Slice

LAKE BUCKHEAD

Chaingang at five hundred pounds, six feet seven inches of killer gorilla, had first faced the seemingly impossible challenge of obtaining a low profile. Where could he possibly hide?

He had emulated his former enemies, the NVA hard core, who hid by day, emerging at night to kill, resupply, move, then vanish again without a trace. They went down into the vast tunnel complexes that spanned the whole of Vietnam ... to hide, to sleep, nursing their wounded, planning strategies, shaping tactics. And so this is what Bunkowski did.

Knowing how his enemies live by their utilities, he goes to their source: the water supply, sewage disposal systems, electrical hookups, telephone cables, pipelines, subways, underground linkages. The subterranean world that charges and flushes and rumbles beneath the surface of urban America.

Now he is down to 320 pounds, but he knows he will be very hot. His face or a reasonable facsimile—scars, dimples, warts, and all—will be plastered all over Buckhead. And there is the little newborn thing that must be cared for. He cannot go back into the sewers.

It is pitch-black night and Chaingang is behind the wheel of the maroon Sedan DeVille cruising through a rich residential section of suburban Buckhead. He is looking for a certain type of midrange home. Medium wealth. Somebody on vacation, maybe. No house-sitter. A certain look that will make his sensors purr. The look that says, NOBODY HOME.

He spots a couple of houses that both feel very good to him. He drives on past, cruising the neighborhood. He doesn't want the kind of Beverly Hills-Bellaire thing where you have a private security force running the streets constantly, yet the homes should be monied. The kind of families that can take long, unhurried vacations.

He stops at an all-night convenience store, buys a paper, a quart of Wild Turkey, and some junk food. Why deprive himself? He deserves some R & R now. He worked for it. He buys some fruit juice. He will wean the newborn monkey onto some juice soon. He will get out of this suit. Put his feet up. Enjoy the pleasure of having paid back that arrogant cop.

Chaingang drives back to the darkened area that still beckons him with its aura of vulnerability and access. One of the houses feels especially good and he has long ago learned to trust these vibes. He pulls up to the rear of the house in a shelter of trees and shrubs. It is a perfect place. Isolated. Total privacy. He checks for the signs of “bells” which can be anything from special wiring to the light beam type detectors. The good feeling is still there. He silently opens the back door with one of his special tools.

Had he not opted to be a killer he would have made a wonderful thief. His burglary skills are superb. Soon the baby infant is inside and safe, and Chaingang, working with a penlight, is securing the windows of a back room so that he can turn the lights on. He does so and completes his initial inspection of the house. His estimate is that a family of 5 lives here. The father owns an insurance agency. They have been gone for 8 days. That means he has anywhere from 2 days to 5 days time here if his assessment proves correct.

After he changes the little guy's diaper and washes his hands, he and baby take their bottles. Monkey gets formula—Chaingang Wild Turkey on ice—just the way he likes it. He hangs the suit up carefully and sits on the bed in his skivvies, watching his son contentedly suck down formula as he sucks down whiskey, still the killer, still the madman, but changed.

Gone is the old necrophagiacal heart-eater. Sissy will prove to be his last mutilation. There will be no more hearts. He has partaken of his last ritualistic devouring of the enemy.

He turns to the story he senses he'll find in the paper and reads with more than a bit of amazement that he has blown up the wrong cop.

BUCKHEAD DETECTIVE KILLED IN BOMB BLAST (BP)—A bomb thrown into the home of a well-known detective, serial murder expert Jack Eichord of Buckhead Springs, killed detective James Lee, 46, police said. Lee had been conducting an inquiry that led him to the home of the special investigator who was out of town on another case at the time of the explosion. “We cannot comment on this at the present time,” Buckhead detectives said, when asked about who they thought had thrown the bomb.

The Buckhead Bombing and Arson Unit said the bomb appeared to have been “a high explosive such as C-4 or plastic explosive, something with a detonation velocity of 25,000 feet per second, like a military explosive, and that the bomb had been built with fragmentation shrapnel such as the satchel charges used in the Vietnam War."

The blast lifted the roof from the home at 2771 Spring Hill Drive, blowing large holes in the walls and floor. “It even blew the window frames out,” one observer said, “and you could see right down where it blew holes all the way through the floor joists."

The baby began crying and Chaingang tossed the paper onto the floor and looked over at the infant beside him on the bed. In just that heartbeat there was a flash of insight that somehow penetrated through to Chaingang's core, and for just that flicker of light Bunkowski realized how insane he must be. Just a flickering hint of the monstrousness of what he'd done, the tableau of depravity and murder revealed itself to him. The revelation was so surprisingly disgusting to him that he felt himself shudder at the awful, bloodsoaked picture that was the sum of his repugnant past.

The huge man gently reached out a steel cigar finger and tried to put it in the baby's tiny fist, and he knew why he had shuddered in that flash of insight. For the first time in his horror of a life Daniel Bunkowski had something to live for.