OCR Text |
Show f*5 The patients were not surprised by her actions, for things were always run qttite informally at Dr. Allred's office. (Quite often one of his wives or children or brethren would enter the back rooms without o f f i c i a l admittance.^ When my father turned to speak to her, she had drawn her p i s t o l - a small, black handgun - and emptied i t into his upper body. (Later, at the t r i a l s , I would glimpse the police photographs: six bullet holes in the head, neck, and chest. His white temple garment-'were stained with blood, his eyes half-open, his face l i f e l e s s . Sometimes those photographs displace my vibrant memories of him always on the move, always working, always bringing l i f e to l i f e . I wish I hadn't seen the pictures.) Afterward, the witnesses were in shock. No one could give consistent, accurate descriptions of the two women, for they had stared at t h e i r guns, not t h e i r faces. An arriving patient had seen someone departing from the office remove a wig and p o l i c e speculated that the assassin could have been a man. Others said no, that the bodies of the assailants were unmistakeably female. Dick Bunker, a member of my f a t h e r 's Soup who had come to talk to him about a ranching venture, had struggled with both women at once, trying to detain them. One struggled free and pointed a revolver at his forehead so that he released both of them, pushing them out the door, crying, "Please don't shoot me. I'm a husband and father." Realizing that the hollow door provided no protection, he released the knob and ran to the rest r o o m ^ c o v e r - J h ey opened the door and shot a f t e r him, t h e n / « t e n e 4 to the examining room, waving the gun ajt- AATuimn+t HTieoilog-ad u™nxt±ixl she moved aoidu, Lhe*i~Ukiii^ aim at my- f a t h e r ' S^ac-6- |