at him as the lightning played and danced across the sky.

“What’s so goddamned funny, asshole?” he yelled.

“You. You and your stupid horses and your screwed-up family history and your pathetic control games. Money is nothing!”

“If it’s nothing, then maybe you wouldn’t mind handing it over,” he said, and grinned.

“I can’t,” I said. “You idiot. You’ve already got it.”

He looked around, then back up at me.

“I don’t see it,” he said. His smile had taken on the aspects of lunacy. His eyebrows were arched and I could see his teeth.

“That’s because it’s out of sight,” I told him.

“Where?” Carpin said. “Tell me, or your buddy there gets it.”

I looked over at Hank, his hands in the air, a gun pointed at his head. Jake grinned at me, the dark gap where one of his incisors had been lent him the appearance of ignorant evil.

I looked toward Hank, caught a split-second of his face in that perfectly illuminated world inside a lightning flash. He was smiling as well.

I remembered. The nitrates!

“Where?” Carpin shouted.

“Right there, you stupid piece of shit,” I said, and pointed to the ground at Hank’s feet.

“The manure pile?” Carpin laughed. “You gotta be shittin’ me.”

“Not the manure pile,” I said. “Under it. Way under it. The old tornado shelter.”

Back in High School I did a brief stint on the Junior Varsity football team. In those days we had coaches who weren’t afraid to rub our noses in the dirt when we screwed up, and if you happened to get on their bad side… look out.

I got on a coach’s bad side once, right in his office. Back then my mouth was a lot faster, sort of like a pistol with a hair trigger. So when I told the coach that maybe he ought to worry a little less about my lack of team spirit and a little more about the rumors of him and Miss Puckett-the young substitute teacher who was being handed around-and about how his wife might react when she found out, the white-headed old pug came unglued.

He stood up from his chair so quickly and violently that a lynch-pin underneath it fell out and the whole swivel seat and backrest fell over and rattled on the waxed tile floor. He never even noticed. His face was fiery purplish-red, the color of a freshly pulled beet.

We almost came to blows that day.

That’s what Carpin’s face reminded me of in the light from the stables and the intermittent lightning. His face was red, just as Coach Looney’s had been.

“What?” he screamed. “All along? All this time? While those two idiots were chasing her all over?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Ain’t it a riot?”

Jake started laughing, the laugh of a dullard who has stumbled across some simple yet profound truth.

“I fucking believe you,” Carpin said. “It’s the only thing that makes any kind of sense. You know why, right? ‘Cause it makes no fucking sense, that’s why it makes sense.”

“Good,” I said. “Your money is on your property. We can go then.”

I took a step toward Hank and Jake.

Carpin’s gun belched flame. A clot of mud leapt up from the ground and swatted me. He’d fired into the ground to my side.

“Not so fast,” he said. “I can’t let you people live. You know too much. You know about the still. You know about the kid. Besides that…”

”What?” I asked.

“I’ve been waiting to do this since I first talked to you on the phone.” He raised his gun, straight-armed, and pointed it at my face.

“Good girl,” Hank yelled.

There was a blur and belching fire. I felt hot air: a bullet whizzing past my cheek just as Carpin’s arm came down under the dark mass of some beast.

Dingo!

They were on the ground for a moment, rolling in the mud. Dingo’s teeth tore through wet cloth down into flesh and bone.

Motion to my right! I snapped a glance.

Jake moved his gun off of Hank toward Dingo and Carpin.

“Get it off me! Kill it-KILL IT!” Carpin screamed as he flailed at Dingo with his other arm. In the night, in the mud and rain, in the orange glow from the stable lights and the blue lightning the two of them looked like one single alien thing suffering its final death throes. Like John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’.

“I cain’t, boss. Ah might hitch’ oo!”

Hank moved, but Jake brought the gun back to cover him.

Hank froze.

At that moment Freddie walked up between us, raised his gun and fired down at the earth.

And then the heavens opened.

Beauty can be many things. For me beauty was the mud and earth moving under my feet and an invisible hand forcing me forward headlong; it was a too-bright eruption of light around from behind me; it was objects moving around me like petals of an unfolding flower.

Beauty was an explosion. And for that briefest of instants I completely understood something-understood it with the perfectness of crystal clarity, so thoroughly got the essence of it that it unraveled before my flight was done. I understood the soul of my friend Hank Sterling. I knew what it looked like.

Then the back of my head encountered mud and the rest of my body flipped over. The air above my eyes was alive with particles. There were long splinters of wood from the inside of support beams and two-by-fours and they were all flying, migrating outward from the center of the blast. There were large nails and shards of glass and whole saddles, moving, drifting away into the night.

My ears weren’t working, by my eyes saw everything, captured it all.

And the lightning dared not strike.

I rolled over.

My hand came to rest on the gun in my waistband. I pulled it out. What good was a gun when the world was going ka-blooey?

I pushed down against the mud. Got up on one knee, shakily.

Somebody else was trying to get up as well.

Freddie.

He turned towards me. Half of his face was gone.

“Freddie,” I said. “You ain’t gonna make it.”

His eyes stared into mine for an instant in the glow of the fire that had once been some horse stables. I thought he was going to say something-he certainly looked for a moment like a fellow who had something on his mind-then he fell over, face first into the mud and never moved again.

I stood up, reeling.

A hand closed around my ankle.

It was almost too much like the dream.

Hank, I thought, but when I looked down, it was Archie Carpin. A long, tapering piece of wood was imbedded in his mouth. The point of it had exited well past his right ear and he was strangling on his own blood. Also, he was trying to talk.

The fingers on my ankle thrummed out a rhythm for a moment and then went still.

Both Hank and Jake were trying to get to their feet.

Jake’s gun came up, pointed right at Hank.

I was cold inside. I’d never known such cold.

Gun up, I pulled the trigger without thinking. Just looked and then-

Crack!

— a spray of blood and bone in another herky-jerky lightning flash.

Jake began to fall amid another flash

Crack!

— and there was fire in the rain, leaping from the muzzle of Jake’s gun, then gone.

Hank jerked like he’d been hit by a charging bull, fell back into the water with a splash.

The hand around my ankle thrummed again, almost as if it was trying to tap out a message in Morse.

I lifted my leg and stomped it, once. Twice.

There were lights, suddenly, cutting across the nightmarish landscape.

A pickup truck. It roared to a stop, slewing mud everywhere.

The front door of the Dodge Ram came open. A cowboy hat with a plastic rain cover emerged. Sheriff Thornton.

I didn’t wait. I got in motion.

Around the manure pile and the concrete chimney, the next lightning flash revealed Jake’s body. I sailed over it, my feet splashing into water.

“Bill!” Sheriff Thornton called out. I ignored it.

Hank was face down in the mud and the runoff. His face was underwater.

I grabbed him by the shirt, took one shoulder and rolled him over.

At least his eyes weren’t staring at me like

— the nightmare-

like he was maybe dead already.

There was a hole in his side right through his ribcage. I turned him again. No exit wound.

His eyes came open. He smiled. His mouth opened. Water and blood spilled out.

“Nice”-cough-“shootin’,”-cough-“Tex.”

“Goddammit. Shut up, Hank. If you talk you’re likely to die.”

He half-nodded, slowly.

“Bill!” The voice, again. Not as loud. Insistent, though. Trying to reach me. It was Agent Cranford.

I ignored it, pulled Hank over to the Sheriff’s truck. Opened the passenger door.

There was a shape beside me. I didn’t know who. Didn’t care. “See to Julie and the kid,” I said, and gestured in the direction of the house.

By the time I got Hank loaded into the back seat, I noticed that the rain was beginning to slack off.

“You’re not gonna die, you sonuvabitch,” I told him. I guess I was a little loud.

His eyes were following me. I didn’t want to look at them. How things like that almost always seemed to go: if I looked into his eyes, he’d die. Superstitious of me, I knew, but I didn’t care.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

Dock had said that.

I shivered. It was cold and I was shaking.

“What?” I almost screamed it at him.

“I ain’t gonna die,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. Hurts…like…hell. But I ain’t gonna give up yet.”