Lizardskin Read Online Free

driver. “All’s I know is, one minute I’m sitting in my cab, and the next Joe’s shooting the shit outta a bunch of Indians at the pumps.”
    “Indians? What kind?”
    The trucker’s lean face split along his worry lines. “Jeez, man! Indians! Crows, likely, or Cheyenne from Busby. Bell give one of ’em a bellyfull of shot, I know
that
!”
    McAllister ducked down to take a look under the trailer bed.
    Across the tarmac, Joe Bell was crouched down beside a line of gas pumps, head down, feeding shells into a semiauto twelve-gauge Winchester shotgun.
    Twenty feet away, a dark-skinned boy in faded jeans and a blue plaid shirt lay on his back in a widening lake of thickening blood. One of his boots was off. It was standing, oddly, upright. A black Stetson with one eagle feather lay on its peak a foot away. Most of the boy’s side was scattered in a pulpy red fan over the pavement. McAllister could see his chest rising and falling. Still alive.
    “Ronny, you get back to the car, you tell Fire to bring the paramedic van and not to screw around doing it!” Fire and Rain was what they called the Emergency Service Unit.
    Ronny jumped and ran. McAllister peeked back around the end of the van. A dusty blue Chevy pickup was parked at the pumps. Its hood was up, and the oil dipstick was on the ground in front of the truck. Jubal’s pickup.
    “Hey, Bell!”
    Bell pivoted with the shotgun, shouldered it, and fired in the direction of Beau’s voice. The back of the trailer rocked, and a license plate flew fifty feet into the ditch.
    “Christ, Bell! It’s Beau McAllister!”
    Joe Bell’s bald head and heavy red beard rose up above the top of a gas pump.
    “Beau?”
    “Yes! For chrissake, Bell!”
    “You see ’em, Beau? Over by the propane tank?”
    Oh, great, thought McAllister. About fifty yards away, there was a big enclosure marked off by a Lundy fence. Inside, a huge white torpedo tank sat atop a series of concrete supports. He could just see some huddled shapes through the support pillars.
    “First thing, Bell, you stop firing at that thing. You hit that tank right, we’re all gonna go way up high and come back down as pink rain.”
    “It was just grazing fire, Beau. I know what I’m doing!”
    Sure, thought McAllister. You sure grazed that boy pretty good, didn’t you? “What the hell’s goin on, Bell?”
    “There’s five of them. Look like reservation Indians. I got this one. There’s three men and a girl. They come in with that old blue pickup there, and I braced ’em. Then they go for the weapons.”
    “What kind?”
    “A knife. A
big
one. Other weird shit. I didn’t stop to make a fuckin’
list
!”
    “What’d they do?”
    “
Do?
They go for weapons, I figure it’s a fight!”
    McAllister turned to Ronny, who was once more pressed close to the truck. “Go get me the hailer, Ronny. I’m gonna see if we can talk our way outta something here. I don’t have time for this shit.”
    Ronny came back with the Motorola hailer. McAllister crawled back to the end of the tractor-trailer. “You there, by the tank!”
    Nothing. Maybe some movement.
    “This is the po—”
    Something went
thoong
and then—unbelievably—there was the whirring sound of—a kind of whistle—what the?—then a huge metallic clang hit the tractor-trailer near Beau.
    There was—there was a god-
dammed arrow
stuck ten inches into the back of the tractor-trailer. It had pretty blue feathers and a dark metal shaft, stuck in there good and solid. McAllister stared at it for maybe five seconds, not ready to believe what he was seeing.
    “Ronny, are you seeing what I’m—”
    Another basso
thoong
sound. McAllister scrambled back into the cover beside the driver and Ronny. The trailer caught another shaft. It hit the outside wall like a hammer blow.
    Arrows, McAllister was thinking. He couldn’t get his mind around it. Somebody was shooting
arrows
at him.
    Two more
thoong
sounds, and two more shrill