Modern Masters of Noir

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  Wasn’t that the way of a woman? Worry you to damn death about some little piddling thing all the time! He sat down at the kitchen table and pulled out his beat-up wallet, opened it. She had the food money. He had the gin check and the check ol’ Lathrop had given him, what—three weeks back?—and he better cash that dude if it was any good anyhow. He’d dump the woman and the boy and he’d go cash the checks and make the deposit and there’d be enough left over to get some suds. He could taste the first one right now. Sharp bite of the shot and then that nice cool taste of the foam off the head of the beer.

  She was running that mouth all the time, man couldn’t even count his money. Going on about Bobby Ray Crawford but he knew it was her way of goading him. He’d get her in the truck and that would do it. She always shut up when they went someplace. He was getting warm in the kitchen with the hot fire going, but damn he couldn’t stand to listen to that shrill hen anymore, and he got up and pulled his coat off the peg and stomped back outside to find the boy.

  The boy had just come out of the woods on the south of the house. Thick woods maybe ten meters from the edge of the fields in back of the house, and he and the dog had been kicking around in there looking for squirrel sign and what not. Shit, the boy thought to himself, fuckin’ Aders done killed off all the fuckin’ squirrel. Otis and Bucky Aders had hunted all this ground to damn death for ten years. You didn’t hardly see no sign at all no more. Once in a while where they cut but shit, they was plumb hunted out.

  The dog was what the beast had heard as he entered the woods from the south side; just a faint, yapping bark that had penetrated one of his kill fantasies as he walked down the pathway that obviously led to a treeline. (Hearing the faint noise on another level of awareness and tucking it away in his data storage system for later retrieval.)

  Life for the beast had been largely lived that way, in fantasy, daydreaming half the time, living out the fantasies the other time. Imagined flights to lift him first from his hellish childhood of torture and degradation, and mind games to alleviate the pain of suffering. Then, later, the thoughts to vaporize that claustrophobic ennui of long institutionalization. So it was not in the least unusual for the hulking beast to be fantasizing as he cautiously made his way through the woods.

  For a time he had daydreamed about killing—the preoccupation that was his ever-present companion, the thing he liked the best, the destruction of the human beings—and the terrain had triggered pleasant memories. As he carefully negotiated the swampy area around a large pond, he imagined the vegetation-choked floor and green, canopied ceiling of a South Vietnamese jungle, and the shadows of tall trees and wait-a-minute vines, and the triggering of a daydream alerted him to the presence of possible danger.

  There were always parallels to be found. This, for example, was rice country. Here in this flatland in between the old river levees you could easily imagine a field crisscrossed by paddy dykes. Where he would have been watching for traps, falls, mines, and the footprints of the little people, here he watched for hunters.

  The beast loved to come upon armed hunters in the woods and he had been fantasizing about a dad and his son; shotguns he would later take; a dog. How easily he would do the man, then stun the boy and use him before he did him, too. The thought of the boy filled him with red-hot excitement that immediately tingled in his groin and plastered a wide, grotesque smile across his doughy countenance. His smile of joy was a fearsome thing.

  How easy and enjoyable it would be to do the daddy first. Take the boy’s shotgun away. Lad, he thought. Take the lad’s shotgun, then bind and gag and hurt him. How easy and necessary it would become to cause the pain that would bring his relief. He had the killer’s gifts—the survival talents—but he’d learned that it was in those times of biological need, when the scarlet tide washed through him, that he had to be particularly cautious. Sometimes when he did the bad things he became careless.

  He was not an ignorant man and in some ways he was extremely intelligent. According to one of the men in the prison where the beast had been confined, a Dr. Norman, he was a sort-of genius. “A physical precognate,” Dr. Norman had told him, “who transcended the normalcy of the human ones.” He was grossly abnormal. He did not find this an unpleasant thought.

  The beast saw himself as Death, as a living embodiment of it, and he had availed himself of all the death literature during long periods of incarceration, devouring anything from clinicians to Horacio Quiroga. And none of it touched him. Death was outside of these others. He thought perhaps Dr. Norman was right, in his rather bizarre theorizing. But it was of no consequence to him either way.

  The beast knew nothing of presentient powers. It was simply a matter of experience; preparation; trusting the vibes and gut instincts; listening to the inner rumblings; staying in harmony with one’s environment; riding with the tide; keeping the sensors out there.

  He could not fantasize because of inner rumblings that had intruded upon his pleasureful thoughts, but these were the demands for food. His appetites were all insatiable, and he was very hungry, had been for the entire morning.

  Instinctively, he knew the small animals could be had. Their tiny heartbeats were nearby and he homed in on such vibrations with deadly and unerring accuracy, but this was not the time for game. He wanted real food and lots of it. He salivated at the thought of the cheese and the meat of the enchiladas he’d eaten the evening before.

  He was HUNGRY. It had been the last food he’d had in thirteen, maybe thirteen and a half hours, and his massive stomach growled in protest.

  The beast was six feet seven inches tall, heavy with hard, rubbery fat across his chest, belly, and buttocks. Four hundred pounds of hatred and insanity. His human name was Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski-Zandt, although the Zandt part wasn’t even on the official dossiers or the sophisticated computer printouts. They also had his age wrong by a year, but the fact that he had weighed fourteen pounds at birth was quite correct. His powerful fingers could penetrate a chest cavity. He had once become so enraged that he had squashed a flashlight battery—so strong was his grip.

  It would be incorrect to say that the beast hated humans. In fact, he enjoyed them. Enjoyed hunting them just as sportsmen enjoy killing game; much the same. He differed only in that he liked to torture his game first, before he killed it. Cat-and-mouse games with his play pretties. Sex sometimes. But then when the heat and the bright-red waves were at their highest ebb, he would take their hearts. He would devour the hearts of his enemy—the human beings—and that was what he loved.

  The beast whose human name was Danny-Boy wished that it were summer or at least that the pecan trees to the west had something for him. There would be nothing on the ground, either, he knew. No sweet pecan nutmeats for Danny. But that was all right. He’d be out of the woods soon, literally and figuratively. And with that he stepped daintily over a rotten log in his big 15-EEEEE bata-boos, and he was out of the woods, in plain view of houses and traffic. With surprising quickness the huge beast dropped back into the cover of the trees.

  “Them fuckin’ river rats done hunted out ever’thing awready. Pah-paw,” the kid whined as he patted the hound absentmindedly. “Fuckin’ Punk,” he said without malice.

  “Them fuckin’ river rats enjoy life ten times more’n you ever will,” his father told him. Let him chew on that a bit. “Let’s go,” he said, and got into the Ford pickup.

  Bunkowski saw the woman leave the house from where he stood, frozen immobile behind a massive oak. Watching the faraway tableau from his vantage point. He saw the boy climb over the side and get into the bed of the truck, for some reason. The woman came out, did something and went back inside momentarily, came back out and got into the truck. The gate was lowered and the hound jumped into the truck; the beast saw it pull out slowly, go out of sight, then reappear to the east of the tar-papered home.

  The beast looked up and the sky corroborated his inner clock, which ticked with a frightening machinelike precision at all times. He
saw that it was after 9:30 a.m. (It was 9:32, at that second. He had not looked at a clock or watch for over thirteen hours.) In a second’s camera-eye blink he saw that there was no corn in the field, saw the dangers of the road to his east and west, then turned and slogged through the woods toward the fence he’d seen.

  Stepping over the rusting barbed wire he emerged cautiously from the safety of the woods, made his way in the direction of the house. He knew certain things and it was not part of his character to question how he knew there was a horse or horses pasturing close by, that traffic would be a light but continuous presence on the gravel road, that nobody else was in the house. He moved into the treeline that bifurcated the two fields and walked slowly toward the home, favoring his sore ankle a little.

  There was a snow fence behind the barns, where a leaky-looking rowboat and an ancient privy rotted away, and he was behind the fence and sensed something, stopped, stood very still, slowing his vital signs to a crawl. Freezing motionless for no apparent reason.

  “Oh, that’s real great,” the man was telling the woman in the truck, who whined.

  “I’m sorry, I’d didn’t mean to leave it, I didn’t do it on purpose.” She had left her grocery list and her money in the kitchen.

  “If ya hadn’t been runnin’ your mouth,” he started to say; but he just let it trail off and slammed the gearshift into reverse, backing out of the turn row. Just my luck, he thought.

  “We goin’ back?” the kid hollered at his dad, who ignored him, put it in drive and started back in the direction of their house. The man was disgusted.

  The beast knew the people were returning. He felt it and then, a beat later, saw the pickup coming back up the gravel road. He was in a vile mood and his ankle was bothering him and he knew he would enjoy taking them all down. He was very hungry, too, so it would be easy for him to do very bad things to this family of humans.

  “I’m goin’ to the john,” the man told his wife as they went back into the house. “You goin’ to be ready to go?”

  “I’ll be ready,” she said, and went into the kitchen. The kid was sitting on the tailgate as Bunkowski walked into the yard. The dog barked at him, the kid told it to shut up.

  “Howdy,” the huge man said.

  “Where’d you come from?” the kid asked him. Chaingang thought how easily he could go over and twist the boy’s head off. It would be like snapping a pencil in two.

  “Over yonder,” he said. “Your folks home?”

  “Yeah,” the kid said.

  “Yes?” a woman said through the partly open back door.

  “Ma’am. I was hitchin’ a ride and this guy’s car broke down and I been walkin’, quite a way. I was wonderin’ if you folks would mind if I rested in your yard for a while?” He could easily pull the door open and knock her out. Go in and chainsnap the man. Come back and get the boy. He was about to make a move, but she said,

  “You just sit down and rest yourself. Make yourself to home.” And she started asking him where the car had broken down and did he want a lift back to the car and did he want to call somebody, and he kind of got taken off his stride and so he went and sat on the steps.

  “You from around here?” the boy asked. The beast only shook his head.

  Inside the house he heard the man say something and she said “. . . broke down back over . . .” (something he couldn’t make out) and the door opened behind him and the man said,

  “You need a ride?”

  “Well, I don’t mind if it’s no bother,” Bunkowski said pleasantly, thinking he’d go ahead and make the move now.

  “It’s no trouble. You can ride into town with us. If you don’t mind sittin’ back there with the boy.” The man said it without any undue emphasis.

  “I’d be real grateful.”

  “No problem,” the man said, stepping around the huge bulk that filled his back steps.

  The last place where he’d come upon a family, he’d killed everybody in the house. Three people. Man and wife and a son—-just like this. The kid, as if reading his mind, moved over out of the way, back into a far corner of the truck bed.

  “Get over here, Punk,” the boy said to the dog, who wagged and obeyed. “Don’t worry,” he sneered. “He don’t bite.”

  “What’s his name? Punk?” Chaingang sat on the cold steel. Shifted his weight slightly so as not to break the tailgate off, and the truck rocked like a safe had been dropped into it.

  “Little Punk.” The kid scratched the dog. “We found him starvin’ over on the dump. Somebody dropped the fucker. He didn’t look like nothin’ but a punk.” The dog licked the kid’s face once and he pushed it away. “Fuckin’ Punk.”

  “Looks like a good dog,” the huge man said.

  “He’s awright.”

  “You ready?” the man said to nobody in general, and he and the wife got into the truck and they drove off down the road, Chaingang Bunkowski bouncing along in the back of the truck.

  When the beast had been a child, a dog had been his only companion and friend. He loved animals. Watching the boy with the dog had calmed him down, but he wasn’t sure what he would do yet. He might take them all down anyway.

  When the pickup reached the crossroads of Double-J and the levee road, Chaingang banged on the window and asked the man to stop. He got out, walked around by the driver. There were no other vehicles in sight.

  “Doncha wanna go on to town?” the man asked him. Bunkowski fingered the heavy yard of the tractor-strength safety chain in his jacket pocket. Three feet of killer snake were coiled in the special canvas pocket. He thought how easy it would be to take them, now.

  “I guess not. This’ll do.” He nodded thanks to the driver, who shrugged and started off. Chaingang stood there and watched the luckiest man in the world drive away with his family.

  The Party

  by William F. Nolan

  William F. Nolan has worked in virtually every medium telling virtually every kind of story. I prefer his crime and horror work. He is able to articulate fear better than most writers because he keeps most of his fear small and subtle. And when he’s rolling, he’s a fine and gifted stylist, right up there with anybody you care to name.

  First published in 1967.

  Ashland frowned, trying to concentrate in the warm emptiness of the thickly carpeted lobby. Obviously, he had pressed the elevator button, because he was alone here and the elevator was blinking its way down to him, summoned from an upper floor. It arrived with an efficient hiss, the bronze doors clicked open, and he stepped in, thinking blackout. I had a mental blackout.

  First the double vision. Now this. It was getting worse. He had blanked out completely. Just where the hell was he? Must be a party, he told himself. Sure. Someone he’d met, whose name was missing along with the rest of it, had invited him to a party. He had an apartment number in his head: 9E. That much he retained. A number—nothing else.

  On the way up, in the soundless cage of the elevator, David Ashland reviewed the day. The usual morning routine: work, then lunch with his new secretary. A swinger—but she liked her booze; put away three martinis to his two. Back to the office. More work. A drink in the afternoon with a writer. (“Beefeater. No rocks. Very dry.”) Dinner at the new Italian joint on West Forty-Eighth with Linda. Lovely Linda. Expensive girl. Lovely as hell, but expensive. More drinks, then—nothing. Blackout.

  The doc had warned him about the hard stuff, but what else can you do in New York? The pressures get to you, so you drink. Everybody drinks. And every night, somewhere in town, there’s a party, with contacts (and girls) to be made . . .

  The elevator stopped, opened its doors. Ashland stepped out, uncertainly, into the hall. The softly lit passageway was long, empty, silent. No, not silent. Ashland heard the familiar voice of a party: the shifting hive hum of cocktail conversation, dim, high laughter, the sharp chatter of ice against glass, a background wash of modern jazz . . . . All quite familiar. And always the same.

  He walked to 9E. Featurel
ess apartment door. White. Brass button housing. Gold numbers. No clues here. Sighing, he thumbed the buzzer and waited nervously.

  A smiling fat man with bad teeth opened the door. He was holding a half-filled drink in one hand. Ashland didn’t know him.

  “C’mon in fella,” he said. “Join the party.”

  Ashland squinted into blue-swirled tobacco smoke, adjusting his eyes to the dim interior. The rising-falling sea tide of voices seemed to envelop him.

  “Grab a drink, fella,” said the fat man. “Looks like you need one!”

  Ashland aimed for the bar in one corner of the crowded apartment. He did need a drink. Maybe a drink would clear his head, let him get this all straight. Thus far, he had not recognized any of the faces in the smoke-hazed room.

  At the self-service bar a thin, turkey-necked woman wearing paste jewelry was intently mixing a black Russian. “Got to be exceedingly careful with these,” she said to Ashland, eyes still on the mixture. “Too much vodka craps them up.”

  Ashland nodded. “The host arrived?” “I’ll know him, Fm sure.

  “Due later—or sooner. Sooner—or later. You know, I once spilled three black Russians on the same man over a thirty-day period. First on the man’s sleeve, then on his back, then on his lap. Each time his suit was a sticky, gummy mess. My psychiatrist told me that I did it unconsciously, because of a neurotic hatred of this particular man. He looked like my father.”

  “The psychiatrist?”

  “No, the man I spilled the black Russians on.” She held up the tall drink, sipped at it. “Ahhh . . . still too weak.”

  Ashland probed the room for a face he knew, but these people were all strangers.