The House of Wolfe Read Free

restroom foyer and saw what was going on and whipped back around into the men’s room and went out the window and over to the truck for the guns. He’d fired two fast rounds from each gun at the bases of their skulls, going for the brain stems to cut motor function and reflex trigger pulls, but he wasn’t used to the Redhawk, and its first shot obviously missed the medulla because the guy jerked the trigger in the microsecond before the second bullet cut his lights. The buckshot charge peppered the far wall and shattered two of the glass-framed posters hung on it. One of them, which Lila made, reads, “Resist Much, Obey Little” directly above a hand-scrawled “I mean all you sonofabitches! Uncle Walt.” The other is a large blowup of Natalie Portman lying naked on a big towel on a plank floor and staring lustily at the viewer, a trio of buckshot holes in one gorgeous thigh right next to an inscription reading, “To Charlie Baby, the world’s greatest plowman, from his most grateful furrow. Yours forever and ever , Nattie.” Our cousin Jackie Marie made it for Charlie for his fortieth birthday three years ago. She lost a bunch of bets that he wouldn’t hang it on the wall.
    Charlie swigs from a fresh Negra and lets Eddie finish his account, then chastises him for taking such a reckless chance that could’ve got some of us killed.
    â€œI got an M-4 with auto select under here,” Charlie says, tapping the bar counter. “I could’ve put the whole magazine in the two of them before they cleared the parking lot.”
    But his heart’s not in the reproach and we all know it, because he’d have done the same thing in Eddie’s shoes. Besides, Eddie’s mode was first-rate. The casual “excuse me” in Spanish didn’t spook them into blasting away but distracted them just enough for us to hit the deck before the barrage went off.
    Eddie says it was a risky thing to do and he knows it, and yeah, we could’ve nailed them outside or hunted them down afterward. Still, he was afraid they might shoot us any second for whatever dumbfuck reason, or even by accident, so he had to chance it.
    Charlie seems about to rebut that argument, but then shrugs and lets it go.
    The ruin a magnum hollow-point can make of a human head is impressive. Except for the blood that’s sopping through the ski masks, we’re able to contain most of the mess inside the hoods as we pull them up carefully to look at the faces. Neither guy is anybody we know. They’re both carrying wallets. One has a Texas driver’s license with a Laredo address, the other a Mexican license. Maybe the names are real, maybe not. Makes no difference. Both wallets hold pictures of women, lottery tickets, paper pesos, a few dollars.
    Although we’re in the legal clear in putting down a pair of armed robbers, Charlie sees no reason to report the matter to the sheriff’s office in town. We all agree. Why go through the bother, the questions, the paperwork? We anyway don’t like being in the news in connection with a violent incident. We have political and media friends in town who at times help us avoid that sort of publicity, but we prefer not to use them except in extreme cases.
    Lila accepts the Professor’s offer to help clean up. Tomorrow she’ll get somebody to repaint the shot-up wall and reframe the posters. The rest of us put on our rain ponchos and pick up the bodies and shotguns and haul them out the back door.
    It’s still drizzling and the night’s gone colder. The river’s barely visible under the dense cloud cover and the risen mist. I bring my truck around and we load the bodies into the back and strip them to undershorts and masks, leaving the masks on because I don’t want any more blood than necessary on the truck bed. We put the clothes and shoes and wallets into a plastic trash bag and add a couple of big rocks and tie it off and