The Holy Terror (31 page)

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 along 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?

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.

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.

“Freak,” the man coaxed. “Freak Flintstone.”

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…