Savant

Copyright 1994 by Rex Miller

1

Columbia, Missouri

2

Elaine Roach needed to find work in the worst way. But even as badly as she needed this job, and as intriguing as it sounded—when she'd responded to the Help Wanted classified ad in the Saturday Star—the idea of calling on a man in his hotel room was anathema to her. She was terribly nervous. While she was coming up in the elevator, her knees started knocking together and she became so suddenly chilled that she feared she'd get violently ill. She nearly punched the lobby button and rode back down, but having to face another Monday morning without employment was a fear as terrifying as this one. She screwed her courage and marched down the hallway, the scrap of paper with Mr. Norville's room number clutched in one of her gloved hands. Even her knock on the door was prim.

"It's open!" a voice screeched from inside. She saw an immense and flagrantly homosexual man seated on the bed speaking into a telephone. "Come in. Be seated," he snapped, the mouthpiece covered so the other party could not hear him, presumably, motioning her toward a chair with a limp-wristed gesture. "I'll be with you in a moment." He turned away and spoke into the phone.

"No—it's someone about the position. All right, I'll see you when I get to the Coast. Yes…Um-hmm…I don't have room for those in my warehouse locally. I'll let you know when we move to the new building. All right. See you in Los Angeles Tuesday evening. Au revoir!" He hung up dramatically. He knew approximately how long the desk clerk usually took to get to the phones at this time of the day. He'd mistimed it slightly, by chance, but his huge paw had covered the mouthpiece when he'd turned and blocked her vision.

"So sorry, my dear. I'm having a perfectly hectic day. My name is Tommy Norville," he announced and swished across the room to greet the woman, who stood up, no longer quite so nervous, but exceedingly puzzled. A 400-plus-pound simpering queen takes a bit of getting used to. They shook hands. He offered a massive hand as if it had no bones in it, and when the woman took it she felt as if she'd grabbed a fat ten-pound perch as he gave her his best impression of a dead-fish handshake.

As usual, he'd sized her up instantly and she was perfect. Utter perfection. The woman was wearing a hat such as nobody had worn in twenty years and white gloves!

"I'm Elaine Roach," she said. "I phoned you about the position in the antique gallery," she told him unnecessarily. An unattractive woman, made more so by a severe hair style—prematurely ugly hair—she was a spinster in her early fifties who could easily pass for Social Security age, due to both her appearance and deportment.

"Yes, Miss Roach, I think your qualifications may do." He turned in a dainty pirouette like an elephant in a tutu, and swished back across the room, bidding her to sit with a limp paw that gestured as if it held a fairy wand. One fear—her greatest, in fact—that of being raped, was no longer relevant.

Norville was dressed flamboyantly, in what she thought of as "sissy businessman" clothing, his hair cut very short on the top and streaked, the twenty-dollar drugstore bifocals down on his nose. They were the kind with the cord attached, and they gave his dimpled face a sort of benevolent and oddly feminine look. He wore a silk shirt, a turtleneck sweater under it that accented his hugely fat double chin, with a loud pocket silk flowing from the pocket of his blazer.

"I haven't worked since I lived in Portland," she said in a quiet voice, her eyes downcast. She was used to being turned down.

"Excellent," he simpered. "Your head won't be filled with wrong work concepts." He was a master at camouflaged doublespeak. After a few minutes in his presence one almost began to make sense out of his utterances, so seemingly connected were the cleverly pseudologic patterns. "Do you have family here?" he asked pleasantly, crossing his legs and almost suffocating as he did so.

"No. Not anymore. Everyone's passed away. My brother and his wife and their two children are all I have, and that's who I was working for when I lived in Portland. If I may ask, what exactly would this position with your antique gallery entail?" She was seated so primly it was all he could do not to walk over and touch her, just to see how high she would jump. Her legs were squeezed so tightly together it was absurd. She held a huge purse in front of her private parts, clasped in a death grip by those hands encased in the stupid white gloves. He couldn't have selected someone more ideal. Chaingang thought he might be in love!

"Of course. Primarily you'd be responsible for keeping our financial records, which are simple in the extreme. You'd open our small amount of business mail that comes in from the periodical auction, cash the checks and so on, and answer the phone. It would not be a demanding job for more than a few days each mouth—the sort of business when things are hectic for a couple of days and then you just sit around idle until the next auction comes up." Consciously, he was forcing his word patterns to match hers. The question that began "what exactly would this position with your antique gallery entail?" was echoed, for instance, in the phrase "the sort of business when things are hectic." He had matched the rise and fall of her speech cadences precisely.

He was also matching his voice and its rhythms to the effeminate clothes, the sissified speech affectations, and the woman's obvious expectations, based on her call—and now on her body language—but he was quite careful not to lay it on too thickly. All he wanted was enough to counterbalance her natural fears, offset his massive size a bit, and give her something to remember him by. He was more animated than usual, and he never allowed his rubbery face to sink into the look it normally wore when in repose.

"There is one other thing I wonder about—and it's something I would pay extra for, in fact considerably extra. A telephone. You know, I was going to break my longstanding rule and install a phone in the gallery itself, but I detest doing that. They're so intrusive! And—no more than we'd use it, I wonder…would you consider renting me the use of your phone for one day each month? Say for an additional two hundred a month?"

"Oh, certainly. I have a private line at my apartment, and you could use it one day a month. Would the calls be local?"

"Um. I wouldn't be using it to call out. We'd be receiving calls on it. I could run the number as our auction line."

"Of course. That would be fine." She shook her head. "I wouldn't charge that much, though. Not just for you using it one day a month."

"I appreciate that, Miss Roach. However I would like to pay it for this reason. Occasionally—I mean, perhaps two or three times a month—I might get a customer inquiring about an item listed in the mail auction. And if you didn't mind, here's what I'd like you to do: You answer the telephone in your normal way, and if they ask if this is the Norville Gallery you tell them yes, but that the director is out, and that I will return their call. Each evening I would give you a call and you'd pass those numbers along to me. You'd seldom get such inquiries, so it wouldn't become a bother. But if you'd be willing to allow the use of your phone in that manner I'd make your salary fourteen hundred a month instead of twelve hundred a month."

"Certainly," she said quickly, mentally counting the financial windfall. They spoke some more about the gallery and what the auctions were like. He'd chosen his person well. Elaine Roach was rather at ease now, evidently pleased by the nature of the work and the pay scale.

"It's done then." He stood up heavily and she got to her feet. "I'll start you on salary instantly, and I'll call you in the morning with your first day's duties." He saw something in her face, sensitive to sea changes as ever. "Monday, rather. I forgot what day it was." He said this in a hushed, prim voice, and she nodded her understanding, She had nothing against a homosexual employer. Perhaps she would find this a pleasant association after all. She mentally made a note to remember to use the word "gay" instead of homosexual.

"So, Mr. Norville, I'll be working out of my apartment essentially, and not at the gallery?"

"Yes. Pretty much so, essentially. You'll make a trip to the bank and post office now and again, but for the most part you'll just stay all nice and cozy, in your apartment." She brightened as he fed her lines back to her. Clearly she was someone who didn't relish being back out in the work force.

The job sounded wonderfully ideal to Elaine Roach, who had not been treated kindly by her fifty-four years on the planet. It was almost too good to be true. She also thought she sensed Mr. Norville's genuine pleasure with her qualifications and it was reassuring that at last she had met someone whose needs she in some way filled.

They said their goodbyes, and he came back inside the hotel room. If she learned at some point that Giles Cunningham was the name on the register as occupant of the room in which she'd met Tommy Norville, it could be explained away in the most understandable terms. Giles and Tommy were roommates. He would wait awhile and Tommy Norville would now cease to be, for a bit, except in print and over the phones.

For the moment, the image that stared back at Tommy Norville in the Hyatt Regency's mirror was one that bore surprisingly little resemblance—size aside—from that of the man who had not long ago occupied Cell 10 in the Violent Unit of D-Seg at Marion Federal Penitentiary. Clothes did indeed make the man. The bleached, newly shorn hair, and such touches as the "seamstress" bifocals, made a remarkable change. But it was his movements, in character, that added texture to the Norville persona.

Chaingang had observed an actor on a television talk show proclaiming what a terrific training ground the daytime soaps were for thespians. He'd watched a few minutes of these programs and found their broadly played, scenery-chewing histrionics laughably inept. Along with his many unique gifts, Bunkowski had the natural skills of a consummate actor: keen powers of observation and mimicry, a predisposition for thorough preparation, the ability to instantly summon up stored emotion, and the feel for a character's center. The acting and reacting he'd seen on the daytime dramas had been ludicrously unconvincing.

He intuitively knew that he'd hammed up the Norville character. If he played him again—and he would—the next time he'd not draw on such a broad stereotype. He filed away a quick critique of his kinesiology and a mental list of suggestions for how he might better locate Tommy's center, when next he came to life.

With that done he shed the character as much as possible. A cap would cover the hair when Giles Cunningham checked out, and he would forget to drop his door opener at the desk. The bellhop who took his bag to a waiting cab would find himself the beneficiary of another oversize tip, with a request to return the key card with thanks. The bill had been prepaid with checkout in mind. The fewer persons who saw Mr. Cunningham prior to his becoming nonexistent, the colder a trail he'd leave behind.

As always, his computer sorted options and retraced movements, calculating the time it would take the authorities to follow his paper trail along the interstate highway. He felt fairly confident that he'd lost his trackers, but for once Bunkowski couldn't have been more wrong.

3

The next few days found Daniel Bunkowski busy with the details of his mail-order scam, and searching for a likely rental location for his safe house. Because the East Minnesota Avenue office had running water and toilet facilities, he could make do with a sleeping bag on the floor for a couple of weeks. Sometime in the next three weeks, however, he needed to find a suitable place where he could hunker down when he "ran his traps," courtesy of Elaine Roach, and pulled the lion's share of money out of his auction remittances. At that point he needed to vanish.

An extremely large but well-spoken gentleman with a full beard, who did something academic and terribly vague for a living, put a deposit on a small rental property in Overland Park. Two months in advance, as agreed, with the first month's rent effective in thirty days. It was adequate for his needs of the moment, and the terms fit his window of logistics. If he had to bail out in three weeks rather than four he could always extemporize for a few days. He was the very definition of "field expedient."

With safe house rented, office and temporary dwelling paid for, ads in the mail, Elaine Roach with her nominal make-work, letters of auction solicitation out, Bunkowski had time. Time to kill, that is.

For the first time since they'd freed him from Max Security in Marion, Illinois, once again blessed with an official sanction to go out there and take lives, he'd analyzed his choice of an escape route. As always, he made such decisions instinctively, but with the constant spoonfed data from his mental computer, acting in sync with whatever presentient vibes were brought forth.

It had been the most natural thing to decide on a northerly course as an exfiltration route from Southeast Missouri. When the Waterton spree reached a climax he'd prepared a suitable identity, legal wheels, and without much analysis headed for Kansas City. Now, with a bit of time on his hands, he could ponder the why of it. He'd been heading for Kansas City, perhaps, because it was home, as much as the beast could be said to have a home.

He had time now to reflect on his early life, something he seldom cared to do. It had been a horror-filled hell of torment: at the hands of a perverted "stepfather" of sorts, a cruel foster mother, and the older boys who turned his early reform-school years into a nightmare without end.

As a little boy he had been kept virtually the slave of cruelly twisted desires, made to feel that he was less than an animal. He was watered and fed from the dog's dishes, kept in stifling closets, tethered to the family bed, and sometimes chained inside a suffocatingly hot "punishment box."

As the child was pushed over the edge, used, abused, tortured to the edge of insanity and beyond, he adapted. Mutated. Survived by escaping into a secret world of the mind.

There, inside a room that most would describe as imagination, there was an inner room, and his insanity or fear had unlocked this place. There—inside a room most of us will never see—many paranormal things become possible. The mastery of one's life support system, the controlling of the vital signs, mind over matter, eidetic recall—many things denied the ordinary human being.

Inside this secret place, he'd taken the first steps toward mastery of the will—steps that would lead a nine-year-old victim to the darkened basement of a third-floor walk-up where a bottle of hydrochloric acid waited. Small fingers had reached the bottle, held it carefully as the bruised, battered little boy made his way back up to the third floor, and down the filthy hallway to the rooms where the drunken man lay in a collapsed stupor.

The man, nude, his blue tattoos of frightening serpents and fearsome objects covering an expanse of leathery skin, sprawled across the bed on his back. The child was rock steady as he removed the stopper, and with fingers wrapped in rags pulled back eyelids and poured. He could no longer hear the screams of the one he called "the Snake Man." Too many years, and hundreds of other screams, had dimmed the brightness of those delightful sounds.

When Dr. Norman had found him, languishing on death row as only Chaingang could languish, he'd known the huge killer was more than merely abnormal. He suspected that Daniel was one of the rare human specimens known as physical precognates. From that moment on, there'd been a bonding process between the doctor and his—for want of a better word—subject. And there'd been questions, hundreds of them, many of which had gone unanswered: What about Chaingang's siblings? Were they alive or dead? Had Daniel ever attempted to seek out his biological mother? Was he furious that she'd abandoned him at birth, forcing him into the horrible childhood he'd had? Had he ever thought of tracking her down? Had he wanted to look up the vicious foster mother who'd allowed these horrors to be perpetrated? Was she alive? What about the man he'd blinded? Did he lust for the Snake Man's heart?

Under drugs and hypnosis, over dozens of interviews, debriefings, interrogations, Q and A of every type, and what could be termed "therapy," Norman learned a few things. The records were long gone as to the identity and whereabouts of the biological mother who had abandoned him at birth. Similarly, if the data had ever been known, there were no records identifying a biological father.

The Snake Man was believed to be deceased. The records showed that he had ended up a pitiful wino, a blind beggar who existed from one jug of cheap muscatel to the next. It was of no consequence—Daniel said. But the doctor never fully believed him.

Chaingang either had no siblings or had no interest in finding them. At one time, he would have loved to find his real mother and go "rip her womb out," but too many years had gone by. The truth is, inside, Daniel had never really lusted for revenge on these old figures from his past. He had so much intense hatred for everyone that years of mayhem had acted as a kind of diffusive influence, spreading his rage out. He wanted vengeance against mankind, not just some old lady in Kansas City.

On the other hand, it was always somewhere down in the dark recesses of his nasty brain fissures, the simmering hatred he felt for his "foster mother"—what a joke—and the nameless, faceless "others" he could no longer hope to identify, much less track. As long as he was here, and had a few days to kill, why not do so?

4

Washington, District of Columbia

5

Fort Worth, Texas

6

Fort Worth, Texas

7

Victor Trask was feeling semi-shitty. He'd woken up with a terrible, pounding hangover and since he didn't drink that was not a propitious beginning to the day. Neither did it auger well that he cut himself while trying to shave his face, the right side of which was pockmarked with old acne scars. He knew that others, women particularly, found his face appealing—women used words like "character" and "interesting-looking" when describing him—but he thought he was ugly as sin, with a face like the landscape of the moon. Actually he wasn't half bad-looking. His features were sufficiently chiseled and decently proportioned to give him a craggy profile, and he'd been blessed with a tight cap of hair that never seemed to be in need of a comb. Trask, true to his inner character, tended to see only the worst. He saw the salt and pepper in his prematurely graying hair, the residual complexion of a zit-ridden childhood, and a bulbous "clown nose." Pulling clothes on he briefly examined himself in the door mirror and saw a thirty-six-year-old guy with a body the color of a dead bluegill. Make that carp. He had to get out in the sun one of these days.

He hated the sun. It was so…sunny. He was a night guy and had nocturnal inner rhythms. It was three in the afternoon, which was like seven A.M. to him, and he had a half an hour of Kansas City traffic to negotiate before he was safely ensconced in the KCM building. The kids were out, which probably meant the traffic would be even worse, if that was possible. He put three Tylenols in his mouth and drank a swallow of tepid water from the tap. Breakfast. He wanted coffee but he would be half an hour late as it was.

He'd been a news announcer and writer for Z-60 for two years—his tenth and eleventh year in the business—when Chase Kincaid, KCM's program director, and also national P.D. of the Karrash chain, had brought him in to work for a guy who was then managing editor of their Kansas City news department. He did three on-air casts a night, good bucks, and no hassles. It had been like the early days at WNEW in New York, where a buddy of his had done the nine-to-midnight radio news. Three casts a night, and you split, the guy told him. "I work fifteen minutes every three hours, sleep all day, and at nine I go down to the Village and hunt for virgins." He was kidding but once it had been almost that big a skate.

D. Andrew Karrash had been a wrestling promoter, of all things, and had made his fortune back in the early days of television. He'd retained the rights to the early grudge matches between the vintage mat stars and the "freak shows" like tag teams and battles royal. When MacLendon and Turner and other broadcast pioneers such as Storz were experimenting with formats in the early days of all-news radio and TV, Karrash was recycling his old Gorgeous George kinescopes to "U"s, independent UHF channels, and other small and medium market properties who were seeing numbers in trash sports.

Karrash's chain ended up with three major market stations, of which KCM was the flagship. When Andy Karrash became ill and retired, less than a year after Trask moved to nighttime news at KCM, there'd been a tremendous shakeup. First, KCM had gone all-talk, under the national ownership of Rogers Communications, a New York—based publishing house expanding into broadcasting. The absentee owners had so far kept Chase Kincaid as local program director, but nearly everything else had changed.

A big-time TV and radio anchor had been imported to helm the news department, and Trask's easygoing boss had been axed. The new managing editor, Adam David, from Pittsburgh, was a top-notch air talent and writer/producer, but about as laid-back as sulfuric acid. To say that Adam David took himself, and the news, seriously, was like saying that "the universe is rather a large place."

All-talk could be a mind-bending concept. At KCM, it was an often uneasy melding of entertainment and hard news, and the two sides of the coin were not necessarily comfortable bedfellows. Louie "Captain Kidd" Kidder, a venerable Midwestern radio and television old-timer, had been brought in to set the tone of the station. In a market that ranged from "more music/oldies" to hard rockin' country formats to zany morning men, Louie Kidder's homespun, gentle wit and thoughtful insights were a welcome breath of radio air. From nine A.M. to three P.M., KCM's airwaves were filled with a basic news and "human interest" mix, some of which involved feeds and special packages such as business and financial/investment news, sports, weather, and various remotes. At three the talk turned to telephone call-ins. The three-to-six and six-to-nine shifts were helmed by men and women who were adept at eliciting the greatest amount of heat, if not light, from the topical subjects of the moment. The midnight phone show starred popular Kim Streeter, who was thought to have one of the three or four sexiest voices of any woman on major market radio. She sounded like the most beautiful, sweetest angel who ever drew a breath. In fact, Kim Streeter was beautiful in the face, and had an angelic personality to go with it, but she outweighed Vic Trask by ten or twenty pounds. This eclectic hodgepodge appeared to be working, if the ratings and word-of-mouth were barometers. Into this stew was stirred the legendary Sean Flynn and company.

Flynn had once been a king of talk, working almost as much as Larry King, with a profile the equal of King's or Tom Snyder's, having made his bones in the competitive Chicago market. Rogers Communications had brought him in from a night gig in some southern armpit of a market, and told him—in effect—do or die. It was his last shot to regain his crown and he came at it with a vengeance; a bright guy who'd fallen down the well of alcohol abuse, he hit the air boldly, with such a cutting-edge intelligence and sense of awareness that he made the nine-to-midnight gig his own overnight. The numbers were astonishing. He nailed the position with his first killer sweep book, a ratings response that two competitive stations sued over, forcing the survey companies to recount. The second count was even higher for Flynn. The guy owned Kansas City at night!

Within twenty-four hours of the announcement of the resurveyed numbers, Sean Flynn, forty-four-year-old has been alky, and two Jewish attorneys from Krelberg, Boda, and Kamen—whom Flynn referred to over and over as Nafka, Kafka, and Putz—with a set of contractual demands unprecedented in the mid-echelon annals of KC broadcasting: astronomical money; a stepladder clause linked to the ratings books; grandfathering out the exhaust pipe; a pay-to play page that made the guys from Rogers wince every time they thought about it, and demands for a producer-writer staff, for God's sake, began a three-day haggling session that ended up with Sean Flynn owning the store.

Flynn took Trask off the air and gave him a title—senior researcher—and they hired a producer from Memphis, a bird by the name of Babaloo Metzger, who had a rep for big numbers and a tough-as-nails shop, and Metzger brought in his own researcher from the Tennessee station, a woman named Barb Rose. Bookings were to be handled by Kincaid, various newsroom personnel, and Flynn had his own private secretary/receptionist/booker/handler/woman-of-the-night named Jerri Laymon. Sean Flynn's "America Tonight" became Sean Flynn's "Inside America," with important guests, open phones, in-depth interviews, and preproduced pieces, and the ratings went all the way through the roof.

It was quite odd—all of it. Victor Trask, headache forgotten, zooming around the tailgaters in the direction of downtown Kansas City, had the odd sensation of being fairly successful in a job he didn't totally understand. Beginning his thirteenth year in a business that made him, at thirty-six, wonder what he wanted to do for a living "when he grew up." And for all that, it was rather satisfying. He genuinely thought "Inside America" was entertaining radio, and this was at least as much fun—if harder work-than the news gig. The job also paid more, you could come in late, or leave early, if you didn't do it too often, and there was no heavy lifting.

He tuned the band of the radio, flipping across the polluted Missouri air:

"Love thirty and the match. We'll be going to Lion, France, on Monday to bring you—" Trask twisted, with a grimace, reminding himself to tell the news reader he'd mispronounced a word.

"…all you talk about is fish and seafood…"

"…on Power ninety-nine! No showers showing within twenty miles of Kansas City and…"

"…Royals lead. It's two and oh!"

"…Sweet Home Ala-bah-ma!…"

"…I-70 just three miles past the Truman Sports Complex. Come on down and check out this selection. You won't—" He clicked back to FM and got some easy guitar he couldn't identify and filed it all away.

Victor Trask was an observer. He noticed things. He would have made an okay cop or a P.I., he thought. Maybe the investigative reporting part of this research gig was what held such appeal for him. He liked the hunt. The dig. Yet, in personal relationships, he hadn't shown any of the same dedication, or tenacity, or grit. He'd in fact screwed away a perfectly good marriage—boring and dead-end but perfectly good—because it seemed as if he could never get into his home life the way he could his work. He was a workaholic, he supposed. Not for the money. That was obvious enough. He liked to keep his mind occupied.

Now his wife was a memory that would have faded completely but for odd moments when a desire to see or talk to his daughter brought the exes into brief contact again. Neither of them could believe they'd ever been married and had lived together for six years, a couple of lifetimes ago.

He finally made it downtown in one piece and went through the usual ritual of the parking garage. Lower-level employees (and you couldn't get much lower than Trask: a few news readers, apprentice engineers, various and sundry copywriters, purchasing assistants, receptionists and typists, and a couple of security guys shared the lowest plateau) could not park in the postage-stamp rectangles reserved for KCM's "key" employees. These were the executives; anyone with chief, manager, or director in their title; the station controller; Mr. Kidder; Mr. Flynn; the VIP rectangle; and of course the account execs. Even the engineers had two spaces! When contract renewal time came around, if he had the clout and the numbers were still up, he was determined to somehow lobby for a parking space. It would be the equivalent of a raise both in money and prestige, but to Trask the awarding of a space epitomized the tacit acknowledgment of worth. Not to mention the implication of a degree of assured tenure.

Trask came into the station through the big, showy front doors, a massive pair of bronze slabs in "lightning-bolt deco," waved to the guy at the security desk, and walked across the long foyer to the elevator. All you saw here were giant plants and the ultramodern artwork and sculpture that dominated the length of KCM's entranceway. From the front doors only the unobtrusive security post, the front desk—always staffed by a bevy of lovely youngsters who came and went with the tide—and the plush seating arrangements in the first-floor lobby waiting area were visible. If one made it past the guard and front desk and turned left, the richly appointed VIP waiting area beckoned. Beyond that was a door that led to the sales area: the sales manager's offices off to the right, the sales receptionist and account executives' offices to the left. Coming back toward the front of the building one would pass sales lounge and bathroom, the big sales conference room, and what they called no-man's-land. Here, at the front of the building, but inaccessible from the front doors or foyer, was the general manager's huge sanctuary, and sandwiched between various utility and storage rooms was the room that housed the internal closed-circuit internal security monitors, and, some said, the audio equipment. It was generally thought that every word spoken in the building was recorded, and-presumably—monitored.

Inside that room abutting on the visible security desk in the foyer, was an invisible room of which Bill Higgins, head of KCM security, was lord high chamberlain. "Inspector Higgins of the Yard," as they called him outside the station, was a pleasant-looking balding man with a mustache, to whom no one but the G.M. and—rumor had it—Rogers Communications, conversed. While it was necessary to have security because of the controversial nature of some of the programming, the way it was handled added to the feeling of paranoia that helped to keep KCM's employees on their toes.

Trask had his I.D. on his shirt, but neither the front-desk guard nor the receptionist needed to see it. Both of them knew his face as he knew theirs. His ride in the elevator was a solo one, so his first words inside the station were spoken on the second floor when he got out and smiled at the beautiful girl at the desk. "Good morning."

"Good afternoon, Vic." She smiled, and he winked at her. All men winked at her—it was a law. Her name was Monica Bonebreak but they called her Monica Heartbreak, a former Miss Congeniality in the Miss Missouri contest, and if she was a loser, thank the Lord that Vic had never met the winner. He always had to fight to get his breath back as he walked past her.

The "program floor" receptionist sat with her back to a long glass wall that ran the length of the building. Behind the glass, one saw Adam David, if he was at his desk, flanked by all the news editors and news readers/reporters, the wire service room, and the editing facilities. All of this was backed with a display of electronic gear, world maps, and a long bank of clocks that gave the time in Tokyo, London, Paris, Moscow, and so on. Everyone who worked at KCM was very ashamed of the clocks, but so far they had been a legacy that Rogers Communications insisted was "part of the KCM-age." If it wasn't broke, don't fix it, so the hokey Dave Garroway-era clocks stayed.

Free-form seating and more silver and bronze sculptures flanked the artwork at the receptionist's desk. Glass walls were at either end of the long entrance area, and a visitor could see Production Studio C to the right, the back of which contained an impressive library, and the announcer engineer area, and to the left were the double-paned hallways that separated Broadcast Studio A and Master Control from the civilians.

Out front, it was all spacious and artsy-fartsy, but Trask no longer worked out here. He walked around the lounges and stopped at Production where he saw a news reader working at the mike. He cracked the door to Engineering.

"Is he doing anything I can't interrupt?"

"Naw," the engineer grunted.

"Thanks," Trask said. He went in to where the man was getting ready to record. "Hi."

"Hello."

"'Scuse me. Hope I'm not screwing you up?"

"Uh-uh. Watcha need? I'll be done in five minutes."

"No.' I don't need in. I was listening on the way in. It's Lee-ohn. The city in France?"

"Huh?"

"You pronounced it like lion in a zoo—it's Lee-ohn." He gave the word its French pronunciation, the second syllable nasal and thrown away.

"Yeah, so?" The guy shrugged and opened his eyes wider, obviously pissed off.

"Hey—not meant as a put-down. I just thought you'd want to know." He turned to leave, feeling like an idiot.

"Do you say 'he drives a Le Sabre'?"

"Yeah." Trask smiled.

"Why don't you say he drives a Luh-sob-ruh? That's the way it's pronounced in French."

"Yeah, but—"

"Do you say Pah-rrryeeee?" He exaggerated the French pronunciation. "Nobody would know what the hell you were saying. Are we in France? Nooo. We're in fucking A-mare-ee-kuh. Okay? That's why we don't use French on the fucking airsville." The man smiled but clearly he was torqued off.

"I gotcha." Trask wanted to say "Yes, but," and explain the logic, but he knew what this guy was like. His name was Michael Melody—his real name—and he was an asshole. "I didn't think. Stupid!" He hit his head with the flat of his hand.

"You got a Band-Aid hanging from your face," the news reader told him as he eased out the door, "by the way."

"Thanks," he said, noticing his goofy reflection and peeling the small strip off and wadding it up in his fingers. He was glad that when he'd smacked his head in that gesture he hadn't given himself a headache again.

Jesus.

Trask walked down the hall past Production Studio B and Engineering, the Talent Lounge where the lesser air people hung out or had small cubicles, past Kidder's and Flynn's suites, and into the guts of "Inside America." Three offices, of which the largest was the producer's, were located across from the Programming Department's bathroom. Visitors to the P.D.'s office, the controller, bookkeeping people, copy chief and copywriter, purchasing assistant, and news readers all shared this one bathroom. The door was directly across from Trask's office. He was wedged in between the "Jew and Jewess," as Sean Flynn called them. (Flynn called the triumvirate "two Jews and a snooze.") Babaloo Metzger, whom he didn't trust, and Barb Rose, nee Barbra Rozitsky, his sworn enemy, were on either side of him, and all day long people went to the crapper across from his office.

He had one hour before the production meeting. They were set for tonight and tomorrow night. They need a guest, a topic, a theme. Flynn was antsy.

He looked at his bulletin board, skimmed through his files, eyeballed notes. Somewhere, there was a clipping in this stack of garbage—yes! There! The words "Black Dahlia" leaped out at him. A highly publicized 1947 murder case. He had a slant. He'd interviewed a guy with LAPD Homicide and had some notes which he began to shape for the production meeting. A team of volunteers had been called to the sight of this ancient torture/mutilation/slaying, because a woman had said she had memories of her father "killing women." They were going to dig. They didn't find anything. But Trask thought he could get some good stuff out of the person with whom the woman's therapy sessions had been conducted.

Four P.M.: Metzger knocked at his door, rubbing the indentations made by his glasses.

"Let's go."

"Okay." Trask got up and gathered his notes. They waited for Barb Rose to join them. She was an attractive, dark-haired woman with good features, a wide mouth, and carefully coiffed hair. She could have been any age from twenty to forty—one of those faces. She dressed upscale, and the largest pair of earrings Trask had ever seen on a white woman dangled from her ears.

"Hi," she said to both men. "You look like you cut yourself."

"Uh-huh," Trask said.

"Umm." Her tone said it all. Too bad it wasn't lower and more severe. Why did they compete so fiercely? "Had any coffee yet?"

"No. Been too busy." God! He wondered if she was actually going to be nice and get him a cup of coffee.

"You look like you need a cup," she said, ever the comic. They made their way into the Programming Conference Room, a somber place about the size of a railroad car, with a dozen or so chairs scattered around two scarred wooden tables placed end to end. Downstairs, the Sales Conference Room looked like the meeting space of a major bank. Upstairs, the conference room resembled the kind of place the border police bring people suspected of drug smuggling.

The three of them took seats as far apart from each other as possible, and waited for Flynn. He soon came, accompanied by the Mystery Tramp, which is what they called Jerri Laymon, who brought his coffee and various papers. She was a sultry, mysterious woman who was quite pretty but who wore dark glasses most of the time, and at night. Everybody thought Sean Flynn was putting the pork to her. Trask and Flynn thought Babaloo was porking Barb Rose. Nobody thought Trask was doing much of anything, except maybe with himself.

Flynn, handsome, gray and silver-headed, with a dark black mustache, his silk tie askew, read quietly, then—not looking up—said, "Who's got something for the hole?"

"I do," Barb Rose said, and everybody looked at her. "Remember the so-called Black Dahlia murder?"

For ten minutes Barb Rose did a presentation based on Trask's notes. There was no way she could have come up with all the material independently, since some of the stuff had been gleaned from a phoner Trask did with the West Coast homicide dick. She had to have had a bug in his office or a tap on his phone. Or somebody else did and she had access to the tape.

"I don't think it's strong enough, even with the tie-in to the local case and the therapist. I do like the therapist interview, and that's strong material on the business about regressing a patient. Let's go at it from a 'Scam or Science' angle, you know?" Flynn pitched his voice down a register. "Psychiatry and hypnosis, how much of it is real, how much is pure hogwash? Something along those lines. Get that old Bridey Murphy thing and get me the background on how it was brought forth, later proven a hoax and so on." He looked at Trask, who was itching to say something.

"What? You got something?" Sean Flynn asked.

"Yeah. What you just heard." He slid all his notes across the table and glanced at Barb Rose, whose face was a mask. She had a pair, he'd give her that.

"Nu?" Flynn glanced at a couple of the pages.

"So doesn't this strike you as a tad odd? We've got the identical shit?"

"Okay," Flynn said with a smile. "So?"

Trask just stared at him and shrugged.

"What's wrong?" Barb asked innocently. "Did he come up with similar stuff?"

"Yeah," Flynn said. "Coincidences happen. What can I say. Let's get on with it. Here's the way I think the show should come together: first, you guys get me somebody who…" Victor Trask tuned halfway out as the meeting continued and Flynn put the "Discoveries Made in Therapy" program together.

They eventually went back to their cubicles and Trask made a cursory search of his phone and office. Nothing looked out of place, but how would he know if he saw something? He gathered up a briefcase full of papers and looked at his watch: six-fifteen P.M. Buzz, his old engineer buddy, was still working dayparts last he'd heard. He'd check at the "Zoo" first.

Trask left the KCM building and found a pay phone. It was still bright daylight at six-twenty. He dropped money, dialed, and after a half-dozen rings, a young girlish voice answered.

"Z-60."

"Hi. Is Buzz Reid working, do you know?"

"Is who working?"

"Buzz Reid? Engineering?"

"Um. One moment please." The line went dead. He waited. It was hot and smelly in the alcove where he was calling. There were two coin phones side by side, with a small divider for privacy between them. Old tobacco smoke and God-knows-what-all made him wrinkle his nose. There were no directories, which had gone the way of phone booths years ago. Vandalism had seen to their demise. Most of the public phones near KCM were card-type or third-party-billing-number-type. Again, coin ops had been phased out because of vandals. He flipped his pen out and scrawled the word vandalism on a pad. This was the kind of stuff he fed off of. He might be able to get a show out of that one thought. Now he'd start a file on the topic and see just where it led him. He was writing locked churches when a voice said hello.

"Buzz?"

"Yo."

"Vic."

"Hey, man. What's up?"

"Not too much. I wondered if I could buy you a cold one when you get off? Talk about a couple things."

"I can't do it tonight. I got a game."

"When?"

"I'm going to be leaving in about…fifteen or twenty minutes, matter of fact."

"Would you have time to grab a cup cross the street? Five minutes or whatever? It's kind of important."

"Yeah, if you wanna come on by right now. I could give you ten minutes or something. Say—meet me at Sammy's in five minutes?"

"I'll be there. Thanks." Trask hung up, started to walk, and changed his mind. Went around the comer and saw a couple of taxis in front of a nearby hotel, got in the first one and had them take him the eight blocks to the greasy spoon across from the radio station. He got there before Buzz Reid did. He had his coffee in front of him when the engineer walked in.

"Hey, stranger," Reid said, settling down beside him in time to have a cup of coffee set in front of him. "Thanks."

"I appreciate it," Trask said. "I know you're runnin' but I wanted to shoot the shit a minute."

"No problem." Buzz was notorious in Kansas City radio. He was forever trying to get guys to screw his wife, a plain woman in her thirties, who, Trask recalled, had long red hair and an Olive Oyl shape. Reid and his wife were "into swinging," so he claimed. Trask had always managed to slip out of such invitations. It was all but impossible to fire an engineer, but his sexual "misconduct" had somehow gotten him terminated from KCM, in spite of a ferocious shop steward and an unforgiving union, back in the days before they'd worked together at the Zoo. He hated KCM, and had a great deal of expertise in what Trask thought of as "bugging."

"You remember how you always used to say they taped the phone calls and stuff at KCM?" he whispered to the small, thin man at the counter beside him.

"Um."

"Is that something you knew for a fact or were you saying what you thought they were doing?"

"Fact. They tape everything. Not just the phones."

"How did you know? Mind if I ask—confidentially?"

"I heard the fuckin' tapes is how. Jimmy Olfanski who used to be the chief at KCM showed me all that shit downstairs. I heard private conversations made in the sales manager's office, in the fuckin' control room. Et cetera, et cetera."

"Downstairs."

"In the manager's office it used to be. Now it's all in the security room down there next to the supplies 'n' shit. Everybody knows about it. They been doin' that shit for years."

"And they play all that back and listen to it? Everybody's conversations? Why?"

"Who the fuck knows, man. They like to keep an upper hand. You know how management is, pops. Always fuckin' with everybody's head. They sit down there and watch the tapes, I guess, and make random checks and that. Old Inspector Higgins his bad self. I guess that's what he does all day. Sits there watching the tapes and jerkin' his wire."

"Watching—you mean they got videotapes?"

"You see the cameras, man. What did you think?"

"I knew they could see, but I never imagined they would be taping with video. What the hell's the point of it all? What do they expect to see or hear?"

"Hey. Go figure. I suppose…employee theft or some shit. I really don't know. I know I could sabotage the shit out of their security systems and they'd never fuckin' know what hit them."

"Yeah? How would you do that?" Trask asked.

"I know some shit about that place, man." Buzz Reid leaned close and whispered conspiratorially, "I know how to get into Security…" Trask just looked at him. "…from above, baby."

"How?"

"Engineering."

"Yeah?"

"You know where the equipment room is across from those offices like Copy and Purchasing?" Trask nodded. "In the early days that's where the other stairwell was. You could drop a ladder down through the back of the equipment closets and climb right down to the ceiling of the security room, pull the partitions out—" Reid proceeded to detail a break-in somewhere between Topkapi and the Brink's job.

"Judas! I wouldn't have the cojones for that, brother."

"Well, anyway—it could be done easily. Tear all that Big Brother bullshit up, man."

"Is there a way to stop that sort of surveillance? You know—make it so they can't hear what you're saying over the phone or in a private conversation in an office?"

"Sure. In theory, they got every kind of bug jammer you can want—stop any sort of pickup from phone taps to reflection bugs. Cost you a few hundred bucks to get a real good one, but they're available."

"Um."

"I got to get my ass in gear, man. Anything else?" Reid took a last sip of coffee.

"No. But I may call for more advice."

"Anytime. Whyn't you come out to the house sometime? Party with us."

"Might just do that one of these days. Hey, Buzz, I really do appreciate your time. I'll holler at you again, maybe."

"Sure thing. Good to see you." Reid got up and waved a salute.

"Same here."

Trask took a mouthful of cool coffee and held it for a few seconds, not wanting to swallow.

| Go to Table of Contents |

8

Back at KCM that evening he found a "progress memorandum," as Flynn liked to call them, from The Man himself, telling Trask—in effect—you're letting down, looking for excuses; get your shit together. Not in so many words, but that was the sum of the long memo. He'd have been willing to bet good money that Barb Rose hadn't been sent one. He knew Flynn always checked with Metzger when he was sending memos or whatever, so this was probably a joint venture. He could recall phrases Babaloo had used in various shitty conversations they'd had: "open up the topics" and "start looking for larger themes" were two that echoed.

Specifics? Make-work. Time-consuming legman/legwoman stuff that he found interfered with the more serious business of digging. Stuff Barb should be doing, he felt. And then there was a page on what Flynn called "Factlets," the little stuff that he would use to weave into the nightly commentary that made people think he was a genius. In the middle of a discussion of The Impatient American, and how we wanted instant rewards and instant gratification, Flynn told a shrink guest, "Did you know, on average, we spend three years of our life waiting for traffic lights?" The shrink laughed, called him on it, and he produced the clinical verification off the "top of his head." Trask's work. You couldn't give him too many Factlets, he had a consuming obsession for the damned things, and they were a pain in the butt to find. Once one had exhausted the obvious printed recorded sources they were hard-won nuggets.

The memo was the perfect ending to a really semi-shit day that had become the genuine article. He went home in a blue funk, his head full of microphone paranoia and Factlet phobia.

He had cleaned all the loose notes out of his office. Anything that he might use toward creating a great theme. It boiled down to a stack of newspaper and magazine clippings, book reviews, and cryptic annotations that referred to sound bites on scraps of half-inch home VHS tape that he'd collected over the past year or so.

The next project he'd build at home. If he used the telephone he'd dial from card-op public phones and use his credit card or bill the calls to the station line. He'd dedicate himself to coming up with something that would pull his rear end out of the flames. He wanted to save his job—at least until he figured out what he wanted to do for a living. Understandably, the first theme was Big Brother. Surveillance. He seriously toyed with the idea of paying Buzz or some unsavory character to climb down the "Engineering ladder" to the internal security vault and get proof of the station's spying on its employees. Wasn't there a Missouri statute against "entrapment" or something? He could check all that out. Build a case. A brief against KCM! File it on the air over "Inside America," and—when it got humongous numbers and regional press—it might be enough that they wouldn't have him killed. What the hell was he thinking? His big theme was to indict the people who employ him? That made zero sense. But still—he'd let it simmer.

He began taping streamers of news clippings around the apartment in categories: Mistrials and Plea Bargaining-the Courts in Trouble, Child Abuse, Pornography, Censorship, Adolescence in the American Value System. It was a personal favorite, but he wondered how it would play in the Kansas/Missouri radio ether: the concept that we'd rather squander millions on parades celebrating a tiny war that had no complete resolution, pretending it was the heroic victory of all time, when Vietnam vets had only begun to be honored, than feed the poor…. He junked that one immediately—too much realism! Pretty soon he'd covered all the walls and was starting a series of file folders with the offshoot topics that ranged from Abortion to Zoning.

So many of these big topics had been done and done and redone and done to death. Could he really stand one more show about the pornography shops, television, the NEA, movie ratings—all of that? Borrrrring. He went around the room pulling down the environmental stuff, the porno stuff, and pretty soon the walls were visible again.

This wasn't the way to go about it. He'd start with categories and get precise definitions, then open them up. He looked at a stack of notes and the one on top read Vandalism. He pulled down a dictionary and turned to the Vs: Vulgarity, Volumetric analysis, Vitriol, Violins, Violence…He stopped his thumbing backward through the dog-eared book and read:

"Violence:

N

(1.) Physical force exerted to abuse or injure. (2.) Instance of a physically forceful treatment or action. (3.) Effecting injury by physical force, brute strength, brutality, physical assault. (4.) Unwarranted or unjust use of physical force or savagery. (5.) Furious, turbulent, or physically violent act of destruction or fierceness."

He read on through the synonyms and variety of meanings: "Excessiveness, rage, brutality, assault, vehemence, fury, destructiveness, force, rampage, savagery, frenzy, fervor, attack, severity, onslaught, turbulence, bedlam—" There was a word or definition explaining violence for nearly every clipping he had! Bloodbath, mad passion, craziness, deadly force, rebellion, street gangs, child abuse, spousal abuse, animal abuse, rape, hysteria, bestiality, explosions, desecrations—it was all here under this one mad umbrella. Violence. Even vandalism!

9

The telephone in Elaine Roach's apartment had the bell position muted to its lowest point, but still she jumped when it rang.

"Hello," she said.

"Miss Roach, this is Tommy Norville."

"Oh, yes, sir!" Her voice brightened. One of the boss's infrequent phone calls.

"Well, how did the first auction night go?" he asked, with just a hint of sibilant simper and pseudo-world-weary petulance in his voice.

"Very well. Sir—I'm glad you called and I certainly hope you won't be angry with me but I—uh—had to take the phone off the hook at two-thirty A.M. I just couldn't stay awake any longer. I hope it's all right?" He could hear the nervousness and fear in her scratchy voice.

"Of course, it's all right. You mean you were still getting calls as late as that?"

"Oh, yes, sir. I think they must have tried to phone me all night, for when I put the phone back on this morning at seven-thirty, it rang instantly. A man in California said he'd been dialing and getting a busy signal all night long."

"Hmm. Amazing!" he said through fat pursed lips.

"Of course, I didn't tell any of the ones who phoned this morning that I took the telephone off the hook last night."

"Well," the effeminate-sounding man told her, "you certainly didn't get much sleep." He wanted to ask about the auction response but he decided he'd go gently. "Perhaps tonight you could retire earlier, Miss Roach. And then, of course, you'll have a couple of weeks to recuperate before the next round of telephone calls."

"Yes, sir. Oh, by the way, you might want to know that we had many calls on one of the items, Mr. Norville. Number forty-one? The cased dueling pistols that belonged to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?"

"Oh?" He kept the interest out of his tone. "Did they fetch a decent price?"

"Oh, yes, sir! The highest bid was from a man in New York who bid $24,500 for them."

"Pardon?" He had to make a noise that sounded like a loud cough, and he covered up the mouthpiece of the phone while he laughed. He loved making fools of the monkey people.

"A man in New York bid twenty-four thousand five hundred for them. And we had about two dozen bids on that item. Next to number forty-one item number three was the most popular, it appears—" Then she began to give him an accounting of the telephone auction. He let her ramble on for a while.

"That sounds excellent, Miss Roach. And you emphasized we would need cashier's checks or money orders, did you not?"

"Yes, sir. And I told them we had to be in receipt of payment within ten days as per the stipulation in our printed terms. Everyone said they would comply. Several persons wanted to know when their items would be sent out, and I reminded them that you will notify all winners within one week, and that it will take about two weeks to process the winning remittances, so with packing time one could safely say approximately six weeks from the time their remittance is sent." She was maddeningly pedantic and precise in spelling out everything she'd enunciated or done in the last twenty-four hours, but that was exactly what he'd wanted. Nothing would reassure a mail-order customer more than a nice, long phone conversation with somebody as obviously straight as Elaine Roach.

He realized that it was doubtful anyone would be writing him a certified check for $24,500, not for a sight-unseen item from an auction with whom they'd had no prior business, but if her figures were any indication, he knew that his war treasury would soon be healthy again.

Daniel Bunkowski had no interest in profit for money's sake, but he had a need for operational funds, and the response to his first mail-order auction had been satisfactory. As soon as he'd notified all the winning bidders of their good fortune, he'd be ready to resume the so-far-fruitless search for his foster mother of years past, Mrs. Nadine Garbella, for whom payback was long overdue.

10

An enormous man named Mr. Bentley, driving legal wheels, headed west on 670 across the stretch of oily water that separates Kansas from Missouri. His I.D. would convince the casual inspector that Mr. Bentley was a prosperous insurance man from St. Louis, dressed for fishing.

He crossed the river in a stream of traffic and turned right looking for Mrs. Garbella. She'd moved around a bit, understandably, over the years. The street signs indicated that he was at the corner of Fourteenth and Bunker. Bunker was a name out of his horror-filled past, and just the word sent a jolt of rage through him.

Say the word and most have some association: Hitler's Bunker, Archie Bunker, but to him it is a synonym for hell. Bunker—even now it can reach whatever vestiges of the little boy that still reside deep inside his massive hulk. The name is a fanged, slithery thing that crawls out of the past, snaking through his memory banks. Terror Avenue.

In his fishing clothes, Mr. Bentley parks, locks the vehicle. A decrepit river-front building, once a cheap hotel, now a sub-poverty-level rooming house. Each time Mrs. Garbella moved she dropped another notch down the scale. This is the bottom of the poverty chain.

He wears a voluminous jacket, too much clothing for the sizzling temperature, but he appears impervious to such mundane externals as heat, and the huge, canvas-reinforced pockets of the jacket bulge with weighty goodies. Many pounds ascend rickety stairs to the second floor. 2C.

A shotput of a fist the size of a small ham threatens to take the peeling door off its rusting hinges. Slow movement inside. The occupant takes her time getting there. He realizes she must be nearly seventy. Late sixties, perhaps. The door cracks open and old eyes peer through from the darkened interior.

"Eh?" the crone cackles from the safety of a chained door, much the same as in his dream about her.

"Hello. Remember me?" he asks in a rumbling, deceptively soft voice. "From many years ago?" He pushes his way in.

"Please—please don't hurt me. I don't have any money. You've taken everything. Please go away." The old woman begins crying.

It is not Nadine Garbella. He is so disappointed. And now here is some old crone blubbering, and he'll probably have to take care of her—seeing as how he's thrust his way into her life.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he says gently. "I thought Mrs. Garbella lived here. Where is Mrs. Garbella?" The tears flow and she crumples into a chair.

"Stop crying, please. I must find Mrs. Garbella." The woman seems to be having a full-fledged nervous breakdown. "Stop it." He gives her a light shake, but a light shake from him is equivalent to a roller-coaster plunge and she momentarily stops but begins gasping for air. "Let me get you a glass of water. This is all a mistake." He searches for a glass in the tiny apartment. He must interrogate this old witch before he can put her out of her misery.

"Please—" She tries to beg him, her sobbing getting worse.

"Listen. Listen to me!"

She gasps like a fish on land.

"Here. Drink." He gives her a filthy cup of tap water and she tries to peck at it like some ancient bird, but immediately resumes soft, monotonous sobbing. Somewhere outside he can hear the intermittent pop of firecrackers in the July streets.

"How long have you lived here?"

"About a year," she says, managing to show coherency for the first time, between gasped sobs.

"Where is Mrs. Nadine Garbella?" Sobbing. "Do you know?" The old woman shakes her head. "What is your name?"

"Ethel Davis," she says and another big flow of tears begins.

"Why do you keep crying? I promise you won't be hurt. Listen, it is important I find Mrs. Garbella, the previous tenant. Where did she move to? Who would know?" Tears.

"Who do you rent this from? Who's the landlord?"

"The boys let me live here."

"What boys?"

"The ones with the bicycles. They're bad boys."

"Did you ever see Mrs. Garbella?" She looks like she's about to die on her own. A few more minutes of this and nature will take its course, he thinks.

"They killed my little cat. My poor little cat!" This starts her off again. He stands there, a monumental mountain of patience, biding his time.

"Who killed your cat?"

"The boys."

He gentles her down, the way one would gentle a wild animal. Reassuring her that everything will be all right. He learned that this pathetic old crone moved into what had become, essentially, an empty, condemned building. But the building had occupants. A biker gang was evidently using it for a combination crack house and torture chamber.

When the "boys," as she called them, weren't otherwise gainfully busy, they liked to take neighborhood pets and play with them. Play, he gathered, involved throwing dogs and cats from the roof. They had extracted some pitiful sum of money from old Ethel for her lodging, and when the well ran dry they decided to take a measure of revenge on her. She had one possession, a cat. They told her they taught it to fly, and laid what was left of it on her doorstep as a parting gift.

She had thought they were back for another round of fun when Mr. Bentley forced his way into her sad life.

"Are the boys up there now?" he asked.

"Yeah." She nodded, still trying to stem the tears.

"Here—for your door." He peeled some small bills off his roll. "Get another cat," he told her, turning and leaving. She watched this huge apparition's back fill the doorway, waiting a long time and not touching the money that had fallen to the floor.

11

Shooter Price came out of Kansas City Military Books in a dour mood. Snipers and Silencers, Memoirs of a Sniper, Handbook for CounterSniper Teams, U.S. Marine Corps Scout/Sniper Training Manual, Sniping in the Carpathians, Police Sniper Handbook, Sharpshooters and Yeomanry; same old stuff.

Two mall rats had come bopping out of the store next to the bookshop and looked at him speculatively and giggled at each other. They were fourteen, tops, dressed like typical slut mall rats, and he could see them whisper and stare holes at his crotch, and as they went by he heard one of them say something that sounded like "Where's Winston?" Whatever that meant.

He felt himself turn livid with bottled-up rage. Price was fuming. For a second, he wanted to go back and kick their asses, but the way that he felt an ass-kicking wouldn't do it. His "primary" had been staying up late and moving and he was tired of all the bullshit and he could feel himself snapping and didn't care.

What the hell did he have? He didn't have anybody who gave a shit whether he lived or died. He tried to count his blessings:

In Fort Worth he had his cars and his library. The books were worth maybe half a million at a conservative estimate. But they'd taken him ten million dollars worth of effort to run down in dusty bookshops from Lee's Summit to London: the finest library of books about snipers extant.

Hell, his 490-horse twin turbo F-40 was probably worth as much as the books on today's market. He'd found a degenerate gambler in Nevada who'd lost big time at the poker table and he'd transferred four hundred K to the man's account for the F-40 and a twelve-cylinder cherry "Redhead" with 430 miles on it, the latter Ferrari one that he'd driven a total of once, trading it off in a deal involving a ragtop XJ-S, a Silver Spirit, a Lamborghini Diablo, and a ton of cash. He had his parents' old Bentley Turbo R. All of these under Mylar in a private garage maintained by River Crest Executive Auto. Once a week, this kid ran a half a buck's worth of gas through each of 'em just to keep them ticking. For what? This is what his life amounted to at forty-one? It pissed him off so much he couldn't think straight. He was like a man about to plummet over Niagara Falls in a small canoe—he could feel himself being pulled over the edge yet he was powerless to fight the thing that was moving him forward. It had started with the guy in the tavern parking lot, this release thing with the rifle—scoping out random targets. He'd seen Big Petey return to the place across the river, alerted first by the OMEGASTAR System, and then eyeballing him briefly through the scope as he did his thing. When Shooter saw the flames he knew it was Chaingang's work, even though he wasn't sure he'd heard the blast.

What a feeling of power he'd suddenly had, as he heard the sirens wailing in the night. There were sirens all the time, but he imagined these were ones responding to whatever Chaingang had just done. He thought about sniping the ambulances or cop cars, whatever he saw with a red ball. Maybe taking out some firemen.

The first target he saw through the scope was a figure moving up some stairs in front of a tenement. He squeezed one off and part of her disappeared. He swung SAVANT in a dizzying arc and spotted a lone figure in a faraway lot, loading or off-loading something, and he shot him. Swung halfway back, ejected the second case and reloaded. A man talking to a woman in a doorway. A challenge. He took the man out. Snicked the casing out. Slid another big hard APEX(X) in and got the woman, too—he could see her screaming through a window of the store where she and the man had been. What a blast! Four down in—what?—forty-five seconds, tops. It was better than the best sex he could remember.

He parked in back of an obvious dumping area and took the case, moving in the direction of cover. It was hot and humid and he felt like shit. He found a good place and opened up the fitted case and took his baby out and put her together.

"The system is sighted with the aid of the Laco 40X sniperscope, manufactured by Laco Optical, Inc., of Bettendorf, Iowa. A prismatic optical instrument utilizing forty-power magnification, the Laco lens of Magni-coat enhances the light-gathering capability of the weapon's sighting device to between ninety-eight and ninety-nine percent efficiency." He searched for the mall rats in his scope.

"The unit is controlled by the Eyepiece Focusing Collar, which is adjustable by manipulating collar in clockwise or counterclockwise rotation." Light glinted off a man's glasses and Shooter blew him away. Snick! Case out. Another big, hard round in place. Bolt closed.

"The Height-Adjustment Sleeve, which is manipulated in a similar rotation." BANG! The rifle thumped him as he squeezed her again, disappointed when the long-haired girl he'd scoped turned out to be a guy.

"The Image Intensifier, which is adjustable by accessing the Intensifier Port by means of an allen wrench and by manipulation of the Intensifier Wing Nut Control…" YEAH! A woman getting out of her car. Oh, shit—look at the bitches scatter. Snick. Load. Click.

"The Elevation Range Knob, which adjusts scope elevation…" A boy on the run. Lead the mutha and…Squeeze! Adios.

"Windage…" She was getting warm. He was heating his bitch up good. Slid that old nasty expended shell out and put a nice new cartridge in her hole. He could smell her juices. Click. Good-looking black-haired baby doll in a sweater. He'd give her a fucking Winston right here—Choong!

Ejected the shell. Reloaded slowly. Hell, he could do this all day. What a fucking rush! "The objective lens, which is adjustable by manipulating the Adjustment Ring until scope is focused, is adjusted only when parallax is present." Big son of a bitch about Chaingang's size. Let's see what he looks like when you lay them crosshairs on that big belly and do This! Lordy! What a mess.

Shooter pulled his face away from the scope. Took his darlin' down and put her away, jogging back to the car. He put her in the back seat and got in. It was hot inside. He hated these wheels, even with the top down. To Price it was just another disposable ride. He looked into the rearview mirror and was surprised to see that one of his eyes had a dark ring around it. His best girl had done up and given him a shiner.

That night, Chaingang was working, trying to run down his missing biker buddies from Steel Vengeance. Doing the kind of tracing that keeps you on the telephone as you sort trails and patterns. Price got antsy watching TV and took his lady out for some night air.

He saw a guy walking down the street. Watched him through the Laco without attaching it to the weapon. The guy walked funny. He definitely needed to die.

"To focus the scope continuously watch the target point through the sniperscope, with the eye centered directly in the eyepiece lens, keeping the crosshairs on the bull's-eye, and moving your head slightly to the left. If the bull's-eye remains centered repeat the procedure, moving your head slightly to the right. If, when the head is moved slightly in either direction, the bull's-eye appears to move out of center or change position in any way, parallax is present."

He nailed the center of the sighting hairs on the walking man's head. "Parallax is the apparent displacement or movement of an object seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object." Squeeze! Oooh.

12

Fort Meade, Maryland

13

Kansas City, Missouri

14

A person can disintegrate in two seconds or they can fall apart over a period of months—even years. Shooter Price had appeared to implode, going off the deep end and killing a dozen times within the span of a few days, killing as he never had, randomly and without purpose. What had pushed him so far? Surely not one more rejection by a woman, or his inability to consummate the act of intercourse. Time, frustrations multiplied by time, the aging process, the cumulative effect of the last couple of months as he tracked a killer even crazier than himself—these were only some of the root causes of his falling apart.

This was, for whatever reason, some semblance of the old Bobby Price who awoke bright and early, feeling refreshed and rather guiltless, hitting the floor and beginning his normal regimen of calisthenics and isometric exercises.

He pulled on old clothes and went out to the car, put the top down, and drove to Hospital Hill Park. There was a place he'd seen where he could work unobserved.

He parked as close as he could to the site he'd found, and carried a new shovel to a place flanked by shrubbery. He stripped off his shirt and began digging, first scoring the earth in a large, fairly round circle, then making a smaller interior circle, which was not to be cut. He was digging earth with a vengeance, his powerful body glistening with sweat as he tossed full shovels of dirt around the hole. This would be a loose berm.

The center would be left as a gun post, a roughly cylindrical form around which he could move, but with a base for SAVANT to rest on her collapsible bipod, which he seldom used.

When Price had dug down a couple of feet, he made yet a third circle and started digging between the central cylinder and the outer edge of the hole. He dug far enough down that when he'd finally removed most of the dirt he had a large hole with a built-in seat that ran around the outermost edge of the gun pit. He could sit comfortably and sight the weapon at his leisure. The only problem was that the berm was up higher than the gun would be. He took a break, toweled off, and climbed out to fix the loose collar of dirt that surrounded the pit. When he was satisfied, he covered the pit with a large, but very lightweight bush net, and broke off long branches of leafy limbs from surrounding bushes and trees, which he used to drape between the gun post and the outside edge of the pit. When he'd finished, it was fairly well camouflaged.

While he dug, some of the same physical changes occurred in Bobby Price's biochemistry that once took place due to drug usage. When Shooter was doing cocaine, certain things happened when he sniffed lines: the white lady would jam the pump that regulated his system, overstimulating neurons, fucking with his brain, kicking him in the chest to get his heart started, floating in his synapses, jabbing his brain in the ass with massive paranoia and hard-charging psychoses. He was there again, but this time without the zip of the blow. One could see it in his eyes, and in his frenetic movements. Neurons were shooting at him inside his mind; lightning from a mental electrical storm was about to strike. Brain nerves fired and Shooter Price jerked as if his mind was exploding.

By the time he'd finished he was stoked with crazy nervous energy. He got back in the car and drove around aimlessly. When a neon tavern sign caught his eye he stopped and parked.

He got out of the car and went in, instantly overwhelmed by the salty booze smell.

When he became accustomed to the darkened interior his gaze was drawn to a woman sitting alone at the bar. She was hard looking, but apart from the fact that she exuded a powerfully feral sexuality, something about her reached out for him. He walked over to her immediately, bending close enough that he wouldn't have to speak loudly to be heard over the music.

"Is it okay if I sit here?" he asked. The woman acted as if she hadn't heard him, ignoring the question. He sat down. Price was sure that he could smell her, an untamed animal scent that—together with the booze smells—was making him hot.

"My name's Bobby Price. Would you mind if I bought you a drink?" he asked her respectfully. Down at the end of the bar three stools from them, an office girl in a colored dress had breezed in and ordered a drink. She smiled at him invitingly but she wasn't what he wanted at all. He ignored the offer, and it was as if the woman next to him sensed it, and she grinned at him for the first time.

"I don't want another drink, but thanks." When she smiled, she looked a lot older, and he wondered if she didn't smile much—thinking it made wrinkles around her mouth or eyes. There were quite a few lines in her face, but he thought she was stunning.

"You're the loveliest woman I've seen in a long time," he whispered to her softly, "and I mean that in the nicest way. I hope you don't think I'm acting disrespectful."

She looked at him funny, cocking her head to see what was going on in his face. She looked back and seemed to be lost in thought for a second. Then she did something that almost made Bobby flip out right there at the bar. She reached over and slid her hand up under his cashmere sweater, and he felt long, sharp nails on his chest. People were all around but he wasn't aware of any stares. The bartender was too busy to watch and the people on either side of him were into their own conversations. She just stood there, playing with one of his nipples and suddenly she began to squeeze very hard.

"Ouch," he said before he could catch himself. Then he laughed nervously. She just smiled and kept squeezing. He felt so odd. Why was she doing this?

She just kept looking at him, reading him—as if his face were a book and his chest were Braille, and she had to pinch his tits to see the words form—and saying nothing. He felt like an idiot. He couldn't think of what to say. After several moments of pinching, she leaned over close and whispered something into his left ear.

"Do you know what Ben Hoa balls are?' That's what he thought she had said to him.

"I was stationed there during the war," he said. Her fingernails were still on his chest, but relaxed now. "That was a long time ago," he said. It was the funniest joke anyone had ever told her. She started laughing raucously, taking her hand out of his sweater and pounding on the bar. People looked over at them. He just kept smiling. The bartender said, "Tell me, too. I need a laugh." But she just ignored everybody. She laughed hard, finally stopping.

"What did I say?"

"Don't. Don't start me again. What did you say your name was, lover?" He started to answer. "Bobby. That was it." She slid that hand back under his sweater and he could feel the long fingernails stop at his left nipple, which already was sensitive from the squeezing she'd given it. "Bobby, I'll tell you what, old cowboy. You pay for these drinks and come with me, lover." She turned and was fucking gone.

He threw a twenty on the bar and was running to catch up.

"Hey—thank you, sir," he could hear the bartender say gratefully. Where was she?

He ran out of the dim interior and almost ran into her.

"You got a car?" she asked. She looked nearly fifty in the sunlight, and he thought she was the sexiest-looking woman he'd ever seen, including on TV and in the movies.

"Yeah. There." He pointed. Almost tongue-tied.

They got in the car and she sprawled out like she owned it. Her left hand glanced against the back of his neck and he said "where to" and she gave him her address.

Price started the car and pulled out, asking for directions and getting them. Her voice was cold and matter-of-fact. But her fingernails were playing with the hair at the back of his head.

He reached for her and she chilled him with her voice.

"You drive and don't be touching me till I want you to, okay?"

"Sure," he said, chagrined. After a few moments, he said, just to make conversation, "I don't even know your name."

"Listen. Here's the deal. You don't talk unless I fucking want you to talk, do you understand me?"

"Yeah, okay—but…" He was so confused by this woman, yet so totally drawn to her. "I…"

"You listen good, Bobby baby. We're gonna have a fucking ball. My name is Cindy Hildebrande. You know everything about me now, all right? You can call me Mama, okay?"

"Sure, okay." He smiled. Whatever you're into, he thought.

"Just drive, cowboy." He'd obviously done something to piss her off. He knew one thing. This old Cindy was going to be dynamite in the sack.

15

Chaingang loved to cruise the strange, darkening burbs of the heartland in the hours following sunset, watching sensors kick the arc lights on, feeling his own vital signs quicken with the coming of the night. He thought of it as sightseeing and he could drive aimlessly through suburban tract developments as one chauffered one's family to see the Christmas lights on a snowy December's eve.

It was invariably fascinating to him, an excursion to slowly negotiate the clean, traffic-free streets, musing about the monkeys who lived inside their overpriced, boxy ranch homes with two-car garages, red-bricked Colonials, and fake Tudors with swing sets and swimming pools in the back yard.

Of an evening the twinkling amber lights would glow from their windows like yellow cats' eyes, portals to mysterious worlds of taxpaying, workaday dads whose preoccupations were with the trivialities of sitcoms and tended lawns. Aliens, they seemed to him, with their absurd play morals and ridiculously structured lives of regimented and duplicitous familial love. Who were these monkeys? Where did they come from—they were everywhere now, snapping pictures, chattering; brainless simians who lived behind five-hundred-dollar door in impeccably decorated Sears showrooms.

They pulled him, you see, with their quiet residential streets and tended shrubbery. He felt the magnet of vulnerable humanity drawing him. How easily he could penetrate their portals, slice through the cozy pseudo-safety of their bolted, locked doors. The weight of his massive killing chain became a serious presence as he thought about how he might enter their lives and turn their worlds into sudden hellish shitstorms of pain….

He flows with the traffic on Sterling, past Norledge, Gill, Chicago, veering northeast now around Mound Grove Cemetery in the direction of Mill Creek Park and a point beyond. Sees the neatly stacked series of firewood logs—a half-dozen racks of wood, perhaps—which appear to have been lined with a plumb bob. Perfectly symmetrical lives play out their days and nights inside. Next door, the house is dark. Maybe up close you'd hear the sonorous sound of ever-present television from within. A "security door" stretches his face into the wide, beaming dimpled radiance that is his most dangerous smile. Pass, his instinct warns him, and he forgets these houses. But then at the next block, midway, he is inexplicably pulled by the hearts that beat inside a home that glows with lights.

Something about this dwelling screams at him. Victim! it shrieks, on a level he cannot pinpoint. If only time permitted. He has so many to do, so little time to do them in. It is impossible to be bored in such a rich and alien world: the phantom empire of Lemuria or Muritania; west of the pillars of Herakles; south of Middle Earth; a thousand million fathoms below the surface of sunken Atlantis; in the subworld towers of topaz; Daniel glides through serpent-infested, monster-haunted seas in search of monkeyfish.

He is nearing the place where they live now and his concentration kicks into third gear. He passes a huge truck stop, and the names on the fronts of the eighteen-wheeler giants type on his mental processor: Freightliner, International Transtar, GMC, Peterbilt. He sees the street sign. Parks. Gets things from his duffel and melts into the shadows.

16

The famous reporter held the microphone directly under John J. Llewelyn's proboscis. The light was bright in the lieutenant's eyes, and the presence of both mike and camera made him nervous. He could imagine how his bald forehead would catch the light and glare like a cueball on TV. He tried in vain to recall the famed investigative journalist's name.

"So you feel the persecution of the L.A. police chief is unfair, is that what you're saying?"

"Look. I don't know the details of what's going on out there but you take any industry where the guy at the top is responsible for the actions of thousands of men…" He was finding it so difficult to concentrate with that microphone shoved in his face. "Some guy runs a big plant, and there's fifteen thousand employees, and fifteen hundred cases of pilfering, I mean—do you fire the top guy because he allowed pilfering? Do you go on a witch hunt and—"

"So you're calling the brouhaha in California a witch hunt?"

"I didn't say that." They could always twist your words. "I know we do our best here. I can't speak for other people in other departments outside the Kansas City area. We do a good job, I think."

"You never worry about your detectives beating someone up?"

"Our detectives spend their day beating on doors, not beating on citizens."

"Get up."

"Pardon me?"

"I said get up."

"Hey!"

"You're dreaming." His wife was touching his shoulders, gently trying to get him awake. The light was blindingly bright in his eyes.

"Jesus, turn the damn light out. What the hell—" He was still brain dead.

"John, honey, wake up. It's the phone."

He came out of the dream and took the phone from her hand, having to wipe his eyes to see if he was holding it upside down and if the switch was moved over. He pulled the antenna out and coughed into the mouthpiece, then realized she'd put it in the ON position already.

"Hello?" he said, in a sleep-fogged voice.

"John, I'm sorry, bud. Hated to wake you." Brown, from the night tour.

"S'okay."

"I was gonna wait but (whirr)…said…wanted you to…(whirr) to call." Llewelyn got up with the cellular phone and moved.

"Shit!" He'd slid the button to OFF as he held it, still half asleep. He pushed it back to ON and somehow Brown was still there. "Sorry. I couldn't hear you."

"Can you hear me okay?"

"Yeah, now. What time is it, anyway?"

"Five fifty-five. You wanna grab a quick cup and call me back in five? It ain't that urgent. Let you wake up a bit?"

"No. S'okay. Go ahead."

"Okay. Guy in a light plane, coming from K.C. International, dude we know, used to be PIO for Civil Air Patrol and so on, he's coming low over the river out by Mount Ely, just as the sun's coming up, 'kay? He says he sees bodies on crosses. Just like in the Bible—all right? Three dudes on crosses. He thinks it's some kind of prank." The words slice down past the sleep, cutting deeply, making something stand up on his skin, electrifying the hairs, prickling his skin. "He goes around and checks it out closer. Crucified, John. Three bodies look like men—headless men. He's pretty shook up. Said he damn near crashed into a power line going low for a closer look."

"You talked to him?" Llewelyn's mind was not receiving information.

"I talked to him myself. I said, 'Are you sure it isn't dummies?' 'No,' he says, 'it could be a hoax, but it looked like decapitated men.' Three of them on these crosses. They had to be fairly large crosses he'd see them from a plane, I tell him. He says he flies low like that whenever he comes to Mount Ely, he likes the view over the river. The sun is coming up in the background over the horizon, big red sunrise, and there are these bodies in the middle of an empty field. Captain says for you to come in when you can—er, forthwith. Meet him at the crime scene?"

"Tell him I'll be right there."

17

Trask had no trouble simulating illness on the second day he called in sick. He phoned Flynn to let him know how ill he was and Jerri Laymon spoke with him.

"Sean's out for a couple of hours, Vic. Do you want me to have him call you?"

"Not unless he needs to speak with me, Jerri," he rasped into the phone.

"You sound awful."

"It sounds worse than it is."

"Well, get some rest and I'll tell everybody, okay?" she said. He thanked the Mystery Tramp and broke the connection. He was ill. He'd had almost no sleep during a headachy period when he was coming down with a cold, and the lack of sleep had done him in. He had the odd feeling of being in a great mood, jubilant in fact, and sick as a dog simultaneously. He socked the vitamin C down, popped aspirins, and worked.

He knew what he had to do and it was making him nuts to think how much had to come together just right to make this sweetheart really happen. He had the inside track on one of the great beats of the year. It coursed through his innards like molten lava—he could taste the richness of it. Gang war! He'd hit on a secret that maybe even the cops hadn't found. He was positive of it. Every time he tried to test his theory it "proved" against the known facts. And he was in the process of weaving it into the very guts of his massive presentation on "American Violence."

On the face of it, the discovery didn't appear to be much of anything. Everyone knew that drugs were the cause of most violence nowadays. What he'd found, however, was a secret beyond chilling—it was so frightening he hadn't completely sorted out the ramifications of it, and he couldn't without official cooperation.

He'd found what he was certain was evidence of a secret race war being waged under Kansas City's nose—without the cops' knowledge! It scared the hell out of him.

Victor Trask's apartment was papered in faces, biographies, background checks, newspaper clippings, photocopies of maps, magazine stories, and his own notes. Looking up from his desk this is what he saw:

The face of the young cabbie, David Boyles. Lived in the 700 block of Truman Road. Secretive. A loner. A weird kid of a man who identified with the De Niro part in Taxi Driver. His friends—such as he had—were casual ones who knew he liked to smoke a little hash, snort some blow, party quietly, and—if you were a bud, he'd deal you some stuff for a profit. Trask was an expert investigative guy when he really went on trail, and all you had to say was "I'm preparing a show for 'Inside America,'" and people would talk. They were conditioned to personal questions such as Flynn routinely asked on the air, and most persons would open up to radio or TV people in a way that even cops had trouble matching.

When you were talking to somebody "off the record," or on "deep background," it was truly amazing what they'd reveal. Tax scams, black-sheep confessions, drug usage, there wasn't much they wouldn't reveal about their own pasts, and they'd tell you everything about the next guy. People, basically, liked to gossip.

From mustached, dark-eyed closet dealer David Boyles, an arrow ran to the other side of the room where wild-haired twenty-four-year-old Steve Yoe's picture adorned another sheet of notes. There was a tie between the two of them. Yoe was an artist for Anderson Design Group, and his own drug record had come to Trask's attention. His connection at one time was "a guy who drove a cab." So Vic knew he was on solid ground.

He didn't know how Jim Myers, Laura Miskell, Annie Granger, Gerald Smotherman, Henrietta Bleum, or Bub Foley fit into the mix yet. But twenty-three-year-old Brad Springmayer, a sheet-metal worker at Mid-America Products, Inc.; thirty-one-year-old waitress Mae Ellen Dukodevsky; and Robbie Allen Scovill all had acquaintances who'd inferred that a puff of reefer or a little hash oil was not out of the question. Bernie Salzman, a pre-med student who had been killed mysteriously just before the big firebombing, had once figured in a three-person scandal at one of the hospitals in which drug thefts had been suspected. Drugs flowed through so many of these names you couldn't help but see the commonality.

Trask had a face for nearly every clipping he'd collected: "Man Admits Murdering Daughter's Husbands," "Kansas Man Charged in Gun Battle," "Woman Shot in Robbery," "Man Charged in Wife's Death," "Woman Pleads Not Guilty to Murder"—dozens of clippings that at first did not appear related to drugs in any remote way. They stared back at him from the wall, between the genial, fatherly face of James Wrightson, Sr., the manager of Missouri Farm Machinery, who was shot and killed in a "drive-by" according to one source, and the sullen, pretty countenance of Monica Foster, twenty-eight, the woman who'd been a fifth-grade teacher at Priester Elementary before she'd been blasted apart. There was another common quality all the victims had.

The Steel Vengeance Scenic Motoring Club members, the forty-three-year-old housewife married to a carpet store manager, the guy who worked at Truesdale's, the woman who'd been decapitated in her home, all these victims of mysterious shootings and even the three headless, mutilated bodies found north of Sugar Creek—they all shared the same thing. There was not a black face among them.

To find a black person who had died violently in Kansas City, Missouri, excepting a thirty-nine-year-old stabbing victim, one Marcus Little, you had to go back over a month. The recent spate of shootings, bombings, and the mob-style executions culminating with the crucifixions on Mount Ely, had claimed non-black victims. Even the three Hispanics and one Asian who had died in recent fatalities were light-skinned. The black man who'd died of his stab wounds had been killed in a drug-related incident.

Drugs and Race were the common threads woven through this tangled blanket of violent crime. Somebody had stepped on a gangbanger's turf, and a drug lord—perhaps one far away—had decided to wage a small war against the non-African-Americans involved.

To be sure, there were holes in this rough blanket. For example, the killing of Henrietta Bleum, seventy, a widowed woman, appeared on the face of it to make no sense. Then Trask discovered she had a grandson involved in dealing. There were a couple of others who seemed to be totally without ties to drugs, even by friends, coworkers, or relatives—but in time, these names would give up their secrets as well. All these killings were tied together, Trask thought.

His confidence was only bolstered by what he learned about Louis Sheves, an unemployed street guy, and a crook—perhaps even a hit man—by the name of Tom Dillon, both of whom had lived on the fringes of organized crime. The more Trask looked at this thing the clearer the picture became. Dope and gangs. Biker thugs cooking up lethal narcotics. Small-time drug guys, and the users/dealers who were their connections. It all fit together like a jigsaw. If the black gangbangers were an offshoot of the big clubs on the West Coast, or in league with the Colombian cartels, the seriousness of the ordnance also was self-explanatory. Either way, they would have access to rifle grenades, bombs, and the sort of individuals who could wield them expertly.

There were some problems in putting this whole bag of disparate parts together. First, he had to keep it absolutely his secret until he was ready to present it, complete and wrapped in pretty ribbon, to the radio station. If anybody found out what he was working on, this would no longer be a Vic Trask project. He'd have lost both his beat and his shot—which he saw as once-in-a-lifetime. Second, he had to go to the cops. If he was right, they had to be told about what he'd found. He thought it was quite possible, however far-fetched others might think it appeared on the surface, that he'd uncovered something the cops hadn't. His desire and his ego were cooking on that high a burner.

First things first: prepare for work. He had to have a presentation that would appear to preoccupy him, a seemingly rich skein of interwoven subjects that did not touch on this subject matter. His "stealables," he called them.

This divided into subsets such as the Factlet stuff. He had a collection of them:

"The Independence, Missourian reports that fifty-seven percent of Americans surveyed would support a tax-funded government program to shelter and care for the homeless." Flynn could almost do a show around such a fact.

"Did you know that when stamps get stuck together by accident you can put them in the freezer for a few hours and they'll usually come unstuck?" He had tons of that kind of stuff. Some of it was of little value, but he was looking for quantity not quality. He wanted bulk for show. And there was wheat with the chaff.

He had some good topics researched. Barb couldn't steal all of them, surely. He had a slant on the ban of rock concerts, and a series of likely booker-interview subjects that began with the Who concert deaths, and ranged from a local ACLU guy to the spokesman for Guns N' Roses—about an incident at a Missouri concert date.

There was a show on local broadcasting that Flynn, and for that matter Trask himself, would get off doing: a lot of data on the station that was being sued in a libel matter, they were appealing a multimillion-dollar judgment; the anchor at "4" who was celebrating twenty-five years on the air—he had a great slant on why he'd turned L.A. down twice; the scandal with the morning team who had talked their newsman into reporting a fake UFO sighting—all kinds of neat interview possibilities.

Then in with the goodies, he'd salted the notes with stories that he hoped Barb would steal. The KPERS show, about an investigation into the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System, an exposé on white-collar crime, an interview with a guy in the Kansas attorney general's office that he knew would semi-suck, a big story on a judge who'd dismissed speeding tickets that was tied to ambiguous outmoded laws and "lost" ordinances, which would be about as much fun to research as gum surgery.

He had a large, graphic presentation that looked so good he thought it would work as a show in spite of having been conceived to be swiped, a thing on the five planes found in formation, wing-to-wing, on the ocean floor, that appeared identical to the famous, missing "Flight 19." All the planes had been Navy Avengers, and one of the numbers on the war planes matched the unit that had lost a squadron in 1945 (a story that hadn't done anything to dispel the "Bermuda Triangle" myth). He'd tied that all into a famous local story about a woman who had proof her husband, an MIA in Vietnam since 1970, had recently been seen. "Missing In Action" had Sean Flynn written all over it—he knew he'd build something with it.

Then there were the pure spikes. Tantalizing show titles he'd simply pulled out of thin air and his imagination:

Fatal Attractions

Up the Academy

So Long, Mr. Farmer

Bounty Hunters—Above the Law?

Closing Costs, the Real Story

High-Tech, Two-Edged Sword of the 21st Century

Closing the Porn Shops

Honorable Men in Politics—Are There Any?

He'd crossed out "Men in Politics" and substituted "Politicians."

Laser Surgery

The New Retirement

Politically Correct, Buzzwords and Censorship

Outsmarting the IRS

Last of the Pioneers

Elvis Imitators—The Dark Side

Back to the Middle East? Post-Victory Questions

Religious Sex

Palimony

The Next Energy Crisis

Payola's Resurgence in the Music Business

Dubious Cures

Dinosaurs

Health Care—"Going Up?"

On and on. He put his stack of "stealables" and related visuals to take to work aside, and concentrated on his real thesis, on American violence. Trask's précis was headed "Causes of Increased Numbers of Violent Crimes." Based on the report prepared in part by the Kansas City Metropolitan Police Department, the Missouri Health Department, and the Department of Justice, its primary elements were listed as follows:

Cause:

Abject poverty, unemployment, lack of hope.

Solution:

Government work programs, communitywide welfare projects targeting the lowest economic strata and the homeless, education about job-finding, education about alcohol, drug, and other substance abuse, more programs for substance abusers.

Cause:

Ghetto slums.

Solution:

Planning of urban housing codes and enlightened federal, state, and city housing authority decision-making, prevention of neighborhood deterioration by stricter enforcement of existing codes, prevention of deterioration by grass-roots citizens groups, formation of neighborhood crime-prevention organizations, more funding for police, more targeting of high-crime areas for patrol by law enforcement agencies, more undercover units in high-crime areas, more crack-house raids, more drug sweeps and streetcorner-dealer-level busts, more gangbanger sweeps, more DEA units.

Cause:

Abuse of children, females, elderly.

Solution:

Education, more enlightened foster parent systems, community programs for abusers and local PSA-campaigns aimed at increasing communication skills among abusers, toll-free "help" hotlines (1-800 numbers), more shelters and shelter guidance, increased funding for counseling.

It looked hopeless when you imagined how much that kind of funding would translate into increased taxes. Perhaps the way to go about it would be to isolate certain areas of vested-interest lobbies—not defense spending, as that was too big a ratings tune-out. But the vested interests now controlled the U.S. Congress. There was an angle there. He wanted the solutions to completely resolve, at least theoretically, the thorny dilemmas which the series of programs on violence would imply if not categorically state.

If Kansas City was under the gun, as he believed, in the midst of a horrible series of homicides orchestrated out of racial hatred, and as retribution against encroachment on a drug mob's territory, what would the white population do? He envisioned a white response, a backlash to the response, and these widening out into all-out racial war. If Trask wasn't very careful about every move he made he could imagine himself touching off a powder keg!

He thought of another swipable note and jotted it down: "The maddening waste, abuse of perqs, and financial mismanagement by the House and Senate—did this earn them each a raise?" Then he decided that wasn't necessarily stealable and put it in a stack of "iffy angles." It had been jarred loose by his thinking on the lobbies, and maybe it belonged in some kind of sidebar to his precis. Trask made another note to go through the "iffy angles" pile and sort out those things that might have some relevance to possible solutions. He made a list of interview subjects: four blacks; an Asian; an Israeli man who was particularly articulate; two whites. He jotted a note for himself to make a "list of suitable Congresspersons worth interv'g."

Trask saw a scrap of note he'd made headed "B.R. Sez Station Bugged." He lifted his phone from the cradle and hit numbers. In a few seconds a young, chirpy woman's voice announced "Z-60" in his ear.

"May I speak with Buzz Reid, please?"

"Buzz Reid?" she said, in the voice operators always use when they're unsure if such a person works there, or in fact exists. "Um—just a moment, please." Another voice came on the line.

"Reid."

"Hey. It's me—Trask."

"You got a cold or somethin'?"

"Somethin'. Hey. About our recent talk. Any chance you could give me another chance to pick your brain about the same topic?"

"I charge."

"Oh-oh. How much? I'm poorfolks."

"At least a cuppa Java."

"Okay. I might be able to scrape that up. Same place?"

"Nah. You at the other place?" He meant the radio station.

"No. Home."

"That's better. You know where the fountains are? The ones we like?"

"You mean—" Trask thought he meant downtown.

"The old tasty fountains," Reid said to him, in the kind of codephrase an old colleague would remember. They had once talked at great length about great fountain sodas "just like they used to make." Only this one small greasy spoon still made them—or so they had agreed.

"Ah! The fountains of our youth."

"That's the place."

"Yeah." It was a few minutes away. "When?"

Reid gave him a time, and Victor Trask thanked him, hung up the phone, and headed for the bathroom. The thought of burgling KCM had loosened his thirty-six-year-old wimpy bowels.

| Go to Table of Contents |

18

Marlon, Illinois

19

Kansas City, Missouri

20

Bobby Price had slept on the floor of a deserted office and woke up stiff in most of his joints, no pun intended. He could not force more than one push-up out of his muscular bod, so gripped he was by a languorous, listless, languid, lovely, lethargic lassitude. He was up on those hard, extended arms, toes erect, frozen in midpush, thinking of lazy words that began with L: lazy, languishing, lambasted, lard-assed, latency. Latent—couldn't that suggest dormant? He was latent. A fucking latent. This lonesome longhorn, this lithe and lank lad was lamentably limp in the lap. Was he a motherfucking latent? Lordy, lordy, lock and load.

The shooter was a neuter, nude and unscrewed, and he had a need to see folks bleed. Bobby Boy had gone bye-bye yesterday evening, and a deliveryman in white coveralls had conned his way into the Kansas City Convention Center, pushing a large, heavy white box (marked FRAGILE) on a dolly. Bullshitting his way in with a big, foxy grin, getting into the building's knickers, finding a floor with nobody home, finding a place that was just the right space.

The deliveryman's costume was on the floor next to the box and the dolly. Hello, dolly, how's your box? He had the case open, his lady screwed together, his tool kit out. He decided to pull his clothes on—the carpet had left his skin with an itchy feel. He needed a hot bath, and a long shower. He felt unclean, and the stink of chemicals from the carpeting was strong in the room. Nanny li'l Bobby don't feel so good today. Tan I stay home fwom school, pwease?

He used the glass cutter and popped a good-size chunk of glass out, with some effort, keeping low and close to the corner. "Red Rock Match Grade Ammunition is available in two classifications of sniper rounds: Super-Hard-on and Anti-Pussy." He forced his mind back into the groove. "Super-Hardened ARmor-penetrating Projectile, High Explosive cartridges." He loaded a SHARP-HEX round into his sweet baby. Eye to the Laco. Careful to keep the tip of the silencer and flash attachment nearly flush with the glass. Far below, he saw a man driving a shiny new car and he blew the fucking thing to kingdom come.

"They consist of an incendiary detonator, a high explosive charge, a super-hard-on tungsten-carbide penetrator…" He snicked the spent shell case out onto the stinking carpet and slid an APEX(X) into her. Eyeballed the Laco. Red Nissan it looked like. Bus. Dizzying pan of vision. Woman in white shirt in front of a self-service gas station pumping her gas. A young girl getting out of her car. Why not? Squeeeeze. Ooh, grue.

Businessman in shirt and tie. Watch him die. Yeah! Reload, Paunchy man in green shirt, blue cap—time for your nap…surprise!

Keep this up all fuckin' day. Man on cherrypicker, two guys beside a truck but they move and spoil the shot. Billboards for the Missouri lottery and the virtues of diesel. Man walking. Squeeze…blood in the trees.

Load and look. Another dizzy arc as he searches for targets. Creme Pontiac Grand-Am. Distant image of a kid on a bike—a good two miles away. He sees a man and woman coming out of a building. Hallmark Greeting Cards, Inc. Imagines them talking about Hallmark signing Shaquille O'Neal of the Orlando Magic; the woman—she's into basketball players, the guy—he writes those sentimental verses inside cards. Roses are red, crosshairs on your head, here comes the lead…now you're dead. Hold still Sam, alakazam…wham, bam! Guts and jam.

To Shooter, at this moment, those who'd warned Columbus of a flat earth were dead right. It was flat, and the end of the world was marked by the horizon line in the far distance. Squinting into the 40X sighting scope, rubbing a sleep cinder from the left corner of his right eye with a thumb, he was amused to feel himself trembling.

The sun had come up the color of blood: a bright red fireball rising in the dark gray beyond the flat edge of the world. Blood red against gray. Far down below him, over a three-and-a-half- to four-mile radius, people were screaming, sobbing, hollering, becoming panic-stricken, telling other people what they'd seen or thought they'd seen, calling the police, calling for the doctor, calling for the nurse, calling for a lady with an alligator purse. But none of this was why he was trembling.

He saw a sign of movement near the locus of his focus and the word lollygag came back into his head after thirty years. He could recall nasty Nanny telling him "not to lollygag." Lollygag? He couldn't spell the fucking thing—but it was another lazy L word. Lollygag!

In Fort Worth, you heard folks talk about how they was gonna "sashay" over to so-and-so. He hadn't heard the word sashay in a hundred years. Sashay, lollygag, traipse. Traipse! There was a dandy. He hadn't traipsed in a coon's age. Traipse? He hadn't traipsed in a month of Sundays. He felt himself jerk, watching for the bright flashes from the mortar tubes. Shit! This was gooder'n sex. But he looked back to rub his eye again and saw all the empty brass on the floor and it snapped him into action.

He took his honey apart and put her back in the fitted case, and began to strap the whole shebang onto the dolly. He was out of there.

21

Victor Trask was supposedly out taping bites for a piece on miscegenation for "Inside America." He was inside his car, taping hallway conversation from a parked car in the eleven-hundred block of Locust, scared all the while he'd be busted and thrown in jail for illegally recording the cops, and getting zip for his chances.

The logistics alone of such a thing were beyond him. He'd not used a voice-activated recorder, so when he couldn't personally monitor he'd had to go back and skim-check hours of random tape, hoping to catch a tiny fish in this enormous sea.

He'd caught nothing but a worse cold, which was now, he thought, settling in as a virulent strain of summer flu. What had he learned? A man—the lieutenant who occupied the bugged office, presumably—had a real hard-on for the Jackson County medical examiner. He was addicted to mixed metaphors. He spent his day on the phone or away from his desk; the long, confidential talks he'd imagined overhearing were nonexistent in this office. What Victor did hear was a bunch of career-related shit about how Sergeant so-and-so should get people to solve their own problems instead of coming to him, and a lot of platitudes about work delegation, keeping options open, prioritizing tasks, and stuff he'd obviously picked up on at a seminar. He kept talking about his "Masters in Advanced Death Investigations," "Project Assignments in Criminalistie Factfinding," and various other subjects that sounded as if they should be in capital letters. He heard nothing about blacks, drugs, serial killings, lab findings, or anything of relevance.

What he finally mined—the lone nugget—came from a headache-inducing monitor of a hallway conversation that he could only halfway hear. It was a maddening thing, like listening to a loud conversation. taking place in an adjacent room where you hear isolated audible phrases but can't make out the overall conversation. A man and woman, not Hilliard, were speaking discursively and a third voice shouted something about a weapon. The word perked up his ears. The chatter moved away from the microphone, and he rewound the tape and listened to it again, not on the tiny earpiece but at full volume on playback, and he was able to discern "…got some more…(INAUDIBLE) how many or anything but it's the same weapon. Estimate the thing has a range of one and three quarter miles and he…" (INAUDIBLE.)

He was too excited to listen further. He turned the engine on, rolled up his windows, and headed back toward the station. He'd gone a couple of blocks—he was very nauseated—and he felt as if his sinuses were so stopped up his head would explode. That was the thought Trask would remember thinking when he saw…someone's…head…explode!

Had he fallen into some terrible time-warp daymare brought out by his worsening flu? The gorge rose in him and he barely got the driver's-side door open in time. There were car horns, trucks honking, and a cab nearly clipped him as he swung to the curb and lurched out onto the sidewalk to be sick again. People were going ape shit. Across the street, they were already converging around a man's headless torso.

He managed to get across the street, his mind racing. Should he phone it in and do a report? That would normally be his reaction—he'd call the news room, record an on-thescene sound bite. He tried to assimilate what he'd seen as he pushed into the swarm of milling onlookers. People were in total confusion, some of them crying, one woman screaming like a banshee. A siren was loud in his stuffed ears. He coughed, almost gagged again, spat into the gutter, blew his nose. He was a mess.

It had been beyond his immediate powers of description. He'd seen the head…just go. Dematerialize! There was no question it was real—awful human matter had left splashes across the storefront behind the man, as well as the sidewalk where his decapitated corpse fell. The shirt, the white shirt the man had been wearing, was now red. The sidewalk was blackish red with his spilled blood.

Trask was wasting time. He stumbled back through the mindless traffic, flung himself into the car and keyed the ignition. He headed back to the station again, violating a "termination clause" contract rule and parking in VIP Sales parking. He burst through the front doors, his face like death warmed over, past Security and the front desk, not waiting for the elevator, taking the stairs two at a time.

He walked into Flynn's reception area, ignoring Jerri Laymon, barging into Flynn's office without so much as a glancing knock.

"I got the big one," Trask blurted out. He was puffing, blowing, winded from his run up the stairs and the brisk jog, nearly exhausted from the flu bug and drained by what he'd just seen. On top of all that, he was almost on the verge of tears. Inexplicably, for a screw-up whose career—such as it was—had become his focus of concentration, Trask had been emotionally twisted by the awful murder he'd just seen. Someone had been killed seconds ago in the most gruesome way and here he was running to cash in on the man's death. Was there nothing to him of any substance? "I've just seen one of the murders take place—not four blocks away." He pointed with a limp finger, working to keep from crashing physically. "I saw a guy get his head blown right off his shoulders—it was the most godawful mess you can imagine…it's a serial killer. He's behind all the mysterious deaths, including the biker-gang homicides and, moreover, I've got you two months of shows backlogged and, well, I'll tell you about those later." He sucked in oxygen. "Right now we gotta get to work on tonight's show. You gotta kill it so we can go with the thing on all the murders. I got it all, the whole nine, chapter and verse. Everything. Deep background with somebody who even knows about the weapon that's doing all these people. Inside cop stuff. I got a thing from a homicide detective who alleges that there are killings the public doesn't know about." Fuck Hilliard. "Coverups. You'll have the exclusive story."

"Excuse me," the Mystery Tramp said in her sultry voice, and Trask turned, annoyed. She was looking at Flynn, who hadn't moved or raised so much as an eyebrow since he burst into the man's office. She held a dainty fist to her ear in the sign for telephone call. "I didn't want to buzz you. It's that call you'd been waiting for."

"Right," Flynn said. "I'm sorry, Vic," he added politely, "I've got to take this. Could you just wait—excuse me for a couple minutes—I'll, uh…just give me two minutes, could you?"

"Sure." Trask went outside and sat in one of the expensive chairs Flynn's "Inside America" guests often waited in. They used Jerri Laymon's office for a kind of "green room" when there was more than a single guest to appear on the show. The chairs were better than what he had in his apartment. He waited for four or five minutes, getting antsy, wondering if VIP Sales would get on his case for parking downstairs. Fuck Sales, he decided. Finally the Mystery Tramp's phone buzzed.

"Okay," she said, "you can go back in."

"Thank you," he said, going back into the office.

"Sorry about that. Now…" Flynn sorted through a pile of notes on his desk. "Here's the deal. I commend you. You get an A for effort, but the problem is—I don't know what you've been doing lately, or how you got on this serial-killer deal, or what went down between you and the cops, but they got a call downstairs from the police. They, in turn, talked to Chase, myself, and Adam David. The investigation is off-limits 'till further notice,' so far as media is concerned. We've promised not to touch it. There was also some concern that you were probing a racial angle that the cops thought could be inflammatory in the community, potentially, and a lot of other stuff about you having overstepped your bounds as a reporter."

"That's bullshit. I did my homework, which is more than the fucking cops did."

"I don't dispute that, Vic. I'm certain you have. But, you know, our hands are tied. You blew it, man. You should have come to me and let me—or Babaloo—or even Adam-work with you to develop a lead and go on the air with it. If you'd done that, we could have put it on the radio first, and if they'd insisted further mentions be deleted, we'd have been forced to comply, naturally. But we'd have had it on. This way, what might have been a scoop—I'm saying, assuming this stuff you've dug up has some basis in fact-would at least have found its way to the air. Now KCM is out of the ballgame. By your playing The Lone Ranger, you see what you've done? You've effectively managed to put a gag order on the people who are paying your salary." Trask was hearing it and not believing it.

"I don't even know how to respond to that. I just saw a fucking murder. I'm sick. I've been working around the clock on all these violence theme shows. I've got a ton of solid research that will win you a fucking Peabody, man, it's so strong—everything tied together with hard facts and interview subjects. Solid gold stuff, Sean. And we've got an eyewitness beat on the worst serial homicide case in Kansas City's history and you're telling me we can't use it?"

"That's it. You've screwed yourself, Vic. You should have done this with the team. You know how we work by the numbers. If it isn't a team effort, it isn't us. That's what you've always done in the past. Why—when you had what might have been a hellacious beat—would you jeopardize all that and go it alone? What was the point?"

"I knew you weren't that happy with what I was producing for you. I had the insight on this great violence piece and everything I turned up fit the conclusions I had reached. I was seeing my stuff get lifted by other staff members."

"You mean Barb—that one fucking story? It was a coincidence, baby. You just got paranoid is all." Flynn's smile was infuriating.

"I may be paranoid, man, but she had every goddamn piece of a story that I'd researched, and it was too many coincidences. I knew damn well she had tapped my phone somehow."

"You've been working too hard or your cold is getting to your head. I mean it. You're just not thinking clearly. Why the hell would Rose tap your phone? Like she doesn't have enough to do with her own assignments? Is your stuff that much hotter than hers? Come on."

"She wouldn't have to tap my phone. Everybody knows—since day one—this place is bugged. I've heard there are mikes in the offices and shit…" He was tired and ill. At this point he just wanted to go home and sleep for two weeks. "I've had engineers tell me that stuff is videotaped, and the phone calls are monitored down in Security. I've always heard that shit."

"Um, Vic…you really believe that? You think I'd work in a place where they tapped their employees' phone lines? Jesus."

"You might not know about it," Trask verbally shrugged in a lame voice. He sneezed and coughed.

"Get Bill Higgins for me," Flynn said into the telephone. "Thanks."

Trask looked down at his shoes. He was really fucking up. The whole thing was becoming too much for him. The buzzing phone sounded like a snake striking. He felt watery inside.

"Hi. Thanks. Yeah—are you real busy at the moment? I want to reassure one of my people—a valued employee who thinks his phone may have been tapped or his office bugged. Could we have some of your time? I appreciate it. Yeah. If you could."

"He's coming up. Just forget all that stuff about Barb, man. She's not out to get you."

"Everybody always said, you know, she and Babaloo…" He let it go. This thing was lost.

"Babaloo is old enough to be her father, for one thing. They're friends. They go way back—from Memphis-they've been a team for a long time. I can assure you they don't have anything going. Not like you're inferring. Vic-what can I tell you?"

There was a brief period when no one spoke. Trask could hear music, talk, ringing phones, faraway conversations, the Mystery Tramp typing. "Hi," he heard.

"Hello." Inspector Higgins of the Yard. Another mustached, receding hairline type. "Hi."

"Hi."

"Bill—Vic has concerns. He feels a phone call may have been bugged. Maybe a mike in his office. He worries about rumors he's heard about KCM having a policy involving the monitoring of conversations—things like that. I thought perhaps you'd set his mind to rest."

"Sure. Do my best." Higgins had such a warm, trustworthy smile. They hadn't exchanged fifteen words in all the time Trask had been with the station, but he instantly liked and trusted the man—suddenly. Perhaps because he seemed so open.

"It's bullshit, I guess," Trask said. Defeated. "I've always heard that—you know—there were hidden mikes."

"Not bullshit at all," Higgins said. "When I came here there were units in all the office intercoms. The general manager back in the old days—I don't have to tell you-had a penchant for eavesdropping. He had it fixed so that all the office intercoms doubled as microphones. In theory, they were always on, and all he had to do was flip a selector switch and he could listen to any office from downstairs. We had all those mikes removed."

"Everybody said—you've heard, I'm sure—that you guys tape everything with the camcorders and stuff…" He was no longer even bothering to form complete sentences so incoherent were his thoughts.

"The camcorders are for your protection. Programs such as Sean's are often controversial or provocative in nature and—even the newscasts—will sometimes be capable of generating a degree of anger in the listener. You know, I'm sure, about the dangerous lunatic fringe of any large audience, be it radio or television or whatever. This is why stations like KCM have to have security staffs. We're not watching you, we're trying to keep you safe. I'd be glad to take you down right now and show you how we operate." All of this in the friendliest, most open manner.

It ended up that Trask, Flynn, and Higgins had to troop downstairs en masse and take the fifty-cent guided tour of Internal Security. Somehow Trask made it through the rest of the afternoon and early evening without collapsing, even if half his time was spent on the throne in the men's potty. By nightfall, he was home—violently ill—and within twelve hours he was getting flu shots, albeit too late. Mercifully, he was dead to the world and missed the next couple of editions of the local papers and the various electronic media newscasts. The news would have only made him sicker as he'd have had to watch others slide the pieces of his jigsaw together for him.

| Go to Table of Contents |

22

Shooter Price, SAVANT in his arms, had managed to escape unscathed. It filled him with self-confidence, to have so easily evaded an attack by an adversary as cunning and deadly as Chaingang. Those fucking shitheels had used his own tracker to locate him. But he had fooled them! He was alive and well, with his incredible weapon and plenty of rounds for her hungry maw, and he would show all of them what payback meant—starting with that fucking hippo.

23

One of the seminar subjects Lieutenant John Llewelyn had recently attentively studied was "How to RePrioritize for Personal Achievement." It was aimed at the kind of mid-echelon-level exec who found that much of his/her workday was occupied in the pursuit of goals and agendas imposed by superiors whose priorities were inevitably perceived as of greater importance than theirs. It was a valuable subset within a course aimed at busy department heads of metropolitan cop shops, but for the life of him he could not find an application to the dilemma that faced his metro squad, supposedly an elite unit within a major enforcement agency.

At 1125 Locust, there were many priorities, but for Llewelyn only one, and it had just been impaled by a rocket from high above in the brassy stratosphere. The goal had-until some twenty minutes before—been the apprehension of a serial killer.

Now…in reality he wasn't sure what the priorities were. Containment? Hardly—with the news of a mass murderer, also a serial killer in the bargain, on every channel and station and front page. Justice? He would have thought so, but twenty minutes ago, in the Homicide Division terminal on-line to D.C., that one had also run screaming into a brick wall.

He had the squad gathered around him, in their conference room, and he looked at the stack of reports in front of him.

"A dozen grenade kills. Thirteen in the shooting and firebombing. Three crucified, mutilated. Six more grenade kills with the long-range weapon. An attempt. A random kill—it looks like. Then Mr. Embry, in back of the parts department at Bonnarella's. Captain Jones, a twenty-nine-year-old guy just back from duty in Kuwait for crissakes. Rick Moore, a kid on the County Road Crew. Miss O'Connell—student. Mr. Beltronena, a forty-four-year-old pastry chef. The goddamn rifle grenades. Here. All in this area—" He pointed to a map sector with a horizontal line in yellow Hi-Liter reaching from the first to the last of the most recent homicides.

"This big son of a bitch is right under our noses here. This is the second fucking time—he's operating within twenty to thirty blocks of headquarters, He's rubbing our noses in it! I think he's trying to make us look like incompetent idiots-this asshole. Why doesn't anybody ever see him? He's big as a goddamn house."

"He gets into his positions at night," Shremp said. "That's the only way he could move around without anybody spotting him."

"So what are we supposed to do?" Hilliard asked. "Put every cop in the city on all-night watch looking for big fat guys with large gun cases?"

"Sure. If we had the manpower, that might be a start," Llewelyn said. "But we don't have the legs. So we'll all work a night tour within forty blocks. Everybody's in the same barrel on this one till he's stopped. We'll divide the city up and watch as much of each section as we can. Looking for big fat guys—or anybody who looks suspicious—and, of course, we can forget the low-lying areas. He needs elevation to use this thing—he can shoot a mile and three quarters and hit you with it, by the way. Let's keep that in mind, too. We all got radios. We'll check in constantly. Sixteen hours out of every twenty-four until we nail him. T.J.—you work something up. Couple hours on, couple off—six on, couple off—that type of staggered schedule. We'll all work a full double shift. Anybody got problems with this?"

"Hell, no," Hilliard said. "We gotta get this bastard."

"What about the bounceback?" Morris asked. He meant on the prints.

"Latent gave us a match-up from The Paseo thing. Shell case—real good partial. Kicked it around through all the usual channels—I get red-flagged." Llewelyn looked down at a piece of printout and licked his lips. Picked it up as if it were on fire and handed it to Morris. "Check that out, Marlin. Ever see that before?"

"Deleted? What the hell does that mean?"

"There it is."

"For what?"

"You tell me, ace. First time I ever ran into that one. I called around, screamed and yelled upstairs. They got on the horn for me and nobody knows jack flash, okay? The killer's I.D.—which somebody, the feds or whoever, has on file, was deleted. Ain't that a beaut?"

"I don't get it," Apodaca said.

"That's right," the lieutenant said.

"Has to be a computer error," Hilliard said.

Llewelyn kept silent.

24

The hillside shooter, driving a rental, is loaded for bear. Polar. A nice fat polar. That fucking uncouth, stinking slob of a heavyweight, heart-gobbling, carnivorous, ursine motherfucker who was contaminating Price's ice—he had something for that big boy. A big, grave-digging antivehicle dumdum with Gangbang's name on it. After all, they were tank killers, right? And Bigfoot—shit, if he wasn't about as big as a tank. Gonna blow his fat mountain of blubbery lard to the sky.

A young girl walked by and Shooter opened his car door, winking at her. He carried his impotence around like a challenge, now, flashing it in the direction of every attractive woman he saw, metaphorically opening his trench coat and showing them his big gun.

She was right behind him. Screwed together and locked tight as young snatch. "To eliminate parallax…loosen her forward end…insert…into, female aperture L5…move the head in slight increments…" She waited in the back seat, waited for him to take her from beneath the covers.

"Hi."

"Howyadoon." A college-age boy. Shooter glanced around. He liked this hillside.

"SAVANT accessories include case cover, ammunition case, shooting gloves, entrenching and hide-excavation tools. Hole-digger, awl, spade, posthole tool, shovel, axe, pick, hatchet, lopper, saw, hammer, nails, wire pliers/grips, lumber, metal supports, sandbag, net, tarp with grommets, canvas sheet, paint, brushes, ladder, drainage tubing, auger, detection monitor, synced auto-pager, radio transceiver, auto-destruct…"

He was crazy as a fucking loon and he'd switched himself to auto-destruct.

"Hi," he said, friendly as hell. More passing trim.

"Hi." She smiled, and her pretty mouth made a phony curve. He would wipe that shit right off her face, he decided. Teach you to smile at me. This lady is a jealous bitch, he whispered to no one, reaching under the canvas cover for the weapon.

The second he touched her, that was all it took. He was instantly hot.

The smiling phony's back might as well have had a bull's-eye painted on it.

The master's touch. He glances around carefully—not that he really cares who sees him—out of long professional habit. He is alone with his lady and a primary target. He wonders if he should see if he could just graze the skull with that antivehicle round in his lady. Mercy!

Touch her. Feel her skin. Slick and hard. Smooth and where one's hand curves she curves, a tough familiar coolness that will grow warm with the pressure of flesh.

Rest the cheek just so. There is no doubt of her sexuality when one's face is pressed so close. She reeks of animal lust and controlled power. The cheek and jaw mold to her, and there is the pleasurable familiarity present with any pair of old lovers. Everything fits perfectly and feels so right to the touch.

She is without morals. She makes no judgments. Renders no decisions. Casts no jaundiced eye. She takes all comers without preconception, partiality, bigotry, bias, or subjective discrimination. She is, after all, the ultimate kind of whore, What she gives she offers to all equally. Her dark hole is always open.

Yet, conversely, the bitch is capable of the harshest, most deleterious, incapacitating, and destructive urges. She will lash out with incredible hostility, striking with nothing less than the most extreme prejudice.

He huddles close, warming her. Touching her in the most intimate ways.

Her unblinking gaze is stern and sharp. He sees as she sees, and her vision—as with everything else about her—is perfect. Nothing escapes her sight.

There is a special place underneath her where she begs to be touched. He cups her smoothness, the fingers resting near the spot that sets her loose. He does not trifle with her as she brooks no capriciousness or teasing. If his desires are genuine, however, she will know, and sensing his sincerity all it will take is a gentle, even pressure.

Without preamble she will explode at the touch, and she gets off with a bang. There is no feeling of raw power quite like it: the rush one feels as a mighty shudder blasts through her long, sleek body. The master's pleasing caress sets the beautiful bitch loose once again.

25

Trask supposed that it was pointless to continue working on the notes about American violence, considering that he had no outlet for the research. But at this juncture it was as much momentum as anything that had kept him working on the story—if indeed it was a story. He was too logy to begin looking for another job yet, and he couldn't sit around watching television, so immersing himself in the homicides was a harmless obsession, he felt. He was razoring clippings and assembling his voluminous notes chronologically when a knock surprised him.

"Hey," he said through the opening in the door, astonished to see the attractive face of Barb Rose, of all people.

"Hi. Any chance I could talk to you for a second?"

"Yeah. Come on in." Why the hell not? He opened the door wide and ushered her in.

"Thanks. Feeling about the same?"

"Pretty much. I'm a little better. I don't get many colds or flu bugs but when I do…they take forever to shake. Have a seat." He pointed to the only available place besides his own chair where he was working, and was suddenly conscious of all the clippings and work-ups adorning his apartment walls. No reason to hide them now, he supposed.

"I'm not going to stay, hon. I just—" She held out a small bag. "Brought you something for your cold. Go ahead and have some while it's still warm."

"Thanks." He almost said—jokingly—what is it, a cup of hemlock? But he sat it on the little bar between the kitchen and living area and took the lid off the container. "Ahh! Smells good." Yellow thick broth of some kind.

"Chicken soup," she said, with a smile. "Fix you right up. I thought you might need some." She was rather self-conscious all of a sudden, and moved toward the door. "I'm going, Vic. I just wanted to tell you I heard about you leaving and stuff and wanted to say goodbye."

"Come on. Stay for a little while. Sit. If you don't mind the mess—and aren't afraid I'll give you whatever I've got. I'd appreciate the company." He meant it, surprising himself as he said it. Every time he was able to think clearly, he could see more and more what a total horse's ass he'd been. He thought he'd been particularly shitty about Barb.

"Okay. But just for a minute." She sat on the edge of the sofa. "I'll stay to make sure you eat that." She laughed warmly.

"Right." He got a spoon and tried some. "Umm. That's very good."

"We Jews are great believers in the healing properties of some good hot chick' n soup!" She gave the word a comedic emphasis. Trask took a few more spoonfuls. Tried not to slurp, but it was difficult. "This stuff is delicious." The more soup he ate the better Barb Rose looked to him. "I gotta say something to you before you leave. And not just because you brought me chick' n soup. I've been a real asshole. Toward you."

"You're right. What can I say?" She had a beautiful smile.

"Don't cover up your feelings like that, Barb. You gotta learn to say what you really think." They both laughed. "But I know I have. I can't explain it. I…"

"That's the past. Forget it. I wasn't always such an easy person to work with. We're a lot alike. Very competitive."

"Yeah. That's for sure. I haven't been thinking clearly…about a lot of things, of which—of whom—you were one. Anyway—hope you'll accept my apology."

"Not necessary. I thought you got a real bum deal at the station, by the way. Not that my opinion is worth anything. I suppose you know I'm leaving?"

"No. Leaving KCM?"

"Yep. Gave my notice a few days ago."

"I hadn't heard. May I ask where you're going?"

"New York."

"New York?"

"CNBC."

"All right! Congratulations. That's great."

"I'm pretty excited."

"You should be." He was happy for her. "That's wonderful, Barb. I'm jealous. How the hell did you get that—not that you're not good at what you do—but wow! New York!"

"It was weird. A guy we worked with in Memphis went out to the Coast. His specialty is business and entertainment news. And CNBC just hired him to create a new department and he called me."

"That's terrific. I'll bet Babaloo is grief-stricken!"

"Babaloo is Babaloo. He had the gig filled by the time I was out of his office. Ditto with yours. He knows a million young writers and broadcasters just crying to crack a market like Kansas City, so it's pretty easy. Even with the crappy money KCM pays." She gestured around the apartment. "I like your wallpaper. Who's your decorator—the Kansas City Star?"

"Yeah." He laughed. "I'm still wound up on this story and I can't stop. I don't have anywhere to go with it but—what the hell. Gives me something to do besides worry about what to put on my résumés."

She nodded. Got up from the sofa and eyed her watch. "Gotta run, kid. Let me know when you land somewhere. Okay?"

"Sure. I don't—I haven't even begun to think about a gig. But I can always get a thing reading news at a little station somewhere. You know—just to put beans on the table. I may not be in too big a hurry to relocate. I've been wanting to write for a long time—and I might try that while I've got the free time."

"Let's keep in touch," she said.

"I'd like that. Really." He moved around the counter and reached out to give her a friendly pat. She leaned in to the side of his cheek, making him wish that he'd shaved.

"I won't give you a real kiss because I don't want the flu," she said, smacking air. "But—bye, hon. Take care and get well."

"Don't be surprised if you get a phone call from me one day. Okay?"

"Okay," she said. He opened the door for her and she went out. "Have fun," she added, in the old-time radio lingo for goodbye.

"Likewise." He'd never really let himself think about how well-built this woman was. Barbra Rozitsky was a looker. He felt better than he'd felt in a week. "Kill'em in the Big Apple," he said to her departing back, and she smiled and waved.

He closed the door and finished his soup. Then he looked up a telephone number in the Rolodex on his desk, and pressed the buttons on his phone. After a few moments, a man's voice said hello.

"Hello. May I speak to Kit please?"

"May I tell her who's calling?"

"Her father," he said.

| Go to Table of Contents |

26

Death is alone. An impossible monster. A hybrid killer with a core as inhuman and beastly as can be conceived. Like an inexplicable strain of pathogenic bacteria, the core continues to evolve almost independent of the host being.

Death's thoughts are of food—burritos at the moment. But on other levels, its dark, poisonous, ectogenous malignancy continues to feed on information and remembered pain and pleasure, changing, growing, spreading within the vast host body. As it feeds and evolves it strengthens.

Death feels the changes and vibrates with the power. Hums with the virulent malignity that makes it stronger, more noxious and fatally toxic, more impervious to antidote.

Beneath the part that hungers for beef and cheese burritos by the bagful, visceromotor-nerve response quickens, sensations heighten, systems accelerate as they electrify and zap the phrenic controls.

Beneath the surface of the beast, there are the tiny paroxysms of microelemental transmutation that Dr. Norman would have given his eyeteeth to understand. With each quivering electrocharge there occurs down inside the core another subtle transformation.

Beneath the skin of the monstrous anomaly that the doctor persists in calling a physical precognate, the godless and godforsaken macrogrossness mutates. Modifies. Powertrips. Nurtures.

The mutating giant was born for the stalk. Its repulsive goals are abhorrently simple: vengeance and annihilation.

On its back, inert, it thinks of burritos, and of death-dealing. Its pleasant daydreams are of those upon whom he'll feed. The other food—that is a mundane biological need that intrudes on his deeper motives.

A massive mound of man sprawled on a filthy camouflage tarp, he turns the pages of Utility Escapes, seeing the name of the cruel stable owner, the daughter of a man who performs certain lab experiments, the father of the boys who killed the animals in the petting zoo, the man who joked of bleeding hearts, the buyer, the clown who keeps creatures in his trailer, the freaks he will ultimately find and dissect.

Look inside the wrinkled obscenity that is his mind: you will see a landscape so alien that it will shock you. What do you recall from the age of seven? Think back. Memories of Daddy? Begrimed in oily dirt, toiling in the garage, as you watch from the safe haven of Mommy's lap? Remember your sixth year? Watching Aunt and beloved Granny planting hollyhocks, Grandmother amid the larkspur? Can you conjure up a vague remembrance of age five? Perhaps you were alone in your crib and you made a noise with your mouth. Mommy and Daddy rush in to confront the early whistler. "It's baby!" Mother says. "He whistled!"

Look inside at the beast's first memory: darkness. Warm, soft, liquid darkness. Heat. Critical mass. Pain. An explosive force. Jarring shock. Sudden light. Dazzling, shattering, soul-rending brightness.

What can you ever hope to understand about such a being? From his first memory there is only pain.

He recalls the roar of madness and noise, the inundation of horror, the whiplash of overpowering reality, and he remembers being torn, thrust from his mother into the blazing world, ripped from a dark and warm womb of a screaming woman.

He remembers soaring aloft in the inescapable clutches of a powerful giant who holds him like a dragon, in long slimy claws, soaring into the blinding sky in a sudden nightmare of birthing cataclysm. Pictures the red deluge. The violent, concussive beginning in bright light as he was wrenched from the hot current of his mother's blood.

He can go back to the beginning but he chooses not to do so. Superior Court of Kansas…in the matter of setting aside the adoption of Daniel…vague fuzz of details blur. Mommy—dead at birth? An adoption that fails to take. A foster mother who says the baby must be disciplined The word inches across his mindscreen as he gazes, unseeing, at the pages of his Bible.

Around the word disciplined the edges are seared, blackened, where the child was subjected to the intense heat of a stove burner, cigarettes, matches, lighters, soldering iron—oh, the list is long and memorable. And those are his good memories. He has had enough of this. He has mutated to the power edge. Chaingang is up and moving to the Buick, which he has come to rather appreciate, now that he's made his peace with the seat controls. It is close enough to the hotsheets to make him continually wary, but when he first went back and moved his Olds from the parking lot of the mall, he affixed homemade plates to the Buick, which effectively protect it from the casual "wants and warrants" DMV check, or from the zealous officer or trooper who matches it to a recent sheet.

The assembly of a fake tag is remarkably simple—child's play, in fact, so long as you have the regional prefix key codes, which are changed each license-renewal period. Once the codes are known, fabrication of a plate is a few minutes handiwork. The easiest way to buy a couple of days' time with a spurious tag is to find a matching model in the area in which you wish to operate, fake their tag, and replace their plates with the fakes, putting theirs on your vehicle. And Chaingang knew a hundred more sophisticated variations on that theme.

But for all of that, he was sure that within twenty-four hours he'd be in another ride. The thing that watched over him kept him, in most instances, from taking imprudent chances.

The Buick cruises on a jagged northeast course, the Missouri River to the north, the Kansas City Stockyards a distant stench to the northwest.

Madison.

Belleview. H 11.

Tarkio. H 12.

Holly

Mersington. H 13.

Overpass.

Viaduct.

Hard eyes scan the rooftop vantage points. He sees a complex of industrial buildings that tug at him. At such times he is wide open to the inner clockwork that ticks within the nervous system, and he stops the car. Pulls his poundage from behind the wheel with a grunt of effort and scans.

The rooftops would be ideal for a sniper. A weapon with an effective range of two miles could smash down monkey men from Kansas to Missouri in an are of gunfire. His face beams at the pleasant contemplation of an unimpeded, wide swath of death cutting down the monkeys. He sees a beauty parlor—talk about bizarre misnomers, a dog kennel from the sound of the barking, an arts 'n' crafts store which appears to be closed. No sense of danger, but he is tugged forward and goes with it, moving closer.

There must be fifty or sixty dogs barking. Yet he sees no kennel signs.

Chaingang walks around the building. Sees what appears to be a private residential entrance to the building. It is a small, stale-smelling entranceway. There are wooden stairs. The loud barking of dogs is coming from behind the door to the right. He knocks—the gentle tap of a sledgehammer-size fist—more out of curiosity and irritation than anything else.

"Whatever it is we don't wa—" The man, more effeminate than Tommy Norville could have ever hoped to be, yet oddly macho in his demeanor, was taken aback. He looked up at Bunkowski's size and regained his composure instantly. "What is it?" he snapped.

"I was looking for a place to board my little pup. Is this a private kennel?"

"It most certainly is not."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I heard the barking and thought—" The man was starting to push the chipped wooden door closed and Chaingang slapped the door with the flat of his hand. It ricocheted off the man's chest, knocking him backward into the room.

"You bastard!" the man shrieked, charging at his huge adversary.

"Stop," Bunkowski commanded, giving him a firm backfist in the face, but pulling it so as not to hurt him badly. Had Chaingang known what he was about to find, he would have broken his spine in half instead of trying to be easy on the fellow. But at the moment he had gained entry, he was still thinking the occupant might be an individual who cared for animals. This was sufficient cause to spare a monkey's life, in Chaingang's twisted world.

The hard fist only made the man mad, and he came at him again, scratching, kicking, a whirlwind of hands clawing and striking out, cursing the intruder: "Fat fucking shit ass bitch pig fucking cocksucker—" Chaingang simply pinioned him in a pair of arms that were meant to do only one thing: crush.

He held the man immobile, one hand over his mouth and nose until it would kill him to continue to do so. He dropped the man, who weighed perhaps 225 pounds, in a limp pile, and as he fought to stay conscious, Chaingang bound his wrists with a cord from his pocket, did the ankles with a nearby extension cord, and—as soon as the fellow had stopped blowing like a whale—gagged him with a shirt found on a nearby chair.

He was immediately aware of the stench, which had been overpowering the moment he burst in, but which was now so stingingly potent as to put him on guard as he moved toward the barking.

There is no smell quite so overpowering as that of sewage, and on more than one occasion he had opted to live down below the streets in various sewers and catch basins. Second only to the raw poisonous odor of concentrated sewage, the stench in the next room was the worst in his experience, as was what he faced.

It was true that perhaps sixty dogs were barking. But there were well over a hundred in the pen. The sight hammered his heart as badly as anything in his adult memory—even worse than the children he'd come upon in Hong Kong that time, or the animals the clown kept in the trailer. This was instantly worse and closed off a part of his mind.

THEY

WERE

IN

A

BABY'S

PLAY

PEN.

OVER

100

STARVING

OR

DEAD

AND

OR

ABUSED

ANIMALS

SQUEEZED

TOGETHER

IN

THEIR

OWN FILTH.

He did not know what to do could not think had ever had such an experience was not prepared could not force his mind back into operation did not know what he was seeing did not understand could not would not did not should not.

Before he could think he was, back in kicking the bound faggot like a big football, 15EEEEE kicks low on the legs so as not to kill him, oofing noises escaping the gag, forcing himself to move back, rip the sides open, forcing his mind to deal with it. They were packed in slimy shit. Dead ones. Live ones. Collected from the streets, he supposed. Should he feed and water them first? He walked around through the barking puppies and dead bodies and newspaper—the fucking shit slime monkey dick-sucking faggot had fed them strips of newspaper.

Newspaper.

He realized he was spinning in circles. Mad as he'd ever known himself to be. He'd kill any human he saw this second—anyone. Went in and pulled the wrists and ankles into a severe hogtie, yanked the gag, pinching the throat in case he screamed.

"Where's the dog food in this hovel, you piece of scum shitass queer aw fuck—" He got a handful of shit and newspaper scrap and shoved it into the bound man's mouth.

"Newspaper! You son of a bitch, I want your skin, your slimy hide up on these fucking walls."He had to force it down and concentrate now. Fifty-seven alive. Opening food. Not enough food. Water in dishes, trays, cups, anything that would hold liquid. Clusters of small wiggling things all over the floor, underfoot. Barking—some of them still afraid or too hurt or ill to eat. Some not able to drink water. All of the animals still alive were badly dehydrated.

He began looking for containers. More food that small puppies would find edible. He found a dead mother dog and starved litter. Wanted to go back and hurt the man but couldn't yet. Was afraid to. Not yet. He had to fight to remember to breathe. Chaingang Bunkowski—in over forty years—had never been so totally confused.

He could speak, function, deal with it. He went out to the Buick and got his duffel and returned. Sorting for things he could use. Fifty-seven alive. Nine near death. Syringe. Lethal injections—as humane as any way to put them to sleep, he hoped. Forty-six dogs? Forty-eight? He'd lost count. He let them try to eat and drink as best they could, did a bit of sorting, put a few of the weaker ones in the bathroom where the others wouldn't bother them. Walked around trying to decide what to do next. Ended up figuring out how he would handle the killing of the man. Decided to learn why he'd done this. Tried to find some clue to motivation before he interrogated him.

He put together a picture of a man named John Esteban. Bisexual. Had an odd assortment of muscle mags and porn. Body-builder crap. Kid vid. Freak stuff with animals. There were homemade videos, too, but he could not bring himself to view them.

The beast returned to the bound-and-gagged man and pulled him upright, carried him into the bedroom.

Went back and gathered boxes of dogs up and sorted them according to category—apparently able to recover, in urgent need of a vet, and seemingly frisky. The Buick stunk like an exploded outhouse when he'd finished packing them into the car.

"I'll just be a minute or two. We'll attend to you. Be good boys and girls," he told them in a cracked voice, all the doors of the car wide open. He was oblivious to passersby. In fact, at that second he gave a shit for little or nothing. Mercifully, he saw no one in the street. He walked back inside.

He put the man on his stomach, tethered to the four corners of the bed with cords. Pulled the gag away for a moment with a hand which looked like a large human hand but which had the power of pliers or vise grips. Out of sight was a coiled length of wire and another object.

"Hello," he said softly in his rumbling basso. "I fed your dogs. I gave them some stuff out of the fridge. I couldn't find any scraps of newspaper to feed, them."

"You listen to me, you—"

"Oh, my. Oh, my, Mr. Esteban. I don't suggest you speak again unless I ask you to do so," Chaingang said in the quietest voice with which he was capable of speaking.

"Gravida—that's what I'm going to call you. Our pet name." He cooed. "Gravida, be a good girl and tell Daniel why you put all those dogs in the pen and gave them only pieces of paper to eat. Do that for me, Gravida, Why? Try to make me understand."

"Fuck you, cocksu—"

"I see. All right, Gravida. Perhaps you're not in the mood for an intimate conversation at this time. You might prefer sex. Eh? Is that it? Would you like some physical intimacy?" He did something and the gag was reaffixed.

"I wish you'd speak with me first. I know you must have some reason for starving all those helpless little puppies but, frankly, I'm not feeling too well myself. I just want you to know, before we have a little sex together, how much I hate you. If I had more time—if I didn't have other pieces of monkey shit to deal with—I'd take you out and peel you, kill you inch by inch, keep you alive for days, but…"

Chaingang could hardly breathe. He had to get out of there. This was a luxury he could not afford.

"I see from your pictures and things you're into buttfucking, eh? So that's the way we'll go, Miss Gravida." The man felt something large and hard inserted in his rectum. "My goodness, we're large back there. You're a real donut, aren't you? Do you know what's inside you now?" The man on the bed squirmed and moaned.

"Obviously, you're really into it. Ready for your last orgasm? Good. I think you'll find this a genuinely moving experience."

He forced another deep breath. Uncoiled the end of the wire out the door, pulled the thing as hard as he could and flattened against the outside wall as the concussive blast from the last grenade—the frag up John Esteban's butt-got his ass off for the last time.

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27

Trask finally kicked his cold, but his chronic stupidity-that he hadn't kicked. It was crazy, but he was still locked into this story that had cost him his gig at KCM, and that was continuing to threaten him with a jail cell. Once again, he was in his ride, parked near the police headquarters, monitoring that damned hidden mike. He'd told himself the reason was that he was going to get up the nerve to go in and get it—but deep inside he knew there was no way. He wasn't really waiting to see Hilliard, or some other cop he knew by name, leave the building so that he could go up to the metro-squad room and ask if they were in, using that as an excuse to be in the building. He was here because he was drawn by that damned bug—he wanted to know what was going on in a case that had become an obsession.

28

"Mr. Conway," the veterinarian explained to the tall, heavyset man, "we'll certainly do our best. But what do you want us to do if in a reasonable time we can't find good homes for all of the dogs?"

"How much would you want to continue to board them, say, for a year? If you couldn't find homes for them?"

"Just the cost of the dog food, I suppose. We could donate the care and feeding." The vet had been carefully selected by Daniel, who had tried to find someone who genuinely cared about animals. His sense of it was that the puppies would do as well here as anywhere, until homes could be found. This was the second vet who'd taken twenty dogs. He'd told them they'd been rescued from the Rutledge, Missouri, Animal Auction, which was a notorious marketplace frequented by "dog bunchers," who specialized in selling large numbers of animals to medical laboratories.

The care for these forty mutts had severely depleted Chaingang's war treasury, but it was of no consequence. He found money absurdly easy to acquire and of no interest in itself. After paying for a warehouse full of dog food and medicine, and impressing the vets with the fact that he'd eventually be returning for an accounting of the animals' welfare, he proceeded to drive back into Kansas, and found himself once again on the dreaded Bunker of his childhood.

He'd removed forty-nine starving, dehydrated pups from Mr. Esteban's home. Three hadn't survived. Forty were in good hands. But he hadn't found other vets he trusted sufficiently to use—and his bullshit detector was second to none. Six dogs cavorted in the back seat of the Buick. He parked, opened the windows so that there'd be ample air for the puppies, and reached back into the furry tangle of wiggly bodies, selecting one, tucking it into his voluminous shirt and starting up the stairs.

Had someone been watching him—this behemoth making his way up the rickety stairs of the crumbling tenement—they'd have seen him apparently talking to himself. He was reassuring the little dog.

He knocked and heard an old woman's frightened voice. "Who is it?"

"It's me. The man who gave you money—remember?" he asked, rather unnecessarily. After a few moments, he heard her unchain the pathetic thing that held the door.

"Um?" She was less than overjoyed to see this nightmare, money notwithstanding.

"I wanted to stop and see how you were doing. Did those boys bother you any more?"

"No," She thought for a moment. "They never came back."

"I don't think they'll bother you again. I brought you a present. To replace your cat." He reached inside his shirt and got out something brown and wiggly, which he handed to her. The old woman took it like it was a lit firecracker, but smiled when she saw what it was.

"Oh! A little dog."

"You like dogs?"

"Uh-huh." It apparently liked her as it was giving her kisses on her wrinkled, veiny hands. "But I can't afford to buy dog food."

"That's all right." He pulled two cans from his voluminous pockets, and then handed her some money. "This will buy lots of food for you and your new pet. Don't forget to give him water and plenty of affection." Doctor Bunkowski found a dirty dish and put water in it, and spread a newspaper down. The old woman was petting the dog, somewhat dutifully, but he was certain they'd become fast friends.

"Thank you," she said, as he turned to leave. "Um. Wait." He turned back to her. "You asked about that lady who lived here. I asked my friend about her. She said she knows where she lives now."

"Mrs. Garbella?" he asked.

"I wrote it down somewhere." She went over to an old table and sorted through things for what seemed like an eternity. "Here it is." She held a scrap of paper out to him in her frail hand. The dog had found an old shoe and was busily chewing it to shreds.

He couldn't read her scrawl and made her decipher it for him. He mentally noted it and told her he appreciated it.

"Thanks for getting that for me." It was by far the longest, most uncharacteristic, and seemingly normal sequences of conversations—with the vets and this old hag—that he'd had in years. It made him think of the time they'd drugged him and freed him from prison, and he'd gone around acting like a monkey. It pissed him off totally.

He stomped out of the building ready to kick someone's ass to the fucking max.

The dogs were going nuts by the time he got the car started again. This was all he needed-he was busy trying to kill a professional assassin and he had five fucking dogs on his hands! Completely intolerable.

He forced everything out of his mind for the moment, concentrating on finding Mrs. Garbella. Within ten minutes he'd found the address the old woman had obtained for him—it was an empty lot full of rubble. It looked like a place where a building had burned to the ground in recent years. It was precisely what he'd expected—nothing. He shrugged and headed for his hideaway. He had to get rid of these dogs. Tighten up. Regroup. Get his shit together.

That night he fed and watered the dogs and gathered them around him in the small stone enclosure, telling them all the bad things were over. He told them about the bad man, and how he was gone now, and how some of their brothers and sisters—the ones he'd tried to feed with an eyedropper—had gone to sleep. Huge hands that had killed many hundreds of times cuddled and stroked the five little dogs.

He shared his body heat with them under the massive tarp, willing himself not to roll over on them by accident while he slept.

He dreamed of the crucifixion and his mindscreen conjured up images of recent cross killings in the Persian Gulf, Mexico, Central and South America; most of them were torture killings with political overtones. He dreamed of Dr. Norman.

"I know many things, Dr. Norman. Chemistry, math, the general sciences. I know of the medical conclusions reached by your colleagues in the Reich Phylogeny College during World War Two: that the cause of death from a crucifixion is suffocation, since one cannot exhale sufficiently when the arms are held up for long periods, and the facility of expelling carbon dioxide from the lungs becomes impaired.

"I know that to crucify properly one should employ expedients such as driving a wooden peg into the upright, so that some of the body weight is taken between the legs. Nailing the feet to the upright also supports the body and prolongs the suffering. Would you like to learn more about this subject, Dr. Norman?"

The enormous figure under the tarp, five tiny dogs packed in around him, smiles in his sleep. He begins snoring like a couple of chainsaws, which momentarily frightens the pups, but they settle back in around his falling and rising mound of belly.

He dreams of eradication, escape, and survival. In a vision black as the darkest midnight, he pictures a white, virgin piece of paper—blemishless white, smoother than the surface of a lake of milk.

Inside the whiteness, it is hot. Burning white fire. An incandescence of white hot vengeance scorches the raw borders of the dream.

Heat envelops him in a sphere of perfect, infinite white fire. The beast punctures it with the sharp edge of his imagination, and the white, milky balloon bursts, as he allows the blackness of his dark thoughts to fill the sphere, cooling it with its inky liquidity. A stream of black fills the round whiteness of the mental image as the ebb of black water would rise in a tub of perfect white, rising as it cools upon touch, and the curve of the black is an essence that stills his beating heart and slows each loud, deep, ragged breath from his mighty lungs.

The snores abate. A subtle change in his rhythms begins. There is an imperceptible and inexplicable slowing of his life force. Slower, the measured thu-bump, thu-bump of his heart beats slower, as he wills, slows, wills the strong pulse down to a crawl.

Willing his heartbeat and respiratory system to slow, becoming a silent, still, invulnerable mass. Efficient. Ruthless. Precise. The breathing so slow and measured.

He waits now for the red mist to come, and dreams of the taste of another fresh human heart.

29

Trask finished reading the news account that blamed the spate of Kansas City homicides on a pair of killers, a man described as a renegade sniper, an "ex-mercenary" named Robert Price, and the legendary mass murderer and serial killer, Chaingang Bunkowski, who authorities claimed had escaped from federal prison. It was quite a scandal, and Trask wished he could have been part of the team that finally broke it in the press. He read about the terrible long-range weapon called SHERFSAVANT, and the cache of unique ammunition that had been found. It was some ending to the violence piece, if he'd only had a show to produce it for.

He turned the radio on and heard his ex-boss ask a guest, "Why is there so much violence in America today? And what can we do about it?"

"I'll tell you one thing—we better get serious about putting the crooks and rapists and killers in prisons that can hold them. We coddle them too much. If somebody rapes a child, for instance, they oughtta be castrated, or if it's a woman—you know—something else like that."

"Go back to an eye for an eye?"

"Well—"

"There's no proof that deters crime."

"Lock 'em up then for life and make sure they can't break out. Make the prisons better."

"Who's gonna pay for all these better, bigger prisons? You and I? The taxpayer? You really want to pay, for some more prisons?"

"I'll pay for my share if they take away the damn TVs and the privileges. Make prison tough again. And stop worrying about overcrowded prisons. Stack 'em. in there like cord wood. Why worry about being so humane to animals who rape and molest and murder? Worry, about the victims for a change…" Trask turned the radio off.

All heat and no light.

The room was still papered in notes. He looked at the chronological summary of the violence material. It was as thick as a book. He pictured Sean Flynn at the mike. Listening to himself inside the old pair of Stanton Dynaphase Forty cans he always wore on the air, big vinyl, chrome, and blue steel headphones, plugged into the air monitor. A researcher—probably some kid fresh from Tennessee—and Babaloo would be in there making notes to slip to him. The idea of going back to radio was a repugnant one. He'd had his share of radio.

Trask picked up the story about the sniper weapon and the serial homicides and thought out loud: "I wonder if I could get a book out of this?"

It wouldn't cost anything to try. God knows he had the research already done. Not to mention the dubious distinction of his nightmarish experience as an eyewitness to a kill.

He took some paper and put it in his machine and typed "THE SHOOTER" by Victor Trask. Changed his mind. Pulled it out and inserted a new sheet of paper, typing a fresh title page: