This paper studies the PML method for wave scattering in a half space of homogeneous medium bounded by a two-dimensional, perfectly conducting, and locally defected periodic surface, and develops a high-accuracy boundary-integral-equation (BIE) solver. Along the vertical direction, we place a PML to truncate the unbounded domain onto a strip and prove that the PML solution converges linearly to the true solution in the physical subregion of the strip with the PML thickness. Laterally, we divide the unbounded strip into three regions: a region containing the defect and two semi-waveguide regions, separated by two vertical line segments. In both semi-waveguides, we prove the well-posedness of an associated scattering problem so as to well define a Neumann-to-Dirichlet (NtD) operator on the associated vertical segment. The two NtD operators, serving as exact lateral boundary conditions, reformulate the unbounded strip problem as a boundary value problem onto the defected region. Due to the periodicity of the semi-waveguides, both NtD operators turn out to be closely related to a Neumann-marching operator, governed by a nonlinear Riccati equation. It is proved that the Neumann-marching operators are contracting, so that the PML solution decays exponentially fast along both lateral directions. The consequences culminate in two opposite aspects. Negatively, the PML solution cannot exponentially converge to the true solution in the whole physical region of the strip. Positively, from a numerical perspective, the Riccati equations can now be efficiently solved by a recursive doubling procedure and a high-accuracy PML-based BIE method so that the boundary value problem on the defected region can be solved efficiently and accurately. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the PML solution converges exponentially fast to the true solution in any compact subdomain of the strip.