Savant (21 page)
He froze. Accepted nothing for what it appeared. Stilled himself, forcing his vital signs to slow. Slowing, stilling, quieting his pulsing life source, calming himself. Gun up, finger on the trigger. He ignored the dead animal and eased through the house in search of intruders, although his heart wasn't in it. This already answered too many nagging questions.
They'd suckered him. It stung for a moment but his rage pushed it down. There was danger: thick; moist; in the air, as real as humidity. They'd been watching him all along somehow. But how? Why hadn't he seen the signs? The monkeys were never that good.
Nobody in the house and no signs of damage beyond the wall. He did not open the envelope but first examined the possum, which had a tractor-trailer-size tire tread through its middle, Roadkill, he noted. He saw no surprises, and he removed the nails and threw it into the back yard.
Chaingang wet some paper towels and made an initial attempt to clean the wall. He did the best he could, put the bloody towels in a grocery sack, took it out in back, and burned it. Still he did not touch the envelope.
He had become proficient at killing with nothing more lethal-appearing than a thick, Manila mailing container. But it was not a hidden bomb that caused him to pause. It was the hidden truth. He was not anxious to learn the bad news, which he knew would explain the out-of-sync personality shifts he'd undergone, the weird "normalcy" that he found so repugnant, the buzzing and the torpor that began in a roll of fat at the back of his neck, and that kept him from being all that he could be.
With a heavy grunt he took the thing and opened it and read. It was from his friend Dr. Norman, the prison doctor from Illinois. He read it as an out-of-body experience, watching himself read the pages of infuriating monkeyspeak. "
Surveillance…brain implant…monitored at all times…every movement is known…no way to escape … Robert Tinnon Price/a.k.a./Shooter.
" Photographs of the sniper in the 1960s, and a recent shot of an averagelooking man with psycho eyes and a blondish buzzcut on top. A jock. Smallish. Wiry. He recalled the man from his spike-team days gone by.
"Attempted to terminate you when mission was aborted…special weapon…motion detector and locator…tracking device…intends to assassinate you unless you destroy him first
." Schematics and pictures of a strange-looking rifle with futuristic configuration and woodsy camouflage finish. Scope. Silencer. "
Effective up to two miles
." A dossier on the murder victims. Price was killing on
his
turf. He'd rip the little pissant limb from limb. He'd even spoiled his tableau at Mount Ely.
The dossier advised him to "
open closet door by front door
." A small version of the mobile tracker had been delivered for his convenience, the message concluded. He opened the door and found the thing, boiling mad the more it all sunk in. Those fucks, tampering with his
brain
. On one level, he was planning to turn Shooter into gristle; on another, he was promising himself that someday he'd eat Dr. Norman's heart for this unforgivable act. The notion that he had an implant, the towering humiliation of it, was almost more than he could bear. Thoughts of the biker in prison, and of dearest foster mommy Nadine Garbella, were now a million miles away. First things first.
He was a man who lived in the moment. True enough, Chaingang espoused the "plan hard, fight easy" militaristic dictum, but as far as analyzing the future, the grand scheme of things, his idea of planning didn't extend much beyond the boundaries of trench tactics necessary for his survival. Had he been motivated to examine his battle strategy, his long-range goals, he'd have probably found them extremely limited. On some level, he knew he would ultimately have to arrange a fitting demise for Dr. Norman, after—that is-he'd somehow negotiated the removal of this implant device. But battle plans…? He wasn't interested. There was never a creature more truly situational than Chaingang.
This, however, was an encroachment, an invasion beyond anything even he had experienced. Chaingang, the ultimate survivalist, took as much of the problem as he could immediately chew and digest, and the rest he simply stored. But where—in most persons—the information would have lain dormant, his autopiloted brain set about to deal with this danger to him, to resolve a seemingly unsolvable problem.
While the beast dealt with immediate details, his computer ingested, sorted, retrieved, and began to build a longrange order of battle—something hitherto alien to him-the climax of which was two-pronged. He would have to figure out a way to force Dr. Norman to shepherd the removal of the implant, and then he had to be totally eradicated, since he represented such an invasive and loathsome threat.
On the conscious plane of the banal, Bunkowski considered the initial problems, as he loaded the tracker unit into the back seat of his ride, packing it tightly beside the big duffel, and roared away from the safe house for the last time.
How does one correct an inflamed pustule? One squeezes it until it pops. He drove, unerringly, in the direction of Bobby "Shooter" Price, to squeeze and be rid of this festering pimple. But it would not be enough to simply squeeze the lifeJuice from the doctor, nor would the eating of his heart be sufficient.
The mindscreen offered his subconscious words of the surrealist Dali, whose description of popping blackheads seemed uniquely apt:
"All those aerodynamic, gelatinous…massive salivary" experiences, involving "exubeirant and sticky viscera"…the "apparitions
aerodynamiques des etres-objets
"… Dali's favorite expression: "There is nothing that cannot be eaten…" Ah, to eat everything! All awareness "transfomed into gourmandism…awareness of reality by means of the jaws." The dioscuric and aesthetic cannibalism, cosmically extended: "the wish to know devours me, but I devour that wish."
Mad as a hatter or the one sane man in an insane universe, Dali had—alone—sensed the dualism of eating and death that transcended the mortuary ritual of tribal funereal consumption. He intuited the reality of cannibalism.
Dr. Norman, too, may have sensed the connection in his paternal playacting, those tender moments when he strove to inculcate his beloved Daniel with the notion that he-Norman—would ensure his marvelous creation's safety and immortality. He would have given anything to be Daniel's literal maker, to be God, or, failing that, to be Chaingang's biological father.
As Dali wrote in
How I Put My Father to Gastronomical Use
, "the consecrated wafer of the paternal communion…became a sublime and delectable representation of my father…Thus I had the possibility of tasting my father…in small succulent mouthfuls." There was but one final solution. Dr. Norman must be allowed to become his own transcendent dream.
Chaingang had to dispose of him by eating him. Not just the heart, but all of him, so that nothing remained. He would eat his clothing as well. Everything. When he was finished there would be nothing left but perhaps a pair of eyeglasses and a name tag!
The thought boiled inside him, bubbled over into his innards with volcanic heat, warming him with pleasure and purpose. For the first time in his life, so far as he could remember, Chaingang had a real goal.
T
rask 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.