Sheriff Stallard couldn’t believe it. ‘But she’s said all that before. Every single word. She’s got to be out of her mind.’
‘Could be they are on this new drug,’ said Baxter. ‘I mean, they got to be on some God-awful substance to carry on like this.’
‘I wish to God I had some substance to be on!’ yelled the Sheriff and pondered the possibility that he already was. It had to be something like that. He’d never experienced a noise of this magnitude in all his career.
The same could be said for the Electronic Surveillance Team that had been sent to bug the Bear Fort. They had just begun to climb the wire fence around the perimeter when the clock and the tape timer struck six and simultaneously triggered the sound system and Wally Immelmann’s most sophisticated deterrent. The latter was not intended for bears. Wally’s enemy this time was burglarisers and he had used American know-how to excellent effect. In fact he had done more. He had devised a means of adding utility to the merely aesthetic and historical interest of his collection of military memorabilia. As the first bugging expert dropped to the ground he set off the sensors and immediately four antiaircraft searchlights swung round and focused on him. So did the guns in the Sherman and the other armoured vehicles. The agents saw them coming and threw themselves flat as the searchlights swung over them. The man on the far side of the fence didn’t. Blinded by the lights and deafened by the sound of Auntie Joan’s yelling about not giving Wally any foreplay he stumbled about helplessly and added his screams to the din. Behind the searchlights the engines of the armoured vehicles and the Sherman roared into life and then the whole place lit up and the searchlights went out. By the time he could see (he still couldn’t hear) he was aware of the Sherman bearing down on him. Agent Nurdler wasn’t waiting. With a terrible scream he headed for the wire and went up it with an agility that was unnatural to him. He was over the top and running like mad through the trees when the tank veered away from the fence and returned to its original position. The lights went out and apart from Uncle Wally demanding at a thousand decibels to know when in thirty years of marriage he’d ever tried to sodomise Auntie Joan peace reigned. The Immelmann Intruder Deterrent had worked perfectly.
The audiovisual equipment in the Starfighter Mansion was working perfectly too. Every detail of the activities in the house was being monitored in the Surveillance Truck in the drive-in and while the bathroom sequence starring Auntie Joan on the can was all too revealing, the other people seemed to be behaving according to schedule, the schedule already firmly established in the minds of the DEA agents. Wally Immelmann was in his den chewing a cigar and alternately pacing up and down the room and helping himself to Scotch. Every now and then he picked up the phone to call his lawyer and then thought better of it and put it down again. He was obviously extremely worried about something.
‘You think he smells us?’ Murphy asked Palowski. ‘Some guys got sixth sense. They can feel they’re under surveillance. Remember that Panamanian down in Florida who was into voodoo. He was uncanny.’
‘Man marries a broad like Mrs Immelmann doesn’t have sixth sense. No way. Got no sense at all.’
‘They say behind every rich man there’s a great woman,’ said Murphy.
‘Great? Great doesn’t get near it. This time it’s gigantic.’
They switched to the quads who were busy filling their exercise books with details of Auntie Joan and Uncle Wally’s sexual habits for their project on American culture for their English teacher.
‘How do you spell ’sodomise’?’ asked Emmeline.
