The Storm Giants by Pearce Hansen Read Free Book Online

mongrels with good natured kicks from his metal toed cowboy boots, shooing them out the way. Norm gave Everett a stoned red eyed grin.
    Wet noses rammed Everett’s crotch and ass as he still exited the car, one dog after another snuffled and slobbered on him. The surrounding pack of waist high hounds orbited the two men as they walked toward the entrance of the brother’s posh pad.
    One of the dogs – a startlingly muscle bound muttley cross between a Beagle and a Rhodesian ridgeback – latched onto Everett’s heel. Everett was forced to an abrupt halt by the gentle, playful, inescapable power of a mouth that could rip off the Achilles tendon if the dog bit down.
    “Good boy ,” Everett said. The mutt let go and faded into the pack with his cropped tail wagging at this little joke.
    The inside p ut the lie to the house’s deliberately deceptive exterior. It was a rock solid pussy palace, filled with assorted bric-a-brac the brothers purchased at head shops: black light posters, lava lamps, cylindrical ornaments encircled by dangling arrays of fishing lines with oil tears weeping down them.
    Rick sat on the tiger striped velvet couch, as stoned as Norm. His blond hair was cut in the same style as Norm’s, and his attire identical. The only real difference between the two brothers was that one was dark and one was light.
    Rick chuckled at a Three Stooges skit on the home theater projection TV, which stood in front of an unpainted plank wall. The brothers had just about every channel in the world; their TV was pirated satellite run through a series of home made decoder boxes.
    A tall stack of stroke magazines teetered next to the couch. The brothers scrambled to hide them when Kerri or Raymond came to call, but the rest of the time the porn was right out in the open: The brothers were dedicated bachelors despite Kerri’s infrequent efforts at domesticating them.
    T heir ‘cowboy pimp’ living quarters should’ve given potential female playmates a heart attack. At first glance, it looked like any girl they picked up for a one night stand stood a good chance of dying from some heinous skin contact disease. However, the brothers were successful players on the local redneck meat market circuit
    Norm proffered the bong, but Everett shook his head. Pot just made him even more taciturn and paranoid than he already was.
    “How’d things go down south?” Norm asked. “Yo u get everything done?”
    “Pretty much ,” Everett said.
    “If you’d taken a load down with you , you know you’dve have made some bank. Kerri wouldn’t need to ever now.”
    Norm was a broken record. How many times had they had this conversation? As many times as Larry had asked him to bring some sensemilla down to him.
    But market savvy Larry hadn’t asked in a while. He’d mumble about market conditions and investment-to-profit ratio if you asked him why.
    “Norm ,” Everett said. “Prime sens is down to a grand a pound, Oaksterdam is killing your prices. It’ll be decriminalized and your kind of operation will be a dinosaur.”
    “Bullshit ,” Rick said, not taking his eyes off the TV screen. As Moe was just commencing to poke Curly and Larry in the eyes, Rick’s preoccupation was understandable. Rick said, “The Emerald Triangle will never die. SoHum will bury your East Bay indoor grows.”
    Norm said, “What we wanted to tell you was, there’s been strangers asking around about you, up to town. City slickers, three of them, real well dressed and real out of place.”
    “ Foreign, y’know?” Rick said, and favored Everett with a malicious chuckle. “They weren’t buyers, they weren’t bandits and they sure in hell weren’t lost tourists. Should have seen it, the street cleared out like it was High Noon or something, everyone figured they were CAMP or some other branch of the bad guys.”
    Everett ’s scowl intensified a little more. “Thanks for the word, but just ‘cuz some one’s beating the bushes, don’t mean I