“You know, it’s my call,” Lucas said. He wiped sweat out of his eyes, blinked against the glare. “All due respect to the FBI, I’m the one in charge of chasing him down. If we can get him alive, we’ll do it. If we have to seriously risk somebody else’s neck, I won’t do it. I’ll green-light Bob.”
“I won’t have any trouble pulling the trigger,” Bob said. “Not after looking at all those people in the holes, including some that he ate.”
“Goddamnit, Lucas...”
“Lucas is right, Sandro,” Bob said, lifting his face away from the scope. “But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. From here, I could punch a bullet through one of those rivets in the trailer. Or a kneecap. I might possibly be able to knock him down without killing him. I can’t think of why we’d do that, what the circumstances might be, but we can keep it in mind.”
Lucas said, “Give me a handset.”
The truck was still a mile out—they couldn’t see all the twists and turns in the approach track—and maybe as much as five minutes, given the rough approach road. Lucas called Rae and told her what they’d been talking about.
She agreed. Take him alive, if possible. Shoot him if he lookedlike he might kill somebody else. Tremanty was on the handset to the helicopter, who relayed his questions to the FBI office in Las Vegas, and, after a moment, he looked at Lucas and shook his head. He listened for another minute, then said into the handset, “We think Deese is coming in now. I gotta go.”
He clicked off, and said to Lucas and Bob, “No sign of Gloria Harrelson. And the body in the hole? They printed the guy and put a rush on it. It’s Cole.”
“Holy shit,” Bob said. “The guy’s a—”
“He’s a cannibal. And now he’s eating his own,” Lucas said. “Whoever that woman is, I think she’s in trouble. She’s got the keys to the car. She should have taken off.”
“Unless she’s working with Deese,” Tremanty said. “Maybe we should have run down and grabbed her.”
“He’s thirty seconds out,” Bob said.
The truck came over a low rise, and the woman got out of the car. They were looking at her right side and back, and Tremanty, with the binoculars, said, “She’s got a pistol in her back pocket.”
“I see it,” Bob said. “What the heck is going on? Is she gonna shoot Deese?”
—
DEESE, in the truck, first saw the door open on the Lexus, then Cox climbing out, carefully facing him. Probably wondering where Cole was. And he noticed the trailer’s open door, and that wasn’t right. Every time somebody left the door open for even a second, Ralph would yell at him. And it was just hanging there, wide open, a dark rectangle against the blast of reflected sunlight that was the aluminum capsule. He came up to Cox and theLexus, but he didn’t stop. Instead he circled her, drove back to the trailer, stopped outside the door.
—
BELOW THEM, ninety or a hundred yards away, Deese got out of the truck, turned toward the open door, paused—a perfect target—and Bob asked, “Lucas?”
Tremanty, hissing: “No.”
Lucas: “Not yet.”
Deese went into the trailer.
—
DEESE BLINKED, in reaction to the heat and the darkness. No lights on, few windows, it took a minute for his eyes to adjust, and he first made out Ralph’s body as being something like a lumpy pile of clothes outside the bedroom door. Then, when he realized it was a body, the thought popped into his mind that Ralph had killed Gloria Harrelson. But no...
“Ralph?”
Nothing. He glanced back at the door, to make sure Cox wasn’t about to shoot him in the back, then walked up to the body. “Ralph?”
It was Ralph all right, lying in a stinking puddle of blood with a hole in his chest. Flies buzzing around, more crawling around the edge of the puddle. What the hell had happened? Must have been Cox, there wasn’t anyone else.
He looked past Ralph’s body to the bedroom and saw a naked leg with a few links of chain wrapped around it. He stepped over Ralph and saw Harrelson, sprawled naked on the bed, witha plum-sized hole in her chest. Not much visible blood; it probably soaked into the mattress beneath her. A shotgun lay on the floor, its butt overlapping the bloody puddle from Ralph. He picked it up, wiped it off on the sheet tangled under Gloria Harrelson’s legs.
Looked back at Ralph, back at Harrelson. From the look of both of them—Harrelson’s pussy and Ralph’s cock—Ralph had taken advantage of the situation.
Deese said to Ralph, as he swung his foot over him, “At least you came before you went, you old asshole.” Ralph, he thought, would have liked that.
He cackled at the line, lost track of what he was doing, and when his foot hit the blood on the far side of Ralph’s body it slipped and he lost his balance, fell on Ralph’s bare chest, one hand went down in the puddle.
