The Last Call

CHAPTER FIVE

“Well. I will just be damned,” Hank said.

“Yeah,” I nodded in agreement.

Julie was all done and just sitting there, sipping on her beer.

I could tell by Hank's serious demeanor that he'd arrived at some important thought or decision. A crossroads, as it were.

“You tell her all about me, Bill?”

“Just that you’re handy in a tight spot, that you’re a client of mine, and that you’re alright. That’s about it.”

The toaster oven timer dinged. My stomach was doing little whirly-gigs, and the smell of toast, butter and cheese had become maddening.

We took time out for Hank to fix us up a plate each and a tall glass of iced tea. The tea tasted like it was a couple of days old, but at least it was sweet.

“Okay,” he said when he was back at the table with us. “So who are Jake and Freddie?”

Julie sat back in her chair. She didn’t seem very interested in Hank’s toaster oven cheese sandwiches. Mine, however, didn’t stand a chance.

“They’re Lefty’s and Carl’s sons. They’re about as stupid as a couple of snipe, but they’re like hound dogs. They never give up.”

“When was the last time you saw them?” Hank asked.

Julie turned to look at me. There was a strange look in her eye. Something she didn’t want to say.

“Better tell him,” I said.

She reached out, wrapped her fingers around her bottle of beer on the table and drained the last quarter of it in one long gulp.

“About an hour ago,” she said.

“What?” Hank and I chimed in at the same instant.

“Following us from Hank’s mall.”

Hank and I were on our feet.

My life is not very exciting. I don’t like excitement. I don’t even watch exciting movies. I like things nice and calm. You put in your day of work, you watch the sun fade from the sky and you draw your dollar. But sometimes you just have to move quickly.

Hank and I were moving before we could think.

He jumped up and locked the back door with a flick of his wrist.

I was into the front room and dodging stacks of old, dust-coated thirty-three rpm records and nineteenth-century legal volumes to get to the front door.

“Lock it, Bill,” Hank called out from the kitchen.

“Yeah,” I said.

The living room had two large windows, one of which had the shade pulled four-fifths of the way down. The shade for the other one was missing completely.

I made it to the front door, peeked out of one of the rectangles of glass that was at eye level.

The front yard was empty. Well, not exactly empty. It was Hank’s yard, after all. There was his car in the driveway. Across the street was my Mercedes. There was beat up Ford F-150 parked behind that.

“Bill, what are we doing?” It was Julie. I turned back toward her voice. She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room in the center of the house.

“Julie. Get back in the kitchen,” I urged. From the kitchen I heard the sound of a slamming drawer. Hopefully Hank was fishing for a gun somewhere.

I looked back quickly toward the truck. I couldn’t see anyone in the cab for a moment, but then again there was a bit of a blur there.

Something had moved.

Then I saw the barrel of the rifle and recognized it for what it was about an instant before it barked a spark of flame.

Things happened pretty fast.

The glass from the window pane on my right crumpled in on itself in three large shards. I hadn’t fully registered what was occurring yet. My first thought on it was a bit odd: windows aren’t supposed to do that! Then I connected it with the rifle barrel about a hundredth of a second later and turned back toward Julie.

She just stood there, bringing her hands to her face.

A large divot of splintered wood had appeared on the facing of the kitchen entryway about shoulder-high not a foot from her. I could see the splinters on her neck and ear.

In the next instant Hank hit her from behind and took her down to the floor. I heard a loud grunt.

“Bill,” Hank called out. “Head’s up.”

Something sailed through the air toward me from their direction behind the tallest stack of books. I snatched it out of the air and was pulling the slide on the object before I could think much about it. It was a thirty-eight.

I looked again out of the small doorway glass in time to see the passenger door on the other side of the truck fly open.

An engine roared into life.

I don’t know what came over me after that. The moment became somewhat surrealistic, with dark, pulsing, purplish and red tendrils creeping into the corners of my vision. It’s happened to me a few times before, and each time it has, by the time I saw the colors and recognized them for what they meant, it was too late.

The front door was suddenly open and I was across the porch and sailing off into the brilliant green too-tall grass and the too-bright sunlight, and the funny thing about it was I couldn’t even feel my feet touching the ground.

The pickup truck was moving, slamming the corner of the rear fender of my Mercedes in an effort to escape. There was the shatter of glass and the crunch of metal. I didn’t much care, though, at that moment. The red and purple pulses were forming interesting tributaries around the movie theater screen my vision had become. And there was a part of me that was watching the whole thing with a sort of rapt fascination, like a kid at the movies with a box of overly buttered popcorn on his lap and an awed look on his face. But, when you’re watching a movie, you’re safe. The bullets aren’t real bullets and the crunching metal is all staged and all is right with the world. That was how I felt.

It looked as though I was going to beat the truck.

I pointed my right hand at the truck cab and the blurry figures inside it as the whole thing loomed suddenly very large in front of me. My hand bucked once… Twice.

The driver was trying to put his foot through the floorboard of the thing. Tires squealed on the hot pavement and a carburetor whined with a steep over-abundance of horsepower.

The center of the pickup windshield blossomed with a huge, elaborate spider web. Another, duplicate, spider web appeared in front of the driver.

The truck came on.

It had been perhaps thirty feet away a second before, but suddenly it was about half that, or maybe more.

Oh, I thought. Okay. Move!

I did this funny thing with my legs-I did a sideways frog-movement. Sort of a cross between a hop and a dive.

I felt a numbness in my left foot, even as my shoulder slammed into the bottom of the ditch across the road from Hank’s house. Anyone who has ever been bitten by a shark while swimming would know how it felt. First there was a bit of a jolt traveling up my leg, a distant cousin to the electrocution variety, then sudden and intense numbness. Last came pain. But that was okay. What was even more noteworthy was the interesting sensation around the crown of my head, and the darkness that came on. Which in itself was interesting because I had been fairly certain that it was early afternoon.