Dit looks her in the eye, and for a second she stops jumping around to stand flat-footed on the ground and give him a little come-hither gesture with the fingers of both hands. He launches himself at her, but when he gets to where she was, she is six feet off to the right, shifting on her feet like a basketball player. “Tubby-Tubby,” she says. “Come and get it, Tub-Tub.” Furious, Dit reaches, misses, and nearly loses his balance. Doodles prances away laughing and mouths the hateful expression. Dit doesn’t get it—why doesn’t Doodles just break away and take off? It’s like she almost wants to get caught, but first she has to run out the clock.
After another serious lunge that misses the target by only an inch or two, Dit Jesperson wipes the sweat off his face and checks out the scene. Bobby Dulac is snapping cuffs on the skinny guy, but Dale and Hollywood Sawyer are faring only a little better than he is. Teddy Runkleman and Freddy Saknessum dodge and bob away from their pursuers, both of them cackling like idiots and shouting their halfwit slogans. Why is low-life scum always so agile? Dit supposes that rodents like Runkleman and Saknessum get more practice in being light on their feet than regular people.
He charges Doodles, who slips past him and goes into a chuckling, high-stepping diddley-bop. Over her shoulder, Dit sees Hollywood finally fake out Saknessum, wrap an arm around his waist, and throw him to the ground.
“You didn’t have to get all physical on my ass,” Saknessum says. His eyes shift, and he gives a brief nod. “Hey, Runks.”
Teddy Runkleman glances at him, and his eyes shift, too. He stops moving. The chief says, “What, you run out of gas?”
“Party’s over,” Runkleman says. “Hey, we were just funnin’, you know?”
“Aw, Runksie, I wanna play some more,” Doodles says, throwing a few hip wiggles into the diddley-bop. In a flash, Beezer St. Pierre thrusts his mountainous self between her and Dit. He steps forward, rumbling like a semi going up a steep grade. Doodles tries to dance backward, but Beezer envelops her and carries her toward the chief.
“Beezie, don’cha love me no more?” Doodles asks.
Beezer grunts in disgust and deposits her in front of the chief. The two state cops, Perry Brown and Jeff Black, are hanging back, looking even more disgusted than the biker. If Dit’s mental processes were to be transcribed from their shorthand into standard English, the result would be,
“You were FUNNIN’?” the chief roars. “What’s the MATTER with you idiots? Don’t you have any respect for that poor girl in there?”
As the state cops step forward to take charge, Dit sees Beezer go rigid with shock for a moment, then move as inconspicuously as possible away from the group. No one but Dit Jesperson pays any attention to him—the enormous biker has done his bit, and now his part is over. Arnold Hrabowski, who had been more or less concealed behind Brown and Black, shoves his hands in his pockets, hunches his shoulders, and gives Dit a glance of shamefaced apology. Dit doesn’t get it: What does the Mad Hungarian have to feel so guilty about? Hell, he just
Beezer likes women who are smart and levelheaded, like Bear Girl; brainless skanks like Doodles drive him crazy. He reaches out, grabs two handfuls of pasty, rayon-covered flesh, and scoops wriggling Doodles under his arm.
Doodles says, “Beezie, don’cha love me no more?”
He lowers the dumb mutt to the ground in front of Dale Gilbertson. When Dale finally explodes at these four grown-up juvenile delinquents, Beezer remembers the signal Freddy had given Runksie, and looks over the chief’s shoulder at the front of the old store. To the left of the rotting gray entrance, Wendell Green is aiming his camera at the group before him, getting fancy, bending and leaning, stepping to one side and another as he snaps pictures. When he sees Beezer looking at him through his lens, Wendell straightens up and lowers his camera. He has an awkward little smile on his face.
Green must have slithered in through the back way, Beezer imagines, because there’s no way the cops down front would give him a pass. Come to think of it, Doodles and the Dodos must have come the same way. He hopes all of them did not learn of the back road by following him, but that’s a possibility.
The reporter lets his camera hang from its strap and, keeping his eyes on Beezer, sidles away from the old shanty. The guilty, frightened way he moves reminds Beezer of a hyena’s slink toward its carrion. Wendell Green does fear Beezer, and Beezer cannot blame him. Green is lucky that Beezer did not actually rip off his head, instead of merely talking about it. Yet . . . Green’s hyenalike crawl strikes Beezer as pretty strange, under the circumstances. He can’t be afraid of getting beaten up in front of all these cops, can he?
Green’s uneasiness forms a link in Beezer’s mind to the communication he had seen pass between Runkleman and Freddy. When their eyes shifted, when they looked away, they were looking at the reporter!
He sees Wendell consider making a break for it, then reject the idea, most likely because he knows he doesn’t have a chance of getting away.
When Beezer comes to within ten feet of him, Green says, “We don’t need any trouble here, Mr. St. Pierre. I’m just doing my job. Surely you can understand that.”
“I understand a lot of things,” Beezer says. “How much did you pay those clowns?”
“Who? What clowns?” Wendell pretends to notice Doodles and the others for the first time. “Oh, them? Are they the ones who were making all that ruckus?”
“And why would they go do a thing like that?”
“Because they’re animals, I guess.” The expression on Wendell’s face communicates a great desire to align himself with Beezer on the side of human beings, as opposed to animals like Runkleman and Saknessum.
Taking care to fix Green’s eyes, instead of his camera, with his own, Beezer moves in closer and says, “Wendy,
