He wondered what it was going to feel like to be shot in the face. When he heard the hammers come back, he knew there would be nothing but a roar and then blackness forever. He couldn’t hold his words back.

“Is this how you pay me back, you fat sonofabitch? You’da died if it hadn’t been for me. I shoulda left your fat ass back there.”

Taylor’s lips and face were swollen and he couldn’t speak plainly. He drooled a little. It was hard for him to hold his head up straight. Jerry had trouble understanding his words.

“You damn bikers … ain’t got … nobody fooled … not me … I … know … I … know.”

A great pain seized the sheriff’s chest, causing him to sag back against the seat. It felt like a huge fist holding his heart and squeezing the blood out of it. His tongue went up into the roof of his mouth. The barrel swung away from Jerry as he fell back, holding his flabby tit with the hideous black hand, three times its normal size. Jerry moved fast without thinking. His foot lashed out and struck the shotgun, pushing it up into the air. It went off, both barrels going at the same time, blowing a shower of pine cones and needles down through the tree limbs. Jerry didn’t wait to see anything else. He took off running, hearing the car behind him, and didn’t stop until he got to his bike. The cruiser came roaring out of the dirt road, sliding sideways with a madman behind the wheel.

The tires were churning and bucking across the dusty ground, throwing a curtain of dirt and sand into the hot air. Taylor had the transmitter of the radio in his puffy hand, howling and screeching orders and instructions that were never heard because his fingers were too thick to depress the transmit button. The Harley coughed once and roared to thundering life as Jerry put all his weight into the kickstarter. Even over the rumble of his own motor, he could hear the carburetor of the Plymouth engine sucking in a great gust of air as Taylor laid his dying foot into it.

Jerry kicked the bike into first and goosed it, popped the clutch and laid it over, spinning in a tight circle in the sand, the swingarm bouncing and jarring until he pulled it back up and flew down the road behind the tan cruiser, eating dust but determined to see the end of it. The car pulled out of sight quickly, then he was riding blind in a cloud of dust. He rode through a hundred yards of it until suddenly the cloud stopped in a sharp curve.