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t was September, and time to go to the York Fair.
Lisa was all for it. She had a tiny thread in her that lamented her lost childhood, and the Midway was just the place for her to capture a little bit of it. The snooty girl’s school where she spent her early days had never allowed such lowbrow diversions.
We wandered among the booths, breathing the popcorn and hot dog odors, hearing the clang of the bell from the strength tester, the litany of the barkers and the hawkers selling hammer-cutting knives.
We lost a few bucks on the Mice-Dice Game, and I brought a carny near to tears at a shooting gallery—the sights on the rifles were deliberately skewed, but I never use sights at that kind of range. I settled for a huge plush bear, so the guy wouldn’t lose money on the night, presented it to Lisa, then walked away with it in a fireman’s carry.
We ate like starved weasels. Lisa and I both loved Walkaway Sundaes, she craved cotton candy and I wanted an emu-steak sandwich.
Then we began to tour the sideshows. We saw the Headless Wonder, the Fat Lady, the Alligator Man and the Egyptian Mummy. After the Chamber of Horrors, Lisa had her Tarot Cards read.
Then we saw “The Ice Monster.”
“Step right up, don’t be shy, see the amazing Ice Monster! Found frozen into an ice floe in the Bering Strait by fishermen, this strange creature may date from the Ice Age! What is it? Nobody knows! Come in, only five dollars, see for yourself! Hurry, hurry!”
What the Hell, we paid our five bucks and went into the tent.
The barker regaled us with an imaginative history of the exhibit—only slightly less improbable than The Wizard of Oz—until he’d gathered enough rubes, then we were ushered inside.
A key technique in making a sideshow attraction pay is “turning the tip,” getting the suckers out quickly, so you can bring in the next batch. This attraction was expensive to run—it needed a reefer rig. But with the crowd dressed for mid-September in shorts, sandals and light tops, nobody was tempted to linger very long. We stood in the chill of the inner chamber, with clouds of white vapor swirling around us, and examined the Ice Monster.
It was a block of ice twelve feet long, chipped and gouged authentically. Some areas were cloudy, some translucent, some quite clear. The thing in the block appeared to be about seven feet long, covered in dense, dark fur and somewhat contorted. The area around its face had been shaved to make it clear, and the features were part ape, part human, with open, staring eyes that were a startling blue.
Lisa gaped at the thing for a few minutes—people were already starting to shuffle out, covered with goose flesh—then looked at me. “OK, lover, I’ve got Popsicle toes, time to ramble on.”
I barely heard her. My attention was drawn to one of our fellow spectators, a medium sized man with dark skin, wide shoulders and black hair. His face was wrinkled and seamed, like a baked apple, he walked with a peculiar rolling gait, swinging his massive forearms as he went, and his expression was a truculent scowl.
“Hey!” Lisa said. “Getting frostbite here!”
We went out into the Midway and hit a few more sinister wonders as we worked our way out of the Fairgrounds.
I remembered the first fair I’d been to, in 1972, and for some reason, recalled “The Mighty Atom,” a Jewish schtarker who claimed to be “93 Years Young” and had photos of his younger self, in a one-shoulder leotard prominently marked with a Mogen David, in his tiny trailer. This old fellow bent thick rods and broke chains with his stringy biceps, long grey locks recalling Samson—God alone knows what all he’d seen in his life, but I did notice the number tattoo on his forearm—living history.
Lisa was chattering on about the Ice Monster, her eyes as bright as new minted dimes.
“What in the world was that thing?”
“It’s an old wheeze, dear, just a moth-eaten gorilla suit with an armature inside, frozen into that ice at the beginning of the season, every year.”
“But those eyes!”
“It’s a damned good example of that particular gimmick. Those are glass eyes from a pawn shop. Somewhere, people used to hock them years ago for some quick cash. The pawnbrokers knew that most people would come back for them, but sometimes they didn’t.”
“I guess you could buy them cheap, then.”
“A lot of them were made into jewelry, back a few years ago.”
“Ugh,” she said.
We were waiting for the Rabbit Transit to take us back to Red Lion, and our car. I try never to park in cities, and the Fair pretty much exhausts York’s parking places within reasonable walking distance. It was worth the price of a fare to eliminate the hassle.
Lisa hugged her new bear all the way home, merry as a bird. I kept on thinking about the man with the wrinkles. He bothered me.
Sideshow attractions are a very rewarding study, if you like the odd side of life—which, of course I do. Besides the freaks, many of whom wouldn’t be able to make an independent living any other way, there are the fakes, and genuine oddities. Some of these will kick around for generations, from operator to operator, and show to show until they get destroyed in accidents or fires. The Headless Wonder is a very effective illusion. It’s been around for donkey’s years, amusing and horrifying people. Likewise the Ape Woman, with that transformation before your eyes that sends the audience screaming into the night, every time.
One old trouper who finally found a “still date,” a regular and fixed venue, is Sylvester the Desert Mummy on the Seattle waterfront. Every time I visit the Emerald City, I make it a point to visit the old fellow and pay my respects at Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, a combination junk store and dime museum with roots in the early years of the XX Century, when Seattle was a rip-roaring frontier city and the gateway to Alaska, not to mention a very lively seaport. Sylvester is a very fine mummy (had you known him in life, you’d recognize him now) who was a regular attraction on West Coast midways until 1955, when he joined the collection at the old trading post. It moved about a block in 1989, otherwise, Sylvester’s traveling days are done.
He dwells among an eclectic aggregation of scrimshaw, “Jenny Hannivers” (those horrible little “mermaids” produced by sewing a monkey to a fish), and other curios. They have the last known “Laughing Jack” (that’s an automaton of a drunken sailor with a fly on his nose, which will gyrate and produce gales of laughter for a coin, once a standard of the penny arcade) and the similar “Esmeralda, the Gypsy Witch” who reads your cards for a pittance. Not many of those left, either.
There are two other mummies, the gruesome Sylvia in her wedding dress, and a baby found in an Anasazi ruin, but Sylvester is the pride of the show. The traditional barker’s spiel was that he was discovered in the desert of New Mexico by two cowboys in the 1890s, preserved by the action of the hot sand. He has a hole in his flank, said to be the bullet wound that slew him. The truth is more complex. The corpse seems to be coated with varnish or shellac, but a recent examination proved that to be false. He was preserved in an arsenic solution—the body still retains considerable moisture—probably just to turn him into an exhibit. Since he shows the marks of a violent life, shotgun pellet wounds long healed, and a possible bullet fragment near his collar bone, I’d not be surprised to discover that his was an unclaimed body from a prison or poorhouse—that “bullet wound” is likely the entrance hole from an embalmer’s trocar, tarted up with red ink or chicken blood. When they take him out of the glass case to dust him, there’s a bad smell, and he leaves behind a stain of dark liquid. No matter, show business has been good to the old rip. He even has a bobblehead.
I’d seen the Ice Monster before, as well, in fact, the old Argosy magazine made much of that one when I was a kid, and they were into the paranormal craze. In fact, recently some scammers in Georgia (the one in eastern Europe) tried to pass off a similar fake as a preserved Bigfoot. I doubt that I’d have spent so much time thinking about this, except for the man with the big forearms. He still bothered me.
The papers were full of it: FROZEN MONSTER STOLEN FROM FAIR!
Being Mr. Weird has its compensations, one being a nice police badge that identifies me as a Special Investigator. So, with my faithful WASP companion, I set off in the hrududu to interview the owner of the exhibit.
His name was Cadmus Vasillias and he was not a happy man. He was also half drunk. He was sweating like a cold pipe, and his wife-beater showed enough ink to print an encyclopedia.
“I was almost bustin’ the nut!” he lamented. “I had to borrow to buy the damn thing, just about had it paid off, then bing! some sonuvabitch steals it! Now what do I do?”
“Was it insured?” Lisa asked him, and got a look of pity worthy of St. Francis of Assisi in return. “Guess not.”
“How did you get it?”
“Originally, it belonged to some gook from one a them little countries south a China. He toured with it for a long time. He died, all of a sudden, and being a carny, didn’t have no family, so it went up for sale. I raised the mazuma and took it on the road. Off season I allus kep’ it in a freezer locker. I was afraid if I let it thaw, it might fall apart. I got no idea how it was made. Now some bastid is gonna let it melt, an’ I’m screwed either way, ’cause if it melts out, people will see it’s a fake, or I’ll never see it again.”
“Did anything else go missing?” I asked.
“Nah, everything else is here.”
“So, make a new monster, freeze it in the ice, business as usual?” I suggested.
Cadmus was not the brightest bulb on the Midway. I don’t think that had occurred to him.
“Hey, that’s pretty smart! You ever been ‘with it’?”
“Oh, he’s with it!” Lisa said, unleashing her blinding smile.
So, having done our good deed for the day, and not a jot richer in clues, we booked.
Next logical places to look were the local college campuses. Students will steal anything that isn’t red hot just to pass the time. I spread terror among the scholars, and was satisfied that for once, they all had clean hands. No ransom demand appeared. This was a bummer to the big ass, dammit, I’m used to getting results.
I found myself in Downtown York, hungry, thirsty, mad as a hornet and feeling inadequate, so I went to a Thai joint on Market Street for noodles and diet Coke. As I shoveled food into my gob with my chopsticks, Mordecai Brenner sat down opposite me.
“By God,” he said. “You’re a hard man to find!”
“Considering our last meeting, why should you be looking?”
“Mohias Dung is back in town,” he said. “I need your help.”
“Last time we saw each other, I tried to kill you—and that’s still on the table, by the way.”
“I’m not a vengeful sort,” Brenner said. “Mohias killed my wife, and I’m going to take his life for that. Otherwise, I’m inclined to let things pass.”
“So am I. But human sacrifice to the Great Old Ones passes my personal threshold.”
“You’re a cannibal. I’d say you owe me some understanding.”
“How about we co-operate on nailing Mohias Dung, then take up our personal differences afterwards?”
“Good idea! Mohias is a very difficult sort. Both of us may not survive, maybe neither of us will.
“He used up all his power escaping from the grave and restoring himself. Since you nearly caught him, he’s been drifting around this country, trying to get re-established as a sorcerer. Times were hard, Shub-Niggurath had abandoned him. A powerless necromancer has no friends, you know? Then he made contact with Wrantegar.”
“A busted Magus and a busted god. How touching.”
“Don’t laugh yet—Mohias is a formidable sorcerer, and his new patron is inclined to pamper him. Now they have an object of power to use to gather more influence.”
“Not the Ice Monster?”
“The last remaining Voormis.”
“Mordecai, you have my complete attention,” I said.
“Thought that would interest you. I followed the carnival circuit for a while—it’s a good place to hide out for a few years—so when I noticed a Tcho-Tcho shaman carting a block of ice through the land, I was careful to keep an eye on it. The Voormis were strange, but they had a serious thaumaturgical charge. Where that old man found this one is a mystery to me. He used it to focus his spells.”
“So how did he die?”
“Lung cancer. He smoked like a Jersey dump. Even a powerful wizard can’t contain cancer forever. He was likely well past a hundred-twenty when he died.”
“And that leaves us with Mohias Dung, Rhan-Tegoth and a Voormis in town. I’m concerned, why?”
“How do you think they’ll gather power?”
“Yeah. Life-force.”
“That’s how you do it. Are there any tomes, or cultists around here?”
“You ought to know.”
“Actually, I got out of touch while I was on the lam. Except for the goth underground I was using in Scotia, I kept a very low profile.”
Lisa was puzzled by the developments. “So now we are for Mordecai Brenner and against Mohias Dung?”
“We were always against Mohias Dung.”
“I get so confused!” Lisa said.
“Just now, Rhan-Tegoth is a greater threat than Brenner, and we may need him to counter Mohias Dung and the Voormis.”
It wouldn’t be long before that prehistoric and pre-human menace would be thawed out and mobile. According to Brenner, cold was of little hazard to a Voormis, a monster spawned amidst the howling wind and ice of the Boreal Pole when the obscene Gnoph-Keh ruled the upper latitudes. With the Voormis to provide magical aid and muscle if needed, Mohias Dung would be a dangerous foe, and even though Rhan-Tegoth was a little too eye-catching to venture out in public, the horrid thing was still a focus of considerable energy.
Brenner had identified the man with the forearms for me, it was Mohias Dung.
“Mohias is a sailor man, he got those arms climbing the rigging and hauling line. If you had a sailing ship that needed a master, you’d never find a better one than Mohias. Pirates are usually great mariners, mostly because they stay close to shore most of the time, and that’s where seamanship really counts.”
Lacking a three-masted brigantine, I found that information of scant value.
So, after supper, I thought a nap might be therapeutic. As I settled myself under a warm throw, our pet rat settled herself in the hollow of my shoulder and curled up in her tail to join me.
Hildy came to visit my dreams. She was wearing a sleek, silver lamé cocktail dress. In dreams, rats are human sized and rather tend to overdress, and we were in a variation of the outdoor café I’d shared with her daddy.
“Good to see you, boss!”
“Well, aren’t you the stylish mousie!”
“Why, thank you, suh!” she giggled and did a sort of a curtsy.
“What’s up, Hildy.”
“Mostly, bad stuff, I’m afraid. Rhan-Tegoth is a very dangerous entity. When they get hungry, they get really fierce. And this is one hungry monster. He spent a long time locked away from the action, now he wants to make up for lost time. Now, you can trust this man Brenner, a little. He’s lusting after Mohias Dung’s life blood, but he hasn’t forgotten that you tried to kill him.”
“Actually, I rather guessed at that, but thanks for your concern. Any tips on finding these crumbs?”
“Have Brenner make a special compass, one that will point to Mohias and his crew. He knows how to do it.”
“Will do. Any special requests?”
“Ooh, would you find me some candied lemon slices? I keep thinking of them, even though I’ve never actually eaten one—it’s a phantom memory from my ancestors, I suppose.”
“If they exist, you’ll get some,” I promised her.
Then I drifted out of the dream and woke up.
We criss-crossed the County, on foot and by automobile. Brenner had found a compass in a cheap kid’s pirate set at the Dollar Tree. It wasn’t magnetized, just a toy. “Perfect!” he said as he discarded the other toys—some child would have a fun discovery—and tucked the compass into his coat pocket. I have no idea what he might have done with the thing, but next time I saw him, he had it fixed to point to Rhan-Tegoth, and somehow, I was glad I didn’t know quite how he did it.
Finding some place to hide that ghastly abomination must not have been easy. York isn’t as wild and abandoned as once it was, with many vacant structures being rehabbed or demolished. I was sure that they had set up shop somewhere on the edges of the city, where they might come and go unnoticed. My usual occult sources were completely at sea about this matter—or so they said. I had my doubts.
Brenner and I took a lensatic compass, a map and a GPS to a quiet part of the city, and began taking a fix on our target. With the rigged compass, we established an azimuth, moved several miles and shot another one. From those, we triangulated what we hoped was their current position.
“Looks dismal enough,” Brenner said. “That street is a sinkhole!”
We drove over to the approximate address, and got a shock. They weren’t there any more when we arrived.
And we got no new heading, either. “Larry, Moe and Curly are wise to us,” I groused. Got any bright ideas?”
Mordecai rubbed his chin with his maimed hand. “I can try some stuff,” he said. “I’m sure as Hell not in the mood to quit.”
We went home for the night.
Now before you get the idea that I let the rat do all my thinking, I had another string to my bow. Sometimes I have enough strings to qualify as a harp, but this time I was playing a washtub bass that sent me to the barn and the workbench. I’d sent a message to a mineral shop in Seattle, and they’d overnighted me a fine crystal of zektzerite, rarer than diamond, but not much good for anything except as a collector’s piece.
The Serpent Men had known better. This one pinkish crystal is the most essential component of a Z-light, which was perhaps their most useful invention.
I needed a bigger chunk of it to upgrade my unit. The Z-light could make Rhan-Tegoth’s footsteps glow, but with more juice and a bigger crystal, it could also make Rhan-Tegoth a very uncomfortable god. A little shaping with a coarse diamond file, some soldering, some duct tape and wire nuts soon had my light power increased by an order of magnitude. I had to remember to be careful with it—at a high setting, it vaporized a chicken. At its lowest power it functioned like a fluoroscope and spectroscope combined, revealing the hidden interior of anything it was trained on, and showing an aura that could be interpreted to discover the chemical composition of matter.
On my way back to the house, I opened the car and extracted a small box of candied lemon slices from a confectioner’s in Red Lion. A promise is a promise.
“And before you made up that light bazooka of yours, what were you planning to do with Wrantegar when you found him?” Lisa was miffed, to say the least.
“I was planning on letting Brenner immobilize him with a spell.”
“Then what?”
“Send his scaly butt to the Repository. They can put him back into long term storage.”
Lisa made a very annoying noise, and stalked back into the kitchen.
With Mordecai to handle Mohias Dung, and the Z-light to cook the Voormis, I was pretty sure that putting these rather hazardous parties out of action was going to be fairly simple biz. Truthfully, I had little idea of what to do with Rhan-Tegoth, once I actually found him. Since he was keeping a low profile, I had to figure that he was still vulnerable. When one of the Great Old Ones has nothing to fear there’s usually Hell to pay, and in short order. They want sacrifices, worship and power, right there, right now, ipso facto drano!
I’d be happy to send that ancient horror back into hiding—even better would be warded storage at the Repository—but if the damned thing was hiding in a cavern somewhere, that was acceptable to me.
It all got funky when the Voormis decided to take French leave. The Voormis are not quite humans. In some ways, they have more than human capabilities, but they have an intelligence totally different from humanity. They’re big, strong, able to endure climatic conditions that would kill a homo-sap in no time. But they solved problems in a totally different fashion, and they had only a limited grasp of impulse control. They do what comes naturally to a Voormis. So when the Ice Monster was thawed out, and thinking again, he decided to go looking for a lady Voormis to offer some romance. Even Rhan-Tegoth couldn’t restrain a horny Voormis.
Still, the Voormis is an intelligent and sentient being. It didn’t take long for it to decide that keeping a low profile was the best course of action. So, it roamed the night, killing chickens and the odd pig, dining on roadkill. The Voormis, like many Arctic creatures, was a very active scavenger. With a map we tracked the sightings, drew some lines and got a rough idea of where it had made its den. The damned thing was wily, but Mordecai had been a frontiersman in Colonial days, and I’m a fair tracker, too. We worked our way through the forest until we cut its trail.
“No way we go after this thing at night,” I said. “That’ll give it too much of an advantage.”
“I was just about to say that myself,” Brenner agreed. “In the dark, a Voormis is holding all the cards. They can see like a cat.”
We ghosted through the woods, with me wishing we could have used dogs, but the animals would have been too busy trying to kill Mordecai. The weather had been mild during the early Autumn season, and our quarry had been sleeping in crude nests made from leaves and evergreen boughs.
So we found it sound asleep, but it woke quickly, and came at us like the hounds of Hades, roaring, snarling and waving its long, powerful arms. It looked a lot like a Wookie, with a face like a wolverine and tusks like a Thuringian boar. Its eyes were full of intelligence and cold rage. Humans were its natural enemies.
Mordecai hauled out a fearsome looking Ruger thumb-buster and let drive with heavy hollow points, the kind that can stop big bears. They hurt it, hurt it badly, but it didn’t stop. It slowed down just enough for me to power up the Z-light and give the thing the full power of the beam. Smoke rose from the flesh of the creature, and it screamed in pain, the rage fading into terror.
It went down, and I played the ghastly power of the long forgotten ray over the beast until it was reduced to a cloud of evil-smelling red vapor over a blackened patch of earth that might never support life again.
One down, two to go.
Lisa came in from her morning ride and padded across the living room, leaving damp marks on the carpet. She’d washed her feet in the stable.
“Why do you go riding barefoot?” I asked her.
“Lover mine, when I was in that prison they called a school, we were always in uniform, it was a wonder we could shower naked, and we always had to wear hard shoes. Then, after I escaped, well, the world of journalism was somewhat formal, and I spent way too much time in heels.”
“I thought you loved those strappy sandals,” I said.
“Oh, I do—I was blessed with sexy feet, something you can show off to soften the male brain. But I can tell you, after a hard day, those tootsies burned like coals of fire. Now, I can dispense with footwear much of the time, and I do so joyfully. Besides, when you’re as tall as I am, it gets me closer to the level of the rest of humanity.” She laughed, and tossed her head. “Not to mention how sexy it makes me feel when I kiss you, standing there on my naked soles, rising up on my toes for you, my treetop darling!”
“No wonder you write so well!” I joked, “You talk like a book.”
“Yes,” she said, “I do, don’t I? Probably the product of having to be ‘on’ all the time. I feel like I’m acting—I really never got to be comfortable with people, except with you.”
Lisa frowned a bit. “I know I seem contrived a lot of the time, but so much of my life has been playing a role to get what I wanted, and now that I have it, I can’t seem to stop.”
I sang, “Don’t change a hair for me, not if you care for me—”
“Lover, I care for you with all my heart and my immortal soul, in my entire life, I’ve never felt so much peace as now, being with you.”
“Same here, sweetheart.”
She smiled again. “I’d best dry off. Fungus lurks everywhere, and feet take maintenance!”
I watched her walk off, lithe as a willow wand, graceful as a breeze.
Then I went back to thinking about Rhan-Tegoth and Mohias Dung.
I met Mordecai in a country restaurant in Felton. He was keeping his address dark, and if he came to my house, the dogs would probably try to kill him. Certain types of sorcerers absolutely infuriate dogs.
“Mohias is probably denned up with Wrantegar somewhere, maybe in a cave or a shack,” the magician said. “He’s running errands for that thing. That’s why you don’t want to get too close to things like that, they use you like a draught animal and discard you as soon as they don’t need you any more. Trying to deal with the Powers is like kissing a rattlesnake, you have to be quick, and it requires your entire attention.”
“Not to mention,” I said dryly, “the basic question of why you might do that in the first place.”
“There is that,” he replied. “Look, I wish I’d never gotten tangled up with this stuff. It isn’t all that enjoyable, it gets damned desperate, and there’s really no way out. The Powers are dangerous and demanding buggers. I think you’ve discovered that for yourself, eh?”
Misery loves company, so I didn’t disagree with him. “So how do we find them?”
“That compass I spelled still seems to be working. But I think it’s time you called in some of your reserves.”
“I was hoping to avoid that.”
“So was I,” Brenner said, sadly. “Somehow I’m thinking that your hard cases are likely to want to do me harm. After all, they do that sort of thing for a living.”
“I’ll get you a head start after we have Rhan-Tegoth under control. I imagine you’ll want to kill Mohias Dung yourself?”
“I would enjoy that. Ezulie was a special person, and he raped her and killed her just because he envied me.
“She was a cheval with the loa for many years, she absorbed a lot of Ezulie’s attributes—and you know the legend of the loa.”
“You mean how being with her makes anyone else seem rather unsatisfactory?”
“Trust me, it’s all true.”
All Souls is a good day for an operation of this sort. We got a fix on Rhan-Tegoth, gathered our forces, and did the work. Mordecai and I went in from the front, the enterence of the artificial cavern they’d found. I suspect it may have been a stable or a cow byre long ago.
I had the Z-light at the ready, but Rhan-Tegoth was a powerful foe. He came out of there like a small tornado, roaring and lashing his hideous appendages. I got the light on him for a moment but he was like a runaway train and he crashed through the bushes. I heard gunfire when he ran into our backup, but it didn’t last long enough to be a capture. The night was his friend, and he vanished into darkness.
Mohias Dung wasn’t nearly as powerful—we brought him to bay.
“He’s all yours,” I told Mordecai.
“I’ve got no pistol, matey,” Mohias Dung said. His accent was not quite Cockney, being a sailor of his time, he spoke the dialect of the ships and sailor towns. “But I’ll oblige you with a knife, so I will.”
“You missed Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day,” I said. “You’d have been just the thing, too.”
“You be buggered!” he spat, looking at me with pure, fulminating hatred.
“No, don’t think so,” I told him. “Mordecai, you have a knife?”
“I thought I might borrow yours,” he replied.
I opened my switchblade and handed it to him. Mohias Dung produced a workmanlike dagger, turned it over in his fist and looked at us.
“I’ll hold your sidearm, Mordecai, after all, we want a fair fight, here.”
Brenner hauled out his oversized six-shooter and gave it to me.
Then they closed and the fight began.
I lit a cigar, might as well enjoy the show. It was interesting to see the way they fought, a window into times long past. It was down and dirty, with lots of grappling and hard shoulder blocks, plenty of punches and kicks. Being left-handed made Mordecai a difficult opponent, but it didn’t seem to inconvenience Mohias Dung a bit. But he’d been buried for a long time, and Brenner had been learning for centuries. So, when Brenner cut cut Mohias Dung’s throat nearly to the spine with a hard slash, I wasn’t surprised. As the sailor went down choking, Brenner kicked him in the crotch.
I dropped my stogie, bent for it, and extracted the .22 from the ankle rig. Mordecai was turned with his back to me, and so, I shot him in the base of the skull. He never knew what hit him. I figured I owed him that much, a quick, clean death with no pain. As he collapsed in that peculiar boneless way that follows a perfect, instant kill, I said, “Flag on the play, unnecessary roughness.”
Then I vaporized Mohias Dung with the Z-light. No way he was coming back this time.
Teddy owed me for our little adventure. I helped the commandos wrestle the body into one of the SUVs they’d come in, and we took him to the crematory retort in Scotia for a quick, off-the-books disposal. On a sunny afternoon, two days later, I took a post-hole digger, excavated behind the neglected tombstone, poured the cremains into it, and then planted an azalea in the hole. The bill was paid. Mordecai Brenner was too evil to live, and now he could be with the woman he loved so long and so well.
I called that justice. |
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