Green must have slithered in through the back way, Beezer imagines, because there's no way the cops down front would give him a pass. Come to think of it, Doodles and the Dodos must have come the same way. He hopes all of them did not learn of the back road by following him, but that's a possibility.
The reporter lets his camera hang from its strap and, keeping his eyes on Beezer, sidles away from the old shanty. The guilty, frightened way he moves reminds Beezer of a hyena's slink toward its carrion. Wendell Green does fear Beezer, and Beezer cannot blame him. Green is lucky that Beezer did not actually rip off his head, instead of merely talking about it. Yet . . . Green's hyenalike crawl strikes Beezer as pretty strange, under the circumstances. He can't be afraid of getting beaten up in front of all these cops, can he?
Green's uneasiness forms a link in Beezer's mind to the communication he had seen pass between Runkleman and Freddy. When their eyes shifted, when they looked away, they were looking at the reporter! He had set the whole thing up in advance. Green was using the Dodos as a distraction from whatever he was doing with his camera, of course. Such total sleaziness, such moral ugliness, infuriates Beezer. Galvanized by loathing, he moves quietly away from Dale and the other policemen and walks toward Wendell Green, keeping his eyes locked on the reporter's.
He sees Wendell consider making a break for it, then reject the idea, most likely because he knows he doesn't have a chance of getting away.
When Beezer comes to within ten feet of him, Green says, "We don't need any trouble here, Mr. St. Pierre. I'm just doing my job. Surely you can understand that."
"I understand a lot of things," Beezer says. "How much did you pay those clowns?"
"Who? What clowns?" Wendell pretends to notice Doodles and the others for the first time. "Oh, them? Are they the ones who were making all that ruckus?"
"And why would they go do a thing like that?"
"Because they're animals, I guess." The expression on Wendell's face communicates a great desire to align himself with Beezer on the side of human beings, as opposed to animals like Runkleman and Saknessum.
Taking care to fix Green's eyes, instead of his camera, with his own, Beezer moves in closer and says, "Wendy, you're a real piece of work, you know that?"
Wendell holds up his hands to ward off Beezer. "Hey, we may have had our differences in the past, but — "
Still looking him in the eye, Beezer folds his right hand around the camera and plants his left on Wendell Green's chest. He jerks the right hand back and gives Green a massive shove with the left. One of two things is going to break, Green's neck or the camera strap, and he does not much care which it is to be.
To a sound like the crack of a whip, the reporter flails backward, barely managing to remain upright. Beezer is pulling the camera out of the case, from which dangle two strips of severed leather. He drops the case and rotates the camera in his big hands.
"Hey, don't do that!" Wendell says, his voice louder than speech but softer than a shout.
"What is it, an old F2A?"
"If you know that, you know it's a classic. Give it back to me."
"I'm not going to hurt it, I'm going to clean it out." Beezer snaps open the back of the camera, gets one thick finger under the exposed length of film, and rips out the entire roll. He smiles at the reporter and tosses the film into the weeds. "See how much better it feels without all that crap in there? This is a nice little machine — you shouldn't fill it with garbage."
Wendell does not dare show how furious he is. Rubbing the sore spot on the back of his neck, he growls, "That so-called garbage is my livelihood, you oaf, you moron. Now give me back my camera."
Beezer casually holds it out before him. "I didn't quite catch all of that. What did you say?"
His only response a bleak glance, Wendell snatches the camera from Beezer's hand.