Frenzy

Part Two

Spain

Who was this man who sat alone in his well-appointed prison of a home waiting? Waiting when under a different set of circumstances he would have gone after her himself. This was, in truth, no man. On the outside you saw what appeared to be this creature of his own design: one Frank Spain by name. A pair of cold, emotionless, hooded eyes that had long ago mastered the trick of staring, unblinking, into space.

His was a face used to showing nothing. Reflecting nothing out of the ordinary. Visage, bearing, demeanor, composure, all icy cold. Placid. Calm and unruffled. But what you saw had in fact become what he was. Empty. Over the years the slaughterer's trade had taken his humanity from him. Spain was a hollow man.

Mr. Cipher. Blank stare. Distorted, flat vision. Bullet-proof sensibility, scarred soul, Wizard of Off. Death-man. This was the shell who answered the phone to hear the voice of Mel Troxell, flying in from Cleveland with bad news.

Spain made him tell it on the phone, of course, and listened to the entire report without interrupting. When Troxell was through, he simply thanked him and told him that he would see him when he got to St. Louis tomorrow.

At least Mel Troxell had the balls to bring the report and hand over his bill in person. For Spain's exorbitant bill from the P.I. firm he got a list of names and a small canister of film that he could not bring himself to watch. The list had cost Troxell a bundle. The report was as good as anything Spain had ever attempted himself. Maybe better. Beyond thorough. Meticulously double-referenced. Triple-checked. This guy's people were damn good. It was worth the money.

The man who called himself Spain answered a few questions, asked many, many more. He surprised Troxell with his coldness and lack of tears. He took the news like a man with a heart of stone. Clearly he felt something, but he must be one of those who chose to keep their grief a private matter. He would do his crying alone. Mel Troxell had broken his share of bad news to people, and his impression was that Spain would be able to deal with it. The only part he had any reservations about was the final payoff.

Then it became Spain's turn to talk. He knew instinctively that Troxell would have to be convinced, and he dredged up reserves of inner strength and managed a consummate piece of playacting. He knew the degree of conviction he would have to show to convince a pro like Troxell that he was incapable as a father of following through on the case. He would use the tools of the Method actor and let the report itself trigger his scene. It wouldn't be that tough. As soon as he heard who was involved he could feel the flood-gates starting to burst inside.

His own people. HIS OWN FUCKING PEOPLE had killed her. Oh, not directly. Those were punks. Nobody types on the outer rim of the mob. But they were working for his own fucking family. Ciprioni. The old man Sally Dago's people. Those sons of bitches. He could feel himself reddening with the madness of it. It was all he could do to think he wanted to taste the revenge so badly. He fought to stay cool as Troxell took him through the report of his daughter's murder.

It was critical that Troxell bought the scene so he took it by the numbers, drawing him out on details as he imagined a "normal father" would in such circumstances. It was easy to do. His emotions were those of any father. Grief. Bitter sadness. Disbelief. Violent rage. Then crushing heartbreak. He feigned confusion at the chain of command, trying his best to muddy the waters with Mel Troxell wherever he could with regard to who was guilty.

"Do you mean those boys — those children — they sold her?" He wiped tears.

"Yes, that's exactly what they did." Troxell began explaining the sticky, red trail of abuse, torture, and death that began with the boys Dawkins and Nunnaly, and led into the sordid milieu of the most depraved porn merchants, and Spain winced as he heard names he knew so well. Punks who worked for the family. He had to fight from snarling at the name "Blue Kriegal." That piece of shit. He was NOTHING. Some trash who sold kiddie porn. Tied to

Dagatina in only the most remote way, but of course Troxell had no way of knowing that. The family used trash like that for mules and mokes. Garbage to stand up and insulate the people who were of some consequence. Porn — in fact, the whole skin racket in general — played virtually no part in the scheme of family business. To think his own people . . .

" — understand what I'm telling you, here." Troxell's tone jolted him and he said, shaking his head in confusion, "All these names . . . Who are these people? Why didn't the police do something? Who's responsible?"

"In a general sense we all are. Anybody who buys a videocassette that contains pornography is feeding that business. But this was a special subbranch of that particular world. Child porn is a bigger industry than most of us think. It has a relatively small but intensely active production and distribution chain. It is obviously aimed at the underground. The home market and the illegal subculture — and it's within that distribution and manufacture that the industry is tied to organized crime. The men who killed your daughter — Morales the cameraman, and Belmonte the packager, and, if you want to call him that, the producer — were making a snuff film for an outfit that is run by a man named Kriegal. He controls production for much of the mid-western and southern states."

"If his identity is known, why don't the police arrest him?"

"It's not that easy. He's like most of the smart mob people now. He stays sufficiently insulated from the actual criminal acts that he remains just out of reach so far as the law goes."

"I just don't see how that can be. I mean, pornography and — torture — and murder —"

"It is the same as the narcotics business. It is protected. Protected not just by dirty cops or politicians but by the green curtain of money that gets pulled across the face of any business with a semilegitimate facade. The crime families are enormous now."

"This man — does he control the porn business for the Mafia here?"

"Yes, but he's just a soldier in an army of mob people, and the snuff movies and all of that are at the extreme outside of the circle of syndicate production. What is now sometimes called The Syrian Mafia, just a newspaper name, but it refers to the top men in the crime family here, two men named Rikla and Measure who control mixed ethnic factions of what is left of the old crime organizations."

"And they specialize in porn with children?"

"I doubt if those men even realize the extent of Kriegal's kiddie-porn operation. They are older men — both in their seventies, and technically they are called 'crew bosses' for the top capos. A man named Salvatore Dagatina, now elderly and in prison. A man named Tony Cypriot, his real name is Ciprioni, who more or less controls the underworld in the Midwest, but their so-called 'underbosses' " — he glanced at a piece of paper —"this James Russo and Lyie Venable, they take a part of Kriegal's profits, so presumably they, at least from a structural standpoint, oversee the operation for their higher-ups. It plays only the smallest part in the overall crime cartel."

"How do you get justice for something like this? The real murderers are as much these men you've just been talking about as they are the ones who actually did it."

Troxell saw what he thought might be the hint of total breakdown in the face of the man. His body suddenly had that brittle look a person sometimes gets before they come unglued. Spain let himself shake in an uncontrollable spasm. It didn't take much playacting on his part. Ever since he'd heard Ciprioni's name he'd been shaking visibly. That cocksucking scum. All the times he'd kissed that guinea ass. Yes sir, MISTER Ciprioni. The times he'd killed for him. Jesus CHRIST, it was too much.

He could hear himself telling the PI, "I just can't . . . I can't go through it. No more. I've lost my wife and now my KID!" His body felt like it was going to self-destruct right then and there. Additionally, there was the curious sensation of watching himself putting it on for Troxell. He wondered for just a fleeting instant as he tried to manifest the signs of a nervous breakdown if indeed he was having one. "The endless questions. Tiff's name smeared in filth." Going on as he shook apart, letting the words freeze his heart. Something about the legal system being what it is. Turnstile justice. The incompetence of the doo-dah and the law's doo-dah, and so forth and so on and vamp to the coda. "Years of agony and notoriety for my dead daughter and WHAT THE FUCK FOR? They'd never do a week in jail for it —" on and on.

Troxell just looked across at his client and mentally shrugged. He couldn't put this guy through it. Here was a man on the brink of total collapse. One look and you could see he was unwrapping.

Now he could see he'd read Spain all wrong. The facade he'd thought was icy strength was just a persona — the frozen mask of a man wound tight, a main-spring about to break under pressure, a bereaved father strung out to his limits and beyond. Frank Spain was somebody balanced on the lip of a deep nervous breakdown.

Still, Mel Troxell tried to argue for the prosecution of the guilty as much as the system would allow. He gently tried to convince Spain that he was too far gone to handle this properly, which brought out all the stops. Spain went into a screaming rage about how he was the client paying the bills, he was the father who had lost a daughter, and he did such a job of portraying a mind about to snap that Troxell finally just shrugged one last time and left. The irony was that it was only an act in Spain's mind. The reason he'd been so convincing with Troxell was that he was in fact going insane. And this beckoning insanity was what the PI saw and what allowed that door to be closed.

The moment the man left, Spain shut off the flow of emotion the way you'd close a faucet. He sat very quietly reading the report again, although he didn't need to do so. Every name, every phrase, every comma, every sentence, was burned into his forebrain, blasted into the cortex forever. Yet he read the report again. And yet a third time. Reading between the lines with the years of insider knowledge that led him down new streets not covered on the pages. He made new, more informed assumptions. Conjecture and theory gave way to the beginnings of his plan. Again, a fourth rereading, this time making notes on a yellow legal pad as he reread the story of his daughter's seduction, abuse, addiction, torture, and degradation. And then, her horror-filled death.

Once again he reads of the fourteen-year-old stranger — this child of his — and the utter and absolute monstrousness of the crimes and inhuman acts committed against her. And once again he follows her trail down to Florida and to Texas, and across the border and into Mexico for her last, screaming, blood-flecked moment of "stardom" in the blinding, white-hot lights. And as he reads the hand of death touches a burning match to a slow fuse.

He begins his own list. It begins

GAETANO CIPRIONI and then

SALVATORE DAGATINA.

And the list has many, many names. The list becomes sacred to him. It is his holy quest. Names. An endless list of what he now thinks of as numbers. Numbers he will do. All of them, each as responsible as the next for the death and horrors of his beloved Tiff as surely as if they were the physical perpetrator.

He makes a little shrine of the film canister and it sits on a shelf there in the study, resting like an urn of ashes from the crematorium, tugging at him and spearing his heart and tearing at his mind until he feels himself burst inside.

And Spain sits there feeling himself disintegrate and the pieces going off the deep end, and he carefully draws a line through the name second from the bottom,

ROGER NUNNALY

He will study the thick dossier until his reddened eyes sting with exhaustion. There are other names he will want to add to his holy list, his private shit list of numbers. Others who will now have to pay with the dearest possible currency, as he has. All of them connected into the network of terror and degradation that conspired to take his family from him, and then to make his daughter's dying a hellish nightmare.

He sees an immediate twist to his plan that will make the joy of what he is about to do all the more rich and delicious. How he savors his taste for the names. And this, the way he will play them against one another, knowing their great weaknesses as he does, this is frosting on the poisonous cake. He must pull himself together, he thinks.

The tears have long dried. But as he reads and makes his notes, his body continues to shake with fury and despair. And he prays for madness to take him now.

"So there I am in my red Santa Claus suit and I got the fake beard on and, shit, an' this little girl comes up with this fox of a mother and I go, Climb up on Santa's lap an' tell him what you want for Christmas. An' when you're done, MOMMY can climb up on Santa's face an' tell him what she wants."

"Bullshit," Eichord could hear James Lee telling his partner. "You ain't got a fuckin' lap. You got a couple of lower fat rolls you might push together — that'd be about it." Eichord held the phone closer to his ear but then he heard the recorded music again and pulled it away again as he heard Tuny say, "Might push YOU together and make a fuckin' gook accordion," and he changed ears with the receiver just as a voice came back on the telephone and gave him the answer to his question.

" 'Preciate it. Thanks. Yep," he told the phone, "I will. Thanks again." So that was it. The last dead end on the paper trail of one Floyd Streicher. Somebody jetting out of LAX just plain didn't exist. He'd run the whole nine yards through MCTF. Everything from motor vehicles to telephone records. He'd run it out for a hundred-mile radius around Metro St. Louis. No such animal. Floyd, he of the hooded eyes — Eichord felt sure — did not exist. So Floyd boarded the TWA flight, but some other wise guy deplaned in St. Louis. So what? Now what?

* * *

The killing came from mysterious and dark energies stockpiled during the long weeks of hibernation and doldrum, at first an expulsion of high-energy flow resulting from a prolonged gestation period and then a shaking of the carbonation in its vacuum-sealed, hermetic skin sack of bubbling, exploding pressures.

At first he could never fully wake up and he slept fourteen sometimes sixteen hours a day. A deep, drugged sleep-coma that hammered him senseless over and over, and he'd crawl back into his nest of dirty bed linens scarcely rumpled from the last sleepathon and with eyes already stinging seek the dark, forgetting comfort of slumber. He slept hard. Mind on hold. His subconscious floating along in the black, timeless oblivion of perpetual night.

Sometimes his bladder would poke him awake and he'd lurch out of his mummy wrappings to pee, eyes half-closed in his prune face as he splashed carelessly over the sides of the commode, staggering back to his unknowing stupor, sound asleep even as his sheet-scarred, wrinkled countenance slammed back down into his beloved, warm nest of covers and unclean bedclothes. Soreness was his alarm clock and discomfort was all that kept him on his feet for seven or eight hours a day.

He never fully awoke. Minimal activity, meals, the mandatory rituals of existence, a sedentary period of staring off into space, then the great weight of it all returning to settle over him like a wet and heavy cloak, weighing him down and forcing him back into his snug, fetal curl within the womb of darkness and collapse.

He sat very still for nearly two days and a night staring with intense concentration at the small can of film as he watched the disaster of his life unfold again and again on the instant replay of his merciless memory. He got up from the chair a few times when his body ached from the motionlessness or from a need to relieve itself, and back in the same seated position to stare some more.

He forgot to drink water for a time and after nearly twenty-four hours his throat had become so raw it was all he could do to swallow.

By the next day he had begun to hear strange things. The noises of the house had become unbearably loud and annoying. He could hear the blood coursing through his veins, and he imagined he could detect arteries beginning to clot and harden. Cells beginning to die. Synapses misfiring. Relays failing. He imagined the machine of his body beginning to self-destruct.

He imagined that the cauliflower of his cerebellum was rotting. His olfactory sense detected the smell of rotting vegetable, and neurons, millions of nerve cells in the hippocampus, attempted to feed the atrophied terminals of the brain's computer. The computer, red-lining on dangerous overload, short-circuited, back-fired, and blew the lights out in his mind.

He fell into a deep, brain-dead sleep. Inert. Torpid. Comatose. Spain no longer dreamed.

When I awake, he thinks, I awaken all atingle. The plan has asserted itself. He awakens remembering all the words to "Lonely Teardrops" as sung by Jackie Wilson. He is fairly certain he could bench-press 350 pounds. He knows his brain has been totally rewired, and he smells burning leaves, toast with ham and eggs, chocolate cupcakes and cold milk, steak tartare with blood running on the platter, freshly baked bread, Tuborg, a German wine he cannot pronounce, Chanel, newly mown spring bermuda, all of these disparate smells sensed simultaneously as his brain screws its olfactory bulb back into the socket.

He knows he could mentally run the hundred in 9.9, memorize the A-through-C section of Webster's unabridged (AARDVARK: of its genus, Orycteropus, it is sole representative of an order, Tubulidentata), climb tirelessly and never fall, fully understand the implications of the theory of noctivating flora, remember a joke about a man named Wolfshlegelsteinhausenber-gerdorf, knows he could now play "Willow Weep for Me" on a B-flat alto, and awash in the diluvial sea of information flooding into his brain, he showers, shits, shaves, brushes, flosses, medicates, deodorizes, and begins to pack.

As he packs for the trip south he is amazed to have Finley Wren, which his eyes read when he was seventeen, repeated back to him by his brain. He has broken through some neural barrier. His memory is trying to tell him something and he senses it now, fully upright after his long, inverted, and perverse couvade, and the enormity of the possibilities sheathes him in yet another layer of invulnerability and resolve.

In his mind he has already completed the journey for which he is packing, and now prepares for the main event, picking up the phone and calling a realtor. He puts his home on the market, having concocted an appropriate scenario, and, using another identity, telephones another real-estate agent to look for something more suitable to his needs. He smiles at the prospects. Finishes packing. Slides behind the wheel, glancing in the rearview mirror and smiling into the slate-gray eyes of a madman.

For over fifteen years he has worked as the top enforcer for the National Narcotics Council, called the Commission within the families. It was the governing body that presided over the eight primary drug families comprising the largest unit within what is wryly called "Organized Crime." It's a difficult concept for the layman. We know of the Mafia and little else. That element, the old-timers within certain sectors of the primarily Italian and Sicilian communities, represents only a minor aspect of the huge drug monolith.

The purpose of the National Council or Commission was to attempt to control an uncontrollable thing that fed on human greed: a billion-dollar business whose continuation required the lowest possible profile. Years of loyalty and success, and the hand of fate reaching out to destroy or incapacitate his superiors, had contrived to elevate Gaetano Ciprioni to the throne of that secret organization. As their enforcement chief it was Spain's function to finalize those solutions that could not be achieved by discussion or threat. He was empowered to act in the Commission's behalf, which meant he was a hiring agent as much as he was a worker.

Working totally outside the families, accessible only by toll-free long lines linked to a special radio-telephone system, he had been for over a decade the busiest professional working outside the military-intel-law-enforcement umbrella. He was the best that drug money could buy, and that means he was the best there was.

Frank Spain's twisted plan of revenge would lead him back, ultimately, to St. Louis and the dark heart of Salvatore Dagatina, titular don of the St. Louis crime family, and to the man who had made this nightmare happen: his traitorous mentor Gaetano Ciprioni. An insane father hungry for vengeance against the mob, that would be one thing. But this is SPAIN, the killer. And in the crushing of his ego he no longer views the hideous death of his daughter as the act of individuals, but rather as the collective responsibility of many. He has devoted himself to a bloodbath of retaliation against all of those he sees as directly culpable.

It would be bad enough to attack him personally. His response to a noci-ceptive stimulus would be predictably awesome, lightning fast, and devastating. But this goes far beyond protective reflexes. They have created an all-kill bomb, set it in their midst, and started it ticking. Let's see how they like a wet red path of torture and death when it's run back down their throats. Over the edge and on a rampage of revenge, Spain begins.

As Spain drove he chewed over a piece of annoying news. The punk Roger Nunnaly had been killed in an automobile accident. Too bad, he thought. What a shame — eh? But no use crying over spilt blood.

For mental exercise he tries to alphabetize the dozens of names as he drives toward the Freunds:

Alba.

Annelo.

Belmonte. No. That should be under the L's, for La Bellamonde.

Casagrande. Ciprioni. Oh, yes. Then young Mr. Dawkins. Shit. Dagatina twice, then Dawkins, then DeVintro.

Dudzik.

Eggleston.

Freunds. Um-hmm. The Freunds twice.

He finds the punk Dawkins without any effort, thanks to the detailed Troxell report. The punk is in a kid's arcade and pool hall, and Spain waits. He follows him. When the kid parks, Spain is on top of him and he is very deft with a blackjack. He carries a leaded sap that can kill but he uses it now with surgical skill. A quick tap. The Dawkins punk crumples in the street and in a few seconds his trunk is popped and Spain is loading the boy, handling him like a sack of potatoes with the adrenaline charge of action and the hypo of mad, vengeful hatred giving him all the strength he needs to do the job effortlessly.

"Ohhhhhhh," the Dawkins kid says, blinking, Spain pulling him from the trunk of the suffocating vehicle. He has lost all sense of time. A moment ago he was getting out of his ride and wham — the lights went out and there was an exploding pain. And when he woke up he couldn't breathe and it was hot and he couldn't move.

"Hello, Greg."

"Mr. Spain." His hands are fastened behind him and he can't feel anything in his arms. No pain. Nothing.

"Bumpy ride?" He can't make out where they are,

"Listen. It wasn't my fault Tiff ran away. Don't blame ME for —"

Spain backhands him rather gently. "Shut up, Greg. Don't try to use that slick con shit on me. It's too late now. Dig?" Tiff's father is speaking calmly, but Greg can see the look of icy hatred in his face.

"Please, Mr. Spain. Please don't hurt me. I didn't — AAAAAAHHH! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH OOOOOHHHHHHHHH CHRIST DON'T DONNNNNNNN'T!"

Jesus, Greg thinks, this crazy fucker is stabbing me. It doesn't really hurt that much. But it scares him to death to see her dad suddenly pull out what looks like a small kitchen knife and slice a line across his chest.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!" he screams again as Spain quickly cuts another line downward across Greg's chest, cutting right through the shirt, cloth, and skin, slicing with great precision. Then making a third long cut. Then, as lines of red begin to bleed through, Spain rips the boy's shirt off. It is only then that Greg Dawkins realizes his feet are already hobbled as he vainly tries to run and pitches forward in another scream of agony.

"These cuts aren't that deep, Greg. Please. Relax," the man tells him soothingly as he rolls him over on his back. "You see what I've done here is carve a nice upside-down U shape on your chest. What was the old joke about the guy who dated a cheerleader from Michigan and he had a W on his chest. Or was it a girl dates a guy and her roommate sees a W on her from his letter sweater and some shit about. Was he from Wisconsin? and she says. No — Michigan. Something like that — I forget how it went. Well, your girl can be from Utah, I guess, eh?" And the knife went into the top of the inverted U and started making a little series of carving motions and then the Dawkins boy started screaming as loud as he could.

He woke up in awful, intense pain, and the fear of Spain's presence was as bad as the physical burning. And as he came around again he looked into the eyes of Tiff's father who said, "Greg. Please. Don't pass out like that, son. You've got to learn to be a MAN now. Otherwise, you little piece of shit, how am I ever going to get you PEELED?" And the hot, biting steel began to carve again.

He took a long time with the Dawkins kid. And when the boy was dead Spain buried him there in the remote gravesite he'd prepared, and got into the car and drove away. He drove for as long as he could keep his eyes open. It occurred to him that he'd felt nothing as he inflicted the pain on the punk.

He had taken no pleasure whatsoever in the act. He wanted the family. He wanted to take it to them.

It was all he thought about as he drove through the long night, and the anticipation of the sweet revenge plastered a frightening smile across his face.

Stoked to the boiling point on speed, hatred, adrenaline, and insanity, he came for the Freunds wired to the max. They were such pathetic garbage to him that he didn't even bother with a professional approach. No special, carefully concocted penetration plan. No elaborate presurveillance. Jeezus. They were NOTHING. Pure shit.

Driving past a dumpster in an alley in back of the McAllen telephone company, he stopped almost as an afterthought, grabbed a few papers out of a box, some manifests and carbons and crap, shoved them into a cheap clipboard, and headed for the Freunds' residence.

It is amazing what you can get away with by using nothing more than a businesslike tone of bored officialese and a clipboard. There's something vaguely but instantaneously intimidating about somebody standing at your front door writing on a clipboard. What could it be? Nothing good. At the very least, it's the census people and God only knows what Uncle Sam does with those figures nowadays.

When the woman Bobbie answered the door, he made sure he had the right party by simply asking her, "Mrs. Freund?"

Spain's state of mind was such that she could have said, I'm Samantha the baby-sitter, and he would probably have been right upside her head anyway, just on general principles, but the woman said,

"Yes?"

"National Express package. I need you to sign please, ma'am," and he's thrusting that official-looking clipboard in front of her, holding something under her face to sign with the pen right there for her.

"Sign here?"

"Right there where the checkmark is," pointing vaguely. But that's enough to keep her looking down and she is midway through the phrase "I don't" when she feels something take out her coordination. What it is — she has the door braced with one arm, and she's trying to see where to sign her name — where is the damn checkmark? When he lets her have a nice hard one from the spring-loaded sap and pushes right in with her, talking to her as she falls, timing a very ordinary-sounding fake conversation to muffle her impact as she crumples to the floor, and doing all of this in a split second. Doing this with professionalism and care, now, on dangerous footing at this stage, moving back through the house hoping he'll find Charlie alone. Hoping he won't have to kill anybody else. No next-door neighbors or passing strangers. Because anyone he sees now will go down. People. Children. Dogs. Cats. Parakeets. Gerbils. Cockroaches. Any fucking thing that moves or breathes dies.

He was still running his mouth about where he was supposed to go with the package and he was glad to bring it in for them it was so heavy and he was glad to do it or some such jive nonsense as he rushed through the rooms when he spotted a long, lanky dude getting off a sofa where a television set was blasting, and Spain didn't even bother to use a real weapon on him, he just threw the sap at him when he raised his arms going, "Heeeyyyyyy," and that's when Spain kicked him real viciously in the nuts and put Charles Freund in a world of sudden hurt.

"AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa," the man moaned. "Huh?" Spain said, taking hold of him. "Awwwwwwwwwww," Charlie repeated on cue.

"You like pain so fucking well," Spain muttered as he dragged Charlie across the rug, "what's the big deal?"

"Ohhhhhhh, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh," and Spain tore his hands away and kicked him again. A real bruising sixty-yard drop kick in the balls, and Freund screamed at the top of his lungs, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" and it was music to Spain's ears as he thought about Tiff.

He wondered how long Bobbie would stay under, and he wondered if anybody else was in the house, thinking these things automatically as he sized up Charles Freund moaning as Spain pulled him across the rug. Moaning and groaning like he really meant it.

"How's that feel, pops? You like that shit?"

"UUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,awwwwwwwwwwwwww-wwwww!"

"No shit? I'm surprised to hear that," he said conversationally, "the way you love that pain and all. I mean," he said, dragging Charlie Freund over to a straight-back chair, "let's see if we can get you into some. How's that sound, fuck-face?"

You can forget all that karate shit. Some guy rushes into your living room when you're kicked back watching the tube and he throws a lead-weighted blackjack at your head, and as you raise your arms to ward off the thrown object coming at your head, he kicks you expertly in the testicles, you can kiss all that kung fu bullshit adios. You're in the big, green, hurt locker. End of story. Goodbye.

Freund was crying and pissing and moaning, his balls swelling up like grapefruit, and Spain got him nice and snug, then went and wired Bobbie, who he figured would be the tougher of the two by far, came back, and went at Charlie for serious.

Charlie Freund gave up the Morales punk, Jon Belmonte, and nine more names while he was waiting to die. Some of them were new names and Spain's list was growing. Charlie and Bobbie were glad to have the other names for him.

He got elaborate, voluminous descriptions screamed, slobbered, begged at him in the closing minutes of their lives. They were imploring, wheedling, whining, praying him to stop please stop anything we'll tell you everything do anything you want just don't hurt us don'tpleasedon'tdoooooooooon't.

For people who liked pain as well as they did, they sure couldn't get behind any of it. At the last there they would like to have had forty or fifty more names for him. Good stories to tell him. Anything to prolong the time they had, anything to postpone the agony and hurting they knew was in their immediate future.

They were giving him bankbooks, dope caches, coke stashes, secret money boxes, hollow books, closet safes, account numbers, cookie jars, film masters, mailing lists, and when they ran out, they started making things up the way people always do. They would have given him Lucky Luciano, Willie Sutton, and the Vienna Boys Choir if Spain would have just kept listening.

Big, flowery descriptions. Addresses. Hangouts, hobbies, habits. Moles and scars. Christ ohnooooooooo dontpleasedon't ANYTHING. We'll tell you what you want to hear.

He had all the real stuff down cold two different ways when Bobbie went under for the last time. Charlie had been more resilient than he looked. He looked like a fag, Spain thought. But of course a person's pain threshold is just a fact of life, like their blood type. You can't do a whole lot about it when trauma paints it all black for you.

Charlie hung in there pretty good, all in all. Spain had his chest almost half-skinned when he finally went out for good and wouldn't come around again. Spain was really sorry to see them go. He had lots of time but they just couldn't keep up with it all. And he hadn't even branded Bobbie on the inside yet.

He took no real pleasure from torturing them. It made him sort of tired. But then, when he walked around their place later, looking at the spots where Tiff had suffered at their hands, his rage returned, and he found a very sharp kitchen knife and really did a jay-oh-bee on the Fruends. It was good to get rid of some of me hostile energies, he thought to himself.

He looked down at what was left of the Freund cadavers finally and said, "Are we having fun yet?" and laughed at the sound of the words.

His long-time colleague in Homicide, Detective Sergeant James Lee, the "Chink" of the legendary cop duo Chink and Chunk, was trying to explain the finer points of tile Oriental Basket Boff when tile loud voice of his partner, fat Dana Tony, came bellowing down the stairs as "Chunk" descended into the bowels of the squad room at Buckhead Station. He was singing a well-known song to which filthy lyrics had been appended. " 'Neath a twilight canopy, you're so mellow —" was being loudly sung as " 'Neath a toilet can of pee, urine so yellow."

"Jeezus," Lee said to Eichord, "it stinks like a taco fart but it looks like a blimp. What the hell izzit?"

"Good morning, ladies," Chunk said, "Kee-rist, it always stinks down here. Smells like shrimp sub-gum farts."

"Good morning, Mr. Goodyear," his long-suffering partner said.

"Morning," Eichord greeted him. "Honcho in yet?"

"Fucked if I know. What do I look like, my fucking brother's keeper?"

"You look like a sperm whale with a double hernia, but I still need to know if the honcho's in yet."

"You look like five guys wearing the same clothes," Lee suggested.

"I didn't see his smiling face, dear," Tuny told Eichord, turning to his skinny partner saying, "and you look like the dildo float in a fucking Chinatown parade, you little moo-shoo porkpecker."

The phone on Lee's desk rang and he snarled, "Hill Street Eaters, Lieutenant Hunter," before snatching the receiver up and saying, "Homicide. . . . Okay." He signaled for Eichord to pick it up as he hit the hold button.

Today they would be Hill St. Blues television cops. Eichord was partially to blame for their style. Ever since he'd told them about the guys in Chicago who were Cisco and Pancho one day, Hawaii 5-0 the next, they'd started doing their own version of wacko cop theater. Every day Chink and Chunk "played" somebody. Like little boys. If you didn't like them it could drive you bats. Fat Dana the Kingfish one day, with his partner Andy of Amos 'n' Andy.

"Well, er, uh, abba dabba, looky heeyuh, now, Brother Andy, those are serious allegations," and the other one saying on cue, "Well, I is de alligatee. And you is de alligator, dere." Just a way to make the time pass between them. TV shows, radio shows, movie scenes — they were a team and they'd been together so long that they literally knew what the other one was thinking. It made for so-so comedy relief, and on occasion some fair-to-middling cop work.

Eichord liked them. Especially Jimmie Lee, with whom he'd been close friends for as long as he'd been a cop. He could hear them banter back and forth as the woman was droning on about the plastic scam in his right ear. One of them saying to the other, "She only lets you go down on her 'cause you got a face like a douche bag." They'd lasted together for so many years. Longer than most marriages.

"... is not the same story we got at all . . . " His brain kicked back in for a second as the woman's voice grated in his ear. An employee from one of the credit-card outfits hassling him about something that was tied to a junkie-related homicide. He glanced up at the wall clock. Smack dab in the middle of the clock face was the tiny printed message "Eatin' Ain't Cheatin'." He managed to get off the phone and they started in on him.

"Hey, the captain's in now," fat Dana said as soon as he hung up the phone.

"Uh-huh." He waited.

"The captain? Did someone ask about the captain?" Lee said with great excitement. "Captain Furillo?"

"Sorry," Tuny said. "Furillo's out with AIDS today, Mick. I'm in charge."

"You, Lieutenant Butt?"

"It's Buntz! You dork-brained little peterface." He straightened his tie like the guy on TV did.

"Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr," Lee snarled menacingly.

"Get hold of yourself, Rinty."

"Watch it. Puke Breath."

"Hey. No way to talk in front of Mizzzzzzz Davenport here."

"Good morning. Detectives," Lee chirped in his best falsetto.

"That's good morning, Detective Lootenant, you titless tramp. That no-dick, cold-fish husband of yours ain't here ta proteck ya."

"Listen, Craterface, or Inspector General Zitz, or whatever your freaking name is," Lee squeaked, "when my husband Furillo gets back he'll have your ugly ass up on charges for this gross insubordination."

"Yeah? I'll have you up on ole Pork Mountain in a minute, Mizzzzzzzzzzzzz Daybed, now haul your skinny ass outta here."

"Sounds good to me," Eichord said, getting up with an audible sigh.

"Oh, don't go away mad," Lee screeched, still in falsetto.

"Two minutes to nine and you maniacs have got me tired already. You wear a person down with that shit."

"You know. Jack," Tuny said, "I wasn't going to say this. But you have a right to know."

"Mmmm?" Eichord said, turning as he started out the door and arching an eyebrow.

"Yeah. We weren't going to tell you. Some of the guys are saying you might be a latent heterosexual."

"Absolutely," he said, turning back. "I guess I can come out of the closet now." He started upstairs.

"Coming in the closet is how they caught on to you in the first place," Tuny told his back.

The pretty girl sitting beside the first-floor dispatcher looked up at him as he mouthed a Hi and she pantomimed a kiss at him as she spoke into a headset contraption. He gestured with a thumb in the general direction of their fearless leader and she nodded. He winked goodbye.

He knocked on the open door as he went in. "'Morning, Captain," he said to the huge, red-faced man behind the desk, who grunted at him without looking up and said,

"YOU look like shit on a stick this morning."

Eichord thought of one or two rejoinders as he eyed the bulging girth threatening to pop the buttons on the man's shirtfront, but he smiled and said, "I need a vacation."

"You just had a fucking vacation."

"You call that circle jerk in California a vacation? I call it a sentence."

"Well, you invincible crime-crushers have a tough time."

"Gimmee a break. Cap."

"You wanna break? You need another vacation? You got it." He slid a Task Force envelope across the desk. "Forthwith."

Eichord went through the motions of opening it and chatting briefly about the summons to St. Louis, even though in fact he had initiated it himself. He was going up there to see if he could fit SEE NO EVIL into the recent St. Louis mob hits. Different MOs than the L.A. EYEBALL work, but the elusive Mr. Streicher was a burr under the saddle.

As soon as he could do so he extricated himself from the captain's presence. In the entire time he'd been in the office the captain had never looked up at him. There was no love lost between them. Eichord didn't respect the man much, and he supposed that it showed. The honcho made no bones about the way he felt about Eichord. Jack was a drunken bum of a prima donna who would have been booted off the force years ago but for the intervention of the McTuff people and the efforts of his rowdy friends Lee and Tuny who had so often rebuilt the bridges he'd fried so hard to burn.

Eichord wasn't disturbed by their relationship. He figured he would have probably felt the same way had their positions been reversed. Everybody from Jack's "rabbi" down knew that the captain was Eichord's superior only in the most nominal sense. Jack served only one master: the Major Crimes Task Force.

Jack Eichord at least knew he was no invincible crime-crusher. He was just another plodding, sweating, paper-shuffling, workmanlike flatfoot. One more booze-battered copper whose butt was growing larger by the day and who had a gray hair for every city he'd ever been in. Somebody whose true cop value fell right in between the extremes of "Eminence Grise of Serial Murder Experts" (Criminology Magazine) and "shit on a stick."

When he finished cleaning up after the things in Florida, Frank Spain headed cross-country for Texas, and days of long driving later, he was crossing over into May-hee-co, passing a billboard advertising a TV show or a beverage or something that said, VIVIR UN POCO. It was the first time he'd smiled in a long time, and he muttered out loud, "Abso-goddamn-lutely," when he saw it.

He'd had all that boring, flatlands driving to plan. To chum all the names and the people together and blend the mix in his head. He understood the organization better than most. Ciprioni, his treacherous mentor, had seen to that.

When Spain was a kid, first working as a mob gofer, still a youngster who they looked on as somebody to cultivate, Ciprioni had pulled his coat to the inevitability of the Dago family's rise and fall. "You won't have to worry about nothin'. I'm going straight up. The Man — he's going to the very top. But these people here" — he meant the other St. Louis family, the ones down the ladder from the big Chicago mob, not to mention Kansas City —"they gonna fall apart when the old mangoes."

The Man, a name he always spoke with reverent emphasis, was his — not just patriarchal godfather but everyone's — spiritual leader. More than the bosses' boss. He was the force that held it together. As far removed from the Dagatina family as America was from the old country. With Tony Gee gone. Sally Dago would be just one more insignificant hood trying to run a crumbling empire.

So much had happened over the years. Sally finally went away behind a racketeering/extortion thing and was still inside. But Spain would figure a way to bring him down too. And that fucking Ciprioni as well. No one was invulnerable — history had proved that enough times.

Sally Dago's people had been a mixed lot, Italians, Sicilians, and mostly Syrians. The two main factions could be played against each other. As Spain drove, he formulated his plan. The way he would take the small fry off first. He'd whack one on either side — figure it out just right — the people would have to be strategically placed just so to make it look like the people "across the street" were making a move of some kind. If he did it right, worked carefully, kept his emotions in check, he could start a fucking gang war.

He stopped and used a telephone, calling someone whose name had appeared in a sidebar of the main dossier.

"Hello."

"Yeah?"

"I'm calling from L.A., can you hear me awright?"

"Yeah. Who's dis?"

"I'm a friend of a certain mutual friend of ours. He tol' me you might be able to put me onto a dude that don't ask too many questions about takin' pictures of pretty girls . . . You know what I'm talking' about?"

"Naw. I dunno what chew talking about."

"Dat's awright. Listen. He said to mention Juan's name," he gave it the heavy H-sound, "and like if you could put me in touch wit' the Morales dude or somebody, there'd be a taste innit for you, comprende?"

"Oh." The interest went out of the other voice. "You talkin' about Morales. Which Morales you talkin' about?"

"Paco, man. Who you tink? Hey, how can I get in touch with him, I runnit by him."

"I don't know fer sure. Who'd Jew say dis was?"

"A friend of a friend of Juan's — a good friend, you know? He said jew was cool, man. So what's the big deal? Paco still over in the trailer court?"

"Yeah. I don't got his number, tho."

"Well, how, uh, where can I leave word for him? He's gonna get well on dis' shit, man."

"Hell, I dunno. You might try d'Bacardi."

"Huh?"

"Yeah. You could leave word at d'Bacardi. He hangs out dere sometime." Pause. "Shit — I dunno, man. I don' see him dat much."

"What's the Bacardi?"

"A BAR, baby, d'Bacardi Bar's d' name of it, okay?"

"Hey, gracias, if you see him tell him Bob Long called. Okay?"

"Yeah. De nada" The line clicked.

Spain asked around a little very quietly. It took him about five minutes to locate the Bacardi Bar, which was a nameless cantina that took its local nickname from a big, neon BACARDI up on the roof of the building.

He spotted the mobile-home park across the road and cracked the door on the stolen van he'd picked up back on the Tex-ee-co side and waited for a few minutes. He didn't see much street activity. He got out and scouted around a little, looked at a couple of mail-boxes and saw Morales, walked up, and knocked on the door. Spain had very carefully tried the knob as he knocked. He'd learned many years ago that to his surprise half the doors you try are unlocked in the first place. This wasn't, but it had given easily. He wouldn't even need plastic. He turned around and walked away as if he was going back to the van, and when he didn't see any eyes, he made a little stutter-step like a double take, a bit of I-for-got-something pantomime with the hands, and walked back to the trailer.

It was an ordinary if rather long, used, singlewide. Spain figured it to be maybe a fourteen-by-seventy. Morales could be asleep in there back in a bedroom. He stuck the little piece of metal in and the door gave with a loud popping noise. No inside chain. Spain went in fast, closing it behind him and blinking in the semi-darkness of the interior. He waited a second listening. Heard nothing and started back into the long rectangular home, his weight shaking the flimsy particle board floor as he walked.

It was a pigsty. Nobody home. Stuff strewn everywhere. No dog. No caged bird. Nothing. Good. He went to work on the door immediately with some pocket tools, fixing the cheap frame so that when the owner came up to unlock his door, it wouldn't push in with the first touch and alert him. He superglued a metal strip in place to hold the latch plate, the plate he'd forced loose, and then darkened it with a fast-drying marker to make the metallic shine less conspicuous.

He waited and tried to keep from breathing any more than necessary. This punk must never bathe. What a hole, he thought. Just a punk who worked the camera on the stuff Jon Belmonte did locally. Rhapsody Video. What a name. Connected to the distribution arm of the kiddie-porn biz through the St. Louis people. The Freunds, Belmonte, all just punks. Pervert scum on the fringes of the sex industry. Spain shivered. Disgusted that the families would tolerate freaks like this. But then they used street hypes for dope salesmen, so what's the difference? The families would pay for their lack of discernment. He would make all these scum pay with their dust.

Almost two hours. A little car pulls up and two beanors get out, talking their fucking greaser talk, chattering away and laughing, and Spain moves back into the hallway as they come in, his piece out in one hand, a sap in the other, piece with a suppressor on, then that whole thing wrapped. A dipshit.22.

The door closes. They start to say something and he steps out of the darkened hall with the piece pointed. Tells them to freeze en espanol.

"Turn around, punks." He motions.

"Whachew wan'?"

"SHUT THE FUCK UP," he hisses. "Morales, listen to me, punk. I need some information and I'll leave you be. You first — put your hands behind you." One of them does, and that's cool. He didn't give a cucaracha which was which but he had to know who was who. He quickly sapped the other one lightly. Wired Morales' hands with a twist-em, stepped on the back of one of his knees, taking him down to the floor. Did a half-frisk. Slipped a billfold out and nodded. Gagged Morales, now that he'd seen the name on a card in the man's wallet and knew they weren't jiving with him, and quickly leaned over and fired a.22 Long Rifle round into the head of the man he'd sapped, placing the shot behind the left eye about one and a half inches from the ear and firing in an upward trajectory. The wrapped, suppressed.22 sounding like a loud, metallic fart.

"Fucked up that towel, didn't we?" He took the coat hanger he'd laid on top of the TV, all nicely straightened, and his pliers, and wired Morales hands nice and tight. The punk's eyes were as big as silver dollars.

"Si, si, senor. You're in a bit of trouble here, chinga chinga. What do you think?"

"Mmmmmfffffffff." Morales struggled.

"Wass yo' name, amigo? Pace? Listen, douchebag, you really like taking pictures of the little kids, eh? You and your pal Juan," he exaggerated the name, "get off on the kiddie stuff. So I'm going to fix you up good." A straight razor flashed open from nowhere and Spain showed it to the man. Then he pocketed it and wired Morales' ankles, pulled the razor out, slit the man's fly of his trousers, and picked up his pliers. The eyes were like golf balls now.

"Hey, I'm not going to hurt your pecker with this," he said gently to the bound man. "This, is jus' so I don't have to TOUCH your filthy excuse for a cocko, Paco." He carefully pulled the limp brown penis from the man's pants and undershorts using the pliers. "No, see, I'm not goin' to hurt you with this." The razor flicked open again. "I'm going to hurt you with THISSSSSSSSS," he said, making the final cut on the last Morales scene.

"This is a little something my daughter wants you to have as a going away present, you spic greaseball garbage." Smiling real big, he stuffs the thing in the man's mouth. "You like the little kids so much, you motherfucker," he says in his tight, fierce whisper, "now you got yourself a little kid's pecker." And he started wiping off prints, careful not to step in the blood.

He took a last look at the two on the floor and walked out to the stolen van, parked right there in broad damn daylight across the road from the Bacardi Bar. Fucking Reynosa.

"Adios, Taco, or Paco, or whatever your fucking slimebag name was." Spain drove back the way he'd come. Driving calmly now. Driving past the back of the Vivir un Poco billboard and heading toward Jon Belmonte's. Five names were now lined through at the bottom of his long list: Greg Dawkins Roger Nunnaly Charles Freund Bobbie Freund Paco Morales

He picked up a sixth name back across the Mex-Tex border. The only one of the first six that was the least little bit tricky. Of course the Nunnaly punk had been a gift from God. But he couldn't just go up to La Bellamonde and gun his ass down in the street. He needed more names and corroboration of the way the Blue Kriegal thing worked. He didn't want to miss anybody because of an itchy trigger finger. Turned out he had to shoot him anyway.

The Mel Troxell people had been achingly explicit about the part Belmonte/La Bellamonde played in his daughter's torture and demise. Another insult on top of insult was the way nobody had even bothered to be very secretive about the snuff movie. Like it was so protected who'd bother them? The cops in Mexico are in with the beaner wise guys anyway, but you'd think Belmonte would at least have been a bit circumspect.

Spain knew he'd have to exercise the greatest degree of self-discipline to keep from whacking Belmonte out immediately.

He found him in back of his house, beating two little tables with a chain. He had the tables out in the hot sun of his courtyard working them over to age them. He hit the captain's desk about a dozen times, not hard shots, but just enough to bite a little wood out each time, and he was going to start on the honey pine chest when he heard Spain walking across the courtyard toward him.

Spain could tell his reflexes were good the way he turned with a graceful, balanced half-spin still holding the chain down by his right leg, and nodding to Spain as Spain said, "Excuse me, sir. I was wondering if you could tell me how to get to this address," as he pulled a folded up piece of paper from his shirt pocket.

Spain looked at the paper as he got closer and shook his head as if perplexed. But he could see Belmonte shift his weight a little. He was moving back as Spain moved forward. Spain read off a fake address and held the note in an outstretched hand but J.B. wasn't having any of it.

He shook his head politely and said, "Sorry, bud, but I haven't lived around here long myself," moving a little as he spoke, wary and experienced, keeping the piece of chain beside him as he stayed a chain-length away from the stranger with the outstretched arm.

Spain read the situation and clocked the guy for a pro, shrugging as he folded the note back up and smiled, saying, "No problem, pal, I'll ask back at the gas station," turning as if to leave as he dropped his sport coat around the .25 Browning and turned firing low. The shot made a loud SSPPPAAAKK as it blew a hole in the coat and hit Belmonte in the hip. He dropped the chain as he fell in a shout of pain, and Spain got to him fast, kicking the chain away and clipped him lightly, then dragging him into the nearby garage.

He had the man bound and gagged and the blood flow stopped within a couple of minutes, and was backing into the garage and loading him into the trunk. He went in the back door of the house and checked it fast, racing through the house with the gun ready, but it was empty. He got in the car and drove out of town until he found some country roads that didn't look like they had much traffic on them.

Juan La Bellamonde came to with his hands wired behind him, bound to a tree. Spain reached down on the grass beside where he'd been sitting and got a straight razor and a small bottle of smoky-looking liquid. Dr. Spain pulled on his rubber gloves, which he'd picked up at the hardware store, and bent to his task. Spain's rubber-covered fingers ever so gently blotted the watering eyes and removed the glass stopper from the acid.

"Do you believe in an eye for an eye?" he asked the man, rhetorically.

The man's eyes teared again, lidless, as he soaked the front of his trousers with urine.

"You've got one chance. And goodness gracious, stop pissing all over yourself — you've got to learn to control your emotions a little." He picked up the wadded tissue and held it in front of the screaming man. "Know what these are?" La Bellamonde knew before he looked into the bloody tissue. "These are your eyelids, freak," he said through gritted teeth.

"And this" — showing him the smoking stuff —"is your acid, you see." The man tried to bite through the gag and began to choke. Spain pulled the gag out for a moment, and when his choking had subsided he told him, "One chance. I want everything about the Kriegal operation. Every name in the mob you can think of. Every address. Every method of contact. Take me through the whole thing by the numbers, from what Blue does with the little boys and girls to who he buys 'em from to what brand of rat poison you put on your cornflakes in the morning. All the dirt. You miss a comma in there. You even ACT like you're getting tired. You leave out one fact and I catch you . . . " He holds up the acid.

La Bellamonde was voluble and forthcoming. He told him all the nitty 'n' every bit of the gritty, but in the end it didn't help. Spain was getting bored with him and he sighed, picked up the acid, and removed the stopper, smiling, holding it real close and saying liltingly, "Murine time . . . " as the man fainted.

Spain was in a great mood by the time he'd taken up temporary residence in a motel a week later. He was doing several things at once, constructing his cover, cultivating a cutout, building a mail-drop legend, all the things he'd done a score of times before, but doing it with a difference now. For the first time he wasn't working for pay. He was working for revenge and it filled him with something akin to glee. The singer was wrong. Living well wasn't the best revenge. REVENGE was the best bloody, fucking revenge there was, and anything less was just kidding yourself.

When a worker wants to insulate himself — or for that matter, when a dealer wants to protect himself — an innocent party is used. Mules, mokes, they're called different things. Square johns who can be spotted, isolated, cut from the pack, cultivated, and put into play without their knowing it. Spain had newspaper ads set to hit the next day at a motel he was using only for fake screening of job applicants. A girl-Friday executive assistant for a mail entrepreneur. He would set some turkey up with a cheap storefront office first. Have her depositing real checks, opening a mail drawer, all that shit. Then he'd use her to take care of details like dealing with realtors — all the things he'd be needing where he didn't want personal contact.

Meanwhile, he did something very tricky. He carefully scripted a meticulously worded scenario and when he had it just right he phoned the cop who'd been out to his house that last time to see "what they'd heard" if anything. They had an odd, linear conversation that had been laid out like a script so that later — if necessary — Spain could always say he had called the police like the concerned father he was to ask if the cops had learned anything about who was responsible for the death of his daughter. In tandem with the Troxell report it wouldn't fly too far but the conversation had been sufficiently ambiguous that it would be something. A card to play just in case. It might be enough to buy him some time when he needed it.

The good part was that it told him Mel Troxell hadn't talked. That was what he had to know. He took the first steps of his plan through the painful motions of calling Pat. He wanted to talk to her like he wanted to chew on broken glass but he was going to lay down whatever cover he could. It was cheap at this price — a few telephone calls.

"Pat," he heard himself saying, "Have you heard anything from Tiff?" wanting to tell his child's mother, his murdered baby's mother, wanting to tell her that he hoped she was happy now. Wanting to rub it in. Wanting to ask her if Buddy's big cock was worth losing her little girl. But number one, he had to play this one straight as an arrow, and number two . . . Shit, that bitch, it probably wouldn't get to her that badly. The cold cunt.

He got through the phone call on automatic and prepared to go into action. He felt the excitement inside him. The knowledge that he was going to bring those sons of bitches down. He was going to start a fucking war.