Slob

Jack Elchord and Chaingang

What the CIA is to the Girl Scouts of America, what NSA is to CIA, what Lee Iacocca was to Mad Man Cal's Used Cars, that is roughly what director of special intelligence/Illinois Public Utilities, is to a subway cop. This individual, nicknamed Captain Sewer by his senior staff members, was the head of the intelligence division of the Chicagoland utilities oligopoly.

For many years each of the big utilities companies has maintained an extremely secret, highly sensitive office. The purpose of each office is the gathering of raw intelligence, threat assessment, and—for want of a better umbrella name—countermeasures. Countermeasures for the "phone company," for example, have become quite aggressive out there on the sharp, cutting edge. No one speaks of these special departments and in fact many of the employees of these vast, conglomerate corporations remain ignorant of their respective existence. But exist they do.

The intelligence divisions all mesh in a central office called Special Intelligence/Illinois Public Utilities, and the director of this top-secret outfit was briefing Eichord when Jack took the call.

"So what you're looking at here," he was saying as they studied an unfathomably complex map of interweaving lines, "would be the location of the laterals for Site Y Branch Line. And this where you see the catch basins marked is where—" when he was interrupted by his aide, who motioned that the call was for Jack.

"Jack Eichord?" Jack said tentatively, picking up the telephone on the other man's desk, surprised to be getting a call in the director's office.

"Yeah, it's me," Arlen told him. "Jack, you've got an emergency personal. You need to go out to the car and take this on two."

"Affirmative. Lou, who is it? D'ya know?"

"No. They've got it downstairs. I just found you for 'em. They'll be putting you through on a special patch."

"Thanks." He turned to the man. "Sorry, I'll have to get back to you." He was moving. "Some sort of an emergency thing, I apologize"—in motion and out the door even as he spoke, the words thrown like a handful of coins crashing out into the room behind him as he sprinted out of there, saying "sorry" and hearing the one they called Captain Sewer mumbling something to him but he was already gone and down on the pavement and running to the car.

Waiting now, as a patch-plugged call on the switchboard landline was laboriously (in seconds) rerouted through his tactical command radio and knowing then it was bad when he said "hello" hearing Edie breathe his name into the other end of a line somewhere.

"Jack . . ." A word that she sobbed, cried out, crying literally, crying as if in pain and he knew it was bad and he was afraid then. Afraid of what the next words would be and he could feel his inner demons gloating as they grabbed his guts and squeezed them and twisted.

He felt time compress in that awful way time sometimes can. Felt one second become an hour in an hour that would last an eternity, felt time wrap itself into a fetal ball and freeze in that position. Felt it crawl to a standstill as he heard her sob his name. Heard the demons roaring in stop-time.

Do you believe in black magic? Had she called him up from the dark place—conjured him, it almost seemed—made this happen by seeing the grainy photo of his ugliness for the first time. Forced Jack to show it to her, the thing that had taken Ed and turned his life source into a bloody mess of gristle and torn meat. And when she had seen the picture, it was almost as if she'd made it happen. Because within hours he had Lee and he had her. He had them both to use.

She had been so easy. She had seen one of her familiar shadows at the window and knew exactly who it was out there, lurking in the darkness of the shaded yard as the kids trudged home from school—it was Weirdo—her old friend back to pay her a social call. And she had felt no fear, only anger and a bit of remorse but then more anger as she stomped out of the back door and around the house to confront the old pervert and he had taken her in midthought, catching her in the air as she was moving, that is, with a huge paw over her mouth, her body suddenly propelled backward through the air as if by dark magic.

He was pulling her back inside as easily as if he had been carrying a fifty-pound feed sack, effortlessly, and she felt like her neck was going to snap as he carried her right back in, back toward the center of the house and then holding her, with her hands tearing at him, whispering awful things to her, telling her how it would be, telling Edie the terrible things about her daughter, the evil that would befall them if Mommy didn't come with him quietly, a big smile for the neighbors to see.

The horror that she'd summoned up with no more than a stare into an old and grainy photo, the horror had come to take her away. And it had her lovely little child as well, and then it showed her something that was so ugly she couldn't believe the sordid, ugly, nastiness of an ordinary object. He fished a little torn scrap of cloth out of his pocket and held it under her nose and she saw immediately that it was part of Lee Anne's ink skirt that she'd had on at school today and she new that the horror had the child and she nodded a grim compliance.

And instantly she was moving and a smile forced itself across her face as he whispered S M I L E roughly to her through fierce, gritted teeth, guiding her by the arms with just the proprietary helpfulness you'd expect of a friend, nothing to arouse suspicions from a casual onlooker, and suddenly she was in with Lee and being forced down to the floor and feeling a rope biting into her flesh, and a filthy gag going into her mouth and hearing the engine come to life beside her and feeling them pull away from the safety of her world.

"Jack," she cried, and sobbed out a sentence to him and he couldn't make out a single word of it. "Jack, Jack . . ." She was crying and for a few seconds he let her cry, the thing that was holding her beside a phone somewhere and then he did something to her to make her scream out in pain and he heard her fighting to regain control of herself and she sobbed out "I—oh, I, uh, Jack . . . Oh God . . . Ah—ahhhhhhh—he haaaaaa—he has Lee, ahhhhh, I had to . . . AHHHHHH help me I . . . Oh, Jack help me PLLLEEEEEEASE I'm sorry oh, I'm sorry"—and then losing it again and hearing her being pulled away and struck and the phone crashing down and a sharp, metallic noise and her sobbing again, and then a quiet, and the thing speaks to Eichord.

"You there?"

"Yes," he replied to the surprisingly deep voice. "I can hear you," he added inanely, his mind freezing from the shock of the moment.

"Listen. Don't bring more police. You come alone or they die, and I let your whore suck me while I eat the rat's heart." That's what Jack thought he'd said for a second then realized he had called Lee Anne a brat. He would eat the brat's heart. Is that what he said? Why would he want to do that? He was fighting to get his brain working. He felt paralyzed. Drunk. He felt as if he was absolutely paralyzed with booze. He couldn't think, move. He strained against the phone, crushing the receiver to his ear before he realized he was holding a two-way radio mike in his hand as the call sizzled on the speaker of the police radio.

"What?"

"You heard me. Don't bother tracing this. And don't be stupid. If I see others, these bitches die bad." The horror gave a location and Jack laid the mike on the seat and started the car, grinding into the ignition having forgotten it was already running, slamming the gear shift down as he screeched out into the traffic, telling himself to breathe deeply and take in some oxygen and get that brain going. Brain dead. That was the only phrase that occurred to him. The patient is brain dead.

The genius cop, Jack Eichord, the crime crusher of all time. Bulldog fucking Drummond and nothing was working up there. Total zero. A cipher between the ears. Come on, for Christ's sake. He was staring at the windshield wipers whipping ridiculously across the windshield, mesmerized by the blades, and then shaking it off like water as he became aware he'd somehow managed to turn on the wipers and headlights and correcting that as he sped through the traffic without his redball on. He could hear the voice all deep and bloodchilling, an accentless rumble of words that still resonated in his head as he drove.

"Mommy . . ." he heard somehow, on a wavelength man has yet to discover, imagining he could hear Lee saying to her mother, "It's wet here," and the horror of it was beyond him and miraculously it all just passed over him and he had shrugged off the paralysis and personal fear and just stood on the brakes, a Charger slamming into him and a potential whiplash case trying to see his license to report him to the police even as he Brodie'd and swung into a hard U-turn against the honking, furious traffic, the wildly angry Chicago motorists—as he started back toward where he should have headed all along to get what he needed to make the horror do as he would wish.

The thoughts he had in the interminable six or seven minutes before he finally got to the place where the monster was waiting for him were all business thoughts. He had his main weapon now and it was loaded in a box with a handle that sat on the seat beside him. And in the backseat was a crudely hacksawed riot gun which he was debating about shoving down into his belt. And in the seat he had a box of twelve-gauge 00 buck "maggies" open and he had his speedloaders out and even as he was pulling the car over to the curb he was putting a speedloader in each pocket and pulling the shotgun over to him and getting out.

And he took the shotgun, which wasn't even a Remington, just some old pawnshop Winchester Defender that he'd taken a hacksaw to, and pulled his belt as tight as it would go and shoved it down in back, pointing down. It was nothing more than the grip, trigger assembly, and the hot loads. Two ugly mags in between his fingers like cigars, five of the hot twelve-pellet loads inside, and he racked it back, fingering the safety off and dropping both the extras he had in his left hand in the street in his nervousness. Easing the piece out of his nice leather holster and letting it slide in gently as it could, wondering if the S.W.A.T. boys and a tac unit would be coming up smoking and ruining everything any second as he removed the carrying case from the front seat. It was heavier than he had expected and the movement inside made it even harder to carry the weight.

"Hey!" the deep voice shouted to him. "Get over here." And it was all happening in broad daylight and it wasn't a monster at all, but a regular human being he had just seen, and the head disappeared back down into the manhole. How the hell had he crammed his bulk through that tiny hole? Eichord wondered. And he sat his box down by the side of the open manhole and gently eased the shotgun out, knowing now that it would be useless, and he placed it beside the box. Then the man called up to him from the darkness below, the voice like a peal of thunder, a deep, strong, metallic clapping boom.

"I don't know what you have in them but don't touch it again. Climb down the ladder unless you want me to twist the head off this skinny cunt," he shouted up savagely to Jack.

"I can't see, please! Wait!" Jack shone a flashlight down into the hole, shouting, "You want me to climb down there?"

"Get that light out of my eyes and get down here!" the man bellowed at him. But he'd already spotted the woman was behind him and still alive. "Don't mess with me or I'll kill her—NOW!" he warned, and he did something to Edie and she screamed and Jack reached into the box and grabbed the first soft thing he touched and flung it into the hole.

"See that. I've got a whole box of them. Do you understand me, you big, fat tub of shit—a whole box of them." He was shaking now and reached down into the box and grabbed another one of the little, furry things and flung it, wiggling down into the hole. He was gambling with lives now and it had to be just right. Just believable enough so that the man would buy it and come for him. The second one was enough and he heard a bull roar of anger.

"I'll KILL these bitches if you throw another one of them down here!"

"Listen, you mountain of blubber, for every fucking second you keep them down there I'll break a paw on one of these mutts and send it down to you do you hear me? Every second you sonofabitch I'm counting to ten now and if I don't see the little girl and the woman up here I start breaking paws. You want proof? Listen."

He reached in and did something and one of the little puppies in the box screamed in pain and Chaingang bellowed:

"ALL RIGHT GODDAMN YOU COCKSUCK DON'T HURT THE DOGS HERE THEY COME UP NOW DON'T HURT"—and his head was in the opening and his chain boloing out at Eichord like a silver lightning bolt him coming up that ladder faster than any living person had ever seen him move before, churning and charging upward on those great tree trunks of legs, the links of the chain catching on the lip of the manhole as he tried to fling it out and Jack shooting him three times as fast as he could pull the trigger, hitting him in the face with the first shot and two more times and Jack making himself move now as the man fell back down into the darkness with a loud, resounding splash and first trying to climb down the ladder facing forward and not being able to and half turning, going down with his flashlight beaming down into the stench and seeing Lee bound and gagged and the woman all right then, and saying to them:

"Oh! Okay baby, we'll get you out of here now." Going to her with the gun and light on the monster and taking her and starting to work on Lee's rope as he came up out of the puddle of slime again, rising up and charging a roaring rhino-sized freight train of death screaming down on them in the close foulness of the hole, one cheek blown away, tough Kevlar body armor taking the other two rounds, and Jack icy, calm, shooting him at point blank range, the mad monstrosity roaring, steaming, bellowing, reaching for Jack even as he missed with his fifth shot, his fingers grabbing Eichord in that powerful and deadly vise grip as Jack squeezed off the top last round into this human beast.

And, oblivious to Lee Anne, who had curled into a tight, frightened ball, and to her mother's screams, snapping a speedloader into the piece and his hands shaking so badly missing and letting the precious live shells splash down into the stinking goo, and then forcing himself to move precisely and taking out the last speedloader, like a blind man fitting the shells down into the cylinder with his fingers and releasing the device, closing the cylinder tightly, feeling it click and then move that millimeter more and stop, and placing the barrel in what was left of the mouth of Daniel Bunkowski and firing blindly, not able to see or wanting to, firing, holstering the piece and working on getting them out of there, the loudness of the reports like cannon shots exploding and echoing in their pummeled, deafened eardrums.

Then he had Edie moving up the ladder and climbing out onto the pavement where she lay right beside the open manhole and the box of puppies from the Humane Society, sobbing, cars going by. And Jack brought Lee Anne out, carrying her like a rolled-up rug, and helping Edie up, and all of them blinking in the bright sunlight as they moved toward the curb and Jack got them inside and called it in. He had to force himself to keep moving. He knew if he stopped he wouldn't be able to make himself go back down and he had to get the two pups.

He had to breathe very deeply to keep from getting sick, and he started back down the ladder. He felt a swirl of water eddying around his feet as he quickly gathered up the small dogs and started back up to the street. The water was rushing through now, coming from a nearby pumping station through the branch lines and into the submains. But Eichord was back up and the puppies were safe. They appeared to be okay.

Below, the water level continued rising as the dark swirl washed over the huge carcass and then it gave the body more buoyancy and the eddying force pulled the motionless shape farther down, sucking it into the inky darkness of the water main.

"Where's the DB?" the first evidence technician asked.

"Down there." Eichord gestured toward the manhole.

"If that main connects into the storm drains and all, no telling where he'll end up."

"Probably turn up as a floater," Eichord told him, "out in the lake."

"Could be," the tech said, looking down into the darkly swirling water. "Probably end up down in the sewer system with the rest of the giant alligators and shit."

"I hear that all right," Jack said, tilting his head.

"Oh well."

"Right. Good luck," he said as he headed for the car where the woman and child sat huddled in blankets.

"You too," the man said.