“Thank God you’re home,” the Judge said. “I can’t tell you what kind of horrible shit has happened to me tonight ... But now the worm has turned. Now that we have cash, we will crush them all.”
Leach just stared. Then he took a swig of Wild Turkey. “We are doomed,” he muttered. “I was about to slit my wrists.”
“Nonsense,” the Judge said. “We won Big. I bet the same way you did. You gave me the numbers. You even predicted the Raiders would stomp Denver. Hell, it was obvious. The Raiders are unbeatable on Monday night.”
Leach tensed, then he threw his head back and uttered a high-pitched quavering shriek. The Judge seized him. “Get a grip on yourself,” he snapped. “What’s wrong?”
“I went sideways on the bet,” Leach sobbed. “I went to that goddamn sports bar up in Jackpot with some of the guys from the shop. We were all drinking Mescal and screaming, and I lost my head.”
Leach was clearly a bad drinker and a junkie for mass hysteria. “I got drunk and bet on the Broncos,” he moaned. “Then I doubled up. We lost everything.”
A terrible silence fell on the room. Leach was weeping helplessly. The Judge seized him by the sash of his greasy leather robe and started jerking him around by the stomach.
They ignored me and I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening ... It was too ugly.
There was an ashtray on the table in front of the couch. As I reached out for it, I noticed a legal pad of what appeared to be Leach’s poems, scrawled with a red Magic Marker in some kind of primitive verse form. There was one that caught my eye. There was something particularly ugly about it. There was something repugnant in the harsh slant of the handwriting. It was about pigs.
I TOLD HIM IT WAS WRONG
By F. X. Leach
Omaha 1968
A filthy young pigs
got tired of his gig
and begged for a transfer
to Texas.
Police ran him down
on the Outskirts of town
and ripped off his Nuts
With a coathanger.
Everything after that was like
coming home in a cage on the
back of a train from
New Orleans on a Saturday
night
with no money and cancer and
a dead girlfriend.
In the end it was no use
He died on his knees in a barn
yard
with all the others watching.
Res ipsa loquitur.
“They’re going to kill me,” Leach said. “They’ll be here by midnight. I’m doomed.” He uttered another low cry and reached for the Wild Turkey bottle, which had fallen over and spilled.
“Hang on,” I said. “I’ll get more.”
On my way to the kitchen I was jolted by the sight of a naked woman slumped awkwardly in the corner with a desperate look on her face, as if she’d been shot. Her eyes bulged and her mouth was wide open and she appeared to be reaching out for me.
I leapt back and heard laughter behind me. My first thought was that Leach, unhinged by his gambling disaster, had finally gone over the line with his wife-beating habit and shot her in the mouth just before we knocked. She appeared to be crying out for help, but there was no voice.
I ran into the kitchen to look for a knife, thinking that if Leach had gone crazy enough to kill his wife, now he would have to kill me, too, since I was the only witness. Except for the Judge, who had locked himself in the bathroom.
Leach appeared in the doorway holding the naked woman by the neck and hurled her across the room at me . . .
Time stood still for an instant. The woman seemed to hover in the air, coming at me in the darkness like a body in slow motion. I went into a stance with the bread knife and braced for a fight to the death.
Then the thing hit me and bounced softly down to the floor. It was a rubber blow-up doll: one of those things with five orifices that young stockbrokers buy in adult bookstores after the singles bars close.
“Meet Jennifer,” he said. “She’s my punching bag.” He picked it up by the hair and slammed it across the room.
“Ho, ho,” he chuckled, “no more wife beating. I’m cured, thanks to Jennifer.” He smiled sheepishly. “It’s almost like a miracle. These dolls saved my marriage. They’re a lot smarter than you think.” He nodded gravely. “Sometimes I have to beat two at once. But it always calms me down, you know what I mean?”
Whoops, I thought. Welcome to the night train. “Oh, hell yes,” I said quickly. “How do the neighbors handle it?”
“No problem,” he said. “They love me.”
Sure, I thought. I tried to imagine the horror of living in a muddy industrial slum full of tin-walled trailers and trying to protect your family against brain damage from knowing that every night when you look out your kitchen window there will be a man in a leather bathrobe flogging two naked women around the room with a quart bottle of Wild Turkey. Sometimes for two or three hours ... It was horrible.
“Where is your wife?” I asked. “Is she still here?”
“Oh, yes,” he said quickly. “She just went out for some cigarettes. She’ll be back any minute.” He nodded eagerly. “Oh, yes, she’s very proud of me. We’re almost reconciled. She really loves these dolls.”
I smiled, but something about his story made me nervous. “How many do you have?” I asked him.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have all we need.” He reached into a nearby broom closer and pulled out another one—a half-inflated Chinese-looking woman with rings in her nipples and two electric cords attached to her head. “This is Ling-Ling,” he said. “She screams when I hit her.” He whacked the doll’s head and it squawked stupidly.
Just then I heard car doors slamming outside the trailer, then loud knocking on the front door and a gruff voice shouting, “Open up! Police!”
Leach grabbed a .44 Magnum out of a shoulder holster inside his bathrobe and fired two shots through the front door. “You bitch!” he screamed. “I should have killed you a long time ago.”
He fired two more shots, laughing calmly. Then he turned to face me and put the barrel of the gun in his mouth. He hesitated for a moment, staring directly into my eyes. Then he pulled the trigger and blew off the back of his head.
The dead man seemed to lunge at me, slumping headfirst against my legs as he fell to the floor—just as a volley of shotgun blasts came through the front door, followed by harsh shouts on a police bullhorn from outside. Then another volley of buckshot blasts that exploded the TV set and set the living room on fire, filling the trailer with dense brown smoke that I recognized instantly as the smell of Cyanide gas being released by the burning plastic couch.
Voices were screaming through the smoke, “Surrender! Hands up behind your goddamn head! DEAD MEAT!” Then more shooting. Another deafening fireball exploded out of the living room. I kicked the corpse off my feet and leapt for the back door, which I’d noticed earlier when I scanned the trailer for “alternative exits,” as they say in the business—in case one might become necessary. I was halfway out the door when I remembered the Judge. He was still locked in the bathroom, maybe helpless in some kind of accidental drug coma, unable to get to his feet as flames roared through the trailer . . .
Ye Fucking Gods! I thought. I can’t let him burn.
Kick the door off its hinges. Yes. Whack! The door splintered and I saw him sitting calmly on the filthy aluminum toilet stool, pretending to read a newspaper and squinting vacantly up at me as I crashed in and grabbed him by one arm.
“Fool!” I screamed. “Get up! Run! They’ll murder us!”
He followed me through the smoke and burning debris holding his pants up with one hand ... The Chinese sex doll called Ling-Ling hovered crazily in front of the door, her body swollen from heat and her hair on fire. I slapped her aside and bashed the door open, dragging the Judge outside with me. Another volley of shotgun blasts and bullhorn yells erupted somewhere behind us. The Judg
e lost his footing and fell heavily into the mud behind the doomed Airstream.
“Oh, God!” he screamed, “who is it?”
“The Pigs,” I said. “They’ve gone crazy. Leach is dead! They’re trying to kill us. We have to get to the car!”
He stood up quickly. “Pigs?” he said. “Pigs? Trying to kill me?”
He seemed to stiffen, and the dumbness went out of his eyes. He raised both fists and screamed in the direction of the shooting. “You bastards! You scum! You will die for this. You stupid white-trash pigs!
“Are they nuts?” he muttered. He jerked out of my grasp and reached angrily into his left armpit, then down to his belt and around behind his back like a gunfighter trying to slap leather ... But there was no leather there. Not even a sleeve holster.
“Goddamn it!” he snarled. “Where’s my goddamn weapon? Oh, Jesus! I left it in the car!” He dropped into a running crouch and sprinted into the darkness, around the corner of the flaming Airstream. “Let’s go!” he hissed. “I’ll kill these bastards! I’ll blow their fucking heads off!”
Right, I thought, as we took off in a kind of low-speed desperate crawl through the mud and the noise and the gunfire, terrified neighbors screaming frantically to each other in the darkness. The red convertible was parked in the shadows, near the front of the trailer right next to the State Police car, with its chase lights blinking crazily and voices burping out of its radio.
The Pigs were nowhere to be seen. They had apparently rushed the place, with guns blazing—hoping to kill Leach before he got away. I jumped into the car and started the engine. The Judge came through the passenger door and reached for the loaded .454 Magnum ... I watched in horror as he jerked it out of its holster and ran around to the front of the cop car and fired two shots into the grille.
“Fuck you!” he screamed. “Take this, you Scum! Eat shit and die!” He jumped back as the radiator exploded in a blast of steam and scalding water. Then he fired three more times through the windshield and into the squawking radio, which also exploded.
“Hot damn!” he said as he slid back into the front seat. “Now we have them trapped!” I jammed the car into reverse and lost control in the mud, hitting a structure of some kind and careening sideways at top speed until I got a grip on the thing and aimed it up the ramp to the highway ... The Judge was trying desperately to reload the .454, yelling at me to slow down so he could finish the bastards off! His eyes were wild and his voice was unnaturally savage.
I swerved hard left to Elko and hurled him sideways, but he quickly recovered his balance and somehow got off five more thundering shots in the general direction of the burning trailer behind us.
“Good work, Judge,” I said. “They’ll never catch us now.” He smiled and drank deeply from our Whiskey Jug, which he had somehow picked up as we fled ... Then he passed it over to me, and I too drank deeply as I whipped the big V-8 into passing gear and we went from forty-five to ninety in four seconds and left the ugliness far behind us in the rain.
I glanced over at the Judge as he loaded five huge bullets into the Magnum. He was very calm and focused, showing no signs of the drug coma that had crippled him just moments before ... I was impressed. The man was clearly a Warrior. I slapped him on the back and grinned. “Calm down, Judge,” I said. “We’re almost home.”
I knew better, of course. I was one thousand miles from home, and we were almost certainly doomed. There was no hope of escaping the dragnet that would be out for us, once those poor fools discovered Leach in a puddle of burning blood with the top of his head blown off. The squad car was destroyed—thanks to the shrewd instincts of the Judge—but I knew it would not take them long to send out an all-points alarm. Soon there would be angry police roadblocks at every exit between Reno and Salt Lake City . . .
So what? I thought. There were many side roads, and we had a very fast car. All I had to do was get the Judge out of his killing frenzy and find a truck stop where we could buy a few cans of Flat Black spray paint. Then we could slither out of the state before dawn and find a place to hide.
But it would not be an easy run. In the quick space of four hours we had destroyed two automobiles and somehow participated in at least one killing—in addition to all the other random, standard-brand crimes like speeding and arson and fraud and attempted murder of State Police officers while fleeing the scene of a homicide . . .
No. We had a Serious problem on our hands. We were trapped in the middle of Nevada like crazy rats, and the cops would shoot to Kill when they saw us. No doubt about that. We were Criminally Insane ... I laughed and shifted up into Drive. The car stabilized at 115 or so . . .
The Judge was eager to get back to his women. He was still fiddling with the Magnum, spinning the cylinder nervously and looking at his watch. “Can’t you go any faster?” he muttered. “How far is Elko?”
Too far, I thought, which was true. Elko was fifty miles away and there would be roadblocks. Impossible. They would trap us and probably butcher us.
Elko was out, but I was loath to break this news to the Judge. He had no stomach for bad news. He had a tendency to flip out and flog anything in sight when things weren’t going his way.
It was wiser, I thought, to humor him. Soon he would go to sleep.
I slowed down and considered. Our options were limited. There would be roadblocks on every paved road out of Wells. It was a main crossroads, a gigantic full-on truck stop where you could get anything you wanted twenty-four hours a day, within reason, of course. And what we needed was not in that category. We needed to disappear. That was one option.
We could go south on 93 to Ely, but that was about it. That would be like driving into a steel net. A flock of pigs would be waiting for us, and after that it would be Nevada State Prison. To the north on 93 was Jackpot, but we would never make that either. Running east into Utah was hopeless. We were trapped. They would run us down like dogs. There were other options, but not all of them were mutual. The Judge had his priorities, but they were not mine. I understood that me and the Judge were coming up on a parting of the ways. This made me nervous. There were other options, of course, but they were all High Risk. I pulled over and studied the map again. The Judge appeared to be sleeping, but I couldn’t be sure. He still had the Magnum in his lap.
The Judge was getting to be a problem. There was no way to get him out of the car without violence. He would not go willingly into the dark and stormy night. The only other way was to kill him, but that was out of the question as long as he had the gun. He was very quick in emergencies. I couldn’t get the gun away from him, and I was not about to get into an argument with him about who should have the weapon. If I lost, he would shoot me in the spine and leave me in the road.
I was getting too nervous to continue without chemical assistance. I reached under the seat for my kit bag, which contained five or six spansules of Black Acid. Wonderful, I thought. This is just what I need. I ate one and went back to pondering the map. There was a place called Deeth, just ahead, where a faintly marked side road appeared to wander uphill through the mountains and down along a jagged ridge into Jackpot from behind. Good, I thought, this is it. We could sneak into Jackpot by dawn.
Just then I felt a blow on the side of my head as the Judge came awake with a screech, flailing his arms around him like he was coming out of a nightmare. “What’s happening, goddamn it?” he said. “Where are we? They’re after us.” He was jabbering in a foreign language that quickly lapsed into English as he tried to aim the gun. “Oh, God,” he screamed. “They’re right on top of us. Get moving, goddamn it. I’ll kill every bastard I see.”
He was coming out of a nightmare. I grabbed him by the neck and put him in a headlock until he went limp. I pulled him back up in the seat and handed him a spansule of acid. “Here, Judge, take this,” I said. “It’ll calm you down.”
He swallowed the pill and said nothing as I turned onto the highway and stood heavily on the accelerator. We were up to 115 when a green exit s
ign that said “Deeth No Services” loomed suddenly out of the rain just in front of us. I swerved hard to the right and tried to hang on. But it was no use. I remember the sound of the Judge screaming as we lost control and went into a full 360-degree curl and then backward at seventy-five or eighty through a fence and into a pasture.
For some reason the near-fatal accident had a calming effect on the Judge. Or maybe it was the acid. I didn’t care one way or the other after I took the gun from his hand. He gave it up without a fight. He seemed to be more interested in reading the road signs and listening to the radio. I knew that if we could slip into Jackpot the back way, I could get the car painted any color I wanted in thirty-three minutes and put the Judge on a plane. I knew a small private airstrip there, where nobody asks too many questions and they’ll take a personal check.
At dawn we drove across the tarmac and pulled up to a seedy-looking office marked Air Jackpot Express Charter Company. “This is it, Judge,” I said and slapped him on the back. “This is where you get off.” He seemed resigned to his fate until the woman behind the front desk told him there wouldn’t be a flight to Elko until lunchtime.
“Where is the pilot?” he demanded.
“I am the pilot,” the woman said, “but I can’t leave until Debby gets here to relieve me.”
“Fuck this!” the Judge shouted. “Fuck lunchtime. I have to leave now, you bitch.”
The woman seemed truly frightened by his mood swing, and when the Judge leaned in and gave her a taste of the long knuckle, she collapsed and began weeping uncontrollably. “There’s more where that came from,” he told her. “Get up! I have to get out of here now.”
He jerked her out from behind the desk and was dragging her toward the plane when I slipped out the back door. It was daylight now. The car was nearly out of gas, but that wasn’t my primary concern. The police would be here in minutes, I thought. I’m doomed. But then, as I pulled onto the highway, I saw a sign that said, We Paint All Night.