He knew them for what they were. The rookie crips were those two that had hung around with Surfer. Smooth Tee had told him so, and when Tee heard what his plans were, the man said, “Take a ‘luude, dude.” Easy for him to say.
He didn’t care about the older one. The shadow on the street was more interested in the one Tee called The American Dream.
* * *
Ted Bundy was executed at 6:16 AM Chicago time on Tuesday, 24 January 1989. That same time, Victor Tremulis had a muscle spasm while shaving and tore a chunk of skin off of his jawbone.
Shustak looked at it with approval, saying that the Painkiller might go for the dried blood.
To stop thinking about Reve, Tremulis stayed in the Marclinn’s bathroom and let the blood drip from his face in thick red goblets. Sitting on the low sink, his pants around his ankles, he aimed the blood towards his flaccid morning penis.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Days continued to blend together like a medley of salsa at a frenetic celebration down South Racine. The weather patterns over the Midwest had shifted so that the frigid cold had turned into a driving, misty rain that never let up. You went to bed and it was raining. You woke up, ditto. Like love for an unattainable person, as January passed into February, no one was completely free from the rain that made faces shimmering liquid and kept those same visages more awake and aware than they’d ever care to be.
Much the way Victor Tremulis felt, lying on his cot at the Marclinn and thinking about Reve. Slapping himself like the hard rain would, his memory stinging with all the things he wanted to say to her and never did. And never would.
As January became February, with spring as far away and as unattainable as the average city dweller’s peace of mind.
Richard M. Daley, Jr. looked as if he might stand a good chance of beating Eugene Sawyer in the upcoming special mayoral primary. In Iran, the Ayatollah was hospitalized for internal bleeding. And the easiest way of grabbing a cab was to wave a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses at most any cab driver in the Loop. Most were camel jockeys, anyways, and they all drove like the streets were as roomy as the Kalihari Desert.
Only it didn’t rain in the desert.
* * *
Conover and Mather had been onto the scheme for weeks, since they found one of Reve’s flyers in the fleshy mitt of a fat black dude with silver caps on his front teeth went by the name of Chubby Love. The sketch of “The Painkiller” certainly wasn’t instilling the fear of God in the street crips; another empty chair was found, no signs of a body or parts thereof, off Beaubien Court, near the Prudential tower.
The leather on the chair was smeared with something the lab boys said was a mixture of hair tonic and analgesic balm.
It was Conover all on his lonesome, though, who was walking the streets of the North Loop this night, the 19th of February. His size ten brogans slapping cement, his second change of socks that day already soaked. Three civilians out trying to avenge their friend Surfer’s death. Fucking rain. Least he wasn’t wearing glasses. Had the Wayfarers back in the squad, but where the fuck had the sun been in a month, anyways? He crossed Monroe and spat onto the curb. Fucking look at that. The city still had their reindeer up top of the El station on Wabash. Dumb shits.
Conover looked up at the lighted buildings, the Polish cleaning women from Bridgeport and Brighton Park still busy scrubbing, the dashes of light resembling negatives of a word processor’s screen in extreme close up. The rain hitting his face like a horny, playful bitch.
Wondered about Reve and the street crips. Man, what would he do if his dick didn’t work? And damn if his little sprout became the Jolly Green Giant when he thought about Reve Towne and her black hair falling over her face as she straddled him, then brandished her pussy his way.
And that was what made him make up his mind to approach that loon Shustak about the girl and her likes and dislikes, etc. etc. What the hell, she wouldn’t go out with him if he cold-cocked her with the question.
He had passed the guy with his beige blanket wrapped around him like an Arab with an identity problem earlier that night. He had set his chair out in the Arcade Place cul-de-sac, near St. Sixtus, the church where Mather always took confession in.
Conover purged himself at The Touch in Fallon Ridge, if you can anticipate the thrust.
And most whores from the Ridge to the go-go palaces of Cal City were resigned to anticipating Conover’s sweaty grunts.
He blew out a plume of breath and let the rain hit his open, unblinking eyes. His eyelashes were plastered to his skin. Yes, Chicago did have some good thinking weather. He wanted to jazz Reve Towne in the worst way.
* * *
Yea, Smooth Tee had the Dream’s moves down pat. Truvillion’s friend followed Shustak’s route past the American National Bank toward that funny little alcove with the cobblestone bricks leading up to Popeye’s Chicken.
Dude called hisself the American Dream, the Tee say. ‘Merican Clown was more like it. The guy was a laugh. A fucking riot.
Now he’s been ridin’ around town in his chair. Jesus Lord, I is wonderin. The man clapped his hand to his face in an exaggerated manner. Lawsy, could he be tryin’ to trap the evil Mister Painkiller?
Shee-it. Doin’ it fo’ a month now, so you ain’t workin and you must be getting your jingle from somewheres. Get a hefty price on those pills you be carryin. Yea, Ray Lewis got you pegged. Wonder who took the time to name you, you fucking faggot. Cock suck man, it was cold. Cock suck.
“I’ll be givin’ you some pleasant fuckin’ dreams,” Ray Lewis, a lazy ass grifter from Whiting, Indiana, whispered like he was a strongarm tough. He smiled and the rain hit his yellowed teeth. “Oh, yea. Cock suck.”
Maybe he’d even keep the blanket when he was through.
* * *
Shustak was feeling dismal, a guy scrabbling away from a disintegrating cliff. His pain was at a lull, numbed by his depression. It helped to squeeze one eye shut and concentrate on those muscles used to keep it up.
So Mama Tomei’s had been a washout, so the killings were still going on. He couldn’t be everywhere. And with Vic Tremble covering the subway end of it.
And no one in the city knew who the Painkiller was. Daves and Petitt had no leads at all. He thought that, in this day and age, a relative or drinking buddy would dime on him.
Where I am is what I am, he had told Vic Tremble once. Well, where was Frank Haid? Where was the Painkiller?
He had gotten used to the blanket and the feelings of helplessness that someone in a chair would have. But he wanted to wear his uniform. He gripped the blanket. He wanted to take a pill. He wrung the wet blanket in his fists.
Thinking it was the Painkiller’s neck, the ruptured arteries spraying his hands, helped enormously.
A fighter battered by February blows.
A fighter who stayed in for the kill.
* * *
“You the American Dream, I be right?” Lewis figured to go into it this way, like kinship and we is all brothers shit.
Shustak looked up, cautious yet curious. A grateful fan out on a night like this? No, his cover wasn’t blown yet.
“I said, you the American Dream?” No longer flashing teeth.
The man in front of him wasn’t the Painkiller. Haid was white and older, fatter. He had used the last few seconds to build up spit in his mouth by not swallowing. He let it drool from the corner of his mouth, thicker and warmer than the rain.
Beneath the blanket, he held tight to a grey stiletto. Wheelchairs weren’t the only things Ben Murdy could procure. Drool hit his blanket. Dark as blood.
“Bbb-ghubbles yhou.” He fluttered his eyelids as if they had weights attached.
“You can be droppin’ the retard faggot act now cause I don’t be playin’ that game.” Ray Lewis twitched a tattoo on the ground. Hungry and cold as shit.
Shustak blinked. Reve had told him once that some times, things were better left unsaid. Well, he would let this guy have his say.
Shustak didn’t think he looked that bulky underneath the blanket. Maybe it was because the guy standing there was so thin.
“Lookithere, we got us a caveman, a whatchoo call Cro-Magnum, here.” Talking to himself, not Shustak, who took him for a doper, not someone who had gone two days without eating and the rain just peeling the weight off of him.
“Pt...pi…pi...pitee.” Shustak brought down his lip with that one, as if the drool was molten lead.
Then the guy shoved the wheelchair backwards, after the last tired cabbie of the post-rush hour narcopolis dozed by…
The chair bounced backwards over the cobblestone into the darkness, the Asian Bank building alongside of them rising to meet the dead sky. The chair banged into a UPS loading platform, new pain jolted through Shustak.
Beneath the beige blanket, turned shit brown by the rain, the stiletto in his hand was a dinner knife in the fist of a hungry man. Another shove and Shustak started to act:
Bolting out of the chair, his chest jutted outwards as he proudly told the Painkiller, CRIPPLED AND INSANE, I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM. I WILL LEAVE SKID MARKS IN YOUR SHORTS.
The Painkiller stepped forward, a halo of light around an executioner’s mask with a zipper going down the center of the face, leaving only a bloody tongue exposed. When he saw the conviction in the hero’s eyes, he backed off…
I’M A NEW DRUG, the American Dream hissed through perfect, clenched teeth. TRY ME.
In his mind. All in his mind. The beige-turned-shit brown blanket was warm now, because Shustak had pissed his pants.
Ray Lewis took a quick glance over at the darkened chicken place. “Love that chicken from Popeye’s,” he sang. He was the one with the perfect teeth.
* * *
“See, I know who you are, Man.” Angry spit hit Shustak’s own.
Grabbing the armrest with both hands. Knuckles white; well yellowish-white. So close to the knife.
“See, what it is, me and the Tee be at the Fonk City and Smooth, see, he be knows the sidewalk preacher dude what knows you. Simple as the pie in your pocket.” White teeth in the shadows. Impatient spit in his sibilants.
The black man reached to his waistband. The rain beaded on his skin.
Shustak made a spit bubble. He still was thinking he was throwing his opponent off track.
Even after the guy pulled a blade of his own.
“You must be getting some kinda dis’bility from the state or sompin, you aint workin’.”
The American Dream battered the Painkiller with February blows forged from his iron will and discipline. The city would privately thank him, but publicly decide him to be a vigilante, a loose cannon. Lying on the ground, the Painkiller begged for mercy, something he never gave his victims.
Shustak frisked him for weapons. Found the acid in one pocket, in one of the plastic travel bottles that you buy to keep your saline solution in if you wear contacts. The bottle had a teal squeeze cap and was labeled ACID. The miniature blow torch and a set of Ginsu knives were in an inside pocket. The Painkiller tried to get up then, make a break for it. The American Dream rabbit-punched him and his skull cracked the ground. CRIPPLED AND INSANE, I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM, he spat. I’VE GOT DYNAMITE IN ONE HAND AND A FIST IN THE OTHER. I’LL SLAP YOU SILLY.
The Painkiller pissed in his pants, obviously frightened. Compared to the dread Eighth Street Man, the Painkiller was spineless. His mad reign was o
The black man had a knife in his hand.
“You’re the Painkiller, aren’t you?” Shustak asked like a hero would when trapped in a villain’s lair. He’d spill his whole story, how a strange meteor made him hear voices that told him to slice and dice crippled people. Or maybe tell him that he was a dentist who had gotten AIDS from one of his patients and he killed his victims with dental instruments.
Shustak readied himself, his own blade with a handle as dark as the womb and as unforgiving as the grave.
Sometimes, in this city, it was the other way around.
“Me, the Painkiller?” The hand that held the knife splayed across his chest. The starving thespian.
Shustak never had time to observe everything in that last moment. He barely had time to raise his own knife. The rain was no more than a misty tingle, much like a seizure that never hung around too long.
Ray Lewis from Whiting, Indiana, slit Evan Shustak’s throat in a clean arc from just below the left earlobe. The blade neatly slid through the sternohyoid muscle; the left innominate vein, and the left common carotid artery. The back of Shustak’s head slapped three times against the wall of the Asian Bank Building. His blood gushed onto the blanket in freshets, creating what could have been a pool of gravy in the darkness.
“Me, the nasty Mister Painkiller?” The very idea left him almost satisfied that the chump only had a few shittin’ bucks in his freak retard pocket.
“An’ you the American Dream.” He laughed hard enough that Dean Conover, walking down Madison, could hear. Ray Lewis wiped his knife off on Shustak’s forehead. He contemplated letting the body drop, let him peek around for more money. Figured maybe the dead guy had been smart after all. Only have as much as you need.
He started walking down the alley, toward St. Sixtus.
“Yea, hero and villain,” He laughed again, but his stomach growling made him stop. He looked back one last time.
“Yea,” he told the corpse. “Dream on.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
It surprised the both of them. Conover had been walking along, the rain was Reve Towne’s fingers playing in his hair and her tongue lapping his neck just under his jacket collar. He heard the voices, heard Lewis laughing. And then there he was.
With the knife still in his hand. The rain wetting the blade again.
Conover tipped to the blade right away, and he was starting to react. That is, he had stopped focusing on an imaginary spot between milky white thighs when the blade came upwards and entered his abdomen just beneath the rib cage.
Lewis was not a strong man. He could not lift the cop off the ground. He settled for letting the blade break off inside of him.
Conover fell to the ground, thinking fragments of words. Lewis had hit an adrenaline rush from the second he had seen Conover, not knowing until the next day’s paper that he had cut up a copper. He ran west down Madison and spent Shustak’s money on a bottle and some chili in a Halsted Street dive.
Conover was on his back, the rain hitting his eyes and generally pissing him off. He tried to remember that joke Anderson had told him at the water cooler. The Jew and the other guy on the plane. Hadn’t he tried the joke out on Mather?
So the plane lands after the engine trouble, the one guy looks over at his hebe friend with the glasses and sees him crossing himself. He says hey what are you doing with the sign of the cross thing, I thought you were Jewish? The guy makes the moves again and says oh I was just checking that I had everything spectacles testicles wallet and keys.
Conover had to speed it up at the last, making his own peace with God as he finished the joke.
He got as far as In the name of the Father.
When he reached down for the and of the Son part he realized that one he had a hard-on and two he had pissed himself and then he was dead...
Chapter Fifty
Ninety percent of the time, the Chicago Tribune will relegate the daily news stories to grace their front page to include national news, such as a coup in Liberia, Lebanon hostage talks, and the like; and local news if it involved politics, Chicago being a political town, in case you just fell off of a turnip truck. The going in-joke come voting days was In Cook County, Vote Early and Vote Often! Any other local news was saved for Section Two, the Chicagoland portion of the paper.
There are exceptions to the rule, say, for example, when a cop is killed. Now, Dean Conover was off-duty and should have been in Section Two, but the thing had snowballed into a Painkiller-related story. The Painkiller
always made the front page because if the murderer was not caught by the upcoming election, well...
The above fold headline for the February 2nd Trib ran this way:
Off-Duty Cop Slain by Painkiller
An officer from the 16th District was slain in the North Loop late Monday evening, apparently after encountering the elusive murderer stalking the downtown streets since November.
Dean Conover, 34, succumbed to stab wounds inflicted in the 150 block of West Madison, and was DOA at Henrotin Hospital. There were signs of a struggle, according to Malcolm B. Dennison, a pastor at St.Sixtus Franciscan Church, near the scene of the crime. Several feet away was the intended victim, an invalid in his late twenties, tentatively identified as Evan Shustak, no known address. Dennison discovered both bodies.
Early reports from Frank Bervid, who examined the first victim at the scene, said that the slash wounds were “similar” to those of the lurid serial killer whose prey has been handicapped street people confined to wheelchairs. The Assistant Medical Examiner would offer no further information until a proper autopsy was performed.
This brings the number of known, and suspected murders attributed to the one known to many as “The Painkiller” at fourteen.
“That number is very high, and I think it is very much out of proportion,” said Area 3 Homicide Det. Lt. Jackson Daves. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of those cases where the killing of Shustak was copycat, and the off-duty officer just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Officer Conover was the recipient of fourteen Honorable Mentions since starting on the force with the Traffic Division in July, 1984.
Victor Tremulis never cut articles out of anything, mostly because he would never know when the urge to nip at his skin with the blades might come upon him. Instead he folded and ripped the pages; the lower half of the Tribune article was ripped horizontally against the grain. He tacked the jagged page onto the wall of Shustak’s room opposite a photocopy of an ad from an early fifties Batman comic, where the Caped Crusader and Robin were asking for donations in the area of polio research.
The Holy Terror Page 23
