Kingdom of Fear

by Hunter S. Thompson

  The Pigs were nowhere to be seen. They had apparently rushed the place, guns blazing—hoping to kill Leach before he got away. I jumped into the car and started the engine. The Judge came through the passenger door and reached for the loaded .454 Magnum. . . . I watched in horror as he jerked it out of its holster and ran around to the front of the cop car and fired two shots into the grille.

  “Fuck you!” he screamed. “Take this, you Scum! Eat shit and die!” He jumped back as the radiator exploded in a blast of steam and scalding water. Then he fired three more times through the windshield and into the squawking radio, which also exploded.

  “Hot damn!” he said as he slid back into the front seat. “Now we have them trapped!” I jammed the car into reverse and lost control in the mud, hitting a structure of some kind and careening sideways at top speed until I got a grip on the thing and aimed it up the ramp to the highway. . . . The Judge was trying desperately to reload the .454, yelling at me to slow down, so he could finish the bastards off! His eyes were wild and his voice was unnaturally savage.

  I swerved hard left to Elko and hurled him sideways, but he quickly recovered his balance and somehow got off five more thundering shots in the general direction of the burning trailer behind us.

  “Good work, Judge,” I said. “They’ll never catch us now.” He smiled and drank deeply from our Whiskey Jug, which he had somehow picked up as we fled. . . . Then he passed it over to me, and I too drank deeply as I whipped the big V-8 into passing gear, and we went from forty-five to ninety in four seconds and left the ugliness far behind us in the rain.

  I glanced over at the Judge as he loaded five huge bullets into the Magnum. He was very calm and focused, showing no signs of the drug coma that had crippled him just moments before. . . . I was impressed. The man was clearly a Warrior. I slapped him on the back and grinned. “Calm down, Judge,” I said. “We’re almost home.”

  I knew better, of course. I was 1,000 miles from home, and we were almost certainly doomed. There was no hope of escaping the dragnet that would be out for us, once those poor fools discovered Leach in a puddle of burning blood with the top of his head blown off. The squad car was destroyed—thanks to the shrewd instincts of the Judge—but I knew it would not take them long to send out an all-points alarm. Soon there would be angry police roadblocks at every exit between Reno and Salt Lake City. . . .

  So what? I thought. There were many side roads, and we had a very fast car. All I had to do was get the Judge out of his killing frenzy and find a truck stop where we could buy a few cans of Flat Black spray paint. Then we could slither out of the state before dawn and find a place to hide.

  But it would not be an easy run. In the quick space of four hours we had destroyed two automobiles and somehow participated in at least one killing—in addition to all the other random, standard-brand crimes like speeding and arson and fraud and attempted murder of State Police officers while fleeing the scene of a homicide. . . . No. We had a Serious problem on our hands. We were trapped in the middle of Nevada like crazy rats, and the cops would shoot to Kill when they saw us. No doubt about that. We were Criminally Insane. . . . I laughed and shifted up into Drive. The car stabilized at 115 or so. . . .

  The Judge was eager to get back to his women. He was still fiddling with the Magnum, spinning the cylinder nervously and looking at his watch. “Can’t you go any faster?” he muttered. “How far is Elko?”

  Too far, I thought, which was true. Elko was fifty miles away and there would be roadblocks. Impossible. They would trap us and probably butcher us.

  Elko was out, but I was loath to break this news to the Judge. He had no stomach for bad news. He had a tendency to flip out and flog anything in sight when things weren’t going his way.

  It was wiser, I thought, to humor him. Soon he would go to sleep.

  I slowed down and considered. Our options were limited. There would be roadblocks on every paved road out of Wells. It was a main crossroads, a gigantic full-on truck stop where you could get anything you wanted twenty-four hours a day, within reason of course. And what we needed was not in that category. We needed to disappear. That was one option.

  We could go south on 93 to Ely, but that was about it. That would be like driving into a steel net. A flock of pigs would be waiting for us, and after that it would be Nevada State Prison. To the north on 93 was Jackpot, but we would never make that either. Running east into Utah was hopeless. We were trapped. They would run us down like dogs.

  There were other options, but not all of them were mutual. The Judge had his priorities, but they were not mine. I understood that me and the Judge were coming up on a parting of the ways. This made me nervous. There were other options, of course, but they were all High Risk. I pulled over and studied the map again. The Judge appeared to be sleeping, but I couldn’t be sure. He still had the Magnum in his lap.

  The Judge was getting to be a problem. There was no way to get him out of the car without violence. He would not go willingly into the dark and stormy night. The only other way was to kill him, but that was out of the question as long as he had the gun. He was very quick in emergencies. I couldn’t get the gun away from him, and I was not about to get into an argument with him about who should have the weapon. If I lost, he would shoot me in the spine and leave me in the road.

  I was getting too nervous to continue without chemical assistance. I reached under the seat for my kit bag, which contained five or six Spansules of Black Acid. Wonderful, I thought. This is just what I need. I ate one and went back to pondering the map. There was a place called Deeth, just ahead, where a faintly marked side road appeared to wander uphill through the mountains and down along a jagged ridge into Jackpot from behind. Good, I thought, this is it. We could sneak into Jackpot by dawn.

  Just then I felt a blow on the side of my head as the Judge came awake with a screech, flailing his arms around him like he was coming out of a nightmare. “What’s happening, goddamnit?” he said. “Where are we? They’re after us.” He was jabbering in a foreign language that quickly lapsed into English as he tried to aim the gun. “Oh, God!” he screamed. “They’re right on top of us. Get moving, goddamnit. I’ll kill every bastard I see.”

  He was coming out of a nightmare. I grabbed him by the neck and put him in a headlock until he went limp. I pulled him back up in the seat and handed him a Spansule of acid. “Here, Judge, take this,” I said. “It’ll calm you down.”

  He swallowed the pill and said nothing as I turned onto the highway and stood heavily on the accelerator. We were up to 115 when a green exit sign that said DEETH NO SERVICES loomed suddenly out of the rain just in front of us. I swerved hard to the right and tried to hang on. But it was no use. I remember the sound of the Judge screaming as we lost control and went into a full 360-degree curl and then backwards at seventy-five or eighty through a fence and into a pasture.

  For some reason the near-fatal accident had a calming effect on the Judge. Or maybe it was the acid. I didn’t care one way or the other after I took the gun from his hand. He gave it up without a fight. He seemed to be more interested in reading the road signs and listening to the radio. I knew that if we could slip into Jackpot the back way, I could get the car painted any color I wanted in thirty-three minutes and put the Judge on a plane. I knew a small private airstrip there, where nobody asks too many questions and they’ll take a personal check.

  At dawn we drove across the tarmac and pulled up to a seedy-looking office marked AIR JACKPOT EXPRESS CHARTER COMPANY. “This is it Judge,” I said and slapped him on the back. “This is where you get off.” He seemed resigned to his fate until the woman behind the front desk told him there wouldn’t be a flight to Elko until lunchtime.

  “Where is the pilot?” he demanded.

  “I am the pilot,” the woman said, “but I can’t leave until Debby gets here to relieve me.”

  “Fuck this!” the Judge shouted. “Fuck lunchtime. I have to leave now, you bitch.”

  The woman see
med truly frightened by his mood swing, and when the Judge leaned in and gave her a taste of the long knuckle, she collapsed and began weeping uncontrollably. “There’s more where that came from,” he told her. “Get up! I have to get out of here now.”

  He jerked her out from behind the desk and was dragging her toward the plane when I slipped out the back door. It was daylight now. The car was nearly out of gas, but that wasn’t my primary concern. The police would be here in minutes, I thought. I’m doomed. But then, as I pulled onto the highway, I saw a sign that said, WE PAINT ALL NIGHT.

  As I pulled into the parking lot, the Jackpot Express plane passed overhead. So long, Judge, I thought to myself. You’re a brutal hustler and a Warrior and a great copilot, but you know how to get your way. You will go far in the world.

  EPILOGUE: CHRISTMAS DREAMS AND CRUEL

  MEMORIES . . . NATION OF JAILERS . . . STAND

  BACK! THE JUDGE WILL SEE YOU NOW

  That’s about it for now, Jann. This story is too depressing to have to confront professionally in these morbid weeks before Christmas . . . . I have only vague memories of what it’s like there in New York, but sometimes I have flashbacks about how it was to glide in perfect speedy silence around the ice rink in front of NBC while junkies and federal informants in white beards and sleazy red jumpsuits worked the crowd mercilessly for nickels and dollars and dimes covered with Crack residue.

  I remember one Christmas morning in Manhattan when we got into the Empire State Building and went up to the Executive Suite of some famous underwear company and shoved a 600pound red tufted-leather Imperial English couch out of a corner window on something like the eighty-fifth floor. . . .

  The wind caught it, as I recall, and it sort of drifted around the corner onto Thirty-fourth Street, picking up speed on its way down, and hit the striped awning of a Korean market, you know, the kind that sells everything from kimchi to Christmas trees. The impact blasted watermelons and oranges and tomatoes all over the sidewalk. We could barely see the impact from where we were, but I remember a lot of activity on the street when we came out of the elevator. . . . It looked like a war zone. A few gawkers were standing around in a blizzard, muttering to each other and looking dazed. They thought it was an underground explosion—maybe a subway or a gas main.

  Just as we arrived on the scene, a speeding cab skidded on some watermelons and slammed into a Fifth Avenue bus and burst into flames. There was a lot of screaming and wailing of police sirens. Two cops began fighting with a gang of looters who had emerged like ghosts out of the snow and were running off with hams and turkeys and big jars of caviar. . . . Nobody seemed to think it was strange. What the hell? Shit happens. Welcome to the Big Apple. Keep alert. Never ride in open cars or walk too close to a tall building when it snows. . . . There were Christmas trees scattered all over the street and cars were stopping to grab them and speeding away. We stole one and took it to Missy’s place on the Bowery, because we knew she didn’t have one. But she wasn’t home, so we put the tree out on the fire escape and set it on fire with kerosene. That’s how I remember Xmas in New York, Jann. It was always a time of angst and failure and turmoil. Nobody ever seemed to have any money on Christmas. Even rich people were broke and jabbering frantically on their telephones about Santa Claus and suicide or joining a church with no rules. . . . The snow was clean and pretty for the first twenty or thirty minutes around dawn, but after that it was churned into filthy mush by drunken cabbies and garbage compactors and shitting dogs.

  Anybody who acted happy on Christmas was lying—even the ones who were getting paid $500 an hour. . . . The Jews were especially sulky, and who could blame them? The birthday of Baby Jesus is always a nervous time for people who know that ninety days later they will be accused of murdering him.

  So what? We have our own problems, eh? Jesus! I don’t know how you can ride all those motorcycles around in the snow, Jann. Shit, we can all handle the back wheel coming loose in a skid. But the front wheel is something else—and that’s what happens when it snows. WHACKO. One minute you feel as light and safe as a snowflake, and the next minute you’re sliding sideways under the wheels of a Bekins van. . . . Nasty traffic jams, horns honking, white limos full of naked Jesus freaks going up on the sidewalk in low gear to get around you and the mess you made on the street . . . Goddamn this scum. They are more and more in the way. And why aren’t they home with their families on Xmas? Why do they need to come out here and die on the street like iron hamburgers?

  I hate these bastards, Jann. And I suspect you feel the same. . . . They might call us bigots, but at least we are Universal bigots. Right? Shit on those people. Everybody you see these days might have the power to get you locked up. . . . Who knows why? They will have reasons straight out of some horrible Kafka story, but in the end it won’t matter any more than a full moon behind clouds. Fuck them.

  Christmas hasn’t changed much in twenty-two years, Jann—not even 2,000 miles west and 8,000 feet up in the Rockies. It is still a day that only amateurs can love. It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to believe in Santa Claus—but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year. . . . Some people can accept this, and some can’t. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season, and also why criminal shitheads all over New York City will hit you up for $100 tips or they’ll twist your windshield wipers into spaghetti and urinate on your door handles.

  People all around me are going to pieces, Jann. My whole support system has crumbled like wet sugar cubes. That is why I try never to employ anyone over the age of twenty. Every Xmas after that is like another notch down on the ratchet, or maybe a few more teeth off the flywheel. . . . I remember on Xmas in New York when I was trying to sell a Mark VII Jaguar with so many teeth off the flywheel that the whole drivetrain would lock up and whine every time I tried to start the engine for a buyer. . . . I had to hire gangs of street children to muscle the car back and forth until the throw-out gear on the starter was lined up very precisely to engage the few remaining teeth on the flywheel. On some days I would leave the car idling in a fireplug zone for three or four hours at a time and pay the greedy little bastards a dollar an hour to keep it running and wet-shined with fireplug water until a buyer came along.

  We got to know each other pretty well after nine or ten weeks, and they were finally able to unload it on a rich artist who drove as far as the toll plaza at the far end of the George Washington Bridge, where the engine seized up and exploded like a steam bomb. “They had to tow it away with a firetruck,” he said. “Even the leather seats were on fire. They laughed at me.”

  There is more and more Predatory bullshit in the air these days. Yesterday I got a call from somebody who said I owed money to Harris Wofford, my old friend from the Peace Corps. We were in Sierra Leone together.

  He came out of nowhere like a heat-seeking missile and destroyed the U.S. Attorney General in Pennsylvania. It was Wonderful. Harris is a Senator now, and the White House creature is not. Thornburgh blew a forty-four—point lead in three weeks, like Humpty Dumpty. . . . WHOOPS! Off the wall like a big Lizard egg. The White House had seen no need for a safety net.

  It was a major disaster for the Bush brain trust and every GOP political pro in America, from the White House all the way down to City Hall in places like Denver and Tupelo. The whole Republican party was left stunned and shuddering like a hound dog passing a peach pit. . . . At least that’s what they said in Tupelo, where one of the local GOP chairmen flipped out and ran off to Biloxi with a fat young boy from one of the rich local families . . . then he tried to blame it on Harris Wofford when they arrested him in Mobile for aggravated Sodomy and kidnapping. He was ruined, and his Bail was only $5,000, but none of his friends would sign for it. They were mainly professional Republicans and bankers who had once been in the Savings a
nd Loan business, along with Neil Bush the manqué, son of the President.

  Neil had just walked in on the infamous Silverado Savings & Loan scandal in Colorado. But only by the skin of his teeth, after his father said he would have to abandon him to a terrible fate in the Federal Prison System if his son was really a crook. The evidence was overwhelming, but Neil had a giddy kind of talent negotiating—like Colonel North and the Admiral, who also walked. . . . It was shameless and many people bitched. But what the fuck do they expect from a Party of high-riding Darwinian rich boys who’ve been running around in the White House like pampered animal for twelve straight years? They can do whatever they want, and why not. “These are Good Boys,” John Sununu once said of his staff. “They only shit in the pressroom.”

  Well . . . Sununu is gone now, and so is Dick Thornburgh, who is currently seeking night work in the bank business somewhere on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. It is an ugly story. He decided to go out on his own—like Lucifer, who plunged into Hell—and he got beaten like a redheaded stepchild by my old Peace Corps buddy Harris Wofford, who caught him from behind like a bull wolverine so fast that Thornburgh couldn’t even get out of the way. . . . He was mangled and humiliated. It was the worst public disaster since Watergate.

  The GOP was plunged into national fear. How could it happen? Dick Thornburgh had sat on the right hand of God. As AG, he had stepped out like some arrogant Knight from the Round Table and declared that his boys—4,000 or so Justice Department prosecutors—were no longer subject to the rules of the Federal Court System.

  But he was wrong. And now Wofford is using Thornburgh’s corpse as a launching pad for a run on the White House and hiring experts to collect bogus debts from old buddies like me. Hell, I like the idea of Harris being President. He always seemed honest and I knew he was smart, but I am leery of giving him money.