Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (29 page)

Surprised that the blow didn’t bring this crazy Anglo in the silly coat to his knees, the bartender cocked back and swung again, smashing Jeter’s misshapen hand on the bar, presumably breaking every bone that hadn’t been broken by the first hit. I’ll never forget the sound of contact, like hitting a Ziploc bag filled with pretzels.

I don’t know why the bartender did it. I’ll never know or understand. All I can guess is that he was reacting to the insult and that he’d done the same thing before in similar situations in order to drive people out of the club. But like my life those past two and a half weeks, what happened next was beyond analysis.

All of us have heard the phrase “He got his head blown off.” I’m here to tell you that doesn’t actually happen. I know because when Jeter reached into his duster with his right hand and came out with the sawed-off double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun that was once referred to as a coach gun because it was the weapon of choice for stagecoach drivers, and pressed the muzzle into the bartender’s forehead with both hammers cocked and fired both barrels, well, the bartender’s head was not actually blown off. The top right quarter of it disappeared, and what was left of the mirror behind the bar was spattered with blood, brains, and chunks of bone, skin, and hair. The bartender dropped to the floor
as if his puppet strings had been clipped, taking a shelf of beer glasses with him.

The sound was tremendous, and my ears were ringing. The two bikers at the bar dismounted and scrambled and passed me, running toward the door. I watched them from above, detached, as if my own soul and perspective were removed from my body.

Jeter was enraged. He stared at his broken hand for a moment, saying “Why in the hell did he do that?” before recovering and breaking the shotgun open with his undamaged right hand. The two huge, spent, and smoking shells hurtled back over his shoulders on either side of his head. He transferred the weapon under his left arm and dug into his duster pocket for two fresh shells. He reloaded and he snapped the shotgun closed with an upward jerk, turning toward the back table while he cocked both barrels. His broken left hand hung uselessly by his side.

“
WHICH ONE OF YOU SHITBIRDS IS GARRETT MORELAND
?”

I realized that the high-pitched noise in my ears was one of the girls shrieking.

The gangster on the right end of the table farthest from Garrett pushed back so hard in his chair that he sent it flying behind him. He stood up next to the table. The dark boy in the middle, who had been getting serviced, stared openmouthed while he inexplicably felt the sudden need to button himself back up. The blond girl next to him screamed while holding her hands to the sides of her face. Garrett still had both of his hands on the table wrapped around his mug, his bearing remarkably calm, his eyes taking in the man with the shotgun, who was approaching him, as if trying to place him, trying to figure out why he’d called out his name.

“You the shitbird Garrett?” Jeter asked him.

Jeter didn’t notice that the man who had stood up was bent slightly forward now, his arm behind his back digging for something in his pants.

Jeter pointed the shotgun with one hand, said again, “You Garrett Moreland?”

And the gangster pulled his weapon, a semiautomatic, and fired four quick rounds—
pop-pop-pop-pop
—with the weapon held sidewise out in front of him. Jeter’s coat danced, and he stumbled back a step, then swung the shotgun over and it exploded again and kicked higher than Jeter’s head. A great bloom of red spattered across the chest of the gangster, who fell back over the chair he’d previously sent skittering across the floor.

Patiently, Jeter slid the shotgun back into its sling inside his duster and came out with a stainless-steel .45 semiauto. He shot the dark boy in the middle point-blank in the neck before the gangster could rack the slide on the pistol he’d been fumbling for. The gangster’s gun skittered across the table and fell to the dirty carpet.

“Run away, girls,” Jeter said. “I’ve got business here with young Mr. Moreland.”

The blonde kept screaming as she ran, her hands still pressed to the sides of her head. There was a moment when our eyes locked as she ran toward the door, and I wondered if she’d be able to identify me later.

Jeter stepped aside for the female with the spiked hair, not expecting her to stop, turn, pause, and shove a pistol into his armpit and pull the trigger three times with muffled
bangs.
He cried out with a yelping sound, the hand with the pistol dropped to his side, and he staggered several steps to his left before collapsing on the dance floor in a heap.

“
Goddammit!
” he bellowed, sounding more angry with himself than with the girl. He writhed on the floor, making
himself a moving target for the girl with the spiked hair, who clumsily tried to aim at him. He rolled to his belly and came up with the .45 and took her down with three rapid shots.

Like a bear cub, Jeter rose to all fours and, with a grunt, he was back on his feet. The second gangster he’d shot was still sitting upright at the table, his hand clamped to his neck. Arterial blood squirted out between his fingers. Jeter staggered over to him and put the muzzle of his .45 to the man’s forehead.

“
Sign your stupid name on them papers,
” Jeter said in his ridiculous Mexican accent, “
or you die, senõr!
”

I walked stunned through the acrid hanging gun smoke and put my hand on Jeter’s shoulder. Shotgun shells and spent casings littered the floor.

“That’s not him,” I said.

“
Your signature or your brains, senõr!
” Jeter said, pressing hard with the gun.

“Jeter, that’s not him!” I shouted. “Garrett ran out the back while you were on the floor!” I was fairly certain Garrett never saw me.

Jeter paused, letting that sink in. I could hear the rapid patter of blood on the floor from the wounds inside Jeter’s coat.

“They all look alike to me,” he said with a harsh laugh, and pulled the trigger. The gangster flopped backward, his eyes wide-open, a smoking hole in his forehead.

JETER STOOD UNSTEADILY
and holstered the .45. His face was drawn and white, his eyes sallow.

“Man,” he said, “I really fucked this one up.”

I nodded.

“I shoulda played that different,” he said. “I never would of thought that girl would have a gun. This is a rough damned place.”

I didn’t know what to do. Try to get him to the Jeep? Take him to a hospital? Leave him there? Wait for the police to show up? I didn’t hear sirens yet.

“I don’t want to die here,” Jeter said. “I want to die in Montana. Not in Denver. Not in this shit hole with these shitbirds.”

He tried to take a step toward the door, but he couldn’t seem to get his legs to obey. Blood streamed from the hem of his coat and pooled on the floor.

“I’m really shot up,” he said weakly. “It’s like everything warm is pouring out of me. I’m gettin’ real cold. Help me, Jack.”

“Where do you want to go?”

That grin. “Montana.”

“We can’t go to…”

“I can hear Cody talking to me in my head,” Jeter said suddenly. “I just can’t hear what he’s saying.”

“Cody?”

“Yeah, I hear him.”

And I remembered I was still clutching my cell phone. I looked at it, saw the call I’d placed had connected five minutes ago.

I lifted it to my mouth. “Cody?”

“Jack, are you all right? Jesus—all I could hear were gunshots.”

“I’m okay, but your uncle Jeter …”

“I heard. I’m on my way. Hang tight for five more minutes.” He clicked off.

Jeter chinned toward the bar. “See if you can find some different music on that stereo, Jack. Find some good old country I can die to. Hank Snow, Little Jimmy Dickens, Hank
Williams, Bob Wills—something good. I can’t stand the crap they play in this place.”

With that, he pitched forward like a felled tree. His head hit the dance floor so hard, the fall alone might have killed him.

I WAS LEANING
against the bar when Cody came in. I’d unplugged the beer signs in the windows and turned off all but the black light over the table so the Appaloosa Club looked closed from outside, and no patrons would come in. I was having an out-of-body experience again, thinking I wasn’t really there.

Cody pulled on a pair of rubber gloves.

“Help me get him into my trunk,” Cody said. “If we leave him here, the cops will eventually trace him to me.”

“Where are you going to take him?”

Cody shook his head. “Up in the mountains. I’ve got a place in mind.”

“He wanted to go to Montana,” I said dumbly.

“I’ll get him up there one of these days,” Cody said, grasping Jeter’s collar and dragging him toward the door.

Cody said, “Jesus, how much hardware does he have under that coat?”

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” I said, walking behind. “It was terrible, Cody. It was a slaughter house in here. The bartender broke Jeter’s hand with a baseball bat, and Jeter started blasting. Garrett got away.”

“I heard. You called me, remember?”

“We’re going to go to prison,” I said.

“I don’t know,” Cody said, looking around the club. “Looks gang-related to me. It looks like maybe a big fight over meth-distribution territory.”

“Do you really think that’s how the police will see it?”

Cody paused and looked up angry. “Are you going to help me, or what?”

“DON’T RACE OUT OF HERE
,” Cody said, after we’d lifted Jeter’s body into his plastic-lined trunk and slammed the lid. “Take it slow and easy. The last thing you want is to be pulled over for speeding. Judging by that look in your eye, you’d confess.”

I nodded.

“Go home,” Cody said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

He gave me a brotherly punch in the shoulder. “We probably should have kept Uncle Jeter out of this. He was past his prime and over his head. And he was too much of a bigot to think straight.”

“You should have seen him in there,” I said. “I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life.”

Cody looked around. The street was dark and lifeless. “Let’s get out of here, Jack.”

I turned toward my Jeep.

“Jack,” Cody called after me. I looked over my shoulder. “Until to night, it’s been another really good day.”

I DROVE WEST TOWARD
home on I-70 with the radio on KOA for sound but not hearing a word. I checked my rearview mirror every few minutes, expecting to see a squad car with wigwag lights flashing. My speed varied from forty to eighty, I couldn’t concentrate. I set the cruise control at sixty-five so at least I wouldn’t need to worry about
that.

I felt dead inside, and my head was in a fog. Only then did I wonder what Cody meant when he said he’d had
another good day. Had he meant with Brian’s call log?

The scene at the Appaloosa replayed over and over like a loop of tape.

Did Garrett see me? Did he know why Jeter was there?
Would he go to the police to tell them what he’d seen, or would he play it like he did with Luis—with silence?

Could the blonde ID my face? What about the two bikers? Did they get a good enough look? Would Cody get pulled over driving up to the mountains with his dead uncle in his trunk?

God.

I found myself drifting off the highway and nearly overcorrected into a pickup in the next lane. I tried to concentrate.

I didn’t hear the first part of the report on the radio, maybe because I’d learned over the years to tune out much of what was on the radio. I caught it midway through.
… The police spokesman says there was a qua druple homicide to night at a Zuni Street tavern … gang-related …

Gang-related.

I WAVED
at the new deputy in his black-and-white across the street from our house, and he waved back.

Inside, Melissa came down the stairs in her nightgown.

“Why didn’t you call?”

I shook my head.

“Honey, are you okay?”

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not.”

“Did Garrett sign the papers?”

Three Days to Go

I
FINALLY DRIFTED INTO
an unforgiving sleep around four in the morning and when I woke up Melissa was standing over me with tears in her eyes. I expected her to say, “The police are here.”

Instead, she said, “It’s Thanksgiving Day, Jack. I
forgot.
Can you believe that?”

“I can,” I said, rubbing sleep from my eyes, “because I forgot, too.”

“How can a person forget it’s Thanksgiving?” she said, and burst out crying.

I stood and held her. She seemed to dissolve into my arms, and I could feel her hot tears on my shoulder. I knew she wasn’t truly crying about forgetting Thanksgiving.

IT WAS COLD
and overcast. The mountains had no tops, and milky tendrils extended down into the valleys like cold fingers. Winter had won again and was reclaiming lost territory, I thought. It was snowing hard in the high country. I thought of Cody having to drive up there somewhere, and hoped he’d made it back okay. I blew in my hands as I walked across the street to the sheriff’s department black-and-white.
Billy Sanders was back. His motor was running so he’d have heat. This time, he didn’t caution me to keep my distance.