Savant

16

The famous reporter held the microphone directly under John J. Llewelyn's proboscis. The light was bright in the lieutenant's eyes, and the presence of both mike and camera made him nervous. He could imagine how his bald forehead would catch the light and glare like a cueball on TV. He tried in vain to recall the famed investigative journalist's name.

"So you feel the persecution of the L.A. police chief is unfair, is that what you're saying?"

"Look. I don't know the details of what's going on out there but you take any industry where the guy at the top is responsible for the actions of thousands of men…" He was finding it so difficult to concentrate with that microphone shoved in his face. "Some guy runs a big plant, and there's fifteen thousand employees, and fifteen hundred cases of pilfering, I mean—do you fire the top guy because he allowed pilfering? Do you go on a witch hunt and—"

"So you're calling the brouhaha in California a witch hunt?"

"I didn't say that." They could always twist your words. "I know we do our best here. I can't speak for other people in other departments outside the Kansas City area. We do a good job, I think."

"You never worry about your detectives beating someone up?"

"Our detectives spend their day beating on doors, not beating on citizens."

"Get up."

"Pardon me?"

"I said get up."

"Hey!"

"You're dreaming." His wife was touching his shoulders, gently trying to get him awake. The light was blindingly bright in his eyes.

"Jesus, turn the damn light out. What the hell—" He was still brain dead.

"John, honey, wake up. It's the phone."

He came out of the dream and took the phone from her hand, having to wipe his eyes to see if he was holding it upside down and if the switch was moved over. He pulled the antenna out and coughed into the mouthpiece, then realized she'd put it in the ON position already.

"Hello?" he said, in a sleep-fogged voice.

"John, I'm sorry, bud. Hated to wake you." Brown, from the night tour.

"S'okay."

"I was gonna wait but (whirr)…said…wanted you to…(whirr) to call." Llewelyn got up with the cellular phone and moved.

"Shit!" He'd slid the button to OFF as he held it, still half asleep. He pushed it back to ON and somehow Brown was still there. "Sorry. I couldn't hear you."

"Can you hear me okay?"

"Yeah, now. What time is it, anyway?"

"Five fifty-five. You wanna grab a quick cup and call me back in five? It ain't that urgent. Let you wake up a bit?"

"No. S'okay. Go ahead."

"Okay. Guy in a light plane, coming from K.C. International, dude we know, used to be PIO for Civil Air Patrol and so on, he's coming low over the river out by Mount Ely, just as the sun's coming up, 'kay? He says he sees bodies on crosses. Just like in the Bible—all right? Three dudes on crosses. He thinks it's some kind of prank." The words slice down past the sleep, cutting deeply, making something stand up on his skin, electrifying the hairs, prickling his skin. "He goes around and checks it out closer. Crucified, John. Three bodies look like men—headless men. He's pretty shook up. Said he damn near crashed into a power line going low for a closer look."

"You talked to him?" Llewelyn's mind was not receiving information.

"I talked to him myself. I said, 'Are you sure it isn't dummies?' 'No,' he says, 'it could be a hoax, but it looked like decapitated men.' Three of them on these crosses. They had to be fairly large crosses he'd see them from a plane, I tell him. He says he flies low like that whenever he comes to Mount Ely, he likes the view over the river. The sun is coming up in the background over the horizon, big red sunrise, and there are these bodies in the middle of an empty field. Captain says for you to come in when you can—er, forthwith. Meet him at the crime scene?"

"Tell him I'll be right there."

The sky was full of July sunshine, titanium silver clouds against great slabs of Cezanne blue and Matisse gray, the blue beginning to deepen as the sun rose higher.

The one in the middle had been put in place upside down. It was bad. Three of them. Nailed to poles and yardarms fashioned into crosses. They found a common Western Auto tool, an orange wrench with its grease crayoned 29.95 still in place. Dotted with the same dried blood as had coagulated in pools under the crucified, mutilated victims. Blood on a bright length of extension cord and pieces of wire, which would end up in evidence bags marked LIGATURES. I.D.s on two of the three. Heads completely gone. Two of them with the chest cavities opened up. Doer had taken the hearts. There were wounds that appeared to be bullet holes in the one whose heart had not been ripped out. No shell casings. Bits of exploded humanity all around. Insects having a field day. In the field.

Lieutenant Llewelyn needed a strong drink. He needed Special Agent Glenfiddich to get over there and pour him a tall one. The captain had fiddle-farted around and "supervised" the evidence techs and securing of the scene, grooming Llewelyn for serious barrel time. He did everything but stencil SCAPEGOAT on his forehead. John had, in turn, Marlin Morris soon at his side, and was trying to get the stencil transferred. Morris in his turn, would pass it on. On a case like this, it came down heavy, hard, and each time rank passed it down it smelled a bit worse. This one was only halfway to grunt level and it already stunk to high heaven.

There were all kinds of people rolling on this one from Clay to Jackson County sheriffs homicide units, the entire metro squad, and the lot of them were commissioned as field examiners. Every dick in the Crimes Against Persons Unit was, for that matter, There was a wealth of talent crawling all over this nasty puppy, and pretty much just grabbing ass.

Julie Hilliard got the nod from her crew sergeant and came over to where Morris was taking notes and snapping Polaroids.

"Do we know anything? I mean—besides the biker gang tie-in?"

"Well." He sighed heavily, looking at the mess. "These three are not going to tell us much."

Yeah, she thought. Right. They're pretty much confirmed kills, too, huh? She watched a tech make a cast of tire-tread marks.

This was one of the scenes she called hurters. After you'd been on a bunch of these it hurt you. It hurt your chances to recapture a strong belief in the hereafter. This was another of those crime scenes that makes a tiny voice inside whisper, "Hell is here. You've seen hell, baby."

Something more terrible than Steel Vengeance had done this to three violent, deadly streetfighters, binding them in baling wire and electrical cord, nailing them to wooden crosses…ripping hearts out…blowing heads off.

This was one of the moments when horror becomes a relative quality, and cops are nudged by the assertion that there are no fundamental truths. At such times, reality and fantasy blur, become indistinguishable, as that which exists and that which is illusion merge. Reality and imagined reality swirl disconnected around the black magnetic hole at the hub of a centerless void. One senses that one exists, at least for that horrific moment, in a universe without a heart.

Chaingang knew something was wrong when he saw the darkened home as he pulled into the driveway. An unobtrusively located, perfectly ordinary-looking small rental property in Overland Park, which he'd been using as a safe house. No broken windows. No lights on. But something elbowed him sharply. Danger. The presence of others. He was instantly wary, moving away from the car and into deep shadow, the killing chain in his powerful right hand, ready to lash out at whatever moved. He waited for a long time, letting the protective darkness circumfuse and protect him.

Slowly, he moved back to the wheels and slid the suppressed SMG from his duffel bag, easing the bolt back and putting a ready round up the spout. He eased toward the back, listening, hearing nothing, carefully unlocking the back door and pushing it open without entering.

The first thing he saw was blood. Just a few drops. He flashed on his old dream. The hunter's dream. The stalk of a wounded enemy. The blood trail. The dream in which the target and the hunter exchange perspectives. Was this what the dream had meant to warn him of? He was not a man who thought in metaphors or symbols. Blood trails were blood trails.

There was an explosion of insight the moment he saw the animal affixed to the wall. A common Didelphis Virginiana, a lowly opossum, dead and mounted under a red banner. Pogo the possum, nailed to the living-room wall with his hardware nails, and across the wall, carefully printed in the animal's blood, D A N I E L. An envelope nailed to the wall beside it.

He froze. Accepted nothing for what it appeared. Stilled himself, forcing his vital signs to slow. Slowing, stilling, quieting his pulsing life source, calming himself. Gun up, finger on the trigger. He ignored the dead animal and eased through the house in search of intruders, although his heart wasn't in it. This already answered too many nagging questions.

They'd suckered him. It stung for a moment but his rage pushed it down. There was danger: thick; moist; in the air, as real as humidity. They'd been watching him all along somehow. But how? Why hadn't he seen the signs? The monkeys were never that good.

Nobody in the house and no signs of damage beyond the wall. He did not open the envelope but first examined the possum, which had a tractor-trailer-size tire tread through its middle, Roadkill, he noted. He saw no surprises, and he removed the nails and threw it into the back yard.

Chaingang wet some paper towels and made an initial attempt to clean the wall. He did the best he could, put the bloody towels in a grocery sack, took it out in back, and burned it. Still he did not touch the envelope.

He had become proficient at killing with nothing more lethal-appearing than a thick, Manila mailing container. But it was not a hidden bomb that caused him to pause. It was the hidden truth. He was not anxious to learn the bad news, which he knew would explain the out-of-sync personality shifts he'd undergone, the weird "normalcy" that he found so repugnant, the buzzing and the torpor that began in a roll of fat at the back of his neck, and that kept him from being all that he could be.

With a heavy grunt he took the thing and opened it and read. It was from his friend Dr. Norman, the prison doctor from Illinois. He read it as an out-of-body experience, watching himself read the pages of infuriating monkeyspeak. "Surveillance…brain implant…monitored at all times…every movement is known…no way to escape … Robert Tinnon Price/a.k.a./Shooter." Photographs of the sniper in the 1960s, and a recent shot of an averagelooking man with psycho eyes and a blondish buzzcut on top. A jock. Smallish. Wiry. He recalled the man from his spike-team days gone by. "Attempted to terminate you when mission was aborted…special weapon…motion detector and locator…tracking device…intends to assassinate you unless you destroy him first." Schematics and pictures of a strange-looking rifle with futuristic configuration and woodsy camouflage finish. Scope. Silencer. "Effective up to two miles." A dossier on the murder victims. Price was killing on his turf. He'd rip the little pissant limb from limb. He'd even spoiled his tableau at Mount Ely.

The dossier advised him to "open closet door by front door." A small version of the mobile tracker had been delivered for his convenience, the message concluded. He opened the door and found the thing, boiling mad the more it all sunk in. Those fucks, tampering with his brain. On one level, he was planning to turn Shooter into gristle; on another, he was promising himself that someday he'd eat Dr. Norman's heart for this unforgivable act. The notion that he had an implant, the towering humiliation of it, was almost more than he could bear. Thoughts of the biker in prison, and of dearest foster mommy Nadine Garbella, were now a million miles away. First things first.

He was a man who lived in the moment. True enough, Chaingang espoused the "plan hard, fight easy" militaristic dictum, but as far as analyzing the future, the grand scheme of things, his idea of planning didn't extend much beyond the boundaries of trench tactics necessary for his survival. Had he been motivated to examine his battle strategy, his long-range goals, he'd have probably found them extremely limited. On some level, he knew he would ultimately have to arrange a fitting demise for Dr. Norman, after—that is-he'd somehow negotiated the removal of this implant device. But battle plans…? He wasn't interested. There was never a creature more truly situational than Chaingang.

This, however, was an encroachment, an invasion beyond anything even he had experienced. Chaingang, the ultimate survivalist, took as much of the problem as he could immediately chew and digest, and the rest he simply stored. But where—in most persons—the information would have lain dormant, his autopiloted brain set about to deal with this danger to him, to resolve a seemingly unsolvable problem.

While the beast dealt with immediate details, his computer ingested, sorted, retrieved, and began to build a longrange order of battle—something hitherto alien to him-the climax of which was two-pronged. He would have to figure out a way to force Dr. Norman to shepherd the removal of the implant, and then he had to be totally eradicated, since he represented such an invasive and loathsome threat.

On the conscious plane of the banal, Bunkowski considered the initial problems, as he loaded the tracker unit into the back seat of his ride, packing it tightly beside the big duffel, and roared away from the safe house for the last time.

How does one correct an inflamed pustule? One squeezes it until it pops. He drove, unerringly, in the direction of Bobby "Shooter" Price, to squeeze and be rid of this festering pimple. But it would not be enough to simply squeeze the lifeJuice from the doctor, nor would the eating of his heart be sufficient.

The mindscreen offered his subconscious words of the surrealist Dali, whose description of popping blackheads seemed uniquely apt:

"All those aerodynamic, gelatinous…massive salivary" experiences, involving "exubeirant and sticky viscera"…the "apparitions aerodynamiques des etres-objets"… Dali's favorite expression: "There is nothing that cannot be eaten…" Ah, to eat everything! All awareness "transfomed into gourmandism…awareness of reality by means of the jaws." The dioscuric and aesthetic cannibalism, cosmically extended: "the wish to know devours me, but I devour that wish."

Mad as a hatter or the one sane man in an insane universe, Dali had—alone—sensed the dualism of eating and death that transcended the mortuary ritual of tribal funereal consumption. He intuited the reality of cannibalism.

Dr. Norman, too, may have sensed the connection in his paternal playacting, those tender moments when he strove to inculcate his beloved Daniel with the notion that he-Norman—would ensure his marvelous creation's safety and immortality. He would have given anything to be Daniel's literal maker, to be God, or, failing that, to be Chaingang's biological father.

As Dali wrote in How I Put My Father to Gastronomical Use, "the consecrated wafer of the paternal communion…became a sublime and delectable representation of my father…Thus I had the possibility of tasting my father…in small succulent mouthfuls." There was but one final solution. Dr. Norman must be allowed to become his own transcendent dream.

Chaingang had to dispose of him by eating him. Not just the heart, but all of him, so that nothing remained. He would eat his clothing as well. Everything. When he was finished there would be nothing left but perhaps a pair of eyeglasses and a name tag!

The thought boiled inside him, bubbled over into his innards with volcanic heat, warming him with pleasure and purpose. For the first time in his life, so far as he could remember, Chaingang had a real goal.

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