The Holy Terror (32 page)

I’M A NEW DRUG, the American Dream hissed through perfect, clenched teeth. TRY ME.

In his mind. All in his mind. The beige-turned-shit brown blanket was warm now, because Shustak had pissed his pants.

Ray Lewis took a quick glance over at the darkened chicken place. “Love that chicken from Popeye’s,” he sang. He was the one with the perfect teeth.

* * *

“See, I know who you are, Man.” Angry spit hit Shustak’s own.

Grabbing the armrest with both hands. Knuckles white; well yellowish-white. So close to the knife.

“See, what it is, me and the Tee be at the Fonk City and Smooth, see, he be knows the sidewalk preacher dude what knows you. Simple as the pie in your pocket.” White teeth in the shadows. Impatient spit in his sibilants.

The black man reached to his waistband. The rain beaded on his skin.

Shustak made a spit bubble. He still was thinking he was throwing his opponent off track.

Even after the guy pulled a blade of his own.

“You must be getting some kinda dis’bility from the state or sompin, you aint workin’.”

The American Dream battered the Painkiller with February blows forged from his iron will and discipline. The city would privately thank him, but publicly decide him to be a vigilante, a loose cannon. Lying on the ground, the Painkiller begged for mercy, something he never gave his victims.

Shustak frisked him for weapons. Found the acid in one pocket, in one of the plastic travel bottles that you buy to keep your saline solution in if you wear contacts. The bottle had a teal squeeze cap and was labeled ACID. The miniature blow torch and a set of Ginsu knives were in an inside pocket. The Painkiller tried to get up then, make a break for it. The American Dream rabbit-punched him and his skull cracked the ground. CRIPPLED AND INSANE, I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM, he spat. I’VE GOT DYNAMITE IN ONE HAND AND A FIST IN THE OTHER. I’LL SLAP YOU SILLY.

The Painkiller pissed in his pants, obviously frightened. Compared to the dread Eighth Street Man, the Painkiller was spineless. His mad reign was o

 
The black man had a knife in his hand.

“You’re the Painkiller, aren’t you?” Shustak asked like a hero would when trapped in a villain’s lair. He’d spill his whole story, how a strange meteor made him hear voices that told him to slice and dice crippled people. Or maybe tell him that he was a dentist who had gotten AIDS from one of his patients and he killed his victims with dental instruments.

Shustak readied himself, his own blade with a handle as dark as the womb and as unforgiving as the grave.

Sometimes, in this city, it was the other way around.

“Me, the Painkiller?” The hand that held the knife splayed across his chest. The starving thespian.

Shustak never had time to observe everything in that last moment. He barely had time to raise his own knife. The rain was no more than a misty tingle, much like a seizure that never hung around too long.

Ray Lewis from Whiting, Indiana, slit Evan Shustak’s throat in a clean arc from just below the left earlobe. The blade neatly slid through the sternohyoid muscle; the left innominate vein, and the left common carotid artery. The back of Shustak’s head slapped three times against the wall of the Asian Bank Building. His blood gushed onto the blanket in freshets, creating what could have been a pool of gravy in the darkness.

“Me, the nasty Mister Painkiller?” The very idea left him almost satisfied that the chump only had a few shittin’ bucks in his freak retard pocket.

“An’ you the American Dream.” He laughed hard enough that Dean Conover, walking down Madison, could hear. Ray Lewis wiped his knife off on Shustak’s forehead. He contemplated letting the body drop, let him peek around for more money. Figured maybe the dead guy had been smart after all. Only have as much as you need.

He started walking down the alley, toward St. Sixtus.

“Yea, hero and villain,” He laughed again, but his stomach growling made him stop. He looked back one last time.

“Yea,” he told the corpse. “Dream on.”

It surprised the both of them. Conover had been walking along, the rain was Reve Towne’s fingers playing in his hair and her tongue lapping his neck just under his jacket collar. He heard the voices, heard Lewis laughing. And then there he was.

With the knife still in his hand. The rain wetting the blade again.

Conover tipped to the blade right away, and he was starting to react. That is, he had stopped focusing on an imaginary spot between milky white thighs when the blade came upwards and entered his abdomen just beneath the rib cage.

Lewis was not a strong man. He could not lift the cop off the ground. He settled for letting the blade break off inside of him.

Conover fell to the ground, thinking fragments of words. Lewis had hit an adrenaline rush from the second he had seen Conover, not knowing until the next day’s paper that he had cut up a copper. He ran west down Madison and spent Shustak’s money on a bottle and some chili in a Halsted Street dive.

Conover was on his back, the rain hitting his eyes and generally pissing him off. He tried to remember that joke Anderson had told him at the water cooler. The Jew and the other guy on the plane. Hadn’t he tried the joke out on Mather?

So the plane lands after the engine trouble, the one guy looks over at his hebe friend with the glasses and sees him crossing himself. He says hey what are you doing with the sign of the cross thing, I thought you were Jewish? The guy makes the moves again and says oh I was just checking that I had everything spectacles testicles wallet and keys.

Conover had to speed it up at the last, making his own peace with God as he finished the joke.

He got as far as In the name of the Father.

When he reached down for the and of the Son part he realized that one he had a hard-on and two he had pissed himself and then he was dead...

Ninety percent of the time, the
Chicago Tribune
will relegate the daily news stories to grace their front page to include national news, such as a coup in Liberia, Lebanon hostage talks, and the like; and local news if it involved politics, Chicago being a political town, in case you just fell off of a turnip truck. The going in-joke come voting days was In Cook County, Vote Early and Vote Often! Any other local news was saved for Section Two, the Chicagoland portion of the paper.

There are exceptions to the rule, say, for example, when a cop is killed. Now, Dean Conover was off-duty and should have been in Section Two, but the thing had snowballed into a Painkiller-related story. The Painkiller always made the front page because if the murderer was not caught by the upcoming election, well...

The above fold headline for the February 2nd Trib ran this way:

Off-Duty Cop Slain by Painkiller

An officer from the 16th District was slain in the North Loop late Monday evening, apparently after encountering the elusive murderer stalking the downtown streets since November.

Dean Conover, 34, succumbed to stab wounds inflicted in the 150 block of West Madison, and was DOA at Henrotin Hospital. There were signs of a struggle, according to Malcolm B. Dennison, a pastor at St.Sixtus Franciscan Church, near the scene of the crime. Several feet away was the intended victim, an invalid in his late twenties, tentatively identified as Evan Shustak, no known address. Dennison discovered both bodies.

Early reports from Frank Bervid, who examined the first victim at the scene, said that the slash wounds were “similar” to those of the lurid serial killer whose prey has been handicapped street people confined to wheelchairs. The Assistant Medical Examiner would offer no further information until a proper autopsy was performed.

This brings the number of known, and suspected murders attributed to the one known to many as “The Painkiller” at fourteen.

“That number is very high, and I think it is very much out of proportion,” said Area 3 Homicide Det. Lt. Jackson Daves. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of those cases where the killing of Shustak was copycat, and the off-duty officer just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Officer Conover was the recipient of fourteen Honorable Mentions since starting on the force with the Traffic Division in July, 1984.

Victor Tremulis never cut articles out of anything, mostly because he would never know when the urge to nip at his skin with the blades might come upon him. Instead he folded and ripped the pages; the lower half of the Tribune article was ripped horizontally against the grain. He tacked the jagged page onto the wall of Shustak’s room opposite a photocopy of an ad from an early fifties
Batman
comic, where the Caped Crusader and Robin were asking for donations in the area of polio research.

Evan Shustak, Chicago’s American Dream, had been dead for one week, with only a few knowing the true circumstances surrounding his life and death (like in a comic book, he supposed) and the wheelchair he had ridden in, along with the beige blanket, was stored in a room marked EVIDENCE in the basement of the James J. Riordan Police Headquarters at Eleventh and State.

Maybe it was: sitting alongside Mike Surfer’s old MediaComp chair, down there in the evidence room, joined again in death. Along with bags of controlled substances and other sundry things.

Control was something Tremulis was losing, as every minute stomped by. “You always thought that we would have stopped him, Evan.” His voice rang as hollow as a side view of his face.

“We. Us.” The two words sounded like a weak gas leak.

It was only him and Reve now. Shustak’s corpse wasn’t even around: when the ghouls at County were done with it, an Aunt Kim Something paid for his body to be flown back to Tempe, Arizona. It seemed fitting that the relative lived on Ash Street.

How the hell was it that Evan Shustak had ended up in Chicago? Now there would be no future episode where someone stood over a Chicago graveside and recounted, “The Secret Origin of The American Dream.”

And the minutes kept stomping on by, reminding Tremulis that he was still part of the passing parade.

* * *

Reve Towne worried about the man whose name she still thought to be Vic Tremble. She suspected it to be a nickname, and also expected him to never have the courage to tell her his real name. And her grief over Evan’s death had not scarred over, as well.

The city he had lived in had forgotten him in the wake of Dean Conover’s funeral. But she would always remember, as Vic would, perhaps a little too much. Since the incident, Vic had stopped going out on patrol. She didn’t blame him. Shit. She was certain that even the Painkiller was leery of showing his face after the publicity his last attack had garnered.

Reve also wondered, sitting alone in the living room of her apartment, if Evan had been any kind of a hero back in Arizona.

And now she was thinking about the only other survivor, a man behind another mask. A man currently contemplating the end of he knew not what.

She took the bus to the Marclinn, knowing he would be there. A man on the street accused her of looking full of piss and vinegar.

Walking through the doors of the Marclinn, she found the lobby vacant. It was like the Marclinn’s “family” was unraveling. With individual threads weren’t being sliced away by the Painkiller. She looked across at the leering faces of the Fates.

Edgar Chuso sat in one chair, watching a blank television screen. What destroys people’s lives so easily?” Reve said aloud, and it kind of jumpstarted the old fart.

But all he had to say was, “Eddie come Beddy come Freddy come Steady...”

* * *

Victor Tremulis was to descend one last time before going back down into the subway. It was too cold for the Painkiller to go anywhere else. Evan Shustak was dead and there was nobody else on the streets to kill. Badaboom. badabing, simple thinking, really.

He would be waiting.

Tremulis descended in a way such as this:

There were parts of the American Dream in this room the small one window room with its view of the neon Magikist lips was as cluttered with parts of a whole as Tremulis’s own mind. Makes sense if you let it.

He looked at the arm bands, the surgical gauze and the rolls of Scotch tape. But it was the fragments of fiberglass casts that interested him the most, out of all the medicinal carrion that lay in the beveled shadows. He had forgotten how long it had been since he last spoke. With Etch at the Coke machine. That must be it.

Now he had to ready himself for the pain ahead, or rather, below. Self-mutilation was the only thing left, now that Shustak was dead, that would give him the needed strength. For he was too cowardly even now to ask Reve to help him through to the end.

Mutilation. And he knew how to do it. What Chuso had said so long ago had made sense. He sucker-punched Shustak into playing the ultimate hero, while he, Tremulis, capered in the tunnels. And for what? In Chuso’s own sage words, why didn’t he just corner Reve for a sympathy fuck and get it all over with. Then move on, go back to washing glasses at the Hard Rock Cafe, go back to being shit on by everybody and their aunt.

He fumbled amongst the ruins of Shustak’s life. One of his lives.