“Will do,” the voices hissed back in the semidarkness, the half-moon above shimmering down through the pink-tinged radioactive stratosphere high above, giving a violet kind of glow to the proceedings. They moved forward in a crouch, the men readying their respective guns, and moved up to the two corners of the building. Inside, they could see men arguing now, an occasional voice rising in curses. Stone stood up as both groups of assassins got in place each about twenty feet away from him on opposite sides. They stared back toward him, waiting for his signal.
Suddenly Stone raised both of his weapons—the Ruger .44 and the mini-Uzi. Pointing one at each flank, he pulled the trigger and kept pulling. The bastards didn’t know what hit them as the slugs poured into them. Within seconds it was all over, and six steaming bodies lay sprawled over one another, their own weapons untouched. Stone suddenly saw movement from one of the bodies, then heard a sharp retort. He felt a slug graze his upper left arm and winced in pain but instantly fired back with the few remaining shells in the Uzi. The ganger bounced around amid his red-coated fellows as Stone’s bullets found their mark. Then he was still. All of them were still.
As Stone quickly reloaded his equalizer—just in case—the farmers who had been meeting inside came streaming out of every door. They started to run toward the hills until Hernandez, whose place it was, saw that the man with the guns was Stone. He stopped, and slowly, cautiously, the others walked back, forming a crowd around the fallen killers.
“You were all almost dead meat,” Stone said, slapping the Redhawk and the auto back into their close-fitting holsters against his body. “These scum were sent to kill you.” The farmers, now about a hundred strong, looked down at what they had almost been turned into, and their brown faces turned a lot whiter.
“We were meeting to figure out a way to—” Hernandez began, standing a few feet from Stone, his big straw farmer’s hat in his trembling brown hands.
“Forget that organization stuff,” Stone said sharply. “You’ve run out of time. The brothers want you all out of the picture. You understand what that means? Kaput, vamoose, fini.… You’ve got to fight back—and hard. Take the weapons of these dead gunmen, then hide, ’cause they’ll send out more men. But listen, I’m with you, that’s all I can tell you. I have a plan, an idea to set the two gangs against each other. But it’s not quite time yet. I need another day or two. I’ll need your help then. You understand me?” He looked around, addressing all of them, wanting every man to feel the intensity of his words.
“You can no longer be wimp farmers, poor little peasants who are being mistreated, and isn’t it all so sad? I’m telling you if you don’t fight back now—and with your blood—you will all be exterminated within the week. It’s your choice, friends. I can’t do any more.” The farmers looked at one another, picked up the weapons of the fallen Strathers killers, and looked at them curiously.
“Practice with them,” Stone said to Hernandez, who had lifted a big Army-issue nickel-plated .45. “But don’t waste any ammunition. There’s a shitload of guns in that town.”
“We hear your words, Mr. Stone,” Hernandez said, looking at the man who had just saved them all with a profound mixture of sadness and hope in his ancient eyes. “We will fight. We will arm ourselves with these—and with hoes and knives and sticks if we have to. But there is no turning back now. It is like you say. There but for your guns lie our bleeding bodies.”
“Good, good,” Stone said, looking sharply at the man. “But there’s one more thing. One of you is a traitor.” There was an audible gasp from the crowd. And voices yelled out, “No, no,” in anger at Stone, an emotion he took as a good sign, as it meant they could feel rage as well as self-pity. And they would need a hell of a lot of that emotion to have the slightest chance of winning.
“Who?” Hernandez asked Stone without hesitation, knowing that if the man spoke the words, they were true.
“I don’t know for sure. The brothers referred to him as someone on the inside, at the highest levels of the organization. Someone ―they would never suspect.’” The farmers looked around at each other suspiciously, a sudden wall of paranoia between them. Men they had trusted for years, decades, suddenly might be hated enemies. It gave them all a sick feeling in their guts, and tightly drawn faces as well.
Hernandez looked around at the group of five men who were standing closest to him, the leaders of the farmer’s movement, and studied one of them closely, his eyes narrowing as if he were examining a frog pinned to a dissecting table.
“Miguel,” he said suddenly, “come here.” A young, handsome man with long wavy black hair stepped forward. He sported a long twirling mustache and the lusty, full-cheeked face that bespoke someone who knew how to have a good time, drink, love the ladies.
“Miguel, did you have anything to do with this?” Hernandez asked him as the man walked up to him and stepped about a yard away.
“Uncle, on my mother’s grave, I swear I had absolutely nothing to do with any of this. Why, the very idea that you would even suspect—”
“Shut up,” Hernandez snapped, his face growing colder and harder, like a body of water freezing up. “I’ve had my eye on you for months now, nephew. While the rest of us suffer, go around with sunken cheeks, you always seem to be well fed and have a self-satisfied air about you.”
“Uncle, is it my fault that I love life, that I—” The man stuttered as he felt the eyes of a hundred other men on him.
“Empty your pockets,” Hernandez said softly, but clearly enough for every man there to hear.
“What?” Miguel asked with a little laugh, as if he hadn’t heard.
“You heard me, nephew, I know that your ears, along with all your other bodily organs, are in full functioning order. Empty your pockets.” Miguel slowly reached down toward his pants pocket and extricated what was inside. As he lifted his hand out, his face seemed to drain of all color, his lips suddenly as dry as sand. For in the hand were ten silver dollars, perfect and glistening.
“Now—I—I can explain,” Miguel began, looking at his uncle, at the others, his head turning back and forth. “I did some work for a man in town, helping him with painting and—”
“Nephew, I will use these dollars and whatever else I find on you to feed your widowed wife and your orphaned children.”
“My widowed wife—” Miguel said, backing off, a look of sheer horror on his face. Suddenly there was a loud pop, and the .45 in Hernandez’s hands burped with smoke. Miguel was sent flying backward as the slug entered his chest and quickly found his heart. He slammed down on his back, dead before he hit the dirt. He had no more excuses—and no need of them, either.
Chapter
Eighteen
* * *
Stone burst into the Strathers brothers’ headquarters like a man who looked like he should be dead. He had borrowed a little blood from the dead hit squad—they had plenty and didn’t seem to mind giving up a little—and had smeared it all over his shoulder and leg, making him look like he had just been through the Battle of the Bulge.
“W-what the hell?” Jayson stuttered as he saw the staggering Stone walk in, dripping little red drops on the floor behind him.
“Ambush,” Stone said in a breathless whisper, as if he could hardly scrape up the energy for the words. “Your double-dealer on the inside with the farmers must have been a triple-dealer,” he said bitterly. “The Head Stompers were waiting for us before we even got to the goddamn farm.” He pulled out the small piece of chain that he had found on the street the day before when the bikers had been in town and threw it down on the floor at the brothers’ feet.
“Man, it was a slaughter. I’ll tell you, your boys fought tough. Went out like men,” Stone said, shaking his head in appreciation. “But we didn’t have a chance. I was lucky even to get—” His right leg seem to buckle a little, and Vorstel jumped up from the couch where he had been playing around with a newly arrived twelve-year-old whose body and face hadn’t yet been mashed in by life
in one of their whorehouses but soon would be.
“Here, sit down, Preacher Boy,” the prune-mouthed giant said. “I’ll get the doc.”
“No, no,” Stone protested, waving his hands. “It looks worse than it is. Caught two, maybe three slugs, but I think they’re all flesh and muscle wounds, so I’ll make it. The main thing is revenge,” Stone said, sitting up straight, as if the mere thought of it gave him renewed energy.
“Goddamn right,” Rudolf said, slamming his fist down so hard on the desk at which he sat that a crack appeared along the center and spread all the way across. “This is it, man,” the neckless wonder said, looking back and forth at his two siblings. “We knew de day was going to come when de bastards was going to start trying to pick us off. It’s wartime. War.”
“Oh, do calm down,” Jayson said, sitting cross-legged on a satin love seat along one wall as he filed away at his long nails, getting them just right. “War is hardly called for. Why should we lose a lot of our men and waste our money? There’s easier ways to strike back.”
“Like what?” Vorstel asked as he paced around the room looking like a caged grizzly ready to break out.
“Like, we snatch his son, his heir. The little bastard’s only about eight or nine. I saw him yesterday riding behind his father when they came in. He keeps the squirt under guard so no one can get close to him. But we could get him. I’m sure. And once we had him—”
“Yeah, I like it.” Vorstel nodded, and Rudolf grunted in assent, though the war idea was a lot more to his liking.
“Once we have his kid,” Jayson said, twirling a silk scarf in front of him like a fan dancer, “we can dictate things around here. We’ll have his balls in a bear trap.”
“But maybe he doesn’t care about the kid,” Stone spoke up, starting to see his attempted manipulations to set the two gangs at each other’s throats not quite heading in the direction he had hoped. “Maybe he’ll just let him die.”
“No way,” Jayson said with a shrieking little laugh. “The bald-headed coot worships that little fucker. He wants to pass his whole operation on to the bald brat and start a fucking empire, to become Attila the Hun II. That kid’s worth more to Bronson than his whole damn gang—guaranteed.”
“But—” Stone spoke up.
“Hey, Preacher Boy, cool it,” Jayson said, sounding annoyed. “You’re just a hired hand, okay? We make the decisions around here. Now off to the doctor with you,” he said suddenly, with a bizarre laugh. “Can’t have our best hired gun all bloody, now can we?”
“But—” Stone tried to interject again.
“You!” Jayson said, addressing one of two guards who stood facing each other at the door to the room. “Take Preacher Boy here over to Doc’s. Tell him top-of-the-line treatment for our boy, here.” Stone saw that he was caught. There wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do. His plans were veering off in a very unpredictable fashion.
“I get the money, right?” Stone suddenly piped up, realizing it would be out of character if he didn’t demand it.
The brothers looked at each other for a few seconds. Then Jayson looked back at the blood-covered man.
“Sure you do, Preacher Boy, every penny of it. Though we’ll have more work for you soon—lots of it, I’m sure.”
“All right, then,” Stone said, rising as one of the guards grunted and pointed the direction. As Stone turned and walked out, the three brothers gathered in the center of the room talking and gesticulating wildly as they planned the abduction of the biker child. The guard led Stone across the street and down about three blocks, through a seedy-looking bar and into the back where he pounded hard on a metal door that wasn’t set quite right on its hinges.
“Doc, Doc, open up, you son of a bitch,” the man screamed, and after about ten seconds the door creaked on. Stone looked in and down at the bloated red face of a longtime alkie. The fat face looked positively diseased pores all enlarged on his cheeks; huge now with broken blood vessels like red spiderwebs all over it; great cauliflower ears, half eaten away, that sat on each side of the alcohol-twisted face.
“Yeah, what the hell you want?” the man asked, and Stone could see a bottle of liquor poking out of the filthy gray bloodstained smock he wore. The doctor squinted through thick bifocals, one lens cracked down the middle, at his unwelcome visitors. “Christ, man, it’s past midnight. Can’t a man drink in peace in this goddamn town anymore?”
“Oh, shut your drunken face, you old alkie.” The guard sneered with disgust. “Here, this stupid fool will see to your wounds,” the Strather man said with a harsh laugh, and walked off, praying that he’d never be hurt bad enough to need to be treated by the likes of that. The brothers had had him on payroll for years now, needing some kind of medical man around, since their own employees tended to get shot up or knifed now and again. The sixty-year-old M.D., who had been kicked out of three medical schools but who had at least once been a credible doctor, was now hardly capable of spreading butter on bread. Still, old habits die hard. So the man stayed on, lost in drunken reminiscences of a past that had never existed.
“Well, come on in, I suppose,” the doctor said, grabbing Stone’s wrist with a limp grip and pulling him in. “Close the door, don’t let the pollen in. Come on.” He led Stone past the anteroom, filled with old magazines and newspapers strewn all over the place like a tornado had just whipped through, then into a second room where medical equipment, most of it rusting and broken, lay in heaps and disorganized piles all over the place.
“Here, sit here, right here,” Doc said, patting a steel table. He pulled out a piece of the sanitary paper that doctors traditionally use, only this piece was being reused and was coated with dried slime and blood from previous patients.
“Ah, look, Doc, I really don’t think it’s so bad,” Stone said, not wanting the bastard to get a close look at his “wounds.”
“Nonsense, nonsense,” the doctor said, pushing him more firmly now, so he had to step backward and ended up sitting on the table. “Everyone who’s sent by the brothers has to undergo an exam. It’s the rules, mister.” He pulled the bottle from his smock pocket, took a deep guzzle, his huge, stubbly Adam’s apple bobbing up and down four times before he stopped. “And rules is rules.” He giggled, his eyes spinning around like pennies caught in a washing machine. “Want some?” He held out the bottle, which Stone could see was the brown stuff—not his favorite.
“I’ll pass,” Stone replied, holding up his hand with a highly depressed look on his face. He glanced over to a second table in the half darkness of the candlelit room, and his face winced in horror. For the good doctor had already been working on someone else—only this one was already dead. A corpse. And God only knew what he had been doing—the damn thing was cut up all which ways, its pieces lying like unassembled parts to a huge cut-and-paste doll, arms lying alongside legs, the eyes and ears all cut from the face, and stacked neatly in little piles.
“Jesus, God,” Stone mumbled silently in prayer deep inside himself. Just being in the place and around the red-faced wino doctor gave him the creeps.
“Now, let me just take a look at your injuries here, my good man,” the doctor said, capping the bottle and slamming it back in his pocket. He stepped in real close, so Stone had to smell his stinking alcohol and cigar-saturated breath and look into his red-pored, exploded-capillary face and try not to vomit. The doc looked around the areas on which Stone had splashed blood and poked and prodded with his fingers, trying to find the entry holes. After about sixty seconds he stopped and stepped back about a yard so he was staring right into Stone’s face.
“You’re not wounded, you lying bastard. What the hell’s going on here?”
“Shit.” Stone grimaced, starting to reach for his gun, knowing his cover had been blown and instantly trying to start computing what that meant. But suddenly the Doc’s hand moved real fast. A scalpel he kept concealed just inside the sleeve of his smock on the right hand came darting up. Before Stone could even respond—as he
was totally unprepared—the glistening scalpel slammed into his shoulder, coming straight down.
“Fuck,” Stone screamed out, grabbing the man’s hand and twisting it so that the doctor turned beet-red with pain from the jujitsu hold as he was bent over backward, nearly half-way to the ground. “I thought doctors were supposed to heal, not stab,” Stone said angrily as he reached over with the free hand and pulled out the blade. It stung like fire as he extracted it, and a stream of blood ran down his chest and back from the wound.
The doctor was sputtering away, trying to rise, but the hold that Stone had on him was unbreakable. “What the hell am I going to do with you, you old fart?” Stone asked as he looked quickly around the room. “I really should kill you. But there’s something so pathetic about you, I don’t think I could stand the memory of that red nose on my conscience forever. So—”
He pushed the man around the room, as if guiding a wheelbarrow with one hand, and the doctor sputtered and wheezed and bumped into things as he stumbled along. Stone saw some twine and surgical tape and reached for them. He suddenly kicked around, catching the ankle of the doctor, knocking him straight to the ground so that the man fell on his face, knocking a trio of teeth free in a bloody little clump.
“I’m just going to tie you up,” Stone said, wrapping Doc’s wrists and feet together in an unbreakable knot his father had taught him, one that would only get tighter the more a man struggled. “You ain’t going to die unless you struggle and have a heart attack, which would be fine with me. Up to you.” He slammed some surgical tape over the still sputtering doctor, who was having trouble even getting a few words together. Stone dragged the man by his ankles along the filthy, bloodstained floor with dried pieces of human anatomy from other “autopsies” lying around the place like droppings from a picnic of ghouls. Mice and rats poked through them here and there, carrying off unrecognizable, dark, shriveled things back to their holes to eat them away from their greedy kin.
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