Slob (27 page)

And when the triple trap is in place, after a last quick check of his procedures, a final enumeration of his mental checklist, he is up and gone. But the huge man does not come up out of RY7/INLET 20, he comes up far away from the access catch basin that is his secret escape route because he knows there is danger nearby and he is nothing if not a survivor.

When he comes back, working his way through the alleyway in between an empty storefront and Flawless Laundry and Dry Cleaners, he sees people and he freezes, turns, slowly and carefully eases his way back down the alley and he is gone even as the one called Retard says to Billy:

"Hey, bro, tell Deuce I got the things," and he goes over to the saddlebags of a huge Hog.

"Deuce."

"Yo."

"Retard's got the stuff. You want a piece?"

"I'll get it," Deuce says moving down the street. "Don't—hey, hold it," he yells at the one called Retard. "Leave 'em in there a minute."

"Jew get the mother fuckers?"

"Yeah. I got six. That twenty-two ain't worth jack shit but I brought it. Fucking piece of shit."

"Give it to Larry, he can't hit shit anyway with the sonofabitch."

"I ain't got a piece," one of the bikers says, coming up to the men.

"Here." Deuce picks a revolver out of the bag and puts it in the man's hand.

"Fucker's loaded?"

"Yeah."

"Who else ain't got a piece? Find out."

"Huh?"

"Fuck it—never mind," the busy general. "Hey, Billy." The biker approached him. "Go ask around to see who ain't carrying somethin'. Tell Nitro and Jim come here."

"Hey, Nitro!"
the man starts yelling.

"Shaddup you fuck," Deuce stage-whispers, "go
tell
the son of a bitch, goddammit, don't yell it. Shit, if I wanted that shit I could yell the fucking shit myself. Jesus." He shook his head as the large, bearded man shrugged and moved off.

"Deuce, Earl ain't got nothin' but a knife."

"Here." He handed a small foreign automatic to the man and stuck a western-style double-action piece in his belt. Then changed his mind and handed it to the man. "Give one to Earl and see who else ain't packin'."

"Earl ain't gonna' be packin' even after I give the motherfucker a piece," and everyone around close enough to hear began laughing hysterically, Earl having been notoriously short-changed in the masculine-equipment department.

"Where the fuck's Nitro and limbo?"

"They're comin. Jim's movin' the ten-wheeler like you wanted."

"Oh, yeah?"

"You need sum'pin, pard?" a hideously scarred face whispered in Deuce's ear, causing him to flinch, which made them both laugh. "Sorry about that."

"That's cool. Soon as Jim comes over we'll go over the shit. Everybody here?"

"Damn straight. Let's go get the motherfucker."

"Deuce," a young, long-haired biker said as he came running across the street. "I got the old Ford loaded with shit and it's up on top of the middle manhole."

"Let's go, Jimbo." Deuce gathered his lieutenants around him and traced a large cross in the dust of a car hood. "Nitro, you take Billy and them dudes and you start here." He pointed to one end of the line he'd drawn. From the air, if you could see through the street, you would know that the holes did not run straight at each other, parallel to the street itself, but were angled in a
Y
shape, but they saw it as a straight line from their street-level point of view. "Over there where the carrying somethin."

"Hey, Deuce. It's on down there. That manhole is on down over in the next block, way ov— "

"Who's fuckin' this goddamn chicken anyway, goddammit, you want to run this motherfucker?"

"Fuck no, I just— "

"Hey! Larry."
A tall man yelled yo, and Deuce said, "Where's that old—what's his fuckin' name, Bugs Bunny or whatever.
Woody,
yeah—Woody, where's that fucker?"

"I'm right here, Mr. Younger," the wino said pleasantly, visions of three hundred dollars dancing in his head, with the promise of an elusive and coveted boner not far behind.

"Where'd jew say that big cocksuck comes up?"

"Right here." Albert Sharma pointed to their right, and down the block over there. "That manhole there. I'll betcha' he's down there right— "

"Yeah. Right. Cool, later. Goddammit, take 'em on down there, go ahead, when you get there start in toward this way, making sure it ain't one of us, goddammit. You see some shadows or some shit, don't just start fucking blastin' or some of us'll get hit in the cross fire. We'll start here—and we'll come toward you—and if his ass is in there, we'll catch him in the middle. Right, Jim, you've worked down in those whores—can he get out?"

"Naw. We'll box the motherfucking cocksucker up good and whack his fat ass out, man. He can't come up the hole here so he's gotta' go one way or the fucking other—right?"

"Yeah, okay, let's go!"

Someone shouts as he starts moving,
"Deuce! Hold on."

"Now what?"

"Wouldn't it be better if we'd blow some fuckin' smoke or somethin' down in there, start fires at either end and burn his ass out."

"Yeah, we can SMOKE the motherfuck out."

"SMOKE the cunt out," somebody else offers. They're less than anxious to go down after him in the dark sewers and water mains but the fearless leader screams:

"Fuck that shit, take it to his ass!"
And the Flames shout back to a man, chains, clubs, handguns ready, Nitro and Jim pry hooks under their respective covers, and nineteen men, the Flames MotorCycle Club of Oldtown, nineteen experienced, veteran street fighters, lanterns and flashlights casting spooky beams down into the inky black, lower themselves below the streets of Chicago to do battle and seek revenge.

And Dr. Geronimo and Woody Woodpecker, standing "safely" away from the action, are suddenly blown off their feet in a horrible, indescribable explosion that is really many explosions but so closely timed that they sound like one fantastic sublevel blast ripping through feet of concrete like an awful earthquake, cracking the city street beneath them in booming and deafening explosion and a violent shower of broken concrete and twisted steel pipe and ball bearings and cement and metal and blood and guts and all in a screaming catalysm that is all the more terrifying because it comes out of nowhere, comes from silent tripwires that trigger U.S. military waterproof/weatherproof ring-release fuse igniter that drives firing pin against primer which ignites a five component powder-core sparking cannon fuse, and comes from nonelectric chemical pyrotechnic ignition matches tripwired by a battery that causes the detonation of blasting caps, and comes from command-detonated claymores synched into a perimeter-attack mode, and imagine two loaded 12-gauge shotguns . . . Rack a shell into each weapon . . . Now drop nine cockroaches into one barrel . . . ten in the other . . . Put the guns in workbench vises facing each other and weld the two barrels pointing into each other's bore . . . Using a trigger-wired remote firing device, simultaneously pull the two triggers firing the weapons into themselves at the same precise millisecond.
BBBBBBBBBBBLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMM-MMMMMMMMMMMM!

This is how you make nineteen cockroaches
all
fucked up.

H
e 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.