Slob (28 page)

In the stolen vehicle parked a short distance from the Lynches he is waiting for the child when she returns from school. He appears to be reading a newspaper, a workman, no doubt, waiting for someone, but he is letting his currents flow into the trees around him. He has a strange and acute sense of being in harmony with nature. The life cycle of deciduousness, self-renewal, and virescence is a never-ending source of intense fascination for him. He prefers plant life to animals and animals to people. Humans are far, far down the evolutionary list for him.

Suddenly his senses are boring in on the little girl who is walking along the sidewalk toward where he is parked. She is with two other children, a boy and a girl, all talking at more or less the same time in loud, grating voices that annoy him. His sense of timing is sheer perfection. The little boy walks on past, the two girls say good-bye to each other, and as his target heads for the house he booms out at her in his deep voice:

"Hey? Excuse me," beckoning her over toward the car with the most radiant and endearing smile on his face. He knows precisely how others see him and he uses his appearance, when he wants to, with the actor's unerring command of kinematics and illusion. None but the most brainwashed and careful person would resist Daniel Bunkowski when he beckoned to them, smiling that dimpled, open, guileless, baby's beaming grin of a trustworthy uncle. And Lee Anne Lynch is a sweet child who has never met a stranger, as the saying goes, and a hundred warnings are forgotten in the urgent beckoning and sincere, warm smile, and she moves back toward the vehicle to hear what he's saying.

It comes out in a jumble of words, an avalanche of persuasion designed to befriend and bewitch, and she draws closer still, something about how you must be the Lynch girl, about how he's a good friend of Jack's, good ol' Jack, and how it is real important something something and she can't quite make out what he's saying and Lee Anne comes closer to the open window where he grins out at her, speaking so warmly, rapidly, and urgently about Jack and her Mom.

"What?" she asks, straining to hear as she moves closer.

"I said, Jack wants you to take this message to your mom. It's real important." His big paw holds a folded piece of paper but it is not stretched out as far as he can reach, it only appears that way. And when she reaches out to take the note from his hand, two things happen. His semicircular vision and 180-degree precognition observe and sense the absence of unwanted watchers and his mighty paw fastens around her tiny arm like a workbench vise, jerking her in through the open window as deftly as you'd lift a sack of potatoes, the heel of the other hand, which is a callused, steel-hard, fearsome thing smashing against her small chin with an almost dainty precision, knocking her unconscious.

And she is down on the floorboard and inert and in one sure movement he rips the thin material of her dress and is moving, out of the vehicle and heading in the direction of the house. The killer is moving fast. Moving through the yard quickly, surprisingly fast and quiet, big blimp body propelled forward on the huge, splayed feet, the rapid flat-footed sliding steps swiftly pulling the bulk like tugs leading a giant ship, guiding the vastness of the torso.

The impression is that of an unexpectedly graceful clown bear, agile fat man, dainty jumbo dancer, XXX-L shirt billowed like a sail or a moving tent, suggestions of agility and power, balance and an odd buoyancy, as the treetrunk legs move the great weight of body toward the house in a massive, unstoppable effort, the big man's compass needle drawn by the magnetic pull of a human heartbeat.

He will take the woman and the child down into the special place he's made for them in a water main. And that is where he will summon the know-it-all cop, and we'll see how he likes it when he comes down to get his whore and the brat, see how he likes it down in the secret subworld. He moves across the yard toward the house where the woman is, already tasting them and grinning with the pleasure of the moment.

Hemo-craving and insatiable; he moves toward the woman, who is unknowingly pulling him to her. And the pulsing, steady throb of a heart is the beat that makes his bloodlust dance.

W
hat the CIA is to the Girl Scouts of America, what NSA is to CIA, what Lee Iacocca was to Mad Man Cal's Used Cars, that is roughly what director of special intelligence/Illinois Public Utilities, is to a subway cop. This individual, nicknamed Captain Sewer by his senior staff members, was the head of the intelligence division of the Chicagoland utilities oligopoly.

For many years each of the big utilities companies has maintained an extremely secret, highly sensitive office. The purpose of each office is the gathering of raw intelligence, threat assessment, and—for want of a better umbrella name—countermeasures. Countermeasures for the "phone company," for example, have become quite aggressive out there on the sharp, cutting edge. No one speaks of these special departments and in fact many of the employees of these vast, conglomerate corporations remain ignorant of their respective existence. But exist they do.

The intelligence divisions all mesh in a central office called Special Intelligence/Illinois Public Utilities, and the director of this top-secret outfit was briefing Eichord when Jack took the call.

"So what you're looking at here," he was saying as they studied an unfathomably complex map of interweaving lines, "would be the location of the laterals for Site Y Branch Line. And this where you see the catch basins marked is where—" when he was interrupted by his aide, who motioned that the call was for Jack.

"Jack Eichord?" Jack said tentatively, picking up the telephone on the other man's desk, surprised to be getting a call in the director's office.

"Yeah, it's me," Arlen told him. "Jack, you've got an emergency personal. You need to go out to the car and take this on two."

"Affirmative. Lou, who is it? D'ya know?"

"No. They've got it downstairs. I just found you for 'em. They'll be putting you through on a special patch."

"Thanks." He turned to the man. "Sorry, I'll have to get back to you." He was moving. "Some sort of an emergency thing, I apologize"—in motion and out the door even as he spoke, the words thrown like a handful of coins crashing out into the room behind him as he sprinted out of there, saying "sorry" and hearing the one they called Captain Sewer mumbling something to him but he was already gone and down on the pavement and running to the car.

Waiting now, as a patch-plugged call on the switchboard landline was laboriously (in seconds) rerouted through his tactical command radio and knowing then it was bad when he said "hello" hearing Edie breathe his name into the other end of a line somewhere.

"Jack . . ." A word that she sobbed, cried out, crying literally, crying as if in pain and he knew it was bad and he was afraid then. Afraid of what the next words would be and he could feel his inner demons gloating as they grabbed his guts and squeezed them and twisted.

He felt time compress in that awful way time sometimes can. Felt one second become an hour in an hour that would last an eternity, felt time wrap itself into a fetal ball and freeze in that position. Felt it crawl to a standstill as he heard her sob his name. Heard the demons roaring in stop-time.

Do you believe in black magic? Had she called him up from the dark place—conjured him, it almost seemed—made this happen by seeing the grainy photo of his ugliness for the first time. Forced Jack to show it to her, the thing that had taken Ed and turned his life source into a bloody mess of gristle and torn meat. And when she had seen the picture, it was almost as if she'd made it happen. Because within hours he had Lee and he had her. He had them both to
use.

She had been so easy. She had seen one of her familiar shadows at the window and knew exactly who it was out there, lurking in the darkness of the shaded yard as the kids trudged home from school—it was Weirdo—her old friend back to pay her a social call. And she had felt no fear, only anger and a bit of remorse but then more anger as she stomped out of the back door and around the house to confront the old pervert and he had taken her in midthought, catching her in the air as she was moving, that is, with a huge paw over her mouth, her body suddenly propelled backward through the air as if by dark magic.

He was pulling her back inside as easily as if he had been carrying a fifty-pound feed sack, effortlessly, and she felt like her neck was going to snap as he carried her right back in, back toward the center of the house and then holding her, with her hands tearing at him, whispering awful things to her, telling her how it would be, telling Edie the terrible things about her daughter, the evil that would befall them if Mommy didn't come with him quietly, a big smile for the neighbors to see.

The horror that she'd summoned up with no more than a stare into an old and grainy photo, the horror had come to take her away. And it had her lovely little child as well, and then it showed her something that was so ugly she couldn't believe the sordid, ugly, nastiness of an ordinary object. He fished a little torn scrap of cloth out of his pocket and held it under her nose and she saw immediately that it was part of Lee Anne's ink skirt that she'd had on at school today and she new that the horror had the child and she nodded a grim compliance.

And instantly she was moving and a smile forced itself across her face as he whispered S M I L E roughly to her through fierce, gritted teeth, guiding her by the arms with just the proprietary helpfulness you'd expect of a friend, nothing to arouse suspicions from a casual onlooker, and suddenly she was in with Lee and being forced down to the floor and feeling a rope biting into her flesh, and a filthy gag going into her mouth and hearing the engine come to life beside her and feeling them pull away from the safety of her world.

"Jack," she cried, and sobbed out a sentence to him and he couldn't make out a single word of it. "Jack, Jack . . ." She was crying and for a few seconds he let her cry, the thing that was holding her beside a phone somewhere and then he did something to her to make her scream out in pain and he heard her fighting to regain control of herself and she sobbed out "I—oh, I, uh, Jack . . . Oh God . . . Ah—ahhhhhhh—he haaaaaa—he has
Lee,
ahhhhh, I had to . . .
AHHHHHH
help me I . . . Oh, Jack help me PLLLEEEEEEASE I'm sorry oh, I'm sorry"—and then losing it again and hearing her being pulled away and struck and the phone crashing down and a sharp, metallic noise and her sobbing again, and then a quiet, and the thing speaks to Eichord.

"You there?"

"Yes," he replied to the surprisingly deep voice. "I can hear you," he added inanely, his mind freezing from the shock of the moment.

"Listen. Don't bring more police. You come alone or they die, and I let your whore suck me while I eat the rat's heart." That's what Jack thought he'd said for a second then realized he had called Lee Anne a brat. He would eat the brat's heart. Is that what he said? Why would he want to do that? He was fighting to get his brain working. He felt paralyzed. Drunk. He felt as if he was absolutely paralyzed with booze. He couldn't think, move. He strained against the phone, crushing the receiver to his ear before he realized he was holding a two-way radio mike in his hand as the call sizzled on the speaker of the police radio.

"What?"

"You heard me. Don't bother tracing this. And don't be stupid. If I see others, these bitches die bad." The horror gave a location and Jack laid the mike on the seat and started the car, grinding into the ignition having forgotten it was already running, slamming the gear shift down as he screeched out into the traffic, telling himself to breathe deeply and take in some oxygen and get that brain going. Brain dead. That was the only phrase that occurred to him. The patient is brain dead.

The genius cop, Jack Eichord, the crime crusher of all time. Bulldog fucking Drummond and nothing was working up there. Total zero. A cipher between the ears. Come
on,
for Christ's sake. He was staring at the windshield wipers whipping ridiculously across the windshield, mesmerized by the blades, and then shaking it off like water as he became aware he'd somehow managed to turn on the wipers and headlights and correcting that as he sped through the traffic without his redball on. He could hear the voice all deep and bloodchilling, an accentless rumble of words that still resonated in his head as he drove.

"Mommy . . ." he heard somehow, on a wavelength man has yet to discover, imagining he could hear Lee saying to her mother, "It's wet here," and the horror of it was beyond him and miraculously it all just passed over him and he had shrugged off the paralysis and personal fear and just stood on the brakes, a Charger slamming into him and a potential whiplash case trying to see his license to report him to the police even as he Brodie'd and swung into a hard U-turn against the honking, furious traffic, the wildly angry Chicago motorists—as he started back toward where he should have headed all along to get what he needed to make the horror do as he would wish.

The thoughts he had in the interminable six or seven minutes before he finally got to the place where the monster was waiting for him were all business thoughts. He had his main weapon now and it was loaded in a box with a handle that sat on the seat beside him. And in the backseat was a crudely hacksawed riot gun which he was debating about shoving down into his belt. And in the seat he had a box of twelve-gauge 00 buck "maggies" open and he had his speedloaders out and even as he was pulling the car over to the curb he was putting a speedloader in each pocket and pulling the shotgun over to him and getting out.