Binge Killer

by Chris Bauer

  I locked my buddies back up. Time to see how Andy and his team were doing in their quest to earn a tacky bowling trophy.

  36

  Randall exited the alley’s parking lot entrance lane with dead Stella in the passenger seat, turned right onto the highway to retrieve the Caddy, which had acquired some interest. Two guys shielded their eyes as they looked through the tinted windows at the interior. A third guy eyed the rear bumper with its bookend anti-drug stickers.

  The car’s owners.

  Randall drove past them, put some distance between him and the bowling alley before he doubled back. Only one guy left at the Caddy now, leaning back against the driver’s door enjoying a cigarette, uninterested in the passing Beetle as it cruised by on its return trip. The other two partyers hoofed it alongside the road in full guido stride toward the entrance to the alley parking lot. North Jersey reality-TV-show types, over-the-top in the gold-chain bling department.

  Farther down, another U-turn brought Randall back around again. This time he pulled Stella’s car onto the shoulder, eight cars or so back from the Caddy. The bling on the two guys approaching on foot reflected the Bug’s headlights.

  Ignition off, Randall took his time exiting the car, wanting them to pass him before he finished locking up. He nodded as they walked by, flashed a big, happy, gentlemanly smile. Hot-shit punks that they were, he got nothing in return.

  Randall liked the Caddy, would not give it up unless he had to. The two punks on foot left the highway shoulder, turned left onto the lane that would take them to the rear of the parking lot, for sure looking to settle a score with whoever stole their car. Randall followed, gravel crunching underfoot as they neared the paved lot. He glanced over his shoulder, sized up the surroundings: dark highway cloaked in a heavy fog that included the smoker at the Cadillac. Randall quickly closed the distance on his prey on light, tiptoey footsteps; he drew both handguns. One loser he dropped with a shot to the back of the head, and a split second later blew apart the surprised face of the second when he turned, his gun dropping harmlessly in the brush. Bang, bang, that quick, execution style, except for the subdued echos of the gunshots, and what to do with the two dead bodies.

  The third guido back at the Caddy had to be smiling now, expecting his buddies were on the delivering end of the shots. Randall dragged each body behind a row of evergreens lining the entrance lane. He doubled over, caught his breath, coughed and wheezed, his disease staking some of its territory.

  Now to retrieve the Cadillac.

  37

  Bang, then bang.

  Sequential strikes on lanes one and two, nearest the front door. Why I heard these two in particular I had no idea, but they pulled my attention away from Andy’s all-business release of his silver bowling ball on lane twenty. At the bar I ordered up a Yuengling Porter and planned to nurse it while I looked the part of interested coal-country bowling groupie checking out the bar area and the lanes. I had no intention of getting juiced, but for the rest of the busy bar-leaners, old and young alike, it was a different story. A lot of people here. Bowlers, drinkers, gamblers. I hoped my bounty was one of them.

  Back to Andy. I heard, didn’t see, his ball’s impact. Ka-pow. A strike, then fist bumps from his teammates. Some serious old-school bowling was going on here, and considering the age of some of them, I was surprised at how good they were. A page out of the seventies and the eighties. No. Farther back, I’m thinking now.

  Road House, a late 1940s movie, entered my head. Richard Widmark, Ida Lupino. Celeste Holm, Cornel Wilde. Black-and-white noir. One of my mother’s favorites, the setting a nightclub with a bowling alley attached. The Thunder Wonderland bar had the same feel and charm, with cozy, softly lit nightclub lamps on café tables, and a piano with cigarette burns on its glossy black finish.

  Background music from overhead, far from the seductive, torchy stuff Ms. Lupino delivered in the noir movie. Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.” The selection made sense, considering that heavy-metal Helen, the fry cook, was tending bar. Above her, along the back of the bar, the hanging TVs showed baseball games on two of them, streaming music videos on a third, and the local news on the fourth, all with closed captioning. My beer arrived.

  “Counsel, right?” Helen said, a pleasant smile from her to go with her careful, almost reverent placement of my Yuengling and an order of onion rings on the bar, food I didn’t order. A bit different from our previous encounter yesterday, when her attitude had me hoping there wasn’t too much spit in the lunch she’d made for me.

  “Yes. And you’re Helen. These rings aren’t mine.”

  She nodded. “Floyd heard what you did today. He says you eat and drink free tonight, lady. Just don’t get sloppy. Sorry, I can’t stay and chat, I’m needed in the kitchen.”

  A person could get used to this small-town familiarity. I raised the pint glass in thanks, lamenting my need to limit tonight’s intake, took a sip. Ahhh. The girl could pour too. Moving in behind Ozzy was Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son.” Where the hell had that come from?

  My eyes sifted through the crowd at the bar, trying to stay on task while I powered through the song’s psycho triggers, doing my best not to pound down the entire pint in one gulp.

  One bit of comfort: Andy. He allotted me some eye action and whispered to his mother when he realized I was here. That gave me a little flutter in one place and a tingle of pleasure in another.

  38

  Randall climbed back into dead Stella’s VW. The third guido might be expecting his drug-dealing thug buddies to return, like, maybe right now, otherwise he’d soon realize he was wrong about which end of the gunshots they were on. Randall started the car, the headlights on but useless in this fog. The mist relented for a moment. There. Guido thug number three. Tall, dark from a spray tan, porkpie black hat, fidgety. Still smoking, but no longer leaning against the Caddy. The guy tossed his cigarette and started walking, coming Randall’s way.

  Randall checked the foggy road in both directions. No traffic he could see.

  He decided how to play this. Yanking dead Stella’s tube top down bared her chest, she looking completely alive, just spaced, in the reclined passenger seat.

  Randall pulled onto the road then braked the car a few lengths up, waited for the thug to arrive alongside. He leaned over the body to manually roll down the passenger window then turned on the car’s interior light. Burying his hand between her legs would sell it better.

  “Hey. Buddy. My young friend here is partied out but will perk back up if I can find her some powder. You holding any?”

  He had the punk’s attention. The punk slowed and smiled at the wasted chick and where Randall had his hand. He leaned in. “Sorry, man, maybe when I get ba—”

  The hesitation was all Randall needed. He extracted his naughty hand and the Rhino magnum from between her legs. The shot took off the front of Mr. Jersey Shore’s head, dropping him like a sack of Purina next to the car.

  A powerful gun. Randall liked the Rhino a lot.

  39

  I felt better with every step I took away from the bar and the Fogerty song. Threading my way with my beer through the standing-room-only jumble of onlookers, I moved closer to the lanes that showcased tonight’s main bowling attraction. The three rows of stadium-style spectator seats were all occupied.

  Andy’s team, the Fighting Cadavers, versus Dody Heck’s team, Clooney’s Concubines.

  Five bowlers each, three women, two men, silky custom bowling shirts on all ten of them. The shirts were distinctive, Andy’s with an elaborate willow tree in brown and green on their red shirt backs, the B&B’s name above the tree in the dripping black blood embroidery he told me about. One lane over was crowded in Pinky Tuscadero pink, with first names stitched in a midnight blue longhand above a breast pocket, their sponsor Aristotle’s Diner. An airbrushed Parthenon looked small on their backs. Plenty of room left over width-wise for additional billboard content for all the Concubines except the skinny elderly redhead I recognized
as the diner’s cashier. The other men and women including Dody looked like they ate at the diner a lot.

  A mistake: six Fighting Cadaver red shirts after I noticed Charlie, Andy’s mother. The overhead scoring said it was early in the second game of the match, the Cadavers up one game to none. Charlie sat nearest the ball return in a plastic chair and tray combination, one of two chair-tray combinations side by side, one for each team. These were the scorekeepers’ seats in earlier days, before electronic scoring; the best two seats in the house for the match. I was able to hear Charlie. She was putting her seat to good use.

  “That’s a shame, Dody, a real shame,” she said, talking trash. Dody’s first ball left her the most difficult spare to convert in bowling, a seven-ten split. “Anyone know how many times the pro bowlers convert a bedpost split?” Charlie asked.

  “Less than one percent, Charlie,” Dody and each of her teammates droned together.

  “Damn straight, ladies. Point-five percent. And that’s the pros. I made one, as in once in all my sixty-two years of bowling. No chance, Dody. You’ve got no chance.”

  “Then watch this, Charlie, and be amazed,” Dody said. She picked up her ball from the ball return and wiped it with a soft cloth.

  I held up my phone like every other person around me and pressed record. You just never knew.

  Dody, a hefty lefty, set up behind the floor dot farthest right, lining up in front of the ten pin. Hers was a three-step approach with an exaggerated pendulum motion and a powerful release. The ball went cross-alley with pure speed and only a slight curve. It caught the left side of the seven pin. The pin exploded against the back wall, dropped into the pit underneath, then, rising from the dead, it skittered back up and out to take out the ten, converting the split. The crowd erupted with frenzied hoots and hollers.

  I sent the video to Vonetta, followed it up with a text.

  These bitches be serious here netta

  Cmon sarge really? A murdering molester out there and you’re recording u-tube shit?

  She made a 7-10 split you asshole. Less than one percent conversion rate

  Wtf is happening to you fungo? You gonna start mining coal too?

  I’m working dude. Not like you, you loan shark

  Fuck you sarge

  Fuck you netta

  The crowd stayed mesmerized by Dody’s circus shot, Dody included. Andy was up next. He picked up his ball; the crowd noise leveled off. He lined up for his approach as everyone quieted. Charlie spoke, her voice weak and elderly-woman cranky. She mumbled something I didn’t hear but she was clearly upset. Dody wandered over, put her arm around her. Charlie whimpered through her words as tears flowed, Dody listening.

  “Sure, Charlie, sure,” Dody said, smiling through tears of her own. “I like it. I like it a lot.”

  Andy lowered his ball, was about to walk back to help. “Ma? You okay?”

  Dody waved him off. “We’re good here, Andy. Charlie’s just, ah, she just coined a new bowling term.” Her voice shook a bit then recovered. “For the spare I just made. The way that pin came back, she wants to call it the ‘Maurice Split.’ I told her I was good with that.”

  Andy’s eyes misted up. He got back to business and fired another strike.

  40

  Randall pulled the punk’s body between two SUVs parked on the shoulder, had to drop it there when a car on the highway approached, the car inching along because of the fog. He crouched below hood level, close to the body while the car crept by. The victim was a blood-spattered cranial mess. The bullet sent chunks of scalp and gray matter skittering off a parked pickup’s windshield, also sent the dude’s silly porkpie hat spinning to the asphalt. Randall helped himself to the Marlboro pack in the dead man’s shirt pocket then frisbeed the hat into the woods.

  Another car passed. He lifted the dead guy by the armpits again, dragged his body off the shoulder and into the weeds. Here, with vehicles still parked between the weeds and the road, the body would be out of view of the highway and people getting onto their cars.

  Bon appetite, forest critters.

  Randall found space for the Beetle farther up the shoulder, past the Cadillac. He turned off the ignition. Right about now a cigarette sounded good, but not in here with her.

  He left the VW in favor of the Caddy, climbed inside, lit up one of the Marlboros, relaxed a bit. Four more dead in the span of thirty minutes. When the news-watching public heard about all the carnage in crime-free, small-town Rancor, they would be horrified. Aghast. Outraged. Maybe he would surrender, or maybe he would be caught, maybe even in the act. Yes, in the act would certainly work. Gratifying. Orgasmic. Surrender to whom, caught by whom, he didn’t know. Here in wholesome, defenseless Rancor, getting caught by a decrepit old woman bowler wasn’t likely, and staying caught by her afterward was less likely yet. The FBI had to be out there by now, on his trail somewhere. Or the State Police. Either would have been fine.

  When word got out, the media would be all over the town. All over his background, all over his story. All over him. Yes. Splendid. It would be all about him.

  And his ex, and his kid, as long as he could find them first. Or maybe after all this hubbub, they’d find him.

  This busy a night at the bowling alley, he could feel it. Could feel that this foggy, dangerous night, and this rocking bowling alley, would surrender them both.

  One parking lot space was open. Not the one the Beetle originally occupied, but the one next to it. Randall pulled in next to the black-and-gold custom van, the last vehicle to enter the lot. He cut the engine, found himself face to face with a dog sitting upright in the van’s passenger seat, two windows and five feet of empty space separating them. He pushed open his car door, releasing cigarette smoke into the Pocono night air, the smoke lost in the mist. He climbed out, brushed himself off.

  “Nice doggie,” he said to the cute brindle-colored thing with penetrating brown eyes. Same dog he’d seen asleep in this van earlier today, at the diner. The dog raised its nose to the window’s edge, the window open slightly for air. Randall was close enough to see the dog’s nostrils constrict, its pores wet and glistening. The dog slid its nose along the opening, sampling all there was to know about Randall, who was interested in making the dog’s acquaintance. Randall lifted his hand so the nice doggie could get a whiff of his fingers.

  The springs on the van squeaked as it tilted toward him, its interior erupting into a barking apocalypse with teeth gnashing and paws clawing at the window. Two mouths and noses jammed into the window opening, interested less in his smell and more in the meat on his fingers, the second dog a large black-headed German Shepherd. Randall recoiled then stood his ground. The display amused him, especially after he realized he’d drawn a gun in response, which incensed the dogs even more. He put the gun away.

  He liked dogs, but not these two nasty, furry fucks. Still, he’d never done a dog. It would pain him if he ever had to.

  He reentered the bowling alley, found room at the bar again, eyed the bowling match in progress. The middle of the second game. Six clueless female bowlers on the two lanes when you included the women of both teams. No one under forty, maybe no one under sixty, far as he could tell, which meant no Regina.

  41

  Ten minutes into my first beer, the bar a distant landscape of shoulders away, it had become standing room only between here and there, people crammed their tightest closer in to the bartenders. Fry cook/bartender Helen patrolled her stretch of it, her head piercings and rave-blue hair shining and glinting, her cute face showcased by under-bar neon. Trip-hammer arms and hands slapped glasses and bottles onto the polished hardwood top. Helen was one of three bartenders working the trough, Floyd the bowling-shoe guy another. I lucked out, got Helen’s distant attention when I raised my nearly empty pint glass. She nodded and got busy drawing another.

  Middle of Andy’s second game, and the electronic scoring showed his team trailed by a bunch, the seven-ten “Maurice Split” the catalyst for the other team, a
shot that stoked up the bowlers on both sides.

  “A turkey, Andy,” Charlie called to her son. “Three strikes is always a charm…”

  Andy assumed his coiled spring stance, unwound, slid his feet smoothly up to the foul line, and buried the ball in the one-three pocket. The pins crisscrossed, scattering in all directions; turkey executed. A “splasher,” Charlie called the hit. For every hit, every pin combination, there was a name, each of them part of Charlie’s vocabulary.

  Next bowler up was a Concubine, her ball in hand. Charlie continued her bench work on the opposition. “You look tired, Myra. We keeping you up, toots? Ball too heavy?”

  Myra was on the small side and overly made up beneath a short red wig. She released the ball, a lazy roller that hooked extra wide before it came back in and entered the pocket from the wrong side. She left four pins, none of them next to each other.

  “A Jersey hit,” Charlie said. “A shame, honey, a real shame. All those lonely pins. Looks as bad as your grandmother’s teeth. Trade in that pink thing you call a ball, Myra. I’ve seen better hits from a six-pound house ball…”

  Helen waved me back to the bar, set up my new Yuengling Porter at the corner. I took out a five, looking to stuff it into her tip jar. She thumbed me in the direction of the Maurice helmet. I did as I was told.

  I was crammed in with younger folks, them sucking down their drafts and drinks and shots like it was a competition, all dressed to impress. A lot of exposed body ink, including on a guy who’d planted himself in front of me, young and tall, with a genuinely gifted, buff upper torso, plus a headful of blond-brown dreads. And apparently interested in me.