Savant

by Rex Miller

  Pwiiing! A metallic thwock that wasn't as loud as the sound that parts of Cindy made splattering off the hallway walls. He was covered in stuff, and so was his darlin'.

  Nasty! He'd never done anybody up close with the weapon. He'd had no damned idea in the world it would take them apart like that. It was one thing to see the results at a mile away or whatever. But the power of her up close was fucking awesome.

  He found a couple of rags and got her wiped off, and then cleaned himself up as best he could, wrapped the rags in another rag and carried his weapon and rag bundle out to the car. There was nobody watching him—that he saw, anyway—and he loaded her into the trunk, put the rags in a box to be thrown away, got in, and started the car.

  It was amazing how much better he felt. He flipped the toggle on the OMEGASTAR and saw that Big Petey was nice and quiet. He switched the pager over to OMNI DF, put it back on primary monitor, and drove down the street.

  He was almost back to the motel, feeling good again, keeping time to the radio with his fingers on the wheel, a golden-oldies station playing "Hard for the Money," when the movement alarm sounded on the DeMon.

  He killed the audio and pulled over, checking the OMNI. The primary target was in motion. He felt like working. Why not? He pulled back out and headed north.

  The big boy was moving fast. He unfolded a Kansas City map. What the hell was out this way, he wondered, besides the county line? Well, one thing for sure, he couldn't go too far or he'd be in the fucking Missouri River.

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  15

  Chaingang loved to cruise the strange, darkening burbs of the heartland in the hours following sunset, watching sensors kick the arc lights on, feeling his own vital signs quicken with the coming of the night. He thought of it as sightseeing and he could drive aimlessly through suburban tract developments as one chauffered one's family to see the Christmas lights on a snowy December's eve.

  It was invariably fascinating to him, an excursion to slowly negotiate the clean, traffic-free streets, musing about the monkeys who lived inside their overpriced, boxy ranch homes with two-car garages, red-bricked Colonials, and fake Tudors with swing sets and swimming pools in the back yard.

  Of an evening the twinkling amber lights would glow from their windows like yellow cats' eyes, portals to mysterious worlds of taxpaying, workaday dads whose preoccupations were with the trivialities of sitcoms and tended lawns. Aliens, they seemed to him, with their absurd play morals and ridiculously structured lives of regimented and duplicitous familial love. Who were these monkeys? Where did they come from—they were everywhere now, snapping pictures, chattering; brainless simians who lived behind five-hundred-dollar door in impeccably decorated Sears showrooms.

  They pulled him, you see, with their quiet residential streets and tended shrubbery. He felt the magnet of vulnerable humanity drawing him. How easily he could penetrate their portals, slice through the cozy pseudo-safety of their bolted, locked doors. The weight of his massive killing chain became a serious presence as he thought about how he might enter their lives and turn their worlds into sudden hellish shitstorms of pain….

  He flows with the traffic on Sterling, past Norledge, Gill, Chicago, veering northeast now around Mound Grove Cemetery in the direction of Mill Creek Park and a point beyond. Sees the neatly stacked series of firewood logs—a half-dozen racks of wood, perhaps—which appear to have been lined with a plumb bob. Perfectly symmetrical lives play out their days and nights inside. Next door, the house is dark. Maybe up close you'd hear the sonorous sound of ever-present television from within. A "security door" stretches his face into the wide, beaming dimpled radiance that is his most dangerous smile. Pass, his instinct warns him, and he forgets these houses. But then at the next block, midway, he is inexplicably pulled by the hearts that beat inside a home that glows with lights.

  Something about this dwelling screams at him. Victim! it shrieks, on a level he cannot pinpoint. If only time permitted. He has so many to do, so little time to do them in. It is impossible to be bored in such a rich and alien world: the phantom empire of Lemuria or Muritania; west of the pillars of Herakles; south of Middle Earth; a thousand million fathoms below the surface of sunken Atlantis; in the subworld towers of topaz; Daniel glides through serpent-infested, monster-haunted seas in search of monkeyfish.

  He is nearing the place where they live now and his concentration kicks into third gear. He passes a huge truck stop, and the names on the fronts of the eighteen-wheeler giants type on his mental processor: Freightliner, International Transtar, GMC, Peterbilt. He sees the street sign. Parks. Gets things from his duffel and melts into the shadows.

  The DeMon glows like a blue-eyed devil in the darkness of the car interior. Shooter flips the LocLok keys to "3," "ext," and "Trans," hits the intrusion-detector alarm switch, the OMNI DF mobile tracker, and opens the hood of the motion pager switch, flipping the toggle to the ON position, and selecting SILENT on the pager.

  He parks and examines his surroundings: a small, bluecollar industrial pocket on the edge of hilly Sugar Creek. Giesler's Country Store and Gas. "REG $1.0l," Stritt Spraying-Seeding and Soil Evaluation. A plant nursery. Mount Ely Auto Body Repair. The immediate surroundings, for some reason, are called Mount Ely, locally. He takes the weapon case and moves across the road and into the tall weeds. Stops. Turns and checks for watching eyes.

  Traffic passes: a beige Ford Ranger with a camper, a gray van chrome-stripped in gleaming flashes of silver that glint in the headlights, a beat-up pickup with two boys in the front—he turns and moves deeper into the weeds. Across from him, down a slope and beside a gravel road, he recognizes Big Petey's ride. He sees the familiar form of his favorite behemoth waddle out of the shadows with something on a rope—or so it appears.

  Men, tethered to one another with something—a long rope maybe. Three guys. He puts his eye to the Laco, and sees their surly faces. Moves over to Chaingang and his practiced fingers find the bolt knob of SAVANT, and he snicks it back. Loads his lady's mouth with a shiny hard killer. Closes her up tight. Chaingang is smack in the crosshairs.

  One has heard the phrase "itchy trigger finger"? Shooter has an itchy trigger side—the whole right side of his body trembles to execute this fat target of opportunity. His brain advises his right hand to squeeze just as Bunkowski is behind a truck. He will get him. There will be another opportunity soon and he'll pencil the big fucker out. Fuck it!

  "Get him in there. Help him or I'll kill you. Do it!" Chaingang ordered. He held a submachine gun with a silencer, wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied in white string like a big fucking salami, and they'd already found out he was serious. The weapon, which looked like a toy in his massive arms, had just shot a round into Mr. Cholia's leg.

  "I can't get up there, motherfucker, you shot me in the le—" Bam. Cholia fell against the tailgate with another round in him. This one in his head.

  "Son of a—"

  "You fuckin'—"

  "Move him now or you go down!" Chaingang didn't care if the whole neighborhood saw and heard what was happening. They loaded the biker into the bed of the pickup. Belleplaine and Vale were handcuffed in thick bailing wire, and the three of them had been lashed together loosely with a fifty-foot electrical extension cord.

  "Excellent," Chaingang said, leaning over the side to give each man an expert tap, just enough of a chainsnap to put them out, a blow designed to silence but not to kill. He was already sorry he'd been impatient with the dead one. These cat-and-dog pukes were starting to irritate him. He shivered as he got in the pickup, ignoring his own ride. "Somebody just stepped on your grave, Mr. Cholia," he said, over his right shoulder, keying the ignition with the biker's key. Echoing the engine noise with the barking thing that was as close as he came to the sound of laughter. It would be pleasant to take these punks off the count. The contemplation of his next act kept him smiling all the way to the kill zone, which was a secluded field adjacent to the highway, only the turnrow visib
le from the traffic's perspective. There was in fact a slight knoll to this part of the community, which is how it had come to be known as Mount Ely. He thought it was fitting.

  There were three large landscape timbers, and three creosoted poles. He had purchased the poles and had stolen the timbers, back when he first hit on this idea, and once he'd selected an appropriate setting, he hid the timbers and poles in deep bush, selected for its preponderance of thorny wild rose and poison ivy. He was impervious to both.

  They waited for him now, along with his digger, which took him all of ten minutes to use. He could dig and tamp in a large wooden cross in two to three minutes, tops, the hole digger biting earth with a vengeance, the soft dirt flying as a quarter-ton rhino pounded the sharp blades in and bit another monstrous chaw from the ground.

  The crosses took only seconds to spike together with ten-penny nails. Messrs. Cholia, Belleplaine, and Vale also took no more than seconds to spike together, that is to the crosses, using—again—your ordinary hardware-store crucifixion nail. Pow. Pow. This is for doggie. Pow. Pow. Nice Mr. Hoggie. Pow. Pow. This is for kitty—right through your titty. Oh, this was going to smart when they came around. Well, that's life—eh? Life can be hard. The biker life. Doggone.

  Then he was gone, back to the trailer, to get his legal wheels and move on down the road. Happy as a big fat clam. Knowing when those punks came to they'd be in a fucking world of serious pain.

  But it was not to be. Shooter couldn't see shit in the headlight glare and he was a man to whom eyesight was everything. Maybe he was getting too old for this work? Bullshit. It was that fucking hooker that had messed up his night, damn the cunt to hell and back, which is where she probably was right now. He wrenched his mind back to his target, the blip on the screen of the OMNI, and flipped the unit back to the auto-track position, keeping a very loose tail on them. Where—oh, there's that fucker. Always down the damned turnrows and gravel shit. Why didn't he just whack these assholes out and go on to the next gig? Always a big fucking production. Always he had to slice and dice and shit. What a fucked-up guy Big Petey was. Oh, well, you couldn't help but love the sum'bitch. I mean-shit, he thought, nobody who had killed that many folks could be all bad.

  He parked and a rustbucket of a VW blew by him doing ninety-and-change. "Get some, Bugs," he whispered. Probably got a Porsche in the bitch. His mind was full of four-barrel carbs and ratios as he carried SAVANT to a place where he could take care of bidness. He needed to get hisself a cool set of wheels and then settle down and find him a good woman. And he needed to fuckin' wax a few more assholes, is what he needed. Screw it down on the fuckers.

  He couldn't see shit and the bugs were biting and bang, pop, wham, what's the big guy doing down there—building a house for crissakes? He carries his lady and eases around where he can see something and—holy fucking shit-Chaingang has got the fuckers up on sticks.

  Three of the bastards on poles. He took his piece out and put her together and eyeballed the scene. Jesus. They were up on crosses. He'd gone and crucified them!

  "The SHERFSAVANT's mil dot duplex reticle in the Laco unit provides extended range-finding capability." Where was the big boy? "Extended ranges are determined by a simple mathematical method called 'the 666formula.' This formula compares the perceived size of the target visually, through the 40X sniperscope, as measured in mils, to the actual approximate height of the target, as expressed in yards." He wanted to see Big Petey waddle his huge, vast yards of fat ass into the scope's crosshairs.

  "The computation is made by first sighting the target through the Laco. 1 mil on the scope reticle is equal to one actual yard at one thousand yards distance." He computed the shot. The shot to Chaingang's head. He'd blow that ugly gangbang up real good. But where was he? In the fucking shadows, jerking off, he supposed.

  "The formula for the computation of extended range is: Actual height of target in yards multiplied by 1,000 over perceived height of target in mills. The 666 formula computes as follows: If a human target is believed to be approximately sixfeet (two yards), tall, and is perceived as having a height of three mil through the scope, express numerically as 2 X 1000 divided by 3 equals 666.666 yards. (100 meters, a hectometer, equals 109.36 yards. 1000 meters, a kilometer, equals 0.62 miles.)" Just as he recited the numbers 666.666, he saw the men clearly. A cloud moved past the moon, and in the added light SAVANT picked up the detail of their chests. It was a heartless crucifixion. He heard the truck rumble off and whirled in the hopes of seeing it and taking a shot but Chaingang was gone again, the fat cocksucker. Damn!

  Way to go, stud. He chewed himself out, using the word what's-her-name from the bookstore had used that first time in bed. She kept calling him a stud and he couldn't get hard for the fucking bitch and then she kept on using it, so stupid she thought she could coax him into a woody. Jeezus Q. Jimminies. It kicked his ass just to think about what bitches had put him through from his perverted cunt of a nanny on.

  "Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christ custodiat animan tuam (Thumpl) in vitum aeternam." (Click. Load. Squeeze. Twomp!) A-fucking-men, asswipes. (Click.) Goombye, farewell, adios from your friendly neighborhood city morgue. You stab 'em…we slab 'em. And we guarantee our work.

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  16

  The famous reporter held the microphone directly under John J. Llewelyn's proboscis. The light was bright in the lieutenant's eyes, and the presence of both mike and camera made him nervous. He could imagine how his bald forehead would catch the light and glare like a cueball on TV. He tried in vain to recall the famed investigative journalist's name.

  "So you feel the persecution of the L.A. police chief is unfair, is that what you're saying?"

  "Look. I don't know the details of what's going on out there but you take any industry where the guy at the top is responsible for the actions of thousands of men…" He was finding it so difficult to concentrate with that microphone shoved in his face. "Some guy runs a big plant, and there's fifteen thousand employees, and fifteen hundred cases of pilfering, I mean—do you fire the top guy because he allowed pilfering? Do you go on a witch hunt and—"

  "So you're calling the brouhaha in California a witch hunt?"

  "I didn't say that." They could always twist your words. "I know we do our best here. I can't speak for other people in other departments outside the Kansas City area. We do a good job, I think."

  "You never worry about your detectives beating someone up?"

  "Our detectives spend their day beating on doors, not beating on citizens."

  "Get up."

  "Pardon me?"

  "I said get up."

  "Hey!"

  "You're dreaming." His wife was touching his shoulders, gently trying to get him awake. The light was blindingly bright in his eyes.

  "Jesus, turn the damn light out. What the hell—" He was still brain dead.

  "John, honey, wake up. It's the phone."

  He came out of the dream and took the phone from her hand, having to wipe his eyes to see if he was holding it upside down and if the switch was moved over. He pulled the antenna out and coughed into the mouthpiece, then realized she'd put it in the ON position already.

  "Hello?" he said, in a sleep-fogged voice.

  "John, I'm sorry, bud. Hated to wake you." Brown, from the night tour.

  "S'okay."

  "I was gonna wait but (whirr)…said…wanted you to…(whirr) to call." Llewelyn got up with the cellular phone and moved.

  "Shit!" He'd slid the button to OFF as he held it, still half asleep. He pushed it back to ON and somehow Brown was still there. "Sorry. I couldn't hear you."

  "Can you hear me okay?"

  "Yeah, now. What time is it, anyway?"

  "Five fifty-five. You wanna grab a quick cup and call me back in five? It ain't that urgent. Let you wake up a bit?"

  "No. S'okay. Go ahead."

  "Okay. Guy in a light plane, coming from K.C. International, dude we know, used to be PIO for Civil Air Patrol a
nd so on, he's coming low over the river out by Mount Ely, just as the sun's coming up, 'kay? He says he sees bodies on crosses. Just like in the Bible—all right? Three dudes on crosses. He thinks it's some kind of prank." The words slice down past the sleep, cutting deeply, making something stand up on his skin, electrifying the hairs, prickling his skin. "He goes around and checks it out closer. Crucified, John. Three bodies look like men—headless men. He's pretty shook up. Said he damn near crashed into a power line going low for a closer look."

  "You talked to him?" Llewelyn's mind was not receiving information.

  "I talked to him myself. I said, 'Are you sure it isn't dummies?' 'No,' he says, 'it could be a hoax, but it looked like decapitated men.' Three of them on these crosses. They had to be fairly large crosses he'd see them from a plane, I tell him. He says he flies low like that whenever he comes to Mount Ely, he likes the view over the river. The sun is coming up in the background over the horizon, big red sunrise, and there are these bodies in the middle of an empty field. Captain says for you to come in when you can—er, forthwith. Meet him at the crime scene?"

  "Tell him I'll be right there."

  The sky was full of July sunshine, titanium silver clouds against great slabs of Cezanne blue and Matisse gray, the blue beginning to deepen as the sun rose higher.

  The one in the middle had been put in place upside down. It was bad. Three of them. Nailed to poles and yardarms fashioned into crosses. They found a common Western Auto tool, an orange wrench with its grease crayoned 29.95 still in place. Dotted with the same dried blood as had coagulated in pools under the crucified, mutilated victims. Blood on a bright length of extension cord and pieces of wire, which would end up in evidence bags marked LIGATURES. I.D.s on two of the three. Heads completely gone. Two of them with the chest cavities opened up. Doer had taken the hearts. There were wounds that appeared to be bullet holes in the one whose heart had not been ripped out. No shell casings. Bits of exploded humanity all around. Insects having a field day. In the field.