Butcher

56

She first thought of getting a cop to go with her while she forced some sort of showdown with Dr. Royal, but the madder she became the more such a confrontation seemed pointless. He was sneaky smart. In that kind of refereed face-to-face encounter he would be cooly articulate, as mock understanding effused from his Nazi mouth, the filthy, murdering son of a bitch! She would be the wild, violent one. The thought of yet another stereotyped judgment call by the redneck constabulary was sufficient to rekindle the heat of her rage.

She put the Lebensborn book back in the paper it had been wrapped in, took a black marking pen from her purse, noted the time, and quickly printed a note:

I'm going to make “Dr. Royal” (Shtolz) tell what he did with Dad. If anything happens, make sure the police arrest him for murder! Love, S.

In her thirty years on the planet, Sharon had been involved in two acts of violence, but as she printed her initial, it was as if Aaron Kamen's daughter no longer existed. This was someone else, a dark being pulled from Sharon's guts by anguish and anger. This stranger now went back out to the car, opened the trunk, and grabbed the first weapon she saw—a tire iron, tossed it into the front seat, got in, started the car, and sped off into the rain.

She marked the numbers seven-zero-nine on her mental slate, and concentrated on finding the street address and nothing else. No planning. Just do it. She drove through the arc of a sodium lamp, rain splashing hard on the windshield, and the poor visibility parted the curtain of her rage enough to allow her to flip the wipers on.

There it was, 709 West Vine. Her arms prickled as she realized this bastard had been sleeping a few blocks away from her. She stopped, made sure of the house number again, then backed about fifty yards down the street and pulled against the curb, killing the lights and the motor.

Fate always has her way. Another time and the mad-woman who'd taken possession of Sharon Kamen's body might have waited a few hours, given up, cooled, gone home, calmed down, and things might have ended differently. But fate had settled around Sharon, sealing her destiny.

For two hours she waited. First she'd roll the window down on the passenger side when the windshield fogged up, then it would get wet and cold and she'd run the engine. Then she'd turn it off and the windows would fog up again, and she'd roll the window down. It kept on this way as the rain stopped, started, pounded, slackened off, stopped, started.... It was a long, angry, perhaps even insane, two hours.

Eventually, Dr. Solomon Royal chanced to emerge from his home, and it was a grimly determined woman who sat in chilly silence, the tire iron comfortingly close at hand.

He opened an umbrella and spryly moved down the steps from his front porch, unlocked the door of his car, closed the umbrella, placing it on the floorboard of the back seat, got in, and started the motor. When he drove away she was right behind him, letting her fury press down on the accelerator. He turned, with her on top of him, and when he braked at the stop sign in front of Bayou City Episcopalian, she came up behind and gave him a hard smack in the bumper.

“How's that feel, you Nazi son of a bitching shit?” she shouted, inflamed by the rush of adrenaline and power, her beautiful chest heaving. It was consuming her that the man in the car in front of her had murdered her father, and she was about to slam into him again when he pulled out from the four-way stop in a fishtailing squeal of wet rubber, and she floored the gas pedal, coming up on his rear again.

He knew, of course, what the situation was the second he saw the woman's face in the car behind him. It was a stroke of luck that she was stalking him. What lovely timing. Small towns have no secrets, and he'd known about her from the moment she first verbalized her suspicions to the police. Just what one would expect from a family of fucking kikes—like father like daughter.

It was resolving itself so perfectly. The only concern he had now was to make absolutely certain it wasn't some kind of a setup that these bothersome imbeciles had concocted. The odd detective or boyfriend lurking about to witness his reactions.

He wished he could get her to the house, where the options would have been so numerous. First the drugs, chloral hydrate at one end and the most toxic poisons at the other. A coffee cup and drinking glasses that he kept prepared and refreshed in his special kitchen cabinet. There were other nice insurance policies against subjugation by an adversary, such as a relatively benign hypo full of pain-killer or the loose newel post on the stairwell, filled with a lead center, that could swiftly crush a skull.

Then there were the proofs that had overflowed his office and now filled his home with decades of irrefutable history. Dusty photos, awards, framed newspaper stories, magazine covers, full-page pictorials of a young Sol Royal treating GIs. Checkable, impeccable proof that he was who he claimed to be.

He could be infuriatingly calm and logical while she accused him of this and that. Sit in front of the big picture window with a nice cup of tea or coffee, elegant and unruffled in his drawing room. The spider could spin his fine web, talking gently and sympathetically as he poured her cup, his voice a cultured, lilting, hypnotic instrument. She would listen to the rhythmic and measured responses, and perhaps drop her guard at last, acknowledging her awful mistake as she reached for her cup.

He'd continue to placate and convince, his voice soft and well modulated, his demeanor reasonable, his idiomatic grasp facile, with only the slightest accent and hint of gutturalness in his speech.

Bright headlight glare in the rearview was dangerously close and it snapped him out of his brief fantasy. He knew what he had to do and shrugged off the thought of a witness as he headed for the floodwater.

She was right there with him, her lights horrible in the gathering darkness, blinding him. The rain was compounding the hazard. He had no choice.

The instant he got to Andrews Road he slowed automatically and she smacked into him. Hard. His head snapped as if it were on the end of a whip. Twisted Jesus he would make this Jew cunt pay. Just keep calm.

He hit the water too fast, almost flooding his engine, the Jewess twat inches off his bumper, both of them roaring over the road, smoke steaming from the hoods of the cars as he gunned it up the incline of 1140, watching the line of road, concentrating to stay on pavement, the mirror now tilted straight up to deflect the bright lights.

She tried to crash into him again as he came to the shallow part of the water but he was ready this time, and able to absorb the impact better, and he floored it as he hit dry pavement, shooting forward. He tapped the brake. Nothing. The brakes were wet. He trod on the pedal with all his strength and the car almost rolled, swerving wildly back and forth as the steaming vehicle screamed to a stop on the high part of the road.

He lurched from the car just as she plowed into it, hitting his automobile a vicious carom shot. His “knuckles” were under the dashboard, as was a loaded Luger. He started back around the car to get a weapon but as he saw her backing the other car up for another run at him, he moved away as fast as he was able, keeping the solidity of the engine block and chassis between them.

She backed up too far and one of the tires slid off the soft shoulder. She stupidly floored the gas pedal, in her panic, sinking a radial into several inches of Missouri gumbo. It was all he could do not to laugh with glee. He started back toward the weapons.

But who would have thought she could run so fast? The buxom young Jew bitch was screaming at him, almost on him, “You fucking Nazi killer! What did you do with my father?” and he never saw the tire iron. On the word father, a sharp shock of pain exploded down through his shoulder and he fell to the wet pavement.

“Don't! Please! I'm not—” he pleaded.

“You bastard son of a—” She was raising the iron back again when he grabbed a slim ankle, yanking savagely. The woman's arms broke her fall but the tire iron went clattering away.

She tried to kick him between the legs as he struggled to his feet and a pointed, high-heeled shoe caught him solidly on the inside of the left leg, just missing his groin. He screamed and smashed a fist towards her face, which she somehow deflected, scratching his arm as she tried to get at his eyes, and then they had hold of each other, screaming and panting as they rolled across the blacktop and into a muddy ditch.

The woman was fighting for her life but so was he. She'd lost a shoe, and managed to kick the other one off, but in doing so lost her balance and he got away and started up the ditch. She grabbed for his legs, trying to pull him back down, but he was able to kick her in the face and scrambled for the car as she ran up the ditch bank behind him.

Emil Shtolz was covered in mud. There was blood dripping from his left arm. His right shoulder felt as if it might be broken. He was limping. His glasses were broken. He was gasping as if he were about to have a coronary. But he made it to the car before she did and grabbed for the grip of the Luger just as she pulled him backward.

They were back on the pavement. Muddy and bloody and fighting like animals or little children, screaming and kicking and scratching, untrained combatants suddenly learning what it was like to battle tooth and nail. He kicked at her as he racked a shell into the gun, more frightened than he'd ever been in his life, knowing that if he dropped the gun she would kill him.

He fired as she leaped at him and, even as close as they were, he managed to miss. She grabbed for the gun and he shot her in the hand and wrist. She fell back, and he shot her again, but he got her with the next one. Hit her dead center.

He knew several things in that instant: he'd won, he knew that. He knew she was dead. He didn't need to check for vital signs, he'd seen innumerable Jews die, and one more had joined their ranks. He had to resist the temptation to blow her apart inch by inch, because he was going to have to do something with this meddlesome sheenie and her car as well. He knew he had chains in the trunk.

All of this flashed through his head like lightning as he wobbled around and somehow regained his feet. His right hand could scarcely hold the damned Luger, so he took it in his blood-encrusted but uninjured left hand and carefully moved around to where he could administer a coup de grace to her head. As he was starting to bring the front sight up even with her temple under its wet mop of hair, a truck appeared in the distance.

Why should he take the chance of moving her and the car as well? Suddenly it was all too much trouble. No one would be able to prove any connection between himself and the dead girl, no matter how much they cared to speculate. His reputation would protect him—these were his people, after all. He hurried to his car, got in, started the motor, cut the wheel as sharply as his condition permitted, and floored the gas pedal, roaring back in the direction he'd come.

Shtolz’ eyes were riveted on the approaching truck. Would the driver notice her? Would he stop to help, or assume that since no one was behind the wheel of the vehicle that the person had gone for a tow truck? Was it someone who would recognize his car? He sighed deeply when the truck turned as it reached the nearest corner, and devoted his attention to making it back through the deep water and, above all else, not driving off the road.

Once he was on the other side he tested the brakes. This time they held after a few taps. He stopped, backed to the water's edge, and got out, aching but with a strong sense of relief. His problems were almost over. When he was sure no one was observing him he took the Luger by the barrel and, with his good arm, flung the weapon out into the moving stream of water. He got back in the car and headed toward his house. He would give himself a chemical bath, patch himself up, and by the time the authorities came around with questions he'd have an airtight alibi scenario for them.

Sharon Kamen no longer thought of Dr. Royal or avenging her father. She felt herself turning cold, sculpturelike, coming unhinged at the pit of her stomach, abdomen, and chest, coming apart like one of Jean Ipousteguy's reclining bronze nudes. She knew she was fading fast, her arms raised, legs in an unladylike sprawl, too weak to stop the wounds that bled onto the hard surface. She could only think of the woman in La Femme au Bain, recumbent, weird, cold, unhinged ... and very still now in the rain.