Slob

Chaingang,Edie, and Lee Anne

He knows nothing of biker gangs or bearded, leather- jacketed, chopper-riding Flames. To him they belong in the same shit pile with all those other slam-dancing pogoing spike-haired punks. Just another punk. If his trap takes nineteen bikers, nineteen undercover cops, nineteen rock-and-rollers, nineteen midget flute players, he has no interest. Just let the little death pies claim punks.

He drives through strange, unfamiliar, hostile streets now, and he knows that each time he takes a vehicle he comes closer to the red line. He can only go to the well so many times. Of no consequence. His red-hot kill hunger has fastened on the newspaper story. The grainy photo and the words the lies the absurd and maddening shit is burned into his head, engraved on his twisted thoughts, branded into the soul of a thing that lives only to punish and destroy.

His plan is to take the cop. You . . . I will take you . . . He concentrates on this thorn in his side. This lying and arrogant implement of those castrated, suited punks he so abominates. He will show this spineless, posturing liar what it is to taste pure terror. He will bait his trap with the punk's squeeze and make him beg for her.

Cigar-thick killer's fingers squeeze the high-impact plastic of the steering wheel so hard that he suddenly realizes what he is doing and relaxes his grip before he cracks the wheel into pieces. He would like to make the man watch him with the woman and then take those fingers and pull the rib cage loose so that he could rip the skin and penetrate the cavity where the life source pumps the liar's bodily fluids and the hot, surging thing suffuses him washing over him and he wills the control back. He will find a place and wait for the cloak of darkness to conceal his initial recon probe.

He comes first in the night. His one-man ambush. Stalking. Isolating his prey. Surveilling. Looking for sign. Movement. The telltale signature of another watcher. The parked van or truck or passenger car. The out-of-place thing. The lay of the land. The way it tasted. The exit routes. The means of infiltration exfiltration. The emergency options. The heartbeat stilled, slowed, breathing great inhalations of air in deep, slow, measured, easy, ominous risings and fallings of the barrel chest and enormous gut. Holding the oxygen in there for a long time then releasing it. Contained. Quiet. Motionless. Impervious. Invulnerable. Sniffing the night smells. Scanning for sign. Feeling for the pulse beat of humans. Listening for voices, vehicles, man-made sounds, intrusions upon the night chorus of crickets singing counterpoint to the suburban, batrachian murmur of vertebrate amphibians. Tick . . . Tick . . .

Satisfied, he returns to the stolen vehicle and heaves his bulk into the seat with a groan and crash of mashed springs. He grinds the car to life and heads for a motel with VACANCY neon. He finds a small suitable motel where they probably won't ask too many questions and rings the night bell. The man in his bathrobe fortunately doesn't look before he pushes the buzzer and Chaingang enters the office lobby in a swirl of sewer stink.

"Aw, Jeezus!" the man says aloud before he can catch himself. "You musta jus' got off work."

"Yeah. Want a room just for tonight," he rumbles. "Pay in advance," and he throws down some twenty dollar bills on the counter.

"Umm." The man eyes the crumpled, filthy bills and forces himself to pick up the money. He wonders how long it will take to get the smell out of the room. But he is afraid to tell the fat man he is full up. Besides there are only two cars out front. He pushes the register over for Chaingang to sign, which he does carefully, printing his newly acquired license- plate number and some other fictitious identification.

The man slides a room key toward him and says, "Checkout time is eleven sharp."

"Yeah." He thinks how easily he could waste the man, grabbing his head by the jug-handle ears and slamming it down onto the counter, how pleasant it would be to see the face bloody the glass countertop and to bang it into the glass again, and again, and then to snap his neck the way you would break a rotten broom handle, snapping it over your leg, hearing the satisfying bone-break and the scream of pain, and then putting his lights out for good.

But he is here on important killing business. And he will save this filth for another time, not letting himself think about the way the man looked at him when he first came in so that the red tide will not wash over him and force him to do bad things now.

He goes into the room and removes his filthy coveralls, which he pitches into a wastebasket and heads for the bathroom. He pisses into the sink, letting his-smelly urine splash down the sides and onto the bathroom floor and lets a trickle of pee strafe the tissue dispenser for no particular reason.

He turns on the hot water and steps into the shower stall, soaping as much of the gigantic body as he can reach, and letting the thick coating of sewer filth wash off of him and turn the floor of the stall a poisonous-looking gray as he luxuriates in the soapy, unfamiliar warmth.

He will steep well tonight. And either early in the morning or tomorrow afternoon he will take the woman and the girl. It will hinge on vibes, the extra sense he depends upon for his own survival. But—whenever—he will take them. They are less than two miles from the beast now and he sleeps dreamlessly, his inner clock wound to go off at six, only a few hours away.

And his mental clock is no joke but a very real thing that is inexplicable and so dead-on accurate it sometimes surprises even him with the precision of it. And he sits up at one minute before six, fully refreshed and ready. He can smell himself now for the first time in a long while, and he clomps into the shower again, allowing himself to drench the dirty carpeting in urine as he walks, a dimpled grin plastered across his face in joyous anticipation.

Twenty-seven minutes later he is waiting, parked down the street, and he sees the child emerge but the woman is silhouetted there in the door and then simultaneously another child next door and it doesn't feel right. He is only mildly disappointed. This afternoon will be the time. He knows that. He checks out of the motel to the clerk's silent prayer of gratitude and immediately checks into another one where he will rest and wait for this afternoon.

In the stolen vehicle parked a short distance from the Lynches he is waiting for the child when she returns from school. He appears to be reading a newspaper, a workman, no doubt, waiting for someone, but he is letting his currents flow into the trees around him. He has a strange and acute sense of being in harmony with nature. The life cycle of deciduousness, self-renewal, and virescence is a never-ending source of intense fascination for him. He prefers plant life to animals and animals to people. Humans are far, far down the evolutionary list for him.

Suddenly his senses are boring in on the little girl who is walking along the sidewalk toward where he is parked. She is with two other children, a boy and a girl, all talking at more or less the same time in loud, grating voices that annoy him. His sense of timing is sheer perfection. The little boy walks on past, the two girls say good-bye to each other, and as his target heads for the house he booms out at her in his deep voice:

"Hey? Excuse me," beckoning her over toward the car with the most radiant and endearing smile on his face. He knows precisely how others see him and he uses his appearance, when he wants to, with the actor's unerring command of kinematics and illusion. None but the most brainwashed and careful person would resist Daniel Bunkowski when he beckoned to them, smiling that dimpled, open, guileless, baby's beaming grin of a trustworthy uncle. And Lee Anne Lynch is a sweet child who has never met a stranger, as the saying goes, and a hundred warnings are forgotten in the urgent beckoning and sincere, warm smile, and she moves back toward the vehicle to hear what he's saying.

It comes out in a jumble of words, an avalanche of persuasion designed to befriend and bewitch, and she draws closer still, something about how you must be the Lynch girl, about how he's a good friend of Jack's, good ol' Jack, and how it is real important something something and she can't quite make out what he's saying and Lee Anne comes closer to the open window where he grins out at her, speaking so warmly, rapidly, and urgently about Jack and her Mom.

"What?" she asks, straining to hear as she moves closer.

"I said, Jack wants you to take this message to your mom. It's real important." His big paw holds a folded piece of paper but it is not stretched out as far as he can reach, it only appears that way. And when she reaches out to take the note from his hand, two things happen. His semicircular vision and 180-degree precognition observe and sense the absence of unwanted watchers and his mighty paw fastens around her tiny arm like a workbench vise, jerking her in through the open window as deftly as you'd lift a sack of potatoes, the heel of the other hand, which is a callused, steel-hard, fearsome thing smashing against her small chin with an almost dainty precision, knocking her unconscious.

And she is down on the floorboard and inert and in one sure movement he rips the thin material of her dress and is moving, out of the vehicle and heading in the direction of the house. The killer is moving fast. Moving through the yard quickly, surprisingly fast and quiet, big blimp body propelled forward on the huge, splayed feet, the rapid flat-footed sliding steps swiftly pulling the bulk like tugs leading a giant ship, guiding the vastness of the torso.

The impression is that of an unexpectedly graceful clown bear, agile fat man, dainty jumbo dancer, XXX-L shirt billowed like a sail or a moving tent, suggestions of agility and power, balance and an odd buoyancy, as the treetrunk legs move the great weight of body toward the house in a massive, unstoppable effort, the big man's compass needle drawn by the magnetic pull of a human heartbeat.

He will take the woman and the child down into the special place he's made for them in a water main. And that is where he will summon the know-it-all cop, and we'll see how he likes it when he comes down to get his whore and the brat, see how he likes it down in the secret subworld. He moves across the yard toward the house where the woman is, already tasting them and grinning with the pleasure of the moment.

Hemo-craving and insatiable; he moves toward the woman, who is unknowingly pulling him to her. And the pulsing, steady throb of a heart is the beat that makes his bloodlust dance.