Leon Trett shook his head several times, as if by doing so he could make the clips appear, make Bubba turn reasonable.
"Now," Trett said. "Now. I want my clips now. I paid for them."
He reached out for Bubba's arm and Bubba backhanded him in the chest, knocked him into the small table underneath the window.
"Motherfucker!" Bubba stopped counting, slammed the bills together in his hands. "Now I gotta start all over."
"You give me my clips," Trett said. His eyes were wet and there was a spoiled eight-year-old's whine in his voice. "You give them to me."
"Fuck off." Bubba started counting the bills again.
Trett's eyes filled and he slapped the gun between his hands.
"What's the matter, baby?"
I turned my head toward the sound of the voice and laid eyes on the largest woman I'd ever seen. She wasn't just an Amazon of a woman, she was a Sasquatch, bulky and covered in thick gray hair, at least five inches of it rising off the top of her head and then spilling down the sides of her face, obscuring her cheekbones and the corners of her eyes, billowing out on her wide shoulders like Spanish moss.
She was dressed in dark brown from head to toe, and the girth under those folds of loose clothing seemed to shake and rumble as she stood in the kitchen doorway with a.38 held loosely in one great paw of a hand.
Roberta Trett. Her photograph did not do her justice.
"They won't give me the clips," Leon said. "They're taking the money, but they won't give me the clips."
Roberta took a step into the room, surveyed it with a slow roll of her head from right to left. The only one who hadn't acknowledged her presence was Bubba. He remained in the center of the kitchen, head down, trying to count his money.
Roberta pointed the gun quite casually in my direction. "Give us the clips."
"Hey!" Roberta said. "You look at me when I'm talking."
Bubba turned his head slightly toward her, but kept his eyes on the money. "Nine hundred. Nine hundred ten, nine hundred twenty-"
"Mr. Miller," Leon said desperately, "my wife is talking to you."
"...nine hundred sixty-five, nine hundred seventy-"
"Mr. Miller!" Leon 's shriek was so high-pitched I felt it ring in my inner ears, buzz along the brain stem.
"One thousand." Bubba stopped in the middle of the wad of money and placed the chunk he'd already counted in his jacket pocket.
Leon sighed audibly and relief sagged across his face.
Bubba looked at me as if unaware of what all the fuss was about.
Roberta lowered the gun. "Now, Mr. Miller, if we could just-"
Bubba licked the corner of his thumb and peeled off the top bill in the pile that remained in his hands. "Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred..."
Leon Trett looked like he'd suffered an embolism on the spot. His chalky face turned crimson and bloated and he squeezed the empty gun between his hands and hopped back and forth as if he needed a bathroom.
Roberta Trett raised the gun again, and this time there was nothing casual about it. She pointed it directly at Bubba's head and closed her left eye. She sighted down the barrel and pulled back the hammer.
The harsh light of the kitchen seemed to etch her and Bubba's outlines as they stood in the center of the room, both of them the size of something you'd normally climb with rope and pitons, not give birth to.
I slid my.45 out of the holster at the small of my back, dropped it down behind my right leg, and released the safety.
"Two hundred twenty," Bubba said, as Roberta Trett took another step toward him, "two hundred thirty, two hundred forty, dude, shoot this bitch, will ya, two hundred fifty, two hundred sixty..."
Roberta Trett stopped and cocked her head slightly to the left, as if unsure of what she'd heard. She looked unable to identify what her options were. She looked unfamiliar with that sensation.
I doubted she'd ever been ignored in her life.
"Mr. Miller, you will stop counting now." She extended her arm until it was T-bar straight and hard, and her knuckles whitened against the black steel.
"...three hundred, three hundred ten, three hundred twenty, I said, shoot the big bitch, three hundred thirty..."
That time she was sure of what she'd heard. A tremor appeared in her