Poor Dead Cricket by W. Glenn Duncan

Author:W. Glenn Duncan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780648037040
Publisher: d squared publishing

CHAPTER

TWENTY

Cowboy kept the Jimmy tooling along about thirty as we approached the place where we’d last seen the Buick. It had been tucked away about twenty feet off the pavement then, at a right angle to the road, beside a large thicket. We were moving in on the Buick’s exposed flank.

As soon as we caught the first faint glimpse of body metal in the headlights, Cowboy manhandled the truck off the pavement, angling cross-country toward the parked Buick. The Jimmy leaped and crashed through the shrubbery. It was a rough, noisy trip.

“Lights!” Cowboy bellowed.

After two tries in the bucking, swaying cab, I found the switch and turned on the overhead spotlights. The Buick-shape ahead exploded into clarity. It was long, shiny, and maroon, I saw. Pretty color.

Two startled faces, one of them Nagle’s, and a third vague man-shape were visible. A hand with a pistol in it waved briefly.

“Go,” I hollered over the engine racket and the rattle of things bouncing around under the seat.

Cowboy floored it. The engine noise got louder.

About ten yards from the Buick, we hit a small ditch. The front end bounced in and out violently. The rear end hung up briefly, then the big Jimmy waddled clear, still aimed at all that tender Buick sheet metal.

The rear door of the Buick opened about two feet, but whoever opened it changed their mind and didn’t jump out.

That indecision cost them their only chance to get away.

We hit the Buick at a fair clip and shunted it sideways five or six feet. Cowboy yelled something—“Yahoo” or something rodeoish like that—and he stirred the gear and drive levers until he found the lowest gear in the box. The Jimmy grunted.

It really did. That big truck grunted and pawed the ground with all four wheels, and it slowly, steadily shoved the Buick sideways into the thicket.

All we could see from the cab was the roof of the Buick just past the Jimmy’s hood. As the car slid and scraped along, the roof flexed and twisted in the spotlights. Beyond the roof, the tops of bushes quivered and dropped out of sight as the car was pushed over them.

Finally, the Buick jammed solid against the larger trees in the thicket. Cowboy backed the Jimmy up a short distance to light up the scene, and we bailed out.

Cowboy went wide to the left, staying in the shadows. I tucked in close to the Jimmy’s front fender. The side of the Buick looked like rumpled maroon corduroy.

“Hey, you guys,” I called, “can Elmo come out and play?”

“… the hell’s going on here, hoss?” Nagle’s indignant voice got louder and louder as he picked himself off the floor of the Buick. He peered cautiously out the hole where the rear side window used to be. His caterpillar eyebrows looked like a gray McDonald’s sign for an instant, then he ducked out of sight.

Cowboy bulled his way through the bushes toward the front of the Buick. When he got there, he used the hood as a rest for his shotgun.

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