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, He’s gotta have something on the ball if he brews that Kingsland Ale, because that is some fine, fine beer. And look at the chief! He’s so ready to bust a gut, he can’t even see that we’re about to lose this case.
“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 got here. Dit looks back at Beezer, who is advancing ponderously toward the side of the shack and—surprise, surprise!—everybody’s best pal and favorite reporter, Mr. Wendell Green, now appearing a little alarmed. Guess more than one kind of scum just rose to the surface, Dit thinks.
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 had set the whole thing up in advance. Green was using the Dodos as a distraction from whatever he was doing with his camera, of course. Such total sleaziness, such moral ugliness, infuriates Beezer. Galvanized by loathing, he moves quietly away from Dale and the other policemen and walks toward Wendell Green, keeping his eyes locked on the reporter’s.
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, you’re a real piece of work, you know that?”
Wendell holds up his hands to ward off Beezer. “Hey, we may have had our differences in the past, but—”
Still looking him in the eye, Beezer folds his right hand around the camera and plants his left on Wendell Green’s chest. He jerks the right hand back and gives Green a massive shove with the left. One of two things is going to break, Green’s neck or the camera strap, and he does not much care which it is to be.
To a sound like the crack of a whip, the reporter flails backward, barely managing to remain upright. Beezer is pulling the camera out of the case, from which dangle two strips of severed leather. He drops the case and rotates the camera in his big hands.
“Hey, don’t do that!” Wendell says, his voice louder than speech but softer than a shout.
“What is it, an old F2A?”
“If you know that, you know it’s a classic. Give it back to me.”
“I’m not going to hurt it, I’m going to clean it out.” Beezer snaps open the back of the camera, gets one thick finger under the exposed length of film, and rips out the entire roll. He smiles at the reporter and tosses the film into the weeds. “See how much better it feels without all that crap in there? This is a nice little machine—you shouldn’t fill it with garbage.”
Wendell does not dare show how furious he is. Rubbing the sore spot on the back of his neck, he growls, “That so-called garbage is my livelihood, you oaf, you moron. Now give me back my camera.”
Beezer casually holds it out before him. “I didn’t quite catch all of that. What did you say?”
His only response a bleak glance, Wendell snatches the camera from Beezer’s hand.
When the two state cops finally step forward, Jack feels a mixture of disappointment and relief. What they are going to do is obvious, so let them do it. Perry Brown and Jeff Black will take the Fisherman case away from Dale and run their own investigation. From now on, Dale will be lucky to get random scraps from the state’s table. Jack’s greatest regret is that Brown and Black should have walked into this madhouse, this circus. They have been waiting for their moment all along—in a sense, waiting for the local guy to prove his incompetence—but what is going on now is a public humiliation for Dale, and Jack wishes it weren’t happening. He could not have imagined feeling grateful for the arrival of a biker gang at a crime scene, but that’s how bad it is. Beezer St. Pierre and his companions kept the crowd away more efficiently than Dale’s officers. The question is, how did all those people find out?