Savant (29 page)
There was no real wilderness anymore. Not this close to urban civilization. You could still find rough, raw chunks of empty space, but not true isolation. There was always the chance of running into somebody. It was no longer possible to get back of beyond—vestiges of humanity appeared everywhere. He hated them so, the stupid monkey men on this planet of dumb apes. He loathed their loud noises, happy laughter, and blank faces full of self-assuredness and herd mentality. He longed for the cleansing of isolation.
He had found a momentary pocket of quiet, where he could plan, plot, prepare—soak up the stillness and solitary joy of seclusion. The monkeys were far away.
The building was stone, a small rectangular structure approximately the size of a small tool shed. Solidly made, but for the roofing, which he had easily restored. The railroad spur that had once existed through these woods was long gone and Mother Nature had reclaimed the bed on which the tracks had rested. Thick near-impenetrable woods surrounded him.
There were others in these woods, but he sensed no monkeys at the moment; rather, there were roving packs of dogs, wild mongrels he imagined, coyotes and their cousins, coyotelike hunters, whose signs and conversation he'd seen and heard nearby. Deer. Other small animals. Humanity had been limited to a single light plane flying over the distant treeline. It was perfect for him.
He felt alone and rather safe in his cozy hideaway, and was pleased he'd discovered it without undue exertion. He found such places by logic, processes of education/deduction, luck, vibes, and something transcending intuition but akin to it. These places pulled him.
Neither vehicles nor mantracks touched the surrounding woods near his small stone sanctuary. No hoof or boot prints gathered water in 15EEEEE super-extra-wide heel marks. No sign of human life hung twisting in a bush or tree limb, to place his safety in possible jeopardy.
If you knew where to walk and were extremely cautious, you could go a few hundred meters and find the red Buick sedan registered to the late Eileen Todd's parents. It resided under a car tarp, inside a rotting barn that hadn't been used for anything in many years. The barn was decorated in rusting POSTED NO TRESPASSiNG and KEEP OUT warning signs. Obviously private property. Again, the structure had been restored by its latest occupant. If you dared you could breach his security system and find the vehicle, camouflaged, hidden inside. But you would have cause to regret such a discovery.
You would have every reason—though probably not the time—to rue the day your woodsy picnic had led you to this ancient shell of a barn.
The vehicle inside had been hidden by someone who had studied demolition the way others study for the bar, or study medicine—a postgrad student with a doctorate in explosives and concealment. Your untimely discovery would transform you, noisily, into a wet shower of unidentifiable red offal.
High explosive, not purchased with his ill-fated auction profits, but recently purloined, is wired to a short-fused frag, but with the ordinary M-26 fuse replaced with a 308-G, the so-called ADD or Anti-Disturbance Device. There were other tremor-sensitive security treats now waiting in these environs, guarding his back door—as it were—from the unlucky meandering monkey.
He has the big map out in front of him, covered in lightly drawn circles. A huge circle surrounds the immediate Kansas City, Missouri, area where Robert "Shooter" Price has chosen to die. The heart of his killing zone has been computed, measured, marked. A series of concentric rings make a pleasantly uniform design as they encircle this heart's edges.
Each of the smaller circles is divided by two lines bisecting each ring's diameter. Each reticulation has the appearance of the crosswires inside a sniperscope. The circular patterns are areas where Price has killed or where he might kill next. Every sector or quadrant of the reticle marks has a grid designation. These grid designations are graded.
Chaingang Bunkowski and Shooter Price once hunted together, at least in theory, as part of the same spike team. Bunkowski recalls the little punk's arrogance. He knows precisely how he will behave now. Without the mobile tracking technology to depend on, he will have no recourse but to try to entrap his enemy. Price will know he cannot hope to find him in a dense population area such as this.
Unless he would have a photograph, or would contact the police and various reporters to correct the poor likeness authorities are using in trying to I.D. him, only his size presents a problem. He does not think Shooter will provide the police or media with such help. He is an arrogant twerp, who will think he and his powerful rifle will be enough to accomplish Chaingang's demise. This belief will kill him.
The zones with the best or highest grades of likelihood are now to be analyzed by his mental computer. Chaingang knows old Kansas City, and to a great extent, he has been able to familiarize himself with the new aspects of the town—the tall buildings, the new structures of note, the streets and sprawling population areas that have only existed in recent years.
He was through here during a killing spree some three years prior to his most recent release from prison, and even in that time he sees industrial parks, freeway changes, and large construction projects that were not there before. And always, it seems, the monkey men work on their ridiculous highways.
Diminutive Shooter, for all his misplaced confidence, has a certain degree of experience in these matters. He will know that the moronic cops will be dutifully watching the taller buildings, water towers, overpasses, and similarly obvious vantages. He will be reticent to utilize such areas, except as possible entrapment sites.
On the other hand, Shooter appears to have gone even more gunny-fruit than he was before, perhaps due to an abuse of controlled substanoes—Chaingang remembers a certain proclivity for pharmaceutical cocaine—or other atrophy of the mental faculties. In news accounts subsequent to the most recent snipings, there is mention of one of his sniper hideouts having been discovered, in an empty office within the Kansas City Convention Center. The actions of a person whose mind has snapped cannot be predicted.
The beast studies his map and open ledger, making notations, figuring probabilities, eliminating locations, refining his plan of attack. The word
Civilization
snakes across his mindscreen and he sees the adjectival root word and its forms, the noun and its variations, and the ironic definitions of the word. It slithers away from him, leaving him with the pleasure of his lonely thoughts of destruction.
Power will come with preparation. He tastes the power-hunger even more than the thirst for Price's spilled blood. In a coil nearby is a yard-length weight of tractor chain. A steel snake waiting to strike, to smash out and demolish, more deadly than any mamba. The chain is inches from his massive killing hand.
Eyes black as midnight, hard pig's eyes, set in a doughy face pale as dawn's light, stare unblinking at the pattern of circles. He tastes the coppery salt of his own mouth's fluids; sharp, misshapen teeth biting through the skin of his lip in fierce and determined concentration. Willing his mind to find the scent of the little faggot shit. Willing his hatred down into the mighty fingers shaped like thick sausages that reach out for the snake and clench it in a strangling vise of a deathgrip. He must get power—raw killing power. Plug into it. Make himself invulnerable in its shielding cloak.
Ice and fire. Bloodlust and the soul of a killing machine in one. Desire to deal death that fills him with heat, but in his monster's heart he is as cold as a shuddering winter chill. Deep inside he lets the rage catch, and the heat propels him out, pushing him toward the monkeys to slake whatever appetites have become inflamed.
O
ne 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.
Trask woke up on the outside of a dream envelope, the memory of the mental excursion already fading, something about calling his daughter, and Kit telling him everything he already knew, that he hadn't been worth a damned dime as a dad—things like that. It was the phone.
"Yes?" he said through cotton.
"Vic, I'm very sorry to disturb you but—uh, we've got a bit of a situation down here at the station. Would you be too ill to come in for a few minutes?" It was Metzger. "We need to talk." This last in Babaloo's sucky voice that he reserved for ultimatums and such. It gave Trask a chill for a second.
"Sure. Absolutely."
"I hate to ask, man. I know you're under the weather. But, you know, if you can…"
"Hey, no problem. What's it about, Babaloo? Can you give me a clue?"
"Huh-uh. Probably better talk in person. An hour be enough time? Two hours?"
"I can be there in an hour. Sure. I'll see you."
"Thanks, Vic. I won't keep you long." Yeah, Trask thought. He was sure of that.
He went into the bathroom, relieved himself, tried to clean up a bit, was too shaky to shave, and finally just said fuck it and pulled some clothes on.
The drive to KCM was a nightmare, because he happened to catch a half-hourly newscast. The serial-murder thing had busted wide open without him, and—so it seemed—was not race-related. There'd been a couple more random rifle grenade kills—as the radio story termed them—long-distance homicides in Penn Valley Park.
He started to wonder whether it might be something they were planning to do on the show. But he instantly realized Metzger would have handled that on the telephone and told him to bring his research in with him. They'd never so much as asked about the piles of shows he'd prepared on the theme of violence—the fact that he'd screwed up this one thing had been sufficient to put his ass in the doghouse forever. He sneezed and it felt as if his head might come off. How could everything be so groovy one minute and so grunty the next?