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Bright yellow lights could be seen in the Winnebago’s windows, but when they were closer, the forms of three men could be seen: two in dark overcoats, their arms crossed as they smoked, and taller man who wasn’t smoking. Additionally, Case Piece thought he heard something.

The sounds of muffled shouts?

The three forms glanced over as the footsteps approached. The two smokers turned out to be Argi and Cristo, the third man, Dr. Prouty.

They all looked…dismal.

“Hey, bros?” Case Piece greeted. “How you be?”

The doctor spoke up, “I regret to reply that we don’t be very well at all.”

“Yeah,” Cristo said, his eyes grim. “Some fucked up shit happened tonight.”

“Oh no!” Sung remorsed.

“What, cops?” Case Piece dreaded to ask.

“Naw—”

“But…where’s Paulie?”

Argi jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, at the motor home, while at the same moment, that muffled shouting rose again.

The shouting, unmistakably, belonged to Paulie.

“Those motherFUCKers! You see what they did! I’m PAULIE FUCKIN’ VINCHETTI, and nobody does a job like that on me! Nobody!” Was there a pause, then a strange, regular slopping sound? “Back in ya go, bitch—yeah, back in! You like that? Huh? Fuck! Those fuckin’ guys! Who do they think they are?” Another pause, another slopping sound. “Fuck it! Back in ya go! What the fuck, huh? So help me God I’m gonna GET those guys!”

“Man, bloods. Paulie, he sound like he’s whilin’ out. Who he yellin’ at?” Case Piece asked.

“The broad,” Argi answered.

“The…” Case Piece’s eyes bulged. “You mean Highball?”

“Yeah,” Cristo said. “See, Paulie’s real?pissed off. You know them guys we pulled some vendetta on?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, tonight they hit us back.”

“They hit us back hard,” Argi augmented.

“Yeah! You like that, bitch? I’ll bet you do!” more of Paulie’s muted shouting could be heard. “Back in ya go! Baaaaaaaaack in!”

“Is he…?” Case Piece began. “He’s not…”

Argi and Cristo nodded.

“Shit!” Case Piece broke, turned toward the Winnebago’s side door. “I gotta go in there and find out why he’s whilin’ on Highball!”

It was Dr. Prouty who took Case Piece’s arm with a hesitant look. “That would be most inadvisable, Mr. Piece. You see, Mr. Vinchetti, at this particular moment, is rather inconsolable.”

“When shit don’t go his way,” Cristo added. “Paulie, well, see…”

“Avoiding proximity is the most sound advice,” the doctor said.

“He’s like a fuckin’ rabid dog when he’s pissed,” Argi finished.

Thumping could be heard now, like someone’s heels thudding the floor in sheer horror. “I’ll just go…rap with him,” Case Piece found some courage.

“Go at your own risk,” Argi said.

Case Piece, in stops and starts, opened the vehicle’s narrow metal door and immediately heard mewling and more thumping. He stepped in, his nose twitching at the awful body odor generated by that obese woman, Melda. The living area was a shambles; more of Paulie’s shouts rocketed forward.

Case Piece, finally, stepped into the horrific back room.

Paulie cackled as he plunged Highball’s margarine-slathered head in and out of Melda’s cave-sized vagina. The comely prostitute convulsed, her bare heels, indeed, thumping against the floor. She was nude, of course, her tremendous body flushed, tense, gleaming in sweat. Her hands had been tied behind her back. Then came that great slopping sound as Paulie pulled Highball’s head back out of the monstrous orifice.

“Ya like that, bitch? Huh?” Paulie gruffed, madman-like as he leaned over to watch her convulsions. Highball’s cheeks expanded, her mouth taped. Air whistled in and out of her dilated nostrils.

“Paulie? Shit, man. What up?” Case Piece babbled. “Highball, what? She mouth off to you again?”

Paulie, still hunching, shot a glance backward. “Those fuckin’ guys! You know what they did?” He was delirious. Highball’s convulsions accelerated when Paulie yanked her back up and—

SHHHHHHHHLUCK!

—sunk her head back into Melda’s vaginal barrel.

“Paulie! Come on, man! You’ll kill her! What happened?”

“What happened?” he growled. “Oh, I’ll show ya what happened!” and suddenly he strode back to the forward room, abandoning Highball. When Melda saw that her boss had left, she relaxed her vaginal muscles and expelled Highball’s head like someone disgorging, say, a meatball from their mouth. The prostitute thunked to the floor only moments before she’d have suffocated.

Case Piece ran to the living area where Paulie manically fiddled with a laptop computer. “Those redneck mother fuckers emailed this to us!” the don exploded. “Watch!”

Case Piece stared at the bright laptop screen, and a crude, glaring image stared back: the rear compartment of, apparently, a large step van, and a metal table. A thin man in a tacky jacket, whose head remained out of frame, was now tearing the nightshirt off of a pudgy teenaged girl with frightfully pink hair. The girl shuddered where she lay, her baby fat jiggling, screeching ineffectually through a gag her mouth. The man tied her to the table.

“Paulie?” Case Piece droned. “What the…what the hell…is this?”

Paulie’s rage turned his face nearly as pink as the girl’s hair. “Just watch!”

Case Piece watched.

On the screen, a gruff redneck voice said, “Here, son. Hold the camera while I’se show ya how ta cut the hole,” and then the image jig-jagged and suddenly a larger man in a tacky jacket stepped into the frame.

He held a power drill, and locked into the drill’s chuck was a 3-inch hole-saw blade.

“Watch careful now, boys…so’s ya know how ta do it.”

The screech of the drill was bad enough but worse—far worse—was the sound of the next process, when the large man pressed down on the girl’s face with his hand and applied the high-rpm hole- saw to the center of the top of her skull. Eventually, the circle of bone and scalp was removed, revealing a clean-cut hole, and the hole itself now revealed a circle of raw, whitish-pink brain.

“Now,” the faceless big man said, “we gots ta cut a slit fer our dicks,” and then he produced a formidable knife and inserted it into the aforementioned hole. This event caused the gagged girl to reflexively twitch.

“Yessir! See, when ya do it right—like I just done—she don’t die right off. It’s always best they still be alive when ya first put’cher bone in.”

“Hot dog, Unc!” celebrated another off-screen voice. “She is! She is still alive!”

I’ll’se go first’n show you boys how it’s done,” the voice said next. “Son? Here. Point the camera down…”

The camera-angle deflected to the man’s crotch, where he’d already extracted his quite uncircumcised penis. He masturbated dexterously until an erection was achieved, and it was then that he…

Well, the dutiful reader can guess.

What Case Piece watched on that screen for the next series of minutes was something he could never have fathomed in a million years. Amid this redneck perverto circus came caterwauls of the most robust sort, a dialect-riot of hoots, Rebel yells, and exclamations such as, “Now hump that head, boy! I say hump it!” and “”Yeah! Yeaaaaaaah!