I stepped onto the island. The group parted and a tall man strode out. He was skinny and pale, his arms and legs too long for his body. Limp reddish hair framed his face, the tangled strands the exact color of a ripe peach.
“Peaches?” Mad Rogan murmured next to me.
“Yes.”
“Anything I need to know?”
“He summons swarms of poisonous swamp flies.”
It’s a known fact that child molesters look just like normal, ordinary people. Peaches looked like you would imagine a child molester might look. His face wasn’t unpleasant, but there was something deeply unsettling in his gaze. Something sick and creepy. It rolled over you like old oil from a fryer.
Peaches pointed over my shoulder at Mad Rogan. “Hey you! You! What the fuck are you doing in my house?”
On his left, a tall man jerked a Glock up. A woman in a black tank top and dirt-smeared jeans next to him raised a Chiappa Rhino. The distinct barrel was a dead giveaway. Just what we needed.
“We don’t want any trouble,” I said. “We’re just passing through.”
“Trouble? I am fucking trouble, bitch!” Peaches waved his arms. His face flushed. He was building himself up. If he’d been a wild turkey, he would have puffed out all his feathers. He’d work himself up to violence in a minute. Mad Rogan must’ve set off some alarm in Peaches’ brain that told him something was to be gained by humiliating him. “You think you can just come through here with your bitch?”
Mad Rogan didn’t answer.
“You mute, punk? You mute?” Spittle flew from Peaches’ lips. He closed the distance.
My heart sped up. My knees trembled slightly from the rush of adrenaline.
Peaches looked like he was about to ram Mad Rogan with his chest. Mad Rogan looked at him. It was a cold, emotionless stare. Peaches decided that two feet of space was close enough. “You’re in my place now! I am in charge here!”
His hand barely missed me as he flailed around. I took a step back.
“Don’t you fucking move! Shoot her if she moves.”
The man on the left clicked the safety off his Glock.
Peaches leaned closer. “I tell you what, if I was in a good mood, I’d fuck you up and send you back without your bitch, but I’m in a bad mood. I’m in a bad mood, punk. I’m gonna shoot your bitch right here and then I’m gonna put you in a hole. You worth money, punk, because you look like you worth money.”
I could shoot Peaches from where I stood. I’d shot through my pocket before. I would have to kill him though, because if he lived, the flies he summoned would turn me into a cluster of boils. Aiming through a pocket was tricky.
Mad Rogan smiled a big, wide, conciliatory grin and raised his hands. “Hey, hey. No need to get worked up. Look, no gun. I can see you’re the man. You’re in charge here.”
“That’s right!”
“You’re a businessman, right?” Mad Rogan kept smiling, his expression pleasant and placating. “Let’s talk, like two businessmen.” He invited Peaches to a bridge stretching back the way we came. “Let’s just calm down for a minute and talk, right, buddy?”
“Talk money, punk.” Peaches moved with Mad Rogan onto the bridge.
Mad Rogan strolled next to him. “I can see you own all of this and you being in charge and all . . .”
Mad Rogan grabbed Peaches by the throat, kicked his feet out from under him, and hurled him into the water as if the tall man weighed nothing.
Several things happened at the same time: I yanked my gun out and took a shooter stance; the barrels of the man’s Glock and the woman’s Chiappa fell off the guns as if sliced off by a razor blade; and Peaches splashed in the water. We all stopped moving, me with my Ruger pointing at the group, and the two shooters staring blankly at their disfigured firearms.
The larger man opened his hand and let the Glock’s remains fall to the ground.
“I’ll fucking kill you!” Peaches howled, rising to his feet, up to his hips in water. Dark green dots swirled around him. A swarm of fat flies shot out of his hands, curving around him like a shawl.
Mad Rogan flicked his fingers. The wall of the nearest building broke off in one long, twenty-foot slab, slid off the building, and crushed Peaches.
Oh my God.
Mad Rogan turned to face the crowd. Behind him a large crack split the building’s side, and bricks and mortar rained down onto the first chunk. Nobody screamed.
The last brick fell onto the pile. It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
“Now we know,” Mad Rogan said, his voice cold. “I’m in charge. I’m in charge of you. I’m in charge of the guy next to you. I’m in charge of the ground you’re standing on. When I’m gone, I don’t care who is in charge. When I leave here, you can fight and kill each other over who is running things while I’m not here. But let’s be clear: when I’m here, when you see me, I’m in charge.”
The woman lowered her disfigured gun to the floor. The rest of Peaches’ people stood motionless.
“Are there any questions?” Mad Rogan asked.
A short man in a tattered Dallas Cowboys jersey raised his hand slowly. The woman in the tank top grabbed his hand and pushed it down.
“Okay then. You may go.”
By the time I took three breaths, the island was clear.
“Which way is your expert?” Mad Rogan asked me.
Chapter 9
“You killed Peaches.” I stepped over the gap in the bridge.
“Of course I killed him.”
I opened my mouth and closed it.
“Okay,” Mad Rogan said. “This is distracting you, and I need you to function, so let’s fix this. Which part of what happened is upsetting?”
I opened my mouth again and closed it again without saying anything. Peaches would’ve attacked us, possibly killed us, so what Mad Rogan did was justified. It was the sheer sudden brutality of it. It was the way he did it, without any hesitation. One moment Peaches was there, and then he vanished. No trace of him remained. He was crushed out of existence. He was . . . dead.
“Let me help,” he said. “You’ve been taught all your life that killing another person is wrong, and that belief persists even in the face of facts. Not only would Peaches have killed us given the chance, but this way I only had to kill one person rather than kill half a dozen of his followers. I saved several lives, but your conditioning tells you I’ve done the wrong thing. I didn’t. He started it. I finished it.”
“It’s not that. I was getting ready to shoot him in the head.” But when you shot someone, there was a slight chance they might live. There would be a body. What he did was so complete and sudden that I needed a couple of moments to come to terms with it.
“Then what is it?”
“It’s the . . .” I struggled for words. “Splat.”
Mad Rogan glanced at me, his eyes puzzled. “Splat.”
“Yes.”
“I had briefly considered impaling him with one of those steel poles from the roof, but I decided it would be too graphic for you. Would that have been preferable?”
My mind conjured up Peaches with a steel pole sticking out of his stomach. “No.”
“I really would like to know,” he said with genuine curiosity. “The next time I kill someone, I’d like to do it in a way that doesn’t freak you out.”
“How about you don’t kill anybody for a little bit?”
“I can’t make that promise.”
Small talk with the dragon. How are you? Eaten any adventurers lately? Sure, just had one this morning. Look, I still got his femur stuck in my teeth. Is that upsetting to you?
Ahead Xadar building loomed, top three stories above the water, its faded green sign grimy and stained with swamp algae. The tangle of wires on the roof looked like a black spiderweb. Somewhere inside, Bug sat in the center of this web, wrapped in his hysterical brand of crazy. I stopped.
“Don’t kill Bug,” I said. “I’m dead serious.”