by Rex Miller
Still, Mel Troxell tried to argue for the prosecution of the guilty as much as the system would allow. He gently tried to convince Spain that he was too far gone to handle this properly, which brought out all the stops. Spain went into a screaming rage about how he was the client paying the bills, he was the father who had lost a daughter, and he did such a job of portraying a mind about to snap that Troxell finally just shrugged one last time and left. The irony was that it was only an act in Spain's mind. The reason he'd been so convincing with Troxell was that he was in fact going insane. And this beckoning insanity was what the PI saw and what allowed that door to be closed.
The moment the man left, Spain shut off the flow of emotion the way you'd close a faucet. He sat very quietly reading the report again, although he didn't need to do so. Every name, every phrase, every comma, every sentence, was burned into his forebrain, blasted into the cortex forever. Yet he read the report again. And yet a third time. Reading between the lines with the years of insider knowledge that led him down new streets not covered on the pages. He made new, more informed assumptions. Conjecture and theory gave way to the beginnings of his plan. Again, a fourth rereading, this time making notes on a yellow legal pad as he reread the story of his daughter's seduction, abuse, addiction, torture, and degradation. And then, her horror-filled death.
Once again he reads of the fourteen-year-old stranger — this child of his — and the utter and absolute monstrousness of the crimes and inhuman acts committed against her. And once again he follows her trail down to Florida and to Texas, and across the border and into Mexico for her last, screaming, blood-flecked moment of "stardom" in the blinding, white-hot lights. And as he reads the hand of death touches a burning match to a slow fuse.
He begins his own list. It begins
GAETANO CIPRIONI and then
SALVATORE DAGATINA.
And the list has many, many names. The list becomes sacred to him. It is his holy quest. Names. An endless list of what he now thinks of as numbers. Numbers he will do. All of them, each as responsible as the next for the death and horrors of his beloved Tiff as surely as if they were the physical perpetrator.
He makes a little shrine of the film canister and it sits on a shelf there in the study, resting like an urn of ashes from the crematorium, tugging at him and spearing his heart and tearing at his mind until he feels himself burst inside.
And Spain sits there feeling himself disintegrate and the pieces going off the deep end, and he carefully draws a line through the name second from the bottom,
ROGER NUNNALY
He will study the thick dossier until his reddened eyes sting with exhaustion. There are other names he will want to add to his holy list, his private shit list of numbers. Others who will now have to pay with the dearest possible currency, as he has. All of them connected into the network of terror and degradation that conspired to take his family from him, and then to make his daughter's dying a hellish nightmare.
He sees an immediate twist to his plan that will make the joy of what he is about to do all the more rich and delicious. How he savors his taste for the names. And this, the way he will play them against one another, knowing their great weaknesses as he does, this is frosting on the poisonous cake. He must pull himself together, he thinks.
The tears have long dried. But as he reads and makes his notes, his body continues to shake with fury and despair. And he prays for madness to take him now.
"So there I am in my red Santa Claus suit and I got the fake beard on and, shit, an' this little girl comes up with this fox of a mother and I go, Climb up on Santa's lap an' tell him what you want for Christmas. An' when you're done, MOMMY can climb up on Santa's face an' tell him what she wants."
"Bullshit," Eichord could hear James Lee telling his partner. "You ain't got a fuckin' lap. You got a couple of lower fat rolls you might push together — that'd be about it." Eichord held the phone closer to his ear but then he heard the recorded music again and pulled it away again as he heard Tuny say, "Might push YOU together and make a fuckin' gook accordion," and he changed ears with the receiver just as a voice came back on the telephone and gave him the answer to his question.
" 'Preciate it. Thanks. Yep," he told the phone, "I will. Thanks again." So that was it. The last dead end on the paper trail of one Floyd Streicher. Somebody jetting out of LAX just plain didn't exist. He'd run the whole nine yards through MCTF. Everything from motor vehicles to telephone records. He'd run it out for a hundred-mile radius around Metro St. Louis. No such animal. Floyd, he of the hooded eyes — Eichord felt sure — did not exist. So Floyd boarded the TWA flight, but some other wise guy deplaned in St. Louis. So what? Now what?
* * *
The killing came from mysterious and dark energies stockpiled during the long weeks of hibernation and doldrum, at first an expulsion of high-energy flow resulting from a prolonged gestation period and then a shaking of the carbonation in its vacuum-sealed, hermetic skin sack of bubbling, exploding pressures.
At first he could never fully wake up and he slept fourteen sometimes sixteen hours a day. A deep, drugged sleep-coma that hammered him senseless over and over, and he'd crawl back into his nest of dirty bed linens scarcely rumpled from the last sleepathon and with eyes already stinging seek the dark, forgetting comfort of slumber. He slept hard. Mind on hold. His subconscious floating along in the black, timeless oblivion of perpetual night.
Sometimes his bladder would poke him awake and he'd lurch out of his mummy wrappings to pee, eyes half-closed in his prune face as he splashed carelessly over the sides of the commode, staggering back to his unknowing stupor, sound asleep even as his sheet-scarred, wrinkled countenance slammed back down into his beloved, warm nest of covers and unclean bedclothes. Soreness was his alarm clock and discomfort was all that kept him on his feet for seven or eight hours a day.
He never fully awoke. Minimal activity, meals, the mandatory rituals of existence, a sedentary period of staring off into space, then the great weight of it all returning to settle over him like a wet and heavy cloak, weighing him down and forcing him back into his snug, fetal curl within the womb of darkness and collapse.
He sat very still for nearly two days and a night staring with intense concentration at the small can of film as he watched the disaster of his life unfold again and again on the instant replay of his merciless memory. He got up from the chair a few times when his body ached from the motionlessness or from a need to relieve itself, and back in the same seated position to stare some more.
He forgot to drink water for a time and after nearly twenty-four hours his throat had become so raw it was all he could do to swallow.
By the next day he had begun to hear strange things. The noises of the house had become unbearably loud and annoying. He could hear the blood coursing through his veins, and he imagined he could detect arteries beginning to clot and harden. Cells beginning to die. Synapses misfiring. Relays failing. He imagined the machine of his body beginning to self-destruct.
He imagined that the cauliflower of his cerebellum was rotting. His olfactory sense detected the smell of rotting vegetable, and neurons, millions of nerve cells in the hippocampus, attempted to feed the atrophied terminals of the brain's computer. The computer, red-lining on dangerous overload, short-circuited, back-fired, and blew the lights out in his mind.
He fell into a deep, brain-dead sleep. Inert. Torpid. Comatose. Spain no longer dreamed.
When I awake, he thinks, I awaken all atingle. The plan has asserted itself. He awakens remembering all the words to "Lonely Teardrops" as sung by Jackie Wilson. He is fairly certain he could bench-press 350 pounds. He knows his brain has been totally rewired, and he smells burning leaves, toast with ham and eggs, chocolate cupcakes and cold milk, steak tartare with blood running on the platter, freshly baked bread, Tuborg, a German wine he cannot pronounce, Chanel, newly mown spring bermuda, all of these disparate smells sensed simultaneously as his brain screws its olfactory bulb back into the socket.
He knows he could mentally run the hundred in 9.9, memorize the A-through-C section of Webster's unabridged (AARDVARK: of its genus, Orycteropus, it is sole representative of an order, Tubulidentata), climb tirelessly and never fall, fully understand the implications of the theory of noctivating flora, remember a joke about a man named Wolfshlegelsteinhausenber-gerdorf, knows he could now play "Willow Weep for Me" on a B-flat alto, and awash in the diluvial sea of information flooding into his brain, he showers, shits, shaves, brushes, flosses, medicates, deodorizes, and begins to pack.
As he packs for the trip south he is amazed to have Finley Wren, which his eyes read when he was seventeen, repeated back to him by his brain. He has broken through some neural barrier. His memory is trying to tell him something and he senses it now, fully upright after his long, inverted, and perverse couvade, and the enormity of the possibilities sheathes him in yet another layer of invulnerability and resolve.
In his mind he has already completed the journey for which he is packing, and now prepares for the main event, picking up the phone and calling a realtor. He puts his home on the market, having concocted an appropriate scenario, and, using another identity, telephones another real-estate agent to look for something more suitable to his needs. He smiles at the prospects. Finishes packing. Slides behind the wheel, glancing in the rearview mirror and smiling into the slate-gray eyes of a madman.
For over fifteen years he has worked as the top enforcer for the National Narcotics Council, called the Commission within the families. It was the governing body that presided over the eight primary drug families comprising the largest unit within what is wryly called "Organized Crime." It's a difficult concept for the layman. We know of the Mafia and little else. That element, the old-timers within certain sectors of the primarily Italian and Sicilian communities, represents only a minor aspect of the huge drug monolith.
The purpose of the National Council or Commission was to attempt to control an uncontrollable thing that fed on human greed: a billion-dollar business whose continuation required the lowest possible profile. Years of loyalty and success, and the hand of fate reaching out to destroy or incapacitate his superiors, had contrived to elevate Gaetano Ciprioni to the throne of that secret organization. As their enforcement chief it was Spain's function to finalize those solutions that could not be achieved by discussion or threat. He was empowered to act in the Commission's behalf, which meant he was a hiring agent as much as he was a worker.
Working totally outside the families, accessible only by toll-free long lines linked to a special radio-telephone system, he had been for over a decade the busiest professional working outside the military-intel-law-enforcement umbrella. He was the best that drug money could buy, and that means he was the best there was.
Frank Spain's twisted plan of revenge would lead him back, ultimately, to St. Louis and the dark heart of Salvatore Dagatina, titular don of the St. Louis crime family, and to the man who had made this nightmare happen: his traitorous mentor Gaetano Ciprioni. An insane father hungry for vengeance against the mob, that would be one thing. But this is SPAIN, the killer. And in the crushing of his ego he no longer views the hideous death of his daughter as the act of individuals, but rather as the collective responsibility of many. He has devoted himself to a bloodbath of retaliation against all of those he sees as directly culpable.
It would be bad enough to attack him personally. His response to a noci-ceptive stimulus would be predictably awesome, lightning fast, and devastating. But this goes far beyond protective reflexes. They have created an all-kill bomb, set it in their midst, and started it ticking. Let's see how they like a wet red path of torture and death when it's run back down their throats. Over the edge and on a rampage of revenge, Spain begins.
As Spain drove he chewed over a piece of annoying news. The punk Roger Nunnaly had been killed in an automobile accident. Too bad, he thought. What a shame — eh? But no use crying over spilt blood.
For mental exercise he tries to alphabetize the dozens of names as he drives toward the Freunds:
Alba.
Annelo.
Belmonte. No. That should be under the L's, for La Bellamonde.
Casagrande. Ciprioni. Oh, yes. Then young Mr. Dawkins. Shit. Dagatina twice, then Dawkins, then DeVintro.
Dudzik.
Eggleston.
Freunds. Um-hmm. The Freunds twice.
He finds the punk Dawkins without any effort, thanks to the detailed Troxell report. The punk is in a kid's arcade and pool hall, and Spain waits. He follows him. When the kid parks, Spain is on top of him and he is very deft with a blackjack. He carries a leaded sap that can kill but he uses it now with surgical skill. A quick tap. The Dawkins punk crumples in the street and in a few seconds his trunk is popped and Spain is loading the boy, handling him like a sack of potatoes with the adrenaline charge of action and the hypo of mad, vengeful hatred giving him all the strength he needs to do the job effortlessly.
"Ohhhhhhh," the Dawkins kid says, blinking, Spain pulling him from the trunk of the suffocating vehicle. He has lost all sense of time. A moment ago he was getting out of his ride and wham — the lights went out and there was an exploding pain. And when he woke up he couldn't breathe and it was hot and he couldn't move.
"Hello, Greg."
"Mr. Spain." His hands are fastened behind him and he can't feel anything in his arms. No pain. Nothing.
"Bumpy ride?" He can't make out where they are,
"Listen. It wasn't my fault Tiff ran away. Don't blame ME for —"
Spain backhands him rather gently. "Shut up, Greg. Don't try to use that slick con shit on me. It's too late now. Dig?" Tiff's father is speaking calmly, but Greg can see the look of icy hatred in his face.
"Please, Mr. Spain. Please don't hurt me. I didn't — AAAAAAHHH! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH OOOOOHHHHHHHHH CHRIST DON'T DONNNNNNNN'T!"
Jesus, Greg thinks, this crazy fucker is stabbing me. It doesn't really hurt that much. But it scares him to death to see her dad suddenly pull out what looks like a small kitchen knife and slice a line across his chest.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!" he screams again as Spain quickly cuts another line downward across Greg's chest, cutting right through the shirt, cloth, and skin, slicing with great precision. Then making a third long cut. Then, as lines of red begin to bleed through, Spain rips the boy's shirt off. It is only then that Greg Dawkins realizes his feet are already hobbled as he vainly tries to run and pitches forward in another scream of agony.
"These cuts aren't that deep, Greg. Please. Relax," the man tells him soothingly as he rolls him over on his back. "You see what I've done here is carve a nice upside-down U shape on your chest. What was the old joke about the guy who dated a cheerleader from Michigan and he had a W on his chest. Or was it a girl dates a guy and her roommate sees a W on her from his letter sweater and some shit about. Was he from Wisconsin? and she says. No — Michigan. Something like that — I forget how it went. Well, your girl can be from Utah, I guess, eh?" And the knife went into the top of the inverted U and started making a little series of carving motions and then the Dawkins boy started screaming as loud as he could.
He woke up in awful, intense pain, and the fear of Spain's presence was as bad as the physical burning. And as he came around again he looked into the eyes of Tiff's father who said, "Greg. Please. Don't pass out like that, son. You've got to learn to be a MAN now. Otherwise, you little piece of shit, how am I ever going to get you PEELED?" And the hot, biting steel began to carve again.
He took a long time with the Dawkins kid. And when the boy was dead Spain buried him there in the remote gravesite he'd prepared, and got into the car and drove away. He drove for as long as he could keep his eyes open. It occurred to him that he'd felt nothing as he inflicted the pain on the punk.
He had taken no pleasure whatsoever in the act. He wanted the family. He wanted to take it to them.
It was all he thought about as he drove through the long night, and the
anticipation of the sweet revenge plastered a frightening smile across his face.
Stoked to the boiling point on speed, hatred, adrenaline, and insanity, he came for the Freunds wired to the max. They were such pathetic garbage to him that he didn't even bother with a professional approach. No special, carefully concocted penetration plan. No elaborate presurveillance. Jeezus. They were NOTHING. Pure shit.
Driving past a dumpster in an alley in back of the McAllen telephone company, he stopped almost as an afterthought, grabbed a few papers out of a box, some manifests and carbons and crap, shoved them into a cheap clipboard, and headed for the Freunds' residence.
It is amazing what you can get away with by using nothing more than a businesslike tone of bored officialese and a clipboard. There's something vaguely but instantaneously intimidating about somebody standing at your front door writing on a clipboard. What could it be? Nothing good. At the very least, it's the census people and God only knows what Uncle Sam does with those figures nowadays.
When the woman Bobbie answered the door, he made sure he had the right party by simply asking her, "Mrs. Freund?"
Spain's state of mind was such that she could have said, I'm Samantha the baby-sitter, and he would probably have been right upside her head anyway, just on general principles, but the woman said,
"Yes?"
"National Express package. I need you to sign please, ma'am," and he's thrusting that official-looking clipboard in front of her, holding something under her face to sign with the pen right there for her.
"Sign here?"
"Right there where the checkmark is," pointing vaguely. But that's enough to keep her looking down and she is midway through the phrase "I don't" when she feels something take out her coordination. What it is — she has the door braced with one arm, and she's trying to see where to sign her name — where is the damn checkmark? When he lets her have a nice hard one from the spring-loaded sap and pushes right in with her, talking to her as she falls, timing a very ordinary-sounding fake conversation to muffle her impact as she crumples to the floor, and doing all of this in a split second. Doing this with professionalism and care, now, on dangerous footing at this stage, moving back through the house hoping he'll find Charlie alone. Hoping he won't have to kill anybody else. No next-door neighbors or passing strangers. Because anyone he sees now will go down. People. Children. Dogs. Cats. Parakeets. Gerbils. Cockroaches. Any fucking thing that moves or breathes dies.