Butcher

44

New Madrid Levee

Less than twenty-five minutes by car, but an experiential universe away from Sharon Kamen and her travail, the beast was back.

He too, however, was on a trail. Anyone else wounded and recovering from a car wreck would have foregone the hunt, but Chaingang's needs were beyond the ordinary. They'd taken him down a gravel road and set him back in dark weeds. Two hours of still, fiercely resolute surveillance had finally been rewarded. He'd seen movement inside the small, tar-papered house.

Still itching, tired, filthy, hunting might have been low on his immediate priorities but for one thing: Vengeance was inseparable from the healing process. Of all the cruelties and inequities of life, the two things that would send Bunkowski instantly bugfuck were child molestation or animal cruelty. The shrinks had lots of names for his identification with animals, but, explanations and psychobabble aside, remembered pleasure was everything for the beast, whether it was raw sex or raw meat. Nothing was as delicious as raw revenge.

When the punk had whipped his horse cruelly in front of a hungry Chaingang, he'd added Jerry Rice's name to the stained Boorum & Pease accounts receivable ledger that the human exterminator had carried since his days in Southeast Asia. The bulk of the entries fit the homemade title Utility Escapes, but in the back pages were names, accounts, clippings, addresses, reminders of judges, CEOs, dog bunchers, baby rapers, freaks, punks, molestors, and torturers, the worst of the monkeys, the ones who needed to be found and erased with extreme prejudice. Richard Shmelman, CEO of the soap monolith Myers and Gumble; Judge Robert Watkins, who punished the good mother and sent daughter back to the arms of her torturer; Edmund Furst, president of ACME, the notorious American Cosmetics Manufacturers Executive; the woman who sold her kids into slavery; the man who condoned his kids’ “harmless” slaughter of a petting zoo, and the judge who backed him; the humane folks who do product testing on animals; the Taiwanese merchants; the Bangkok kiddie pimps. A random page or two of yellowed newspaper clippings contained more offhand animal cruelty than a Mexican rodeo, more stories of child abuse than a major city's DFS file cabinet. Mr. Bunkowski's shit list. Names he could recite like a rosary.

Inside the tar-papered shack a bright explosion of light suddenly spilled out of an open door into the yard. Loud voices carried. Two men left on a bike, in a roar of unmuffled, gravel-spitting acceleration, and when all was still again he moved from the shadows. The horses were saddled and tethered where they still stood, presumably, from that afternoon. Starving. Unwatered. Shaking.

He waited for a long time, conscious of the sound the twelve gauge would make and how the noise would carry. Then, when he knew the time was right, he blasted the piece of shit through a window, paying back the drunken asshole who closed his eye, the Snake Man, the girls who'd laughed at him that time as they sailed by in their daddy's convertible, the people who made hospital gowns, Spanish Rodriguez, Mommy, Dr. Norman, the designers of cars who made them for fucking dwarves, the seven goddam dwarves themselves and the cunt who dropped them, Norwegian whalers, Japanese sailors, Illinois jailers, the whole shit parade, the double-zero buck punching a nice wet hole in the middle of all that trash.

Quick resupply. A fast gathering of money, food, weapons, this and that. He cut the horses loose and waddled back toward the ride.

As he pulled off the gravel the fucking car was limping—a flat. He sighed, heaved his tonnage out of the vehicle, opened the trunk. Nothing. The asshole hadn't even been carrying a spare. He left the thing where it sat, his duffel and weapons case in his hand, and started down the road toward the nearest heartbeat.

The kill had been satisfying in one respect but Bunkowski was less than devoted to firearms. They were never his weapon of choice in ambush situations, where he preferred a killing chain, his hands, a club, or his fighting Bowie. Grenades and shaped charges were next on the list, and, finally, guns. Shotguns were accessible, cheap, and disposable, but they were noisy. The one exception, a suppressed street-sweeper with poisoned shell loads, had grown difficult to obtain for field-exigency situations. Even distant neighbors would have heard this ruckus. He shrugged it off.

The ma ‘n’ pa bait-food-crackerbarrel-gunsmith-dog pound-shit hole never closed, apparently. He propped the used shotgun up against the wall by the screen door, opened the door, and clomped in, his ankle now one more point of hurt. He was beginning to drop back into one of his dangerously ill-tempered moods.

“Hey, big boy!” the proprietor called to him. Chaingang's face crinkled in its deadliest configuration, a malevolently beaming ear-to-ear grin. The President of the United States mouthed platitudes and promises in the background darkness. “Come on in. I been watchin’ that fackin’ liar on TV,” the older man said, viciously. “Them sons of fuckin’ bitch'n crooks in War-shington—” he began a tirade about politics in Missouri pidgin English, as Chaingang fumed. While the store owner ranted he noticed mud on the giant's booties.

“I know what you been up to,” he said, knowingly. “You the one, all right. You behind the Winchester shoot!"

How could he have known? Obviously someone had found the body already. Perhaps it had been on the news, a television bulletin, or the noise of the blasts had ... he was too exhausted and irritated to aggravate himself with the illogic of it. A yard-long steel snake that slept in a specially reinforced canvas pocket dangled from the beast's hand. Taped steel links the size of cigarette packs chainsnapped the idiot into oblivion.

Daniel stepped over the body and without preamble searched the premises, taking some money, another shotgun, and the keys to the man's pickup. He placed the Winchester, wiped, not that it mattered, back on the rack of firearms for sale, and, almost as an afterthought, added the weapons he'd taken from the punk's shack.

The truck was a real piece of crap, but the tires were fairly round, at least before Chaingang threw his elephantine load into the front seat with a crash and groan of old springs. He got the seat back, arranged his duffel and weapons case, and drove to the pumps. After filling the rusty pickup with gas, he wedged his bulk back in behind the wheel, started up the sewing machine engine again, and gunned it into life, driving down the road in newly acquired wheels which he knew he'd have to dump immediately.

About a mile and a half down the blacktop there was a muddy access road that led up over a nearby levee, where it disappeared. It was near the river, probably a place frequented by local hunters and fishermen. The small sign by the road told the whole story: Winchester Chute.

Nobody's perfect.

The loud vocal bark that was his approximation of a human laugh snapped forth involuntarily.