The Holy Terror (26 page)

“Actually,” Murdy said. “It didn’t lighten up from the sun quote unquote in Celluloid City. I mean, get this. I’m out there at this big, you know how it is, posh party out somewhere on Beverly Glen, near where Harry Hamlin lives and this... this shmuck from Central Casting, he’s smashed, says to me, he says that Danny DeVito could do the thing better, you do know I was out there for that Tarses thing?” He paused without taking a drag off of his menthol.

“Desmond said,” Reve answered, transfixed.

“Anyways. Oh, hell, anyways. Geena Davis dyed my hair right there because we were both bored.” He waved the rest of the story. Tremulis heard a bass pattern from upstairs that he felt in his ears like a bleeding hematoma.

“So you’re going after that horrid Painkiller.” The statement, the abrupt change in both subject and expression, jarred the three of them. Shustak jostled his drink.

“Yes,” he said. “We know who he is.”

“We think,” Tremulis added because it was true.

“Listen to me, will you?” Murdy said. “I’m still talking in LaLa-ese. I said the word ‘horrid’. Sorry.” His cigarette was out. “Cutting down,” he said aloud, as if having second thoughts in his mind. Shustak ordered another Canada Dry. The waiter brought one of each for everyone and a dry vodka martini with two olives for Murdy.

He sipped at it, unconsciously tonguing the inner part of his upper lip. Tremulis caught a glimpse of the blue vein on the underside of the man’s tongue and looked back into his own drink.

Shustak was telling Murdy that he had a new phrase he was going to try out on street scum one day.

“I’m a new drug. Try me.”

“I like it, I like it.” Murdy said with a large amount of gleefulness.

* * *

The night wound on like the subway eternal, Tremulis getting just enough hooch in his system to think that maybe he could get a hard on if he squeezed his eyes shut for about a billion seconds.

Murdy told them that his friend Milton Castle from up around Bowmanville could get them some used wheelchairs. Tremulis excused himself to go to the bathroom. Why the hell was Murdy going along with Shustak’s fantasy? he thought. Maybe he was angry, too, because gays are lumped into the same old category as cripples. If the Painkiller was out doing them, the city would blame it on their promiscuity, like they do AIDS...

But wasn’t catching the Painkiller his fantasy, as well?

Just what the hell were they supposed to do if the Painkiller did approach them with his toolbox of cutting things? Make the sign of the cross? Blow him away? Run him down?

He had finished pissing; and now stood there staring at his limp dick. A machine above the urinals sold Mentor condoms. Someone had written in marker on the white machine,”It’s all in the wrist, with a deck or a cue.” Tremulis recognized the Nelson Algren epithet.

He knew he was doing all of this for one reason. To impress Reve. He shivered at the thought. He zipped up and went back to the table.

To Reve.

Knowing that the only wet spot he would ever sleep on would be from his own blood.

Lights Out at the Marclinn, Tremulis thought.

The lobby was empty. As if he and Shustak had walked into the waiting room of a hospital on a slow night. Nutman was there at the desk, but he was sleeping. On Insomniac Theater, Channel Seven’s late night movie theme, Zombies On Broadway was replaced by first a commercial for a lawyer who took the sting out of bankruptcy, and then one for girls like Cheryl, who are just waiting for your call on the 900 party line in your area.

They had seen Reve into a cab and her Ohio Street apartment destination, and both were now happy to be in warmth again. How someone like Blackstone Shatner could live on the street, Tremulis would never know. Times like this, he didn’t know why he’d ever thought the life of a street person could possibly be glamorous. His fingers were like twigs, and it felt like somebody was sticking a spade underneath his left shoulder blade and getting a good bit of leverage.

God knew how Shustak was feeling.

* * *

It had worn her down, the day, what lay ahead, everything. Reve Towne was dead on her feet. It was a small studio she’d lived in’ these past three years, in the Grand Ohio Apartments. The entire building looked to be built like a miniature Amtrak train, but her landlords, the Bartolis, were good people.

She was too tired to even put on her cassette player. Roxy Music usually dissolved her waking moments. Reve undressed as she walked over to the Murphy bed, unmade going on four days now. Didn’t listen to her answering machine, like anybody was hiring freelancers in the post-holiday lull and they were all trying to reach her! The money from her student loans would last her through the summer, and she was still tossing around the idea of writing stories about’ Evan as The American Dream and mailing them off to Peggy Nadramia at Grue Magazine in New York.

In white panties and an olive t-shirt, she dug her toes into the garish red shag carpeting of the living room as if it were a new thing, installed just that very afternoon. She swayed back and forth, as if The Diamonds were playing “The Stroll” just for her.

After a moment of this, she fell into the bed, for it was too warped to fall onto. And while others counted sheep or sexual conquests, imagined or otherwise, Reve counted the titles of...the books she might one day write.

LEAN CANDLES IN BRITTLE TOWNS: the serial killer in America today.

SPECKulations: Richard Speck’in his own words and some that aren’t.

STALKING SANITY WITH THE AMERICAN DREAM: A Life In Progress
.

Could she ever write about the Painkiller? Or Vic Tremble? This she doubted, because that would mean revealing too much about herself.

The room smelled of cedar blocks and O’Boise’s potato chips. Reve was asleep in minutes. Victor Tremulis would be aroused by the knowledge that she snored through her nose.

* * *

Evan Shustak lay on a cot near Tremulis. In the faint light bleeding from the Magikist lips across Randolph Street, the man with a passion for self-mutilation considered his surroundings.

On a small valet between the two cots, Tremulis saw the glint of a plastic Illinois Disabled I.D., a. few coins, a few pills. Pink and elongated. The coins were copper, and looked like drops of blood from the red lips flashing across the street.

On the wall was a creased poster of Superman reminding everyone that 1981 was The Year of The Disabled. Next to that, held in place by a blue tack, was a recruitment flyer for the Chicago Chapter of the Guardian Angels. And a lobby poster for Attack of the 50-foot Woman, for cry-eye.

He looked over at Shustak, who was whispering his nightly prayers. His own prayers to The Givers of Pain and Rapture included the invocation of “bless my family and friends that I might take away their pain.”

He looked back around the room.

The floor was cluttered with portions of fiberglass casts and limb braces, rolls of gauze, empty prescription bottles and boxes of Band-Aids. All part of The American Dream’s, what, inventory? Disguises? Who really knew?

Below the cot Tremulis lay on were Shustak’s comic books.
Green Lantern
and
T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents
, the 50s
Prize Frankenstein
books by Dick Briefer.
Phantom Lady and The Holy Terror
, these from the late 40s, the former always using her blackout powers, the latter enigmatically saying “This is my body,” or, “Thou shalt have no gods,” before bashing someone’s head into a pulp.

Shustak had explained to him that he had received the valuable books from Barry Allen Bonasera, the owner of All-American Comics. Shustak had somehow stopped a robbery in progress, but Bonasera was still grateful enough to part with his back stock.

Tremulis thought of Reve again, of how he sputtered a quick goodbye earlier that night. Maybe Christmas and New Year’s 1989 would be better for both of them. All three of them.

“I’ve been intimate with Reve.” Shustak’s whisper shocked him. He thought he had spoken the fantasy words himself.

“What?” he said, trying to make it sound less desperate than it was.

“Yes,” Shustak spoke straight up at the ceiling. “She has seen me without my arm braces on.”

* * *

Shustak then returned to his own thoughts before sleeping. Tonight, The American Dream was gunned down in the Van Buren corridor, beneath the El tracks.

But he had fought the good fight. Never to have to wake up again.

Not ever.

Thus was he assured of a restful sleep.

That same night, Father’s voice insisted that, for whatever reason, Frank Haid turn the wheelchair around that the headless corpse might view the black and white picture of John F. Kennedy above the Glover’s tonic and Sloan’s Liniment bottles.

Haid spent several futile moments trying to pry Father’s rotting hands away from the wheelchair armrests without breaking the fingers off. Finally, he stepped around behind the chair, like giving the corpse a surprise bear hug, and tried not to think of the things crawling in Father’s throat cavity.

Then, he prayed.

My Jesus have mercy on the Soul of JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY.

Incline Thine ear, O Lord, unto our prayers, wherein we humbly pray to show Thy mercy upon the soul of Thy servant JOHN, whom thou has commanded to pass out of this world, that Thou wouldst place him in the region of peace and light, and bid him be a partaker with Thy Saints. Through
Christ our Lord. Amen.

Haid liked the way whom Thou hast commanded sounded, but after Father made him recite the obituary psalm twenty-five times, because Kennedy deserved to be remembered, the hulking man broke down in tears of fatigue.

Ben Murdy was having trouble acquisitioning the used wheelchairs, but assured Evan Shustak that he would have them by the end of the next week. Shustak wasn’t concerned at the delay, there was plenty to do as The American Dream. Priority was checking on the Painkiller’s possible haunts.

So it was that he stood in the north side alley, freezing his ass off along with Vic Tremble. It was Saturday night, the seventh of January. The garbage cans around them were brimming with discarded Christmas detritus: brittle trees, broken bulbs, and dozens of cards filled with holiday news already forgotten.

“I don’t follow you on what exactly it is we are doing in this alley.” Tremble was the first to speak after long moments of teeth-chattering silence.

The halogen lighting of the alley that ran behind Eugenie Street like a hairline fracture caused both mens’ faces to take on a freakish pall. The American Dream was wearing a cream-colored ski mask as part of his costume. When he passed beneath an apartment building’s shadow, as they continued west, the blackness advanced over the Dream’s face like cancer in bone tissue.

“Besides getting dirt and shit all over our jackets—”

“I’m wearing my armor,” the Dream said. “As you well know.”

“Yea, right. Right.” Tremble muttered this as a drop of numbing water fell from a pipe overhead and hit him high on his right cheekbone. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“If Frank Haid is the Painkiller,” the American Dream spoke in a monotone and scratched his right wrist brace, “and we are both dead certain that he is, from what the homicide detective Daves told me, he’s most likely going to be afraid of women...”

“A little clichéd, don’t you think?”

“Vic, our very existence is a cliché,” the Dream said, making it sound both sage and obscure. They continued maneuvering around piles of blackened slush. “Think about it: all of his known victims since mid-November have been men, with the exception of Wilma Jerrickson.”

“Maybe she was a mother image for him.” Tremble conceded.

“Possibly, though I think it was more a Virgin Mary angle.”

“Oh, come on,” Tremble snorted. “That lady was seventy years old. If you think she was a spinster, well, like the country song goes, I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona.”

“You’ve seen the articles from
LIFE
on the Catholic school fire he was in as a child.” The American Dream looked up at the sky as if he could see the image of St. Vitus burning in the purple splotches between the clouds. “What I’m saying is that this is more a religious experience for him.”

“And you know what that cop Rizzi would say,” Tremble replied. “He’d say, go ahead, talk some shit.”

The wind shifted as they passed Crilly Court, and they heard punk music from the Exit, behind them on Wells. Everything around them, Tremble thought, even the rat gnawing at a Styrofoam box from McDonalds, its eyes wide with futile hope, was moving away from the last second desperately. Everyone hoped for constant change. He often thought of the bankers and the secretaries in the Loop as individual neutrinos careening through the Fermilab accelerator in Batavia.

Yes, everything was moving forward at breakneck speed. Everything but finding the man who killed Mike Surfer. Finding the Painkiller. He looked again at the ruins of Christmas gaiety, knowing that he had hardly noticed the holiday season at all.