That was unnerving.
And then there was a blast that made me crouch, and I got a glimpse of gunfire at the far end of the pen, where it met the building. I saw a shape move quickly and gracefully from the side of the pen into the building, and I saw another shape fall out toward the pen.
I heard someone yell inside the building, and then I heard double shotgun blasts, and then a silence that was far from golden. I inched my way to the pen, slipped the rifle through the bars so that it was propped against them, stuck a foot on the lower bar, and climbed over.
I dropped down as silently as possible, picked up the rifle, and moved toward where the body had fallen. I was shaking a little, like leaves in a light wind.
I reached the wall of the building and put my back to it and crept along it until I came to where the man had fallen. There was enough light I could see it was one of the cops, even if his head was gone. He had on the uniform. His service automatic was still in his hand.
Trembling, I took the automatic from him and stuck it in my pants pocket, turned cautiously into the opening where the shape had gone, knowing now it had been one of the twins.
Inside it was dark and the smell was strong, but there was a light at the far end of the building, and I could see in the distance better than up close.
I crouched down and put my back to the wall and sat for a moment until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I took a deep breath and started out along what I realized was a walkway. As I came nearer the light at the far end, I could see better. I could see the walkway was attached to a wall on the far side and ended at a closed door.
I also noticed that if I were to step too far left, I would fall into a long concrete trough, and worse, I would fall into what was in the trough. Manure and what might have been blood from butchering churning along, pushed by water, probably dropping off into a septic tank buried somewhere outside. It was hard to see exactly what was there in that light, but it was easy to smell and identify it. Right then I swore off sausage and pork chops but reserved the right to eat bacon.
If it wasn’t bad enough that if I fell off the platform to the left I’d end up deep in hog shit and blood, to the right the concrete floor was twenty feet below, and it was my guess the hogs first entered there on their way into the butchering room. I could almost smell the remnants of their fear, or maybe that was my fear I smelled.
On I went, sweating, the rain pounding about the same rhythm as my heart. And then I tripped, lunged forward, almost lost my footing and fell into the hog mess, almost lost the rifle too, but I ended up keeping both. I got down on one knee and felt what I had tripped over.
I put my hand out and touched something soft and warm, wet and sticky. I pulled my hand back. I squinted. It was hard to see, of course, but I could make out that what I had put my hand in used to be a face. It was the body of the other cop, and he had fallen in such a way he was stretched across the ramp, barring the pathway.
I inadvertently wiped my hand on his uniform front, stepped over him, and moved toward the door. The twin who had killed him had to have gone through there, and now the door was closed, and if I were to open it, there was a good chance he, or both of them, would be waiting on the other side, ready to cut me in half.
I paused for a moment, then went back the way I had come, outside the main building, under the aluminum hog-pen roof, and then over the side of the bars like before, only going outside this time. When I dropped on the other side and picked up the rifle, I could see the house in the distance, some of the lights on, and I thought I might ought to give it up and go back there.
But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. The bastards had shot Leonard’s Pookie.
I slipped around the outside of the building, ducking low where there were windows. There were a few dim lights inside, the kind that stay on all the time but have low wattage. I made my way on around the corner and got to the other side and saw a door there.
I didn’t think going through a door was any better an idea now than it was before. I passed it and moved along the wall, came to a pen on the far side, only this one was filled with Yorkshire hogs. Rain splashed on the outside of the pen and hammered on the roof, and the hogs stirred restlessly down there, lots of them, too many for the space.
I put the shotgun through the bars, climbed over into a large pile of hogs, managed to pull the rifle out from under hog feet, picked it up, and made my way through them. It was like climbing over stinky, warm, moving boulders. They sniffed and honked. I tried not to excite them. I moved along there until I could see the pen had bars that led up to the side of the building, ended below a window. There was an orangish light in the window, like a candle inside a jack-o’-lantern.
With hogs bumping against me, one of them nipping painfully at the back of my thigh, I put the rifle against the bars and took off my shirt. I rolled it with a few whips of the wrist, then I tied one end to the rifle barrel, the other to the stock, making myself an impromptu strap. I slung the rifle over my shoulder with it, started climbing the bars by standing on a hog’s head first, and inched my way up toward the window.
When I got up there, I peeked over the sill. It was a large window about the size of two normal ones, but it was one pane of glass.
In the orange light, I could see it was an office, and the pale-faced twins were in the center of it, standing back to back, at a slight crouch, facing the two doors I might have come through.
I hooked my right leg over a side bar, made myself as comfortable as possible, poked the rifle against the window glass gently, took aim, and was softly squeezing the trigger when one of the twins, perhaps alerted by a shadow, a sound, turned and saw me through the glass.
47
Any kind of weapon pointed at you is call for loose sphincter muscles, but a shotgun at that range is in a completely different league. As the twin whirled in my direction I fired my shot, but it was so hasty, I didn’t know if I had hit anything, because the next thing that happened was I dropped the rifle and swung down with my legs caught up in the bar so that I was dangling upside down. I heard a clanking sound below me but didn’t take time to note it. At the same instant, the glass was blown out by the shotgun and it rained down on me and the hogs below.
As I was trying to right myself and stay below that windowsill, out came the twin. I had just pulled myself up slightly when he leaned out of the window and poked the shotgun in my face. I grabbed the barrel and pushed it away from me, and that caused the twin to lose his balance and come tumbling out of the window and into the pen below.
He landed on some rambling hogs, and the shotgun bounced away from him and disappeared under a sea of hogs. I swung down on one of the bars and then leaped out at him as he tried to get up beneath a horde of now squealing and rampaging hogs. They ran together and knocked one another down and slid on the concrete that was wet from the blowing rain.
I dropped on a hog straddle-wise and rode it for a few feet before falling off. I turned at a crouch, and there came the twin. He had a knife he had produced from somewhere, and he was stepping partly on hog backs, partly on concrete, making a unique path in my direction.
I remembered the automatic I had picked up and reached for where I had shoved it in my pants pocket, and that’s when I remembered the sound of something falling earlier, and now I knew what it was.
The twin stepped one foot up on a hog, and the hog moved, and the twin fell, and I tried to push my way through the hogs to him before he could get up, but that didn’t happen. Just as I got to him, he was up and the knife slashed out at me.
I slap-passed it, but it got part of my naked skin, nothing terrible, but it seemed like a harbinger of things to come. I practice martial arts, have for years, including knife defense, but as my Shen Chuan instructor once told me, “There is no good knife defense, only a defense that is better than nothing.”
Also, I had been stabbed and cut before and had found it most unpleasant.
The knife slashed back and I scooted b
ack. It missed me by inches. He came again, a straight thrust this time. I grabbed his wrist with both hands, something my dad had taught me. I grabbed it and held on and kicked him in the nuts as hard as I could. It was a little like kicking a Ken doll in the crotch. No effect.
He slugged me with his free hand, and it was a good left hook. It shook me. Birds and bees seemed to pass before my eyes, and hogs actually passed beneath my feet, and down I went, still hanging on to that wrist with both hands, pushing the blade away from me.
I wrapped my legs around him as a hog stepped on my face, and I could feel the wet stink against my naked back, the weight of the twin pressing down on me. He tried to slug me with his free hand again. I jerked my leg up and kicked him in the thigh and sent him back, and at the same time I squirmed out from under him, but I had lost my hold on his wrist.
He was up as quick as a whack-a-mole, and with the knife hand in front of him, his other hand folded across his chest to avoid me gripping it and to use it to slap punches I might throw, he advanced on me.
As he did, a hog ran between his legs and knocked him forward. I heard his teeth hit the concrete as two large hogs ran across his back. This caused his head to lift, and as it did, I kicked a field goal with it. It was a really hard kick, and I heard a sound like a rotten stick cracking, knew I had caused something to go in his neck. He made a noise like a water hose breaking loose, then lay flat on the concrete as more hogs walked on him. He was breathing, but barely. I could hear that busted sound still going, but softly now, like a child trying to play a bagpipe.
I shoved some hogs aside, searched about, found the twin’s shotgun, decided that would do, and then, stumbling, nearly falling, I made my way toward the bars of the pen. I put the shotgun through them and climbed over, receiving a nip on the ass from a hog as I went. Behind me, I could hear the twin making a sound almost like a scream caught up in a corked bottle and then I heard a sound like someone ripping a sheet, and I knew the hogs had him. He was still and bleeding, and now he was their sausage.
48
I worked my way around to the building again, and this time I decided to chance the door. I had done one of them in, so the one inside, if he was still there, couldn’t be blocking both.
I tested the door. It was unlocked. I pulled it open quickly and slid inside at a crouch, my back against the wall. But no one was visible. I inched toward the desks, pointing the shotgun. No one was hiding between them. The door at the back of the room was wide open. I stood at the side of the door for a moment, looking out, letting my eyes become more accustomed to the light. The doorway led back the way I had come in originally, before I had turned around and gone back through the pen. It was a platform that jutted out onto the walk that bisected the trough of hog shit and the twenty-foot drop to a concrete floor.
I took a breath, went through the door, and that’s when I knew he had me.
He was standing right there beside the wall, and as I came through he punched his shotgun against my temple, and in that instant I visualized all I was and all I would ever be flying away from me in blood drops, skull fragments, and brain matter.
But that’s when Leonard, who had come up behind him, grabbed the shotgun barrel and jerked it up, causing a blast from the gun to smack loudly into the ceiling. He twisted the shotgun out of the twin’s hand, said, “Give me that.”
He used the stock on the surprised twin’s head, twice in rapid succession, knocking him against the wall. Leonard crowded him so he couldn’t fall, hit him again, flattening his nose. The twin staggered, and Leonard moved and let him stumble by.
Leonard put the shotgun against his head, pushed him with it, made him walk backward. Leonard said, “You don’t fuck with Hap and Leonard, and I hope you’re the one shot Pookie.”
The twin looked at him oddly. A slight smile crawled across his otherwise dead face, and Leonard let her rip. The twin’s head dissolved, and then he toppled into the hog shit. I went over for a closer look. He floated on top for a moment, and then the water moved him along, and he went under and churned out of sight.
49
Walking back to the house, I said, “Sorry about Pookie. He was a fine guy.”
“Still is. He had on that bulletproof vest. He’s got a bruise the size of a cantaloupe and the color of cancer on his chest, a few pellets in his face, some splinters from the door, maybe a cracked rib. Ambulance picked him up. He’s at the hospital. He’ll be all right.”
“They killed both the cops,” I said.
“I saw the bodies.”
“You came at the right time.”
“I usually do. You lost your shirt.”
“Oh, really. I hadn’t noticed.”
Back at the house, Delf and Johnny were holding down the living-room couch.
“Sorry we weren’t with you,” Delf said. “We were clearing the house.”
Leonard and I put the shotguns aside. “You did right,” I said. And then I told them what had happened out there.
“It’s messy,” Delf said, “but you are deputies, and they were scum. We’ll make it right. You lost your shirt, by the way.”
“Oh, really.”
“And you’re bloody.”
“Another surprise. What about the Professor?”
“Didn’t find him,” Johnny said. “But those dick guards said Professor was in the house. We were going to make another sweep for him or evidence.”
Me and Leonard picked up our shotguns.
“Let’s do this,” I said.
50
The search was slow and tedious, and we didn’t split up this time.
Delf and Johnny went through drawers and closets, everything, and me and Leonard followed about with our shotguns, just in case an army of samurai were crouched in a closet somewhere behind the winter coats.
You could see Delf and Johnny had already done this, way things were thrown around, but this time out they were less tender and short on police procedure.
At one point, Delf paused at one of the bathrooms and peed in the sink, us standing outside the open door, hearing his stream hit the porcelain. He came out drying his dick on a hand towel, which was not a pretty sight. He threw the towel in the corner and zipped up.
I said, “Doesn’t that compromise evidence?”
“Not the way I see it,” he said.
“All righty,” I said.
Upstairs, Johnny took a leather jacket from a closet, tried it on. It didn’t fit. “Shit,” he said. “Always wanted one of these.”
He tossed it back in the closet. It made a hollow sound when it hit the closet wall.
We searched high and low, but no Professor, and no real evidence. We ended up back in the living room.
“Could have slipped out the back way when we came up,” Johnny said. “Might be why the twins were back there. He could be hiding with the hogs.”
“He was, they’d squeal,” I said.
“That’s some funny shit,” Johnny said. “But not that funny.”
“Okay,” Leonard said, “so we check the hog house, see if he’s hiding there.”
“I got to pee first,” I said.
“Be sure and pee on something that matters, and wipe your pecker on a towel or curtain,” Delf said.
“I saw the master at work,” I said. “I know how it’s done.”
I didn’t do that, though. I went to the toilet down the hall and took a leak, and when I finished, during the shaking of the member, I realized something.
I zipped up, went back to the living room.
“One thing,” I said. “Outside, you look at the house, there’s a room off to the top left. It has a stained-glass window. I don’t remember seeing it from the inside.”
“Oh,” Delf said.
We all went upstairs, moved down a wide hallway to the far side of the house. We went into a room that should have been the room with the stained-glass window, but it only had a normal window.
I remembered that the closet where Johnny found the j
acket had only had a couple of coats in it, and I remembered too the sound it had made when it hit the closet wall.
The closet door had been left open. I turned on the light and stepped inside. The others stood outside the closet and watched me.
I ran my fingers along the left side of the closet. I could feel air blowing against my fingertips. I pushed gently against the wall, but nothing happened.
I took down the clothes bar to give me more room and felt around at the bottom of the drywall, but still nothing.
I heard Leonard say, “Here we go.”
I came out of the closet and saw him touch the light switch. He pulled the switch down and turned off the light, then he turned the little panel that contained the switch. It moved easily. Under the light-switch panel was a gap, and you could see the wires that went to the switch, but you could see another switch inside.
Leonard hit the switch, said, “Open sesame.”
The wall where I had felt the cool air made a snapping sound, and there was a bit of light shining through a crack.
Delf took out his pistol, went inside the closet, pushed the wall gently. It swung open.
51
In the room, you could see through the round stained-glass window, and you could see the rain blowing sideways in the light.
Johnny felt along the wall and found a switch, clicked it. The room filled with light. It was a bigger room than I’d expected. It was well furnished, even had a bed and a couch and a desk and a very fancy computer on it, along with a printer and a desk lamp. There was a door off to one side, a bathroom maybe.
I went over and opened that door gently, made sure I stepped back so no one in there with a gun would have a clear shot at me.
I peeked around the corner of the door, saw what was in there. Then we all saw what was inside.
In the bathroom, sitting on the pushed-down toilet lid, was a woman holding a dark-skinned baby sucking on a pacifier. The woman was dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt. She was barefoot. She was very pretty, had black hair and prominent teeth.