Savant

10

An enormous man named Mr. Bentley, driving legal wheels, headed west on 670 across the stretch of oily water that separates Kansas from Missouri. His I.D. would convince the casual inspector that Mr. Bentley was a prosperous insurance man from St. Louis, dressed for fishing.

He crossed the river in a stream of traffic and turned right looking for Mrs. Garbella. She'd moved around a bit, understandably, over the years. The street signs indicated that he was at the corner of Fourteenth and Bunker. Bunker was a name out of his horror-filled past, and just the word sent a jolt of rage through him.

Say the word and most have some association: Hitler's Bunker, Archie Bunker, but to him it is a synonym for hell. Bunker—even now it can reach whatever vestiges of the little boy that still reside deep inside his massive hulk. The name is a fanged, slithery thing that crawls out of the past, snaking through his memory banks. Terror Avenue.

In his fishing clothes, Mr. Bentley parks, locks the vehicle. A decrepit river-front building, once a cheap hotel, now a sub-poverty-level rooming house. Each time Mrs. Garbella moved she dropped another notch down the scale. This is the bottom of the poverty chain.

He wears a voluminous jacket, too much clothing for the sizzling temperature, but he appears impervious to such mundane externals as heat, and the huge, canvas-reinforced pockets of the jacket bulge with weighty goodies. Many pounds ascend rickety stairs to the second floor. 2C.

A shotput of a fist the size of a small ham threatens to take the peeling door off its rusting hinges. Slow movement inside. The occupant takes her time getting there. He realizes she must be nearly seventy. Late sixties, perhaps. The door cracks open and old eyes peer through from the darkened interior.

"Eh?" the crone cackles from the safety of a chained door, much the same as in his dream about her.

"Hello. Remember me?" he asks in a rumbling, deceptively soft voice. "From many years ago?" He pushes his way in.

"Please—please don't hurt me. I don't have any money. You've taken everything. Please go away." The old woman begins crying.

It is not Nadine Garbella. He is so disappointed. And now here is some old crone blubbering, and he'll probably have to take care of her—seeing as how he's thrust his way into her life.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he says gently. "I thought Mrs. Garbella lived here. Where is Mrs. Garbella?" The tears flow and she crumples into a chair.

"Stop crying, please. I must find Mrs. Garbella." The woman seems to be having a full-fledged nervous breakdown. "Stop it." He gives her a light shake, but a light shake from him is equivalent to a roller-coaster plunge and she momentarily stops but begins gasping for air. "Let me get you a glass of water. This is all a mistake." He searches for a glass in the tiny apartment. He must interrogate this old witch before he can put her out of her misery.

"Please—" She tries to beg him, her sobbing getting worse.

"Listen. Listen to me!"

She gasps like a fish on land.

"Here. Drink." He gives her a filthy cup of tap water and she tries to peck at it like some ancient bird, but immediately resumes soft, monotonous sobbing. Somewhere outside he can hear the intermittent pop of firecrackers in the July streets.

"How long have you lived here?"

"About a year," she says, managing to show coherency for the first time, between gasped sobs.

"Where is Mrs. Nadine Garbella?" Sobbing. "Do you know?" The old woman shakes her head. "What is your name?"

"Ethel Davis," she says and another big flow of tears begins.

"Why do you keep crying? I promise you won't be hurt. Listen, it is important I find Mrs. Garbella, the previous tenant. Where did she move to? Who would know?" Tears.

"Who do you rent this from? Who's the landlord?"

"The boys let me live here."

"What boys?"

"The ones with the bicycles. They're bad boys."

"Did you ever see Mrs. Garbella?" She looks like she's about to die on her own. A few more minutes of this and nature will take its course, he thinks.

"They killed my little cat. My poor little cat!" This starts her off again. He stands there, a monumental mountain of patience, biding his time.

"Who killed your cat?"

"The boys."

He gentles her down, the way one would gentle a wild animal. Reassuring her that everything will be all right. He learned that this pathetic old crone moved into what had become, essentially, an empty, condemned building. But the building had occupants. A biker gang was evidently using it for a combination crack house and torture chamber.

When the "boys," as she called them, weren't otherwise gainfully busy, they liked to take neighborhood pets and play with them. Play, he gathered, involved throwing dogs and cats from the roof. They had extracted some pitiful sum of money from old Ethel for her lodging, and when the well ran dry they decided to take a measure of revenge on her. She had one possession, a cat. They told her they taught it to fly, and laid what was left of it on her doorstep as a parting gift.

She had thought they were back for another round of fun when Mr. Bentley forced his way into her sad life.

"Are the boys up there now?" he asked.

"Yeah." She nodded, still trying to stem the tears.

"Here—for your door." He peeled some small bills off his roll. "Get another cat," he told her, turning and leaving. She watched this huge apparition's back fill the doorway, waiting a long time and not touching the money that had fallen to the floor.

To understand the why of it—why Chaingang let the old woman live, why he gave her money for the broken door, why he didn't shake the bag of wrinkled skin until the secret of Nadine Garbella's whereabouts fell from her, why he did what he now did—took a degree of understanding not even Dr. Norman could claim.

Only the beast himself knew why he was motivated to kill. There are obvious possibilities: it had been a long, dry spell without killing, and he'd been in close proximity to the monkeys, the hated ones, for periods of forced interfacing. He was tired of taking monkey shit in any form. He was tired of sleeping on the floor of an office overlooking East Minnesota Avenue. He had been screwed with and manipulated once again by The Man. He was crazy as steel cheese—that was part of it.

Sure, as a boy his only companion had been a mongrel pup, and there was the thing the shrinks call transference, and the thing that made him believe animals were better than humans, and the fact that no animals had ever done to him what people had done. But that didn't begin to cover his true feelings.

Chaingang roared his parody of laughter when he saw the bulls gore the onlookers in Pamplona on TV. He wanted to take the ears from every matador, and every other spic piece of shit in those arenas, blow all those chili-sucking grease-ball beaners to a place beyond Latin hell, and it was not a figure of speech in his case. He wanted every bullshit bullfight, cockfight, dogfight to go up in flames. He wanted the puppies in the labs to go for the throats of those sensible, maddeningly "reasonable" men and women who were only doing "humane" experiments, as they shot bullets into animals and mutilated them so that young ham-fisted surgeons could practice on them. He wanted everybody in the fucking shit army dead of colon cancer, he wanted all the rodeo stock to throw and break the red scaly-assed dumb necks of every shitheel moron cowboy on the circuit, he wanted every slimy-boxed whore at Barrie K Cosmetics suffocated in her own putrescent filth for the cruelties their lab assholes inflicted on animals, he wanted to take the offspring of the cunts watching every donkey baseball game and petting zoo and cheapskate-run mall pet shop and slit their whelps open while the bitches watched—and that was when he was in a good mood.

When he was in a dark killing mood—as he was now—well, by Christ, you'd better run silent and deep. Whoever crosses his path now he plants. To observe his actions you'd see nothing untoward. The man in his fishing clothes waddles out into the street and unlocks his ride, heaves his bulk in, and the driver's side of the vehicle now rides dangerously low on its springs as he starts the car and eases on down Bunker, turning at the next comer and disappearing from view.

The car is tucked away out of sight and he is puffing and blowing as he ascends the stairs of an adjacent building. Three flights later, his strong heart pounding like a jackhammer, he waits until he has his breath back, and easily penetrates the locked door that leads to the roof. Carefully and slowly he eases out onto the roof, keeping close to the air ducts, chimneys, and walls.

There are people visible on the adjoining rooftop. His computer logs "eight Caucasian males," then he sees a female, then another. Then an eleventh person who appears to be a young male. In his data storage bank he realizes that he automatically filed away the intelligence that there were no bikes on the street. He scans below as best he can and sees nothing—no passers-by to speak of. He sees neither bicycles nor motorcycles. He sees something that does not enrage him so much as freeze him inside.

An animal is thrown from the roof of the building; he hears the shouts and the noise as he momentarily files the image, realizing that the sounds of popping firecrackers he'd heard while inside the slum building were small arms. A dog. Airborne. Gunfire. Hoots and laughter. Inside his mind he has recorded the memory of a shout to "pull"—their game. They have seen skeet-shooting; this is their joke-their firing range. Killing stray cats and dogs for sport. He does not let rage come.

The first reaction is to get the SKS and take as many out as he can. No. They are a gang. There will be more to replace whomever he manages to exterminate. It occurs to him in passing that he wishes the biker gangs were more like the blacks. The crack dealers kill each other, while the white bikers are merely a general nuisance. He wishes all persons of all races would kill one another with equal enthusiasm and fervor; he is an equal-opportunity hater.

Now he sees (a.) why no bikes. This is their play place. They must have a club nearby. It is unlikely they would use their own haven for such fun and games as they prefer to draw no unnecessary heat—these outlaw gangs. Perhaps they cook crystal in the old building as well. This explains (b.) why no guards. No street kids. No beepers. No walkie-talkie units. His computer registers that he observed no "jigger" on the premises, "jigger" being D Seg slang for one who acts as lookout.

He closes the door to the roof and keeps the picture of the scene on freeze frame inside his head, and for a beat he allows enough of the red tide to come so that he can imagine clicking a full mag into the Chinese submachine gun (a crude copy of the Swiss weapon that he converted himself to "legal collectible" semiauto status), and selectively taking a few—but he thinks better of it.

Back downstairs, in his wheels, the huge killer circles the block until he sees street people. It takes him less than five minutes with his magnetic personality and acting ability to learn what he wants to know. He lays down a convincing screen of gab and draws the words in like a fisherman with a net, hauling in facts about the gang "doin' all that shootin' around the corner."

He has their identity now, their collective name, and he knows where they hang. When Chaingang Bunkowski has your name and address it does not bode well. The prognosis for your future is a gloomy one. You are in a world of deep shit.

He stops and retrieves a book and pen from his duffel and prints SVS/M in block letters, each letter perfect and without character, pressing hard with the writing instrument that indents each notation on the page.

Their name, he has learned, is Steel Vengeance. They regard themselves with a proud bravado they have not yet earned, but in time these errors shall be corrected.

Beneath their "recreational" address he writes the address of their meeting place of record. He will add their names and much more.

He thumbs past drawings: an M-3 firing unit duct-taped to a length of det cord.

A "smart bomb" activated by an ordinary kitchen food timer.

A recipe, for mixing powdered potassium chlorate with a modified Vaseline-base paste, that bakes a very nasty cake.

A device for starting an undetectable fire.

A place inside an ordinary home where a five-hundred-pound giant can hide and not be found—even by trained dogs.

A drawing of an impromptu fougasse bomb fired with an M-57, firing wire, and a fulminate of mercury blasting cap.

A powerful rocket launcher and projectile made from common hardware store materials and home appliance parts.

A lethal bomb made with nothing more difficult to procure than a shotgun shell, a nail, a cigar box, a spring, and an ordinary mousetrap.

The look on his huge, fat face was positively beatific as he devoured each drawing with his eyes. A sense of reverence filled him when he touched this tome, much as a Gideon Bible gives comfort to the soul of a weary traveler.

Chaingang Bunkowski had his own Bible of sorts. It was a very old Boorum. & Pease Accounts Receivable Single Entry Ledger, blue with maroon corners, 272 pages. It was headed Utility Escapes and that is how he thought of it. The book had survived two prison incarcerations, one on death row, and had accompanied him on over a hundred excursions into murderous madness. It was much more than a book of escape plans, although it was certainly that. Over half the ledger was filled with meticulously rendered drawings, plans, diagrams, sketches, maps, schematics, blueprints for hideouts, evasion devices, mantraps, escape routes, dump sites, ready-made burial spots, and assorted doodles and cryptic signs decipherable only to the artist.

One reason why the book had not been permanently confiscated by authorities was that the head of the program responsible for Bunkowski's recruitment, Dr. Norman, had long ago prepared his own secret copy of the book, which he continued to study with the same fascination that one might examine the Rosetta Stone. He considered the pages to be the work journal of a genius of evil, and he regarded the sketches and jottings of his lunatic Leonardo as parts of a decoder. He had made certain that Chaingang would continue to add to his handbook of homicide, and so further Dr. Norman's own work.

In the ledger there were also names, addresses, newspaper clippings, and tiny entries razored from various directories, books, and magazines. There were trial write-ups. (Judges were a favorite entry.) The district judge who fined the man a dollar for the death of several animals, quoting scripture as his higher authority, his name and address were recorded for payback—should an opportunity present itself.

The judge, defendant, and defense attorney in the recent matter of a tortured child whom his honor had returned to the care of the torturer were entered for retaliation. There was the stable owner who'd been caught whipping a horse to death for the third time, and the CEO of a large oil company. These were the names that Chaingang had memorized, sometimes complete with images, which he would scan in a kind of litany; familiar bedtime stories he liked to fantasize about. Men and women whom he hoped to take to the edge of whimpering, screaming madness before he let them die. In a way they were his prayers.

Bunkowski, possessor of a phenomenal eidetic memory unit, had no need for the ratty, soiled ledger which he continued to carry with him. But it pleased him. He would thumb past the dog-eared, yellowing pages, and the cutaway view of a wooden trap he'd once built in a catch-basin of the Chicago sewer system would fill him with nostalgia. Or the complex notes for a particularly insidious variation of a Malaysian whip would crinkle his face in a beaming smile as he remembered the pleasure of the first enemy he impaled on it. It was his Linus blanket.

He could open randomly to a small map that he'd once made driving through marshland and recall the pleasant hours spent at an old waterfront hideout, or see a place where he'd picnicked over the site of a mass grave of his own making, or recall with undisguised glee the planting of the shaped charges that once wiped out a squad of the little people. These were wonderfully pleasant memories. It was his family photo album. His vacation slides. His home movies.

Chaingang sometimes would hold the ledger without opening it, not thinking of any particular entry, but just enjoying the knowledge that it represented countless kills, scores of escapes, dozens of times when he'd faced the monkey men and come away the victor. It was a survival manual. It reassured him.

Dr. Norman had been puzzled by six missing ledger pages. He knew the subject of his intense study so well, and Daniel was not one to allow blotched drawings, flawed map-making, or those sorts of accidents in something of such importance to him. Why had the pages been removed?

Daniel himself feigned ignorance of the matter, having claimed that from time to time when he'd been under extremes of duress the pages had been used to build fires, write messages on, and once—he admitted—when there was no toilet tissue available. Dr. Norman believed otherwise.

There was information on those pages—secret plans, perhaps—that Bunkowski did not want anyone else to see. That is what Dr. Norman thought. He was wrong.

The missing pages had been particular favorites of Chaingang's; pages that had warmed him time and again with hot recollections of steamy violence. Memory triggers and fantasy levers. Pages that in some way brought back the boiling pleasures of various crimes. The pages had been torn out in the heat of the moment and ingested.

They were gone, quite simply, because he had eaten them.

The ramshackle building that houses the biker club faces Fifteenth, squatting ominously between two slum tenement houses. A plethora of large street machines, Harleys for the most part, have crowded the small yard frontage spilling out into the street.

Midnight moonlight drenches the pavement. Probes for movement. Finds none. Blackens, bleeding into phantom silhouettes and pools of deep shadow. Quiet, untroubled, totally in harmony with the darkness and mood of menace, Death observes from the pocket of deepest impenetrableness. He has all the watcher's strengths: presentience, patience, concentration, and unswerving relentless hatred. His natural abilities number analytical acumen, logic by inference, observational reasoning skills, and other assorted gifts. His is an acquisitive/inquisitive mind. He wants to know.

How many? Who? Where? What are his options, parameters, hazards, vulnerabilities, escape routes? The one who thinks of himself as Death is master of the conclusionary processes: induction, eduction, reduction, deduction. The techniques are commonplace enough, but the processes—these are rare.

He has lowered his respiratory rate, not unlike the manner in which people can control their heartbeat rate by exercise. Death stills his vital signs by a kind of self-hypnosis, massive will, and the traditions that have become this killer's disciplines.

The single street light illuminates the clubhouse headquarters, its salient aspects being a street number above a filthy metal door and a painted sign reading SVS/M K.C. Chapter, near which two bikers loudly argue.

Death cares nothing of the names they choose: Steel Vengeance Scenic Motorbiking; Satan's Vipers and Sado/Madmen; Silent—Vicious, Slaves/Masters; in his street conversations he's heard three names. In his head, they are the "dog and cat punks." Some of them wear their count proudly, in scraps of colored animal rags, or in cryptic notations on their skull-and-dagger colors. They are childish thugs and he will now eat their lunch and be done with them.

Death keeps his own mental count. Thirteen are present. Eleven inside the club and two in front. Seventeen names wait in the mind. One—temporarily gone—beyond even his reach for the moment. Imprisoned. Three are absent, and he will take them, too, very soon.

He waits. Something is ajar. His vibes are all he trusts, especially in such activities as these. Some loose end has taunted him since the killing field in Waterton, Missouri, where he constantly prickled from an eye in the sky, an invisible watcher somewhere beyond his scope. He found locator devices hidden in his clothing and custom-made 15EEEEE boots, and from that time he'd been able to shrug off the feeling. It had returned, inexplicably, an itching that had settled on the thick roll of muscle and fat at the back of his head. He forced his concentration past it and stepped out of the shadows.

"I'm gonna get me one of them damn things if—" one of the punks was saying when a steel chain link approximately the width of a coffee cup in diameter smashed his thoughts into jellied pulp.

As the other punk started to involuntarily react, his world was turned upside down.

It is an alien sensation for most two-hundred-pound men to find themselves suddenly dangling in the air, but that was only the half of it: something foul-smelling and awful and approximately a foot wide had picked him up by his face and shut off his breathing. This monstrous thing was connected to a mutant roughly as powerful as three or four of your average Kansas City Chiefs defensive linemen and it was pulling him down, holding him immobilized, suffocating him while he kicked and flailed about ineffectually.

He was not a man used to being terrified. The emotion was, in fact, new to him altogether. But an immense beast squeezing his face, mashing his lips and nose and eyes all into a grotesque parody of the adult who holds the child's cheeks tightly so the lips squeeze together, had taken away his air supply, his mobility, and his reason. The hand, with a grip so powerful it was tearing his flesh, crushing the bones in his face as it suffocated him, then suddenly released him and he sucked air in desperately.

But just as he did so the big ugly nightmare hauled up a mighty, reeking, toxic double-lungful of stale burritos, wild onions and garlic, bad tuna, and your basic terminal halitosis and belched this turd-breath into his mouth and nose as he inhaled, clamping that fist back in place and screwing the mouth and nose shut, asphyxiating, suffocating, strangling, and humiliating him all at once as he gagged to death on his own bad luck.

Chaingang watched him die, and then sealed the deal with steel, chainsnapping the man's head as he fell. He tucked the chain away and picked up the haversack. He armed it and threw it in the nearby open door, flinging himself down. The explosion was deafening.

His hearing was momentarily blocked by the concussive force of the satchel charge. He backed away, as he realized he was now completely deaf and—as he pulled wadded cotton from his ears—he would not be able to hear a police siren or a gunshot. He swallowed hard, but it was as if he were at the bottom of a very deep and silent well. His ears wouldn't clear, but something else was off—something in his remarkable life-support system had been screwed up, tampered with in some way. He turned and made a quick waddle for the nearest pocket of deep shadow, aware of unnamed and undefined tugs at his inner gyro.

Chaingang was a man for whom "future" was an incomprehensible and irrelevant abstract. He was a being totally in the now, and field expedience, homework, and battle tactics aside, reflective self-analysis was an insignificant part of his makeup. He had no special agenda, no game plan beyond the acquisition of food and revenge, and the assurance of his continued survival.

For all of that, he was capable of infrequent moments of introspection. He was subliminally aware, for example, that the destruction of the asshole bikers had been a rather removed and impersonal one. It bothered him—on principle—that he hadn't wanted to take time to rig a mass death for them that would be more suitably slow and ignominious.

But he realized that a hands-on confrontation with them would have been, in the end, unsatisfying. It had given him nothing to touch that biker out in front of their hole. Toying with them, torturing them, would have been pointless. Perhaps one animal or child abuser…sure; but such punks in great numbers were too overwhelmingly moronic to deal with. The dog-and-cat punks were so far down the food chain he considered them subhuman. They were beneath his contempt.

He also was acutely aware that this was also totally uncharacteristic of him—to analyze and pick at his own behavior. That bothered him because he knew his inner workings so well. Something was askew and it was something he couldn't identify. It rankled, put a big buff under his saddle, pinched the corner of his perceptions and pissed him off even more.

Then, too, there was the matter of his carelessness. He was now unable to monitor his actions properly. He'd had a charge wired to the back door but whether it had gone off or not…who knew? It was remotely possible he'd taken them all out with one haversack. He'd used too much high explosive, but he'd been irritated and didn't want to fool with them. He belched, swallowed, and still the deafness remained an annoying buzz inside his head. He was sure he'd have heard the other charge blow; he'd felt this one in his teeth.

Chaingang spat and recognized the salty taste. He'd probably bitten his tongue. A barking cough of laughter escaped. It sounded far away to him. This was intolerable. He turned and disappeared into the night.

Back inside his wheels, Chaingang took stock. He had used his last haversack. He had two pies left: three-and-a-half-pound antipersonnel weapons that could be fired from a variety of detonator modes. Each shaped charge contained a pound and a half of C-4 military explosive, an extremely reliable and stable plastique. He could, as they say, "write his name" with them. They were simple to point, prime, and fire. Electrical current blew a blasting cap and approximately seven hundred deadly stainless-steel ball bearings exploded outward in a sixty-degree blast pattern, each of the screaming projectiles looking to take names and dig deep graves. He loved and trusted his pies. Two were insufficient.

He had three grenades. A half dozen magazines and partials for the SMG. He needed that auction money and he needed to resupply. And he was fucking deaf, which irritated him to no end. His strange mind sorted pathways, payback methods, possibilities of extrinsic surveillance, all of these things on a subconscious scanning level.

Back in his temporary quarters, he rested and plotted. How would he arrange the final meeting with Miss Roach? He'd come up with an alternate way of running his traps if his hearing was still damaged in the morning.

Bunkowski slept soundly, and was delighted to have nothing more than a slight deafness when he awoke the next day. He phoned and Elaine Roach answered on the second ring.

"Hello?"

"Miss Roach, it's Tommy Norville."

"Oh, yes, sir!" She was always predictable to him and he was immediately reassured. The payoff would go smoothly.

"I wanted to check and see how much had come in so far?"

She told him in a long, laborious recounting about every nickel and dime that had come in response to the auction scam. He let her wind down and—not surprisingly—learned that "only a little over three thousand dollars more" had come in since the initial deposit in her account. Still, not at all shabby, and with the expenses deducted, he stood to clear a neat $12,500 on the venture. Adequate.

"I can't understand why none of the big bidders on Item number forty-one sent their money," she whined, obviously frightened that he was going to hold it against her and that their failure to remit was her doing.

"It's quite normal, Miss Roach. I too would be skeptical of such an item from an unheard-of company. Just wait until we've been around for a few months. Don't trouble yourself about these early results, they are precisely what I anticipated."

"Oh, I see." She was clearly relieved that she wasn't going to be held responsible. Much of her life had been a skirmish with blame and guilt.

"You did a fine job for me and we'll have a long and mutually pleasant association—just don't you worry!" he simpered, continuing to reassure her.

They chatted a bit more about business matters, and then he said casually, "Oh, Miss Roach, I almost forgot. I need to transfer some funds to a creenus account for faltrane, and here's what I would like for you to do…" He gave her the instructions to go down and withdraw all the Norville Galleries monies and take it home with her. He'd tell her where to send it in a few days. He did some double talk and used his gift of gab to convince her—over her objections—it would be all right to keep the large sum at her place. Yes, it would be his responsibility if it was stolen. No, she wouldn't have to hold the cash long. He instructed her to go get the cash "now," and that he'd be in touch soon.

The huge homosexual was there in the parking lot waiting for her when she came scurrying out of the bank, and he almost gave her a heart attack when he spoke to her from his vehicle.

"Miss Roach, it's me!"

"Oh!" she said with a start, clutching her handbag to her bosom, squinting to make sure it was her boss. "Hello!" It had almost given her a coronary when he spoke to her. She'd been hurrying for the safety of her car with the money in her purse, and she just knew she was going to be robbed. It was not all that incorrect a perception, as it turned out. He'd been waiting across the street from the bank, watching to see if she'd been under any surveillance. None that he could identify asserted itself, and he drove into the lot next to her car.

"Sorry to startle you. You sounded so worried on the phone I thought I'd go ahead and take it off your hands here and you would not have to mail it to me."

"Thank you, sir!" she said. "Do you want me to—er, count it out now?" she asked, the white gloved hands with a death grip on the auction proceeds.

"Please," he said with a pout. "And may I suggest getting in the car first? We don't want prying eyes seeing that money, do we?"

"Oh, no, sir."

"You just don't know whom you can trust," he said, as she got in, agreeing with him and opening her handbag. First she counted the money into her own hands, then she counted it again into his. He watched her as she counted the bills, thinking how easily he could snap her neck—it would be like breaking a couple of pencils to him. Crunch! She'd be so dead. So easy. It was actually a shame he wasn't in some legitimate business, it occurred to him, as she was to his mind a perfect employee.

"Fifteen thousand nine hundred. Sixteen thousand. Sixteen thousand one hundred, sixteen thousand two hundred—" She counted the last of the bills into his enormous open hand.

"You're a good employee, Miss Roach. I want you to know I am pleased with your work."

It was as if he'd given her a thousand-dollar bonus. She lit up like a Christmas tree. Probably the first time anyone had been pleased with anything about her.

"Thank you, sir," she said with awe, then reverted to her normal downcast gaze, waiting for further instructions.

He peeled off a couple of hundreds and told her to take it, starting to say it was for all her extra work, but instinctively he knew not to do that.

"This is for petty cash, so be sure and keep an account of it," he said in a serious tone. She took the money with a curt nod. "That will be all until next month's auction, unless I should think of something and call in the meantime. Oh—just continue to deposit any remittances—and we'll settle up in a couple of weeks as we're doing now. All right?"

"Yes, sir," she said. She got out of the car with a final, nervous nod, and went to her own vehicle. They each pulled out of the bank lot, heading their separate ways. They would not meet again. Tommy Norville, in fact, ceased to exist, as did the Norville Galleries of nonexistent merchandise. The odd pieces bought for show had actually been resold to their original sellers—each at a loss. Chaingang Bunkowski's depleted war treasury had been restored. He was getting his hearing back. Last night had been a resounding success.

He bought a newspaper and looked for the stories on firebombings, a subject so near and dear to his heart.

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