Butcher (28 page)

“May I help you?” Mrs. Schecter asked in the frosty tone she reserved for people who came in looking to use the bathroom and so on. No response. The thing was lumbering through the store, seemingly oblivious to her,
touching
the garments as he moved by the clothing racks, leaving his scent everywhere. He was like a steer or bull or something, an animal that had wandered in off the street. A rank stench, not of sewers, but an equally sulfurous and deadly toxicity of unthinkable body odor assaulted her patrician nose. “Are you looking for something?"

He pulled apparel off racks. Anything that looked big enough. He was trying things on before she could stop him. This monstrosity of a blubber gut in a filthy T-shirt with ... was that
blood
on it?

Ryan Sneeden sensed, perhaps smelled, something foul and came out blinking, a curly headed little boy of a young man in his mid twenties, a big fake stewardess smile in place. “Hi. How you doing today?” Neither he nor Mrs. Schecter had ever seen a creature such as this in the store, nor had they been ignored in so rude a manner. Sneeden found it quite distasteful and went back in his office, shutting and locking the door.

The intruder had a pair of bib overalls that looked like about a size fifty-eight. A pair of XXXXXL jeans that appeared to be about six feet across the ass. T-shirts. A belt made from the entire length of a large dead cow. He plopped them up on the counter, frightening Mrs. Schecter half to death. She didn't know whether to ask would there be anything else, would it be cash or charge, or please go away and permit me to inhale. The beastly stink was quite unbearable up close.

Chaingang's black marbles cross-haired the woman behind the counter for the first time, an old douchebag about fifty-something with dark hair bifurcated by a silver-white streak. It made her look like a cartoon skunk to him; Porky Pig's skunk woman. She was wearing an expensive red dress, weighed a fast ninety-five pounds, and was really a rather decent-looking old bitch, he decided. The glint of gold and diamonds against her out-of-season tan winked at his good eye. He was usually uninterested in such things, but he needed to resupply and his mindscreen was planning for certain contingencies that might require a hefty bit of barter material.

He went back and selected a suit, an act that in itself was something to see, as he pulled on a four-hundred-dollar banker's gray job and admired himself in one of the three-way mirrors: suitcoat over damp fatigues and slaughterhouse T-shirt. He looked like the drummer in a punk-rock house band at an institution for the criminally insane. He found a couple of shirts with broad stripes, a tie with bright stars, perhaps five feet long, and some underpants to see him through the perilous night. Deposited all of this on the counter with his other purchases and let Skunkie sack it up for him in a nice, tasteful container.

“How do you wish to pay? Cash or charge?” she intoned, trying not to breathe any more than necessary.

He eyed the street and the rest of the store in the shoplifting security mirrors, as he pulled out a disreputable hunk of moist cash.

“Do you have somewhere I could make wee-wee?” he asked, his bass voice rumbling like a Hammond organ in the enclosure. His breath was as potently malodorous as the rest of him, and she blinked in disgust.

“I beg your pardon?"

“Wee-wee. You know,” he said, having a bit of fun with her, “drain the old liz.” He cupped his package.

She didn't find off-color behavior amusing in the least, and let him know with her stare, which had withered many a man. Oh, the clientele they sometimes had to put up with. Fortunately most of the chubbies who came in were, well, gentlemen at least.

“We don't have public facilities,” she said, a stern frown drawing down the corners of her mouth.

“
Do you
ever wee-wee or has that old hole of yours dried up completely?” he whispered, something snaking out of his right hand and shutting off all the sights and sounds and smells in her little world.

Skunkie dropped back against some XXXL turtlenecks like a steer getting kissed with the bolt gun. Even before she quit twitching, he was waddling back to the office where the young chap had run to hide earlier.

His odd brain was working a mile a minute as he moved quickly around the leather wing chairs and dressing mirrors. A fist the size of a twenty-two-pound cannonball knocked once on the door and Ryan Sneeden jumped up.

“Yes?"

“Fellatio you look at this cranmus of mine for a sexer? The lady up front didn't fress to change, so I was hoping that you could.” He heard the fellow fumble with the lock and saw the door open. Chaingang's face was contorted into his parody of a human smile.

“Just doing my books,” Sneeden said, with bravado. “Whatcha’ need there, big guy?” He exuded polish and self-confidence. Just the kind of little asshole Bunkowski liked to hurt.

“Ah, well,” he rumbled, “for openers I need to see if you can catch up with Skunkie?"

“Pardon?"

“You'll have to hurry. She's on the way to
hell,
” Chaingang said, as he hammered a bottomfist into the youngster's face, hitting him right between the eyes. The blow went
Thock!
just like a Porky Pig cartoon sound effect. If his Bowie hadn't been under wraps, parked in the taped-up duffel, he could have partaken of the delicious opportunities, but for now he concentrated on resupply. The young man had no keys, so he would not be able to lock the store. Shame. He went through the desk rapidly, found the cashbox and took it. Took the young fellow's billfold, money clip, ring. Felt his neck, groin, spine, and ankles for surprise treasures, found none, and unzipped. He actually did have to wee-wee and did so on the lad, who'd fallen with his head at an angle that suggested he might not be rallying, unless there was an afterlife.

Chaingang checked the back door: locked, no keys in it. Went to the front and kicked Skunkie under the counter. She fit there as neatly as if she'd been designed to tuck into that available space.

With a loud grunt he squatted down and took off her bracelet and two absolutely killer diamonds. Some old man had paid for his thrills. He idly toed her skirt back and appreciated the good, if slightly skinny, legs, and checked out her old saddlebag ass. At the very end, he noted with amusement, Skunkie had made wee-wee.

He rang up a sale on the register, cleaned it out, and was stuffing bills and things here and there when a young bloke of perhaps twenty came in and saw a giant behind the counter. He still had on the gray coat over his T-shirt, which looked hip enough to the kid.

“Hi."

“Sor-ry,” Chaingang simpered, in his most effeminate caricature. “We're clothed until tomorrow. In-ven-to-ree!” He pouted, with big, fat pursed lips.

“Um, okay,” the kid said, leaving. God, he thought, there were tons of fags everywhere.

Bunkowski hoisted his purchases, saddled up, and walked back out into the parking lot of the mall, in quest of appropriate transportation. Behind him, Marsalis's “A Sleeping Bee” serenaded the dead.

T
hey were parked in a black Dodge van with privacy glass and Virginia tags, in front of an overgrown lot on the nearest side street intersecting the main thoroughfare where the shopping mall was located. They'd driven all night, the wheelman good, but of a more garrulous nature than some. She'd excused herself and crashed in the back. She was a lady who had to grab her Zs while she could.

Watchers always wonder if
they
have watchers, and not without good cause. Watching watchers is part of the game in what is often disdainfully regarded as the intelligence community. That's what they did, people like the man and woman in the muddy black van. The spook version of internal affairs, crossed with what the former Soviet citizenry had once termed Smersh, was their adoptive parent company.

If they in turn had been observed, their watchers would have seen a rather dirty Dodge van with out-of-state plates pull up and an attractive, slim, thirty-something woman in slacks get out and stretch. Vacationers, probably, in the area visiting relatives. She walked to the corner of the video store and looked around, as if waiting for a friend, changed her mind apparently, and returned to the vehicle. A watcher would have observed nothing more.

The van stayed put, and inside, the glow of the OMEGASTAR mobile locator/tracker stayed locked onto their target, who at the moment was less than two hundred feet away. It was a judgment call. Doing somebody in a crowded shopping center wasn't out of the question but there was a lot to factor in.

They were still there when the target came out in his limping waddle, loaded with clothing purchases it looked like, and walked out into the busy parking lot.

Here is what they saw: They saw him chat with some old friends, stand around chewing the fat, looking as if he'd misplaced his ride, then suddenly wave as he spotted the car. They saw him walk up to the vehicle, laugh about his momentary mental lapse with the driver, toss an enormous duffel bag in the back seat, get in the car, and pull out. From a few hundred feet away it appeared the person who'd been in the driver's seat had moved over and the target had driven away. For some reason the other person's head was no longer visible above the seat.

Nobody could do fakes like Bunkowski. He had all the actor's skills, from mimicry to observational brilliance, but his physical presence and organic sense of how to move in order to manipulate, confuse, boggle, and convince, was second to none. It was as if a great stage actor with the gifts of a young Brando, Olivier, or, more accurately, Jackie Gleason, had decided to become a serial killer, Think of the ways they could mislead, bewitch, and persuade with their communication capabilities turned on full. Chaingang could make a person feel as if he alone in all the world could help him in his fumbling, clownish moment of need. As with Gleason, the physical package only added to the power of the act, especially when he assumed an underdog's helpless persona. The rubbery face, the baby-fat guileless smile, the disarming moves—he was an actor's actor.

Had the watchers been nearer they might have heard bits and pieces of conversation floating their way on the scented, wet Bayou City pollution. “—visited my son. He's stationed at Fort Sill.”
Why, what a coincidence, he
might have replied.
I just got back from Oklahoma too! as
his mindscreen began to spin a scenario that would be impossible to move away from. They could have heard how easily he inserted himself into a life, created a plausible chain of events that bumped against the other person's experience, listened to him scrandle a frace of doublespiel that could, if you were unlucky, leave you very surprised and dead.

Even as he dealt with the dopey-looking middle-aged man sitting at the wheel of the Plymouth, obviously waiting for his better half to emerge from a store, he felt the dual pulls typical of his brief moments of human interfacing. He hated the monkey people but every time he heard them speak or peered into their nothing lives he found the fragments totally fascinating. After all, that part of him that had remained human identified with the species of which he had once been born.

“Hah doo. I was wonderin’ canna canna ansellation?” Forget the sense of it, it wasn't communication intended for the vic he was about to hurt, it was for onlookers, the watchers whose proximity to his awareness was a sharp burr. To an observer, the tone and openness and body language completely masked his intent. The watchers would not observe his head inside the car, the Breath of Death in some poor man's face, and, as he recoiled, the snap of the neck as giant paws took the victim below the line of sight. “You slide on over there, podna,” the beast might ad-lib, smiling, as he wedged his girth behind the wheel.

There was never a sense of threat, nothing observable. How the hell were the watchers supposed to know what was going on? It was only when they saw one head instead of two that they realized what they'd witnessed. Damn! The big fucker was so slick. They'd have to tranq the rogue elephant elsewhere. The money was exceptionally good, but it was stressful work.

They settled back and let the Plymouth vanish from sight, then the wheelman turned on the ignition and they followed the signal from the target's locator, pulling the Dodge van back onto the blacktop road, and hoping they wouldn't have to drive through much more water.

S
he first thought of getting a cop to go with her while she forced some sort of showdown with Dr. Royal, but the madder she became the more such a confrontation seemed pointless. He was sneaky smart. In that kind of refereed face-to-face encounter he would be cooly articulate, as mock understanding effused from his Nazi mouth, the filthy, murdering son of a bitch! She would be the wild, violent one. The thought of yet another stereotyped judgment call by the redneck constabulary was sufficient to rekindle the heat of her rage.

She put the Lebensborn book back in the paper it had been wrapped in, took a black marking pen from her purse, noted the time, and quickly printed a note:

I'm going to make “Dr. Royal” (Shtolz) tell what he did with Dad. If anything happens, make sure the police arrest him for murder! Love, S.

In her thirty years on the planet, Sharon had been involved in two acts of violence, but as she printed her initial, it was as if Aaron Kamen's daughter no longer existed. This was someone else, a dark being pulled from Sharon's guts by anguish and anger. This stranger now went back out to the car, opened the trunk, and grabbed the first weapon she saw—a tire iron, tossed it into the front seat, got in, started the car, and sped off into the rain.

She marked the numbers seven-zero-nine on her mental slate, and concentrated on finding the street address and nothing else. No planning. Just do it. She drove through the arc of a sodium lamp, rain splashing hard on the windshield, and the poor visibility parted the curtain of her rage enough to allow her to flip the wipers on.

There it was, 709 West Vine. Her arms prickled as she realized this bastard had been sleeping a few blocks away from her. She stopped, made sure of the house number again, then backed about fifty yards down the street and pulled against the curb, killing the lights and the motor.