The Vile Village (10 page)

Stone moved sharply at a forty-five-degree angle to the right, pulling up his Ruger as he slid. It was the laido way of walking,
an opposite angle with every step, another one of the Major’s tricks, things they didn’t teach you at military school—or anywhere
else, for that matter. The biker, seeing that the scythe had missed Stone’s skull, snapped it with a flick of his wrist, and
the curved metal blade, as sharp as a scalpel, whipped back two yards to the left as if it were a living predator searching
for its prey.

But by then it was already too late. The hunter was about to become the hunted. Stone ripped the huge fourteen-inch-plus chrome-plated
Ruger from his holster and pulled the trigger again and again. He just wanted to stop the big sucker, who was already yanking
the chain with a quick pull of his hand, trying to send the head scalper and neck slicer back the other way. The first .44
slug hit Pins in the hip and spun him halfway around like he was pirouetting in a ballet school. The second shot, a little
higher, caught him mid-back, right at the spinal cord, ripping it into two twisted pieces as the steel shell tore through
the flesh and bone. Pins continued to spin around like a top, propelled by the sheer kinetic force of the second Ruger shot.
The third found him just about chest-high, just as he swung forward again. The screaming .44 tore right through the biker’s
breastbone like a drill bit searching for oil. Only what it found was red, bright W. For the heart exploded as the bullet
slammed dead center through it so that Pins’s brawny, bare chest suddenly looked like he had been taking a shower in ketchup.

Somehow the huge body came to a stop, and the biker looked down at the blood spurting rapidly out of the three wounds like
fountains on metal cherubs peeing in a rich man’s front yard, when there had been such things.

“I’m dead,” he said simply and eloquently. And then he fell to the floor, his legs suddenly giving out from under him like
a jack kicked away from under a stalled car. He lay there spasming, his arms and legs jerking around like manic snakes.

There hadn’t been too many occasions when there had been complete silence in the Get Drunk, but tonight was one of them. Both
sides of the room, both gangs, eyed each other furiously, all of them debating whether to go for their guns or not. Then they
did, and every single soul in the entire place had some sort of piece or pieces in their hands, ready to send some son of
a bitch into the next world. The bikers were sure that Stone was with the Strathers gang, or why was he standing over with
them? The Struthers bunch, for their part, were sure that the bikers had decided to take them out and were just using this
as an excuse. At any rate, the two groups of mortal enemies pulled their weapons, aimed them, and held them straight out in
trembling hands, fingers pulled so tight against triggers that a fly landing on one would have set off.

But they didn’t pull them. With guns aimed in every goddamn direction in the room, with just about every man clearly going
to shoot someone and get shot if they fired themselves. It was like the political situation of the town itself—a stalemate.
They couldn’t pull a single trigger because it was pretty likely that a hundred would go off.

“You killed Pins,” Bronson, the leader of the bikers, finally said with a deep sadness in his voice, breaking the stark silence
of the room, which was punctuated only by breathing and an occasional burp or fart from the soused gang members of each camp.
“He was like a fucking brudder to me. With me from the start. And you, you little worm who don’t deserve to lick his fucking
feet, you come and take him out, after all he’s been through.” Bronson laughed a dark, throaty laugh and rose from the table
where he’d been sitting with his cohorts. The rest of them rose, too, all of them equally frightening-looking, though each
in his own particular way—from chains around their necks to scars across their chests and arms and backs. Every man had tattooed
or disfigured himself in some way. And they were powerful-looking. Stone had hardly seen such muscles on anybody since he’d
watched his Wrestlemania tapes on VCR back at the bunker.

Bronson put both hands up on his tattooed cheeks, and Stone could see by the oil light above him that the man’s whole face
was emblazoned with black designs of snakes eating rats, dragons ripping girls’ legs apart and biting them in a soft place.
The man was sick—to the core. He was also huge, as Stone could clearly see, when the biker leader rubbed his eyes with his
plate-sized hands. Not a gun had lowered; every hand still held a bead on someone across the room.

After a few seconds the biker topman took his hands away and opened his eyes. He snapped his fingers, and two of his bare-chested
minions rushed down and picked up the fallen Pins, who had pretty much stopped spurning by now, his hands already hardening
into a rigor mortis of clawed prayer.

“If we was alone, I’d kill you right now, scum,” the biker said, burning with rage as his eyes shot into Stone’s like laser
beams. “But looks like if I go after you, everyone in the damn place gets turned to chop suey.” He swept his hand over the
bar as if it were his canvas—and the material wasn’t quite stretched enough for his painting in blood, for carrying out his
strokes of death. “So I’m going to take my leave, gentlemen—and assholes.” He bowed a deep, exaggerated gesture, nearly stretching
his head down to the buckled wood floor of the place. Stone could see by the man’s flexibility and the way his muscles bulged
all over the goddamn place that the biker was tough as fucking barbed wire. It didn’t even look like a slug could penetrate
those granitelike scarred arms. But Stone had made his move, and for better or worse, there was no turning back now.

With Bronson leading the way, guns following them as they exited every step of the way, the biker crew left en masse, not
wanting to risk all their property, whorehouses, gin mills, on the turn of a gun barrel, not because of one little bastard
who wasn’t a piece of spit on the face of the fucking earth. Bronson paused at the door as his men filed past, holding the
dead Pins aloft like some sort of sacred statue.

“You”—he pointed at Stone from across the smoked-misted barroom—“are a dead man. And on that you can make book.” He spat down
at the floor to punctuate the words, then turned and was gone. Outside, the sounds of motorcycles being started filled the
late afternoon, and the scent of petrol fumes wafted in through the cracks in the walls. Then, with high-pitched screams and
loud roars, the whole crew took off in a cloud of dust down the street.

Stone stood there in the middle of what was left of the bar crowd and felt every eye in the place on him. He could, suddenly
understand why actors got stage fright, as for the life of him, Martin Stone, now that he had center stage, couldn’t think
of a goddamn thing to say. At last, as no one else spoke up to break the silence and every gun still sort of hung out there
as if wanting to shoot something, and he’d do just fine, Stone spoke up.

“Uh, howdy, folks,” he said, shrugging his shoulders a little. “Sorry if I dirtied up the place.”

“Who the fucking hell are you?” a voice boomed out from behind him, and Stone turned to see the one the barkeep had called
Vorstel holding a sawed-off shotgun aimed straight at Stone’s chest.

“They call me Preacher Boy, on account of I preach the Gospel with this,” Stone said, patting his Ruger with the other hand.
“And I’m here to tell you that many a man has seen the truth from the blinding light of this motherfucker.”

“I say kill the asshole,” said a man just to Vorstel’s right, dressed in what looked like three or four bearskins sewn together
the wrong way. He started to raise his chromed .45, but the leader of the Strathers gang slammed his shotgun down hard on
the man’s wrist, and the pistol clanked to the ground.

“You’re being an idiot, as usual,” Vorstel said, looking annoyed at his underling, who reached down with a pained expression
for his weapon. “If it was up to you, you’d shoot every damn asshole who walked in this place. And then there’d be only me
and you, and I’d have to shoot you ’cause I couldn’t stand talking to no one but your ugly face for the rest of my days.”
For some reason the rest of the Strathers crew thought this statement was quite amusing, and laughter broke out around the
place as the men slowly reholstered their weapons. Whatever was about to happen, a gunfight didn’t look like it was going
to be next on the agenda. But they all kept their eyes glued on Stone, who walked a few feet down the bar toward Vorstel,
keeping his own hands clearly away from his weapons so no one felt threatened or got overexcited.

He could see as he grew closer that Vorstel Strathers, one of three brothers who ran the hundred-man gang, as Undertaker had
told him, was truly ugly. He had seen ugly men before, ugly because their features were twisted or because of some great deformity
or injury. But Vorstel seemed to have all of the above and more. It looked like he had had acid thrown all over his face and
then put it through a strainer. Everything on the huge face had been moved around and rearranged, like a child’s swirling
finger painting. The mouth had shrunk down to something that only an olive could slide through, with but three teeth remaining
in the center, so that when the gang leader spoke, he resembled nothing so much as a beaver with terrible acne atop a body
that could have gotten work ripping down trees. The biggest of the Strathers brothers gave even Bronson a run for his money.
Though not quite as muscular as the biker, Vorstel was, if anything, even larger and with that face, it was hard to believe
anyone on the planet would challenge something that looked like that. And then Stone realized that was pretty much what he
had just done.

“Why you done that?” Vorstel asked with a strange expression as he studied Stone. He walked up to him as he reholstered his
own shotgun and around the stranger, giving him the up-and-down with his eyes.“Why you killed Pins? Not that I liked the bastard—in
fact, I hated him—but still, what’s your game, mister, Mr. Preacher Man?”

“I’ll tell you exactly why I sent that man to the Lord,” Stone said, getting a beatific expression on his face. He knew he
had to play a part that was overdone but not ridiculous. A front that would not allow them to put a finger on him—to really
see who he was. Another trick from the Major. Exaggerate an accent, a mannerism, anything about yourself. It forces the enemy
to focus on that and not see the rest of you, what you’re hiding, be it a plan or a weapon.

“I took out that biker bastard because I wanted to show you that I’m the baddest fucking gunner around these parts. And why
you should hire me pronto, before I go sell my services to them Head Squashers, or whatever the hell they call themselves.”

“Kill the bastard. Kill the fucking scumbag,” voices yelled out from around the room, and Stone heard the squeak of dry leather
as metal pistols slid out of them again.

“Put them fucking dildos away before I blast somebody’s goddamn balls off,” Vorstel screamed. He whipped his shotgun straight
up and let out a blast that poured right into the ceiling, sending down a little cyclone of splinters over the whole crew.
“You guys is dumber than worms climbing onto a fishhook.” The headman snorted contemptuously. “You won’t even let the man
speak before you want to kill him.” He turned back to Stone and nodded his head, letting out a little smile, or what Stone
guessed to be a smile, as the three teeth set in the middle of the cellike mouth seemed to curve up slightly.

“Now, why the hell you want to work for me?” Vorstel asked, sweeping his huge arms around the room. “I got plenty of assholes
ready to take out anyone I tells’em to.”

“That’s right,” Stone said, looking around the room. “Exactly—you got assholes. But what do you do when you need someone smart,
W. Vorstel Strathers? When you need someone like me. Billy “Preacher Boy” Pinkus. Gunman, negotiator, strong-arm, I do it
all, Vorstel. All.”

“And what the hell’s your fucking qualifications, Mr. Chairman of the Board?” Vorstel asked, looking edgy again, like his
hand might just snap up that sawed-off .12-gauge. Stone glanced out of the corner of his eye for a place to jump, but he knew
that if his bullshit didn’t work out, and fast, he didn’t have a chance in this den of wolves, every one of whom was just
itching to take his head off and send it down to the land of unidentifiable has-beens.

“My qualifications,” Stone said with a smirk, trying to act more confident than he felt. His heart was jumping around inside
his chest like a basketball on a court, but his face didn’t betray him, it stayed hard and amused by the whole thing. “Worked
for the Chester gang out in Amarillo, the Boffords down in Chattanooga, the Spencer twins out in L.A., but they’re all dead
now, no fault of my own.” Stone spat out a ridiculous false list of his connections with other gangs, all made up and all
far enough away, he prayed, for no one present to know the fucking difference. And no one did, for when he had stopped his
spiel, the place was again silent, and Vorstel just kept staring at him.

“So you came here and killed that asshole just to get a job with me?” the face-twisted gang head asked skeptically.

“Goddamn right,” Stone said. “Because I’m a man with big ambitions. “I need gold in my pocket to feel secure, and your name,
the name of the Strathers brothers, is famous all over the fucking West. Everybody said you want to make big money instead
of shooting the toes off every little penny-ante scumbag in the street? Go see the Strathers, they said. So here I am.” He
giggled softly, trying to sound like Richard Widmark in
Kiss of Death
. “I need money, big money, and you need my gun if you ever want to break the stalemate you and the Head Suckers, or whatever
the fuck they’re called, are in.”

Stone heard grumblings all over the room but no screams of “Get the cocksucker.” He stood there silently as Vorstel’s eyeballs
spun around in his head like roulette balls on speed.