Slice

by Rex Miller

  And this is Michael Hora and so Chaingang goes right up close and puts one up in his ear and kicks the Llama away and is going up those rotten stairs but the slow lady she moves pretty good she's damn fast for being slow and she's already inside fumbling with a 410 when he plunks her in her pig back and she turns as if to say, Hey, watch it, and he plugs her right in her forehead and she goes down with one of the little chunks of dirty lead in her brain and he's grabbed the 410 and at a window, making sure Hora hasn't moved, and Sissy hasn't come outside but she could be looking out a window and he's got Hora by a boot and dragging him into the dilapidated tool shed in thirty seconds. It went all right.

  He goes next door.

  “Hear that shootin'?"

  “Yeah,” she says, still washing a huge shirt by hand out in back. Stray hair down in her eyes. Sweat pouring from her. She looks whiter than he's ever seen her. Shooting, shmooting, her body said. “I feel like shit."

  “Go to town. I want you to see the doctor. Ask him to give you something so you'll feel better."

  “I'm okay. I'm just hot."

  “Do as I say. Tell him you feel like you're gonna pass out."

  “I do feel a little faint.” What an idiot.

  “Right. Here's the keys. Drive carefully."

  “Okay.” She goes out and heaves herself into the vehicle. She can barely get behind the wheel even with the seat pushed all the way back. She starts the car and drives off at about fifteen miles an hour. At that speed she'll be an hour just getting to town and back. Fine, he thinks, getting the keys to Hora's pickup and starting to clean up the messes. Get the slow sow and Hora loaded and covered. Start for the bridge. He puts them down in the graveyard and drives back. Takes a marking pen and makes a sign for the door of the house and starts packing. He has everything ready to load into the Caprice by the time she comes back from town to find they're leaving.

  “He said I was okay."

  “I don't trust small-town doctors. Now that you're getting this close I want us near a city doctor who really knows his stuff."

  “Okay.” He seemed so considerate lately.

  “I want somebody good nearby, in case there's any trouble with the, uh, delivery. First, though, I want to give you some more acting practice.” It was a word he hadn't used in nearly eight months, the whole time she'd been with him, and her face lit up with the luminosity of the eternally hopeful.

  “Sure."

  “Need some new wheels.” Also need some new money. He'd turned up nearly six hundred dollars squirreled away inside Hora's place, but that wasn't nearly enough now. He wanted a nice cushion. But he could go out and get what he needed that night ... Or the next day ... He'd get it.

  Daniel Bunkowski almost never killed to rob. He had little intrinsic interest in material goods, and certainly none whatsoever in the accumulation of monetary wealth. But he enjoyed the sport, the challenge, and the RIGHTNESS of thievery. It was important to him to rob now and then. Those scum out there OWED it to him.

  His precognitive computer of a mind stored his next steps for later retrieval. The distancing of themselves from Stobaugh County. The best way to get the next legal wheels and how he would coach Sissy to buy the car. How the second legally bought ride would insulate him. Next the new identities. Clothing. The physical make-overs. His, anyway, almost no point in wasting anything on this one. Let her drop the frog first.

  Daniel understood the process of ovulation by which the female egg is fertilized by male spermatozoa. How it develops into an embryo and fetus and after the three requisite trimesters, what the doctor kept calling “the thirty-seven to forty-week gestation,” an infant is miraculously produced. It meant no more to Bunkowski than the lunar cycle. It was just something that was. He had never had any reason to come to terms with the fact that HE, this beast on two legs, was capable of producing a normal, human, viviparous response. When the time came, he would learn the meaning of the phrase “a sense of wonder."

  BUCKHEAD SPRINGS

  “Juggy” he said to the PR guy, “f'r Chrissakes.” Hey, Jack, what can I say, booby?” He spread out his hands expansively in a totally insincere gesture.

  “Hey, this is home, ya know?"

  “I hear ya, paisan, but this was the deal,” he whispered conspiratorially, smiling some orthodontist's Bermuda vacation.

  “Donna too? Jesus.” Eichord was just a hair away from boiling over and he knew he didn't want that to happen. But the PR dude should have handled it so it wouldn't have ended up on his fucking doorstep.

  “It's a PHOTO OPPORTUNITY, poops,” Juggy Jay told him. Juggy and Eichord got along well because they both had a sense of humor, and Juggy had earned his nickname out in the wet trenches, something Jack knew all about. All too well.

  “Uh huh,” he said, feeling like a fatuous fool in his old Mets cap.

  “What can I tell ya?"

  “Right.” Where was a hounds-tooth cape or a meerschaum when yon needed one.

  “You guys are news. People wanna see. Superflyyyy.” He grinned.

  “Cut me a huss,” Eichord said, without moving his lips.

  “It's good for the shop."

  “Real smart. And down the line I'm on a homicide and some crazy hump sees this and he knows what my lady looks like."

  “They got fifty GRILLION shots of her in Dallas, bunky, and one more ain't gonna hoit. Also, that's why the wig.” Booby. Poops. Bunky. Poopsy. Juggy. Christ, it sounded like the fucking East Side Kids. Eichord sulked.

  “It's all right, hon,” Donna whispered to him, having already quite obviously accepted the fact that a photographer was waiting to take a picture of the Eichords.

  “No. It's not, actually,” he said to her quietly in his most brittle whisper, and he smiled to soften it. “But what the hell."

  “Come on.” She held his hand. “If we don't give it to them with our blessing they'll just get it anyway under worse conditions—that's what you've always told me.” She'd acclimated herself to Jack's unwanted celebrity, as well as her own. She'd had her fill of the spotlight too, such as it was, but ever since Dallas there'd been enough vestiges of it from time to time that it no longer jarred. It was certainly part of her husband's life, and for good or bad she figured she might as well do the best she could to accept it gracefully. Jack was hot and cold on it. One time he'd grin and go with the flow. Next time he'd stomp his feet a little.

  In Dallas, where Donna had been abducted and raped by the brother of a psychotic killer, she'd had her fifteen minutes of stardom and then some. She'd been hounded by print and electronic media, the American version of the paparazzi, and had not handled it well. They'd talked about it. Jack talked about it. “You have to understand the public's curiosity. The concept of serial killings holds a perverse fascination for these people.” He was talking about a woman buying supermarket tabloids, but he meant everybody. “The horror of it is kinda like terrorism itself, you know? We can't quite put it in any of the accepted pigeonholes.

  “We try to comprehend the mass horror of the Reverend Jones, the clown who tortures and kills boys—whose names begins with the ironic John Wayne, the mystical, demented monsters like"—he started to say Joseph Hackabee, but swallowed the words and said—"the so-called Lonely Hearts killer. And more than anything else we want somebody to have answers.

  “They want to believe some cop has genuine insight into the mentality and psyche of the serial murderer. It's the supersleuth syndrome, that desire to have a hero we can put our faith in. Sherlock's on the job, gang. We can sleep safely tonight. But where was I in Atlanta, for example, when that nut was killing the kids? I've struck out more times than I've hit homers, but the press don't talk about those.

  “Part of it is the guys I work for. The brass with the hash-marks and big bellies and Swiss bank accounts. I'm a media tool, they say,” he pronounced the words with a vengeance, “and they're going to use whoever or whatever they can because to them the balance of the scales rests on manipulation of the public pe
rception. It's not so much catch the bad guys as make sure we LOOK like we caught the bad guys.” He shook his head in frustration. “Finally you just shrug and say, What the hell.” And that's what Jack was doing now.

  This would get a lot of coverage. The big regional daily was doing a piece on law enforcement. It was pro-cop, with a pictorial section on the Major Crimes Task Force and—central to that—Jack. These were the kinds of public-relations pieces in which the top cops, Eichord's rabbis within the system, could use print to spoon-feed whatever the latest official thinking was. This week's installment in the continuing efforts of the establishment to keep the old upscale image in motion. Jack and Donna Eichord at home. It went against his grain but he was smart enough to know he wasn't being asked, he was being told. It went with the territory. So you give in here, whether you think it's right or wrong, and later—when something is too tough to swallow—you stomp and scream and kick holes in the wall and maybe then it's your turn and you get your way.

  “Okay, gang,” the woman from the paper said to them, “let's do it."

  The young man with the camera got down on his knees as if to pray, and he motioned for the Eichords to move to the right. “Could you come over this way, please?"

  “Sure,” Juggy Jay said, as if he'd been asked.

  The cop and the cop's wife moved over as directed. The sun hit Eichord right in the eyes like a couple of steel knitting needles. He made a kind of humming noise in agony and the photographer said, “Good. Hold THAT!” And something clicked and a car squealed up and Eichord saw fat Dana lurch from one side, Chink from the other, and Jimmie motioned him over.

  Donna saw them say something to him that made him change the set of his big shoulders—bad or good she couldn't tell but something—and turned back and shouted, “That's it. Sorry! Gotta go. Donna,” and he sort of pointed with his head, which she knew by now meant, Better go on back in the house. She'd been through enough with him that she knew he didn't futz around. When he looked like that, it was time to move. She just said her thanks, made a couple of quick apologies, said good-byes, and went inside, wondering if it were something bad.

  “Thanks,” Eichord said from the back seat of the car as they pulled away, “gave me an excuse to put an end to that shit."

  “Our pleasure."

  “Okay. What happened?” The unmarked car's radio was blasting. Lee leaned back over the seat with his hand over his face, as if he didn't want anybody reading his lips.

  “I got pulled in on the thing yesterday. The feds.” Eichord's heart started to sink. “No. Really. No sweat. They don't know jack. They don't know babyshit. Gave me this hilarious thing about a secret surveillance camera or something, said they had me dead-bang. I said, Fine, assholes—arrest me then, right? I'll sue you from one end of the fucking city to the other.” Eichord didn't appear relieved. “They later cop that it's bullshit. They run some crap by me about computer-enhanced doodahs, and the electronic reebus-feebus. All this good craparoony. And the bottom line is—they cut me loose. Nothing. I go home—right. The blimp here's on the landline. Meet me outside. He wheels by in the blimpmobile and lays it on me.” He looks at Dana Tuny.

  “They had this moke John Monroe in Segregation and, funny thing, somebody didn't like the way he ratted out his partner and what not. They convinced him he didn't have anything to live for, and the booger just goes over, takes a towel, and hangs himself.” Chink tilted his head over like he was dead. Dana's hung-man neck schtick.

  “So now what?” Eichord felt like he was being booked on the Titanic.

  “Who the fuck knows?” Lee said. He looked over at his pudgy partner and shrugged.

  “What a handjob."

  “They'll watch you the rest of your fucking life, man.” Eichord told him. All for twelve fucking thousand. “This just keeps getting worse and worse.” And he didn't know anything. He hadn't even seen the tip of the shitberg. “Jeezus, Chink—I mean, seriously, you're a logical person. You knew there was no fuckin’ way you could get clear with the money in that sort of a controlled circumstance. You knew it would mess up your job. They'd be suspicious of you forever. It might even get you thrown off the force not to mention into prison. Why in the flaming FUCK did you do it?"

  “Everybody else gets THEIR slice of the American Pie, papa-san. I looked down there and saw that fucking money, and that was MY slice. Hey, I'll tell you the truth I only wish it had been MORE. I wish it wasn't twelve I wish it was a hundred twelve. And as far as them watching me the rest of my life, fuck ‘em. And I'll tell you something else, Jack. You know something: if I had it to do over, I'd do it AGAIN!"

  “Dana,” Eichord said, looking into the bloodshot eyes in the rearview mirror, “what the hell are we gonna DO with this maniac?"

  “Fucked if I know. What do I look like f'r Chrissakes, a"—he couldn't think of the name “halfway house” and he trailed off sleepily—"a goddamn whaddyacallit?"

  “Yeah,” his partner said to him reflexively, “for once you got it right, hippo hips. You look like a goddamn whaddyacallit."

  They rode in silence and finally Eichord muttered, “Well, at least there's one thing to be thankful for: it's still a secret. Only seventeen people know about it."

  “That's a lotta yak shit. Nobody's knows but you, me, the human blimp, and"—he narrowed his eyes and intoned in his best Sessue Hayakawa—"Admiral Yamamoto. Nobody else knows that on the dawn of December twenty-first, my men and I will attack Pearl Bailey."

  But Eichord wasn't going for it. He said in a serious, soft voice, “Jeezus, man. I just can't come to grips with it. You FUCKING GOT TO COUGH IT UP, BUD. Get it? You gotta give it back. Either Dana can get it back to ‘em, I can get it back to ‘em someway, or whatever, but get rid of that damn stolen money."

  “Don't talk nonsense, Amellican G.I."

  “One, it's the right thing to do. Two, it'll show you are a honest person who just fucked up for a second, came to your senses, and decided to play it straight. VERY important, mano, when they descend upon your silly butt with the warrants and the hoo-hah. Gon’ be too late then. Get the money back now while you still got a shot."

  “You spleek suplisingly good Engrish for a total roon-a-tic. But your thinking is unsound.” Still with the put-on voice.

  “Yeah.” Wonderful. His best friend was going to prison. He couldn't get it up half the time for worrying. And down at the office he had twenty-nine fucking dossiers from the task force. Missing persons all having vanished in the same sixty-mile radius during the past six or eight months. Sometimes life was just a bowl of cherry pits.

  MOUNT VERNON

  Howard Kresse, Kresse and Co., Inc., Kresse Enterprises, Inc., Kresse Entertainment, Inc., Hokress/Amalgamated Industries, Inc., Midwest Investment Partners, Ltd., Kresse Art Museum, and a young man purporting to be his son despite the name “Richard Cross” on his credit cards had to drive in all the way from Kresse's exclusive country club on the other side of Mount Vernon, just so—as he eloquently put it—his hotshot kid could put a night deposit in some shiksa's sperm depository. “Turbulent” was the most genteel word that could accurately be applied to their father-and-son nonrelationship.

  Richard had gone through a period where he had even started calling his father “Howard,” but his mother had been so hurt he'd returned to “Dad.” It was a small hypocrisy to pay for a loving mother. In fact, this inquisition of the day was all for his mom's benefit, and for his fiancée's, to see if he could lay a foundation on which to build a new relationship. Sharon was a traditionalist who insisted they have all the family ties and niceties of holiday gatherings and all the rest of it. So far it had been a mitigated disaster.

  Richard could never understand what made his father tick. He seemed enamored of money, but when his son took over the famous Marsh-Endicott Agency in Chicago, and he became the official guru of record to one of the biggest accounts in local print advertising, he'd thought that would have turned the tide. But no. It only managed to widen the gap b
etween them. Richard could NEVER please his father in a thousand years. Finally, he'd learned to accept it. The unfairness of it rankled, but he'd please his favorite ladies and bite his tongue until he could shake loose of his carping father.

  “You really turn onto this shit or you just doin’ this to bug me,” the father asked his kid rhetorically.

  “I don't TURN ON to it. Dad, gimme a break here, will ya?” The kid was twenty-eight years old and making a hundred and fifty thousand a year running one of the biggest agencies in regional advertising.

  “You still play the rock-'n'-roll on the radio, look at this hair down to your ass, live like a MENSCH for a change. Be a man, what d'ya—seventeen years old with pimples? Act like a grown-up person."

  “Lighten up. Riding with me was your idea."

  “Mother said make an effort. She blackmails me. Make an effort with the boy. So I make an effort, I cram myself in this kiddybopper car the hotshot drives to go put a few hard earned dollars into the bank, we can't go down in the daytime like normal people, we got to drive down and in the darkness yet. And I'm crammed in the front with my son the hotshot here, I can't feel my legs they're numb already, I'm getting such a migraine from this music noise here you gotta play."

  “So what did you want to talk about? Come on.” He reached over and killed the tape deck. “I know you're pissed about somethin'."

  “No. Why would I be pissed? My wife is going to Europe by herself. I'm stuck here working my ass off. I gotta kid don't care enough about his old man to bring the girl he's goin’ to marry over even if she is a shi—uh, even if we don't know her from nothing. Why would this be a possible irritation?"

  Howard Kresse was a business genius. He was responsible for developing some of the biggest shopping malls in the Midwest back in the early 1950s, a pioneer from the dawn of urban renewal. He'd been in on the first teams to steamroller the old ma-and-pa stores for the vast parking lots and huge shopping centers of the new American merchant's dreamworld. Howard Kresse was a dream salesman. He dreamt of big bosomy blond women, shiny limos with wet bars and telephones, leveraged buy-outs, and sprawling shopping centers. And not in that order.