The Holy Terror (35 page)

Pitch the final bitch.

Tremble risked a sidelong glance at the tracks of his fears. The fingers within the Painkiller’s chest tingled. He looked the killer square in the face, the killer confused at what to do. Tremble thought of Chinatown. He would have taken Reve to a nice little place at Alexander and Wentworth. Ants now, it was like ants climbing over the hairs on his wrist.

Fuck the givers of pain and rapture. Fuck Chinatown and the Loop and the city in general. As above, so below. This whole story was his. A bum peeked around a pillar, looking like a corpse falling from an upright casket.

All he had to report was “Fourski and twoski is shitski.” And he was gone like that. The Painkiller had a beatific smile on his face as Tremble extracted his arm. I’m delirious, was what he thought as he stared at what was left.

* * *

Ropes of his flesh trailed into the Painkiller’s chest like cheese on a Chicago-style pan pizza. It felt cold as it slipped down from elbow to wrist, exposing grey muscle and red veins. Not a truly bad situation, kind of like putting a vacuum onto your palm. That’s what Tremble was thinking as his muscle disappeared into Haid’s chest with a sound that was too horribly like the smacking of lips.

The Painkiller didn’t look any stronger, any more radiant. He wasn’t grinning. Forgetting what he swore to himself a minute ago, Tremble sucked in a litany: givers of pain this last time I pray...

At the sound of the mumbled word pray, Haid sputtered in anger and disbelief. The idea of false gods didn’t sit too well with Father. Tremble too busy to notice this. He was watching loose chunks of muscle falling to the cement like small fish on the Twelfth Street docks.

Haid’s eyes bored into him.

“Bastard.” Tremble muttered so low even he could not hear it. He brought the remains of his left arm back, the only muscle remaining on the skeletal limb was caught between the joints like pieces of steak and gristle.

“THOU SHALT HAVE NO GODS—” Haid bellowed and the echo went down the tunnel and found a new home at the next platform. The BEFORE ME part was cut off abruptly as Tremble hit him full in the face with his ruined arm.

* * *

The bones shattered along with both their wills. Tremble was beyond caring as each individual sliver of calcium fell away from him. He lifted what was left. All but the thumb and little finger lay on the grey cement, shards of tibia and wrist bone scattered like a Halloween game of pick-up sticks.

The bones in his hand dangled from his ulnar, a string of muscle no wider than his finger wrapped around the red-streaked white like a string-around-the-pinky reminder of something important.

He almost toppled backwards, the pain like a direct heroin shoot to the heart. The Painkiller howled in surprised shock, a zealot who has had his name deconsecrated. He hopped up and down, the grey shirt that Tremble’s arm had gone through was simply wrinkled as if by static cling. The fiberglass cast fell from the wheelchair with a clatter, the chair itself wheeling backwards in a counterclockwise doughnut; the killer’s torso shook like the guy was doing the bossa nova; Tremble thought of an old Elvis song about the dance, “drink, drink, drink, oh fiddle-de-dink, I can dance with a drink in my hand.” Then he tried moving, found himself in a St. Vitus Dance, the equal to a wedding reception “chicken dance,” and he knew that he would never hear the Painkiller’s true name. As he already was forgetting his own.

He danced towards the Painkiller, readying his valediction in bone. Sometime during all this, another train had rushed by, scattering the evidence of the slivers on the ground.

Tremble grasped the ruined forearm, his right hand’s little finger at the wrist, his thumb and forefinger nearly touching halfway up to the elbow. Haid looked on in papal wonder.

This was something Tremble had never thought about. The sound of his last heartbeat, yes. Would his ears hear things after his heart stopped pumping oxygen to the brain? Yes, he had thought about that. But this— He made a fist with his right hand. The bones in the lower half of his left forearm becoming powder. The bones, broken further, didn’t snap like twigs or like Rice Krispies without the crackle or even the pop. He let his arm drop back down and saw that it had become even with his waistband. More chips fell off and skittered, fell into his pocket rim like lint. He just didn’t care anymore.

“This is for Evan Shustak, you bastard,” He stepped forward and swung his splintered forearm into the Painkiller’s left cheek. He was aiming for the eye, but settled for what he got.

Haid screeched as blood appeared on his cheek. He swiped at his face and left a red smear.

“And for Mike Surfer.” Head bent and eyes zombie-glazed, Tremble swung and missed. Pathetically, his tongue dug into his lower lip when he saw shards of his bones sticking out of the Painkiller’s chest.

‘“And for Reve Towne,” he said, falling over backwards, as in real life. The Painkiller shrieked as beads of his own blood appeared on his chest. He stumbled backwards and fell onto the El tracks but missed the third rail. Tremble collapsed into himself with what he hoped with all his soul was death.

The nearest train was a rumor away.

Seizure’s Palace

Epilogue Two

The Painkillings stopped with the murder of Chris Kanarsky—Mr. Tambourine Man—on the 22nd of March. On the 4th of April, the new mayor was elected, and after a month without another murder it was decided by the mayor’s new press secretary, fueled by dead end reports from Area 3 Homicide, that a memorial was in order.

Since the victims all met their fates in the Loop, St. Sixtus was chosen for the church of service.

* * *

Before the service occurred, though, a floater came up with the spring thaw in the South Branch of the Chicago River. “The body was spotted as a possible jumper,” Det. Daves was quoted in the April 17th papers. The Fire Department’s First Scuba Team, stationed at 324 South DesPlaines, implemented a Stokes basket to lift the bloated body. This was to avoid having frozen limbs broken off.

The condition of the body left the race and age of the body unknown. The hole where Mike Surfer’s shunt fit into his neck had smoothed over as the skin bloated with gas, and so he officially ended up as John Doe 89-6.

* * *

Frank Haid had time to think in the weeks it took his face and chest to heal. The last one had done him good, Father agreed. But he had learned something important. He could save the souls of all the street cripples, not just those in wheelchairs. The man who severed his arm and muttered names that held no meaning to Haid had shown him that. Father reluctantly seemed to okay the sentiment.

He readied himself for the St. Sixtus memorial during this time. Read and reread the ways of the breviary and the Litany of The Precious Blood. Vince Janssen’s body gathered dust. The mass would be a good one. Damn straight, numbnuts, Father said.

* * *

Dean Conover had been buried at Flat Rock Cemetery off U.S. 60 in Eastwood, Kentucky two months before. Aaron Mather’s new partner was Ileana Cantu and both were in attendance at the Healing Mass, as the memorial came to be called.

Officers Rizzi and Christopher, who had asked for transfers to the 16th District because of the scars the Painkiller had left them, would also attend. Dets. Daves and Petitt were already balls deep in a series of Cash Station shootings in the Atrium Village neighborhood.

Each night after partaking of communion with his uncle’s corpse, Haid thought how the mass would go:

Father Madsen, so serene, his hands clasped over the black chasuble, Father Dennis with his limp within him now. Father Madsen ready for the healing mass and its willing sacrifices. The arthritic and autistic, the retarded and the balding, those with cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis. Muscular dystrophy. ALS. All with fretful Sunday-go-to-meetin’ faces. Good Friday faces.

The aisles brimming with sufferers. He is resplendent in his vestments. The heavy doors of the church pressed shut by the sheer weight of the crowd, He wouldn’t save them all, but he would try his best. All that Father ever expected.

“Let us celebrate the mystery of life,” he’d say reverently. The bowl of chrism lay on the counter before him. Once the mass had been called The Last Rites, but now it was referred to as The Anointing of The Sick and Dying.

God grant to the souls of your service the forgiveness of sins that they may obtain the pardon they’ve always desired.

He tinkled the little bell, anticipating the first to come within his grasp. Father Madsen spread his arms out, the flowing black of the chasuble like wings. Everyone stood and waited for a sign. Several coughed.

In a dream he would soon make reality, the Painkiller said:

“Let us pray.”

* * *

After a time, when the givers of pain and rapture had finally deadened his senses, he lived in the ruins of the old Johnston Building, on Calhoun Place, until three whacks of a beat cop’s baton helped his decision to move.

He then took up alongside a breezeway east of the Schubert on Monroe, leaving the wheelchair behind as a sad reminder of his failure, taking instead a happy thing. Well, two happy things. The beige blanket and a faded fiberglass cast.

The first was a symbol of hope. The second, yellowed by the sun and nicotine from the many smokers who passed him daily, was a necessity. The cast became, months ago, an extension to his arm. His left limb was consumed by the killer of the cripples. The remaining nub of elbow was cauterized in some fantastical way, he still wasn’t certain how. The pain of losing the arm, of breaking the bones in order to kill his enemy, left things at times blurred. Other times, clear as the empty hole in the cast where his hand should be. The cast fit nicely over the nub, you see, and it was a nice thing to bat away memories with, if nothing else.

The cotton around the edges went grey long ago, and one night a rat climbed up into the cast’s open hole and started chewing on Vic Tremble’s arm. He allowed it to happen because it had been awhile since he had felt anything at all for any long period of time.

It was summer, an achingly beautiful day where the sun blazed the ozone away and cabbies didn’t swear and you could smell Lake Michigan in waves of déjà vu. Each office building thrummed with vibrant energy, the inhabitants eagerly awaiting the afternoon’s staggered release. And the cabbie didn’t swear. Was that mentioned?

He had dubbed the alleyway Seizure’s Palace almost immediately after claiming squatter’s rights, after a husk of a middle-aged alkie who oozed cheap bourbon and cheaper carpet cleaner pissed into the cast, then struck a match and chained two unfiltereds, then pissed again. This time in Tremble’s grinning face. He dropped the matchbook, gold and white twirling round and round into the grey and black, bore the name of a Las Vegas casino with a similar name to the one Tremble took for his residence. Way past easy.

The bluest of blues summer day became a velvet purple night with the wind whispering in ways that would have made one think it was cheating on one of the other elements. The flags above City Hall—city, state, and country—whipped against a surreal backdrop like rugs being shaken on the back porch of a Winthrop Avenue three-flat, within spitting distance of the elevated tracks. The subways smelled faintly like salt water and street musicians needed to be coaxed to play something sad. Every corner was layered with the smells of pan pizza, caramel corn, pierogi, and hot dogs with steamed, poppy seed buns from Dudley’s Carry-Outs, Mickey D’s, and restaurants whose names had double meanings to tie them in with the Board of Trade or the Art Institute.

The Theater was previewing “In Bold Blood,” a one-man show of the late-Truman Capote performed by Ben Murdy. Reve Towne, Aaron Mather and Ileana Cantu, and Nick Desmond were in attendance, but while he watched them in the ticket line, Tremble did not recognize them.

As they did not recognize him.

He was at times very talkative, particularly if you gave up a pill or a coin or combination of both. He could hip you to some very weird stories. As he had once said, the givers of pain come in many guises...

He could tell you stories about an American dream and a holy terror. Of painkillers and healing masses, old drinking buddies and concrete surfers until his eyes would glaze over. He had one particular story, hardly believable, even if you had time to listen the full way through. The story, bare-boned, wasn’t long; simply one of man vs. man with homeopathic ramifications.

Maybe you’d think the story to be true because of the way he would twist the cast on his left arm. Grab it roughly near the wrist and scratch his splayed fingers across the cross-hatched surface. Turning it round and round until you started thinking that he might one day whittle the bone nub at his elbow down to nothing.

And where one end of the cast had been crusted by grey dirt, the other end was rust-colored with his blood. Those fascinated by the blood would listen to the story long after the final curtain fell in the theater.

As long as they had coins or pills, he would talk.

And, if you were one of those who could stay and listen to the very end, you would hear the narrator mumbling to himself, a single voice amidst a madhouse defined.

Father Madsen, Arms Upraised

(and, as if in a dream, Mike Surfer’s voice whispered through the pews…)