While my friend was talking, Kong got so angry it seemed as if his body doubled in size. And it looked as if a chemical trick had transformed the blue of his eyes into red, blood red. In fact, he gave the impression that he was going to explode at any moment and take all of the witnesses in this tense encounter with him. As for me, I had long ago realized that this piece of turd was the undisputed despot of the district. I had had more than enough of his kind. I had never been anywhere where there wasn't some arrogant clown who fucked the ladies until they dropped dead, who solved the dental problems of others by brute force, thanks to the muscular strength Mother Nature had endowed him with, and who unselfishly applied his entire energy to making life even more difficult than it already was for the peaceful and law abiding. Yet for some reason, even dictators knew their limits. Bluebeard was one such limit. It wasn't quite clear to me why someone like Kong, who had in excess all that his opponents lacked, would be afraid of a poor cripple like Bluebeard. Suddenly Kong chuckled roguishly, as if the whole business had only been an April Fool's joke. "Heh, heh, heh," he bawled, "I'm so afraid I'm wetting my pants, my friend. The mighty force of your front stump is a world legend. Just don't worry about the two of us missing out on a little dance. When the time comes, our account will get settled just like all accounts get settled sooner or later."
Then he turned to me and gave me a cold stare.
"And as for you, Sweetie, you can bet your right paw that we're going to have a very entertaining conversation between ourselves in the not-too-distant future, a conversation you'll remember for a long, long time. And so until then, my friends …" he said, then jumped down from the wall. Both of his rat-faced lackeys followed him, and slunk away into the bushes.
Without giving them so much as a glance, Bluebeard left immediately. But I chuckled softly to myself.
"Hey!" I called after him. He stopped in his tracks and turned around.
"I'm afraid that you're slowly forgetting your own principles."
"Is that so? And why, if I may ask?"
"You told them that I'm your friend."
I was astonished by what I saw in Peter Fonda's garage. Deep Purple lay stretched out on the wild postal worker's carefully polished Harley-Davidson, and stared at the ceiling with wide-open eyes. He lay stiff on his back and had all four limbs extended as if he wanted to demonstrate the gymnastic positions of which he was capable. My premonitions had hit the bull's-eye. Good old Deep Purple turned out to be the aggressive geezer of the previous day who had insisted so vehemently on the inviolability of his turf.
As soon as we approached the back of the garage, we saw a long, irregular trail of blood smears and spots that Purple had left behind him in the garden.
In my opinion, the last minutes of his life must have passed as follows: someone bit Deep Purple several times in the neck while he sat on the boundary wall of his territory. Then he plummeted from the wall into the garden. But he did not die immediately, and that was remarkable for his age. After the murderer convinced himself that his handiwork had been effective and had gone on his way, something happened that was nearly a miracle. Despite his great loss of blood, Purple apparently regained consciousness and gave some thought about his place of death. Whether this was the reason for what happened next, or only mental confusion, in any case Purple partly crept and partly staggered back to his home, to the postal official whom he loved (and hated) more than anyone else in the world. Arriving at the rear of the garage, he faced his most difficult obstacle, because he could only enter the shed, which had a rickety, do-it-yourself look, through a tiny opening where some bricks had fallen out, just under the corrugated iron roof. And so Deep Purple made a risky leap for the last time in his life. He jumped from a standing position nearly seven feet high, five times his body length. And he succeeded. He squeezed himself through the opening, let himself drop into the garage, pulled himself up on his legs, and limped to the Harley. Racked by pain, he climbed up on the machine and gazed drunkenly around from the newly waxed leather seat.
Meanwhile he had become cold, so cold that he thought he would never be warm again. He did not understand what had happened and why it had happened. Or did he? Did he make a mistake? Did he know the reason behind the bloodthirsty attack? Might he have known his bestial murderer? Questions ... questions upon questions that very likely would never be answered.
Suddenly he fell over. Like an elephant shot down in the savannah, Deep Purple collapsed on the black leather, stretching out all four limbs.
"I saw the trail of blood in the garden and followed it," said Bluebeard.
Seen from below, the motorcycle resembled an Indian burial mound on which Purple lay like a legendary, fossilized chief. I jumped up on the saddle and looked the corpse over closely. It was puzzling how the old buzzard could have managed to come this far with a huge, gaping wound in his neck. Not only his neck, but also his entire head now looked like a wrung-out, blood-soaked washcloth.
