The Holy Terror

by Wayne Allen Sallee

  “Do you believe in God?” Haid continued. “Our Father?”

  “I see red tarantulas coming down the Daley Building, but they can’t see me here, like they could when I lived on Trumbull.”

  Haid was moving closer even as he became aware of Father’s intentions, and the topmost part of the wedge flattened his hair.

  “In the name of the Father,” Haid reassured himself.

  “They vibrate a different way than we do.” Last was in his own world. “Part of Einstein’s Unified Field Theory.”

  Haid reached forward to touch the other man’s shoulders. His palms warmed and he thought maybe it was a shade lighter inside the statue’s base.

  “They can make their ships fly this way. The Stealth Bomber flies this way. That book says that the greys live out in a dried lake bed in Nevada.”

  “I think your story is fascinating,” Haid said, pulling him forward. “Just like the scriptures.” Their chests touched and Haid’s eyes blurred for, a moment. Might have been caused by the penlight.

  Haid had to burrow towards the very back of the wedge, pushing Martin Last along. He felt like a human snow plow more so because parts of the man were falling to either side of the path he made.

  “I’m so warm, is my nose bleeding?”

  That’s what he was saying as Haid’s hands met in the center of Martin Last’s spinal cord. The man’s essence poured up his veins and filled him with radiance. Still, he had to draw the body forward and kiss him before he was consumed in the rapture.

  There in the Picasso, Haid slept, sated.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Evan Shustak was hurting bad. PAIN PAIN PAIN in my Brain PAIN PAIN BRAIN BRAIN in my b

  What it was: the man’s pain relievers were gone. His heating pad, the cord long ago frayed but still workable. Gone. The Hell’s Kitchen sweatshirt, the wrist braces. Gone. Ditto the little bags of pills and lozenges.

  His costume was his pain reliever. He often thought about the amount of placebos that were force-fed to just about everybody these days, from Anne Klein dress-for-success outfits to the Air Jordan hightops that meant you weren’t just some project spook.

  One thing about this, though. It actually helped him to be without relief. The pain helped detail his face into the semblanceof a potential Painkiller victim.

  Shustak’s (he was not the American Dream, for the duration) right shoulder sloped forward and a twitch rictused the left corner of his mouth into a pathetic sneer. Toes curled up in one shoe because the laces were not as tight as in the other.

  Same old bone tunes night and day

  My neve endings strings that the Lesser Gods play—

  One hand deliberately wrung the beige blanket on his lap.

  Dr. Wagner would say that the heating pad cape, et al., were what kept his patient from going insane. Not the direct relief, but rather a symbolic succor in the form of, to him, a metahuman’s uniform.

  The city paid for Shustak’s psychiatric bills, in the form of disability checks he received from Springfield. The state paid for loafers and alkies to do much less than patrol the city streets with no hope of release.

  Reve had left him near the Cryin’ Dime, in the shadows of City Hall. The Marclinn was in sight to the east. He allowed a flashing red and blue neon guitar with the Old Style legend imprint his face.

  As if any of the regulars would notice him in their misty alcohol fog, Shustak still disguised himself; in his words, he didn’t need Zero Stanley or Slappy Vander Putten blowing the entire operation.

  He hadn’t shaved for several days. Made it look like he had a bad cut—Skinny Minny Krejca had showed him how, using strips of cold hot dog—over his eye and parted his hair different.

  Nick Desmond, Murdy’s bartender, had drawn a rough sketch of the guy he had glimpsed back of the Cass Hotel. Reve was now showing the sketch around to the key players in the Painkiller saga. She had left him sitting there at six that night, the 20th of January, and was to return at nine with sandwiches.

  The door to a Perkins cab slammed shut and his entire body palsied up.

  This was not a deliberate motion.

  * * *

  Tremulis was popping wheelies in the subway near the Clark/Lake Transfer stop. He would stay underground, with Shustak staying in the streets above. There had been no reported Painkillings since late December, and the detectives, Daves and Petitt, thought that the increasing cold might be scaring him into hibernation. Or to warmer climes, Petitt had gone so far as to send a departmental FYI to each city along the well-travelled Greyhound line from Chicago to New Orleans.

  That was all nice and well, but it held little bearing for Tremulis, who was imagining the love and adoration he would receive from Reve after he, Vic Tremble, Average Guy, captured the Painkiller. He continued with his wheelie-popping, pretending the small wheels were landing on the Painkiller’s neck, and Tremulis’ full weight was causing the killer to die in spasms Of agony. He thought of the hooker, Lullaby and Goodnight, fully understanding how someone could have the killing lust as self-gratification.

  He continued his clever little maneuvers, with more people watching him than a saxophonist playing “The Lover’s Concerto” near a newspaper kiosk. Much to the musician’s disdain, since Trernulis had shown up, he had made a total of thirty-seven cents and a bus token.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Reve Towne clutched a sheaf of sketches in her hands because it was too cold to separate each page when she came across someone in a wheelchair. What she’d do, was hand three or four to each one. God knew there were more than enough to go around. Why were so many handicapped street people out here? Reve wasn’t thinking about the Painkillings, but of the temperature. She thought that sitting stationary all day would lower someone’s blood pressure.

  Still, there would be plenty of flyers to go around. Though there were quite a few crippled men, they were staying visible and, for the most part, heading wherever they called home before the nine-to-flyers left their jobs. She and Evan had run off copies at the all night Kinko’s at Wells and Isola. She was glad for the cold and not the freezing rain so common to Chicago in January. After she passed out as many as possible to those in chairs, she would tape the flyers to lampposts on the mall.

  It was a good thing that the cops, while not believing that Frank Haid could be a suspect without probable cause, were still persuasive in their ways. Several of the men— including Chubby Love, one of Mike Surfer’s friends, and Reve was startled to see him resigned to a wheelchair—had told her that Rizzi and Morisette had sternly told them to stay at the Servicemen’s Center at the Madison Building or up at the 7th Street Hotel.

  And for the hundredth time, Reve wondered if they were doing the right thing singling out one man in a city of three million, even if it wasn’t by name.

  It was all hunches. But the police worked on those same hunches. Yes, Frank Haid sounded crazy, and he was seen in the vicinity of one of the first murders, but did that give them the right to suspect him any more than another? The police had a list of possible perps, including those incarcerated in recent weeks. There had been a killing on 23rd and Pulaski, under the El tracks, that was most certainly copycat. And Frank Haid was indeed on their list of suspects.

  But still she thought about persecuting the innocent. She remembered a chapter in the annals of Chicago's killing history: a schizophrenic black man who happened to be hanging out in Grant Park at the time of the ax murders in the summer of 1973 was tried and convicted of the crime. The true killer had confessed some eight years later, the black man in jail the whole time. Both had gotten a kind of religion.

  No, Reve was concerned with what Evan or Vic would do if they did encounter the elusive Painkiller.

  The canary-yellow sheets showed a rough sketch of Haid. Nick Desmond had given them a good description, and had been adamant on illustrating the man's furrowed brow.

  Underneath the sketch, which had originally been done in charcoal, Reve had printed the wo
rds:

  HAVE YOU BEEN APPROACHED BY

  THIS MAN??? HE MIGHT BE THE

  PAINKILLER!

  DON’T THINK THAT THIS WON’T

  HAPPEN TO YOU!!

  Reve knew that if the police actually caught her pinning these up, her ass was grass. And if it was Dean Conover that saw her, well, her ass was one of the things she was worried about.

  Underneath the admonishment, she had written the names of as many SROs as she could think of:

  HOTEL LASALLE 215 W. WASHINGTON

  HOTEL MORTON 538 S. DEARBORN

  METROPOLIS 211 W. CO UCH

  MARCLINN 29 W. RANDOLPH

  7TH STREET HOTEL 2 E. BALBO

  PACIFIC GARDEN 646 S. STATE

  HOTEL DAHLIA 39 W. NORTON

  ST. FRANCIS CENTER 122 W. KINZIE

  BENEDICT FLATS 100 W. ONTARIO

  Once, she had to duck into the Bordeaux Restaurant to avoid being seen with the flyers by Rizzi and Morisette, even though she was certain the two beat cops would know immediately who was distributing the sketches of the Painkiller. She wondered if it might not be a bad idea to send a copy to one of the television stations. Channel Seven, the ABC affiliate, was right there at State and Lake.

  Man of La Mancha was playing at the Chicago The-ater, and a Winner’s Circle off-track betting parlor had opened up alongside the bagel shop in the sixty-odd days since Wilma Jerrickson’s death in the alleyway. Near the Orleans Street bridge, she gave several flyers to a Rastafarian whose ringlets were frosted by the river cold, and he returned her concern, by telling her that God Blessed Her. Further north, a short man with a walker said he “onnie wanna shot anna.” For a brief moment, Reve thought that the man was confessing to a murder.

  She never saw either man again, and later often wondered if the Bible and the barstool-thumpers ended up as two of the Painkiller’s victims.

  For there are always unknown victims.

  And Reve didn’t know what was worse: the amount of street people out here in the dead of winter, or the amount of the working class who simply ignored them as they would a mope passing out flyers for the new Mr. Submarine.

  On Kingsbury and Isola, an old lady wearing two different colored surgical masks huddled around an upright cart. The cart was piled with pale garbage bags wrapped in string. The tightness of the string made the whole thing seem to be a living bulbous mass. The same could be said of the woman in her layers of cloth.

  Near One Illinois Center’s south tower, Reve saw a black man who seemed to be blind, but sure as hell knew what was going on around him. He had a beatnik goatee and shook a red plastic cup from Irving’s Red Hots. The noisily-jangled cup, on closer examination, was half-filled with mostly copper. Maybe everybody else had caught on that the guy was following the girls wearing leg warmers over their blue jeans with his “sightless” eyes.

  She passed him and heard the dull chink of some gullible soul dropping him a quarter. Near the Kroch’s and Brentano’s on Michigan, another man sat with his legs folded up underneath him like a flattened accordion. He was wearing grey mechanic coveralls over a midnight-blue parka with orange hood lining. It was as if the coveralls were the man’s testament to actually having an honest job at one time.

  As she walked up to hand him a flyer, she saw words on the front double pocket of the coveralls: BILL’S BODY SHOP, 24 Hr Towing, 806 Otter Creek Road, Streator 64, Illinois. She wondered when the last time was that she had seen a zip code written that way. Probably in one of Evan’s Blue Beetle or Holy Terror comics in an advertisement for Mason Shoes or a tie that lit up “Will you kiss me in the dark, baby.”

  And there was a woman whose face looked like it had imploded, muttering about Christ and paint chippings, and another with a baby in her needlepointed arms, a voice like an airhorn. Words blowing out through crooked gaps between her teeth: gimme mbaby somto EEEEEEAAAAAATTTT—A guy on State Street near the Stevens Building, wearing only one shoe over red socks, talking to a foot messenger that looked like a little skull girl. The guy was wearing a three-piece sharkskin suit and dragging a Burberry overcoat underneath the shoeless foot, begging the messenger and anyone else who would listen that all he needed was ten dollars to use a FAX machine in the lobby of the Pathway Financial.

  All of them real people, leading real lives.

  * * *

  Dean Conover, off-duty and sipping bonded bourbon, watched Reve crisscrossing the street from a front table at Nolan Void’s. He was just finishing up a joke to Mather, who had just signalled for another beer. He was wearing a chambray shirt. His partner wore a navy blue tee that read TO SERVE AND PROTECT… whenever we FUCKING feel like it!

  “Hey, I got another,” Conover said, absently touching his crotch whenever Reve moved on. She was talking with a couple of crips that had staked out the area near where they were starting construction on a Stouffer’s Hotel. Plenty of people in the afternoon waiting for the buses that turned off Wacker, he supposed.

  “Like I have a choice,” Mather didn’t even make it a question.

  “So there are these two lawyers on a plane, coming into O’Hare from some shine city like Detroit,” Conover said, getting into it. “One’s a Jew, the other ain’t. The plane hits some turbulence over the lake or something, and everybody thinks they’re gonna crash. Oh, yeah. Almost forgot, the Jew is wearing glasses. They land okay, and the guy Catholic looks at the Jew and sees him doing like the sign of the cross...”

  “Hey, look.” Mather didn’t want to hear any more, and he tapped the window. “It’s Reve Towne. Wonder what she’s passing out?”

  “Man, she’d be a knockout if she was passing gas!” Conover said, too loud. “Can I go for a piece of her,” he said with a modicum of leering enthusiasm.

  And he forgot to finish his joke, so that was something.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The three of them sat in Nolan Void on the night of the deathwatch. Tremulis looked around at the crowd. Mostly groups of threes. What was it about that number? One of the bouncers at Hard Rock Cafe carried a card in his wallet. It said CHOOSE ONE: 1,2,3,4 on the front. The flip side read IF YOU PICKED 3 THEN YOU ARE A SEX FIEND. Truth was, most people picked three.

  Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

  See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil.

  The deathwatch: it was Monday, the 23rd of January, and serial killer Ted Bundy was madly scrabbling with the police, confessing to murders of women in Colorado and Idaho, hoping for a stay of the execution that had finally caught up with him.

  Sitting there amidst the beer chuggers and the dead longneck soldiers on the tables around them, it could have been that they were the only three pessimists there.

  Tremulis and Shustak were still in the Everest & Jennings wheelchairs, trying to stay the part for the duration. They sat there in the bar with their eyes on the tube, rather than someplace else on the off chance that the Painkiller might show his face for a final salute to one of his kin. The way a killer might pop in for a final eyeball at his gash in a casket.

  You could watch Bundy sweating from three different angles, with two television sets at either end of the bar, plus a big screen job above the jukebox and Joker Poker game. The sets would rattle each time a Lake Street elevated rumbled by like tangible thunder, and no one seemed in the least concerned that the televisions might fall on them.

  Normally the bar would have a Hawks game on SportsVision. Tonight it was CNN and Bundy jokes, all around. Free Home fries if Bundy fries. Buckle up, Ted. It’s the law! Posters on the bar advertised the coming weekend’s band Skinhead Jesus Joe and the Fever Beings. Three dollar cover, two drink minimum.

  The volume was turned down on the sets. It was enough to just watch Bundy sweat. Tremulis had read about him back in high school. His fingers drummed the chair’s armrest as the TV flashed prom photos of girls dead a decade.

  Someone dropped silver into the Seeberg. The Widows of Whitechapel’s “Tricks We Tried Today.” Of all people, it was Shustak who sang a
long with the compact disc, soft as a man in church on the sly.

  “Tricks we tried today, that we might wake up

  With tomorrow in our eyes, and in our throats,

  A veiled tongue, a thin disguise,

  The gangman lied about the tricks

  We tried today. Snub your thumb

  At the stiff palace, small denial

  And lesser malice, towards the tricks

  We tried today...”

  Tremulis half expected Shustak to open his mouth for the communion wafer. Behind them, a waitress was making change: “Five and ten, hon. Here you go, babe.”

  “Tomorrow morning Bundy will be dead,” Shustak said, fingering the beige blanket that now smelled of cigarette smoke as well as the street.

  “Yes he will and a damn good thing,” someone passing on his way to the john mumbled. “Yea yea yea,” a seated patron agreed, his words sounding as if they were stumbling out of his mouth of their own volition.

  “One less.” It was all Tremulis wanted to say on it.

  “One less.” Reve touched her Tom Collins glass of ginger ale.

  “And how many people are out there tonight, sharpening their first knives on tonight’s telecasts?” Shustak said, looking first at Reve, than at Tremulis.

  No one answered him, although someone at the bar commented on what a looker one of the sorority girls Bundy had killed was. His drinking companion had to remind him that the girl was dead, for one, and two, if she was alive she’d be pushing forty.

  But that changed nothing.

  * * *

  They left Nolan Void just after midnight, Terrible Ted still alive. Reve called a Checker cab from the bar and gave them both hugs before she disappeared into the back seat. The cab’s interior smelled of lanolin.

  They wheeled out back of the Marclinn and called it a night. Neither knew that they were being watched. The man following them was onto what was happening. No conspiracy there. There they were now, walking out of the alley and into the rooming house. What, did they think this was some made-for-TV movie?