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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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“Shut up! Get a smile on, goddam you!”
Bobby Terry began to grin. It was like watching a mechanical funhouse clown grin.
“You nogood,” Dave snarled. “I’ll do it. Stay in the goddam car.”
They had pulled even with the Scout, which was idling with two wheels on the pavement and two on the soft shoulder. Smiling, Dave got out. His hands were in the pockets of his yellow slicker. In the lefthand pocket was a .38 Police Special.
The Judge climbed carefully down from the Scout. He was also wearing a yellow rain slicker. He walked carefully, bearing himself the way a man might bear a fragile vase. The arthritis was loose in him like a pack of tigers. He carried the Garand rifle in his left hand.
“Hey, you won’t shoot me with that, will you?” the man from the Willys said with a friendly grin.
“I guess not,” the Judge said. They spoke over the steady hiss of the rain. “You must have been back in Copperfield.”
“So we were. I’m Dave Roberts.” He stuck out his right hand.
“Farris is my name,” said the Judge, and put out his own right hand. He glanced up toward the passenger window of the Willys and saw Bobby Terry leaning out, holding his .45 in both hands. Rain was dripping off the barrel. His face, dead pale, was still frozen in that maniacal funhouse grin.
“Oh bastard,” the Judge murmured, and pulled his hand out of Roberts’s rain-slippery grip just as Roberts fired through the pocket of his slicker. The bullet ploughed through the Judge’s midsection just below the stomach, flattening, spinning, mushrooming, coming out to the right of his spine, leaving an exit hole the ...
None of them noticed the crow that had fluttered down to a telephone wire on the far side of the road.
Dave Roberts took a step forward to finish the job. As he did, Bobby Terry fired from the passenger window of the Willys. His bullet took Roberts in the throat, tearing most of it away. A fury of blood cascaded down the front of Roberts’s slicker and mixed with the rain. He turned toward Bobby Terry, his jaw working in...
“Oh shit, lookit this! ” Bobby Terry cried in utter dismay.
The Judge thought: My arthritis is gone. If I could live, I could stun the medical profession. The cure for arthritis is a bullet in the guts. Oh dear God, they were laying for me. Did Flagg tell them? He must have, Jesus help whoever else the committee sent over here…
The Garand was lying on the road. He bent for it, feeling his guts trying to run right out of his body. Strange feeling. Not very pleasant. Never mind. He got hold of the gun. Was the safety off? Yes. He began to bring it up. It seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.
Bobby Terry ripped his stunned gaze away from Dave at last, just in time to see the Judge preparing to shoot him. The Judge was sitting on the road. His slicker was red with blood from chest to hem. He had settled the barrel of the Garand on his knee.
Bobby snapped a shot and missed. The Garand went off with a giant thunderclap and jagged glass sprayed Bobby Terry’s face. He screamed, sure he was dead. Then he saw that the left half of the windshield was gone and understood that he was still in the running.
The Judge was ponderously correcting his aim, swiveling the Garand perhaps two degrees on his knee. Bobby Terry, his nerves entirely shot now, fired three times in rapid succession. The first bullet spanged a hole through the side of the Scout’s cab. The second struck the Judge above the right eye. A .45 is a large gun...
Silence descended.
Rain drummed on the roofs of the Scout and the Willys. On the slickers of the two dead men. It was the only sound until the crow took off from the telephone wire with a raucous caw. That startled Bobby Terry out of his daze. He got slowly down from the passenger seat, still clutching the smoking .45.
“I did it,” he said confidentially to the rain. “Killed his ass. You better believe it. Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Fuckin-A right. Ole Bobby Terry just killed him as dead as you’d want.”
But with dawning horror, he realized that it wasn’t the Judge’s ass he’d killed after all.
The Judge had died leaning back into the Scout. Now Bobby Terry grabbed the lapels of his slicker and yanked him forward; staring at what remained of the Judge’s features. There was really nothing left but his nose. To tell the truth, that wasn’t in such hot shape, either.
It could have been anyone.
And in a dream of terror, Bobby Terry again heard Flagg saying: I want to send him back undamaged.
Holy God, this could be anyone. It was as if he had set out to deliberately do just the opposite of what the Walkin Dude had ordered. Two direct hits in the face. Even the teeth were gone.
Rain, drumming, drumming.
It was over here. That was all. He didn’t dare go east, and he didn’t dare stay in the West. He would either wind up riding a telephone pole bareback or… or something worse.
Were there worse things?
With that grinning freak in charge, Bobby Terry had no doubt there were. So what was the answer?
Running his hands through his hair, still looking down at the ruined face of the Judge, he tried to think.
South. That was the answer. South. No border guards anymore. South of Mexico, and if that wasn’t far enough, get on down to Guatemala, Panama, maybe fucking Brazil. Opt out of the whole mess. No more East, no more West, just Bobby Terry, safe and as far away from the Walkin Dude as his old boogie shoes could carry h—
A new sound in the rainy afternoon.
Bobby Terry’s head jerked up.
The rain, yes, making its steel drum sound on the cabs of the two vehicles, and the grumbling of two idling motors, and—
A strange clocking sound, like rundown bootheels hammering swiftly along the secondary road macadam.
“No,” Bobby Terry whispered.
He began to turn around.
The clocking sound was speeding up. A fast walk, a trot, a jog, run, sprint, and Bobby Terry got all the way around, too late, he was coming, Flagg was coming like some terrible horror monster out of the scariest picture ever made. The dark man’s cheeks were flushed with jolly color, his eyes were twinkling with happy ...
No, Bobby Terry tried to say, but nothing came out.
“HEY, BOBBY TERRY, YOU SCROOOOWED IT UP! ” the dark man bellowed, and fell upon the hapless Bobby Terry.
There were worse things than crucifixion.
There were teeth.
Chapter 62
Dayna Jurgens lay naked in the huge double bed, listening to the steady hiss of water coming from the shower, and looked up at her reflection in the big circular ceiling mirror, which was the exact shape and size of the bed it reflected. She thought that the female body always looks its best when it is flat on its back...
The shower ran on and on.
There’s a man with a cleanliness compulsion, she thought. I wonder what happened to him that makes him want to shower for half an hour at a stretch?
Her mind turned back to the Judge. Who would have figured that? In its own way, it was a damned brilliant idea. Who would have suspected an old man? Well, Flagg had, it seemed. Somehow he had known when and approximately where. A picket line had been set up all the way along the Idaho-Oregon border, with orders to kill...
But the job had been botched somehow. Since suppertime last night, the upper echelon here in Las Vegas had been walking around with pasty faces and downcast eyes. Whitney Horgan, who was one damned fine cook, had served something that looked like dog food and was too burned to taste like much of anything. The Judge was...