Chapter 111

They were headed out the barn again, this time through a different door and without Rawle in a headlock. This time, he was walking free, alongside one of the Valley’s most powerful drug dealers, and his bodyguard.
They walked to a steel barn located 10 metres behind the wooden one.
“In the winter, up here on the Mountain, it’s too cold for chickens,” Dee said. “We have chicken barns, down in the valley, but up here we raise fur, when I got time. Chinchilla, muskrat and nutria. And I bought two Alpacas this year, for wool. The wife wanted that.”
“Mmm,” Rawle murmured. He wanted to go home more than anything in the world.
Glenny clacked open the latch on the corrugated steel door and pushed Rawle inside.
It stunk and was dark. The barn was full of chicken fence and cages.
They walked the dirt floor down the centre of the barn. Many of the cages were jammed full of brown, sleeping Chinchillas. The stink from them was ferocious. They looked like floppy, depressed cartoon rabbits. It made Rawle sick to look at them.
At the end of the barn, there was a series of low to the ground pens, with bars on them instead of chicken wire. The barred pens were for piglets, Rawle thought.
“Pigs,” he said. He could see their pink butts flitting back and forth in the dark between the bars.
“You’re right, Dee said. “I keep a few pigs, too-”
“-Help US OUT!!” A human voice suddenly wailed from the nearest pig pen.
The voice was incredibly loud and Rawle jolted and felt goosebumps stick out along his arms.
A human hand was hanging out from the bars of one of the pig pens, reaching out and clasping at the air.
“I killed one. I killed a piglo,” the voice yelled.
Rawle put two and two together. It was the same hoarse, grandmother voice of Darlene Missions.
“Darlene,” he whispered, afraid she might overhear him.
A human face could be seen now, pressed up against the bars, streaked in mud.
As Rawle got closer, he could gradually see into the open top of the pen. A woman’s short, plump naked body was lying there, like a shaved hog, with long blonde hockey hair running down her back. She was lying in the mud, face down. One of her hands was handcuffed to a bar on the side of the pen, and one of her ankles was cuffed on the opposite side, stretching her out and forcing her to lie flat.
In her free hand, she was holding what looked to be a handful of beige human shit, which she tried feebly to fling at the men. The soft material dropped sporadically across the dirt and sawdust floor, not even close.
“That’s Darlene Missions,” Dee said, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Not much to look at, is she? She’s been in there a week or two, I guess. Jack got us on track. Eh Glenny? She eats whatever she can kill and drinks piglet piss, I figure. At least you kicked your Dilaudid habit, Darlene,” Dee called out to the pen. “She’s been a junkie all her life, until now. All she needed was a little intensive care.”
Intensive care, Rawle repeated the words to himself, remembering what his wife, an Intensive Care nurse had been put through.
He did not feel bad for this woman in the pig pen.
She deserved it.
After all the fear Rawle had felt in the barn, seeing Darlene brought low made him feel elated.
“Looks like she’s lost some weight,” he said, amazed he was able to joke at a time like this.
The blacj kidnapper laughed.
“What did he say?” Dee said, looking over.
“Ah-ah-ah. He said ‘it looks like she lost weight,’” Glenny said.
The bikers laughed togther, uproariously. Rawle felt a rush of pride, at making his captors laugh.
He felt a rush. A small taste of what someone like Dee Lee must feel, all the time. It was a real, tangible energy, a force of nature, as real as gravity. It was power.
“Once we got the name, Matt Pye, from Jacky, we put him under surveillance. He led us right to the old bitch. She was hiding with some fat cocksucker in Halls Harbour. A lobsterman.”
Darlene could be heard moaning from the pig pen.
“Well. I really gotta say thanks. For taking this woman off my back. It’s a huge, huge relief.”
“You’re welcome. And I appreciate you saying so, Raoul.” He glanced at the pen again. “We’ve tried everything to get some info out of her, but she’s basically a nut. Nothing she says has been useful, at all. One thing we do know is, she was the one behind the attacks on you, all of them. That’s according to Matt Pye. And also, her son Kurtis and her relatives have left the province, supposedly. C’mon, let’s go.” Dee turned around and the men walked back out of the steel doors.
Rawle was glad to put Darlene Missions and the darkness of the chicken barn behind him.