Butcher

61

Bayou City

It was a pleasant night in Bayou City. No traffic. One cop car. Plenty of shadows. Chaingang's kind of scene.

A dainty quarter ton of avenger carrying a case full of happy surprises tippytoed out of the deepest pocket of darkness and penetrated a shabby storefront bearing the NEW AGERS emblem and the legend New American-German Enterprise for Reunification and Solidarity. The door had a cheap lock. What was there to steal inside, after all? A cruddy flag and some cast-off furniture? Who'd have thought someone would want to break in? Break out, maybe, but in?

Chaingang glided in soundlessly, a graceful clown bear easing in through the darkness, bearing enough plastique to blow a bridge.

He found an address sheet with the members’ names as soon as he gained entry, and was about to leave his surprise when a loud noise startled him and the homemade submachine gun's ugly snout automatically pointed in the direction of the sound. A human snore.

A closed wooden door. He'd assumed it was the club shitter, but as he carefully turned the knob and eased the door open a crack he saw three young men, two asleep on cots, one on the floor, the tiny crash pad awash in graffiti, Nazi symbols, and trash. The three biggest pieces of trash were sleeping so soundly, amid a couple of cartons of empties, that even as the door squeaked loudly they continued to slumber. One of them was really sawing logs, but he suddenly woke up, wide eyed, a size 15EEEEE bata boot having cut off his air supply.

The snorer began to thrash around until he saw the eye of a 9mm firearm a couple of inches away from his own right eye. His hands released their grip on the ankle of the massive boot, but his protesting whimpers woke the others.

“Hello, lads,” Daniel said, smiling his most dangerous grin. “Remember me?” Two of them had been part of the group that gave him his beating and only the weapon kept them from trying to rush him. All they could see was a ventilated barrel shroud, bore, and the front of a trigger housing, a long Parkerized-type magazine sticking from its underside. It looked like a Mattel or Hasbro toy, dwarfed as it was by the enormous paws that held it.

They watched him slowly, carelessly, switch the weapon to his left hand, reaching for something with his right.

The huge beast felt a jolt of Alpha Group II course through him and said, in a goofy caricature of his own rumbling basso profundo, “This is N.B.C., the National Ruttkicking Corporation,” at which point he tenderly whomped all three punks with his immense chain, trying to honk them on the head as if their melons were the NBC chimes, bing, bang, bong, playing with them. He only thumped the first one on the head, but caught the other two with glancing blows that still left them partially paralyzed. His second attempt was more accurate. One of them, he recognized, was the joker, who'd been particularly annoying. He saved him to enjoy.

Chaingang wrapped the taped tractor-strength chain rather loosely around the joker's throat, with the skinhead facing away from him. The last vestiges of the drug, as Norman had predicted, were causing Daniel to behave weirdly, but since it put him at no risk, he didn't worry about it. He was concentrating on something, and during the interim asked the joke teller how to get to certain addresses on the club roster, quizzing the young man about who lived with whom, what their role was in the organization, and their ties to the old Nazi doctor. The joker, who had just watched this elephantine destroyer kill two of his buds without breaking a sweat, was frightened for the first time in his dim-witted life, and volunteered more information than he was asked, in the hope of saving himself.

The one wrapped in chains heard a strange noise behind him. It was the big fat one grunting. Then there was a stench unlike anything the skinhead had ever known, worse than any backed-up septic tank or sewer smell. He was about to retch when he heard the beast speak.

“A bear and a rabbit are taking a dump in the woods. The bear says to the rabbit, ‘Say, listen, when you take a dump does shit ever stick to your fur? The rabbit goes, no! ‘Good,’ the bear says, and he picks the rabbit up and wipes with him.” The joker almost cried when he felt himself being pulled backward.

When Chaingang finished his business with the big one, he pulled up his britches, said good-bye to the bitches, and went into the other room. What a dump.

He left another calling card, so to speak, this one comprised of military high ex, a detonator, and a trip wire. The closed door to the crash pad, the beat-up table, and one of the stacks of skinhead illiterature, each maintained pressure on the spoons of a trio of short-fused ‘nades. The shaped charges were superfluous. The place was already beginning to stink to the point of lethal toxicity. Bunkowski was one of the only serial killers for whom the police jargon “dump site” had more than one meaning.

Chaingang closed the outer door on his work, waddled to his ride, and got in. Enough for one day ... he was pooped.