by Rex Miller
What he finally mined—the lone nugget—came from a headache-inducing monitor of a hallway conversation that he could only halfway hear. It was a maddening thing, like listening to a loud conversation. taking place in an adjacent room where you hear isolated audible phrases but can't make out the overall conversation. A man and woman, not Hilliard, were speaking discursively and a third voice shouted something about a weapon. The word perked up his ears. The chatter moved away from the microphone, and he rewound the tape and listened to it again, not on the tiny earpiece but at full volume on playback, and he was able to discern "…got some more…(INAUDIBLE) how many or anything but it's the same weapon. Estimate the thing has a range of one and three quarter miles and he…" (INAUDIBLE.)
He was too excited to listen further. He turned the engine on, rolled up his windows, and headed back toward the station. He'd gone a couple of blocks—he was very nauseated—and he felt as if his sinuses were so stopped up his head would explode. That was the thought Trask would remember thinking when he saw…someone's…head…explode!
Had he fallen into some terrible time-warp daymare brought out by his worsening flu? The gorge rose in him and he barely got the driver's-side door open in time. There were car horns, trucks honking, and a cab nearly clipped him as he swung to the curb and lurched out onto the sidewalk to be sick again. People were going ape shit. Across the street, they were already converging around a man's headless torso.
He managed to get across the street, his mind racing. Should he phone it in and do a report? That would normally be his reaction—he'd call the news room, record an on-thescene sound bite. He tried to assimilate what he'd seen as he pushed into the swarm of milling onlookers. People were in total confusion, some of them crying, one woman screaming like a banshee. A siren was loud in his stuffed ears. He coughed, almost gagged again, spat into the gutter, blew his nose. He was a mess.
It had been beyond his immediate powers of description. He'd seen the head…just go. Dematerialize! There was no question it was real—awful human matter had left splashes across the storefront behind the man, as well as the sidewalk where his decapitated corpse fell. The shirt, the white shirt the man had been wearing, was now red. The sidewalk was blackish red with his spilled blood.
Trask was wasting time. He stumbled back through the mindless traffic, flung himself into the car and keyed the ignition. He headed back to the station again, violating a "termination clause" contract rule and parking in VIP Sales parking. He burst through the front doors, his face like death warmed over, past Security and the front desk, not waiting for the elevator, taking the stairs two at a time.
He walked into Flynn's reception area, ignoring Jerri Laymon, barging into Flynn's office without so much as a glancing knock.
"I got the big one," Trask blurted out. He was puffing, blowing, winded from his run up the stairs and the brisk jog, nearly exhausted from the flu bug and drained by what he'd just seen. On top of all that, he was almost on the verge of tears. Inexplicably, for a screw-up whose career—such as it was—had become his focus of concentration, Trask had been emotionally twisted by the awful murder he'd just seen. Someone had been killed seconds ago in the most gruesome way and here he was running to cash in on the man's death. Was there nothing to him of any substance? "I've just seen one of the murders take place—not four blocks away." He pointed with a limp finger, working to keep from crashing physically. "I saw a guy get his head blown right off his shoulders—it was the most godawful mess you can imagine…it's a serial killer. He's behind all the mysterious deaths, including the biker-gang homicides and, moreover, I've got you two months of shows backlogged and, well, I'll tell you about those later." He sucked in oxygen. "Right now we gotta get to work on tonight's show. You gotta kill it so we can go with the thing on all the murders. I got it all, the whole nine, chapter and verse. Everything. Deep background with somebody who even knows about the weapon that's doing all these people. Inside cop stuff. I got a thing from a homicide detective who alleges that there are killings the public doesn't know about." Fuck Hilliard. "Coverups. You'll have the exclusive story."
"Excuse me," the Mystery Tramp said in her sultry voice, and Trask turned, annoyed. She was looking at Flynn, who hadn't moved or raised so much as an eyebrow since he burst into the man's office. She held a dainty fist to her ear in the sign for telephone call. "I didn't want to buzz you. It's that call you'd been waiting for."
"Right," Flynn said. "I'm sorry, Vic," he added politely, "I've got to take this. Could you just wait—excuse me for a couple minutes—I'll, uh…just give me two minutes, could you?"
"Sure." Trask went outside and sat in one of the expensive chairs Flynn's "Inside America" guests often waited in. They used Jerri Laymon's office for a kind of "green room" when there was more than a single guest to appear on the show. The chairs were better than what he had in his apartment. He waited for four or five minutes, getting antsy, wondering if VIP Sales would get on his case for parking downstairs. Fuck Sales, he decided. Finally the Mystery Tramp's phone buzzed.
"Okay," she said, "you can go back in."
"Thank you," he said, going back into the office.
"Sorry about that. Now…" Flynn sorted through a pile of notes on his desk. "Here's the deal. I commend you. You get an A for effort, but the problem is—I don't know what you've been doing lately, or how you got on this serial-killer deal, or what went down between you and the cops, but they got a call downstairs from the police. They, in turn, talked to Chase, myself, and Adam David. The investigation is off-limits 'till further notice,' so far as media is concerned. We've promised not to touch it. There was also some concern that you were probing a racial angle that the cops thought could be inflammatory in the community, potentially, and a lot of other stuff about you having overstepped your bounds as a reporter."
"That's bullshit. I did my homework, which is more than the fucking cops did."
"I don't dispute that, Vic. I'm certain you have. But, you know, our hands are tied. You blew it, man. You should have come to me and let me—or Babaloo—or even Adam-work with you to develop a lead and go on the air with it. If you'd done that, we could have put it on the radio first, and if they'd insisted further mentions be deleted, we'd have been forced to comply, naturally. But we'd have had it on. This way, what might have been a scoop—I'm saying, assuming this stuff you've dug up has some basis in fact-would at least have found its way to the air. Now KCM is out of the ballgame. By your playing The Lone Ranger, you see what you've done? You've effectively managed to put a gag order on the people who are paying your salary." Trask was hearing it and not believing it.
"I don't even know how to respond to that. I just saw a fucking murder. I'm sick. I've been working around the clock on all these violence theme shows. I've got a ton of solid research that will win you a fucking Peabody, man, it's so strong—everything tied together with hard facts and interview subjects. Solid gold stuff, Sean. And we've got an eyewitness beat on the worst serial homicide case in Kansas City's history and you're telling me we can't use it?"
"That's it. You've screwed yourself, Vic. You should have done this with the team. You know how we work by the numbers. If it isn't a team effort, it isn't us. That's what you've always done in the past. Why—when you had what might have been a hellacious beat—would you jeopardize all that and go it alone? What was the point?"
"I knew you weren't that happy with what I was producing for you. I had the insight on this great violence piece and everything I turned up fit the conclusions I had reached. I was seeing my stuff get lifted by other staff members."
"You mean Barb—that one fucking story? It was a coincidence, baby. You just got paranoid is all." Flynn's smile was infuriating.
"I may be paranoid, man, but she had every goddamn piece of a story that I'd researched, and it was too many coincidences. I knew damn well she had tapped my phone somehow."
"You've been working too hard or your cold is getting to your head. I mean it. You're
just not thinking clearly. Why the hell would Rose tap your phone? Like she doesn't have enough to do with her own assignments? Is your stuff that much hotter than hers? Come on."
"She wouldn't have to tap my phone. Everybody knows—since day one—this place is bugged. I've heard there are mikes in the offices and shit…" He was tired and ill. At this point he just wanted to go home and sleep for two weeks. "I've had engineers tell me that stuff is videotaped, and the phone calls are monitored down in Security. I've always heard that shit."
"Um, Vic…you really believe that? You think I'd work in a place where they tapped their employees' phone lines? Jesus."
"You might not know about it," Trask verbally shrugged in a lame voice. He sneezed and coughed.
"Get Bill Higgins for me," Flynn said into the telephone. "Thanks."
Trask looked down at his shoes. He was really fucking up. The whole thing was becoming too much for him. The buzzing phone sounded like a snake striking. He felt watery inside.
"Hi. Thanks. Yeah—are you real busy at the moment? I want to reassure one of my people—a valued employee who thinks his phone may have been tapped or his office bugged. Could we have some of your time? I appreciate it. Yeah. If you could."
"He's coming up. Just forget all that stuff about Barb, man. She's not out to get you."
"Everybody always said, you know, she and Babaloo…" He let it go. This thing was lost.
"Babaloo is old enough to be her father, for one thing. They're friends. They go way back—from Memphis-they've been a team for a long time. I can assure you they don't have anything going. Not like you're inferring. Vic-what can I tell you?"
There was a brief period when no one spoke. Trask could hear music, talk, ringing phones, faraway conversations, the Mystery Tramp typing. "Hi," he heard.
"Hello." Inspector Higgins of the Yard. Another mustached, receding hairline type. "Hi."
"Hi."
"Bill—Vic has concerns. He feels a phone call may have been bugged. Maybe a mike in his office. He worries about rumors he's heard about KCM having a policy involving the monitoring of conversations—things like that. I thought perhaps you'd set his mind to rest."
"Sure. Do my best." Higgins had such a warm, trustworthy smile. They hadn't exchanged fifteen words in all the time Trask had been with the station, but he instantly liked and trusted the man—suddenly. Perhaps because he seemed so open.
"It's bullshit, I guess," Trask said. Defeated. "I've always heard that—you know—there were hidden mikes."
"Not bullshit at all," Higgins said. "When I came here there were units in all the office intercoms. The general manager back in the old days—I don't have to tell you-had a penchant for eavesdropping. He had it fixed so that all the office intercoms doubled as microphones. In theory, they were always on, and all he had to do was flip a selector switch and he could listen to any office from downstairs. We had all those mikes removed."
"Everybody said—you've heard, I'm sure—that you guys tape everything with the camcorders and stuff…" He was no longer even bothering to form complete sentences so incoherent were his thoughts.
"The camcorders are for your protection. Programs such as Sean's are often controversial or provocative in nature and—even the newscasts—will sometimes be capable of generating a degree of anger in the listener. You know, I'm sure, about the dangerous lunatic fringe of any large audience, be it radio or television or whatever. This is why stations like KCM have to have security staffs. We're not watching you, we're trying to keep you safe. I'd be glad to take you down right now and show you how we operate." All of this in the friendliest, most open manner.
It ended up that Trask, Flynn, and Higgins had to troop downstairs en masse and take the fifty-cent guided tour of Internal Security. Somehow Trask made it through the rest of the afternoon and early evening without collapsing, even if half his time was spent on the throne in the men's potty. By nightfall, he was home—violently ill—and within twelve hours he was getting flu shots, albeit too late. Mercifully, he was dead to the world and missed the next couple of editions of the local papers and the various electronic media newscasts. The news would have only made him sicker as he'd have had to watch others slide the pieces of his jigsaw together for him.
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22
Shooter Price, SAVANT in his arms, had managed to escape unscathed. It filled him with self-confidence, to have so easily evaded an attack by an adversary as cunning and deadly as Chaingang. Those fucking shitheels had used his own tracker to locate him. But he had fooled them! He was alive and well, with his incredible weapon and plenty of rounds for her hungry maw, and he would show all of them what payback meant—starting with that fucking hippo.
Back in Illinois, Dr. Norman did not think of Daniel as a hippo so much as a huge, angry bear. He shuddered as he read of the killings, and of the attempt to get their sniper. Like maddened polar bears who have invaded the same huge ice flow, they were now circling each other in the dance of death. One, armed with a sniper weapon without equal, the other with presentience to warn him of danger; each seemingly invulnerable to attack from the other. But Norman knew, as he read the account, precisely what the outcome would be. He knew that there was no living human who could go up against Daniel and live. And he understood the prison wisdom that stated "Chaingang has nothing but his hatred." He was sure that the knowledge of the implant had only amplified that, if anything.
Bunkowski, the man, was precisely the reverse of Danny, the little boy. In Chaingang's world, he rules and you are the victim. The cons always said there were three codes inside: the penal code by which the prison operated, the inmate code by which cons coexisted behind bars, and the survival code. The last code transcended the others, the one that Chaingang practiced as a religion.
In Kansas City, Missouri, it was another day. The dawn had come up gray and wet-looking. Shooter felt tough and privileged. He did a few half-hearted push-ups, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He showered, shaved, and dressed with some care, dressing for success.
Price wore sandwashed bronze linen slacks from Côte d'Ivoire, a metallicized anaconda Western-style belt with verdigris-patina buckle by Mark Cross, and a River Crest Pro Shop pullover in mulled claret. He pulled on pale yellow silk socks from Neimann's, and antique gold, woven ostrich quill skimmers. The sniper as fashion plate. It wouldn't matter. He was going down in the pit, under full camouflage.
Shooter in Missouri and Dr. Norman in Illinois both began their morning with the same news. Neither man happened to turn on their respective television sets. Each read, with divergent reactions, the substantially identical accounts of the previous day's violence. One from local law-enforcement agencies' reports to the various data-collection terminals such as NCIC and VI-CAP. The other from the Kansas City papers.
"Six More Killed in Bloody Massacre" was the headline of the Star, and Bobby Price smiled when he read the stories under the subhead "Police Confirm Mass Killer on Rampage."
A lone gunman is believed responsible for six murders and one attempted murder in midtown Kansas City, Thursday, as the spate of bloody homicides continued, pushing the city's violent death record to an all-time high. In what were termed sniper killings, a man that witnesses called huge, over six feet tall, weighing between 350 and 400 pounds, is thought to have taken six more lives using a long-distance rifle of some type. Lieutenant John J. Llewelyn of the Kansas City Homicide Division of the Crimes Against Persons Unit said that he is believed to be using some kind of high-explosive projectiles such as rifle grenades.
Llewelyn confirmed that the killer's weapons and methods appear to match those employed in twenty-nine recent slayings. He's probably got automatic weapons, grenades, and is familiar with various explosives.
Kansas City Homicide has called in a special department of the FBI for assistance with the case, which may or may not be drug-related. The shootings and firebombings that resulted in thirteen dead in an attack on a biker gang's headquarte
rs, and the grisly ritual mutilation and murder of three other bikers at Mount Ely, have lead to speculation that drug dealers may be involved with the slayings. The biker-gang members had a history of drug arrests, both for possession and distribution of drugs like crystal meth.
Fatally wounded Thursday were Mark Berkemper, forty-two, a professor at State Business College; a Jane Doe of approximately twenty-six years of age, Dick Thompson, thirty-three, an advertising consultant with Saveth-Blackman-Grant; E. L. Campbell, twenty-six, a driver for a lawn center, George D. Unwin, fifty-seven, U.S. Army, Ret.; and Phyllis Guthrie, thirty-eight, a clerk employed by the Kansas City Housing Authority. Neither the Kansas City Police nor the FBI would comment further as to any possible connection between these killings and what were called random murders. The deaths brought to 173 the number of homicides in the city since January 1.
Price laughed at the crude police composite sketch that was prominent in both papers. The eyes and mouth were all wrong. Gangbang was even fatter and uglier than the drawing. He read the other account in which he was described as a "motorist."
"The so-called Crucifixion Killer," the caption under the drawing began, "as described by witnesses to a high-speed car chase that ended in gunplay in midtown Kansas City Thursday."