Savant (27 page)
"Paper!" the guy was screaming. Chaingang hit the button that lowered the window, after a few misses, and told the monkey to give him one. Gave him pocket change. Flipped through the wrong section first, then turned it and saw a small front-page headline: Six More Killings, Police Admit Serial Killer. That little fucking shit! Killing on his ground. Who the fuck did he think he was? Someone honked in back of him and he started shifting into reverse to ram them, but then better judgment pulled his sleeve. He had to stay on track and take care of this.
In that moment, he saw through a window in his rage—he was a different person. Celibate! Losing his temper when it could hurt him. He was behaving uncharacteristically. It sobered him and he bit down on his thoughts about the implant, screaming out of the line of parked cars in the direction of Shooter Price, tearing around a beige Oldsmobile and a white Dodge Caravan, driving around a muscle car as if it weren't there, the white blip growing larger and stronger in the center of the OMNI device.
He was locked down now. Concentrating fiercely, with all his energy on the act of destruction,
slicing through traffic—five hundred pounds mashed
down on the gas pedal, floorboarding it through teenagers and retirees alike, around a kid in a Pontiac Bonneville, a woman in a brown Chrysler LeBaron, a kid in an old Roadrunner, a couple in a Jap thing—zooming out of nowhere to loom larger than life in Price's mirror.
Shooter had been tracking him, he was going to whack Big Petey with his baby, who was in her case in the seat in back of him, and he'd been parked on a side street, but when he saw the blip—the blimp-size blip—coming nearer, he turned the car to follow him and take a shot, but suddenly Chaingang was on his ass, driving a different set of wheels, roaring down on him with a vengeance, and he was scared almost to the point of going sane.
He saw the car come out of nowhere, moving way too fast—he knew cars—they were gonna hit. He floored the accelerator and shot out into traffic and some poor devil in an Ace Trucking Company job smashed into the little M30 with a resounding crunch of chrome, metal, fiberglass, plastic, shit, and shinola. Shooter grabbing SAVANT and shagging ass as the glass— already cracked—shattered under a hail of lead.
Shooter just went—fuck the mobile tracker—and he was running fast— zigging through honking motorists, zagging away from the hail of terminal saturnism—that's your basic Beaumont-Port Arthur lead poisoning—splattering around him. There wasn't but two things Shooter Price could do besides pull a trigger and both of 'em was run, and he flat out ran for his crazy life as Chaingang Bunkowski stood flat-footed, next to a wrecked M30 and an Ace who'd been in the wrong place, glass all around his fat ass, oblivious to the waft of distant sirens, a Chinese copy of a submachine gun cradled in his arms as he cursed his slowness and ran one more magazine through the pipe just for luck.
Bat-batta-bat-bambambam,- popping rounds came across the traffic in the direction of disappearing Shooter, the felt-padded bolt clattering as the weapon blew smoking cartridge cases into the broken glass and car parts.
He had to make himself squeeze back into the car and get in the wind. After all, as his dearest mommy used to say, there was a time and a place for everything.
He made a U-turn, swung around, reached into his duffel and plucked out one of his remaining grenades, and after determining that it didn't have a file- notched spoon (the way his luck was going he'd blow his fat ass up with a short-fused frag!), he took the pin out and tossed it into the M30 convertible, tromped the gas, and watched it blow in the Buick's rearview mirror.
Some days were like that. No matter what you did you just couldn't get arrested.
V
ictor Trask was supposedly out taping bites for a piece on miscegenation for "Inside America." He was inside his car, taping hallway conversation from a parked car in the eleven-hundred block of Locust, scared all the while he'd be busted and thrown in jail for illegally recording the cops, and getting zip for his chances.
The logistics alone of such a thing were beyond him. He'd not used a voice-activated recorder, so when he couldn't personally monitor he'd had to go back and skim-check hours of random tape, hoping to catch a tiny fish in this enormous sea.
He'd caught nothing but a worse cold, which was now, he thought, settling in as a virulent strain of summer flu. What had he learned? A man—the lieutenant who occupied the bugged office, presumably—had a real hard-on for the Jackson County medical examiner. He was addicted to mixed metaphors. He spent his day on the phone or away from his desk; the long, confidential talks he'd imagined overhearing were nonexistent in this office. What Victor did hear was a bunch of career-related shit about how Sergeant so-and-so should get people to solve their own problems instead of coming to him, and a lot of platitudes about work delegation, keeping options open, prioritizing tasks, and stuff he'd obviously picked up on at a seminar. He kept talking about his "Masters in Advanced Death Investigations," "Project Assignments in Criminalistie Factfinding," and various other subjects that sounded as if they should be in capital letters. He heard nothing about blacks, drugs, serial killings, lab findings, or anything of relevance.
What he finally mined—the lone nugget—came from a headache-inducing monitor of a hallway conversation that he could only halfway hear. It was a maddening thing, like listening to a loud conversation. taking place in an adjacent room where you hear isolated audible phrases but can't make out the overall conversation. A man and woman, not Hilliard, were speaking discursively and a third voice shouted something about a weapon. The word perked up his ears. The chatter moved away from the microphone, and he rewound the tape and listened to it again, not on the tiny earpiece but at full volume on playback, and he was able to discern "…got some more…(INAUDIBLE) how many or anything but it's the same weapon. Estimate the thing has a range of one and three quarter miles and he…" (INAUDIBLE.)
He was too excited to listen further. He turned the engine on, rolled up his windows, and headed back toward the station. He'd gone a couple of blocks—he was very nauseated—and he felt as if his sinuses were so stopped up his head would explode. That was the thought Trask would remember thinking when he saw…someone's…head…explode!
Had he fallen into some terrible time-warp daymare brought out by his worsening flu? The gorge rose in him and he barely got the driver's-side door open in time. There were car horns, trucks honking, and a cab nearly clipped him as he swung to the curb and lurched out onto the sidewalk to be sick again. People were going ape shit. Across the street, they were already converging around a man's headless torso.
He managed to get across the street, his mind racing. Should he phone it in and do a report? That would normally be his reaction—he'd call the news room, record an on-thescene sound bite. He tried to assimilate what he'd seen as he pushed into the swarm of milling onlookers. People were in total confusion, some of them crying, one woman screaming like a banshee. A siren was loud in his stuffed ears. He coughed, almost gagged again, spat into the gutter, blew his nose. He was a mess.
It had been beyond his immediate powers of description. He'd seen the head…just go. Dematerialize! There was no question it was real—awful human matter had left splashes across the storefront behind the man, as well as the sidewalk where his decapitated corpse fell. The shirt, the white shirt the man had been wearing, was now red. The sidewalk was blackish red with his spilled blood.
Trask was wasting time. He stumbled back through the mindless traffic, flung himself into the car and keyed the ignition. He headed back to the station again, violating a "termination clause" contract rule and parking in VIP Sales parking. He burst through the front doors, his face like death warmed over, past Security and the front desk, not waiting for the elevator, taking the stairs two at a time.
He walked into Flynn's reception area, ignoring Jerri Laymon, barging into Flynn's office without so much as a glancing knock.
"I got the big one," Trask blurted out. He was puffing, blowing, winded from his run up the stairs and the brisk jog, nearly exhausted from the flu bug and drained by what he'd just seen. On top of all that, he was almost on the verge of tears. Inexplicably, for a screw-up whose career—such as it was—had become his focus of concentration, Trask had been emotionally twisted by the awful murder he'd just seen. Someone had been killed seconds ago in the most gruesome way and here he was running to cash in on the man's death. Was there nothing to him of any substance? "I've just seen one of the murders take place—not four blocks away." He pointed with a limp finger, working to keep from crashing physically. "I saw a guy get his head blown right off his shoulders—it was the most godawful mess you can imagine…it's a serial killer. He's behind all the mysterious deaths, including the biker-gang homicides and, moreover, I've got you two months of shows backlogged and, well, I'll tell you about those later." He sucked in oxygen. "Right now we gotta get to work on tonight's show. You gotta kill it so we can go with the thing on all the murders. I got it all, the whole nine, chapter and verse. Everything. Deep background with somebody who even knows about the weapon that's doing all these people. Inside cop stuff. I got a thing from a homicide detective who alleges that there are killings the public doesn't know about." Fuck Hilliard. "Coverups. You'll have the exclusive story."
"Excuse me," the Mystery Tramp said in her sultry voice, and Trask turned, annoyed. She was looking at Flynn, who hadn't moved or raised so much as an eyebrow since he burst into the man's office. She held a dainty fist to her ear in the sign for telephone call. "I didn't want to buzz you. It's that call you'd been waiting for."
"Right," Flynn said. "I'm sorry, Vic," he added politely, "I've got to take this. Could you just wait—excuse me for a couple minutes—I'll, uh…just give me two minutes, could you?"
"Sure." Trask went outside and sat in one of the expensive chairs Flynn's "Inside America" guests often waited in. They used Jerri Laymon's office for a kind of "green room" when there was more than a single guest to appear on the show. The chairs were better than what he had in his apartment. He waited for four or five minutes, getting antsy, wondering if VIP Sales would get on his case for parking downstairs. Fuck Sales, he decided. Finally the Mystery Tramp's phone buzzed.
"Okay," she said, "you can go back in."
"Thank you," he said, going back into the office.
"Sorry about that. Now…" Flynn sorted through a pile of notes on his desk. "Here's the deal. I commend you. You get an A for effort, but the problem is—I don't know what you've been doing lately, or how you got on this serial-killer deal, or what went down between you and the cops, but they got a call downstairs from the police. They, in turn, talked to Chase, myself, and Adam David. The investigation is off-limits 'till further notice,' so far as media is concerned. We've promised not to touch it. There was also some concern that you were probing a racial angle that the cops thought could be inflammatory in the community, potentially, and a lot of other stuff about you having overstepped your bounds as a reporter."
"That's bullshit. I did my homework, which is more than the fucking cops did."
"I don't dispute that, Vic. I'm certain you have. But, you know, our hands are tied. You blew it, man. You should have come to me and let me—or Babaloo—or even Adam-work with you to develop a lead and go on the air with it. If you'd done that, we could have put it on the radio first, and if they'd insisted further mentions be deleted, we'd have been forced to comply, naturally. But we'd have had it on. This way, what might have been a scoop—I'm saying, assuming this stuff you've dug up has some basis in fact-would at least have found its way to the air. Now KCM is out of the ballgame. By your playing The Lone Ranger, you see what you've done? You've effectively managed to put a gag order on the people who are paying your salary." Trask was hearing it and not believing it.
"I don't even know how to respond to that. I just saw a fucking murder. I'm sick. I've been working around the clock on all these violence theme shows. I've got a ton of solid research that will win you a fucking Peabody, man, it's so strong—everything tied together with hard facts and interview subjects. Solid gold stuff, Sean. And we've got an eyewitness beat on the worst serial homicide case in Kansas City's history and you're telling me we can't use it?"
"That's it. You've screwed yourself, Vic. You should have done this with the team. You know how we work by the numbers. If it isn't a team effort, it isn't us. That's what you've always done in the past. Why—when you had what might have been a hellacious beat—would you jeopardize all that and go it alone? What was the point?"
"I knew you weren't that happy with what I was producing for you. I had the insight on this great violence piece and everything I turned up fit the conclusions I had reached. I was seeing my stuff get lifted by other staff members."
"You mean Barb—that one fucking story? It was a coincidence, baby. You just got paranoid is all." Flynn's smile was infuriating.
"I may be paranoid, man, but she had every goddamn piece of a story that I'd researched, and it was too many coincidences. I knew damn well she had tapped my phone somehow."
"You've been working too hard or your cold is getting to your head. I mean it. You're just not thinking clearly. Why the hell would Rose tap your phone? Like she doesn't have enough to do with her own assignments? Is your stuff that much hotter than hers? Come on."
"She wouldn't have to tap my phone. Everybody knows—since day one—this place is bugged. I've heard there are mikes in the offices and shit…" He was tired and ill. At this point he just wanted to go home and sleep for two weeks. "I've had engineers tell me that stuff is videotaped, and the phone calls are monitored down in Security. I've always heard that shit."