I was sick of it all, and I was afraid. I just wanted to get our business wrapped up and go home, and I wanted to stop drooling in my sleep.
Throughout the day we sat, watched, and waited. The two shooters practiced for two more hours, then drove off with their trainer in a
Jeep. The merry band below whiled away the rest of the afternoon wandering around and showing off their guns to each other, the women continuing to smoke and look bored. After nightfall we sat through a cross burning during which everyone got drunk. A half hour after the last reveler had stumbled off to his or her lodging, we began clambering down the mountainside under the faint glow of a half moon. On his right hand Garth had donned a weighted black leather glove, a souvenir of his long-ago days as a county sheriff when he'd had a lot of territory to cover, with little help, and the hot prairie wind made a lot of people unpredictable and dangerous.
We came down behind Paul Piggott's cabin and went around to the front door, where Garth knocked. There was no answer, and he knocked again, harder, while I looked down the pathway behind us to make certain we were unobserved. Finally the door opened, and Paul Piggott, silhouetted against the light cast by two hurricane lamps, stood staring at us somewhat uncomprehendingly with bleary, greenish eyes that were the color of jungle mud. His long black hair hung in greasy ringlets around his puffy face. His shirt and sleeveless leather jacket were open, and his paunchy beer belly hung down over his wide leather belt.
"Howdy, Pilgrim," Garth said in his John Wayne drawl as I drove the stiffened fingers of my right hand up through rolls of fat into the man's solar plexus. "The little dogie and I are doing a survey to see what the folks in this area think of vigilante justice and fluoride in the water."
The breath exploded out of Piggott in a beery, belchy whoosh, and as he doubled over I brought my stiffened fingers up into his larynx, not hard enough to crush and kill, but with sufficient force to keep him talking in a hoarse whisper for an hour or two; it was a neat trick I'd learned from Veil Kendry, my sensei. Garth placed his hand on top of the man's greasy head and shoved him back into the crude, one-room cabin. I followed after Garth, closing the door behind me. Garth stood in front of the wheezing, doubled-over man in the center of the room, waiting for Piggott to catch his breath, and then, as Piggott suddenly lunged for him, swatted the man in the face with the back of his gloved hand, breaking the biker's nose, knocking out two teeth, and sending him crashing onto a sagging, ratty sofa bed set up along one wall.
Garth unhurriedly pulled up a stool and sat in front of the couch, and while he waited for our breathless and bleeding host to compose himself, I looked around. Guns of all shapes and sizes were mounted on the walls, which were also festooned with Nazi flags and other regalia that loomed eerily and almost seemed to wave in the flickering light from the hurricane lamps. Cases of beer were stacked up on either side of the doorway. In one corner were a grill and two cans of Sterno, and in another a grimy, stained, portable toilet, apparently for use when it was raining, or too cold-or when he was just too lazy- to use the latrine outside. Against the wall opposite the sofa was a table, and on it was set, most incongruously, a shiny shortwave radio powered by four chunky dry cell batteries linked in series; the outside aerial had been too thin for us to see through binoculars.
Finally I turned and went to stand beside my brother, who was leaning forward on the stool, crowding the cowering Piggott, who was dripping blood from his broken nose and mouth all over his bare chest and stomach. The man's eyes were glazed with shock, and he had the look of a cornered animal.
"So, Paulie," Garth said in a casual tone. "How's the assassination plot coming along?"
Piggott wiped his mouth with a trembling hand, then spat blood to the side, over the armrest of the sofa bed. "Who the hell are you?" he croaked, massaging his bruised larynx with his bloody right hand.
"We are the marvelous flying Frederickson brothers," I replied, rapping my knuckles on his left kneecap. "We're annoyed by something that happened to an acquaintance of ours, and we're going to take it out on you. My advice to you is to simply answer my brother's questions the first time, truthfully, because he gets impatient easily. Don't bother trying to lie, because the man's a veritable human lie detector. You're liable to lose the rest of your teeth."
He didn't take my advice. He obviously recognized the name, for he drew his breath in sharply. Then, whether out of misguided bravado or an even greater fear of someone or something else, he suffered a severe attack of stupid. "I'll die before I tell you anything," he rasped, then spat blood at my brother.
"Suit yourself," Garth replied evenly, then hit Piggott so hard on the side of the head that the man catapulted over the armrest and crashed to the floor, where he lay half conscious, moaning and holding his head as he drew his legs up into a fetal position. Garth rose from the stool, walked across the room, and took a shotgun from a mount on the wall, then came back and pressed the wooden stock against the man's temple. In the same easy tone, he continued, "If I crack your skull open, how much shit do you think I'll get on my shoes?"