Читать книгу White Hot Pistol - Eric Beetner - Страница 6

Nash spun to see a jittery skeleton of a man, his frame draped with worn-edged jeans and a denim jacket over a splotchy white t-shirt, a gun in his hand, trembling like a leaf about to fall.

Nash put his hands up a few inches, some sort of instinct telling him to do it even though he hadn’t been told to.

“This is a mistake,” he said. “I just stopped for a Coke. I didn’t know what was going on so . . .” Nash realized explaining wasn’t going to help make him look any better in the gunman’s dilated eyes.

“I seen you come in,” the man said. “Seen you take the bag.”

Nash closed his eyes briefly. This guy had been watching the whole time. It was too late to make up a story about why the bag was in his hand.

“Jacy, get to the car,” Nash said. Best he could do was to keep her safe. If this got ugly – uglier – he still wanted her to get away.

Jacy backed slowly toward the Honda.

“We didn’t see a thing,” Nash said. He slowly bent his knees and set the bag down on the parking lot concrete. “We’re just gonna be on our way.”

“The fuck you didn’t see a thing,” the man said. The gun came up higher in his hand, his arm outstretched to the point that it looked painful. The barrel wavered and would send a bullet in a direction that no one would be able to guess if the man found the notion to shoot. “You saw me,” he said.

“It’s dark, mister. Real dark. We didn’t see shit.” Nash took a tentative step backward to the car. He heard the passenger door creak on worn out hinges, and he knew Jacy had reached the car. He felt the keys rub against his thigh, pressed against the forgotten dollar bills in his front pocket.

The gunman’s feet shuffled in place, the addict’s tap dance. Nash calculated the distance between his car behind him and the gunman ahead. Which was the better bet? He felt doubtful the man would let him drive away. And with the jitters and nervous sweat he could smell coming off the guy even from twenty feet away, Nash knew he had a chance at disarming him. But then what?

Nash hadn’t been in a fight since the day he left Noirville, when they used to be a weekly occurrence. His skills were surely rusty. But this was exactly his kind of fight. Not one he started, but one he knew he could finish.

The man wiped a runny nose with the back of his free hand. “Why’d you have to come here, man?”

A question Nash was asking himself. “You let us go, and we were never here. Okay?”

The man thought about it, his body twitching as the synapses fired trying to decide Nash’s fate. A dirty fingernail went into his mouth to be chewed, the tap dance reached a Gene Kelly climax.

Nash tried banking on the complete sensory overload in the gunman. “I’m just gonna–”

A bullet bit the pavement by Nash’s right foot. Nash bolted away, drawing fire away from the car and Jacy. As he rabbited across the parking spaces, he aimed for the shadow of the octagon. Another shot kicked up dry dirt in what were once flower beds but had fallen into arid voids in the wake of neglect from highway maintenance crews. Nash crouched as he ran, slowing him a little, but making him a smaller target.

He found the center of the building, an open air pass way with a Men’s room on one side, a Women’s room on the other, and his original goal of two soft drink machines in between. He bypassed the Coke and ran for the far side of the building, into the blackness of the prairie at night.

Nash paused at the far end of the corridor to listen and make sure the man had followed him. If he’d decided to skip going after Nash and attack Jacy instead, Nash would go back for her. But he heard uneven footsteps, like a giant toddler was chasing him.

Nash ran into the darkness. His eyes were slow to adjust from the daylight-simulating lamps of the parking lot. His calves scraped against dead and half-dead plants of indeterminate size. He paused, hands on knees and sucking air, his own wheezing breath the only movement in the still night. On the horizon, he saw a cluster of white lights like a constellation fallen to earth. The tops of grain silos, easily two thirds of a mile away. Too far to run in the hopes of a phone or some help, and to leave the rest area, would mean leaving Jacy behind. To Nash, that defeated the whole purpose of coming back to get her out.

Nash watched as the gunman appeared at the end of the pass way, a dark shape against the rectangle of light. He stopped and looked, arms outstretched and grasping at any clue as to which way to continue the chase. Nash figured that if he could lure him out into the dark, then loop around back to the parking lot, he could be gone with Jacy before the man realized what had happened. And even if he decided to give chase, that cube truck was no match for a hatchback.

Nash bent down and felt the ground, his eyes seeing vague shapes now. He found a palm-sized rock and hurled it to his left. The gunman spun at the sound and fired, then followed his shot into the dark.

Nash ran the opposite way around the far side of the octagon, back to Jacy.

As he reached the harsh line separating light from dark under the overhead lamps, a pair of headlights crested a rise in the southbound lanes. Nash reached his car.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Jacy said. “What the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know, but we’re getting out of here.”

The lights turned into the rest area. Nash saw the silhouette of the car in the harsh overhead light. The telltale bump on the roof. A state cop.

Red and blue lit up the rest area, moving the shadows of scrub bushes across the grassless ground in a repeating waltz. Nash exhaled and stopped his movement into the Honda.

The gunman came around the far side of the building. Nash froze, but when the man saw the state policeman’s car, he pocketed the gun. When the trooper put the car in park and opened the door, the gunman surprised Nash by firing lies as powerful as the bullets.

“Officer, this man killed my partner. He tried to hijack our truck. He killed him.”

He pointed at the dead body on the ground. The trooper held one hand on his revolver and noticed the crumpled body, then drew his weapon as he turned to Nash.

“Hands behind your head!”

“No, you’ve got it wrong,” Nash said.

“Hands up, now!”

The trooper marched for Nash, gun leading the way in a two-handed grip.

“It was him,” Nash said as he complied with the request to put his hands behind his head.

He saw the trooper’s eye go to his leg, the smear of blood there. The angry snout of his gun came forward steady as a locomotive. Nash’s next plea caught in his throat. The trooper reached him and brought one hand away from the gun to lift a pair of flex cuffs from his belt. The gun remained steady.

“I didn’t do this,” Nash said, weakly, as the trooper spun him and slid the plastic cuffs over his wrists and pulled in the slack. When he looked over Nash’s shoulder, he saw Jacy in the car. The trooper’s gun came back up in two hands.

“Out of the car. Now!”

Jacy stood up out of the car, tears already falling.

“She did it, too,” the skeletal man said. “She was there the whole time.”

The trooper slid cuffs on Jacy and pushed her toward his cruiser. As he passed Nash, he shouted, “On your knees.” Nash obeyed, waiting for his time to tell the truth of it.

Jacy was stuffed into the back seat of the patrol car, then the trooper turned to the gunman.

“You, over here. Stay where I can see you.”

Nash watched the gunman take a few stutter steps toward the cruiser. The trooper walked to Nash, dug in his back pocket and removed his wallet, then went to the car and found Jacy’s purse.

The gunman shifted on his feet, his complexion pulsing red, then blue in the lights of the patrol car. “Officer, I–”

“I’ll get to you. Stay where you are.”

The trooper got on his radio. “One-one-three requesting backup at rest area eighty-four. Man down and suspects in custody. Request checks on–”

Nash heard his name go out over the police radio. Then the trooper dug into Jacy’s purse, brought out her I.D., and read her name into the handset. Nash sank inside. Brian may be asleep back in town, but someone at the precinct would hear that call of a dead body, and then his stepdaughter’s name, and call to wake him. Their escape was over.

“And you,” the trooper shouted across to the gunman. “What’s your name?”

“I don’t think that’s important right now.” He stepped away from the car, moving across the white lines of parking spaces toward Nash, toward the Honda and the trooper.

“Don’t give me any shit. What’s your name, fella?”

“Don’t you see? He killed the guy, not me.”

“Bullshit,” Nash said. “He’s lying.”

“Oh, yeah?” the trooper said as he lifted Jacy’s gun from her purse.

Nash felt the heat of the bullet in flight as it sailed past him and landed in the trooper’s shoulder. Nash looked up to see the gunman and his wavering pistol out in front of him again.

The trooper dropped Jacy’s purse back onto the seat and reached for his sidearm. Another shot hit its mark as the gunman stepped ever closer to the state cop. Whether dumb luck, or a newfound marksmanship, both shots landed outside the perimeter of the Kevlar vest the trooper wore.

Nash flopped from his knees to his stomach and started to roll away, out of the line of fire.

The third shot landed in the trooper’s neck. He fell back, clutching with one hand at the spurting neck wound. The trooper lifted his gun and fired at the advancing skeletal man, missing wide right. The gunman raised his cheap, probably stolen, gun and pulled the trigger again. Empty.

He closed the gap and put a foot down on the trooper’s gun hand, pinning him to the asphalt. The trooper coughed and a spray of blood came with it. The meat of his neck was open, showing the path of the bullet.

The gunman bent down and twisted the trooper’s own gun from his hand. He turned it, put it between the trooper’s widening eyes, and fired.

Nash rolled himself up and over the curb, spinning into the dusty planter area, then crawled to his knees and moved off into the darkness, hiding again from the killer.

The gunman looked down at where the trooper’s eyes should have been and found only a single red Cyclops eye of exposed bone and torn flesh. Jolted from his survival instinct march across the parking lot, he seemed to feel the electric burst of what he’d done.

The gunman scanned the black night around him, his eyes unfocused, as Nash watched him from the shadows. Nash knew he wouldn’t be able to run as fast with the cuffs on. He waited for the killer to make the first move.

“I don’t got time to chase you down again, fucker,” the gunman said. “Just come on out, and let’s get this over with.”

A sound spun the man’s head to the right, and he fired a shot into the black. The crackle of the trooper’s radio filled the space behind the gunshot echo. Backup was on its way.

“Shit,” the gunman said to himself. His eyes flitted across the empty horizon, seeing nothing. Nash wondered how long until the cops showed up and if he could hide out until they did.

Another burst of radio chatter seemed to run like an electric shock up from the gunman’s feet. He turned and ran for the cruiser, taking the trooper’s gun with him. Nash watched from behind a dead bush as the killer slid behind the wheel, gunned the engine, and pulled out, lights still flashing.

As the car swung back to face the highway, Nash caught sight of Jacy’s screaming face in the back window of the patrol car.