Stephen Hunter - Dirty White Boys

Lamar must have pulled the trigger ten times before he realized the gun wasn't going to fire. Couldn't. No magazine.

In the interim, Bud balled his fist. He hit Lamar in the throat and felt his antagonist sag back.

He rolled just a bit and grabbed his Commander from the high hip holster and tried to bring it up against Lamar, but Lamar was too fast on the recovery and with his own left hand grabbed at the pistol.

The two men began to slide through the mud down toward the stream, hopelessly locked, each desperately seeking leverage, strength, hope as they tried to control Bud's Commander. Bud's thumb was over the safety, trying to get it down, Lamar's below it, trying to keep it up.

Their faces were inches apart.

Suddenly, fast as a snake, Lamar seemed to leap out. He sunk his teeth into Bud's nose. The pain scaled the heights of his spine and he screamed, but in the same terrible second he remembered: I shot his fingers off.

With a jab his thumb lanced out against Lamar's fist, hit bandage, dug through it, and felt scab yielding to blood and heard a new scream, not his own.

Bud tore the automatic free and rammed it into Lamar, but when he pulled the trigger it would not go. Lamar had got a finger between hammer and receiver.

“You fucker, you fucker, you fucker,” Lamar was saying.

Bud got the gun free and with his thumb cranked back the hammer, but again Lamar snared his wrist.

The gun in Bud's hand was like a bayonet as each tried to gain control and drive it into the other's heart. It rose and rose, wavering this way and that, now Bud ahead, now Lamar, the two of them locked in each other's arms, squeezing and biting and batting at each other with their skulls.

Up and up the gun came until it seemed to touch Bud's chin; he felt it hard and cold and saw Lamar's merciless eyes but from somewhere some last ounce of rage unleashed a last ounce of strength.

The gun fired.

The flash erupted in Bud's face; the light was incandescent and unyielding and seemed to fill all the corners of the earth, and as the tide of brightness roared through his brain, it destroyed his vision. A thousand bits of powder and lead drove into his skin.

He fell backward, isolated in his blindness, seeing nothing, feeling nothing.

Bud was helpless.

He'd lost the gun, he was blind, his ears rang.

He's going to kill me, he thought, and waited for the next shot, almost welcoming it, for it would stop the pain that now began to throb in his head, and it would let him rest at last.

But no shot came. He blinked and groped and still saw nothing but only heard some unidentifiable sound, a rasping, a moaning, whatever.

He drove his fists into his eyes and pressed them hard, backing sightly up the bank.

He opened his eyes, waiting to die.

But ever so slowly he identified the sound. It came from a hulk just before him, sunk to the knees in the stream, hands clasped over face.

Lamar's hands came away and another flash of heat lightning crackled in the distance and Bud saw that the bullet, a hollow tip had blown through Lamar's chin upward and like a plow had gouged a furrow up what had been a face. The teeth and most of the tongue were gone, the nose had been eviscerated, and as the bullet had opened and surged upward it had destroyed both of Lamar's eyes and opened his forehead so that pulsing dark matter showed amid the bone. It had erased his face.

“ Liilmu, iiilmu, iiilmu ,” Lamar moaned and Bud knew it was "Kill me, kill me, kill me.”

Bud finally found the Beretta .380, though it had slipped down almost into his underpants in the struggle. He raised it and aimed. He was three feet away. He fired twice into Lamar's head, and he fell sideways into the creek and did not move.

Bud stared at him for just a second, then sat down as an exhaustion so total it seemed to penetrate to his heart overcame him. He felt numbness everywhere, except where he hurt. The little gun slipped out of his hand and he did not even look for it.

Holly, crying bitterly, had made it nearly all the way back to the farmhouse when she heard the roar. She turned to the west and saw them, or rather their lights; three helicopters roaring in over the tree line, lights flashing dramatically.

Then, from the other direction, she saw the vehicles-state police cruisers, vans, ambulances, a whole convoy-racing down the road to the farm. The vehicles and the helicopters reached the house almost simultaneously, and from each there poured a crowd of black-garbed men in hoods with fancy guns. It was all theater, like a movie; it had nothing to do with anything.

She walked toward them as the men completed their dramatic performance, kicking in doors, presumably racing through the house ready to hose anything that moved down with their machine guns. But there was nothing to hose down.

She reached the perimeter.

“Help,” she said.

In seconds policemen surrounded her.

“They're out there,” she said, pointing.

“Bud Pewtie and Lamar. Over there, in the trees. I heard some shots.

You'd better hurry.”

“Let's go,” said an old man, who seemed to be in charge.

“Please hurry,” she said, but they were already gone.

We were so close, she thought.

Bud climbed up the bank through a fog of exhaustion; he could make no sense of the rising dust, the roar of the helicopters, the flashing of their navigation lights.

His mind worked imperfectly. It closed on one thought:

It was over.

A light came onto him.

He blinked.

“There he is,” shouted the pilot over the intercom.

C.D. looked, and yes, the light came onto Bud, who groped blindly, then sank to his knees. C.D. saw the blood all over him, focused a pair of binoculars on the face and saw how battered it was.

“Put it down, GODDAMMIT,” he screamed.

The bird hit with a thud.

“Listen, you get back to the house and see if there's a goddamned doctor in the cars, or at least a goddamn paramedic.

Get him here fast. That boy's hurt bad. Then you call Comanche Shocktrauma and tell them to expect incoming.”

“Mark the place with a flare. Lieutenant, so we can find it on the way back.”

“Goddamn right I will,” said C.D.

“And bring some more men to secure the area.”

He rolled from the deck of the Huey, and someone handed him a flare, which he ignited with a yank. The flare's red fire blossomed. Carrying it, he raced down to Bud as the helicopter roared away into the night.

He ran down the slope and came to Bud, dropping the flare.

“Bud, Bud—”

“Got him. Lieutenant. He's down there. Blew his face off. Oh, Christ I hurt.”

“Take it easy. Bud.”

He tried to comfort Bud, holding him close, putting his hand to the highway patrolman's chest to check the heart-beat.

Bud fell forward, then caught himself. In the flickering magenta of the flare, the blood all over his face looked almost black, and the swelling had all but buried one of his eyes. The man was shivering, and saliva and phlegm ran out of his bloody mouth.

“I killed him. Oh, fuck, is he dead,” Bud was saying.

“Good work. Bud. You got him. Great goddamn job.

Now settle down. Help is—” But suddenly someone else was before them.

He thought it was another cop, but as the figure drew nearer and acquired clarity out of the darkness he recognized its size.

“ Where's Lamar?” asked Richard.

C.D. was close enough now to see how swollen the man's face was. Had he been hit? Did Lamar beat him? But Richard sniffled and C.D. knew he'd been crying.

“It's all over,” he said.

“It's finished.”

“Where's Lamar?”

“Dead,” said C.D.

Richard held something up. C.D. saw that it was a Smith & Wesson .357.