Chapter Eight

 

"Christ wept, Cordell, can't you focus the fucking thing? What's the hell's the matter with you?"

The Wicked Witch of the West was berating his assistant, Cordell the ugly monkey, in a drafty stone chamber in one of the towers of his castle. The room was drafty because the entire eastern wall was taken up by a huge, arched, glassless window, completely open to the afternoon sky outside.

A small terrace landing strip jutted out from the great window, and a small class of winged piglets was taking flying instruction from an older hog in a leather flak jacket and a set of goggles. The little piggys were practicing take-offs and landings, and making rather a comical botch of the maneuvers in the process. The veteran swine often raised his eyes to Heaven as he patiently tried to drill some basic rudiments of air technique into the young porker's heads.

The Witch was squinting his goggled eye at an elevated video monitor mounted above his bed, and this was why he was cursing at Cordell. Five tiny figures appeared at the very bottom of the screen, half obscured by forest shadows, and they were very difficult to make out.

No amount of fiddling with the focus controls on the elmo could have improved the resolution of the image, and no amount of ill-tempered verbal abuse could have inspired Cordell to do more than he already had, but the Witch was a firm believer in the principle of condemnation and torment as prime employee motivators. In his earlier, more mobile days, he had even presented executive management training seminars on the subject, and profited handsomely with them, too. His seminars had been quite popular, within a limited segment of Oz employers.

The monkey, Cordell, pawed at the elmo controls a bit more, mostly for show, then threw his wizened monkey hands up in the air and shrugged. He was eyeing a banana in a fruit bowl on a nearby table hungrily, and this kept his mind off his employer's irritable carping.

"Fine. Goddamn cheap electronics. I knew we shouldn't have bought this thing at Radio Shack. Try the zoom.

Cordell touched a control, and the image narrowed in on and enlarged the five figures. The details blurred quite a bit with the zoom, but the figures under observation presented a motley and distinctive appearance, and could hardly be mistaken for some other group of five.

There was the Witch's despised sister, who'd had her cute little butt replaced with a ferchrisskes tin can without even checking with him first.

And here was something new - Barney the Squeamish Lion, of all people - the lazy and ungrateful employee who'd whined about a few little flying pigs and quit a very good job without giving adequate notice.

And here was the screaming lamb, Toto, and, sure enough, there was his owner, the outrageous and uppity Special Agent Bitch from another dimension, who'd had the temerity to steal his Ruby Brain, and who, just incidentally, had freed the loathsome Scarecrow from the cornfield where the Witch had been so gleefully certain he would rot until the end of his miserable life. 

Which was supposed to have been in short order, once the Witch had completed his training program with his wonderful flying pigs, and sent them on their intended air raid over the cornfield. Chomp, chomp, chomp, and then sayonara, Scarecrow, old pal, that's all she wrote. That had been the plan, and it had been a good one. But now look . . .

. . . ah, speaking of loathsome, HERE was the Scarecrow himself, chatting animatedly with the big wuss of a Lion, bouncing along in his quick, light stride, a blurred but infuriating suggestion of a smile on his artfully designed cloth face, snooty nose in the air and not a care in the world.  The Witch's one good hand drew up into a claw and he ground his teeth until they ached.

Here was something interesting - the small party of five became far easier to see on screen as they passed through the last few straggling trees of the forest and emerged into the light of a clearing on a steep hillside.

Despite the poor resolution on the elmo screen, and the small size of the image, it was quite clear to the Witch that the travelers stood at the head of Poppy Valley, a massive heroin plantation maintained by the Emerald City drug cartel, a loose (and only very loosely concealed) coalition of various Oz big business interests.

Some claimed that Oz the Great and Powerful himself held a controlling interest in the operation, but the Witch knew for a fact that this was not so. He himself held the controlling interest, and Oz, who tended to ignore virtually everything that went on in his domain, had never said pea-turkey about it. 

The Witch also knew that the very gates of the Emerald City lay just beyond the great poppy field, and that the hated travelers he sought to detain had only a short stroll to negotiate from where they now stood before they would reach those gates, and relative safety within the city.

The small figures on the screen were now pointing across the valley, and the object of their attention was all too evident in their happy physical attitudes. Now Margot was shaking the goddamn Scarecrow's hand, pumping his straw arm up and down enthusiastically, and the Lion had raised Toto up to his shoulders so that the small lamb could see the Emerald City across the valley. Margot left off on the Scarecrow, and went to pound the Lion on the back. Special Agent Brain-thieving Gale moved toward the Scarecrow and said something, which, of course, the Witch could not make out, the image on the elmo being so inadequate for revealing detail.

But it was perfectly clear, blurred detail and all, that the highly attractive Gale, whom the Witch himself would not have thrown out of bed for eating crackers, had impulsively thrown her arms around the Scarecrow and hugged him soundly. It was also abysmally clear to the Witch that the much despised straw-homicidal-maniac-bastard was not wholly unwilling to permit this surprise incursion.

"Zoo-ooommm . . ." the Witch hissed at Cordell, and soon he was rewarded with the edifying if extremely blurred spectacle of the Scarecrow smiling a touch dazedly to suddenly find himself with an armful of Special Agent. Damned if he wasn't closing those stupid red eyes of his, too!

"Aaarrggh!" the Witch gargled, too infuriated, for the moment, to form coherent syllables.

As the Witch watched, beside himself with wrath, the party of five began to scamper down the hill, making for the city in obvious high spirits.

"Cordell, get me the cell phone," the Witch snarled, when he, at last, had calmed himself enough to talk.  "Dial the Poppy Valley guard house, right now!"

Once the Witch had the open line in his hand, he waited until he heard a rough voice speaking the word "Prego?"

"Carlo," the Witch growled. "Listen up. There's a gang of trespassers in the valley. I want you -”

"I keel," promised Carlo, head of the Poppy Valley security force. "I keel SLOW, if you give me right bonus."

"No, goddamnit, you idiot, you don't 'keel' anybody! I want those people stopped and HELD, do you hear? Hold them until me and Cordell get there."

"No keel?" asked Carlo, clearly disappointed. "Bonus no need to be that beeg . . .”

"No, no you won't. You'll do just as I say, or you'll be back waiting tables at the Emerald City Spaghetti Kitchen before sundown, get me?"

"Hokay, hokay, no keel," answered Carlo, sounding somewhat hurt. "No need you be so nasty about it!"

The Witch fumed for a minute, then went on with the conversation.

"There are five, a tin woman, a lion, a scarecrow, a lamb with a muzzle, and a good looking young woman. Carlo, let me impress on you, these people are DANGEROUS. Make sure you have plenty of muscle with you, and watch the woman, she's got a gun. Hear me? Make sure you watch that Scarecrow too, understand? He's trouble. But, above all, make sure NONE of them gets killed. I don't care how you do it, but I want these people alive. Are we clear?"

"Hokay, five, all different kind, no keel anyone, just catch, just hold. Maybe we do a leetle torture before you get here, heh? The womens, maybe?"

"No, no, no. Just hold them all. No torture, no search, no jumping the women, nothing. Do this right, and we'll talk bonus. Do it wrong, and -”

"No need to threats," Carlo interrupted. "You no trust me, Meester Weetch? Hurt my feelings? Pah! How much bonus we talk, heh?"

"Get going, Carlo," the Witch snapped, declining to discuss the details of any prospective bonus and severing the connection.

"Now, we'll see . . .” the Witch gloated, and settled back in his hospital bed, his one goggle eye riveted on the monitor.