crowded and federal judges not wanting to tax the sensitive criminal psyche-he began to have nothing but contempt for the legal system of America.
Jake wasn’t alone in that contempt. Almost any law-abiding citizen with a modicum of intelligence felt nothing but contempt for America’s legal system.
Jake looked at the house on the hill and knew, he knew, for the first time that he could remember, raw fear.
West sat on a broken down chair and rubbed his aching stump. Would the goddamn thing ever heal?
West hated Ben Raines. Loathed him. But he was afraid of Ben Raines. Scared to death of him. West wished they could just call this thing off and go on back to Tennessee. Jesus Christ! He couldn’t get over the sight of those bodies piled around the house and on the porch. And Raines had booby-trapped the town, too. West shuddered at the thought of falling into one of those mine shafts.
God, what a way to die.
He bet there were snakes down there in them pits, too. Snakes and rats eatin’ on the bodies.
“Shit!” he muttered.
Texas Red ran his fingers through his long red hair. He sat off by himself and engaged in, what was to him, heavy thinking.
This whole operation was screwed up. Everything about it was screwed up. But he wasn’t gonna give up. No way.
If any of them did that, word would get around the whole southwest that they let one man, one woman, and a handful of kids kick the shit out of three or four hundred men. Couldn’t let that happen.
“So,” Red muttered, “that only leaves us one choice. Kill them all.”
Crazy Cowboy Vic wasn’t scared of Ben Raines. Cowboy Vic wasn’t afraid of nothing. Cowboy Vic didn’t have sense enough to be afraid of anybody. He grinned as he pulled at his crotch. Thought about all them young girls in the house. Smooth tight pussies.
Vic liked to hear the girls holler when he hurt them. That’s when he really got his rocks off. And Vic liked to kill. Didn’t make no difference to Vic who or what it was. Human or animal. He liked to kill; liked to torture.
Far back as he could remember, he liked to torture animals. Skin them alive. Cut the paws off dogs and cats.
Of course his parents knew about his aberrations. Of course his parents didn’t report him to the authorities. Victor was their darling little pride and joy.
Not even when Little Victor buried the neighbor’s pet up to its neck and ran over it with a power mower did his parents report it. They concealed the fact. Heaven forbid anyone should learn they had a nut for a kid.
They thought they were doing Victor a favor by keeping quiet about his … strange behavior.
There are a great many stupid parents in the world.
Vic slobbered on himself as he thought about the kids in the house. And Ben Raines. He’d like to torture Ben Raines. Make him holler.
Yeah! Good fun!
“I wonder what they’re thinking?” Rani asked.
“A lot of them are thinking about quitting,” Ben told her. “But the majority of them know they can’t quit. Word would get around that they were whipped by a handful of kids and one man and one woman. They can’t allow that to happen. They have to try to kill us to shut our mouths.”
“We must have killed half of them,” she observed.
“Or a lot of them have run away.”
“We’ve wasted quite a few. But you’re right. A lot of them have hit the air.”
Ben sat eating a can of cold beans, washing it down with water from his canteen.
Rani looked at him, calmly eating amid the gore, and shook her head.
“Hungry?” Ben asked.
“No. How can you just sit there, with dead bodies all around us, and eat?”
“Because I’m hungry,” Ben answered simply.
“You know what I mean.”
Ben jerked his thumb toward the outside. “Because of them, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t view them as human beings, Rani. It’s very doubtful any of those dead men ever, in their entire lives, did one decent thing-even back when we had a civilization. They were thieves, bully boys, thugs, rapists, muggers, street slime, rednecks, white trash, racists-you name it. If they had their choice between stealing and working, they stole. They beat their wives and girlfriends and abused their kids. They cheated on their income tax-if they even bothered to file-and the rest of us paid for it. To a man, they considered themselves smarter than the law and above obeying the laws the rest of us lived by. They filled every cheap honky-tonk in the country whenever they had a few bucks in their pockets and were looking for trouble. Their idea of fun was stomping somebody’s head in; usually somebody who just happened to come in for a quiet drink and hadn’t bothered a soul. They were loud- mouthed, profane, obnoxious, ignorant,
crude, and rude. And when they died, if the undertaker would shove a tube up their rectum and give them an enema, they could have been buried in a matchbox. I don’t give any more thought to killing them than I would stepping on a roach or kicking a dried piece of dog shit off the sidewalk. That answer your question, dear?”
She looked at him for a long moment before speaking. “There is a lot of arrogance in you, Mr. Ben Raines. Are you aware of that?”
“A lot of people confuse a desire for order and discipline with arrogance, Rani. I went for a good many years in the Tri-States without firing a shot at anything other than a paper pop-up target. We who made up the Tri-States proved that a society totally void of crime is not only possible but very easy to attain.”
“By trading one type of fear for another, Ben?”’
Ben smiled at that. “It’s a funny thing, Rani. But in all my years, I’ve never been afraid of the cops. If one obeys the law, there is no need to be fearful of authority.”
She turned around, scanned her perimeter, and looked back at Ben. “And I bet you drove 55, too, didn’t you, Ben?”’
“Yes, I did. I didn’t like it; thought it was a stupid law. But it was the law, so I obeyed it. I never got a ticket, either.”
She once more turned around, looking at the body-littered area around the house on the hill, overlooking the ghost town. With her back to Ben, she said, “You people in the Tri-States got a lot of negative publicity.”
“Yes, we did, Rani. Our system of justice was harsh. It was a one-mistake society. But no one went hungry in the Tri-States. Not one person. No one was denied proper medical care. Everybody had a job. The taxes were fair. We didn’t allow huge corporations to swallow up the small farmer. We had damn few complaints from the people who chose to live in the Tri-States.”
“You people also had quick trials, too, Ben.”
“We sure did,” Ben said, giving his perimeter a once-over. “The legal profession, as you knew it, wasn’t the same in Tri-States. But there again, I don’t recall a single complaint from any legal resident of the Tri-States.”
She shook her head. “What’s the point of arguing, Ben. It will never be again.”
He looked at her, surprise on his face. “Of course, it will be, Rani. Not as big as before. But it will be.”
“You really believe that, don’t you, Ben? God, you’re a dreamer, you know that?”
“If we don’t put it back together, Rani, I firmly believe civilization will die.”
She looked around her and reached for her twin 16’s. “If we don’t start paying attention, Ben, we’re going to die. Here they come again.”
Chapter 24
This time the outlaws were much more cautious in their attack. They did not attempt to overwhelm the house by sheer numbers, electing to reach the crumbling buildings of the town and settle in.
“War of nerves,” Ben said. “They’re going to try to wear us down.”
“Mr. Ben!” Jordy called in a whisper from upstairs. “Your radio is talking!”
On the second floor, Ben listened to his radio. The static was still there, but he was able to understand the transmission.
