Butcher (32 page)

It was the richest kind of bottom land one found in the Bootheel, but it could be costly to farm there. Backwater alone could push in during wetter years, leaving in its postdiluvian wake a stinking mudhole covered in water-logged trees. Even if they didn't blow the levee, this much water already meant Meara would spend a butt-kicking month hauling logs, picking up chunks, and doing the hard manual labor that would be necessary to farm in the flood's nasty aftermath.

Ray was not one to complain or give in to illnesses. He thought most people ran to the doctor for the least little thing, and he believed a man could will himself to stay well. When he felt bad he'd toss back a straight shot, chase it with a big glass of cold orange juice, gobble a few aspirin, and drive on. This was something else. He was sick as a dog, so much so that it was overpowering his efforts to reclaim the boat, and he shook it off as best he could.

The boat was completely full of rainwater. He tried to start bailing with the milk jug but gave up. Too much water and he was in too deep to tip it, so he untied the boat and turned to pull it back out of the water but lost his footing and stepped off into the ditch, plunging down into icy water, the mud seizing his hip boot and damn near drowning him before he could get himself unencumbered. He was beyond swearing. A quiet, slow anger was starting to build inside.

He got the boots off, tried to clean out what mud he could, gave up, and jammed them back on, sitting in the middle of the road, drenched, shivering in the rain, finally emptying the water from the boat and getting in. He got it pushed off at last and started the motor, easing the boat out the drain canal past the large oak trees and into the rainy chop.

Nobody would believe what it was like here. You could have a piece of farm ground one day and a lake the next. The wind had picked up some, and the boat was going pretty good, bouncing over the whitecaps. He was going against the current, the prow standing out of the water with his weight and the weight of the big Johnson offsetting the boat's balance. Suddenly there was a noise and the engine stopped dead. Had that fat shit monkey-wrenched him?

What now? He had the sinking sensation of being out of gas but when he looked he discovered he'd sheared off a freaking motherjamming cotter pin. He had nothing. He patted pockets, scrambled around in the recesses of the boat. He'd dumped the small nails he carried for that purpose when he'd emptied the water.

Any small piece of wire or whatever would fix it temporarily. Surely he could come up with a mere fishhook or paper clip? No. Nothing. It was starting to rain harder and he was freezing again and the current was taking him back to the big oaks. And he hadn't had any coffee, much less orange juice. And it was already noon. The day was half over and he was sitting in a boat filling with water out in the middle of what used to be his beans.

It took him fifty-seven minutes to paddle across. He was exhausted from paddling against the current and shaking from the cold. By the time he had pushed through the clog of willows on the other side he didn't have any strength left in his arms, shoulders, or back. He'd only thought he had a headache and neck ache when he woke up.
This
was a headache. It wouldn't have surprised him to see Chaingang waiting to snuff him.

He finally made it to the bank, reached his paddle out, and felt the wood strike good old solid roadway underneath, so he stepped out of the boat. Later, much later, he'd recount the incident and speculate that what he'd done was hit the bridge rail with the paddle. When Ray stepped out he also stepped off the Southeast Mark Road Bridge, dropping down thirty-seven feet in ice-cold water.

He was instantly traumatized. He'd never completely recall how he escaped the death grip of the wet poncho, only the vague sense of swimming into willows where he was found, clinging for his life, in shock, when Wendall Chastain came along and saved his life, hauling him into his boat and taking him back to shore.

“I'll be fine, Wendall,” he kept arguing with the man. “Just let Pee Wee Kimbro know and he'll fix my motor and bring it across to me."

“Bullshit, Ray. Now get in there and get dry clothes on before you catch your death. I'm going to run back across, but I'll be right back for you in about ten minutes. Now git!” the man commanded.

Meara didn't even thank him. He turned and trudged up the road, fighting a wave of nausea. What he wanted to do was fix a few stiff drinks and sit in front of his stove for about six days. He managed to get inside, change clothes, crack the seal on a half pint, and take a couple of shots with bottled water, although his well was sunk so deep he could have probably drunk the tap water safely. He was already sicker than any tainted wellspring could make him. He forced himself to pull a leather jacket on and went back out in the rain.

Chastain had just tied up and was starting up the road to get him when Meara came out of the house. Big pieces of the day would come back to him later as deep, dark holes, and this was one. He had zero memory of crossing back with Chastain or making his way to Kimbro's. He remembered ringing their doorbell.

One of their dogs, a strange-colored semi-hound, came barking out from behind the house and bit Meara on the back of the right leg before he could kick it away. He didn't even care.

“Hi, Ray,” Betty said, opening the door, and he sneezed in her face by way of answering. “You look like you're getting a cold. Come on in."

“Howdy,” Pee Wee's mother-in-law said. “Pee Wee ain't here."

“He had to go in to the blacksmith's, Ray."

“Can I have my keys, please?"

“Uh—I think Pee Wee's got ‘em."

“Oh.” He sneezed again.

“You're gonna give us your germs,” Pee Wee's mother-in-law told him sternly.

“I'll wait outside,” he said.

“I don't know when he'll be back. You know Pee Wee."

“That's all right."

“Say, Ray, your—uh—lady called and said to give you a message.” She went over to the phone. “Come on in,” she said as an afterthought, ignoring the look from her mother.

He opened the door. “Sharon? Sharon Kamen called?"

“I got a note here someplace,” she said, rummaging through loose scraps of paper by the telephone.

“Could I use your phone while I'm here, Betty?"

“Sure. Go ahead.” He picked it up and dialed the motel.

“Thanks,” he said, as the line rang. He heard Betty Kimbro's mother mumble something about how his germs would be in the mouthpiece of the phone and they should take Lysol to it.

Meara asked for Sharon's room number and listened to the phone ring over and over. Betty came over beside him and laid a crudely printed note down beside the phone. He could make out the word package.

“She left a package for you at the motel,” Betty told him when he eventually hung up. It brought another big shiver.

Ray thanked her and went to Pee Wee's barn and got some wire, jimmied his truck door open, and hot-wired the ignition.

“Reckon he found his keys,” Betty Kimbro said to her mother, as they turned the volume back up on the soap opera they were watching. Meara's truck could be heard starting up and roaring off in the direction of town.

“Better hope he didn't give us any of his germs,” her mother said, absentmindedly.

Bayou City

I
t was a pleasant night in Bayou City. No traffic. One cop car. Plenty of shadows. Chaingang's kind of scene.

A dainty quarter ton of avenger carrying a case full of happy surprises tippytoed out of the deepest pocket of darkness and penetrated a shabby storefront bearing the NEW AGERS emblem and the legend New American-German Enterprise for Reunification and Solidarity. The door had a cheap lock. What was there to steal inside, after all? A cruddy flag and some cast-off furniture? Who'd have thought someone would want to break in? Break out, maybe, but in?

Chaingang glided in soundlessly, a graceful clown bear easing in through the darkness, bearing enough
plastique
to blow a bridge.

He found an address sheet with the members’ names as soon as he gained entry, and was about to leave his surprise when a loud noise startled him and the homemade submachine gun's ugly snout automatically pointed in the direction of the sound. A human snore.

A closed wooden door. He'd assumed it was the club shitter, but as he carefully turned the knob and eased the door open a crack he saw three young men, two asleep on cots, one on the floor, the tiny crash pad awash in graffiti, Nazi symbols, and trash. The three biggest pieces of trash were sleeping so soundly, amid a couple of cartons of empties, that even as the door squeaked loudly they continued to slumber. One of them was really sawing logs, but he suddenly woke up, wide eyed, a size 15EEEEE bata boot having cut off his air supply.

The snorer began to thrash around until he saw the eye of a 9mm firearm a couple of inches away from his own right eye. His hands released their grip on the ankle of the massive boot, but his protesting whimpers woke the others.

“Hello, lads,” Daniel said, smiling his most dangerous grin. “Remember me?” Two of them had been part of the group that gave him his beating and only the weapon kept them from trying to rush him. All they could see was a ventilated barrel shroud, bore, and the front of a trigger housing, a long Parkerized-type magazine sticking from its underside. It looked like a Mattel or Hasbro toy, dwarfed as it was by the enormous paws that held it.

They watched him slowly, carelessly, switch the weapon to his left hand, reaching for something with his right.

The huge beast felt a jolt of Alpha Group II course through him and said, in a goofy caricature of his own rumbling basso profundo, “This is N.B.C., the National Ruttkicking Corporation,” at which point he tenderly whomped all three punks with his immense chain, trying to honk them on the head as if their melons were the NBC chimes, bing, bang, bong, playing with them. He only thumped the first one on the head, but caught the other two with glancing blows that still left them partially paralyzed. His second attempt was more accurate. One of them, he recognized, was the joker, who'd been particularly annoying. He saved him to enjoy.

Chaingang wrapped the taped tractor-strength chain rather loosely around the joker's throat, with the skinhead facing away from him. The last vestiges of the drug, as Norman had predicted, were causing Daniel to behave weirdly, but since it put him at no risk, he didn't worry about it. He was concentrating on something, and during the interim asked the joke teller how to get to certain addresses on the club roster, quizzing the young man about who lived with whom, what their role was in the organization, and their ties to the old Nazi doctor. The joker, who had just watched this elephantine destroyer kill two of his buds without breaking a sweat, was frightened for the first time in his dim-witted life, and volunteered more information than he was asked, in the hope of saving himself.

The one wrapped in chains heard a strange noise behind him. It was the big fat one grunting. Then there was a stench unlike anything the skinhead had ever known, worse than any backed-up septic tank or sewer smell. He was about to retch when he heard the beast speak.

“A bear and a rabbit are taking a dump in the woods. The bear says to the rabbit, ‘Say, listen, when you take a dump does shit ever stick to your fur? The rabbit goes, no! ‘Good,’ the bear says, and he picks the rabbit up and wipes with him.” The joker almost cried when he felt himself being pulled backward.

When Chaingang finished his business with the big one, he pulled up his britches, said good-bye to the bitches, and went into the other room. What a dump.

He left another calling card, so to speak, this one comprised of military high ex, a detonator, and a trip wire. The closed door to the crash pad, the beat-up table, and one of the stacks of skinhead illiterature, each maintained pressure on the spoons of a trio of short-fused ‘nades. The shaped charges were superfluous. The place was already beginning to stink to the point of lethal toxicity. Bunkowski was one of the only serial killers for whom the police jargon “dump site” had more than one meaning.

Chaingang closed the outer door on his work, waddled to his ride, and got in. Enough for one day ... he was pooped.

B
y nine the next morning, Bunkowski was at the door of a home in the Bayou City low-income housing projects, a maze of identical buildings within Parabellum bullet distance from the heart of what he thought of as Turdtown. One of the youths who'd assaulted him was a kid named John Stephens, and it was housecall time.

The door was unlocked and standing partially open, and a loud TV blared on the other side, giving him a good excuse not to knock. He had a silenced .22 under his humongous T-shirt, and he hoped he wouldn't have to use it. The killing chain and a large pocket knife were more to his taste at that moment, and taste was what this visit was all about.

He turned the knob and quickly stepped inside, a disarming smile in place.

“What the hell you think you're—” an older man started to ask, but the smiling behemoth shushed him with his finger.

“It's a surprise for John ... from the guys,” he grinned conspiratorially. “Is he asleep?"

“Yeah,” the woman said in a loud voice, “but who the hell—” He gave her a quick thud on the skull with his bottomfist, which felled her back down to the sofa, a pile of quivering Jell-O. The man tried to get up, but his reflexes were a tad slow and he, too, took a hard thump to the head.

No follow-through with the chain. He wanted to save them.

He found the young punk John sleeping it off in his trash-and-clothing-strewn bedroom, which was decorated in Third Reich repros, and rock star pussy posters.

“Wake up, sweetheart,” he said to the kid. No response. “Fine.” The boy was sleeping on a mattress bare of sheets or blankets. Chaingang wished for Superglue, but had none on him, and, somewhat irritated, he chainsnapped the sleeping punk and returned to ma ‘n’ pa.

There was a good bit of slicing and dicing and miscellaneous mayhem for the next half hour. Dr. Bunkowski tried a couple of organ transplants but the donors rejected the work. Open-heart surgery is tiring, and by a quarter to ten the beast had disposed of the wannabe Adolph and was kicked back on the living room sofa, feet up, watching a talk show about the obese. He was fascinated.