The Holy Terror (21 page)

He remembered the actress’s name, and the name of the character she played on the show, just as he recalled the names of Playmates or Penthouse Pets. Because to do otherwise would be to cheapen their lives.

He hoped that he would never have to see the television actress without her clothes on. At twenty after, he was in Nam and Reve was nursing him, he had stepped on a can of worms and they had given him blue balls to top it all off.

When the Dream showed to tell him about the junkie, Tremulis thought, Man, I’m not the one who fantasizes to feel better about life.

On the first day of Christmas, my true love...

Well, as wiser men have said, Shit Happens.

Mike Surfer started drinking his holiday cheer at the crack of dawn. It hadn’t warmed up like the weatherman had said. The temperature outside, that is. He knew all night long that the temperature wasn’t rising because the pain in his knees told him so. The weatherman on Chicago’s Very Own Channel Nine’s name was Jerry McBride. Grandma had always pronounced his name “Jelly.”

“Don’t care if it is cold,” he said to no one, just to break his own personal silence. “Ain’t no snow onna ground to be stoppin’ me from goan up top the bridge.” He said it with defiance, as if it was Detective Stephen Louis Carella having a showdown with The Deaf Man in imaginary Grover Park. You had to do what you had to do, if you were a character in a novel or a real life living, breathing human being who was calling it quits.

Enter Mike Surfer, thinking about the Madison Street Bridge, out past the Civic Opera House. He’d wheel out there in months past and think about the people he’d outlived. Madee’ya, with her achingly beautiful lips and sad eyes. Grandma, it was now, with her little eye-openers of vodka in the morning. And he knew his drinking buddy, Reg Givens, was long gone. How would Reve and Evan, and his new friend Vic, how would they take it? Maybe there would be meaning, maybe the write up in the papers will help public awareness, help the Painman slip up and get caught.

Thinking about the people he’d outlived, as if his strength at surviving meant he was a failure.

Now he would ride the wild surf into whatever oblivion a suicide was relegated to, and he just didn’t care. He wheeled out the door of the Marclinn, in the early morning hours when Santa’s sleigh might still be overhead and Colin Nutman was sleeping at the front desk.

Surfer wheeled west, then south and down the vacant concrete canyons that were Clark Street’s municipal office buildings. The United Artist Theater proclaimed:

Tom Cruise in

The Ral Donner Story

Brian Hodge’s
DARK ADVENT

He wrapped his scarf tightly around his shunt. The streets were deserted. What right did he have to think that he had been able to protect Gramma? Putting on a smile for everyone an’ for what? Gramma loved him and did he ever sit with her and wait for her nephew to show up? No he did not.

He paused in front of Mayor’s Row to scrape some street crap off of his right wheel. In Chicago, there was either a ton of snow on the ground or it was one of those brutally cold winters where what little snow there was bounced down the streets eastward into Indiana. No shit, that’s what it seems like. There were a few lines of white along the curbs and alleys, but that was it.

Rolled across Clark to Daley Plaza. The Christmas tree was eighteen stories high this year, the red and amber lights off until later that morning. Just to the east of that was the Picasso sculpture.

Passing behind it, he saw a glint of metal within the hollow wedge of its backside and just as quickly dismissed it as the remnants of a gang fight or an all-nighter. He passed a couple of beat cops, portly Jeff Macas and petite Nan Hite, the latter’s hair as dark and hypnotic as Reve Towne’s, and they all exchanged hellos and holiday greetings. Surfer continued wheeling and could smell the river now. Past LaSalle and straight west now. The sky that hazy color when true day has not yet made its appearance, like a camera scene with a faded gel over the lens.

The stretch of Madison at East Wacker was steep enough that he had to pull himself along, grasping the metal girder of the bridge curbside and then the rusted vertical rungs of the chest-high metal fence on the water side.

Surfer was sweating a thin line down hjs capless forehead as his fingers grasped a metal sign that told how Mayor William Hale Thompson had dedicated the bridge in 1932. He paused for breath, unloosening the scarf from around his neck, rasping noises coming from the shunt, opaque in the early morning frost. He glanced up at a red square, a glassed in white ring within, its black and white sign bearing the legend LIFE RING/SALVAVIDAS.

The sky above turned a dirtier shade of dishwater grey as he gathered up his reserves of strength, the ones that had gotten him this far in life. And wondered exactly when it was that things had gotten so bad.

Gramma had always said that he was the stable one, always keeping his emotion in check. Like detectives in novels who had seen it all. Like the cops in real life who found babies in microwave ovens, it had happened in Phoenix, not here. But still. In one of the last books Gramma had loaned him, the detectives at the 87th precinct were finding college girls hanging from lampposts. But they’d never come across someone burning men in wheelchairs. Men and... Gramma.

They only found her foot! Her foot, for God’s sake. There would be traffic soon, people driving to the Greyhound Station on DesPlaines. Do it now, best get it done.

He grasped the cold metal rungs of the fence, thinking on how, from the outside, he might look like a dwarf in prison, straining to get out.

Kept on straining as he lifted himself up. The shunt loosening and popping from the hole in his neck, dangling from the strap around his neck. He wheezed as he stood higher than he had ever stood, even when he had full use of his legs and Madee’ya was in his arms and she had wrapped her legs around his waist and they had done it right there in the hallway with Mike giving her all of his love standing upright on the hard wood floor and Madee’ya’s lips were all over his face and stubbly neck.

Wheezing but not weeping. All he had to do was tip forward like a drunk on a bar stool. Like Givens at Hard Times. Gramma—

Tipping forward, the air bracing this close to the water. His knees popped as he straightened his legs out. The wheelchair rolled back down the incline towards Wacker. Mike Surfer was hanging ten.

The river was frozen in spots, but there was plenty of safe water between huge chunks of ice. The ice mostly herded alongside of the buildings. Mike Surfer was at the crest of the bridge.

With the water rushing up to meet him; he wondered if the cold and the dark and the numbness were what the Painkiller’s other victims felt before the splash was lost to the city.

Tremulis had called the Marclinn first thing that morning. Mother hated when he made personal calls, she might be expecting a call of her own from some other middle-aged housewife filled with holiday ennui. So he had gone down to the Busy Bee diner, underneath the El tracks at North and Milwaukee, bought himself a peanut butter pierogi, and dialed the number from the front booth.

The old man, Chuso, answered the phone like this:

“Eddie bum beddy come Freddie come steady come two-legged, toe-legged, bow-legged Eddie.”

Tremulis didn’t even bother to ask what that meant, and said he wanted to speak to Mike.

“Ain’t here,” Chuso said. “This the guy that walks so good, Vixtor?”

“Yea, do you know where he is?” It was Christmas Day. Everything was closed downtown. “Or, is Evan Shustak there?”

“Listen, you,” Chuso slurred into the phone. “You don’t give a rat’s ass about us, you want to fuck that girl so much, do it and leave us alone. Leave Mike alone, he’s been through enough.” He hung up the phone.

Tremulis’s entire body tensed up as he stood there, the waitress saying ‘Dzien’ dobry” to everyone, silver tinsel hanging above the phone booth, the place smelling of eggnog and beer sausages and ham.

He thought of last Christmas, where each minute was like hot oil dripping towards a raw wound. He had gone into the kitchen and placed his fingers within an hair’s breath of Mother’s Ecko eggbeaters and then plugged the cord in. Tore a fingernail and that was about it.

The only thing he had been afraid to try was to put a staple gun to the underskin of his knee and then use a stapler remover on the outer and inner hamstring tendons. He wished Mike was there; the night before, Evan had suggested that the two of them sit in wheelchairs as decoys, they could let Mike act as “coordinator,” make him feel useful. At least he wasn’t the kind of killer who would be enticed by Reve as bait. Reve. Was Chuso really right?

He went back home to listen to Diedre Tremulis complain about the amount of time her worthless son was spending with his colored friends.

* * *

The call came in at four-fifteen that afternoon, empty wheelchair at Madison and Wacker. Morisette and Rizzi were on the scene in five minutes. The rest of the Crime Scene Unit showed up in spurts, several of them called away from their holiday dinners.

The chair was dusted for fingerprints, an old scarf was bagged as evidence. The police were taking no chances on this one, especially because there was frozen spittle on one arm of the chair.

The chair was an Everest-Jennings, and Morisette thought it looked familiar. He was weary. The Unit photographer snapped several photos. The way the chair had come to rest, none of the men there had thought to look up the incline of the bridge. There was no snow to hold tire treads.

The street had never seemed more deserted.

“And to all a good night,” Rizzi said, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them.

The closest thing to a religious atmosphere in Washington Square that Christmas evening was the breaking of the bread scene performed by the palsied hands of the Salvation Army volunteers.

The huge storefront was bordered by the park on Delaware, and, to the south, just past Tooker Place, the Blattner Military Supply Store. Tonight, the homeless of the River North area gathered single file as if in an unemployment line. The group, mostly men, though there were several women, stood close enough to bleed into each other’s wounds.

Christmas dinner was minestrone soup, fist-sized Chunks of Gonella bread from the main bakery over on Levee Street, and a variety of Hawaiian Punch fruit drinks. Also in attendance at this holiday festivity of goodwill were Reve Towne, Evan Shustak, and 16th District police officers Aaron Mather and Dean Conover.

Shustak was wearing a plain green shirt over black slacks. Father Marvin Malone, pastor at the Holy Name Cathedral and sponsor of this get-together three years now, had mildly suggested that the homeless might shy away from Evan if he was dressed as The American Dream.

It was quite warm in the Salvation Army store, and Reve was dressed simply in her Gitano jeans, with a powder blue Elliot’s Nesst t-shirt tucked into the waistband. The two cops had taken off their leather jackets.

Those in attendance had nicknames for each other as those at the Marclinn. Shustak talked for a time with a Nam vet who went by the name of D Minus Rex. Earlier, he had met a young man named Simon the Pieman who made his living scavenging pie tins out of garbage cans. The two patrolmen had stopped by during the course of their shift. They both knew Shustak and Towne from way back. When Conover stared at Reve’s compact breasts his eyes twinkled oh so merry.

Mather walked over to the window to stare at the rabid wrinkles in his reflection. For him, his face mirrored in nighttime windows was much worse than staring at a bathroom mirror under halogen lighting. Quite a few Chicago businesses were putting halogen lighting in their parking lots so that kids wouldn’t congregate. The thinking being that kids wouldn’t hang out if they saw how ugly they really were. Still, staring out the window at his face reflected on the blackness of Bughouse Square, it depressed him more than anything else could this Christmas night.

Shustak walked over to him, Reve followed after she had helped serve a few bodies. And Conover followed her, like a magnet to steel.

“There’s nothing more I can tell you that you haven’t already read in the papers,” Mather was saying.

Conover flexed his beard and spoke, directly to Reve for the most part. “We’ve all watched a video at the station on ‘Surviving Edged Weapons.’ Cop in Houston with a stiletto in his ear, first two minutes of the film, ba da boom, ba da bing.”

Shustak wanted more. “You think he’s really cutting them up and cauterizing the wounds with acid...”

“Here.” Mather handed him a folded up copy of Daves’s C.A.P.S. report. “I didn’t give this, to you.”

“Of course not.” But he didn’t have a chance to read it, because at that precise moment a news van pulled up outside.

* * *

The blond newswoman stepped out of the side door of the network van as if she were a damsel in distress gingerly making an escape in any of the current slasher films. A dark-haired Mongoloid followed, minicam in hand.

A few of the street bums had gathered by the inside of the window as the crew set up their gear. An older woman with a fright-wig hairdo—several of the men knew her as Chiller Dihler from Decatur—waved to the camera as if they had already begun broadcasting. The newswoman was still having her face touched up, an assistant putting gloss over her lips.