1
Leroy Shanker downshifted his $53,000 customized off-road pick-up as he made a left turn onto Center Street. None of the regulars had yet appeared, he noted, but it was barely sundown, and some of them were probably putting in some overtime at the mill. And most of the others, he thought, were probably still trying to get permission of some sort from their wives or gals. “Not like me,” he muttered under his breath, recalling the argument he had had half an hour before with Thelma Lou.
She had wanted to go to the picture show at the Buena Vista drive-in, but he made it clear that it was Friday night, and nothing was going to divert him from his accustomed pastime.
“You been wi’ me b’fore,” he had said. “An’ y’re invited to come on out wi’ me t’night--if it suits you. If it don’t, then stay home. It’s my truck an’ my gas, an’ it’s my call on Friday night.”
As he cruised down Center Street, a three-lane blacktop running the length of Buena--pronounced Boon-a--Vista, Leroy’s blue eyes squinted furtively up each side street.
“No sign o’ that turkey, Billy Bob Singleberry. Leas’ ways, not yet,” he muttered.
Leroy turned his air conditioner up another notch and reached a fresh Coors out of his built-in refrigerator. There was a bit of chatter on the CB this evening, some of it just truckers up on the interstate, but most of it from locals in their trucks or home in their so-called dens. He turned down the volume and turned up the volume of his short wave receiver that brought in police and ambulance calls. In the background, mournful twangy music came from the six speakers hooked up to his elaborate CD player, but Leroy scarcely heard it.
When he reached the lumber yard near the outskirts of town, Leroy made a U-turn and headed south, back the way he had come. He squinted grimly as he saw a dozen on-coming headlights, some of them three or more miles in front of him. He could tell that most of the vehicles ahead of him were moving slowly, their drivers similarly cautious about whom they met and who was near them.
Leroy’s palms were sweating as he and the first two vehicles approached and, with no eye-contact on their drivers’ part, slowly moved past each other in opposite directions. As they had drawn abreast of each other, each expressionless driver had nodded his head once and had raised his right index finger from his steering wheel in a ritualized greeting. Leroy suspected that they, like him, had their left hands tightly clutched around the customized pistol-grip stocks of their sawed-off shotguns.
Leroy slowly licked his lips and glanced over his shoulder at the pair of double-barrel shotguns and the M-15 in the rack behind his real-leather seat. Then he took a quick pull on his beer and patted the .357 magnum S&W whose moose-hide holster was strapped to his left leg just below his knee.
When couple of head lights appeared behind Leroy from a side street, he flicked a switch on his dash and bathed the possible pursuer in the intense light of the two dozen large lamps mounted on the top rear of his cab. “Moron,” hissed Leroy, as he recognized the half-blinded face of one of the Cutler boys from nearby Strong City.
“Pull on around me, kid!” he said into his dash mike, and the twin speakers atop his cab immediately conveyed his order via 150 decibels to the pale teenager. “Do it slowly--an’ don’t y’ ever creep up b’hine me no more!”
The young man complied, and Leroy could see the fear in the kid’s face--which made him feel good. He shut off his rear-facing lamps and, for fun, turned on the three dozen lamps which faced forward. As the Cutler boy winced under the intense light shining on the back of his neck, Leroy laughed aloud.
Two expensive trucks in the on-coming lane passed Leroy, and, as he raised his finger in greeting, he mentally compared his own vehicle. These were both newer models than his, with more horsepower, and they had larger, deeper-tread tires, but his had a better paint job--midnight blue with air-brushed pictures of life-size topless blondes on his cab doors--and he had seven silhouettes of pick-ups painted on the left side of his hood, while neither of them boasted of even a single “kill” yet.
“Pansies,” he hissed in scorn. And then his head rocked backward and struck the M-15 stock with great force.
“Oh shit,” groaned Leroy, as his vehicle was propelled in a zigzag across a vacant lot despite the fact he was pressing down on his power brakes with both feet.
When his adored pick-up came to rest against the brick wall of Miller’s Hardware, its right fender crushed in and his right front axle bent, Leroy tore off his seatbelt and threw himself down on his back across the leather seat. Bright lights from atop the cab of another vehicle shown intensely on his pale hand as he reached up to pull his shotguns and M-15 down from his rack. Then Leroy’s ears were assaulted by the loud laughter of Billy Bob Singleberry coming from a pair of 250-decibel speakers.
A single shot grazed Leroy’s wrist as he pulled down his M-15.
“Come on out of there, Pea-woy!” said the speakers behind his truck. “Put ums ‘ittle fingers on top o’ y’r haid, Pea-woy! Out o’ that heap o’ junk--now!”
With his .357 magnum in one hand and his sawed-off shotgun in the other, Leroy dropped through the trapdoor in the floor of the passenger’s side, crouched, and darted behind his truck’s huge right rear tire. Instantly he began firing at Singleberry’s truck, and the firing continued like a hailstorm for nearly forty seconds.
2
At 10:42 that spring evening, Sheriff Manly Bentrite pulled his car into the gravel driveway of Leroy Shanker’s trailer and shined his spotlight around the area. Then he opened his door and carefully lifted his middle-aged overweight body from the seat. As his feet made crunching sounds on the driveway, a light came on inside the trailer and a nose and eye appeared behind the dark green curtain of a small window.
“Miz Hunter? You in there, Thelma Lou?” he asked, knowing that she was. “It’s Sheriff Bentrite, ma’am. Gotta talk with you.”
Thelma Lou, a short, gaunt woman with greasy black hair, opened the trailer door a couple inches.
“What’s y’r problem, sheriff? Leroy in trouble agin?”
“I’ll ‘preciate it if y’d let me come in for a couple minutes and talk with you sittin’ down, Thelma Lou.”
When they were both seated in the small kitchenette, the sheriff heaved a long sigh and said, “Better straight from the shoulder, Thelma Lou. Leroy’s gone and got hisself killed tonight.”
There was a long pause while Thelma Lou Hunter absorbed this information.
“What done him in?” she asked simply.
“About three or four hundred rounds from five kinds of automatic rifles punctured just about ev’ry organ in his little body, Thelma Lou. He probably didn’t feel a thing after the first two rounds. Sorry to bring you this kind o’ news.”
Thelma Lou heaved a big sigh, went to a small broom closet, and opened the door.
She returned with a thick cardboard box that was about twice the length of a box of facial tissues and plopped it heavily onto the kitchen table.
“That dang fool, sheriff. It was a clear case of suicide. Leroy was a retrograde technophobe. He just couldn’t bring hisself to enter the modern world by switching his arsenel over to fully automatic. I tried to give him this f’r his birthday just last Feb’ry--but he wouldn’t even look at it!”
Sheriff Bentrite gazed admiringly inside the box at the clean, oiled weapon and sighed.
“Dang right, Thelma Lou. Leroy’s death def’nitely was a case o’ suicide.”
He sighed again, patted the shoulder of her thin cotten bathrobe sympathetically, stood up, and quietly let himself out the door of the shabby trailer.
