Maureen DeCampe had seen the old bastard bent on slowly murdering her as he came over the rise, the man's frame, rope, and what looked like the cattle prod silhouetted against the sky when a dry lightning bolt lit up the heavens. He looked for all the world like a maniacal biblical prophet out of history. Just then, the moon peeked through an opening in the clouds. She quickly hid among some barrels just outside the fence gate. A sign proclaimed the place to be Midlothian Tool amp; Die, but the sign appeared ancient, and it remained questionable exactly what sort of place this was, except that it reeked of petroleum and alcohol and carbide odors, with a touch of methane. The old sign looked like something left over from another era. The place could just as well be a gin mill today.
She inched along the fence, not certain where or how close Isaiah Purdy might be at this moment. Having taken her eyes off him once, she'd lost his gray form in the surrounding gloom.
Still, she heard animal noises. Was it Purdy? No, it was something sounding trapped, the poor creature crying and whining off deep in the woods. She heard the pitter-patter of scurrying mice and rats among the discarded boards and barrels on the other side of the fence. In all the time she had been here, she had not heard a farm animal, not so much as a dog bark or a cat meow. Now she heard someone whistling, and she turned to stare at a man on the other side of the fence, not a hundred yards from her, lighting up a cigarette. His bulk stretched the idea of comfort in a uniform with white shirt and blue patch, the knit badge of a security guard. Her heart skipped a beat at seeing the man, as it had at seeing Nancy Willis, but Nancy lay dead now as a direct result of helping Maureen, and she was keenly aware that approaching the man certainly put him in as much danger, but she had no choice. In her condition, without help, she was not going to get free of Isaiah Purdy. Purdy had made her an expert on helplessness.
She rushed along the fence, banging, calling out, when suddenly she felt the sting of an electric bolt streak through her being, toppling her and sending her into unconsciousness, but in one instant before she lost consciousness, she realized that she was again in Purdy's hands.
“ Hey, old man! How're you doing tonight?” shouted the security guard. “What's all the ruckus?”
“ Damn varmints-rats!” Purdy called back in his most casual tone, while Maureen DeCampe lay in a patch of blackness at his feet.
“ Hate the damn things. Why'd God make 'em in the first place? To torment good people like us?” asked the guard, puffing on his cigarette.
“ What's it they say? Lord works in mysterious ways?”
“ Is that your final answer?” he joked, mimicking a now world famous game show host. “You think the same is true in His creating the mosquitoes and the gnats?” The guard swatted at something that bit his forearm.
“ OK, my friend,” Purdy added, “God didn't make rats at all.”
“ Didn't? Then who? Satan?”
“ My friend, rats came along for the ride, came out of the evil men do. They're here to remind us of our sinful natures, same as those stone statues-gargoyles. Hell, we're all just like 'em.”
“ Just like who?”
“ Rats! Ain't you listening, son?” Purdy cleared his throat and pulled on his chewing tobacco, one foot on top of the game he'd just hunted down, keenly aware that if the moon should return, or if another lightning strike lit up the place, the guard would see what lay at the old man's feet. He thought on the one hand how he might need to get a few steps closer to the guard, that he might need to zap him with the cattle prod, and on the other hand, he thought, I gotta get her up and outta here, but I can't so long as this idiot is talking to me.
“ There are some among us who can't help but give in to that nature.” Purdy fished for words to extricate himself from the conversation.
“ Nature of the rat, you mean?”
“ Chinese have it on their calendar-year of the rat.” old man now wondered if babbling would work, in hopes that the younger man would grow bored and end it and walk off. “Yeah… hey yeah, and the Chinese are 'sposed to be real smart.”
“ It's what ya might call imprinting from birth for some. Why, the Lord don't have any more use for rats than we do, son. Still, the rats among us flourish, and it's a damn rare moment in this life when a man gets even a whiff of real home-grown justice.”
“ I 'spose you're right, old man.” The security guard hadn't seen DeCampe or heard her pleas. A radio played from a nearby doorway, a loud medley of Johnny Cash tunes. The old man secretly thanked Johnny Cash.
But now the guard stepped closer to the fence, closer to Purdy, and he would see DeCampe crumpled at his feet. The idiot was actually interested in the gibberish Purdy had concocted to put him off! Shit.
Closer and closer he came. Purdy stiffened his hold on the cattle prod, gauging his reach through the gate; exactly at what point would he be able to stab the beefy man with it, to render him unconscious? He would not get a second chance. The man was not wearing a side arm, but he had a nightstick and a huge flashlight, which thus far, he had seen no use for. But this meant he had good eyes, and with each step, those good eyes came closer to discovering the woman lying prone at the old man's feet.
One more step, and there'd be hell to pay, but then someone at the door called out the name Frank several times. Frank stopped and turned, waved and shouted across forty yards to his boss at the door. “Be right there, Mr. Wainwright.” He then muttered under his breath for Purdy's sake, “Now you wanna talk about rats? That SOB has incisors longer'n any rat's gonna have.”
Frank the watchman then looked over his shoulder and said to Purdy, 'Talk to you again, old-timer. Gotta go. Duty calls, and ain't that a bitch. Some fifteen-minute break, huh?” Cigarette smoke trailed after the man as he sauntered off.
Purdy waited for the man to disappear through the factory door, taking his flashlight, nightstick, his eyes, and radio with him.
Purdy kicked the woman at his feet for making him sweat and for shaming him, as Jimmy Lee's taunts continued in the old man's brain. She'd shamed him good, breaking free like this; even if she were recaptured without incident, it was incident enough to give him ulcers. Not to mention how things looked to Jimmy Lee. Jimmy Lee would be laughing in his ears for weeks over this.
Purdy bent and placed DeCampe's limp form over his shoulder and started back with his prize toward the safety of the bam. “Some big rat you are, Your Judgess. Had yourself a nice little runabout, but now it's time to go back and nest down with Jimmy Lee, like two mice nestled in a burrow.”
With no one to see her, with no one watching him, with the watchman gone and sirens in the distance not finding this place, Isaiah Purdy returned his unruly charge to the safety of the old farmstead. He returned Maureen DeCampe to the hell he meant at all costs to inflict on her.
Reaching the interior of the bam, stepping over the realtor lady, he dropped DeCampe's unconscious body hard on the earth beside Jimmy's still grinning corpse.
“ A couple few bruises now. You brought 'em on yourself, dearie,” he began. “Ought to speed up the process some, like a bruised apple-jump-start this death by decaying, huh? Whataya think, Jimmy Lee?” he asked the corpse and cackled, pleased with his own words, even though only Jimmy could hear them.
He paused a moment to study Jimmy Lee's badly spaced, badly cracked, yellowed teeth just back of the bloated, mottled lips that'd been pulled by death into the familiar dead man's smile. Isaiah said to the empty bam, “Always had to fight the boy to brush his damned teeth. The one thing I hated seeing was the boy's bad teeth. If only the fool had listened, but guess it don't matter nary a bit now. Once't you're dead, good teeth, bad teeth's all the same by then, huh, Jimmy Lee?”