The Cleanup

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  And then again, no, he heard himself think. His spirit didn't ache, but it felt too cold to be proud of itself, either. You killed eighteen people tonight.

  Nothing faintly like a tinge of remorse went off within him.

  The ambulance was very close now. Its siren scraped the perimeter of auditory pain. Then he turned to his right and watched it squeal around the corner, rumbling into the park. Heading toward the source of what it knew.

  "Thank God that thing isn't coming for you," said the familiar voice, from behind him.

  Billy turned slowly, nodding his head with resignation. Of course, he told himself. Of course.

  "I already did," he said. "Piss off."

  "Oh, Billy," Christopher pshawed in patronizing tones. "Come on. Don't you want to know what I think about this latest escapade?"

  "Nope."

  "Aren't you even the slightest bit curious?"

  "Nope."

  "Aren't you getting tired," the tone serious now, "of lying to both yourself and me?"

  Swigging heavily on the bottle. "Nope."

  "Well, then," the angel sighed. "I'll just have to tell you, anyway."

  Billy turned and walked away. Christopher followed, pacing him. Billy sped up. Christopher sped up. Billy got an insane flash of him and Christopher, running full-tilt down the length of Central Park. It was too ridiculous.

  "Tell you what," he said, stopping and turning to face the angel. "Howz about I tell you how I feel about this latest escapade?"

  "Fine," Christopher said, leaning against the building and folding his arms across his chest. "Fire away."

  Billy had to laugh; the phrase was just too, too appropriate. "Let me put it this way," he began. "For someone who's been stabbed four times and taken three bullets in the face, I feel real perky!"

  "And you look fabulous!" Christopher camped. "Not a hair out of place!"

  Billy ignored him. He was remembering his last victim of the night: the way the bullets had felt when they slammed against his forehead, his nose, his chin. He was remembering the guy's expression, switching from brutal self-confidence to absolute terror in the instant it took for his muzzle flash to fade.

  "You know what was strange?" Billy said, his eyes still focused inward at the memory. "I barely even flinched. I know that it couldn't hurt me, so it barely even mattered."

  "Nothing left but to lay back and enjoy, am I right?" It wasn't really a question.

  Billy nodded, sardonically grinning. "Absolutely," he said. He was being a wiseass, but in fact he wasn't entirely joking. It had been, at the very least, a rewarding experience all around.

  And he knew that Christopher already knew that. "So the idea of urban avenger appeals to you, does it? Killing people doesn't bother you anymore?"

  "Not those people, no," Billy answered at once. "Every single one of those fuckers deserved it."

  "According to who?"

  "According to me, man! Remember me: Absolute Judge of Right and Wrong, Master of Mine Own Destiny?" He could feel the anger boiling up inside him, and that was good. Anything to keep the terrible cold at bay. "What, have you got a problem with it?"

  Christopher shook his head, but his eyes were stern. "I don't have any problem with the deaths, per se. I do have a problem with the fact that you enjoyed them."

  "There's just no pleasing some people, is there?"

  "I also have a problem with the fact that you're turning your back on me, to be honest."

  "What do you expect, Christopher?" Hoping that he sounded as disgusted as he felt. "You're a pain in the ass. I can't remember the last thing I did that you approved of. Why don't you just bugger off?"

  It was Christopher's turn to look disgusted. "This is beneath you, ace. This is rebellion for the sake of rebellion. It's stupid. It's Jimmy Dean. Why don't you—"

  "Why don't you take a hike!" Billy shouted back. "Why don't you take the hint? Don't call us! We'll call you! Is that clear enough for you? Am I getting through to your lighter-than-air brain?"

  "Suit yourself," the angel said, hands up in a whoa, Nellie gesture. "But I'd like you to keep one little thing in mind.

  "The next time you call, I may not answer.

  "And it might be when you need me the most."

  "I'll take my chances," Billy spat back, but a chill wind blew through his hollow spine as he spoke. It was not something that the angel could have missed.

  Christopher nodded and smiled sadly. "That you will," he said.

  And then he was gone:

  Leaving Billy, feeling suddenly and terribly alone, to contemplate the entrance to the Dakota. There was a set of ghostly pictures that had been haunting him in the moments before the ambulance and the angel had disturbed him. He returned his attention to them now.

  John Lennon was a man who had tried to change the world with his music; and while you couldn't exactly say that the man was a failure, he hadn't quite achieved world peace, either.

  The dream had ended for Johnny on the little patch of pavement just across the way. It had ended in a brief but fatal thunderstorm of bullets.

  Billy found himself wondering what would have happened if John Lennon had been granted the Power: to both Mark David Chapman and the world at large.

  No answers availed themselves.

  "We gave peace a chance, Johnny boy," Billy heard himself saying. "Now it's time to try something different."

  The beer, as he drained it, felt almost cold as he did.

  THIRTY-THREE

  CONTACT

  It was 2:35 on Friday morning when Rizzo and Hamilton arrived at the Twenty-second Precinct house in Central Park. The Eighty-fifth Street Transverse was down to one narrow lane where the overflow from the parking lot had forced use of the police barricades. Like flies on shit, the news media was there: a buzzing swarm of insects, shoving their lights, cameras, and actions everywhere but up the asses. Which, in Rizzo's opinion, was where they belonged.

  There were a lot of patrol cars, as well. Apparently somebody had gotten the troops ready for a mobilization. Rizzo suspected that it was a case of too much, too late.

  But if the carnage was as massive as Detective Bartucci said it was, he could understand the overreaction.

  Somehow, they made their way into the station house without being interviewed. The place was a bughouse nightmare. It was hard to believe that anything but pandemonium was actually being accomplished.

  Hamilton was the one who spotted Bartucci, hiding in the back of the chaos. "Come on," he said, tugging on Rizzo's sleeve. Bartucci saw them, waved them grimly forward. They followed him into an office and shut the door behind them.

  "Okay," Bartucci said in a way that suggested things were not. He looked like twenty years had passed in the last three hours or less. He was a round, balding Italian man who was noted for his big smile and his quadruple chins. The smile was gone. The chins were bristling with unshaven stubble that was coming in gray. There was little difference in color between his dark eyes and the bags beneath them.

  "Okay," he repeated. "This is my problem, not yours though I can't say I'm happy about it. I wouldn't wish this shit on anybody. But I called you in because I want you to hear the tape, see if it triggers off any connections. Alright?"

  Rizzo nodded. Hamilton stared at his hands, unreacting. It was starting to be a habit. The Smiley-Face business had gotten under his skin, and that nonsense about the hippie kid was seriously coloring his judgment. Rizzo spent five seconds alternately pissed at and worried about his partner.

  Then the tape started rolling.

  And the rest of the universe was put on hold. "Twenty-second Precinct," a voice began. "Sergeant Reilly speak—"

  "Don't talk," a deep, gravelly voice interrupted. "Just listen to this."

  A third voice came in. It was different from the others in virtually every respect: the high warbling of its pitch, the spitfire rapidity of its speech. The reason for the difference was immediately evident.

  The owner of the third
voice was terrified.

  "You gotta understand," it began. "It was all Toby's idea. He was the one who—"

  "Whap!" There was bone and meat in the repercussive sound. The third voice screamed. Something low and murderous murmured behind it. Then the staccato syllables resumed, faster and more terrified than before.

  "MY NAME IS TODD JOHNSON!" Every word was a continuation of the scream. "AND I'M HERE BECAUSE I SHOT MY FRIEND IN THE HEAD, AND THIS GUY CAUGHT ME, AND HE WOULDN'T DIE . . ."

  The second voice came in, fainter this time. It said something that sounded like, "Time to eat."

  There was the unmistakable sound of a gun going off, the unmistakable thud of meat against pavement. Both Rizzo and Hamilton put a foot between themselves and the floor.

  "There's one asshole who'll never play the piano again," the second voice said distinctly. He'd obviously taken over the phone. "You'll find him near the playground by Tavern-on-the-Green. I'm using your call box there, as if you didn't know."

  "Holy shit." The voice of Sergeant Reilly. It had picked up a bit of the late third voice's terror.

  "You'll recognize him," the second voice continued, "easily. He's the guy with one end of the gun spot welded to his hand and the other end in his mouth. If you find anyone else who meets that description, check his wallet." The voice laughed throatily.

  Rizzo stared incredulously at his companions. It wasn't just the coldness of the voice and the deed; it wasn't just the fact that he'd caught the audio equivalent of a snuff movie.

  What really got to him was the voice. It was, once again, unmistakable.

  "Clint Eastwood," he said.

  "Exactly," Bartucci agreed, grinning tersely. "Ain't that a pisser?"

  "While you're at it," Clint continued, "you might want to round up the rest of the boys. They're scattered all over the park, but I'll tell you where."

  The next three minutes of tape were spent on descriptions and locations of the dead. If the descriptions were to be believed, the variety of deaths was staggering. The voice kept saying things like, "I scared him to death. You don't wanna know how." Odd tickles of laughter punctuated the speech, but the man appeared to remain basically under control.

  "All this stuff accurate?" Hamilton wanted to know.

  "The locations are," Bartucci said. "It's hard to say what killed a couple of them—Pathology's looking into it now—but from the looks of it, he's pretty much dead-on. He killed them. Or at least he had a part in it."

  "There's one other person you might want to look for," the voice continued. "This beautiful blonde woman: the one my little rapist friend was on when I, um, dealt with him." That laugh again. "She ran off into the Ramble somewhere. I lost her. You might want to look for her, just in case."

  "You find her?" Rizzo was lighting a cigarette.

  "She made it almost all the way up to the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse." Bartucci passed the ashtray of his desk. He didn't smoke. "Multiple rape, from the looks of it. Multiple stab wounds for sure."

  Hamilton perked up. "Any similarity to—"

  "He's not your pattern killer, no. This was random. Just a bunch of fun-lovin' guys, I suppose." Then Bartucci put a finger to his lips and said, "Ssssh. This is the part you wanna hear."

  "You're probably wondering why I did it," the voice began. "No problem.

  "Your hands are tied, but mine are not. That's what I like. The dumb fuckers I cleaned up for you tonight couldn't stop me, no matter how hard they tried. Neither can you. Don't even bother to try.

  "The best thing you can do is let the city know—and you can quote me on this—the following:

  "I am out here, people. I am stalking the streets. I am looking for the muggers and the rapists and the killers. I am looking for the kidnappers and the pimps and the enforcers. When I find them, I will kill them, and I won't lose a second of sleep over it.

  "CRIMINALS WILL NO LONGER GET EXAMPLES. THEY ARE EXAMPLES.

  "Do I make myself clear?"

  Three seconds of silence enveloped the room: dramatic pause on the tape, stunned silence from the men.

  "And I've got a special message for Detectives Rizzo and Hamilton, the men assigned to the so-called Smiley-Face Slasher. You'd better move fast if you want him to face due process of law.

  "I don't. I want him all to myself."

  The click of the deadened phone line followed, and Bartucci stopped the tape.

  "So what do you think?" he inquired.

  Hamilton was staring at Rizzo. Rizzo knew what his partner was thinking. He refused to acknowledge the stare.

  "I think," Rizzo said, "that the guy's a fucking fruitcake."

  "Absolutely. Only problem is, he's good at it." Bartucci got up, paced for a second, stopped. "You know, I've seen a lot of strange shit in my life, but this one takes the cake. We can't explain some of the things he did. It's driving us nuts."

  "Like what?" This from Hamilton.

  "Well, like the burned kids, just for starters. Six of 'em, up by the bandshell, burnt black as last week's leftover pot roast. Word from the lab is that they've found no trace of any fire-inducing agent. No gasoline, kerosene, phosphorus, napalm, or anything else. And to make matters worse, they tell me that the bodies had uniform burns. It's like the fire started everywhere at once. You follow?"

  Rizzo and Hamilton didn't. They wore matching expressions of ugly gaping incomprehension. The shakings of their heads looked choreographed. "It doesn't make sense—" Rizzo began.

  "Exactly. And neither does anything else about this case. Take the guy who was scared to death: he sure as hell looked like it. There wasn't a mark on his body. Or look at the guy we found up in the Ramble, with the word RAPIST carved straight through into the middle of his fucking forehead. A branding iron couldn't do that. It wasn't a knife or a scalpel, either. I've never seen what a laser beam could do, but I'm guessing that it would look something like that."

  "So what are you saying?" Rizzo demanded. "The guy's got a ray gun?"

  "I don't know what I'm saying! I'm stating the facts, but I don't know what they mean!" Bartucci's face darkened, and a ripple moved through his many chins. Then he realized he was shouting at the wrong man, and a little self-conscious laugh of dismay twitched out of him. "I'm sorry. I don't know. I didn't think about a ray gun. If he's got one, it's like nothing I've ever heard of before.

  "And that still doesn't explain—aw, forget it. It's too much." He paused to rub his forehead. Presumably, it ached. His eyes were hill of pain as he looked up and added, "You know what this means, don't you?"

  Rizzo took a second before answering. "You heard about the bombing, right?"

  "On Forty-second. Yeah." Bartucci's chins fluttered as he nodded.

  "It means to me that the city's going nuts."

  "Yeah," Hamilton interjected. "But the bombing is a separate case. This vigilante was provoked by the slasher. You can tell."

  "Well, that's just spectacular," Rizzo snorted. "Who knows? Maybe they'll get together, wipe each other out, and then all of our troubles will be over. Seems to me like they were made for each other."

  Made for each other. Rizzo could feel the words gather mass inside the room, as if they had a life of their own. He could feel them impact upon Hamilton, feel his partner zero in on the thought with the abstract singlemindedness of a tongue worrying a loosened tooth.

  And, quite thoroughly despite himself, he felt his spine go cold . . .

  THIRTY-FOUR

  HEROES

  Friday morning was sunny and cool. It was the beginning of a genuine feel-good day: the kind that mandates smiles as surely as freezing rain brings out the bitches.

  So New York was already in a whopping good mood when it flipped on Good Morning America or picked up its morning paper. For some, it simply blunted the impact of the slaughter; for others, it was simply all the more cause for celebration.

  There was a new hero in town.

  Whether you liked it or not.

  And they called him th
e Central Park Vigilante.

  The media wasn't able to do anything with the Dirty Harry tie-in. Clint Eastwood himself was on the West Coast making a film, so he had a clear alibi; but he made a special point of informing the Powers That Be that they would call this wacko the Clint Eastwood Vigilante at their own considerable financial risk. "Dirty Harry Vigilante" didn't have quite the right ring. So a handful of geniuses from all over the city arrived on the name that stuck at roughly the same time.

  Clearly, the Central Park Vigilante was an idea whose time had come.

  It was the buzzword on the streets, that glorious morning. Even the thirty-two fatalities from the Show World explosion were left behind by a cool clear margin. Mindless, anonymous terrorism was one thing; fight-back heroism was another thing entirely. It dominated the headline news, the broadcast news, the conversation around the water cooler and the lunch counter at Chock Full O' Nuts. Man-on-the-street interviews and polls were being taken almost frantically. This was clearly an audience-participation event, and everybody was eating it up.

  By the time the Post finals hit the streets, word was out that popularity polls ran almost seventy-five percent in favor of the vigilante.

  It was through this happy carnival atmosphere that Billy Rowe wandered. He felt better than he had for days; perhaps better than he ever had before. He was basking in both the glory and the anonymity: without the latter, he wouldn't have been able to wade chin deep in the former.

  Because this was real notoriety, played out on the big canvas of the world. This was real controversy, inciting shouting matches amongst people who were total strangers to each other, much less himself. This wasn't a bunch of friends sitting around talking about how cool his new song was or how much talent he had.

  This was impact. No question about it.

  This was the Real McCoy.

  And they love me! his mind kept repeating, awestruck and gleeful. They really do!

  It was flabbergasting. No two ways about it. It was all the recognition he'd ever hoped for. He took a sweeping bow at the corner of Fourteenth and Third, saluting the green veneer of Carmelita's Social Club.