by Rex Miller
Death keeps his own mental count. Thirteen are present. Eleven inside the club and two in front. Seventeen names wait in the mind. One—temporarily gone—beyond even his reach for the moment. Imprisoned. Three are absent, and he will take them, too, very soon.
He waits. Something is ajar. His vibes are all he trusts, especially in such activities as these. Some loose end has taunted him since the killing field in Waterton, Missouri, where he constantly prickled from an eye in the sky, an invisible watcher somewhere beyond his scope. He found locator devices hidden in his clothing and custom-made 15EEEEE boots, and from that time he'd been able to shrug off the feeling. It had returned, inexplicably, an itching that had settled on the thick roll of muscle and fat at the back of his head. He forced his concentration past it and stepped out of the shadows.
"I'm gonna get me one of them damn things if—" one of the punks was saying when a steel chain link approximately the width of a coffee cup in diameter smashed his thoughts into jellied pulp.
As the other punk started to involuntarily react, his world was turned upside down.
It is an alien sensation for most two-hundred-pound men to find themselves suddenly dangling in the air, but that was only the half of it: something foul-smelling and awful and approximately a foot wide had picked him up by his face and shut off his breathing. This monstrous thing was connected to a mutant roughly as powerful as three or four of your average Kansas City Chiefs defensive linemen and it was pulling him down, holding him immobilized, suffocating him while he kicked and flailed about ineffectually.
He was not a man used to being terrified. The emotion was, in fact, new to him altogether. But an immense beast squeezing his face, mashing his lips and nose and eyes all into a grotesque parody of the adult who holds the child's cheeks tightly so the lips squeeze together, had taken away his air supply, his mobility, and his reason. The hand, with a grip so powerful it was tearing his flesh, crushing the bones in his face as it suffocated him, then suddenly released him and he sucked air in desperately.
But just as he did so the big ugly nightmare hauled up a mighty, reeking, toxic double-lungful of stale burritos, wild onions and garlic, bad tuna, and your basic terminal halitosis and belched this turd-breath into his mouth and nose as he inhaled, clamping that fist back in place and screwing the mouth and nose shut, asphyxiating, suffocating, strangling, and humiliating him all at once as he gagged to death on his own bad luck.
Chaingang watched him die, and then sealed the deal with steel, chainsnapping the man's head as he fell. He tucked the chain away and picked up the haversack. He armed it and threw it in the nearby open door, flinging himself down. The explosion was deafening.
His hearing was momentarily blocked by the concussive force of the satchel charge. He backed away, as he realized he was now completely deaf and—as he pulled wadded cotton from his ears—he would not be able to hear a police siren or a gunshot. He swallowed hard, but it was as if he were at the bottom of a very deep and silent well. His ears wouldn't clear, but something else was off—something in his remarkable life-support system had been screwed up, tampered with in some way. He turned and made a quick waddle for the nearest pocket of deep shadow, aware of unnamed and undefined tugs at his inner gyro.
Chaingang was a man for whom "future" was an incomprehensible and irrelevant abstract. He was a being totally in the now, and field expedience, homework, and battle tactics aside, reflective self-analysis was an insignificant part of his makeup. He had no special agenda, no game plan beyond the acquisition of food and revenge, and the assurance of his continued survival.
For all of that, he was capable of infrequent moments of introspection. He was subliminally aware, for example, that the destruction of the asshole bikers had been a rather removed and impersonal one. It bothered him—on principle—that he hadn't wanted to take time to rig a mass death for them that would be more suitably slow and ignominious.
But he realized that a hands-on confrontation with them would have been, in the end, unsatisfying. It had given him nothing to touch that biker out in front of their hole. Toying with them, torturing them, would have been pointless. Perhaps one animal or child abuser…sure; but such punks in great numbers were too overwhelmingly moronic to deal with. The dog-and-cat punks were so far down the food chain he considered them subhuman. They were beneath his contempt.
He also was acutely aware that this was also totally uncharacteristic of him—to analyze and pick at his own behavior. That bothered him because he knew his inner workings so well. Something was askew and it was something he couldn't identify. It rankled, put a big buff under his saddle, pinched the corner of his perceptions and pissed him off even more.
Then, too, there was the matter of his carelessness. He was now unable to monitor his actions properly. He'd had a charge wired to the back door but whether it had gone off or not…who knew? It was remotely possible he'd taken them all out with one haversack. He'd used too much high explosive, but he'd been irritated and didn't want to fool with them. He belched, swallowed, and still the deafness remained an annoying buzz inside his head. He was sure he'd have heard the other charge blow; he'd felt this one in his teeth.
Chaingang spat and recognized the salty taste. He'd probably bitten his tongue. A barking cough of laughter escaped. It sounded far away to him. This was intolerable. He turned and disappeared into the night.
Back inside his wheels, Chaingang took stock. He had used his last haversack. He had two pies left: three-and-a-half-pound antipersonnel weapons that could be fired from a variety of detonator modes. Each shaped charge contained a pound and a half of C-4 military explosive, an extremely reliable and stable plastique. He could, as they say, "write his name" with them. They were simple to point, prime, and fire. Electrical current blew a blasting cap and approximately seven hundred deadly stainless-steel ball bearings exploded outward in a sixty-degree blast pattern, each of the screaming projectiles looking to take names and dig deep graves. He loved and trusted his pies. Two were insufficient.
He had three grenades. A half dozen magazines and partials for the SMG. He needed that auction money and he needed to resupply. And he was fucking deaf, which irritated him to no end. His strange mind sorted pathways, payback methods, possibilities of extrinsic surveillance, all of these things on a subconscious scanning level.
Back in his temporary quarters, he rested and plotted. How would he arrange the final meeting with Miss Roach? He'd come up with an alternate way of running his traps if his hearing was still damaged in the morning.
Bunkowski slept soundly, and was delighted to have nothing more than a slight deafness when he awoke the next day. He phoned and Elaine Roach answered on the second ring.
"Hello?"
"Miss Roach, it's Tommy Norville."
"Oh, yes, sir!" She was always predictable to him and he was immediately reassured. The payoff would go smoothly.
"I wanted to check and see how much had come in so far?"
She told him in a long, laborious recounting about every nickel and dime that had come in response to the auction scam. He let her wind down and—not surprisingly—learned that "only a little over three thousand dollars more" had come in since the initial deposit in her account. Still, not at all shabby, and with the expenses deducted, he stood to clear a neat $12,500 on the venture. Adequate.
"I can't understand why none of the big bidders on Item number forty-one sent their money," she whined, obviously frightened that he was going to hold it against her and that their failure to remit was her doing.
"It's quite normal, Miss Roach. I too would be skeptical of such an item from an unheard-of company. Just wait until we've been around for a few months. Don't trouble yourself about these early results, they are precisely what I anticipated."
"Oh, I see." She was clearly relieved that she wasn't going to be held responsible. Much of her life had been a skirmish with blame and guilt.
"You did a fine job for me and we'll have a long and mutually pl
easant association—just don't you worry!" he simpered, continuing to reassure her.
They chatted a bit more about business matters, and then he said casually, "Oh, Miss Roach, I almost forgot. I need to transfer some funds to a creenus account for faltrane, and here's what I would like for you to do…" He gave her the instructions to go down and withdraw all the Norville Galleries monies and take it home with her. He'd tell her where to send it in a few days. He did some double talk and used his gift of gab to convince her—over her objections—it would be all right to keep the large sum at her place. Yes, it would be his responsibility if it was stolen. No, she wouldn't have to hold the cash long. He instructed her to go get the cash "now," and that he'd be in touch soon.
The huge homosexual was there in the parking lot waiting for her when she came scurrying out of the bank, and he almost gave her a heart attack when he spoke to her from his vehicle.
"Miss Roach, it's me!"
"Oh!" she said with a start, clutching her handbag to her bosom, squinting to make sure it was her boss. "Hello!" It had almost given her a coronary when he spoke to her. She'd been hurrying for the safety of her car with the money in her purse, and she just knew she was going to be robbed. It was not all that incorrect a perception, as it turned out. He'd been waiting across the street from the bank, watching to see if she'd been under any surveillance. None that he could identify asserted itself, and he drove into the lot next to her car.
"Sorry to startle you. You sounded so worried on the phone I thought I'd go ahead and take it off your hands here and you would not have to mail it to me."
"Thank you, sir!" she said. "Do you want me to—er, count it out now?" she asked, the white gloved hands with a death grip on the auction proceeds.
"Please," he said with a pout. "And may I suggest getting in the car first? We don't want prying eyes seeing that money, do we?"
"Oh, no, sir."
"You just don't know whom you can trust," he said, as she got in, agreeing with him and opening her handbag. First she counted the money into her own hands, then she counted it again into his. He watched her as she counted the bills, thinking how easily he could snap her neck—it would be like breaking a couple of pencils to him. Crunch! She'd be so dead. So easy. It was actually a shame he wasn't in some legitimate business, it occurred to him, as she was to his mind a perfect employee.
"Fifteen thousand nine hundred. Sixteen thousand. Sixteen thousand one hundred, sixteen thousand two hundred—" She counted the last of the bills into his enormous open hand.
"You're a good employee, Miss Roach. I want you to know I am pleased with your work."
It was as if he'd given her a thousand-dollar bonus. She lit up like a Christmas tree. Probably the first time anyone had been pleased with anything about her.
"Thank you, sir," she said with awe, then reverted to her normal downcast gaze, waiting for further instructions.
He peeled off a couple of hundreds and told her to take it, starting to say it was for all her extra work, but instinctively he knew not to do that.
"This is for petty cash, so be sure and keep an account of it," he said in a serious tone. She took the money with a curt nod. "That will be all until next month's auction, unless I should think of something and call in the meantime. Oh—just continue to deposit any remittances—and we'll settle up in a couple of weeks as we're doing now. All right?"
"Yes, sir," she said. She got out of the car with a final, nervous nod, and went to her own vehicle. They each pulled out of the bank lot, heading their separate ways. They would not meet again. Tommy Norville, in fact, ceased to exist, as did the Norville Galleries of nonexistent merchandise. The odd pieces bought for show had actually been resold to their original sellers—each at a loss. Chaingang Bunkowski's depleted war treasury had been restored. He was getting his hearing back. Last night had been a resounding success.
He bought a newspaper and looked for the stories on firebombings, a subject so near and dear to his heart.
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11
Shooter Price came out of Kansas City Military Books in a dour mood. Snipers and Silencers, Memoirs of a Sniper, Handbook for CounterSniper Teams, U.S. Marine Corps Scout/Sniper Training Manual, Sniping in the Carpathians, Police Sniper Handbook, Sharpshooters and Yeomanry; same old stuff.
Two mall rats had come bopping out of the store next to the bookshop and looked at him speculatively and giggled at each other. They were fourteen, tops, dressed like typical slut mall rats, and he could see them whisper and stare holes at his crotch, and as they went by he heard one of them say something that sounded like "Where's Winston?" Whatever that meant.
He felt himself turn livid with bottled-up rage. Price was fuming. For a second, he wanted to go back and kick their asses, but the way that he felt an ass-kicking wouldn't do it. His "primary" had been staying up late and moving and he was tired of all the bullshit and he could feel himself snapping and didn't care.
What the hell did he have? He didn't have anybody who gave a shit whether he lived or died. He tried to count his blessings:
In Fort Worth he had his cars and his library. The books were worth maybe half a million at a conservative estimate. But they'd taken him ten million dollars worth of effort to run down in dusty bookshops from Lee's Summit to London: the finest library of books about snipers extant.
Hell, his 490-horse twin turbo F-40 was probably worth as much as the books on today's market. He'd found a degenerate gambler in Nevada who'd lost big time at the poker table and he'd transferred four hundred K to the man's account for the F-40 and a twelve-cylinder cherry "Redhead" with 430 miles on it, the latter Ferrari one that he'd driven a total of once, trading it off in a deal involving a ragtop XJ-S, a Silver Spirit, a Lamborghini Diablo, and a ton of cash. He had his parents' old Bentley Turbo R. All of these under Mylar in a private garage maintained by River Crest Executive Auto. Once a week, this kid ran a half a buck's worth of gas through each of 'em just to keep them ticking. For what? This is what his life amounted to at forty-one? It pissed him off so much he couldn't think straight. He was like a man about to plummet over Niagara Falls in a small canoe—he could feel himself being pulled over the edge yet he was powerless to fight the thing that was moving him forward. It had started with the guy in the tavern parking lot, this release thing with the rifle—scoping out random targets. He'd seen Big Petey return to the place across the river, alerted first by the OMEGASTAR System, and then eyeballing him briefly through the scope as he did his thing. When Shooter saw the flames he knew it was Chaingang's work, even though he wasn't sure he'd heard the blast.
What a feeling of power he'd suddenly had, as he heard the sirens wailing in the night. There were sirens all the time, but he imagined these were ones responding to whatever Chaingang had just done. He thought about sniping the ambulances or cop cars, whatever he saw with a red ball. Maybe taking out some firemen.
The first target he saw through the scope was a figure moving up some stairs in front of a tenement. He squeezed one off and part of her disappeared. He swung SAVANT in a dizzying arc and spotted a lone figure in a faraway lot, loading or off-loading something, and he shot him. Swung halfway back, ejected the second case and reloaded. A man talking to a woman in a doorway. A challenge. He took the man out. Snicked the casing out. Slid another big hard APEX(X) in and got the woman, too—he could see her screaming through a window of the store where she and the man had been. What a blast! Four down in—what?—forty-five seconds, tops. It was better than the best sex he could remember.
He parked in back of an obvious dumping area and took the case, moving in the direction of cover. It was hot and humid and he felt like shit. He found a good place and opened up the fitted case and took his baby out and put her together.
"The system is sighted with the aid of the Laco 40X sniperscope, manufactured by Laco Optical, Inc., of Bettendorf, Iowa. A prismatic optical instrument utilizing forty-power magnification, the Laco lens of Magni-coat
enhances the light-gathering capability of the weapon's sighting device to between ninety-eight and ninety-nine percent efficiency." He searched for the mall rats in his scope.
"The unit is controlled by the Eyepiece Focusing Collar, which is adjustable by manipulating collar in clockwise or counterclockwise rotation." Light glinted off a man's glasses and Shooter blew him away. Snick! Case out. Another big, hard round in place. Bolt closed.
"The Height-Adjustment Sleeve, which is manipulated in a similar rotation." BANG! The rifle thumped him as he squeezed her again, disappointed when the long-haired girl he'd scoped turned out to be a guy.
"The Image Intensifier, which is adjustable by accessing the Intensifier Port by means of an allen wrench and by manipulation of the Intensifier Wing Nut Control…" YEAH! A woman getting out of her car. Oh, shit—look at the bitches scatter. Snick. Load. Click.
"The Elevation Range Knob, which adjusts scope elevation…" A boy on the run. Lead the mutha and…Squeeze! Adios.
"Windage…" She was getting warm. He was heating his bitch up good. Slid that old nasty expended shell out and put a nice new cartridge in her hole. He could smell her juices. Click. Good-looking black-haired baby doll in a sweater. He'd give her a fucking Winston right here—Choong!
Ejected the shell. Reloaded slowly. Hell, he could do this all day. What a fucking rush! "The objective lens, which is adjustable by manipulating the Adjustment Ring until scope is focused, is adjusted only when parallax is present." Big son of a bitch about Chaingang's size. Let's see what he looks like when you lay them crosshairs on that big belly and do This! Lordy! What a mess.
Shooter pulled his face away from the scope. Took his darlin' down and put her away, jogging back to the car. He put her in the back seat and got in. It was hot inside. He hated these wheels, even with the top down. To Price it was just another disposable ride. He looked into the rearview mirror and was surprised to see that one of his eyes had a dark ring around it. His best girl had done up and given him a shiner.
