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I hit the horn again and offered blubbering noises. It was no stage performance for police-vehicle limelight. The grief over the damage to the Lincoln was very real.
The next thing I knew, the barrel of a pistol was pointed at my head from over the rearview mirror. I could follow the foresight back to a steady eye, glinting in the darkness. What looked like lieutenant bars were stitched onto his collar, gray against black. He’d crept up as silently as my David, though my blasts on the horn had helped.
More men came around the front, and powerful flashlight beams lanced into my eyes. I gave a very real whimper and a pained yip.
“Yo!” the lieutenant said. “They got him chained in the driver’s seat. That’s why he didn’t run. Get a bomb-dog up here, now!”
“Keep those hands up,” a voice ordered. I’d been trying to shield my eyes from the flashlights with my forearm.
“Yeah, Corp, it’d be just like those bastards to blow up some poor dumb Grog to try to get us,” another, younger voice said.
Not just one dog came forward, but three. After the first, a good-natured yellow pot roast of a birder sniffed around beneath the car and behind my seat, pausing with interest over my wounds; other yelping hounds smelled the upholstery and started running in and out of the surrounding woods, trying to locate a trail.
They removed my chains with bolt cutters and kept their guns on me.
The lieutenant had an aged, battered face, but kindly eyes. He looked like the sort of man you’d send into the brush after an escapee from a sensitive institution. I wondered what sin lay in his past, that the Kurian Order did not let him rise above his original commissioned rank.
“That’s those guerillas for you,” an Ohio backing up his lieutenant said. “Take some poor dumb hurt animal and chain him behind a wheel. Fuckers. I bet they told him home
and bed were just down the road. Poor dumb Grog.”
Since they seemed in no hurry to effect my ticket for the hells I’ve missed in this life, I fell out of the door and decided to vocalize. Maybe it would draw the hounds’ attention. Every minute counted. Eventually they’d backtrack, but if I could delay things here . . .
I lay on my face, hiking my butt up as though expecting a deserved kick, arms extended toward the lieutenant with the pistol. “Me drive. Me drive good,” I gabbled. “No go wrong way. No carelessnessish! Not see tree beside road. Only see tree on road.”
“Wow, this one’s a regular J. Edger Proofcock,” a soldier to my right said, with the youthful voice I’d heard earlier.
I looked at the front of the car and let out a wailing cry of horror. “You fix? Please you fix? Scrap, no, not scrap! Oh, oh, oh! Drive good no!” I finished, summoning the rest of this season’s allotment of tears. I crawled for the wreck, patted the hood of the Lincoln, threw myself against a tire under the hostile guns, weeping like bereft Niobe herself. Human culture is so rich in emotional exhibitions. Not the Golden One way—we only howl to frighten enemies—but over a lifetime among men I’ve now learned to appreciate the benefit of a good teary purge.
“He’s worried we’ll shitcan him for wrecking that Xanadu ride,” the man with the bolt cutters said. “He doesn’t know guerillas from churchmen.”
“Whaddya say, Lieutenant? End the laments?” the man with the shotgun said, bringing it to his shoulder again.
Coming your way, beloved. Tell the children.
“Top, hold up,” the youthful-sounding one who’d expressed sympathy for the poor dumb animal said. “Let me take him. I can find a buyer in Lex. Ought to be worth a couple thou. Big healthy Grog like that.”
“Healthy? You see he’s bleeding, Frisky?” bolt cutters said.
“C’mon. Grog’s clean their teeth with grenades,” my new guardian said. “If he’s still yappin’, he’ll live, probably longer than any of us. Thirty percent for you, Lieutenant, twenty for the Top. I’ll take him to Lexington with a pass and see what I can get for him.”
“Forty percent for me,” the lieutenant said.
“And thirty for me,” the shotgun-wielding Top added.
“You’ll take ten,” the lieutenant said. “Eager to please, muscles like that. And can drive, too. Ought to be worth four or five thou if he speaks and savvies and is intact below the belt. Schmuck.” He took a breath, looking at the anxious dogs, still running back and forth sniffing for scent fifteen miles behind. “This night’s going to suck hard, and six gets you a Kewpie doll that the damn legworm ranchers will be peeing in the wells before we use them. Might as well take a bonus.”
“That’s being on the righteous side, sir,” Frisky said.
“I’ll want a receipt, Frisky. I don’t want any of my forty rolled up some whore’s ass so her pimp don’t find it. Buy him a decent labor-belt to hide those bandages.”
“Sir yes sir,” Frisky said.
Frisky went to work securing the detail’s investment in me. They didn’t have handcuffs big enough for my wrists, so they settled for leg irons.
If I’d known what was to be endured over the next few months, I might have been tempted to rush the top sergeant. A shotgun blast, a brief caress of hot air and lead before the end of this trying world; that would be nothing compared to the evil awaiting me in the Coal Country.
• • •
