The Cleanup

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  It was time for them to go. He told them so as he took them down. The March 28th Coalition poster was the first to come down, rippling in terror and the Stanton Street breeze as he laid it gently on the floor.

  Then came his old band posters. There was a terrible appropriateness to their fall. And there will be no rock 'n' roll Heaven, either, Christopher had said. Christopher could eat a dozen elephant turds, so far as Billy was concerned; but there was still a disconcerting rightness to what he'd said, in light of Billy's successes to date.

  All none of them, he heard himself thinking. All none of them worth mentioning.

  It was a bleak thought, but it passed with relative ease. All but one of the wall's posters were draped across the floor, editing each other by overlap. The only one left was for Pink Floyd's The Wall: the screaming face it depicted looked very much like the agony submerged so deep within him.

  Mona's rape.

  The three dead women.

  His own murder.

  And the man he'd murdered himself.

  What remained on the wall, once The Wall came down, were the press clippings for Jennifer Mason, Christine Brackett, and Marcy Keller. The last one was of particular morbid interest to him, just now.

  Marcy Keller had looked almost exactly like Mona.

  And there was a warning there. Oh, yes, there was. He could almost hear the nasal screeching of the demons, saying we let your girl off easy this time. She only got raped and beaten and slashed within an inch of her life.

  But she could be dead, and then what would you do?

  Think about it, holy man.

  Think about it.

  He was thinking about it, alright. He didn't know what to do about it, exactly, but the thought was definitely there. How could he protect her, short of being with her constantly? How could he do that-and still pay the rent, much less accomplish anything else?

  "That's easy," he muttered to the walls. "I can't." It was not a happy admission. It left him with only one course of action.

  As if I ever had any choice.

  Billy rolled the posters up into one fat tube, slipped a rubber band around the whole of it, and slid it under his bed. There was a pile of file cards next to his right knee, several cardboard-mounted packs of thumbtacks just beyond them, a black Flair in his pocket. He had everything he needed for a low-tech simulation of Dr. Strangelove's legendary war room.

  And it was war that he was contemplating. Most definitely.

  War.

  The pen came out. Uncapped. Held ready. He took the stack of file cards and set them on his knee. He wrote SMILEY-FACE SLASHER on one, set it down on the floor. He wrote RICKIE AND REX on another, set it down beside the first. Stared at the two, in juxtaposition, for a moment. Thought about them for quite a bit. And then started to write again.

  SHORT TERM, he wrote in huge letters that encompassed the next card. He set it down above the other two, centered. LONG TERM, he wrote on another, setting it well apart from the others.

  Good, he thought. This is where we get a handle on what's happening. This is where we assume some real control.

  Another category occurred to him: IN GENERAL. He wrote it on two cards, set one down beneath both the long-and short-term categories. Then he did the same with two cards that read IN SPECIFIC. SMILEY-FACE-SLASHER and PICKIE AND REX went under the short-term/specific column. What followed came easily. He was on a roll.

  RAPE, MURDER, and THEFT, each with their own cards, went under short-term/in general. WAR, STARVATION, and POLITICAL IMPRISONMENT went under long-term/in general. Nothing under long-term/specific as yet. There would be, he felt quite sure. Given time.

  How? was the next question that occurred to him, dragging its friends, the five W's, behind it: Who, What, Where, When, and the ever-popular Why. It occurred to him that everything on his lists was kind of grim. Not good. I will not go over the edge on this.

  He took a breather, moving into the kitchen for a sixteen-ounce Bud which he carried back into his room. He noticed that there were two empty quarts and six empty cans lying around, along with one complete dirty wardrobe and a spare dirty T-shirt to boot. The beginnings of decay. I'll have to take care of that, he told himself, and then returned to the matter at hand.

  Good thoughts. Positive visions. He oriented himself toward them. LOVE, he wrote, then copied it three more times and put it under every heading. MONA, he wrote once, then hesitated for nearly a minute and wrote again, placing it under both specific columns. Then MUSIC went down twice, posited as a general thing.

  He ran into an impasse.

  Why are there so damn few specifics? he angrily demanded of himself. The first word was the best one, and he pursued it down several other avenues. Aimlessly.

  But something was starting to coalesce now in the back of his head. A worldview. Something to hang his strategy on. He smiled, his creative juices churning. Another beckoned.

  What are you going to do? he asked himself, staring at the growing tree of logic before him. He focused on the short-term/specific pile, and the impasse came back. He didn't know how to find them. He didn't even know who they were. He had faces—half a face, in the case of the slasher—but there were an awful lot of faces in New York City.

  And plenty of places to put them in.

  Out of frustration he turned to the short-term/general column. RAPE. MURDER. THEFT. They were easier. Oh, God, so much easier. What was taken care of. Why was entirely self-evident. Who presented him with an empty thought balloon, a chalk line waiting to be made flesh. When was something that dangled, savory, at the tip of his tongue.

  He turned his attention to where.

  That was interesting. He smiled as he speculated. His own neighborhood was ripe, and that was a fact; but in the scheme of things, nobody gave a good goddam about what happened to assholes in the Lower East Side. Same went for Harlem. He could probably kick some shit in the neighborhood of Little West Twelfth Street; but Bobby Ramos and his sweetheart notwithstanding, he had no particular vendetta against homosexuals. And there were worse places in the city, without a doubt. More poignant places, with regard to where he aimed.

  Parks. The word resonated in all the right ways. Where do the scumhags hang out at night? he asked himself, and the answer squatted firmly in his hand. The parks: Washington Square, Madison Square, Union Square, Bryant—

  And the answer came to him, and it was so obvious that he had to choke back the laughter. Visions of Charles Bronson danced sugarplum-like before his eyes.

  Yes, he thought, draining his beer and setting it down on the floor, like all the ones before it. Yes, he reiterated, clapping his hands with glee.

  Yes, he concluded, grabbing his jacket against the cool October night, and into the first phase of the plan.

  THIRTY

  A STROLL THROUGH CENTRAL PARK

  Billy dallied for a moment at the northernmost tip of Grand Army Plaza, just looking. There was the Pulitzer Fountain and the Plaza Hotel, 9 West Fifty-seventh and 767 Fifth, the heart of high-rising, pulse-of-the-nation Manhattan spread out before him. There was power here, immense and ever churning, beautiful and terrible and deep as any ocean.

  Even now, with the ten o'clock moon above, when most of the action had been taken indoors or to another part of town, the southeast corner of Central Park was a vital and vibrant artery in the life of the city and the world. He could feel the force that moved mountains and nations. Pushing. Pushing.

  When he'd first moved to New York, all those many years ago, he'd tasted that hot coppery charge in the air and fallen in love. Here, I can do anything, he'd told himself with absolute conviction.

  And now, at last, it was true.

  "Look out, baby, cuz here I come," he informed the towering skyline. He felt like David, on a battlefield crawling with blank-faced Goliaths. He was not afraid. He was amped to the gills.

  He was ready.

  Billy quickly looked both ways, checking for cops or oncoming motorists, then crossed over to
the first pedestrian path and headed in toward the zoo. There was a fresh quart of Bud in his hand; he took a swig off it as soon as the Central Park darkness enveloped him.

  Scarcely ten yards down the path he noticed a jumble of jagged white outlines painted across the pavement. For a moment he was startled, then the Village Voice article came back to him. Some artist, making a statement about nuclear war and Ground Zero, had taken upon himself the task of painting crude figures of humans and other animals—a dog, and something that was either a cat, a squirrel, or a very large rat. One crude figure reached out for another. Just like Michelangelo.

  Billy snorted and shook his head. High art tended to do that to him. And though he grew faint at the very thought of hurting the artist's feelings, he doubted that these little slapdash outlines had put an end to nuclear war. They didn't even make him think about nuclear war.

  They made him think about Jennifer Mason, and the considerably more gifted cop who'd drawn the white chalk line around her body. He drank to their memory and then pushed on.

  Moving deeper into the darkness.

  Kennan Wyeth was tall and thin, with a healthy head of dusty-blond hair, a wicked tan, and a faceful of deep, gritty lines that time and trouble had bequeathed him. He hated to shave. His beard grew in darker, but never seemed to get past the bristle stage. He thought it made him look like Don Johnson. He was wrong.

  Tonight, Kennan sported a black leather jacket, black Motorhead T-shirt, black peg-leg jeans and ankle-high engineer boots with lots of little silver chains. He also wore an eight-inch blade in his back pocket. It kept him warm when the world turned cold.

  The world had turned absolutely frigid, just lately, for poor old Kennan Wyeth. Try as he might, she refused to put out for him. Lord knows that he tried to hold a steady job: the bitch just wouldn't cough up anything that would hold his interest. He was a restless soul, with big dreams, none of which involved shit jobs or going to school.

  Kennan Wyeth was thirty-four years old. Most of the last sixteen had been spent playing Ping-Pong with Bikers Island. He agreed with the social workers who blamed society, even though they were a bunch of drippy rats assholes that he hated almost more than the judges, cops, lawyers, screws, and pederasts they tried to save him from. Society was to blame for his seven counts of narcotics possession, three counts of assault with a deadly weapon, five counts of resisting arrest, and one count of second-degree murder. It was a liberating insight.

  So when Kennan spotted the dicklick lounging on the wall of the Gapstow Bridge, he had no moral quarrel with himself. Society was to blame for what was about to happen.

  With any luck, society would never even find out.

  The pond was still close enough to Fifty-ninth Street to catch the light from the city. The surface of the water twinkled like a million rippling knives. Tall, lush trees surrounded the inner rim of the park, and he walked in their long shadows, several hundred yards in. He moved quietly through the grass, and he wasn't easy to see. He was banking on that.

  The Gapstow Bridge was at the north end of the pond. It was just a little pedestrian affair: solid stone, roughly twenty yards across. The walls were four feet high at the ends, higher in the middle. The lounger was toward the end, where the mouth of the bridge came up in a kind of monument-like thing. The lounger had his back against it, feet stretched out in front of him on the wall, just smoking his cigarette and drinking his beer and staring a hole in his shoes, from the looks of it.

  His back was to Kennan, who came within fifteen yards before he hit the pedestrian path. The sneaking up part was done.

  "Hey," Kennan said, boot heels clopping as he sauntered over to the kid. He had a thin, adenoidal voice, heavily steeped in Brooklynese. His lips sneered when he spoke. He thought it made him look like Jimmy Dean. Wrong again.

  The kid didn't respond. He just kept smoking and drinking and staring straight ahead. Kennan didn't like that.

  "Hey, kid," he repeated, within five feet now. "You got a hearin' problem or sumpin'? I'm talkin' to ya!"

  No response. Kennan was definitely unhappy now. He noticed that the kid also had a leather jacket and needed to shave. He didn't let those similarities blossom into feelings of brotherly love.

  The switchblade in his pocket felt very warm indeed.

  He was now within a foot of the kid, practically right in his face, and there was still no response. The asshole didn't even look up. Kennan felt a wave of something unsettling rush through him, bit back on it hard. He'd seen harder cases before. They all bled when you stuck them.

  "Listen, prick!" he yelled, unable to get the slight quaver out of his high-pitched voice. "You betta listen when I talk ta ya!"

  Then the kid went to take another swig, and that was all she wrote. Kennan let out a snarl and swung, a backhanded slap that sent the quart spinning off to shatter on the rocks some thirty feet below. That got a rise out of the little shit; he let out a snarl of his own and whipped his face around.

  But by then, Kennan had the knife out, its keen point hovering an inch from the kid's nose. "Ya money, asswipe. Let's have it," he said . . .

  . . . and then the kid had a hold on his knife hand at the wrist, so fast that Kennan didn't even see the blur. He gasped, tried to draw back, couldn't. There was no give in that grip.

  The kid's other hand was coming around now, open palm aiming straight at the outstretched blade. Kennan's eyes bugged out. This ain't happenin', he heard himself thinking. It sounded stupid, even to himself.

  The blade punched in through the palm and came out the other side like a blood-smothered jack-in-the-box. The kid didn't even flinch. He pushed even harder, hand sliding down the cold steel, closing in on the hilt.

  Kennan began to burble something that even he didn't understand. His bladder let loose in a prickly, warm flood, adhering his jeans to his legs. He watched the impaled hand slide the final inch, felt it close around his own. The grip was no less solid for having had its muscles slit. He felt his knucklebones strain against his skin.

  But the kid's face was the worst. There was no pain in it, and no mercy. It was the face of a judge, or a demon, or both. When it smiled, Kennan's size 39-D prison-issue asshole began to flutter like a headless chicken.

  "Na," the kid said. "You got that backwards, man. You're supposed to give all of your money to me."

  It took a minute for Kennan to divine the perfect sense of that. Then he galvanized into action, left hand swooping down to his right pants pocket, head bobbing like a doggie dashboard ornament. He fished out a crumpled wad of bills—fifty, sixty dollars' worth that he'd only just scored this evening—and handed them over. The hand holding his wrist disengaged to accept the money. The hand with the knife through it stayed right where it was. So did Kennan.

  "Terrific," the kid said. "What's your name?"

  "K-K-Kennan." Face slick with sweat and tears and snot and drool. "K-K-Kennan W-Wyeth."

  The kid smiled again, pocketing the money. "Well, it's been a pleasure doing business with you, K-K-Kennan. Have a nice day."

  . . . and suddenly he was flying, the kid flipping him up and flinging him like a beanbag over the side of the bridge, in rapid headlong pursuit of the late quart of beer. He felt his hand lose its grip on the handle of the knife, felt the iron grip let go of him at the same time, felt the wind whistling around his ears. The streetlight, fainter beyond the bridge, still glistened softly on the water that he raced toward like Superman. I'm gonna land there, he heard himself thinking. I'm gonna miss the rocks. I'm gonna be okay

  Wrong again.

  ". . . an' dat was when I hadta cut loose from the bitch," Dewayne Peterson complained. It was nothing new. Either was the story, which—barring constant revision and twisting of facts—Richie Grover had suffered through thirty times in the two weeks since Dewayne's wife split with the children.

  Richie rolled his eyes and sucked on the joint. It was low-grade Colombian, the same shit he dealt. But it gave a righteous buzz if you smoked en
ough, and he had. Coupled with the Thunderbird, it melted down his inhibitions and made him feel like the stinking High Lord of the Universe.

  "Dewayne," he croaked, still holding in the hit, "you so full o' shit dat it hurt."

  "Suck mah big black dick," Dewayne retorted cleverly, reaching for the joint.

  "Suck it yo'self, you so Goddam big." But the joint changed hands, and silence resumed.

  The park was quiet at night. Peaceful. All the street noise was far away. Sitting down by the lake, with the cool grass beneath them, it was almost possible to forget how fucked up your life was.

  Richie looked at Dewayne, and Dewayne looked back. They'd been hanging out together since they were old enough to pronounce mo'fo', grown up on the same block of East 108 Street, gotten into much of the same kinds of trouble. Sometimes they got on each other's nerves like crazy, but they had enough in common to keep them together.

  Both of them were black, broke, and twenty-three in America. Both of them were high school dropouts. Both were minimum-wage messengers who still lived at home; even Dewayne, with one child and another on the way, was still stuck at Momma's indefinitely. They had mutual tastes in drugs and music. They also shared a profound hatred of the white-dominated world.

  So when they saw the beautiful white chick walking across the Bow Bridge, less than a hundred yards away, an identical idea pinged in both of their heads. It was too cool to be true, and both of them knew it.

  When Dewayne's mouth opened to let out a coyote howl, Richie slapped an urgent finger to his lips and shook his head no-no.

  She was coming straight toward them.

  All they had to do was wait.

  She was tall and blonde and unspeakably well-proportioned. Her tits were as big as they could get without turning sloppy. Her hips were profound, in the best sense of the word. The jogging suit she wore had money written all over it, and it clung to her body like a sausage skin. Her flesh was white as cream. Her hair hung to her ass.