“Weldon,” Weldon said.
“Weight?” Bensenhaver asked.
“Weight?” said Weldon.
“What do you weigh?” Bensenhaver asked him. “If we're going to lug you off in the copter, we got to know what you weigh.”
“One-eighty-something,” Weldon said.
“You?” Bensenhaver asked the younger one.
“One-ninety-something,” he said. “My name's Raspberry.” Bensenhaver shut his eyes.
“That's three-seventy-something,” Bensenhaver told the deputy. “Go ask the pilot if we can carry that.”
“You're not taking us anywhere, now, are you?” Weldon asked. “We'll just take you to the National Guard hospital,” Bensenhaver said. “Then if we find the woman, and she's all right, we'll take you home.”
“But if she ain't all right, we get a lawyer, right?” Raspberry asked Bensenhaver. “One of those people in the courts, right?”
“If who ain't all right?” Bensenhaver asked him.
“Well, this woman you're looking for,” Raspberry said.
“Well, if she's not all right,” Bensenhaver said, “then we already got you in the hospital and we can castrate you and send you back home the same day. You boys know more about what's involved than I do,” he admitted. “I've never seen it done, but it doesn't take long, does it? And it doesn't bleed much, does it?”
“But there's courts, and a lawyer!” Raspberry said.
“Of course there is,” Weldon said. “Shut up.”
“No, no more courts for this kind of thing—not with the new law,” Bensenhover said. “Sex crimes are special, and with the new machines, it's just so easy to castrate someone that it makes the most sense.”
“Yeah!” the deputy hollered from the helicopter. “The weight's okay. We can take them.”
“Shit!” Raspberry said.
“Shut up,” said Weldon.
“They're not cutting my balls off!” Raspberry yelled at him. “I didn't even get to have her!” Weldon hit Raspberry so hard in the stomach that the younger man pitched over sideways and landed on the prostrate pig. It squealed, its short legs spasmed, it evacuated suddenly, and horribly, but otherwise it didn't move. Raspberry lay gasping beside the sow's stenchful waste, and Arden Bensenhaver tried to knee Weldon Rath in the balls. Weldon was too quick, though; he caught Bensenhaver's leg at the knee and tossed the old man over backwards, over Raspberry and the poor pig.
“Goddamnit,” Bensenhaver said.
The deputy drew his gun and fired one shot in the air. Weldon dropped to his knees, holding his ears. “You all right, Inspector?” the deputy asked.
“Yes, of course I am,” Bensenhaver said. He sat beside the pig and Raspberry. He realized, without the smallest touch of shame, that he felt toward them more or less equally. “Raspberry,” he said (the name itself made Bensenhaver close his eyes), “if you want to keep your balls on, you tell us where the woman is.” The man's birthmark flashed at Bensenhaver like a neon sign.
“You keep still, Raspberry,” Weldon said.
And Bensenhaver told the deputy, “if he opens his mouth again, shoot his balls off, right here. Save us the trip.” Then he hoped to God that the deputy was not so stupid that he would actually do it.
“Oren's got her,” Raspberry told Bensenhaver. “He took the black truck.”
“Where'd he take her?” Bensenhaver asked.
“Don't know,” Raspberry said. “He took her for a ride.”
“Was she all right when she left here?” Bensenhaver asked.
“Well, she was all right, I guess,” Raspberry said. “I mean, I don't think Oren had hurt her yet. I don't think he'd even had her yet.”
“Why not?” Bensenhaver asked.
“Well, if he'd already had her,” Raspberry said, “why would he want to keep her?” Bensenhaver again shut his eyes. He got to his feet.
“Find out how long ago,” he told the deputy. “Then fuck up that turquoise truck so they can't drive it. Then get your ass back to the copter.”
“And leave them here?” the deputy asked.
“Sure,” Bensenhaver said. “There'll be plenty of time to cut their balls off, later.”
Arden Bensenhaver had the pilot send a message that the abductor's name was Oren Rath, and that he was driving a black, not a turquoise, pickup. This message meshed interestingly with another one: a state trooper had received a report that a man all alone in a black pickup had been driving dangerously, wandering in and out of his rightful driving lane, “looking like he was drunk, or stoned, or something else.” The trooper had not followed this up because, at the time, he'd thought he was supposed to be more concerned about a turquoise pickup. Arden Bensenhaver, of course, couldn't know that the man in the black pickup hadn't really been alone—that, in fact, Hope Standish had been lying with her head in his lap. The news simply gave Bensenhaver another of his chills: if Rath was alone, he had already done something to the woman. Bensenhaver yelled to the deputy to hurry over to the copter—that they were looking for a black pickup that had last been seen on the bypass that intersects the system of county roads near the town called Sweet Wells.
“Know it?” Bensenhaver asked.
“Oh, yeah,” the deputy said.
They were in the air again, below them the pigs once more in a panic. The poor, medicated pig that had been fallen on was lying as still as when they'd come. But the Rath brothers were fighting—it appeared, quite savagely—and the higher and farther from them that the helicopter moved, the more the world returned to a level of sanity of which Arden Bensenhaver approved. Until the tiny fighting figures, below and to the east, were no more than miniatures to him, and he was so far from their blood and fear that when the deputy said he thought that Raspberry could whip Weldon, if Raspberry just didn't allow himself to get scared, Bensenhaver laughed his Toledo deadpan laugh.
“They're animals,” he said to the deputy, who, despite whatever young man's cruelty and cynicism were in him, seemed a little shocked. “If they both killed each other,” Bensenhaver said, “think of the food they would have eaten in their lifetimes that other human beings could now eat.” The deputy realized that Bensenhaver's lie about the new law—about the instant castration for sexual crimes—was more than a farfetched story: for Bensenhaver, although he knew it was clearly not the law, it was what he thought the law should be. It was one of Arden Bensenhaver's Toledo methods.
“That poor woman,” Bensenhaver said; he wrung the pieces of her bra in his thick-veined hands. “How old is this Oren?” he asked the deputy.
“Sixteen, maybe seventeen,” the deputy said. “Just a kid.” The deputy was at least twenty-four himself.
“If he's old enough to get a hard-on,” Arden Bensenhover said, “he's old enough to have it cut off.”
But what should I cut? Oh, where can I cut him? wondered Hope—the long, thin fisherman's knife now snug in her hand. Her pulse thrummed in her palm, but to Hope it felt as if the knife had a heartbeat of its own. She brought her hand very slowly up to her hip, up over the edge of the thrashed seat to where she could glimpse the blade. Should I use the saw-toothed edge or the one that looks so sharp? she thought. How do you kill a man with one of these? Alongside the sweating, swiveling ass of Oren Rath that knife in her hand was a cool and distant miracle. Do I slash him or stick him? She wished she knew. Both his hot hands were under her buttocks, lifting her, jerking up. His chin dug into the hollow near her collarbone like a heavy stone. Then she felt him slip one of his hands out from under her, and his fingers, reaching for the floor, grazed her hand that held the knife.