Simmons, Dan - Joe Kurtz 01 - Hardcase by Simmons Dan

Author:Simmons, Dan [Simmons, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: det_hard
Published: 2011-04-05T06:27:52+00:00

CHAPTER 24

The Alabama Beagle Boys—back when there were five of them, there were only four living now—came by their name via an unfortunate photograph picked up by the wire services in the mid-1990s when an Alabama Department of Corrections official, exhilarated by his popular press after bringing back chain gangs, issued horizontally striped prison uniforms to all state inmates. The photographer from the Dothan, Alabama, newspaper had gone out to one of the prison-striped chain gangs working along State Highway 84 not far from the Boll Weevil Monument and photographed five men pulled from the work detail apparently at random.

It had not been random. It had amused the gang bull to line up five dim-witted brothers for the shot, the five overweight young men all serving three years for a completely botched Wal-Mart robbery in Dothan during which thirty-five legally armed Wal-Mart shoppers—the majority of them senior citizens—and the seventy-four-year-old "Wal-Mart Greeter," who had been carrying a.357 Magnum, all had drawn down on the boys, putting four of them in the hospital for gunshot wounds and sending all of them to the Babbie State Prison just outside of Opp. The five were known then just as the Beugel brothers—Warren, Darren, Douglas, Andrew, and Oliver—but a combination of a Dothan Journal misprint that went out to UPI and the comic image of the five in their striped coveralls changed their name forever to the Alabama Beagle Boys.

Six months after the photograph was taken, four of them escaped—Oliver, the youngest, had crawled back through the wire to rescue his pet crayfish and had been shot twenty-four times by guards. The first thing the Beagle Boys did after eluding the "Largest Manhunt in Southern Alabama History" was to visit the Department of Corrections' Chiefs farm outside of Montgomery, where they killed the man, burned down his house, raped his wife into a coma, and nailed the family's dog to the barn door (although those still in prison in the South maintain that it was the dog who was raped and the wife who was nailed to the barn door).

Warren, Darren, Douglas, and Andrew then headed for Canada but, stymied by the difficulty of crossing the border under the delusion that they needed passports, went to ground in Buffalo, where they became lay ministers and soldiers in the White Aryan Army of the Lord, headquartered in the suburb of West Seneca.

This night, at a warehouse near the State University of New York campus, they were shopping.

"Full auto with laser shit is what we want," said Warren, the oldest.

"Of course, of course," said Malcolm Kibunte, bowing the huge rednecks into the rear room of the cinder-block warehouse. "Full auto with laser shit it will be, then."

The Boys had been carefully and repeatedly frisked before being driven, blindfolded, to the warehouse site, where Doo-Rag and a dozen of his men watched carefully and a bit reproachfully. The Alabama Beagle Boys ignored the gangbangers.

"Holy shit," breathed Douglas, who, after Oliver, had always been the least brilliant of the five, "lookit here.

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