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“Vexatious?”

“It means ‘irritating, annoying, provocative.’”

“I know what it means,” Benny said as the intruder seemed to grow in size with every step he took.

The golf club had been hanging at his side. Unaware of what he was doing, he’d raised it, though not overhead, only to chest level. As Spike loomed, Benny decided that a nine iron was insufficient to the task, that even an axe would have been insufficient to the task, and that in facthewas insufficient to the task.

“You won’t be needing that with Mr. Hanson Duroc,” Spike said.

He took the golf club from Benny, tied the steel shaft in a knot as if it were made of pretzel dough, and dropped the nine iron on the floor.

“Cool,” said Harper.

Benny estimated that if he put his hands around Spike’s neck, they wouldn’t entirely encircle it. Not close. Instead of making an effort to confirm the truth of that observation, he hearkened back to something the giant said earlier. “‘Properly motivated.’ How will you properly motivate Handy Duroc to tell us who pressured him to shove me out of Surfside?”

“Intimidation will most likely work,” Spike said. His breath smelled like sugary cinnamon rolls warming in an oven.

“If intimidation doesn’t work?” Benny asked.

“I have other techniques.”

“I want to know what they are.”

Spike sighed. “Well, one of them I call ‘shock and awe.’”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“I sort of do,” said Harper.

“Shock and awe doesn’t involve violence,” Spike said.

“What’s it involve?”

“Show us,” Harper said. “Show us what it involves.”

Benny appreciated how cute Harper was, but just then she seemed too cute, the kind of cute that slid into Holly Golightly territory and invited chaos. She had put her spray starch on the coffee table.

“Here’s one thing I might do to Mr. Hanson Duroc,” said Spike. “I might stand very close to him like I’m standing close to you, Benjamin. I might say something like this.” His face knotted with anger and contempt. His voice grew menacing. “You tell me what you know,Handy, or I’ll never give you a moment’s peace. I’ll ride your back like a demon. I’ll never take my eye off you.” As he finished that statement, he took his right eye in his thumb and forefinger and plucked it out of its socket. With the optic nerve, muscles, and glistening blood vessels trailing behind—an impossible two feet of them—he thrust the eyeball against Benny’s right eye.

Taken quite by surprise, Benny found that he couldn’t breathe even as his heart knocked as fast and loud as the hooves of a horse racing over cobblestones. For a moment he couldn’t move, either, but then he stumbled backward. He encountered the sofa, and his legs buckled, and he collapsed onto a hardness of white mohair.

Bending over him, unrelenting, Spike pressed the extruded eyeball to Benny’s eye again. “I can see deep in your brain, you piece of crap,” Spike snarled, “and if I see you’re lying,Handy, then you’re a dead man.”

Benny was saved from the embarrassment of a scream by his inability to command the function of his lungs, throat, larynx, and mouth. As Spike let go of the eye and it reeled into its socket like a tape measure slithering back into its housing, the only sound that escaped Benny was a thineeeeeeeeesuch as air makes when escaping through the pinched neck of a balloon.

Stepping back from the sofa, smiling, Spike said, “So what do you think?”

Harper stood nodding like a bobblehead doll, ponytail waving behind, but then she found her voice. “Shock and awe. You didn’t oversell it. That was definitely shock and awe.”

“Thank you,” the giant said. “It’s not my best stuff, but you can see how it would be effective.”

Benny struggled up from the sofa, swaying. He expressed his confusion and concern. Their puzzled looks brought him to the realization that the sounds he was making weren’t words.

As if psychic, Harper spoke for him. “Hey, big guy, you scared the bejesus out of me.”

To Benny, that did not appear to be true. She had not collapsed onto the sofa and hadn’t made the air-escaping-the-pinched-neck-of-a-balloon sound. She looked as though she had every bit as much bejesus as she’d had before the eyeball trick.

She continued, “What are you, Spike? What the hell are you?”