Whoops, I thought. Welcome to the night train. “Oh, hell yes,” I said quickly. “How do the neighbors handle it?”
“No problem,” he said. “They love me.”
Sure, I thought. I tried to imagine the horror of living in a muddy industrial slum full of tin-walled trailers and trying to protect your family against brain damage from knowing that every night when you look out your kitchen window there will be a man in a leather bathrobe flogging two naked women around the room with a quart bottle of Wild Turkey. Sometimes for two or three hours ... It was horrible.
“Where is your wife?” I asked. “Is she still here?”
“Oh, yes,” he said quickly. “She just went out for some cigarettes. She’ll be back any minute.” He nodded eagerly. “Oh, yes, she’s very proud of me. We’re almost reconciled. She really loves these dolls.”
I smiled, but something about his story made me nervous. “How many do you have?” I asked him.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have all we need.” He reached into a nearby broom closer and pulled out another one—a half-inflated Chinese-looking woman with rings in her nipples and two electric cords attached to her head. “This is Ling-Ling,” he said. “She screams when I hit her.” He whacked the doll’s head and it squawked stupidly.
Just then I heard car doors slamming outside the trailer, then loud knocking on the front door and a gruff voice shouting, “Open up! Police!”
Leach grabbed a .44 Magnum out of a shoulder holster inside his bathrobe and fired two shots through the front door. “You bitch!” he screamed. “I should have killed you a long time ago.”
He fired two more shots, laughing calmly. Then he turned to face me and put the barrel of the gun in his mouth. He hesitated for a moment, staring directly into my eyes. Then he pulled the trigger and blew off the back of his head.
The dead man seemed to lunge at me, slumping headfirst against my legs as he fell to the floor—just as a volley of shotgun blasts came through the front door, followed by harsh shouts on a police bullhorn from outside. Then another volley of buckshot blasts that exploded the TV set and set the living room on fire, filling the trailer with dense brown smoke that I recognized instantly as the smell of Cyanide gas being released by the burning plastic couch.
Voices were screaming through the smoke, “Surrender! Hands up behind your goddamn head! DEAD MEAT!” Then more shooting. Another deafening fireball exploded out of the living room. I kicked the corpse off my feet and leapt for the back door, which I’d noticed earlier when I scanned the trailer for “alternative exits,” as they say in the business—in case one might become necessary. I was halfway out the door when I remembered the Judge. He was still locked in the bathroom, maybe helpless in some kind of accidental drug coma, unable to get to his feet as flames roared through the trailer . . .
Ye Fucking Gods! I thought. I can’t let him burn.
Kick the door off its hinges. Yes. Whack! The door splintered and I saw him sitting calmly on the filthy aluminum toilet stool, pretending to read a newspaper and squinting vacantly up at me as I crashed in and grabbed him by one arm.
“Fool!” I screamed. “Get up! Run! They’ll murder us!”
He followed me through the smoke and burning debris holding his pants up with one hand ... The Chinese sex doll called Ling-Ling hovered crazily in front of the door, her body swollen from heat and her hair on fire. I slapped her aside and bashed the door open, dragging the Judge outside with me. Another volley of shotgun blasts and bullhorn yells erupted somewhere behind us. The Judge lost his footing and fell heavily into the mud behind the doomed Airstream.
“Oh, God!” he screamed, “who is it?”
“The Pigs,” I said. “They’ve gone crazy. Leach is dead! They’re trying to kill us. We have to get to the car!”
He stood up quickly. “Pigs?” he said. “Pigs? Trying to kill me?”
He seemed to stiffen, and the dumbness went out of his eyes. He raised both fists and screamed in the direction of the shooting. “You bastards! You scum! You will die for this. You stupid white-trash pigs!
“Are they nuts?” he muttered. He jerked out of my grasp and reached angrily into his left armpit, then down to his belt and around behind his back like a gunfighter trying to slap leather ... But there was no leather there. Not even a sleeve holster.
“Goddamn it!” he snarled. “Where’s my goddamn weapon? Oh, Jesus! I left it in the car!” He dropped into a running crouch and sprinted into the darkness, around the corner of the flaming Airstream. “Let’s go!” he hissed. “I’ll kill these bastards! I’ll blow their fucking heads off!”