“Okay, okay,” West continued in the same loud, tense voice.
“I’m going to unlock the doors real slowly. Please don’t shoot. Please. We can work this out, all right? And if you start shooting here, everyone at the Seventy-six truck stop will hear, so what good will it do?”
Bubba had already thought about this, and she was right.
“The two of you are getting in my truck,” he said.
“We’re taking a ride.”
“Why?” West kept on.
“What do you want from us? We have no problem with you.”
“Oh yeah?” He gripped the carbine tighter, loving the way the bitch in uniform was groveling before him, the great Bubba.
“How about at the range the other night, when Queerbait there hit me?”
“You started it,” Brazil said to him and all listening to channel two.
“We can work this out,” West said again.
“Look. Let’s just get right back on Sunset, maybe meet somewhere where we can talk about this? All these trucks coming in here, they’re looking. You don’t want witnesses, and this isn’t a good place to be settling a dispute.”
Bubba thought they had already gone over this point. What he planned to do was shoot them out near the lake, weigh their bodies down with cinder blocks, and dump them where no one would find them until mud turtles had eaten important features. He heard that happened. Crabs were bad on dead bodies, too, as were household pets, especially cats, if locked up with dead owners and not fed, and eventually having no choice.
As Bubba deliberated, eight Charlotte patrol cars with flashing lights were speeding along 1-77, now within minutes of the truck stop.
Shotguns were out and ready. The police helicopter was lifting from the helipad on top of the LEC, sniper shooters poised. The SWAT team had been deployed. The FBI had been called and agents were on standby, in the event hostage or terrorist negotiators, or the Child Abduction Serial Killer Unit, or the Hostage Rescue Team, might be what it took to save the day.
“Get out of the car,” said Bubba.
In his mind, he was not in plaid shorts, white tube socks, Hush Puppies, and a Fruit of the Loom white T-shirt that had never been washed with bleach. In his mind, he was in military fatigues, with black grease under his eyes, hair a buzz cut, sweaty muscles bunching as he gripped his weapon and prepared to score two more points for his country and the guys at the hunt club. He was Bubba. He knew the perfect sliver of undeveloped lake property where he could do his duty, having his way with the woman first. Take that, he would think as he drove home his point. Now who’s got the power, bitchf
Police cars turned onto Sunset East. They traveled single file, lights going, in a neat flashing line. Inside the truck stop, several truckers, who believed they had been stagecoach drivers in an earlier life, had lost interest in microwave nachos, cheeseburgers, and beer. They were looking out plate glass, watching what was going on at the edge of the parking lot as pulsing blue and red lights showed through trees.
“No way that’s a rifle,” Betsy was saying as she chewed on a Slim Jim.
“Oh yeah it is too,” said Al.
“Then we should go on out and help.”
“Help which one?” asked Tex.
All contemplated this long enough for police cars to get closer and the sound of chopper blades to be barely discernible.
“Looks to me like Bubba started it,” decided Pete.
“Then we should go get him.”
“You hear about the guns he’s got?”
“Bubba ain’t gonna shoot us.”
The argument was moot. Bubba could feel dark armies closing around him, and he got desperate.
“Git out now or I’m going to let loose!” he screamed, racking a cartridge into a chamber that already had one.
“Don’t shoot.” West held up her hands, noting the double feed that had just jammed his gun.
“I’m opening the door, okay?”
“NOW!” Bubba pointed and yelled.
West positioned herself before the door as best she could, and planted a foot on it. She raised the handle, and kicked with all her strength, as eight police cars roared in, sirens ripping the violent night.