Slob (9 page)

The real killers are seldom portrayed in popular fiction. They are seldom pretty enough for consumption. The word
assassin,
literally, means one who does murder under the influence of hashish, and today it evokes the pop-culture portrait of a black-suited ninja dropping down out of the trees to kick the bad guys into little pieces. Real killing is seldom so neat as one sees it on the screen. There is lots of blood and gore and horror. And "wet work," the profession of slaughtering, takes its toll on the killer as well as the victim.

The real irony is that our spymasters and those who control our intelligence monolith wish that they had a vast agency of highly efficient superkillers to draw from. How operationally marvelous it would be for all of them if they could only reach out and draw upon the wealth of diversity, the richness that our pop fiction would have you believe exists. We do have killers, of course, and have had for a long time. But their track record is far from great.

Unlike KGB or the Israelis we have not maintained a special section of security personnel whose sole function is to kill. We have had to build a small pool of talent outside the security umbrella, in the elite branches of the military, in certain areas of law enforcement, and even marginally in the private sector for "termination with extreme prejudice."

In 1960, with sensitivities raw, the national security heads decided to create a small and highly clandestine unit that could be used for assassinations. At the time our intelligence services taught the deadly arts but only as an adjunct to tradecraft. We had no counterpart to SMERSH's Active Measures Department that operated covertly as a unit trained to do sanctioned murder by governmental decree.

It proved as difficult for our controllers to find contact killers as it had for outraged wives wanting someone to cowboy their cheating spouses. So our security people turned to what is laughingly called organized crime, on one hand, and the military on the other. One of those military experiments was MACVSAUCOG, a hot mouthful of alphabet soup cooked up by an action arm of the National Security Council. Mack-Vee-Saw-Cog, as it was pronounced, was the first of the so-called secret sanction groups, and because of its special status of a "paramilitary" unit the most clandestine.

MACVSAUCOG was classified out there in the vortical swirl of smoke beyond the ULTRA TOP SECRET YOUR EYES ONLY classification. The main course was counterinsurgency warfare. The first thing it served up to its proud masters was a nasty little piece of business called the spike team. The spike team was designed for one purpose. To assassinate covertly. And it was built around one man, a four-hundred-plus pounder who was then waiting to hear on an appeal, doing Death Row time in a federal prison in Illinois. He was a "discovery" of unusual proportions in every sense.

Marion Federal Penitentiary has a number of nicknames, one of the more accurate being The House of Pain. It is the only correctional institution in the Federal lash-up with a level-six rating. A con inside Marion is serving an average sentence of forty-and-a-quarter years. Slammed down tight under a twenty-two-and-a-half-hour-a-day lockdown, behind a fortress of eight guard towers and chainlink and sharp razor wire, are some of the toughest, most feared, wild-eyed killer cons in the federal system. In 1961, over there with the 340-some animals in Max, was a creature named Daniel Bunkowski.

At the time of his incarceration Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski tipped the scales at 422 pounds. At six feet seven inches he was a find. A unique combination—both seemingly retarded and a mind that was incredibly keen, a rational-and-"sane"-appearing sociopathic mass murderer. If his ramblings under drugged hypnosis were to be believed he had killed more than any other human being alive. So many killings in fact that even he wasn't sure how many lives he had taken.

A respected sociologist had seen something in his personality, some camouflage, some signal, and he had begun a series of carefully structured tests on Daniel and come away amazed. Bunkowski's IQ was not measurable. It "warped the curve." He was an autodidact, a self-taught killer whose alarming proclivity for violence was surpassed only by what appeared to be a genius intellect. A computer was spoon-fed the results of the testing and the consensus with respect to Mr. Bunkowski. And the computer served a select and highly covert series of on-line terminals.

There was even a bizarre, and far from scientific opinion advanced by one Dr. Norman there in the shop. He was of the opinion that this behemoth of a man had managed to escape detection and capture for so long a period, murdering wantonly and randomly as he had, because he was presentient. A physical precognate. None seriously believed this other than Dr. Norman, but it made the Bunkowski dossier even more interesting to certain folk in the clandestine service, for whom every poisonous cloud has a silver lining.

After more tests, interviews, drug-and-hypnosis sessions, interrogations both rigorous and benign, examinations, and debriefings, the aggregate data was poured into the computers and the mavens gathered to pay homage to the
deus ex machina
of tradecraft, and the printout filled them with certitude. Theoretically, at least, this Bunkowski person was ideal for the purposes they had in mind. And they began creating a spike team around this unlikely discovery.

Here is how you create a Daniel "Chaingang" Bunkowski. Take a little boy. Take his daddy away when he is a baby and substitute a succession of drunks, hypes, perverts, and assorted human filth. Make Mommy a drunk too, and now give the baby a particularly vicious "stepfather" who doesn't like to hear baby cry. He likes to put Danny in high places where he will scream in terror, and leave him locked in closets for days yes
days
at a time, and because he is a bad little boy and survives chain him into a special little metal place you've made for him. It is his discipline box. And at night when "Uncle" comes to visit Mommy later on, and Mommy is gone, Uncle will chain him under the bed and bring him out to use him and then jam him back under the bed on his chain, feeding and watering him in doggy's bowl. And when you beat him use your fists first, and then a nice electrical cord, and later on a short piece of rubber hose so Mommy won't see too many bruises. Force the little boy to do every despicable, unspeakable, depraved, degenerate thing in the pervert lexicon, and then invent a few just to keep interested. And don't forget to torture him every so often with clothespins, pieces of wire, matches, burning cigarettes, a soldering iron—anything that will inflict sudden and devastating pain. And then when he is a big boy put him in a home where lots of bigger kids can use him too, and that is how you make a Daniel Bunkowski.

Now tease and torment and assault and abuse and abandon and finally try to kill little Danny. And if Danny surprises all of you and SURVIVES . . . oh, my God in heaven . . . if he's four-hundred-and-some pounds of deeply, brutally disturbed manhood, six-feet-seven of spring-hard legs bigger than tree trunks and fingers that can rip a jawbone loose, tearing stabbing ripping like steel tools, and if he's spent about half of his horror of a life institutionalized in one way or another and if he's free to roam and kill, well by God on high you'd better get up and pray because he is a DEATH MACHINE and vengeance is his and you'd better believe he has a hundred ways to hunt you down and turn you into an unrecognizable bathtub full of red pulp and dripping, steaming dog shit.

And this is what is dreaming the dreams. He is dreaming it is night and he is camouflaged, traps set, waiting beside the neat green pipeline, a perfect roofing of leafy, verdant cover that hides the trickle of water. He is CHAINGANG again in his dream. A silent, still, unseeing, unmoving, lone killing unit. Waiting. Impervious to the tiny things crawling on him and buzzing around him. Waiting in the absolute blackness of the deep Vietnamese jungle, listening to the mosquitoes and the symphony of night noises, the dark overture that will tell him of the coming of the little ones. And the steel cigar fingers of his giant right paw veer so gently touch the special canvas and leather pocket that houses his three-foot, taped tractor chain, and he takes the last inch of slack out of the wire that triggers his grenade trap. And he waits with infinite patience, a beaming smile plastered across his big, dimpled countenance. And this is what he dreams. Of humans coming there in the darkness.

He dreams that he waits without moving. Scarcely breathing. His vital signs slowed to a crawl. A deadly, totally dedicated, ruthless killer. Efficient. An atavistic throwback to the precivilization when man killed to live. He lives to kill. And he is waiting in the blackness with a loaded M-60 LMG, a violent hell of hand grenades wired into his frag trap, a razor-sharp bowie, and a yard of heavy chain. And in this dream he smiles his grotesque, dimpled smile, remembering the red mist and the taste of fresh, bloody human heart.

F
or three days and the better part of a fourth Jack Eichord sat on his butt at a borrowed desk in the squad room alternately reading the file on Sylvia Kasikoff and making fruitless phone calls of one kind or another. He was tromping over old ground. As police work it was probably worthless, as a time killer it was only slightly better. Boring stuff. People had moved, phone numbers had been disconnected, people had days off at work, work numbers had changed, out for illness, busy but he'll call you back, and so on. There's nothing worse than having to spend hours and hours on a telephone, especially when the results were zipadee-doodah.

A lot of calls were long distance, and everything involving a direct dial call seemed to backfire, and every time Eichord got a phone operator it was as if he'd played Operator Roulette and lost. That's like you have all these operators waiting, in theory, and you dial 0 and the most vile-tempered, arrogant, stupid, offensive, abrasive, sententious, officious and slow-witted bitch at AT&T gets you. After a couple of days of this he was getting phone paranoia, and subconsciously concocting little scenarios in which the phone company, pissed at divestiture, decides to seek revenge on the populace at large and instructs all its operators to be as obtuse, recalcitrant, irritatingly brusque, and shitty-tempered as possible.

On the third day something happened to the lines and all 1-plus calls were answered by operators who kept insisting that he "report your trouble to Repair." After a few of those he gave up on phone calls, both local and LD, and concentrated on pouring through old police reports, crime-scene photos, interviews, newspaper write-ups on the Lonely Hearts Killer, lab reports, transcripts, all manner of fun reading from official CYA tap dances to autopsy summaries. There was a ton of paperwork to digest, and he'd barely scratched the surface.

At approximately 1400 he packed it in and took his map into Vernon Arlen's office and got directions on how to get to the Lynch home, filled his battered attache case with unread homework, and headed north for suburbia, despite having been unable to get an answer at the Lynch house for the fourth day in a row. It beat sitting in the squad room sucking up used smoke.

About this time he always thought about stopping in some nice little neighborhood tavern for a cold one, just to relax in familiar surroundings, mellow out for a few minutes, and enjoy watching the working folks come in for their boilermakers, a little shot n' beer or two on the way home, and a little double for a tightener on the way out the door what the hell. He loved the booze smell of bars and he'd nurse his Light and let the effluvia seep into his bloodstream by osmosis.

Or he'd stop into some little bistro for a little happy-hour pick-me-up. A nice dark saloon, atmospheric and dense with smoke and that rich, brain-battering booze aroma that he loved. Even as he drives through the gray Chicago streets the ambience swirls around his imagination engulfing him in the memories of that mixture that is uniquely happy-hour bistro. Lentheric, VO, Johnny Walker Red, Chanel, Gibsons, margaritas in icy glasses, a Harvey Wallbanger; assorted scents and flavors of urban decadence waft through his imagination.

His mind's eye pictures a nice, dark saloon with that heavy old wainscoting, an ornate backbar full of crystal, a shiny, gleaming brass rail. Leather stools. No chrome. No plastic. No disco bass thumping. The music drips out of the darkness and booze smell, the notes cool and fluid, golden colored and intoxicating like the stuff in the glasses—and it drips into a drinker's wet daydream. The music cuts through the swirl like a silver stiletto plunged into wet, black velvet, piercing the boozer's back with blue-note jazz. Unsmiling, tough, a little twisted maybe, convincingly alcoholic, sustaining the buzz and nurturing the feel of a serious drinker's saloon.

But now he is out of the mainstream, driving with frequent checks to find the next street marked on his map, on a route that looks like any midwestern small town, cleaners and package stores and video shops and Radio Shacks and fast-food places in an endless blur of neon, gray streets and the beginnings of a pretty sunset in the background, as he negotiates the unfamiliar territory, fixing it all in his mind so he can find his way back after dark. And now through the commercial section and out past the junkyards and salvage places and nurseries and on his way to the suburbs.

1619. Eichord has been parked across from the Lynch residence for an hour. He's read reports with half an eye on the street traffic, after having rung the bell and waited a couple of minutes. No barking dogs. The street is quiet save for a pack of kids on the way home after school. He watches a couple of jets go over and leave contrails in the stratocumulus, and he moves his head from side to side to get the cricks out, hearing the second vertebra pop like a finger snap.